I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book.” It also said that “There were few of that period [Bloomsbury, 1920s] whom Viva King did not come to know.” Ezra Pound greeted her naked once (he, not she). She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner Margaret Jourdain to tea. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer, “If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. King’s parties you would risk peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell.” Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the people who flash through King’s pages was like trying to read the names of stations on a fast-moving train.
But reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity; Richardson called her “a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother Courage” and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 — despite his tendency to make off with her jewelry. (She offers a fastidious way of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: “I needed revving up — and though the men may have had the right tools, they were bad mechanics.”)
When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva King’s book, I quickly discovered that “The Weeping and the Laughter” is a popular title. The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual, but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” is taken, in turn, from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (translation: “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”). Dowson’s poem is appropriate for an autobiography written in one’s eighties after a long and busy life:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.
That hasn’t prevented other authors from using it for their own purposes. So, let’s take a look at some of the other books with this title.
The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947).
The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the English translation of this German novel about the murky details surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. Married to a dancer whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for his sheer obtuseness. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime and Punishment — and then quickly added that Maass lacked Dostoevsky’s obsessive intensity. This may be one of those books whose cover outrates its contents.
The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950).
Vera Caspary’s publisher boasted that The Weeping and the Laughter was her “debut in serious fiction” — which, of course, is a slight against Laura and previous novels that were marked as suspense or murder mysteries and consequently, not “serious.” The mystery here is Beverly Hills widow Emily Arkwright’s own psyche and motivations. Why did she attempt suicide when she was, on the surface, popular, happy, and successful? Dorothy B. Hughes — no slouch at writing “serious fiction” mislabelled as suspense herself — called it a fine portrait of “the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will bend.” This was reissued some years ago by the Murder Room Press, but for some reason, Amazon reports the Kindle edition is “out of stock” (is this even a thing?).
The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953).
Julian Maclaren-Ross, who might have caught some buckshot had a shotgun been fired at one of Viva King’s parties (he was X. Trapnel in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time), took the phrase as the title for his first memoir. This volume covers his childhood up to the age of ten. Born in Ramsgate, he wrote that his first memory was of seeing an attack by German Zeppelins (an astonishing feat if it was the first raid on Ramsgate in late 1914). Arthur Marshall wrote in the New Statesman that some of Maclaren-Ross’s recollections were “probably tosh,” but overall the book gave a “charmed pleasure” and was “immensely engaging.”
When it was publised, The Weeping and the Laughter was intended to be the first of a total of four books of autobiography. They even had titles: Threnody on a Gramophone, The Sea Coast of Bohemia, and Khaki and Cockayne. Drink, poverty, and chaotic habits undermined his plans, and it was up to London Magazine editor Alan Ross to assemble posthumously his fragments into Memoirs of the Forties (1965), which achieved a success that eluded Maclaren-Ross during his lifetime. These were subsequently combined with The Weeping and the Laughter and other pieces into Collected Memoirs, which was published by Black Spring Press in 2005. I’m shocked to see that this edition been out of print for over a decade now. Unacceptable!
The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975).
I include this only for the sake of completeness. This is the sort of book that no one bothers to review. The publisher’s own jacket blurb suffices to explain why:
Kate Fielding – a widow, but still comparatively young – seems to have everything a woman could wish for in life – except someone with whom to share it. Then she meets and falls passionately in love with a young artist — Larry Stafford. Can their love survive the difference of a decade in their ages, the criticism of friends and of Kate’s daughter, Roz, herself deeply involved with a married man? Can they overcome the terrifying illness which attacks Kate?
Folks, Lloyd Douglas wrote this story back in 1929. It’s called Magnificent Obsession. Save your time and watch the Douglas Sirk – Rock Hudson – Jane Wyman movie version, which put the O in overwrought (and we’re all the better for it).
The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988).
This was Barber’s 32nd novel, published posthumously. A bestseller, probably because he’d amassed an army of fans with the previous 31. Twins of noble birth are separated in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The lucky one makes it to Paris and finds success in love and business. The other is lost and written off as dead. But is he? And what about that teddy bear: is it just an object of childhood obsession like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Or is there more to the story? I’m pretty sure I will never know. Or care.
Where are the The Weeping and the Laughters of this century? Has Ernest Dowson lost his capacity to inspire?
Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.
• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961)
By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.
The Baron and Baroness von Büllop on their honeymoon.
Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.
• Quail in Aspic (1962)
By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton
Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.
Elsa Maxwell as Count Charles Korsetz.
This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.
• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981)
By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.
Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:
Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.
• Lord Bellinger (1911)
By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.
Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.
• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961)
By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.
Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.
Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.
• I Think I Remember (1927)
By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall
A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”
There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.
• Water on the Brain (1933)
By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).
• The Way Up (1972)
By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).
The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.
• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937)
By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.
The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.
And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.
• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp
By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.
Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.
• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940)
By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.
Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:
I was wearing an original Déclassé (salvaged from the wreck of my wardrobe), of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cufflinks, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which also could be used for water-divining.
Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.
As much I base most of my choices for this site on research, my heart belongs to my first neglected book love, the browsing of library and bookstore shelves in search of unfamiliar titles. As physical used bookstores become ever rarer in the U.S., I have to resort to online equivalents. A favorite technique is to select a publisher and date range and simply scroll through the listings that come up on one book site or another.
Which is how I came across Perplexities, a book I suspect I would never have found through research or physical browsing. It came up, quite simply, as the cheapest copy of a Faber & Faber title from the early 1930s I could find on AbeBooks.com. So I ordered it. I was pleased when it arrived with its dust jacket relatively intact, since this usually drives up the price.
Now, frankly, given my inveterate book buying, I tend to place my new arrivals in one of the teetering stacks scattered around my office and only return to them months or years later. But the writing in Perplexities is so spare, so lacking in artifice — so naked, if you will — that I began reading immediately:
I must write. It may be a way of fixing my mind on a logical sequence of ideas. It is ridiculous to allow one’s thought’s to run round within a desire like a squirrel in a cage.
I am the slave of an emotion, whereas I believed, not so long ago, that I had won freedom.
Perplexities’ unnamed narrator is, we learn, a French-born woman living in London and in love with a man from the North named Peter. In love — but not head over heels. No, she has seen too much for that. And so she tries to examine this new love, this new relationship, this possible future, in the context of the loves and relationships of her past.
The first of these, of course, is with her mother. A vain, beautiful Parisian, a widow holding herself to a higher standing than her husband’s legacy can support. And aspiring to a higher romantic standard as well. Protective of her prospective suitors, her feelings to her daughter are early on complicated by jealousy and a ferocious defense of her primacy as the object of desire in the house. “Whoever loved my mother ceased to know freedom for as long as they loved her.” For longer, in fact: “After she had lost the power to confer joy she retained the power of inflicting pain.”
Her mother is, in today’s vocabulary, an expert emotional abuser. “Her strength was in her tongue. She could hurt amazingly with her tongue.” Yet she also positioned her daughter to maintain and, indeed, improve her social and economic status: a good Catholic education in convent schools, proficiency in English with time spent with an English family, the Giffords.
Observing the Giffords adds to her understanding of the minefield of emotions lurking at even apparently placid family dinner tables. “Mrs. Gifford was a hard-working, devoted, conscientious wife and mother,” the narrator acknowledges. “I often wondered why her family did not leave the house in a body.” For Mrs. Gifford’s husband and children live in abject fear of her ability to inflict guilt in retribution for the smallest perceived slight:
I believe that more pain and suffering have been inflicted in the name of love than under the frank panoply of hate. Hate, at least, does not paralyse its victims by calling on their chivalry at the same time as it strikes. An enemy does not use as a shield the loud warning that he himself will be hurt if we are not careful.
This is, I think, an observation of striking insight — and striking currency. This is precisely why the damage done by parents who abuse through martyrdom is fundamentally different from that inflicted by direct abuse.
The narrator of Perplexities is in her early 40s. Her husband, an Englishman she married for love, was killed in the war over a decade earlier. Her two children, to whom she admits she was at best only adequate as a mother (“The passion of motherhood is a closed book to me”), are grown, living their own lives, and not looking to her for emotional or financial support. Nor does she expect it: “To expect gratitude seems a commercial appreciation for returns which has nothing to do with love.”
She has a job — and likes it:
I thoroughly enjoy work myself. I can enjoy almost any kind of work, provided it aallows me to put into it the whole, no more (not for long at least), but no less.
Her male colleagues, she thinks, fail to understand this balance. Some try to fill their time away from work with hobbies, seeking fulfillment they lack at work. Others are what we would now call workaholics:
I think one of my colleagues, Smith cannot fail to return after his death, day after day, to his desk, to watch his successor going on with his work. Smith loves the office, he loves coming to it in the morning, he is the last to leave it at night, he does not know what to do with unexpected holidays, he is always ready to postpone the expected ones.
It is the independence she has won through work, widowhood, and given her own children their freedom that ultimately allows her to recognize the trap that a relationship with Peter, her Northerner, would be. He is not an equal opportunity lover: “Mutual pleasure in sex does not enter Peter’s calculations.” Even worse, he’s a thirty-something man walking around with an umbilical cord. Proposing a seaside holiday, he adds that his mother, of course, will be joining them.
Perplexities is, effect, one woman’s inventory of her experiences of love and life in an attempt to decide what to do with the rest of it. And her choice is a courageous one: “Above all, I must try to conquer fear before I die.” This, she believes, is “a crusade on which all the remaining forces of a solitary woman with a love for freedom might well embark.”
Perplexities was marketed as a novel, but even Faber & Faber struggled to classify the book. “Whether one regards it as fiction or a transcript from real life, Perplexities is a very unusual book” declares its dust jacket. Too unusual for some reviewers: “There is some championing of the cause of prostitutes and perverts, a great deal of muddled thinking, rather tediously recorded, and a complete absence of a sense of humour,” observed B. E. Tood in The Spectator.
The Bookman’s critic was one of the few to acknowledge that the narrator’s perspective was more common than some might think: “Many women will share the author’s perplexities, and will enjoy a sense of fellowship in reading this book. A sensitive, critical mind is brought to bear upon the peculiar problems of modern life, especially women’s problems, which are discussed with such sincerity and common sense as should help to clear fresh paths through the tangles of convention.”
In some ways, Perplexities anticipates by almost fifty years Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman, another book written in an attempt to take stock of a life and decide whhere to go with it. Koller had foresaken romantic love after an early failed relationship while in graduate school and was already intellectually prepared to embrace a solitary life (though with a German shepherd as companion), and it was a path she stuck to until her death almost forty years later. But as much as I admire Koller’s book, I have to say that I suspect more readers today would respond to the simple, succinct prose and the fearless candor of Perplexities.
E. R. Leigh, according to copyright records, was the pseudonym of Jeanne Berthe Julie Rigaud, a French woman born in Paris in 1881, who married Harry Footner, a civil engineer, in 1902. Like her narrator, Jeanne Footner had two children, both of whom were in their twenties when she wrote her book. And like her narrator, she lost her husband in the war — on August 1, 1916, one month to the day after the start of the Battle of the Somme. She took her pseudonym from her husband’s middle name, Erlegh. Perplexities was her only book. Perhaps, also like her narrator, its writing helped her reach some decision. She never remarried and she died in Portsmouth at the age of 70 in 1952.
Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (pseudonym of Jeanne Rigaud Footner) London: Faber & Faber, 1932
I stumbled across a brief item about this book some months ago that so intrigued me that I tracked down and read it, despite the fact that it’s in French and my reading ability in French is passable at best. Silhouettes crépusculaires is a memoir of a remarkable journey that Carola Ernst undertook in the fall of 1914. Working as a volunteer in a Belgian hospital in Charleroi whose wards were filled with wounded French, Belgian, and English soldiers, she came to know André Sinclair, a French artillery captain blinded in combat. She was able to convince the city’s German garrison commander that Sinclair’s condition effectively made him a noncombatant and therefore that he ought to be exempt from being treated as a prisoner of war. Even more astonishing, she got him to agree to issue an order directing other German units to allow Ernst and Sinclair to make their way back to France so that he could rejoin his family.
The journey recounted in Silhouettes crépusculaires took place at an exceptional moment, as the two sides were just beginning to dig themselves — literally as well as psychologically — into the 500-mile line of trenches that came to be the Western Front for the next four years. Having raced through Belgium, pushing the Allies nearly to the gates of Paris, the German Army was still organizing itself to serve as an occupying power. Policies and procedures were still being put in place, and Ernst benefited from the fact that no one had yet declared that what she was proposing was prohibited.
Within a few months, perhaps weeks, the restrictions would be set in place to make movement of just about any sort by Belgian civilians, let alone enemy soldiers, fit or not, just about impossible. At several points along their way, in fact, the German officer in charge of the garrison controlling a town they had to pass through calls a halt to their travel out of sheer dismay that there wasn’t a rule for or against what they were doing. To avoid extending their authority too far into unknown territory, however, each commander only goes so far as to sign an order allowing them to go on to the next garrison down the road. Even without official restrictions, however, their journey wasn’t easy. There were almost no automobiles that hadn’t been confiscated for military use, let alone fuel. Several legs of their route through Belgium involve riding for hours in the back of a horse-drawn wagon.
Once they arrived in Germany, the situation changed dramatically. Although Germany was by then effectively under military government, the attitudes of the military authorities responsible hadn’t had time to set in their prejudices. As Ernst, who was fluent in German, and Sinclair, who spoke none, made their way from Aachen to Cologne and then down along the Rhine to the border with Switzerland, the German officers they encountered were mostly amused by the novelty of the pair’s venture and treated Sinclair with full military courtesies.
And they were still willing to look the other way rather than attempt to seek direction on how to deal with a situation no one had yet anticipated [the translations are mine]:
“I am only saying that a French officer in Germany now is a prisoner of war, and that there is no exception to the rule.” “Here is one though.” “Get to the point: what do you want?” “That you allow us to leave Cologne tomorrow, without going through the police.” “I allow nothing at all, nothing at all. Allow! But, see! … Is he in uniform, your Frenchman?” “No, in civilian clothes. There were German officers who advised us to cover the uniform so as not to not attract attention.” “Has your case been submitted to the Kommandantur in Aachen?” “Yes; and here is a note addressed to the Commandant of Fribourg, to facilitate our proceedings at the Swiss frontier. If you want to see it?” “It’s useless.” “So you give me your permission?” “Well! … Let’s say I haven’t seen you. Otherwise, I should arrest you.” A pause. “No, it’s good,” he declared gruffly. “We shall say that I am unaware of your presence here. Now, take advantage of it!”
They make their way from Cologne to a German town across the Rhine from Basel in the course of a single day. There, a garrison sergeant sets them up in a hotel room while he arranges for a car to take them into Switzerland. The hotel’s chef exclaims in dismay when he encounters Sinclair: “‘Good Lord!’ he shouted, raising his arms excitedly. ‘What happened! You are not going to tell me that it was the war that did this!’ and he pointed to the blindfold.” The reality of the war’s cost in dead and wounded had not set in.
Their passage through Switzerland goes even more quickly, despite the delay from the desire of the Swiss Army regiment in Basel to take in the spectacle of an actual casualty of the war they would take no part in.
“Captain,” said one of the officers who had received us on arrival, as he entered, “our colonel will be happy to greet you; he’s downstairs, by the car; when you allow it, I will lead you to him.” “Whenever you want, sir.” There was a coming and going of uniforms and a clanking of weapons: our departure set everyone in motion. On both sides of the staircase, the people had massed. Everyone was trying to see; they jostled each other, stretched their necks to see us.
Within another day, Ernst and Sinclair have made their way to Normandy, where Sinclair is reunited with his family.
Then the most difficult part of the journey begins. As a Belgian with parents in Brussels, Ernst does not want to linger in France. Retracing her steps, however, is not an option: she has no letters of passage, no reason why any German authority would allow her to even set foot across the border again. She is forced to take a circuitous route, from France to England and then, via the Netherlands, back to Belgium. Now there is no longer novelty or the bewilderment of bureaucrats to provide comic relief. She is merely a civilian attempting to do something for which almost all enabling mechanisms have been dismantled. Over the course of several weeks, she manages to get back to the hospital in Charleroi, but it is a journey marked by frequent unexpected stops and endless hours of waiting for transportation whose existence is often only speculative.
If there is one predominant mood to Silhouettes crépusculaires, it is one that has become all too rare in today’s world: courtesy. Ernst wrote the book soon after her return to Belgium in 1915, but she chose not to publish it until 1921, when, as she writes in her introduction, it had become a “sketch of an autumn twilight, of an end of civilization”: “It evokes the smile of the isolated individual, of the simply good man who holds out his hand to the passing stranger, without ostentation, without pay.” Ernst offers to take Captain Sinclair back to his family as a simple act of one human helping another. No matter how pleasantly or unpleasantly disconcerted are the various officials of different nations she encountered, Ernst was treated with respect and deferment. It was a mood that would not survive the war.
Silhouettes crépusculaires, by Carola Ernst Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1921
This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown
‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.
De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’
Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.
In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.
On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’
De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.
‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’
‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’
‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’
Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.
De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’
It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.
During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.
Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.
The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.
At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’
Cover of an English edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus).
Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.
Notes 1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).
Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946
Cover of the Harvill Press edition of The Restless Years.
In the final pages of Southern Adventure, the previous volume in his memoir The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky boards a train from Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia to return to Russia having been struck by “the realization that nobody needed me here.” Anyone who’s read the first three volumes will know that Paustovsky must have been haunted by the memory of the two people who did need him: his mother and his sister Galya.
Paustovsky’s mother and sister were the last remnants of his family, a family blown to pieces by war, revolution, and misfortune. Volume One of The Story of a Life opens, in fact, as the author, then a young schoolboy, travels through a Ukranian winter to his father’s burial. The last sight we (and Paustovsky) have of them is in Volume 3, In That Dawn, when he’s forced to abandon them in Kiev as control of the city is wrestled for by the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, and the Ukranians. At the time, Galya had already begun to lose her sight, leaving the two women in a desperate state, with few friends and almost no resources to support themselves aside from the few funds that Paustovsky can send them from time to time.
By the time Paustovsky is reunited with them at the beginning of The Restless Years, Galya is blind and they are reduced to living in a single room in a tenement in Kiev: “two spindly iron bedsteads, an old cupboard, a kitchen table, three wobbly chairs and a mirror on the wall.” Everything in the room is grey — as if covered in dust, but in reality simply worn out of color through years of constant wiping and polishing.
Yet their faith in Paustovsky is undiminished by their years of waiting and need. All that matters to them is that, as a writer, he can change the world. “Tell me please, about the things you write,” his mother asks: “Can they help people, so that they will suffer less?”
It’s hard for any writer to change the world, especially when writing in a time of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. But as The Restless Years demonstrates, in Paustovsky’s case, it was not for lack of trying. He arrives back in Moscow in August 1923, almost five years after his last departure. The city is in the midst of one of the early experiments of the Soviet regime, the first cycle of the New Economic Policy and the closest the Communists came to embracing capitalism. Moscow is full of “NEPmen.” These supposed entreneurs were, for the most part, schemers, grifters, and swindlers with little to contribute to actual economic improvement. To Paustovsky, they are like characters in a cheap imitation of a Chekhov play, living “in shabby and spasmodic grandeur, with ramshackle motor-cars, faded beauties and restaurant-gypsy music.”
The city is also overrun by thousands of children orphaned through almost a decade of devastation. These bespriorniki wear bits of old army uniforms, beg for handouts or rummage for scraps in gutters and wastebins, carry their meager belonging in their pockets — “bits of broken combs, knives, cigarettes, crusts of bread, matches, greasy cards, and bits of dirty bandages.” As poor as he and his fellow writers may be, often going a day or two without a meal, Paustovsky finds some comfort in knowing that the bespriorniki are even worse off.
1923 was no more than thirteen or fourteen years later than the schoolboy days that open The Story of a Life, but to Paustovsky it seemed as if he had already lived “so enormously long that the thought of it filled me with terror.” At 30, he feels himself an old man among many of his fellow writers, even though most were no more than five years younger.
That feeling only intensifies when he learns of Lenin’s death. “Men were waiting to be saved from thousands of years of helpless sufferings,” he reflected, and now, “The man who knew what had to be done was gone.” He goes to the train station to travel to Red Square for the funeral but arrives too late. He then tries to walk along the tracks into town but soon collapses out of hunger and exhaustion.
Lenin’s death took from Paustovsky and millions of Russians the spark that fired their spiritual commitment to the revolution. In its place came a grey blanket of bureaucracy and mechanical repression overseen by Stalin. Paustovsky found himself increasingly consumed in self-protection — and most of all, in protecting his intimacy with the Russian language:
I tried to put up a resistance against everything capable of soiling the inner world I carried within me and tried to communicate to others. Most of all I was afraid of becoming contaminated by that exhausted and impotent language which at that time was spreading relentlessly and swiftly.
“The Russian language exists like a collection of great poetry, as unexpectedly rich and pure as the blaze of a starry sky over a forest waste,” he writes. Had it been otherwise, “I should have taken up bookkeeping or something of that sort.”
It was a struggle in which he was, by his own admission, largely unsuccessful in the next few years. “There is nothing worse than a nail driven into the wall and bending,” Paustovsky tells us. “One has no confidence in it.” His poor attempts at fiction in the mid-1920s “resembled in some inexplicable way a mass of nails more or less bent.”
What breaks this impasse is an assignment to travel deep into central Asia. Paustovsky’s imagination had been inspired by reading of an attempt by a Frenchman, Bernardin St. Pierre, to interest the Empress Catherine in his founding a utopian republic on the shore of a vast and desolate inlet off the Caspian Sea known as Kara Bugaz (now Garabogazköl). Catherine had better sense than the Soviets, who launched a grand venture to establish a salt production industry in the regime.
Cover of Kara Bugaz (The Black Gulf).
If you want an unbiased version of the Kara Bugaz salt factories and Paustovsky’s role in propagandizing it, I highly recommend reading Frank Westerman’s excellent book Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. For as much as Paustovsky earned a reputation as one of the few Soviet writers to maintain a relatively high level of personal integrity through decades of pressure to conform to the changing tides of editorial policies, his novel Kara Bugaz (1932) (translated as The Black Gulf) veers too close to socialist realism (i.e., propaganda) for comfort. Even in retrospect, his willful misreading of the reality of the situation is clear:
As I have already said, the work in Berezniki was carried out by deportees. But deportation is one thing and work another. Their condition as deportees in no way affected the selflessness of their work. They were the first, according to the chemical experts, to set up machines and installations which they had never seen before. In the past they had only dreamed about them or else read about them in foreign scientific and technical journals. Indeed, there was much to amaze the layman and strike him as being nothing less than a miracle.
The one good result from Paustovsky’s Kara Bugaz experience was that he quit the writers’ collective he’d joined after returning from Moscow and committed to making it on his own as an independent: not an easy task for any writer and particularly challenging through twenty years of Stalin’s rule.
But it also makes The Restless Years the most problematic book in The Story of a Life. It’s easy to read the first five books as the story of a series of violent storms as seen by a bit of flotsam caught up and tossed about by their winds and waves. Paustovsky was too close to the center of Soviet cultural life not to know the true nature of Stalin’s regime. And he cannot console himself, like his friend Mikahil Prishvin, by losing himself in the wonders of Russian nature and wildlife.
The fact that he kept himself aloof from much machinations of the Soviet system doesn’t mean that he remained pristine. Glimpses slip through now and again in The Restless Years. In describing an incident in which he collapsed from typhus while traveling on assignment in the Caucasus, he mentions in passing:
Famine had started in the Ukraine at the time and thousands of refugees rushed off to the south, to Transcaucasus, to the warm regions where there was enough to eat. They flooded out all the railway stations between Zugdidy and Samtredi. Typhus broke out among them.
There may have been a million or more corpses left in the wake of “Famine had started in the Ukraine.”
Sergei Budantsev
As with the two volumes before it, The Restless Years is full of wonderful sketches of the many writers Paustovsky encountered in the course of his long career. Perhaps the best are his recollections of Isaac Babel in volumes 4 (Years of Hope) and 5 (Southern Adventure). In one profile in this volume, however, he drops his artifice of blindness to Stalinist repression for a moment. He writes of Sergei Budantsev, who was loved as a conversationalist for his habit of sharing his thoughts for future books, “telling people willingly and in detail” their plan, subject, characters, and plots. “He would thus create a whole cycle of oral chapters and novels, worked out and completed to the last detail” — which then, all too often, he failed to translate onto the written page. Paustovsky ends his sketch with one chilling sentence: “Budantsev was one of the first to die in a Chukota concentration camp.”
The Russian edition of The Restless Years was published in 1964 — after the end of the Khruschev Thaw, but perhaps early enough in Brezhnev’s regime that such a blunt disclosure could still be tolerated. Nonetheless, when he wrote his memoir of Soviet literary politics, The Oak and the Calf, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was critical of what he saw as Paustovsky’s reluctance to call out Stalin’s repression directly, lumping him in with Ilya Ehrenburg, whose record of collaboration with the regime was certainly worse. The two men, he felt, were “writers who had seen the great dark epoch, and yet were forever trying to sidle round it, ignoring the things that mattered most, telling us nothing but trivialities, sealing out eyes with emollients till we no longer saw the truth.”
But Paustovsky may have had a different objective in writing his memoirs than of providing a historical record. He was an impressionist at heart, and if he can be criticized for not speaking out against the arrests, camps, exiles, and execution he knew were going on, he must also be credited for leaving behind one of the most vivid autobiographies ever written, a book of life every bit as much as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. And The Restless Years shows how Paustovsky came to understand how he needed to write.
Ironically, he claims that he came to this realization came to him on his journey to Kara Bugaz:
… I realized very soon that one must never make a special point of looking for material and behaving like an outside observer; instead, one must simply live while travelling or staying anywhere one happens to be, without trying to remember everything. Only then does one remain oneself and impressions are absorbed directly, freely, and without any previous “screening,” without the constant thought of what can and what cannot be utilized for a book, what is important and what is not.
“Memory,” he concludes, “will eventually make the necessary selection.” In saying this, Paustovsky is treating memory as inspiration rather than source. Throughout The Story of a Life, he recreates experiences, conversations, and sensations that no one could be expected to have remembered accurately or objectively. He doesn’t pretend to be authoritative on any point aside from his own memories, and even in recording those memories, he is saying, in effect, not “This is happened to me” but “This is what my life was like.” It may have made him a lesser witness in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, but it certainly made The Story of a Life a book that seems at times as vivid and immediate as one’s own experiences.
Note: As I mentioned in my post on Volume 5, Southern Adventure, Vintage Classics has announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith in June 2022. As wonderful as I’m sure it will be, this edition will not, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6. All six volumes can be found on the Internet Archive.
The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon London: Harvill Press, 1974
Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is resigning herself to gradual blindness.” Edward Field recalls seeing her at the Yaddo writers’ colony around the same time, a tall elderly woman in a white dress and an outsized sun bonnet. At the time, Field was in his early thirties; she was in her seventies.
The other writers at Yaddo must have felt they had little in common with this aloof woman born in another century. Those who recognized her name knew it from the critical success of her three novels: Do I Wake or Sleep? (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952), which had been nominated for the National Book Award. Far fewer knew that it was a pseudonym.
By the time she published her first novel as Isabel Bolton, Mary Britton Miller had become accustomed to being an outsider. But she’d started at the center of American society, born at the Madison Avenue mansion of her father Charles Miller, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Grace (née Rumrill). Charles, considered a rising star on Wall Street, was largely a self-made man, having overcome the scandal of his father’s suicide in 1847.
From the New York Daily Herald, 16 March 1847.
It was through Grace Rumrill that the Millers gained most of their status. Her father was a prosperous manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts and her brother James was a vice president of the Boston and Albany Railroad, having married the daughter of its founder, Chester Chapin. James and his father-in-law also founded and were on the board of the Chapin National Bank in Springfield. With a large summer house on the shore of Long Island Sound in New London, Connecticut and a mansion in Springfield, James Rumrill and his wife Anna Chapin Rumrill were among the wealthiest and most influential members of New England society.
Mary Miller and her identical twin sister Grace joined two older brothers and one sister in a bustling household full of servants that followed the common routine of autumns, winters, and springs in the city and long summers at the Rumrill-Chapin estates in New London. It was there, while playing tennis at his brother-in-law’s house that Charles Miller fell ill in August 1887, just two weeks after Mary and little Grace’s fourth birthday. Pneumonia quickly set in. Tending to her husband, Grace also became ill, and the two died within hours of each other a few days later.
From the Fall River Daily Evening News, 22 August 1887.
Their deaths not only left their children orphans but paupers. Having rushed back from vacation in France upon receiving the news, James Rumrill was appointed executor and soon discovered that Charles Miller’s practice was based largely on goodwill and promissory notes. He settled matters with his brother-in-law’s creditors and took the children to Springfield to live with his mother. Rebecca Rumrill tried her best, but she was in her late seventies and in poor health and died a little over two years after the five Millers’ arrival.
Writing as Isabel Bolton eighty years later in her memoir Under Gemini, Mary recreated the impression her death left on the twins:
Everything was at sixes and sevens. Grandma had gone. We could no longer find her in the library sitting beside the fire swinging her slipper on the end of her great toe. We could not find her in her room or in the dining room. There was a feeling among us all that we were not so safe and sheltered as before.
With Grandmother Rumrill gone, the children became the wards of James Rumrill and his wife Anna. James, who Mary remembered as “the most remarkable miniature gentleman anyone could imagine,” dapper and full of good humor, left the real decision making to Anna. She, in contrast, loomed over them like the judge in the supreme court of their lives. “Whatever charm and geniality she might have had,” Mary recalled, “was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed.”
Anna saw the Miller children as a problem to be solved. She had no desire to bring them into her fine house on the hill above Springfield, so Anna hired a former teacher to move in as their custodian. She was Desire Aurelia Rogers. As Mary later wrote,
Desire — who could have thought up a better name for her? What hopes, what dreams she must have had before she came to live with us. What lovely pictures must have floated and dissolved and built themselves again in that sad and hungry heart.
Unfortunately, Desire Rogers was outnumbered and outgunned. The five Miller children buzzed with more energy than she could match. The boys mocked her, the older sister Rebecca ignored her, and the twins alternated between tormenting and adoring her. She learned to trust their uncle’s characterization of them as “sprigs of Satan.” Life at the house on Maple Street became more and more anarchic. And Miss Rogers had no hope of support from Anna Rumrill, whose only interest was in keeping the orphans at arm’s length.
When Philip, the oldest of the orphans, was ready to go to college, Aunt Anna saw her opportunity to push the Millers even farther to the margins of her life. James arranged for Philip to attend his alma mater, Harvard (which continues to offer a James A. Rumrill scholarship) and Anna convinced her brother to take James, the younger Miller son, to Europe for a year’s study at a preparatory school in Geneva. Rebecca was to be sent to live and study with a music teacher in New York. The twins learned of these decisions when they returned home from school one day and found a sign reading, “THIS PROPERTY TO BE SOLD” planted on their front lawn.
They were to be packed off even further from Springfield than Geneva: Long Island. Mary and Grace, then just short of 14, were sent to live with a family in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island. Though sad at being parted from Miss Rogers, they enjoyed their summer freedom, going off together around the countryside or swimming in the large lagoon.
Just ten days after their 14th birthday, while swimming at the mouth of the lagoon, they were caught in the current of the outgoing tide and were pulled away from their rowboat. They both struggled to swim back to the boat, but as Mary recalled in Under Gemini,
… this we saw was hopeless, a futile thing to do — to waste strength necessary to swim ashore. We were lost and terrified — Grace’s strength already spent. Was she clinging to me? No, she was not, she was still beside me in the water, swimming still. What was it she was saying? Clearly, I heard her voice; as though I myself were speaking the words, she said, “My darling Mary, how I love you….”
From the Brooklyn Standard Union, 14 August 1897.
News of Grace’s drowning made headlines in New York papers the next day. It left a permanent scar on Mary’s being. She had spent fourteen years with more than a constant companion. As she wrote in Under Gemini, as identical twins, Mary and Grace saw themselves as a single collective being:
Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of us happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.
The death of her parents and the death of her sister Grace were the tragedies that bookended Mary Miller’s childhood. Together they had an impact so profound that she wrote the story of these events and the years between twice.
Her first account, published as Mary Britton Miller, was In the Days of Thy Youth (1943). Reviewers lumped the book in with Life with Father and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, both much more nostalgic and comical accounts of life in the 1890s. The Chicago Tribune’s critic called the book “Charming, incredibly egotistical, beautifully remote,” but also “as antidiluvian as the dinosaur.” In a review titled “Gilt Gingerbread”, the New York Times recommended it mostly “For those who want to escape the headlines of today.”
Mary Britton Miller, around 1948, and the cover of Do I Wake or Sleep.
Unhappy that the book “made no ripples in the pond,” Bolton took a friend’s suggestion and adopted the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton for her next novel. It proved a lucky choice. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised as one of the best novels of its decade. Edmund Wilson reportedly fell for his fantasy of the young, pretty, and talented Isabel Bolton and was nonplussed when the stately older woman, walking with the aid of a cane, approached the bench where they’d arranged to meet in Central Park and introduced herself.
Her subsequent novels, The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions, were equally praised. Though some critics such as Stanley Edgar Hyman dismissed the acclaim for Bolton’s work as an aberration, most agreed with Diana Trilling that she was one of, if not the best, “woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Rose Field, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, ranked her alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Ann Porter, and Kay Boyle. “Miss Bolton’s talent is clear,” she wrote.
None of the people applauding the arrival of Isabel Bolton, from what I can determine, bothered to learn anything about Mary Miller. There was no mention of the several volumes of poetry, mainly sentimental in nature, she had published earlier nor did anyone give In the Days of Thy Youth a second look. They certainly didn’t know that the tragedies that framed that story came from her own life or that her sister’s drowning in 1897 did not mark the end of her woes.
Alone after Grace’s death, Mary attended a New England girls’ boarding school and then was shipped off to Europe to stay with her cousin Marguerite Chapin, who was studying music in Paris. It’s not clear if her aunt Anna Chapin Rumrill had any more intent than to get her out of the way. Mary may have returned to Europe a few years later, spending time in Italy where Marguerite, having married Price Roffrello Caetani, was now, officially, Princess of Bassiano and Duchess of Sermoneta.
Edward Field claims there were rumors that Mary had become pregnant while in Italy and given birth to an illegitimate child that she gave up for adoption. I’ve found nothing to substantiate this. Laurie Dennett barely mentions Mary in her 2016 book An American Princess, The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani, even though the two cousins remained in touch through the decades and Marguerite was to publish one of Mary’s stories in an early volume of her literary journal Botteghe Oscure.
Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Mary decided to settle in New York City, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became active in social reform and led a study for the Consumer’s League of the conditions of children working in homes in New York slums. In her report, she wrote that “It is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of young children in New York who ought to be in school who are hidden away in East Side tenements by their parents and often locked in so that they may be forced to do the awful home work outside factories, which the present laws do not forbid.” The situation, she argued, was effectively a sanctioned form of slavery.
From the Daily People, 30 December 1912.
After their grandmother’s house in Springfield was sold and the Miller children sent their separate ways, the siblings never found another home. Philip, the eldest, took a law degree and moved to Illinois, though he eventually returned to New York to join the prestigious Sullivan, Cromwell law firm. Rebecca married a Canadian doctor, Edward Farrell, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for years.
From the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, 11 May 1916.
James, the younger of the two boys, had been taken under the Chapin wing and brought up through the ranks of the family bank in Springfield after graduating from Harvard. In 1915, he became president of the bank and was beginning to exert some influence in Massachusetts state politics. Within a year, however, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He eventually recovered enough that he was allowed to go for walks on his own. Early on the afternoon of 11 May 1916, a gardener at the Swan Point Cemetery next door found his body with a revolver laying nearby. Like his grandfather Ezra Miller, he’d taken his life with a shot to the head.
Though the three remaining children were reunited in the early 1920s when Rebecca returned to New York City and her husband took a position on the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, tragedy continued to haunt their lives. Edward Farrell was struck by an attack of peritonitis and died before he could be operated on. Rebecca suffered from a crippling form of depression and died a few years later at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx.
When she was in her forties, Mary became writing poetry. Most of her poems were simple and transparent, written for children. Her first book, Menagerie (1928), was a collection about animals illustrated with woodcuts by Helen Sewell. Her poem “Cat” (“The black cat yawns/Opens her jaws,/Stretches her legs,/And shows her claws.”) has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of cat poems. Even after her success as Isabel Bolton, she continued to publish collections of children’s poems, the last, Listen — the Birds appearing in 1961.
The remainder of her poetry was ethereal and religious, often invoking Jesus or the spirit. If there is a common theme through these poems, it is loss. In one of her “Stanzas to Spring” in Intrepid Bird (1934), for example, she cannot greet the season without some dread:
My eyes are worn with watching, and my heart is filled With unavailing knowledge. Underneath your bough Too much extortionate trust has been expelled For aught but apprehension to invade me now
Her reservations about looking back are clearest in “On Remembering One’s Childhood”:
If to these fonts and springs That joyed my soul When I was young I could return To be made whole again, I would discover Mint and fern And cresses green And flowers fresh and fair — But should I dip my hand Into the candid stream What flower or leaf or fern Would I recover there?
Reading this in light of her own experiences, one has to wonder if Mary Britton Miller ever fully recovered from the losses of her childhood.
She was forty when she took up poetry, sixty when she took up fiction. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she took up prose. For In the Days of Thy Youth is fact with the names changed and the occasional assistance of an omniscient narrator. Dedicated to “G. R. M.” (Grace Rumrill Miller, her drowned sister), the book opens with the death of their parents as perceived by the four-year-old twins. At first, there is only the commotion, the appearance of unknown relatives, the murmurs in the parlour. The adults try to explain the situation:
From their faces and the tones in which they spoke the twins got a sense that the world was coming to a sudden end, that a calamity so dire was about to overtake them that everything to which they were accustomed, light, air, food, shelter, the very business of living with these good things — was about to be whisked away from them. So when they finally realized that what they were being told was that their parents — their mother, their father were dead, “tot,” it did not seem so very terrible.
In the Days of Thy Youth is the story of the orphaned Millers (here called Marshalls) vs. the powerful Chapins (and their Rumrill followers), a contest doomed from the start. Although the little girls are relieved to be welcomed by their familiar grandmother, they can sense that the odds are against them. “Five orphan children, a bereaved old lady. You couldn’t set this outfit up against these Arnolds [the Chapins] who always managed to marry the right people and who felt in each other’s society such boundless assurance, energy and joviality.”
Their security grows more fragile with their grandmother dies. The twins find only a morbid pride to hold up in the face of their comfortable, better-off cousins:
“You have never had a funeral in your house.” No,” said Julia regretfully, she had not, and she continued to stare. “We’ve had three,” said the twins, lording it over Julia.
To the Chapins, on the other hand, the orphans are a cross they are only happy to bear when it allows them the leverage of superior self-righteousness over their neighbors. Otherwise, they are sure to make it “as obvious as a brass band” to the children “that they were a chronic source of trouble and responsibility.”
The fact that reviewers compared In the Days of Thy Youth to light-hearted memoirs of the “Gay Nineties” shows how little they understood it. Mary may have described wonderful summer days playing on the wide lawns of the Chapin/Rumrill estates on the shore of Long Island Sound, but she never forgot that the Millers were poor relations hosted with reluctance and some suspicion. The children might be invited to elaborate Christmas feasts at the Chapin mansion in Springfield, but then find themselves standing in the entrance hall afterward, abandoned. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaims one relative. “Why didn’t you go home?” “We didn’t go home because nobody sent for us,” Philip replies.
Mary was able to see the potential for psychological devastation in the Chapins’ treatment of the Miller children and their concerns through their Aunt Anna’s effect on their guardian, Miss Rogers [the one name unchanged in this book]. When the twins are told that their grandmother’s house is being sold and their siblings farmed out to the care of others, they see in an instant the consequence for her:
They knew that from the moment she passed over the threshold of life with them at Maple Street Aunty Dee would cease to exist as a substantial human being. She would be Miss Nobody, Miss Nowhere, Miss Nothing-at-all. She’d be a ghost, calling on other ghosts to see, to hear, to speak to her. Nothing she said or did or even thought would be real, and nobody in any way connected with the bitter, defeated creature locked up inside this phantom lady could communicate with her. They might put out their hands to touch her, but to no avail. Miss Rogers would be ghost — wholly ghost.
By the time she was writing this, Mary was becoming something of a phantom in the eyes of others herself. Not long after In the Days of Thy Youth was published, Philip, her last remaining sibling, died of a heart attack while sitting at his desk on Wall Street. A year later, she would burst upon the literary world as Isabel Bolton, but she’d already lost most of her family and friends.
Those who looked closer, however, would see a woman still vitally connected to her world. Though her eyes were failing, she kept up with current literature by hiring readers. She fired one for balking when he came to the word “fuck” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. She published five books of children’s poetry between 1957 and 1961, each with a different theme and illustrator. Jungle Journey (1959) was illustrated by one of her closest friends, Tobias Schneebaum and drew, in part, on his experiences living with indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (later retold in Keep the River on Your Right (1969)).
Mary dedicated her next book as Isabel Bolton, Under Gemini, to Schneebaum. In it, she returned to the story told in In the Days of Thy Youth, but with a much tighter focus. This time, instead of hovering over her cast in the third person, she wrote in the first person, giving her world a fixed center: the being formed by her bond with her identical twin.
It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins — I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.
“There is a legend,” she wrote, “that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed.” Their nurse grew flustered. She called for their mother, who declared that one was Mary, the other Grace. Thus, Mary’s words eighty years later: “This may be so.”
“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,” Plato wrote in The Symposium. Grace Miller’s last words to her sister before drowning were, “My darling Mary, how I love you.” To Mary, so many years later, these words were a confirmation that they had found that whole in each other:
That business in which we are all perpetually engaged — the making of an individual soul — is an enterprise of memory. In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.
“I am an old woman now and full of many memories,” Mary wrote “but those which I have here evoked have for me still the strange and wonderful completeness of having lived another’s life that was at the same time my own.” If the people who saw Isabel Bolton sitting in a corner at a cocktail party or floating through the rooms at Yaddo saw her as something of a ghost, perhaps they could sense that she was walking through the world with the shadow of her sister at her side.
Mary Britton Miller was born in the horse and buggy era and wrote her memoir of her life as a twin in a time of ballistic missiles and Mutually Assured Destruction. But she had become familiar with destruction and loss early on in her life, and her awareness of life’s fragility pervades every page of her work as Isabel Bolton. As she wrote in Many Mansions,
… [T]here was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide.
When David and Blanche, the two old friends in Mary’s last novel as Isabel Bolton, The Whirligig of Time, sit together, meeting in their eighties after a separation of decades, they feel themselves moving “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.” Perhaps Mary Miller wrote this because she knew just how close we always are to unimaginable catastrophe.
Gerald Wilkinson and his parents, Bombay, India, 1914.
I first came across Peter Greave in a battered Penguin paperback copy of his 1977 memoir, The Seventh Gate, that I’d found at the Montana Valley Book Store, a marvelous storehouse of books in the little town of Alberton, Montana. The Seventh Gate has the grim fascination of a car crash. Born in Bombay in 1910, Greave spent his first years in the comfort of a villa surrounded by a lush garden and cared for by Indian servants. That haven was soon destroyed, however, by his father’s predilections. It wasn’t just that his father (who is unnamed in the book) was a swindler, he was also a chronic exhibitionist. He would ask his wife to play something on the piano to keep her occupied while he strolled out to their porch and exposed himself.
Greave’s childhood was punctuated by abrupt moves as his father fled the police and creditors or pursued ever-riskier ventures. In late 1918, the family sailed from India to New York City on a ship called The City of Lahore to make a fresh start. The voyage was not smooth: the ship was quarantined at Cape Town when influenza broke out among the crew; then the Hindu and Chinese seamen began fighting and one man was thrown overboard. Twice German submarines tried to torpedo her. Then, hours after the family disembarked in New York, the ship caught fire and sank at pierside.
Advertisement for the 1921 Dixie Flyer.
Greave’s father tried to set up an import/export business. It failed. Then he took off for South Africa hoping to sell Afrikaners a new American automobile called the Dixie Flyer. Greave’s mother and the three children were left freezing in a tenement flat in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the car had a tendency to stop running, usually far from a garage. The father returned and took the family back to India again. This time he started a sporting newspaper; it too proved a failure. Then he set up a lottery scheme that proved another scam. He was convicted of fraud and sent to jail.
Greave’s mother fell ill of cancer. As he writes in The Seventh Gate, the family fell apart “like an old trunk eaten by white ants” — his sister sent to a convent in Calcutta, Greave and his brother to a derelict school in Darjeeling. Desperate for a home, Greave ran away from the school in the spring of 1923. Alone and almost penniless, he traveled eight hundred miles — walking, train-hopping, stowing away on a boat — to a remote town in East Bengal. There he persuaded a kindly woman he barely knew to take him in.
Cover of the Penguin edition of The Seventh Gate.
By the time Greave was a young man, he’d become accustomed to life on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society. With his sketchy education and lack of connections, he took whatever work he could get. He sold gramophones; he sold refrigerators; he sold coloured enlargements of family photos for a firm that rarely delivered them. He spent most of his time reading, going to movies and getting drunk: “I lived like a nomad, moving from one city to another, existing in seedy hotels or in shoddy rooms.” His father reappeared. The two often shared the same rooms and pooled their meagre resources. Then one day in 1938 while shaving, Greave noticed a reddish bump on his forehead. Others appeared on his legs and buttocks. A doctor diagnosed food poisoning: “You’ve been eating some muck from the bazaar.” New symptoms joined the skin lesions — numbness in his right hand, pain and cloudiness in his eyes.
Finally, he went to an Indian hospital in Calcutta, where he was diagnosed with leprosy in August 1939. Hearing this news, Greave “realised instinctively that I had crossed a frontier from which I could never return.” He spent the next seven years in squalid Calcutta flats, living off handouts, an occasional cheque from his father and the kindness of a few Indian friends. With India being torn apart in the conflicts over Partition, his existence grew more and more tenuous until he received a letter from a doctor with the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association. The doctor offered him free treatment at St Giles, England’s last operating leprosy clinic, outside Chelmsford. Greave managed to obtain a berth on the Franconia, a ship carrying British Army troops and their families away from the embattled former colony. The Seventh Gate ends in August 1947 as Greave stands on the deck, his last view of India slipping over the horizon.
The story that followed was told in Greave’s first book, The Second Miracle, published in 1955. His first miracle was making it to St Giles, where through slow and painful drug therapy, his leprosy was cured. The second miracle referred to in the title was his spiritual recovery. Greave wrote in the brutally honest tradition of Rousseau and Stendhal that considered hypocrisy as the greatest of all sins. While he hid away from the world in his room in Calcutta, Greave had come to see his disease as a mark of “the guilt of a thousand generations of twisted minds, and of bodies thirsting for decay.”
The Homes of St. Giles, the last clinic in England for the treatment of leprosy.
The Second Miracle takes the reader not only through the physical ordeal of Greave’s treatment for leprosy but also his realisation that he — not his doctors and not God — was responsible for what he made of his situation. In the end, he went from slinking through his days “sunk in lethargy” to an attitude of joyful penitence — of saying in his prayers, “Thank you — give me more.” This attitude would be crucial to Greave’s acceptance that, despite being cured, his leprosy had left him with such severe damage to his eyes, nerves and muscles that he would remain at St Giles, dependent on its care, for the rest of his life. It fills the two otherwise grim books with vitality, wonder and hope.
Years after I posted pieces about The Seventh Gate and The Second Miracle, I was contacted by Josephine, a woman living in Herefordshire. Josephine had been given Peter Greave’s journals by a friend. Greave had left them to the secretary at St Giles and through various hands they made their way to her. Having been born and raised in India, both Josephine and her husband had a keen interest in materials related to Anglo-Indian society. She also informed me that Peter Greave’s real name was Gerald Carberry, though she had no idea why he’d chosen the pseudonym.
In June 2019, I arranged to visit Josephine and look through the journals. When I arrived, she showed me into her dining room. There on the table sat an old fruit crate filled with what looked like two dozen or more well-used school notebooks. Josephine had marked the dates covered by each — the earliest starting in January 1937, the last in late 1969.
The first entry in Gerald Carberry’s diary, dated 11 January 1937.
Not knowing what I would find, I hadn’t planned how to use the few hours I had. At first, I skipped through entries almost randomly, photographing pages with my phone. In the earliest entry — 11 January 1937 — he was miserable. “Nothing to read, nothing to do, and no money. And a god-damned toothache.” He was rooming with his father — “H,” for Herbert Carberry — who is also broke but working on some suspicious deal: “I’m sick of his strong silent man act.” And he was frustrated with a woman he referred to as “C”: “It’s like her to start her stuff when I’m in a worse corner than usual.” I jumped forward to the 1950s, where he reported his progress in writing The Second Miracle, worried about publishers and critics, exulted when BBC Radio invited him to appear. In the journals from the 1960s, the handwriting grows larger, looser and more difficult to decipher. Fears about losing his sight came to dominate the entries.
Pages from Gerald Carberry’s diary.
I soon began to focus on references to “V.” The initial first appears in the entry of 5 June 1948, the first since his arrival in England nine months earlier. V appeared to a nurse at St Giles. “V was anxious this morning, and behaved with less than her usual sense,” Gerald wrote.
By August, she had left the clinic and he went to see her in London. They saw Oklahoma at the Drury Lane Theatre, sat together in a bar full of visitors to the Olympics and, near midnight, went to V’s room. They “experimented with passion,” but he confessed, “I felt little real desire.” “She sensed it almost immediately and was, I fear, hurt and disappointed.” And yet she begged him, “Can’t we be married?” He quickly gave in. On 9 September 1948, he wrote, “I’ve done it! What the blazes it will lead to I don’t know.” Just a few lines later, he wondered if the marriage can be annulled but feared the resulting publicity “would immediately finish me.” He hadn’t told anyone at St Giles aside from “M,” a fellow patient and confidant.
Armed with the date of the marriage, Josephine and I searched on a genealogical website and confirmed that Gerald Carberry and Violet Wood married in London in September 1948. This fact — indeed Violet’s very existence — was never mentioned in The Second Miracle. It seemed from the diary that Gerald and Violet rarely lived together — there are notes about sharing holiday cottages, but also entries where he fretted about not receiving letters from her.
Then, in an entry dated 26 September 1964, he wrote, “10 months since Vi died.” In the following pages he wrote multiple versions of the days leading up to her death: “And so, when I returned to your room it was all over …”; “It must have been around eleven on the night of 25 October 1963 that I learnt she was going to die”; “She died on the morning of the 5th of December.” It was as if he hoped to appease grief by achieving the most precise record of her death. Yet the sense of loss remained. In one of the last notebooks, from December 1966, one line appears on the inside cover: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
A note from 3 December 1966: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
As I later read through the hundreds of pages I’d photographed, it became clear that Violet was not the only secret Gerald Carberry had kept from the readers of Peter Greave’s books. In trying to reconstruct Gerald’s story through further research, I discovered that Carberry was also a pseudonym. Gerald Carberry had been born Gerald Wilkinson and christened at St Teresa’s Church in Kolkata on the 11th of November 1910. His parents were listed as Herbert Reginald Wilkinson and Katherine Margaret Wilkinson, nee Tighe.
His father had been born in Manchester and enlisted in the 1st (Kings) Dragoon Guards at the age of 16 in 1899. After service in the Boer War and Aden, he made his way to India. When he married Katherine Tighe, whose father had been a police commissioner in Bombay, in 1909, Herbert Wilkinson’s profession was listed as “merchant’s assistant.” The job must have involved some travel, because a few months before Gerald’s birth, Herbert was arrested and fined in Adelaide, Australia for indecent exposure.
Herbert Wilkinson’s arrest for indecent exposure, Adelaide, Australia, 29 June 1910.
Sometime after the family’s return to India in 1922, Herbert Wilkinson changed his name, because the Times of India article about his conviction for “cheating and abetment” identifies him as “Herbert Carberry, alias Wilkinson.” The rest of his family went along and Gerald began Gerald Carberry, the name by which he was known outside of his books.
Greave had also taken liberties with some of his characters. In The Seventh Gate Greave wrote of his sexual relationship with a woman he called Sharon. Sharon was clearly the “C” of Gerald’s diary: “C and I spent hours together yesterday;” “With C all afternoon.” He was deeply affected by her: “Another of C’s moods worked off on me;” “Struck cold by something C said.” According to the book, Sharon married, left India in 1946 and was killed in a traffic accident soon after arriving in England.
In the diary, however, C remained alive and part of Gerald’s life into the early 1960s—despite his marriage to Violet. He wrote of meeting her. In 1951, he quoted from one of her letters: “For God’s sake, come to me Gerald; come to me before I lose my sanity.” From some of the clues in the diary, I was able to identify “C” as Catherine Rowland-Jones. Born in Bombay in 1914, she married Owain Rowland-Jones, a ship’s captain, and left India for England not long before Gerald’s own departure. Living in Kensington after coming to England, it would have been easy for her to meet with Gerald, who appears to have come to the city often by train from Chelmsford.
An excerpt from the diary entry for the meeting with “Mac”, November 1966
After Vi’s death, yet another woman appears in the diary: Mac. In a long entry from November 1966, he wrote of meeting her at the Liverpool Street station in London, after which they spent a long afternoon in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel. “For the first hour her behaviour was relatively subdued, but as one double vodka after another disappeared her voice and her spirits rose disquietingly.” She plied Gerald with drinks, insisted he kiss her, implored, “Will you marry me?” She may have been another nurse from St Giles, as she speaks of her impending departure for “that big hospital in Barnsley” (Yorkshire). He referred to her apprehensively as “Mac the Knife.”
By this point, however, sight was his biggest concern. From the early 1940s, the effect of leprosy on his sight had been a constant worry. “I just don’t know what to do with these bloody eyes”; “Eyes killing me again”; “I feel blindness hovering over me.” At times, he couldn’t focus or bear bright lights. In the 1960s, there were repeated visits to the Royal Free Hospital for operations. Each time he wondered whether he would wake up from the anesthesia and find himself blind. In the next entry after his meeting with Mac, he writes, “The world becomes increasingly foggy and indistinct. All I see is seen darkly even at noon when the sun shines brightly.”
The last entry in Gerald Carberry’s handwriting, 30 December 1966
His ability to see became intertwined with his will to live. “Long ago I made up my mind that when it came to this, I’d say, OK, enough,” he wrote in late November 1966. “But already I may have lost the power to act, to conclude the final chapter.” The last entry in his hand is dated 30 December 1966: “Almost certainly my last entry. No sight left — can’t read, can’t write. At last I’m ready to say — I don’t want to live anymore.”
After this, the remaining pages are blank. The next journal opens in early 1967. The handwriting is new, a precise secretarial copperplate: Gerald’s dictation, taken down by the secretary at St Giles. Occasional passages are written in Pittman shorthand: other secrets to be revealed, perhaps.
Most of the people I write about are no longer with us. And when I began my research for the post about Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman five years ago, I assumed she was, too.
Instead, I discovered that she was not only alive but was still on her quest to carve out a place for herself in the world as a solitary woman, a woman not tied to marriage, family, job, or place but only to her own need to find meaning in our world. She was a Diogenes of our time — except her search was not for an honest man but for the purest level of self-honesty. Unfortunately, this is not a kind time for a Diogenes. Rent, food, taxes, cards of identity, and the fact that our world today requires one thing foremost of a person — a fixed address — all worked against her.
Nor was her quest free of other complicating factors. These were hinted at in An Unknown Woman but more obvious in its sequel, The Stations of Solitude (1990). She cut ties with her family in Ohio over wrongs that may have been more perceived than real. She got jobs with her exceptional intelligence — she had a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard — and lost them over her unwillingness to comply with institutional norms. When she grew uneasy with her connections to a place, she would load up whatever junky car she had and head for another place. Even the website she set up some years ago required the help of a friend in Colorado and once set up, she tended not to respond to people who wrote her through the contact form it provided.
Berkeley librarian Francisca Goldsmith noted the problem in her Library Journal review of The Stations of Solitude. Koller, she wrote, seems to “take pride in her independence but complains when others have not come to her assistance as thoroughly as she believes they might.” As a result, Goldsmith wrote, Stations “is a disappointing book, primarily because Koller seems to be writing for herself, failing to invite readers into her exclusive domain of solitude.”
In An Unknown Woman, Koller acknowledged the paradox she embodied. She was engaged, she wrote, in a battle: “I’m defending, and laying siege, all at once.” “I’m even the prize,” she joked — “But I’m also the only one who’d want it.” Koller understood — and accepted the consequences of her honesty. Honesty may indeed be the best policy, as the saying goes, but as another saying goes, the truth hurts. Alice Koller’s life in some ways is testimony to the cost of honesty when taken to its extreme.
I first heard from one of Alice Koller’s death in Trenton, New Jersey last month from one of her relatives, Akiva Fox. I was hoping someone would publish her obituary but was about to give up hope when I was contacted by Penelope Green, who was looking for details on Alice’s life in preparation of her New York Times obituary. That obituary is now online and well worth reading. I also recommend that anyone interested in Alice’s life read the profile that Judy Flander first published in the Washington Star in 1977 — five years before the publication of An Unknown Woman.
Development was the first novel published by Bryher, pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman. It was the first of three loosely-fictionalized autobiographical novels, followed by Two Selves (1923), which was first published by Contact Editions, the Paris-based press established by Robert McAlmon and West (1925). All three of the books are virtually unattainable in first edition, but the University of Wisconsin Press did reissue the first two books as Two Novels: Development and Two Selves, edited by Joanne Winning, back in 2000.
Development takes Nancy — Bryher’s fictional self — from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. The Scillies were deeply important to Bryher, to the point that she took the name of one of the isles as her pseudonym, and the remote wildness of the Scillies seems to have motivated her to reject many of the customs and values of the conventional world she’d been raised in.
Bryher was one of Dorothy Richardson’s closest and most loyal friends, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which was itself (to some extent) a fictional autobiography, was clearly an inspiration. As in Pilgrimage, the story is told through the stream of the lead character’s consciousness, but in Bryher’s case, there’s a certain stiffness to the stream, if that makes any sense. Pilgrimage radiates such a vibrant sense of living in the world; in Development, on the other hand, the world is seen through a very literary/rational sensibility. And, frankly, one perhaps a little too satisfied with its own opinions — something it was refreshing to see is not unique to young men.
Perhaps this is because Bryher felt she had been born the wrong gender. As she once wrote her long-time lover, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), “I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy—I am just a girl by accident.” At a very young age, Nancy finds herself thinking, “Her one regret was that she was a girl.” When many little girls wish for dolls, Nancy dreams of owning a pocket-knife. She longs to be a sailor, imagines stowing away on a ship when she turns fourteen: “Why was she born with a boy’s heart when she might not go to sea?”
Little of Nancy’s knowledge of boys comes from first-hand experience. The only child of an enormously wealthy father — Sir John Ellerman, Bryher’s father, owned shipping lines and newspapers and was likely one of the richest men in Edwardian England — Nancy rarely have the opportunity to play with others. “Henceforth, her games should be shared with her elephant, a safer and quieter companion” than a girl she encounters one day in front of her house in Cornwall. She also learns about the world through books written for boys, especially the historical novels of G. A. Henty. Although Bryher never mentions the novelist, it’s clear that her first inspiration is Henty’s 1887 novel, The Young Carthaginian, A Story of the Time of Hannibal. Nancy begins to write her first novel: “Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign” — taking her hero’s name from one of Henty’s leading characters. The allure of Carthage fades, however, when she sees the actual remains of the city “a darkness of mud, a greyishness that held no violet about it, set with a few bleak stones.”
If Bryher/Nancy is sure she was meant to be a boy, she’s equally sure she was meant to be a writer. Even more frequent than her dreams of the sea are those of writing a book. One reason that language has such importance for Nancy is that she is a synesthetic. As she grows, her associations between words and colors grows more intense — “until her whole vocabulary became a palette of colours, luminous gold, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water.” This sensation extends even to letters: “Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose.” Because of Nancy’s fascination with language, Development is as much as anything a bibliomemoir — long before anyone was tossing that word around. We follow along as she falls in love with Shakespeare, partly for his poetry, mostly for his history, dislikes Keats, gorges herself in the lush exoticism of Salammbô. The third and final section of Development, “Transition,” is a catalogue of the reading of her late teens, each book leading her towards the one she is preparing to write. Fortunately, when she does put pen to paper, she sticks to original material: “The intervals of her reading Nancy filled with her own manuscript, wrought neither of imagination nor remembered stories but of the one experience she knew from end to end — herself.”
Before this last burst of the intellectual development in her late teens, however, Nancy has to endure her middle passage: boarding school, or as Bryher un-subtly titles this section, “Bondage.” Like Bryher, Nancy is sent relatively late to a girl’s school, joining the Fourth Year and quickly being progressed to the Fifth. Her two years, though, seem an eternity. A decade before Antonia White’s Frost in May, fifty years ahead of Deschooling Society, Bryher was scathing in her criticism of mass education. Downwood — the fictional equivalent of Queenswood, the school Bryher attended — is a typically grim English boarding school, “one of the coldest, bleakest places she had seen, with open windows, worn-out carpets, and a mass of white paint inside, and outside a long weedy lawn and a few flower-pots.” While slightly more comfortable than Dicken’s Dotheboys Hall, Downwood is hardly better in its approach to instruction. Rote learning, repetition, memorization, and progress in locked step are the hallmarks of its regime, compounded by ruthless conformity. Nancy learns never to mention she has travelled widely. Having never really known other children, she finds them more like cattle. “For the first time the spirit of the crowd — an oppressed thing in turn oppressing, judge of outward aspect only, blind to the finer shades, with the strength of the sloth, the ferocity of a brute — weighed her and weighed her distrustfully.” The effect of being in class is deadening: “Not a girl was idle, joyfully idle; not a mind was interested; not a thought was alert.”
As much as we sympathize with Nancy, there is a certain superiority in her views towards her classmates that’s hard to like. She pities them “the poverty of their monotonous restricted thought.” Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Development, I found it undermined by a deep-seated solipsism. For great stretches of the book, it really does seem as if no one else exists. At one point as she recounts Nancy’s experiences around the Mediterranean, for example, Bryher writes, “Unshaken from her Italian allegiance, Nancy left, one January morning, for Algiers.” Nancy is at this stage around the age of 10 or 11. Nancy didn’t leave for Algiers — she most certainly went along as one of a party led by her mother or father or both. Ditto for the visits to Egypt, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, etc.. Did Nancy have a governness? A tutor? Apparently not. In reference to her own parents, the words “mother” and “father” appear just three times each. Looking back, I see I had much the same impression about Bryher’s much-later non-fictional memoir: “The Heart to Artemis is remarkably depersonalized. If Bryher were to take a Myers-Briggs test, I’m pretty sure she would prove to be an NT. We learn a great deal about her thoughts and very little about her feelings. For a life so full of experiences, it’s almost creepily dispassionate.”
Development was in some ways Bryher’s most successful novel. Published in both England and the U.S., it went into second printings. One reason was the controversy stirred up by her account of Downwood. After publishing an article titled “Cramped School Girls” that summarized Bryher’s descriptions of the school, The Daily Mail solicited “the opinions of our readers, particularly those who have attended such schools as are the subject of Miss Bryher’s outspoken criticism.” Over the next few days, numerous women wrote in. One girl said “To pass examinations was the main object at my school. The rules were particularly stupid.” A former teacher said she had led “the cramped life of a nun,” though she felt the experience of the war meant that many were coming back “with a far more human outlook.” A Miss Cowdroy, principal of Crouch End School, however, thought that schools like Downwood had become “as extinct as the dodo. Every modern school aims at complete self-development and self-expression.” One father supported Bryher, writing that “Parents need to insist upon the reform of the mid-Victorian system,” while Avery H. Forbes, a teacher with 38 years’ experience argued somewhat ironically that “girls are far better taught than are boys of the same age.”
Bryher responded with a letter to the editor, rejecting Miss Cowdroy’s argument and suggesting that schools like Downwood weren’t becoming extinct fast enough. She spread the fault widely if evenly: “I blame the parents. It is their duty to insist that a suitable and healthy education should be given to their children…. I blame the teachers. They should insist on freedom of life and thought…. I blame the children themselves. They should fight for an education that will fit them for their future life….” The Mail, however, gave the last word to Miss Angela Brazil from Coventry, who said she’d received letters from hundreds of schoolgirls, most of whom wrote of the “gorgeous fun” they had at school. Despite Miss Brazil’s optimism, though, sadly too many of Bryher’s criticisms of Downwood remain valid for our schools a hundred years later.
Development, by Bryher London: Constable, 1920 New York: Macmillan, 1920
Maurice Sachs was a charmer. Jean Cocteau once warned their mutual friend, the poet Max Jacob, “Don’t trust Maurice. He’s a charmer. He would try to charm God Himself!” In writing his memoirs with utterly self-effacing candor, he managed to make his charm live on after him. Sachs wrote in the tradition of Rousseau, Stendhal, and André Gide, convinced that the greatest sin of all was hypocrisy. In the pages of his posthumously-published memoir, Witches’ Sabbath — being reissued this week from Spurl Editions — and its sequel The Hunt, Sachs admits to breaking most of the Commandments.
Though he rarely managed to complete the novels he started and few of his plays made it to the stage, Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. Though a homosexual, he wasn’t averse to going to bed with a woman if it served a purpose. He also wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. He seduced several German officers while living in occupied Paris and numerous members of the LVF (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, a Nazi-friendly French military group) and Gestapo after moving to Hamburg in 1943. “My life has been nothing but one long complicity with the guilty,” he wrote. “I have always been on the side of the pariahs.”
Sachs’ grandmother had scandalized French society by leaving her husband to marry Jacques Bizet, the talented but erratic and spendthrift son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Sachs idolized Jacques, but by the time they became close, Bizet was already bent on self-destruction. Maurice remembers Bizet playing around with a revolver one day. He “fired one bullet out the window to show me it was really loaded, and put the barrel in my mouth, right up against my palate. Then he put my forefinger on the trigger and said: ‘When you’ve had enough of life, that’s the way to kill yourself. It’s clean, and you don’t feel a thing.’” Not long after that, Bizet used the gun in exactly that way to take his life. Maurice was just sixteen.
Sachs’ grandfather was a wealthy diamond merchant, but Sachs’ parents managed to squander his legacy. When he was seventeen, Maurice had to arrange for his mother’s quick escape to England after she wrote her creditors a large check guaranteed to bounce. He disliked his family so much he fantasized in his memoir about the family he wished for: “My father comes in all muddy from foxhunting, my mother gets up from the piano where she has been singing a simple ballad.” He claimed the only things he inherited from his parents were his father’s laziness and his mother’s “lack of balance.”
His parents rid themselves of the responsibility to raise Maurice by sending him off to a boarding school. By his account, French boarding schools were just as much hotbeds of sadomasochism and homosexual as English ones. Maurice skirted the approaches of masters and upperclassmen but fell in love with a fellow student and appears to have accepted his sexual preference with remarkably little angst.
After leaving school, he set himself up in Paris with what he’d saved from his grandfather’s estate and dove headfirst into the city’s social and cultural life. “How good it felt to be twenty, in those days. This was the reign of gaiety and license,” he recalled. He met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and fell under the spell of his piety. Sponsored by Maritain and his wife, Sachs converted to Catholicism in 1925 and soon after entered a seminary to become a priest.
It was to be a short stay. Sachs put on his soutaine in January 1926; by the end of September, he had been ejected from the order. While enjoying a short vacation on the Riviera, he made the acquaintance of the American writer Glenway Westcott, who in turn introduced him to a handsome (and wealthy) teenager named Tom Pinkerton. Sachs fell madly in love with Pinkerton. Though Sachs maintained the relationship remained platonic, Pinkerton’s mother complained to the Bishop of Nice.
Sachs acknowledged that “I mistook an ephemeral enthusiasm for an eternal vocation.” He also confessed that he felt “a mixed delight” in the trappings of the church “that was not entirely pious.” He loved his soutaine, for example: “The black was becoming, and made me look slender.” He is also reported to have had his lined with pink silk crêpe du Chine.
He went from one institution to another. Leaving the seminary made him eligible for military service, and he was soon stationed with the French army of occupation along the Rhine in Germany. While his first job was monitoring latrines, he was soon put in charge of the officer’s library after a colonel found him reading Montesquieu at his post. About the only thing he took away from his time in the army was his lifelong friendship with the poet Max Jacob.
Back in Paris again, he indulged himself in the two vices he’d become acquainted with in the military: sex and drink. Though he claimed not to have known of their existence, he began frequenting Paris’s male brothels, including the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, notorious as the scene of Marcel Proust’s more extreme sexual experiences. He also became a profligate drinker: “it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to sit down to a meal without having drunk about ten cocktails.”
Sachs rarely held back his passions. If Cocteau learned to be wary of Maurice’s charms, Sachs gave into his enchantment with the poet and artist completely: it was, he wrote, “total, immediate, and delicious.” “When we left this magician,” Sachs recalled, “I knew beyond all doubt that I was going to live only for him.” Cocteau’s response to Sachs was friendly but cautious.
He did, however, recommend the young man to Coco Chanel, who hired him to assemble a private library. Then “on the point of no longer counting her fortune,” Chanel gave him a monthly budget of 60,000 Francs and carte blanche in his commission. “I had no problem making a good living out of this sum,” Sachs wrote in something of an understatement. It’s unlikely that much of Chanel’s investment made it to her shelves. He took full advantage of her largesse:
I had an apartment, paintings, a car, a secretary, two servants, a masseur, expensive love affairs; I spent my nights in cabarets, my afternoons at the tailor’s, I bought books and bibelots, and this was perhaps the moment of my life when I enjoyed the highest degree of physical comfort. What young man would not have been intoxicated by so many absurd grandeurs which he believed to be the result of his personal genius?
By the time he’d exhausted Chanel’s good humor, however, he’d managed to convince other investors of his genius as well. Lucien Demotte hired Sachs to help assemble collections of French paintings that were shown in Paris and London. The pair then headed, artworks in hand, to New York, where Demotte owned a gallery on East 57th Street. Unfortunately, they landed in New York with perhaps a million dollars’ worth of merchandise which had little prospect of being sold. Sachs was able to hang onto Demotte’s coattails for a while, standing in as a groomsman when Demotte married the daughter of the Franco-American tycoon Felix Wildenstein in early 1931, but he soon had to fend for himself.
Louis Marcoussis, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs and Moise Kisling at the Claridge Galleries, London, June 1929
He came up with a solution with the help of Harold Peat, director of a lecture tour agency. Impressed with Sachs’ good looks and suave manners, he agreed to take Sachs on as a lecturer. The only problem was: on what?
“What will you talk about?” “About art.” “There can’t be more than three hundred people who are interested in that. We need three thousand. Why not talk about politics?” “Because I don’t know anything about politics.” “Just read the morning papers, and that evening tell what you read in your own words.”
Two weeks later, Peat was selling his new client as “Maurice Sachs: Famous French Economist,” whose talks promised to “Train a Spotlight on the Secrets of Europe.” Sachs also found support for his new career in an admiring member of his early lectures. Gwladys Matthews, whose father was pastor of the largest Presbyterian congregation in Seattle, was an aspiring writer who wanted to get free of her family.
Sachs claimed he told her of his preference for men but said he was interested in gaining a wife for the sake of a future political career. He charmed Reverend Matthews with the sincerity of his passion: “I love your daughter,” he told Matthews. “If you do not give your consent to our marriage, I shall marry her all the same.” Regardless of who was fooling whom, Maurice and Gwladys were married in Seattle in June 1932, her father officiating.
In Witches’ Sabbath, Sachs referred to Seattle as “Morpheus,” which gives a clue to the prospects for the marriage. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks then returned to the West Coast, taking an apartment in San Francisco. It was there, in April 1934, that Gwladys filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Brilliant Romance to End” read the Associated Press headline for the news. In fact, what would prove Maurice’s longest romantic involvement had begun – according to the divorce papers – in February 1933 he ran off with a young Californian he refers to in the book as Henry. As usual, Sachs was honest about his dishonesty: “I had married her like a madman; I left her like a coward,” he wrote.
Gwladys, by the way, later moved to Hollywood, worked as a screenwriter and married the pioneering photographer Ned Scott in 1936. Before his desertion, she also did Sachs the favor of translating his memoir, The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, which Knopf published just weeks after Maurice took off with Henry.
The book, now long out of print, received good reviews. “A charming and delightfully kaleidoscopic parade,” wrote C. Norris Millington in The American Magazine of Art. “staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France.” Millington credited Sachs for his “dramatis personae”: “practically every well-known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, bookseller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” Others thought he took his personal Who’s Who too far, noting that his index listed 770 names, or roughly three names for every page.
Maurice and Henry took the advance for Decade of Illusion and bought berths on a cattle boat returning to Le Havre. Sachs returned to a family devasted by the Depression. “Nous n’avons rien” he wrote: “We have nothing left.” Sachs’ mother had suffered a heart attack; his Uncle Richard had committed suicide. Though Sachs’ most tolerant, if skeptical, supporter, André Gide, helped him get a job editing a new series for La Nouvelle Revue Française, the money wasn’t enough to support the two lovers and Maurice had to fill in as a desk clerk at the cheap hotel where they stayed. Sachs’ description of the hotel (which he calls the Hotel Saint-Joachim but was actually l’hôtel Saint-Yves) and its residents are some of the best passages in Witches Sabbath.
A man who stays in a hotel, far from his habitual milieu, inwardly liberated, rarely constrains himself. The employee sees him naked. In two years of the hotel business, I learned a great deal about human behavior. I have seen maniacs, debauchees, paragons of virtue, monsters of anger, the timorous, the greedy, and the generous; I have observed vanity and folly, dreadful aberrations, charming virtues, conduct full of inner distinction, and incredible abasement I have watched, and a horrible spectacle it was, thousands of individuals eat, whom it was my duty to watch as they did so (spaghetti dinners were always the worst). The toilet that doesn’t work, the bath that overflows, the bed in which, in spite of everything, a lady believes she has found a mischievous flea, oblige a curious participation in the intimacy of people whom you know too much about and whom you don’t know. The intimacy that no sympathy motivates is as painful as a promiscuity of the flesh.
Even with this income, Sachs wrote, “There was almost no day when I knew exactly how we were going to eat that evening.” He admits to hanging around the bookstalls across the river from the Louvre for the purpose of stealing books. Cocteau later wrote that during this time, Sachs would stuff his pockets with toilet paper, rustling it so others thought his pockets were full of 1,000-Franc notes. “It gives me confidence,” Sachs told Cocteau.
Sachs’ way of coping with poverty disgusted some of his acquaintances. Marcel Jouhandeau, who later collaborated with the Nazis, claimed that it was his encounters with Sachs that led him to write a notorious article, “How I Became an Anti-Semite,” for the journal of the far-right party, Action Française.
Sachs was saved by the actor Pierre Fresnay, best known among English-speaking audiences for his role as the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Fresnay encouraged him to write for the stage. Though most of Sachs’ attempts never reached completion, let alone the stage, his translation of the Terence Rattigan play, French Without Tears was a success. Fresnay enlisted Sachs to work as stage manager when he organized a run of plays performed on alternating nights in London’s West End in 1938. Sachs returned to Paris exhausted. It is here that Witches’ Sabbath ends. “I am leaving. I don’t know where I am going, where I shall go. To the East, if I have any luck.”
The Hunt ( La chasse à courre), Sachs’ last and incomplete memoir, picks up a two years later in May 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg was approaching Paris. Sachs had managed to attach himself to the staff of the government radio network and fled with it to the Third Republic’s final capital in Bordeaux. There, he first encountered the deceit, greed, and hypocrisy that would characterize much of French life under the Occupation. After a few weeks of sharing an over-priced bed in an overcrowded hotel, he returned to Paris.
There, he found the black market was already booming. “What was I going to do if not the black market?” he asked. Once again, Sachs relied on his charm and connections to work his way in. He became a specialist in moving jewelry and precious goods, often working on consignment. He lied and was lied to on a daily basis. “I was up to my neck in the very finest garbage,” he wrote.
And exceptional garbage it was. While rationing and deprivation was the rule for ordinary Parisians, with the right connections and enough money, the life of luxury rolled on: “the Chataigné … turned out a delectable lobster au beurre blanc, Philippe served the foie gras at the height of rationing, chocolate mousse, and meat without coupons, the Vieux Pont-Neuf, where they had cakes made with real cream, Gaffner served beefsteaks, Lola Tosch offered leg of lamb, et cetera….” It took a furious amount of wheeling and dealing to keep up this lifestyle, however, and Sachs’ accounts of his many transactions are both dizzying and mind-numbing.
After a point, however, the reader loses interest in knowing how much he took from the Duchesse d’Y or sold to the Comte de T.. Sachs came to feel the same way. “The fatigue, the boredom, yes, above all the boredom of these incessant transactions, the unreality, the roguery, the disgust I felt for myself and for others suddenly seized me by the throat,” he wrote. He teamed up with the ex-wife of one of his friends and retreated to the quiet of a village in Normandy.
In The Hunt, he refers to the woman as Pomme. In reality, she was Violette Le Duc, who later became famous for her memoir, La Bâtarde. Though they spent months together – continuing to keep up a steady black-marketing operation, only now in produce, meats and cheeses – it would be hard to tell from comparing their respective accounts. In The Hunt, Pomme is a pleasant companion with an absurd crush on him. In La Bâtarde, he is the brilliant, handsome, and talented Maurice Sachs – Le Duc refers to him by his full name at least 50% of the time. Sachs ultimately found her suffocating. Le Duc credits him with inspiring her to write:
Maurice said to me next day: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”
That afternoon, Le Duc began to write what would become her first book, L’Asphyxie. If you are interested in a third version of this story, you can watch director Martin Provost’s 2013 film, Violette.
Maurice and Pomme were accompanied to Normandy with Karl-Heinz, a German Jewish orphan that Sachs took a notion to adopt. The Rothschild family had taken in a group of Jewish orphans ejected from Germany a few months before the outbreak of war in hopes of finding homes with good French families. One doubts two black marketeers hiding out in the country were quite what they had in mind. And Sachs’ treatment of Karl-Heinz demonstrated the dangers of boutique parenting.
Sachs was attracted by the twelve-year-old’s good looks, but as soon as the boy opened his mouth, he left his foster father with a longing to flee. Karl-Heinz was not interested in books or art or music. His ambition was to be a waiter. Sachs was glad to learn of an American Quaker organization that was arranging for orphans to be sent to families in the U.S. and soon Karl-Heinz was standing at the nearest train station, ticket in hand. “My burning love for Karl-Heinz had already been extinguished in the tepid waters,” Sachs confessed, happy to be rid of the boy’s “appealing mediocrity.”
Sachs returned to Paris and the 24×7 life of deal-making, but his luck in coming out on the profitable end of these increasingly complicated three-, four- and five-way transactions was on the wane. By the beginning of autumn 1942, he was looking for another way out.
In October 1942, Sachs finally headed East. To Hamburg. His rationale is unclear from The Hunt and none of the several biographies written since the 1960s have come up with a definitive answer, but the most likely reasons relate to lust and greed. Sachs was infatuated with the strong, self-confident blond Aryans he encountered in smart uniforms in Paris and saw a chance to carouse with more of them in the Fatherland. He also thought the Nazis would pay well for information supplied by a willing Frenchman operating inside the forced labor organization supplying thousands of workers for German factories.
Sachs managed to slip out of occupied France in November 1942, sleeping with his guide along the way. The final section of The Hunt is drawn from letters he sent back to Paris. At first, he found the experience of going to work with hundreds of other French workers tedious: several pages of The Hunt are devoted to cataloguing the character flaws and bad habits of Bretons, Gascons, and others. And “Need I add that they had never heard the word ‘conversation’ in their lives?” He was proud, however, of what he referred to as his “little Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
Sachs was in Hamburg when some of the cities’ most devastating bombing raids took place. “The city is really nothing more than a heap of charred rubble in which I still have a room without water, without electricity, almost without anything,” he wrote after one raid. Still he felt more at home than he had in occupied France. “No doubt about it, I adore this country: the only one where I find it easy to be happy, where I’m instinctively happy, as it were.” And there was no shortage of sexual partners: “There’s love for all through the town,” he reported almost giddily.
In June 1943, he wrote with excitement – and suspicious ambiguity – of getting a new job. “I am well paid, newly clothed, and well thought of,” he crowed. The job undoubtedly involved collaboration with the Gestapo, but it also provided him with opportunities to seduce young Frenchmen of the LVF and the occasional willing Nazi. He may not have known that at the age of 36, he was already being referred to as Maurice la tante — Maurice the aunt.
The Nazis were less susceptible to Sachs’ charm, however. In November 1943, he was arrested for his homosexual activities and sent to the Fuhlsbüttel prison. What happened to Sachs after this was for some years a mystery. When La chasse à courre was first published in Paris in 1947, it ended with a postscript added by the publisher stating Sachs’ whereabouts were unknown. Later, it was reported he had been lynched by inmates. Finally, a German reporter was able to confirm that in April 1945, Sachs and the other prisoners in Fuhlsbüttel were evacuated to avoid the approaching British Army and forced to march to another facility in Kiel. Walking through the snow without food, water, or proper clothing, many of the inmates died along the way. When Sachs and another prisoner failed to join the formation on the morning of April 14, 1945, they were shot in the head by a Belgian SS guard.
Le Sabbat (subtitled souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse — Memoirs of a Stormy Youth) caused “a considerable furor in literary and salon circles,” as Janet Flanner reported in a 1946 “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. One French reviewer described it as “The chronicle of a vicious drunk and pervert, whose struggles to refashion his life and regenerate his soul are blocked by a voluptuous pleasure in guilt and loathsomeness.” Even untranslated, the assessment of another reads like a seminarian’s list of venal and deadly sins: “Mal élevé, vicieux, orgueilleux, vaniteux, adonné aux pires excès, aux perversions les plus scandaleuses, homosexuel, renégat, mufle, il représente le point extrême de la jeunesse débauchée et cynique.” An American academic reviewer put it more bluntly: “Young Jew writes je as easily as Jean-Jacques.”
The book was first translated into English by Robin King in 1953 as Days of Wrath: Confessions of a Turbulent Youth. It’s a rendition best left forgotten. The TLS reviewer called the translation “slapdash” and “disfigured by an exasperating carelessness in the proof-reading.” And despite his claim that the book was of greater literary than documentary value, King also chose to bowdlerize the text. As Benedict Nicolson put it in his New Statesman review, “There can be no excuse” for King’s editorial decisions: “… reproducing parts of chapters, omitting a phrase here, a paragraph there, in so arbitrary a fashion that one is continuously driven back to the French text to discover what the author intended.”
Spurl Editions has wisely chosen to reissue the 1964 Richard Howard translation, titled Witches’ Sabbath, instead. At the time of its original publication, Anthony Powell called it “a near-classic of its kind.” Powell had an elegant way of describing Sachs’ elusive manner of dealing with facts. “Although one suspects there is little here that is not, within its context, true, the skill of the narrative makes truth almost beside the point.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano was so inspired by Sachs’ handling of the truth that he brought Sachs back to life as an aging and unrepentant collaborator in the first novel of his “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Etoile (1968).
A year after Witches’ Sabbath, its sequel The Hunt, Richard Howard’s translation of La chasse à courre was also published by Stein and Day in the U.S. and Calder & Boyars in the U.K.. Although a much shorter and obviously incomplete book, Sachs’ charm was still on display. “There’s a racy, flaunted untrustworthiness about Sachs which keeps you on your guard just as surely as it keeps you reading,” David Williams wrote in The Daily Telegraph. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had the opposite of Robin King’s assessment, saying the book had far more documentary interest than literary merit.
Spurl Editions has done readers a great favor with its reissue of Witches’ Sabbath. At a time when people are looking for a good book to hunker down and enjoy, this is an excellent way to spend a few days while you’re barricaded behind your walls of toilet paper. You can order the book now from Spurl or from Amazon as of April 3.
This is a sad book: a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s prolonged and painful death from cancer over the span of four years. It’s an even sadder book when you know what came after it.
Betsey Barton was born in comfort and grew up in luxury. Her father, pioneering advertising man Bruce Barton, didn’t invent the concept of boosterism, but he certainly refined it. His 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, gave aspiring American capitalists a “Get Out of Purgatory” card by assuring them that Jesus — “the world’s greatest business executive” — wanted them to get rich. As a founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), still one of the world’s leading ad agencies, he came up with brand names and slogans that are woven into our vernacular: General Motors; General Electric; and Betty Crocker, to mention a few. Barton went on to become a prominent Republican congressman representing Manhattan and advocating the Isolationist cause at the start of World War Two. During the run for his third term as President, FDR loved to mock Barton and fellow Isolationists Joe Martin and Hamilton Fish III with his phrase “Martin, Barton, and Fish” (to the rhythm of “Winken, Blinken, and Nod”), but his mockery had little effect on Barton’s wealth or social standing.
Betsey Barton (left), from Town and Country magazine, 15 July 1934
Barton’s only daughter Betsey was in the spotlight from the time she had her coming-out ball. Her picture appeared regularly in newspaper society sections and the pages of slick upscale magazines. In 1934, not long after being photographed for Town & Country, Betsey was severely injured in an automobile accident. Her back was broken and she was left paralyzed from the waist down. Three years later, while spending a winter holiday with her family outside Phoenix, the ambulance carrying her to a hospital for routine physical therapy went off the road, compounding her existing injuries and leaving her with severe nerve damage.
Photo of Betsey Barton from 26 February 1937 Pittsburgh Post Gazette
At first, Betsey and her parents hoped she would recovery her ability to walk, but after years of expensive and unsuccessful treatments, they came to accept that her condition was irreversible. As she experienced just how many challenges everyday life put in the path of a disabled person — even one with all the advantages of money and position — Betsey became an advocate with a cause. And when the first American servicemen began to return from combat with similar injuries, she became a writer as well. Her first book, And Now to Live Again (1944), was a call for these men not to lose hope.
Though she described herself as a nonprofessional, Betsey Barton wrote with the credibility of someone who’d been through the same experience. Her message was simple: in losing one life — a life free of injuries — these men had won a new one, a life “that in many delicate and tender ways is a far better one.” She recognized her readers would be skeptical. “Had I read this years ago when first I lost the use of my legs I would have thrown down the book in disgust,” she admitted. She offered herself as an example of both the potential for rehabilitation and its many opportunities for setbacks. “I have done all the wrong things and made all the mistakes it is possible to make and still survive.” But she also addressed the practical considerations of the handicapped: “Going into restaurants, going into subways, going out to dinner … become monstrous affairs demanding will power and planning and concentration.”
After the war, she continued to take an active role in the cause of the disabled and made frequent visits to military hospitals to talk with and support G.I.s undergoing rehabilitation. She turned these experiences into fictional form with her 1948 novel, The Long Walk. Set in an Army hospital, the story focuses on the “difficult” patients — the men who resist rehabilitation, sunk in their hopelessness and self-pity. Barton placed herself in the story in the person of Janet, a wheelchair-bound young woman whose presence is intended — but with mixed results — to boost the mens’ morale. While most reviews were complimentary, one British critic noted a weakness that runs through much of her writing: “The country which Miss Barton explores with so much sympathy and understanding is entirely that of the mind, and its physical setting is negligible.”
Around the time The Long Walk was published, Betsey’s mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Having relied heavily on her mother’s support through years of therapy, the news hit Betsey with exceptional force. As Love is Deep is the diary of Esther Barton’s long and ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer and her daughter’s even longer struggle to come to terms with her mother’s death.
When she returned to New York City to be with her mother, Betsey wrote, “I was met by a stranger. A nervous, thin woman with what appeared to be suddenly whitened hair greeted me in the library.” The woman she had left “well and strong and full of life” was now shaking and hesitant. And worst of all for her daughter, she wanted to be left alone. “Mothers don’t ask to be left alone very often. They are the available members of the human race,” Betsey noted, frustrated at being unable to reciprocate the support she’d been given. Even when the two women sit together, Betsey finds herself “filled with a sense of desolation” at her mother’s silence.
This separation becomes a major theme in their relationship and a primary source of the feelings Betsey struggles with after her mother’s death: “So I stood outside her, as I was to do so often in months to come, filled with admiration at her ability to continue on with life as it had always been, terrified at the lack of communication.” Ironically, another accident ensured that Betsey could not be with her mother at the end. When Esther Barton died in November 1951, Betsey herself was laying in a hospital room, having slipped in her bathroom and fractured her left thigh. She was unable to attend the funeral.
The Arizona desert had by then become the Barton’s second home and the setting becomes Betsey’s spiritual refuge over the following years. It also became a practical refuge when the family’s home in Foxboro, Massachussetts — the home she grew up in, a small Colonial cottage expanded through numerous additions — was condemned and had to be demolished. Esther Barton had lavished years of collecting on the house’s furnishings and Betsey now watched “all the lovely things within it” being dispersed to scattered family and friends. “The house could be looked upon as a symbol of a time of life and through tears I could come finally to accept that what I missed was the fact that the time of life was over, must be over, for all of us.” In the desert, she found “a different kind of thinking” as she looks out on the long vistas towards the mountains: “Relationships, too, perhaps, are different because they exist within these lovely dimensions.”
As her mother was dying, Betsey channeled some of her energies into a second novel, The Shadow of the Bridge (1950), set in an exclusive New England girls’ boarding school. There is no mention of this in As Love is Deep, but it’s perhaps significant that one of the two main characters in the novel, Alida, is haunted by the memory of her mother, who died when the girl was still a child. While novelist Sterling North thought the book was “a beautifully organized, exquisitely told story, enriched by a real mastery of abnormal psychology,” most critics were much harsher. “This story of adolescent anguish is clearly written, with earnest intensity, but it casts little light upon ancient trials and the intensity itself is of such an unrelievedly banal order that it is something of an embarrassment,” Gertrude Buckman wrote in The New York Times. “There is freshness neither in the writing nor in the conception or drawing of characters or situation.”
Even though As Love is Deep is just 144 pages long, it took Betsey Barton seven years to write. Though she claims to reach some sense of what we casually refer to as “closure” — “the present was returned to me at last” — there is an underlying and unresolved conflict evident throughout. Early in the book, she writes,
I have given up the idea of working on myself, lost faith in it, since I have learned that will power, no matter how faithfuly applied, cannot restore my ability to walk. At one time I had thought that, despite all medical dictums, my force of will could cure me. Now I know differently. My interest in esoteric knowledge has not waned. It is only that I have suffered the disillusionment of not being able to bring about a miraculous healing of myself.
Both And Now to Live Again and As Love is Deep are filled with calls to find peace and perspective in love, beauty, and spiritual matters. “If we look at it right,” she argues, “even when we are doing what seems like nothing but the drudgery of physical exercise, we are working with divine tools, sacred tools, following the holy laws that will lead us out of disease into ease.” Yet one senses that Betsey Barton was herself never fully convinced. Her own physical challenges rarely allowed themselves to be ignored for long.
On the morning of Thursday, 13 December 1962, readers of The Los Angeles Times were greeted with a headline announcing Betsey Barton’s death. The morning before, Betsey’s live-in nurse found her floating face up in the pool outside her house in the hills above Bel-Air. Her wheelchair lay at the bottom of the dead end. Tracks in the lawn and deck indicated Betsey had wheeled herself up to and into the pool. The watch on her wrist read 4:40 AM. The police reported that acquaintances said that Betsey had been despondent over her increasing health problems. Though no note was found, the death was ruled a suicide. Her father funded a fellowship in his daughter’s name, administered by the World Rehabilitation Fund, to support the work of rehabilitation therapists and clinics in Third World countries and provide hope even though Betsey Barton ultimately lost hers.
As Love is Deep, by Betsey Barton New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1957
Church, prayer, going to Sunday services and weekday evening meetings remains the center of life for some families and communities. One hundred years ago, they were the frameworks of the rituals and values of many English people, particularly those of the class of shopkeepers and lesser professions. Each denomination and sect identified itself through its practices and principles.
As Peter Fletcher shows in his memoir, The Long Sunday, the Wesleyan Chapel in their East Coast seaside town was the center of his family’s lives, the measure by which they judged themselves and their neighbors. His parents’ commitment to faithful attendance, service in countless supporting chores, and application of the church’s strictures to control their children and condemn their neighbors was the one point on which they could agree. They were united in their ability to place their brethren in precise order of damnation or salvation. They knew “who was making eyes at whom, who was being married, who was expected to die, who was prosperous, who was running for bankruptcy, who was suspected of secret drinking, card-playing and other vices.”
This was even easier when it came to other Christian churches. “I could have prepared a seating-plan of Heaven — this is where my concentric circles first come in — showing exactly where the members of the several denominations, from Salvationists to Roman Catholics, would find themselves in relation to the Great White Throne.” “Without the slightest hesitation I could have decided to whom to distribute harps and haloes, and who would be fortunate to secure ‘standing room only’ on the edge of the outer darkness.”
In all other matters, Peter realized as he grew, their primary function was to serve the other as “a catalyst precipitating resentment.” His father was to blame for all his mother’s disappointments, and vice-versa. “The one thing they had in common was their religion.” They projected their expectations onto their children, and in his zealous quest to please them by achieving all possible prizes for service, rote learning, and generally pious demeanor, Peter acknowledges that “By the time I had reached the age of fourteen I was an unsufferably self-righteous little prig.”
At that point, however, his attitude began to change, and it was primarily due to his own quiet, careful observation of the adults in the congregation. He began to notice the discrepancies between what people did and said in church and what they did after. “For reasons best known to themselves the adults were by common consent playing, and thoroughly enjoying, a highly dramatic game of ‘let’s pretend.'”
That didn’t prevent him, though, from throwing himself headlong into throng when an Evangelistic Campaign pitched its tent in town. “I was one of those into whose hands this great enterprise had been committed. I was on the inside, looking out.” He goes to all the meetings, and vies with the best of them when it came to profess his sins and ask for redemption: “the longer one person went on the longer would the others be likely to go on when their turn came. So once a prayer meeting got under way there was no telling when it would stop.”
Growing up in an environment go strenuously concerned with following the straight and narrow path did mean that certain aspects of Peter’s upbringing were neglected. Here, for example, is the sum of his father’s attempt to explain the facts of life:
“That’s a tom-cat, but it has been cut.” “I didn’t notice anything wrong with it.” “Of course you didn’t. I said it’s been cut.” His tone of voice indicated that the word, ‘cut,” had some special significance, but I hadn’t the remotest idea what it was; so after a pause, I said, Oh, has it?” My father asked: “You know what I mean, don’t you?” I answered, “No.” “Well, if you don’t know what I mean, I can’t tell you!” My father replied, and relapsed into morose silence. And that was the beginning and the end of all the parental instruction I ever received into the mysteries of procreation.
It is only when Peter enlists in the Royal Ordinance Corps several months after the start of the war in 1914 that he is able to step free of the pressure to “play along” with the rituals of his family and the church. Being treated as an anonymous and presumably incompetent recruit comes as something of a relief. And when a big, coarse, hard-drinking Welshman in his unit shows some kindness to him after Peter passes out on the parade ground, he realizes that the man is treating him in a more truly Christian manner than anything he had experienced in nearly twenty years’ daily life in the Wesleyan Church: “I have given up the religious which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy, or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday.”
The Long Sunday is a remarkable effort to understand a time, a place, and a way of making sense of the world that Fletcher himself has moved on from without ever giving the sense that he is trying to reject it or undermine it by revealing its flaws. Whatever flaws he can now recognize in his parents, their rituals and beliefs, and their efforts to pass them along to him, he is less interested in passing judgment than in achieving some perspective and balance in his understanding. And in that regard, The Long Sunday is a model of a clear-eyed but deeply sympathetic approach to revisiting one’s past.
“It was my father’s strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total of over two and a half million words,” Page Smith writes in his introduction to this book, which should be considered as artifact more than work of literature. The letter’s length was only one of its unique features: “Much of it was devoted to an account of his sexual adventures, related in very explicit detail.”
Smith, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, received the letter along with a handful of his father’s belongings, in several boxes and trunks delivered to his house in Santa Cruz, California after his father’s death in 1968. Although Smith’s father had mentioned the work to his son, he’d never hinted at its volume or its depth of erotic material. So when Smith first began reading through the stacks of papers, he was quickly put off.
Few children want to know anything about their parents’ sexual lives and the contrast between Smith and his father was particularly stark. Smith married the one and only woman he’d ever fallen in love with and stayed faithful to her until the day he died (she died two days later). Smith’s father had been married three times and, if the letter is an accurate account, had slept with hundreds, perhaps thousands of women. Smith acknowledged his own attitudes towards sex as conventional. His father had been fascinated by all variations of sex and experienced many of them repeatedly.
And so Smith’s first inclination was to leave the boxes in his barn and put the thing out of his mind. As a historian, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of burning the lot. “There was some prospective historical-sociological-psychological significance to it,” he thought. Eventually, an editor at Little, Brown encouraged him to try shaping the material into a publishable format. An unabridged version would have run to 15-20 costly volumes and held appeal for only a handful of research libraries. In the end, the version published by William Morrow in 1976 represented about seven percent of the total.
“My father failed by virtually every standard that the average American regards as important,” Smith writes in his introduction. “He was an absent husband, a nothing father, an inadequate provider, a repeated business failure. In one area only was he an unqualified success — in bed, in sexual exploits.” If W. Ward Smith had any special talent, it seems to have been his appearance. He was a strikingly handsome man. “Women followed him with their eyes. Some looked discreetly, guardedly. Others stared openly.” Once, when Smith was dining with his father and their wives in a San Francisco restaurant, an attractive woman came up to their table, threw her arms around Ward Smith, and kissed him, whispering, “You’re beautiful” in his ear. She was a complete stranger.
He was also attractive to men, in the sense that he seemed to exude confidence, to be the type of man other men wanted to be around and imitate. It made him highly effective as a fund-raiser. Early in his business career, he got involved in various drives to raise funds for charitable causes in Philadelphia, and this brought him into contact with some of the wealthiest men in America, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. His reputation followed him to New York, where he became active in the Republican Party and organized fund-raisers in support of Allied war causes. In one drive, he placed a coffin with an effigy of the Kaiser in a rented hall and people paid a dollar each to drive a nail into it.
Coming from a middle-class family in upstate New York, Ward Smith got a leg up in society by marrying Ellen Page, daughter of a wealthy Baltimore businessman. The two were completely unsuitable. She came into the marriage a virgin, a classic example of the sheltered Southern belle. Ward, on the other hand, followed wherever his erection led him. He referred to Ellen as a “Vestal Virgin” and himself as “Prancing Pan.” They had two sons, quickly settled into separate routines, she in suburban New Jersey and he in a Manhattan apartment, free to carry on his affairs unencumbered. She divorced him after ten years.
Despite his appearances, Ward Smith was destined for failure as a businessman. His charm, intelligence, and capacity for hard work were undermined by his unquenchable appetite for sex. He would sleep with his colleagues’ wives and girlfriends, he would bring women into his office after hours for sex, he would step away from party and fund-raising dinners to have a quickie in any convenient corner. After working on Nathan Miller’s successful 1920 campaign for Governor of New York, he was fired when Miller began to distrust Smith’s handling of funds.
It was only the first in a string of rise-and-fall cycles for Ward Smith. According to Page Smith, detailed accounts of his father’s successful and unsuccessful business ventures come second only to descriptions of his couplings. One month he might be hosting dinner for dozens of friends in an expensive Manhattan restaurant, the next playing a trick on a telephone operator to get his nickel back after making a call. He ran an oil company, dealt in Florida real estate, manufactured twine, tried his hand at dairy farming, even made a killing one time buying and selling truckloads of beach sand. In the end, he became almost wholly reliant on the income made by his adoring third wife, a successful fashion designer.
And he had sex whenever and wherever he could. I confess that I skimmed much of this material as it is numbingly relentless at points, but the number and variety of locations involved alone are phenomenal: hotels, subways, parks, restaurants, nightclubs, trains, buses, cars, offices, staircases, closets, phone booths, women’s and men’s rooms, bordellos, ferry boats — there might even have been a church pew or two. The paperback edition of A Letter From My Father advertises the book as “A Classic of Erotic Literature.” In reality, it’s probably more effective than saltpeter in killing any erotic spirit. Reading the book reminded me of the time when I was eight and ate an entire bag of Red Whips: fifty years later, even the smell of Red Whips makes me nauseous.
On top of this, the reader has to confront the fact that Ward Smith was a pretty nasty piece of work when it came to his attitudes towards Jews, blacks, and Fascists. He always made it a point to comment if a woman he slept with was a Jewess, believing he had the power to release a craven eroticism stifled by their husbands. He despised FDR, referring to him as “Franklinstein,” and was an enthusiastic supporter of the isolationist America First movement. Writing in 1943, with a son serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, he describes “Herr Hitler” as “a true German patriot seeking only what he considers best for his people” and Mussolini “likewise a true Italian patriot.” After the war, he applauds the addition of air conditioning to the New York-Baltimore train, but complains that a quarter of the passengers are blacks.
Ward Smith’s account of his life ends in 1947. Or, as his son puts it, “The letter did not end; it stopped.” It’s hard to imagine any reader regretting this. Page Smith’s judgment on his father’s life is that it “seemed to me singularly futile and depressing,” and one can only agree. If there is any value to A Letter From My Father, it is only as a glimpse at the underbelly of American history. “Sex, power, money, and politics — all that is certainly thoroughly American and thoroughly human if not especially admirable,” Smith acknowledges. And for Page Smith himself, editing the letter allowed him to achieve some sense of reconciliation with his father. Which certainly gives the work value at a personal level. But outside the intimate circle of father and son, it can only be considered a curiosity.
A Letter From My Father: The Strange, Intimate Correspondence of W. Ward Smith to His Son, edited by Page Smith New York: Morrow, 1976
The King of the Barbareens is a memoir of a childhood spent as a bit of jetsam tossed about in the social welfare system that existed in England in the early part of the 20th century. Apart from an impression of watching an Armistice parade at the age of two, Janet Hitchman’s first memories are of living with Gran and Granfer Sparkes in their little house at the end of the “loke” in a village outside Norfolk.
“Another one of your grandchildren, Mrs. Sparkes,” people would ask when seeing the child for the first time. “No, no relation of mine. None whatever.” She slept in a tiny old cot next to Gran and Granfer’s bed, with no bed clothes and just a piece of flannel for warmth. All she knew was that Gran Sparkes had promised her dying mother that the child could stay with her.
Elsie May Fields — the name Janet Hitchman found on her birth certificate — had been born in July 1916 to Margaret Ames, a seamstress. Her father’s name was left blank. On the back was penciled “Frederick Burrows, deceased 27.9.1916.” Doing a little digging on a genealogical site, I learned one reason why little Elsie was given up to the care of others. Burrows had been killed while serving on the Western Front. Her mother was a widow with two children and had clearly had an affair with Burrows several years after her husband’s death. What family Elsie might have had didn’t want to claim a soldier’s bastard as their own.
Over the next fifteen years, Elsie was carried along through an almost random series of arrangements. When a lump behind her ear was diagnosed as a mastoid, she was taken into a hospital where the treatment and recovery, in the days before antibiotics, was long and painful. Brought back to the Sparkes, she was quickly taken away again when a social worker decided the conditions in their home were too filthy for a child, and placed in the care of a widow:
As we sat at tea I brought forward a problem that had worried me since we met.
“What shall I call you?” I asked.
“What did you call Mrs. Everett?”
“Aunt Ada; but I’d rather call you Mummy.”
“Thass all right. I er bin called a thing or two in my time. Mum’s better than most of ’em.”
Then one day, when Elsie was about nine, Mum came in and said, “Elsie you’re going away tomorrow.” The girl was transferred to Gimingham Hall, where a Mrs Huntly and a small staff cared for a home full of elderly women, “all a bit ‘gone’ in the head.” As an adult, Hitchman concluded it was a private mental home and her transfer was probably a mistake. There were 25 “inmates,” several troubled teenage girls, and one other girl close to Elsie’s age. After her initial shock at seeing the women in the home rocking back and forth in their chairs or polishing a single piece of silver for hours on end, she accommodated to her new home. The inmates were gentle with her, Mrs Huntley a bit too concerned about heaven and hell but generally kind. The one thing that most disturbed her were the “pig-killing screams” that some of the women made when it came time to be bathed. “It will be all right,” one of the women on the staff told her. “It is only noise.”
“It give me a pain.”
“You mustn’t let it. It is only noise. You’ll hear worse and louder before you die.”
“There isn’t any worse noise that someone afraid.”
“All the noise of Hitler’s bombardment has not shaken me in this opinion,” Hitchman added.
Once again, the current picked up Elsie and carried her along to another foster home, and then to the Thomas Anguish Hospital School of Housecraft for Girls in Norwich, a charity home for teenage girls. Elsie found the home “a very happy place,” and the women in charge encouraged her to pursue her love for writing: “Once when turning out the box room Miss Hayhurst had unearthed a pile of obsolete hand bills, advertising some long-forgotten church bazaar. She met me on the landing and said: ‘Would you like these, Elsie: you can write on the backs.’ I have never in my life received a present that gave me so much pleasure.”
Despite, this, though, Elsie had a strong rebellious streak, and one day was called into the office and informed she would be moved to one of Dr. Barnardo’s homes. “‘Barnardo’s,’ I gasped, ‘but that’s a reformatory.'” The Barnardo Home outside Norwich she was sent to was, in fact, a very well-run and progressive institution for its time. “It ran like clockwork; it was magnificent,” Hitchman writes. “I loathed it.”
At thirteen, a veteran of a dozen different placements, Elsie was perhaps too independent a spirit to benefit from the safe, clean, and very efficient environment, which primarily aimed at rescuing children from the most desperate conditions of poverty and neglect. “At Barnardo’s drawing breath was our only freedom; and then it had to be drawn silently.” She was given free access to books and had time to find a quiet corner and read, and she devoured what the home could supply. It was then that Elsie decided to change her name to Janet after reading Jane Eyre. She would later write a biography of Dr. Thomas Barnardo, They Carried the Sword (1966).
After three years at Barnardo’s, Janet was taken to a boarding house in London to study for the civil service exam. The plan was for her to become a postal clerk. She rebelled again, however, and found herself, at the age of seventeen, fending for herself. She took a place in a hostel for young women and got a job in the shipping department at Debenham’. But the cost of room and board — meager to begin with — left her with almost nothing. She slept most of her time off sleeping: it was her cheapest option. “I suppose it sounds a shocking thing for a seventeen year-old girl to spend all her spare time asleep; but there it is; I was waiting for something to happen, enduring the dust and noise of the dispatch room in a kind of coma, until somebody noticed I was quietly dying.”
Janet Hitchman, 1968Fortunately, a move to another department, one with windows, and a raise in pay saved her, and she began to explore London — at least as much as she could with just three shillings a week in pocket money. She moved on from the store to a series of seamstress jobs and ended up, almost by accident, as the stage manager for a small but lively theater company. That led to meeting a young designer, Michael Hitchman, marriage, a child, divorce, and surviving unhappily as a domestic. “The great thing is not to be dependent on other people,” she writes near the end of the book, in what could stand as the orphan’s motto.
The King of the Barbareens leaves Hitchman at the age of forty. “Life has been much easier since I faced the fact that I am not a very nice or likeable person,” she writes. Religion, in the form of a Quaker community, has provided some consolation. And she has finally achieved her ambition of earning a living as a writer.
Hitchman went on to write for The Observer and other papers. She wrote a number of plays and radio productions for the BBC, the Barnardo biography, and in 1968 a novel, Meeting for Burial, based on several people she knew from the Quaker community in Norwich. Her best known book was Such a Strange Lady (1976), the first major biography of Dorothy Sayers, which received generally favorable reviews despite Hitchman’s not being given access to Sayers’ private papers. She died in Norwich in 1980.
“Time and again throughout my childhood,” Hitchman writes in her memoir, “I had heard people shrug off my orphan state with the words, ‘Well, what you’ve never had, you can’t miss.’ There was never a greater fallacy.” “I wanted relations, people I could call mine by right, not courtesy.” While rich in the variety of characters Hitchman recalls, The King of the Barbareens is a powerful account of what it’s like to be truly alone and powerless in the world.
The King of the Barbareens, by Janet Hitchman London: Putnam, 1960
Julia Strachey is hardly forgotten. In 2009, Persephone Books reissued her 1932 novel Cheerful Weather for the Wedding with a cover featuring “Girl Reading,” a gorgeous painting by Harold Knight, and way back in 1978, Cheerful was reissued along with her 1951 novel The Man on the Pier (using her preferred title, An Integrated Man) as a Penguin Modern Classic.
But neither can she qualify as a major figure in English literature, even within the narrower limits of the mid-20th century. She wrote an occasional short story and some undistinguished poetry but went through years with little or no writing to show for it. So there have to be other reasons to recommend reading a book about her life. Fortunately, there are plenty. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey is a perfect illustration of how, in the right hands, an unpromising assortment of materials — autobiographical fragments, letters written by both women, an occasional editorial note — can be combined to create a stunningly powerful book.
Julia Strachey, age five, taken in IndiaFrances Partridge (then Marshall) first met Julia Strachey in 1909. Frances was nine, Julia eight, and they were in the same class at a girl’s day school outside London. By that time, Julia’s life had already been subject to a fair amount of disruption, and the situation never changed all that much thereafter. Born in India in 1901, her father Oliver, was the sixth child and third son of Sir Richard Strachey and older brother of a charter member of the Bloomsbury set, Lytton Strachey. Her mother, Ruby, was a Swiss-German beauty whose scandalous reputation was well established by the time she married the far more conventional Oliver.
The first few years in India would always hold a sunny place in her memories. Her mother was devoted to her, her father tender, their servants kind, and odd creatures — snakes, frogs, birds — wandered through its spaces. There were moments of innocent comedy as little Julia began to explore her world:
One day I wandered into a vast apartment, or so it seemed to me, next door to the dining room and normally out of bounds. As I entered I beheld to my surprise, at the far end on a kind of platform, my papa, usually so elegant in his stiff white drill suit and solar topee — standing now, a new colour (a brilliant crayfish pick) in the middle of a sort of local monsoon, with torrents of water descending in needle sprays upon his head. I had never seen him in the altogether before — didn’t even take in that that was what it was, and the scene was so unexpected that I must have stood there gaping, no doubt with the door wide open into the central dining room; at any rate I heard shouts from under the waters telling me to go out again and shut the door.
In reality, however, Oliver was profoundly unhappy. His musical aspirations had to make way for a profession. A brilliant man (he worked as a cryptographer for the British Army in both world wars), he was dissatisfied with his work. And he soon discovered that Ruby’s reputation was well deserved. When she became pregnant with another man’s child, they hastily decamped from India: Ruby to the continent, Oliver with Julia to England. They divorced soon after. (Years later, encountering Ruby in France, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Ruby, you’ve done very well. You’ve had five children by four men, haven’t you?””By five men, Oliver,” she replied, “but don’t tell George.”
Oliver deposited Julia with an elderly aunt little interested in her care, who turned her over to a very old and very deaf Scots nanny who resented the imposition. She spent much of the next few years trying to amuse herself in the large dark house on the edge of Bloomsbury:
In the silent blackness of those teardrenched hours in bed, I would hear the clip-clop, clip-clop of the horses bringing their hansom cabs along the road outside, would hear them emerging little by little from an immense distance, and (after passing our house) retreating again little by little into a further immense distance in the other direction, thus giving me an audible statement of the incalculable remoteness of the vast Unintelligible Beyond lying all around my bedroom and the house.
Then, in 1911, Oliver married Ray Costelloe, whose mother, Mary, had married the art historian Bernard Berenson. Mary Berenson was one of the three children of Richard Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, wealthy Americans active in the Quaker movement who had moved to England in the 1880s. Mary’s brother was the writer Logan Pearsall Smith. Her sister Alys was Bertrand Russell’s first wife. Oliver and Ray had no time for Julia, so soon after their wedding they deposited her with Logan and Alys (now separated from Russell):
Beside me towered two gigantic and handsome ladies who beamed me a welcome. I saw they were no longer young but in their middle years, because of the pepper-and-salt in their hair, and also a certain rigid stoutness, and loosening of jaw-lines. But I saw also that they were as radiantly healthy, brilliantly blooming and resplendently coloured and fleshed as the summer hollyhocks standing up beside the garden door.
All these prestigious connections had little to offer in the way of consolation for a lonely little girl who understood she was an awkward addition to their household. Logan Pearsall Smith was a manic depressive, “engulfed in a lack of interest in the living world so absolute that I was shocked. Deeply shaken.” Alys (known as Aunty Loo) took primary responsibility for Julia’s care, but she had a unique approach to the task. Aunty Loo was an Edwardian example of the kind of extreme altruism that Larissa MacFarquhar studies in her book, Strangers Drowning. She had an array of charitable causes she sustained and was constantly raiding the drawers in the house for clothing to donate. She also supplied her own needs from the piles her charities amassed:
The dresses that Aunt Loo subtracted from the American mercy parcels for wearing herself would, of course, have been taken over from someone maybe half, or maybe double her size. And it was perhaps to hide the imponderables of the fit of all these frocks of varying sizes that she was in the habit of adding, on top of any frock that she had selected for herself, a number of loose tippets, ‘Berthas’, tucked capes, frilled jackets, ‘Dolmans’ and the like. It was August, and today Aunt Loo’s assorted jackets were of thin cottony stuff. On top of all, and always taking pride of place, it was her custom to slip on a white embroidered muslin affair of broderie anglaise — whose wide sleeves easily accommodated all the other sleeves crowded within.
This last item, Julia learns, had previously been Bertrand Russell’s christening robe.
Aunty Loo also approached the world with a certain severe simplicity that Julia came to understand acted as a harsh barrier underlying any of the superficial warmth of her concern for the child. “I always feel so bad — so awfully sorry — that I can never be really fond of thee,” she once confessed to Julia. “I mean that I can’t give thee the love that thee’s own mother would have given. It’s awful that I can never give thee proper affection.” This sincere, if thoughtless, confession had the emotional impact of a sledgehammer. “It was one of those moments when suddenly a chasm opens under one’s feet, an earthquake,” Julia recalled. “I saw that I was left standing on the wrong side of it, that my home, so to speak, lay crumbled away in ruins upon the further unreachable part.”
No wonder that, as Partridge put it, Julia had “a vision of herself as entangled in a web of intransigent practical circumstances created by what she liked to think of as a hostile Cosmos.” And there is plenty of evidence here and in Partridge’s diaries that Julia suffered from a form of manic depression herself. A beautiful, effervescent young woman, she was considered brilliant company. She partied, drank, traveled, had country house weekends and affairs with the Bright Young Things and the Bloomsbury set, to both of which her pedigree offered automatic membership. She tried college, gave up after one term, tried studying art, did a bit of modeling, tried her hand at writing. She took none of it too seriously.
Somewhere around mid-1926, she met Stephen Tomlin, whom Partridge recalls as “a brilliantly talented, neurotic young sculptor, who dented the hearts or minds, or both, of most people who met him.” Julia fell for him. He … well, leaned for her. There was an attraction, but he was also bisexual and involved with a number of men, among them the painter Duncan Grant (who was living with Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell).
They married in 1927. At this point, Julia takes a turn, as the autobiography that Strachey began writing in the 1960s came to an end, leaving Partridge to work with letters, diary entries (mostly her own) and a half-dozen autobiographical pieces written in the 1950s. The record of this period is fragmentary. As Partridge writes,
It is impossible to be certain when the first cracks in the marriage began to appear, but by early 1930 problems seem to have been acute. The main root of the trouble lay in Tommy’s manic-depressive character. When in a depressive bout he drank heavily, and this in turn led to uncontrolled infidelity, followed by agonising guilt. Julia reacted by finding attraction elsewhere There were two attempts to solve their difficulties by temporary separation.
Duncan Grant’s illustration for the cover of Cheerful Weather for the WeddingThe one bright spot at this time was Julia’s finishing Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, which was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1932, complete with a jacket illustration by Duncan Grant. Many of the circumstances in the novel, which takes place on a wedding day during which a woman perhaps not unlike Julia realizes she is marrying the wrong man but goes ahead with it anyway, were drawn from her own wedding day. She later told Partridge “that marrying Tommy was one of the things of which she was most ashamed.” “She was never really in love with Tommy,” Partridge observes: “She was desperately lonely.”
By early 1934, Julia had decided to make the break permanent. She went with Frances and Ralph Partridge on a long visit to Portugal and returned to a single flat in London. She spent much of the next few years making a circuit of her friends’ houses and estates: at the Guinness (brewery) estate outside Dublin; Pakenham Hall, where she saw Anthony Powell woo his future wife, Lady Violet Pakenham; Glengariff Castle with Solly Zuckerman; and many visits to Ham Spray, the Wiltshire house that Lytton Strachey left to Ralph Partridge. Just counting up the entries in the indices of Frances Partridge’s diaries, it appears that Julia made over sixty visits to Ham Spray just between 1939 and the early 1960s.
Julia Strachey in the late 1930sShe also had a few flings, mostly with younger men. She and Philip Toynbee ran off to France for a holiday. He was 21. She was 36. It lasted under two months. A year later, she fell for another artist (heterosexual this time), the painter Lawrence Gowing. He was easy going, full of good humor, and absolutely committed to his work. Julia found his focus something of a novelty:
The first time I visited Lawrence’s studio I found him crouched on all fours on the handsome red plush carpet, another present from his grandmother. Beside him were paintbrushes of every size, palettes, cans oflinseed oil and tubes of paint. A half-finished canvas was laid out on the floor in front of his knees. One could see he was short-sighted by the way he seemed to be putting the colours on the canvas with the end of his long finely-pointed nose, instead of with his brushes. I at once saw that his absorption in his work was total. He was lost to the world. It was a sight I was never to forget.
They soon began living together. Though they discussed marriage, it was Julia who demurred. By the time they did marry, in 1952, their relationship was already something of an odd compromise. Lawrence took a post with an art college in Newcastle. Julia could only bear the dreariness of Newcastle for a few months at a time. He was attracted to some of his students. She increasingly worried about her age, her place as a writer, her place as a woman. And she was increasingly suffering what we can see as clear signs of depression or perhaps bi-polar disease. In Partridge’s view, her situation is captured by these lines from An Integrated Man: “She seemed to be shrieking to be released. He was looking at an animal in a trap, crying out to be saved.”
Despite Lawrence’s roving eye, they found a certain comfort in each other’s company. Julia got a job she enjoyed, working as a reader in a publishing house and they took a country cottage a half hour or so from Ham Spray. She published several pieces, including a story titled “Can’t You Get Me Out of Here,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.
I won’t attempt to summarize this piece, more essay than story, but it’s unlike anything that would have appeared in the magazine at that time — free-wheeling, absurd, imaginative, comic, yet packing a devastating emotional force. Strachey takes a bizarre incident from one of her trips to Italy, in which a tree frog leapt from an arbor into a tureen of spaghetti sauce sitting on her table, was fished out with a ladle, and then hopped off, disoriented, into the nearby bushes. “I am a tree frog myself,” she writes:
And I can confirm that it is indeed a brash curiosity about queer-looking-things-far-glimpsed that starts a tree frog’s nervous speckled legs to twitch. I know it all –the lunatic leap out from the scaffolding into space, the brief whiz through colored airs, then the landing down in the dark, among yielding, treacherous, slithering things…..
But for me it is the spectacle of the very Distances themselves, Long Distances (not negligible Distances), that intoxicates. Or to put it another way, the spectacle of Differences that acts like strong drink and causes the green-speckled legs to twitch.
Later in the piece, she and Lawrence, back in England, have to take Popsy, a friend’s dog, to a kennel for a short stay. Having had the run of a farm, cavorting among the cattle as Julia took her for a last walk, Popsy reacts in shock and panic when the gate of the kennel pen is shut in her face:
At any rate her old, familiar, beautiful life was over. She had been deserted by the ones she loved; she had been betrayed into the hands of these strangers, to live out the rest of her days in this rotten few inches of earth. That’s anyway, how it was to her.
As for me, I felt, as I lay in bed that night, as if a meat axe had been thrown into my soul and was sticking there, undislodgeable. In no time I was out of the scaffolding and down in the darkness inside the old spaghetti tureen.
One cannot miss the parallels between Julia’s abandonment by her parents and Popsy’s being left at the kennel.
Julia Strachey outside Ham Spray, 1964From this point forward, the signs of Julia’s decline became too obvious for Partridge to ignore. In 1962, she agrees to stay with Julia while Lawrence is away with Jenny, the woman he eventually comes to live with. “On the eve of setting out for three weeks married life with Julia. I’m very well aware of the difficulties and sadness that lie ahead, and also full of humility and uncertainty about my appointed task.” When Julia complains, “I can’t live alone,” Partridge confides in her diary, “What is my responsibility towards her, as her oldest friend? I am selfishly wondering, and so far my answer is: I’ll do everything I possibly can, short of giving up my independent solitary life.” (Ralph Partridge had died of a sudden heart attack in 1960.)
In 1964, not long after the death of Frances’ only son, they travel together to Rome. Frances is always alert for Julia suddenly veering off course, concerned that neither her prescription drugs nor the Italian wine are helping. In her diary entries, Frances is constantly switching between friend and caretaker: enjoying her company, ushering her out of awkward situations. A year later, after a dinner together, Frances writes with relief, “She is, after all, the person with whom I am most at ease, the oldest of my friends.” By 1970, Frances is noting that Julia “is coherent one moment, muddled the next.” Their friendship strains, breaks. Julia “flounced out of my flat banging the door and saying we are constitutionally unfit to get along with each other.” Two years without contact follow, until Frances extends an olive branch and invites Julia to dinner again. Their friendship resumes.
By early 1974, however, the reprise is at an end. “Julia has suddenly lurched into old age and it’s a distressing spectacle,” Frances writes. In July, after a phone call full of “inspissated gloom,” she cries out to her diary: “Oh Julia, Julia, Julia, Julia!” Over the next months, more pleas for help, followed by recriminations and accusations. In December, another call: “I wonder if you’d have a moment. I’ve been feeling suicidal. The doctor doesn’t send my pills and my sink’s full of dirty washing up and I have no food in the house.” Frances rebels — if only to herself: “F (silently): No. No. No.”
A year or so later, suffering from the flu and losing energy, Julia writes in a last diary fragment, “My fear is that I shall lose the only interest I still have in staying alive — namely the desire to get some of my past life materialised in my writing. But my memories — even the most vital and precious — seem to be fading also, like the daylight.” To which Frances adds, “To further this aim of Julia’s, and at the same time show her quality as a writer and a human being, has been the purpose of this book.”
Julia Strachey died in 1979. Frances Partridge died in 2004, just short of the age of 104, having published the last volume of her diaries three years before. It seems unlikely that another book like Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey will ever be published. Julia and Frances knew each other for seventy years, at their best and worst of times and had the capacity to write about their experiences with honesty, intelligence, and more than a little humor. Frances loved Julia but struggled to tolerate, let alone understand, the effects of her mental illness. Would any of us do better? Neither woman will ever rank among the major figures of their time. Yet in this book they managed to create one of the finest English autobiographies. It’s been reissued several times by Penguin, most recently by Phoenix in 2001. It richly deserves to be brought back again — and this time, for good.
Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge London: Victor Gollancz, 1983
Born in Galicia–meaning Poland–er, now Ukraine, coming of age in Vienna, working as an actress on stage and screen, marrying screenwriter and director Berthold Viertel, living in Berlin in the days of Brecht and Weimar, moving to Hollywood just ahead of the first Nazi persecutions of Jews, becoming something of a center of the German intellectual exile community, then surviving the McCarthy Red Scare, Salka Viertel came to know, clink glasses, break bread, and shed tears with about half of the entries in James’ encyclopedia. Kafka and Max Brod dropped by her Prague apartment for supper; she and her husband worked at the legendary Berlin film studio, UFA; Eisenstein wrote to her in desperation when he ran out of money filming “Que Viva Mexico!”; she wistfully knocked back vodka shots with Garbo on New Years Eve after Berthold left her for a younger woman; her son, Peter, worked on “The African Queen” with John Huston (and later turned the story into the novel White Hunter, Black Heart). Hers was a fruit cake of a life story.
Sergei Eisenstein and Salka Viertel on the beach in Santa Monica, 1930
I was going to write up a longer post about The Kindness of Strangers, but then I discovered that NYRB Classics is about to reissue it in a few months. So, in commemoration of Independence Day, I will just quote the following story from her time in America.
Having room to spare in her house in Santa Monica in the 1950s, Salka offered the use of a studio over the garage to the black documentary filmmaker, Carlton Moss, and his wife, Lynn. Because Lynn was white, the couple hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to rent to them. A while after the Mosses moved in, Salka had an encounter with her neighbor:
In all the years I had lived on Mabery Road, I had exchanged merely friendly nods and brief greetings with my next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, an old retired couple. Aloof and gentle, they did not even reproach me when my dogs dug a hole under the fence and killed their pet duck, Matilda. Lynn and Carlton had lived for some time in the “Schloss,” as Carlton called the house (pronouncing it “slush”), when early one morning, as I was watering my roses, I saw Mrs. Ferris cutting flowers in her garden. I wished her a pleasant day; she called back: “Oh, I am so glad to see you,” and came to the fence with a huge bunch of sweetpeas.
“I’d like you to give this to your mother.” I thanked her and said that my mother would be enchanted with the lovely bouquet.
Then Mrs. Ferris asked: “That nice couple over your garage, are they staying with you for any length of time?”
“As long as they wish it,” I answered defensively.
But Mrs. Ferris had more on her mind and slowly and hesitantly it came out. “You know that Mrs. A., the lady who owns that large Spanish house down the road, has been canvassing for signatures to protest your renting to Negroes?”
“No one can tell me who should or should not live in my house …” I burst out angrily.
Mrs. Ferris reached over the fence and put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t get excited! I want you to know that no one signed. We, the property owners on this side of the Canyon, had a meeting”–apparently I was not considered a “property owner” as I had been excluded–“and my husband told them: These are friends of Mrs. Viertel. We are pleased she is our neighbor.”
Moved by the unexpected support, I thanked Mrs. Ferris profusely. But she had not finished. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head and looking reproachfully at me, added: “Yes, that’s what my husband told them, regardless of the fact that we’ve seen you driving around with that ‘Roosevelt for President’ sticker on your car.”
Dear Mrs. Ferris! This was the only time in my life I regretted not being a Republican.
Just in case the newest addition to the British Royal Family, the Duchess of Sussex, is in need of some self-help reading, here is a tiara-full of memoirs written by princesses from the past.
Lady Craven and her son, from The Beautiful Lady Craven
• The beautiful Lady Craven; the original memoirs of Elizabeth, baroness Craven, afterwards margravine of Anspach and Bayreuth and princess Berkeley of the Holy Roman empire (1750-1828), edited by A. M. Broadley and Lewis Melville (1914)
Elizabeth Craven’s was only a morganatic title, granted after her second marriage to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. She was easily the most prolific writer in this bunch, but her memoirs were not collected and published for over eighty years after her death. It’s a wonder she had time to write, given her seven children and many affairs. But the book was worth the wait. She conversed with Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, witnessed the French Revolution, and dined with much of Europe’s royalty of the time.
If it’s the best in blue blood Regency gossip you’re interested in, look no further. Here is her sketch of Ferdinand IV, then King of Naples:
His features were coarse and harsh; yet the general expression of his countenance was rather intelligent, and perhaps even agreeable, although, separately taken, every feature was ugly. His conversation, his deportment, his manners, were, from an unpolished simplicity, rude in their nature, though rather pleasing; as they removed from the mind what is always to be expected from a sovereign, that habit of disguise, artifice, and concealment, which accompany the possessor of a throne. If he did not converse much with strangers, yet he always appeared to say what he thought; and, although destitute of art or elegance, he did not betray a want of understanding or of information. He reminded me of a rustic elevated by accident to the crown.
The two volumes of The beautiful Lady Craven are available on the Internet Archive: Volume 1 (link) and Volume 2 (link).The cover of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, with a photo of Emily Ruete in costume
• Memoirs of an Arabian princess: an autobiography, by Emily Ruete (1886/1907)
Emily Ruete was born Salama bint Said, a Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, and grew up on the island of Zanzibar, where her father ruled–and profited from the busy spice trade. Much of the book is devoted to memories of her childhood, such as the excitement surrounding the arrival of ships returning from Europe:
For us children those ships symbolised delightful mystery, as they brought us all our lovely toys from Europe. Upon the fleet’s arrival a day would soon be fixed for the distribution of the goods among high and humble, old and young. Twenty or thirty boxes were full of playthings: horses, carts, dolls, whips, fishes and ducks that followed a magnet, musical boxes of all dimensions, concertinas, flutes, trumpets, mock guns, and what not. If we were displeased, woe to the delinquent captain; he was a plenipotentiary entrusted with full powers and no restrictions; he sailed under the one specific order to purchase the best regardless of expense.
When finally the division was enacted at Bet il Mtoni and Bet il Sahel, it took three or four days to get everything duly apportioned among several hundred persons. Eunuchs attended to the unpacking and sorting out, while a few of the Sultan’s elder daughters performed the allotment proper. Jealousy, envy, and malice were unfortunately more conspicuous on this happy occasion than at any other time of the year.
It was in Zanzibar that she met and became pregnant by a German trader named Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. He arranged for her to escape to Aden, where she had the child, and where they married. She took the name of Emilie (spelled Emily in the English translations of her book) and traveled with her husband to Germany, losing the baby to illness along the way. They had three more children after settling in Germany. Unfortunately, several years after their arrival, Rudolph slipped while stepping off a tram and was struck and killed. Left with few resources, she wrote her memoirs to raise some money, and later, agreed to assist Chancellor Bismarck in several intrigues involving German interests in East Africa. She died in Jena at the age of 79 in 1924. Christiane Bird published an account of her life, The Sultan’s Shadow: One Family’s Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, in 2010.
The 1886 English translation of her memoirs can be found on the Internet Archive (link), but it is better to read the superior translation, by Lionel Strachey, published in 1907, which can also be found there (link).Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and her book
• Pleasures and palaces; the memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (1915)
Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich offers the new princess-to-be her closest example. Born Eleanor Calhoun, she was an American actress who appeared with great success in numerous productions in London’s West End and at the Theatre National in Paris before marrying a Serbian prince in 1903. Thanks to the Balkan war and then the First World War, her reign was brief, but there is no sense of resentment for lost glories in this book. Although the Times Literary Supplement sniffed that “If it were not written by a Princess, we should say that there were too many Kings and Queens in it,” the book is suffused with her spirit of playfulness, as in this anecdote of a royal reception at Kensington Palace:
Standing near the entrance to the royal marquee, under the grand old trees, were King Edward and Mark Twain, the king laughing at the remarks of the American wit and philosopher, who was slightly smiling. Mark Twain, it was remarked, wore his hat, which an Englishman would not have done while in talk with the king. It was a wide, soft white felt hat, matching his white hair, and he was also clad in creamy-white broadcloth made ample and easy, a subject for Fragonard. The king, on the contrary, was wearing a strange assemblage of garments of varying cut and hue, producing an effect the opposite of happy. A relative of his, admiring Mark Twain’s beautiful appearance, scrutinized the king’s costume with a puzzled look, and aware of his usual good taste, she ventured to say:
“I am looking, sir, at your purple waistcoat. Your coat is — a kind of — pea-green, and — and your — h-m-m — upon my word! Really, how did it happen?”
The king in answer laughed and named different tailors who had at different times, he said, sent him a garment, begging him to wear it, and he had put them all on at once, “to do the tailors a good turn.”
The Princess became a fierce advocate for Serbian victims of the war and published a book about their plight. She died in New York City in 1957 at the age of 92.
• Arabesque, by Princess Musbah Haidar (1944)
Princess Musbah’s father was Ali Haidar Pasha, a Sherif of Mecca, which meant he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was also an important member of the Ottoman court, and Arabesque provides an insider’s view of life in the final years before foundation of the Turkish republic. Her mother, Isobel Duncan, was the daughter of a British general serving as an advisor to the Ottoman Army, and her father served in various administrative posts in Istanbul, Syria, Medina, and Beirut.
In their book, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings, Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright call Arabesque “a unique and extremely well-informed window onto the political and social events unfolding around her.” Princess Musbah shows the role of women in the Ottoman court to have been misunderstood by many Westerners: “[T]hese foreigners did not realise that many of the veiled ladies of the Harems were better born, better read, spoke several languages and dressed with a greater chic than some of their own most famous society women.” Ironically, one of the few Western women to express a different perspective was Lady Craven, who wrote in her memoir:
The women, who were very numerous, were like walking mummies. A large loose robe of dark green cloth covered them from the neck to the ground; over that was a large piece of muslin, which wrapped the shoulders and arms, and another which went over the head and eyes. All these coverings confound the shape and air so much, that any rank may be concealed under them. I never saw a country where the women may enjoy so much freedom and liberty as here, free from all reproach.
Arabesque is also full of wonderful details of the bustling life in the streets of Istanbul, Damascus, and Beirut, including the many temptations that they presented to a child:
On the shelves, which ran the length of the shop, were stacked gaily painted wooden boxes of sweets, and on the long counters stood big glass bottles, each one holding a different-coloured sweet, green, pink, brown, red. A fat smiling man asked Musbah which one she wanted. Haji Bekr himself. Musbah pointed at each one in turn–she wanted a taste from them all. Haji Bekr, with a laugh, put a large hand into each bottle and filled up a box for her. The variety of the sweets made one’s mouth water. The Turkish Delight, Rahoul Lacoum; akidas, a kind of hard boiled sweet; there were long, wriggly pink and white sticks; round rings like transparent glass of different flavours and colours; cakes of crushed nuts and pistachios, with sugar sparkling like crystals; there were kurabiyahs, macaroons stuck on sheets of paper.
The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished in 1924, forcing the break-up of Princess Musbah’s family. Her father went to Beirut; some relatives returned to Mecca; others joined the community of European royal exiles in Paris and on the Riviera. Her mother stayed in Istanbul to raise her daughters, and Musbah eventually married a British army officer like her grandfather and settled with her husband in England
• The Memoirs of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester
“A sense of dedication is an excellent quality; so is a sense of humour. The two are not always found together in one person.” This judgment, from one of the reviews of The Memoirs of Princess Alice, sums up the mix of a near-Victorian commitment to duty and a Bright Young Things spirit of carefree fun. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester was the daughter of the 7th Duke of Buccleuch and married Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, making her (among many other things royal) Queen Elizabeth’s aunt. Before she died at Kensington Palace in 2004 at the age of 102, she had become the oldest member of the British royal household in history.
Her memoirs, as with her life, can be divided into two clear sections: life before and after royalty. As a young woman in the 1920s, she enjoyed all the recreations of the Jazz Age, including a year in Kenya amidst the parties, drinking, and affairs of the Happy Valley set. As Isabel Colegate wrote in her review for the Times, “Altogether there is more than one echo of Nancy Mitord in the author’s account of her growing up.”
As the wife of the third son of the King of England, however, she had to focus on raising a family and following wherever duty led Prince Henry (usually referred to as the Duke)–which included time in Australia in the late 1940s as the Governor General. A very private person by nature, she was never truly comfortable with the constant demands for public appearances such postings required, but she summoned what the Queen Mother called “the courage of a lion” on countless occasions–even if it was only for what one wit described as “doling out the last of the roly-poly pudding to a houseful of pensioners.”
Although the Duke was a man of dedication and responsibility himself, he also betrayed at times the consequences of being raised at the height of privilege:
The Duke was doing The Times crossword when the news was breathlessly broken to him by two of his daughters that they had just left the third in hospital with a broken collar-bone after all three had been in a car crash; he merely asked them for a three-letter work for sheep. He could not bear his tea to be too hot and nothing would prevent him from sloshing it from cup to saucer and back if it was. At home his valet poured his tea out for him at five to nine so that it should be cool enough for him to drink when he came down at nine. Unsuspecting guests who drank it were in trouble….
It’s anecdotes like these that led Hugo Vickers, a prolific biographer of British royalty and society, to include the memoirs on his list of best royal biographies for Five Books: “I reviewed the book when it came out. I just found myself laughing on every page. I was gripped and again it was this wry quality that attracted me.”
Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, the second volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, covers a period of just over ten years, but it is a nearly non-stop parade of personalities. Most of them come from French literature, art, and theatre, for Belloc Lowndes spent much of this time writing notes from Paris for a variety of English papers.
She started working as a journalist at a young age out of necessity. Her mother, Bessie Parkes Belloc, whose short but deeply loving marriage to Louis Belloc was the focus of the first volume, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, had inherited a considerable fortune not long after becoming a widow. But she put it in the hands of a family friend who lost it all in a series of bad investments, and Marie and her brother Hilaire spent their teens living off the charity of family.
The experience left her with a certain amount of resentment about the leisures of the English upper classes:
I had felt painfully apart from the life led round me in Sussex by the young people with whom I came in contact. From Jane Austen, onwards, this kind of life has been described in innumerable English novels. But not one of the writers, with the exception of Anthony Trollope, seems to have realized the part that money, even though in those days never mentioned, played in country house life. We were really poor, and so I could never join in the driving, the riding, and the coming and going to country houses, and occasionally to London, which filled the lives of my contemporaries.
When she returned with her mother to live with her grandmother, Louise Swanton Belloc, at her house in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, Marie was relieved to escape the obsession of her schoolmates and their parents over “making a good marriage.” Through her grandmother, who had a very successful career as a translator, Marie already had numerous contacts with figures in French culture and politics great and small, and these provided her not only with the material for countless articles but also many of the best parts of this book.
Many English language readers have lost sight of French literature between Flaubert and Proust, so even some of the more familiar names in Where Love and Friendship Dwelt may no longer ring a bell, but pretty much every French writer of any substance in the last decade of the 19th century appears here. Guy de Maupassant confided his passion for the English novel to her–but cautioned, “All the same, Tom Jones is a book you must not look into till you are married.” Anatole France’s taste in English literature was, as much of his work seems today, idiosyncratic: he thought Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor its supreme masterpiece.
She visited Zola and his wife in their Paris townhouse “filled–crammed is the right word–with large pieces of what they believed to be mediaeval furniture.” Only his tapestries pleased Marie: “Whether old or faked, they were beautiful, and that could not be said of anything else in his Paris house.” She saw Alphonse Daudet in his years of suffering the advanced stages of syphilis, the time recounted in his slim, stunning journal, In the Land of Pain. She walked with Paul Verlaine as he was on his last legs, near death at 51 from drugs, alcohol, and depression:
He and I once had a long talk on Hell and the Devil. Both Hell itself, and the Devil as an entity, were to him intensely real. Indeed he spoke as if Hell is a city much like Paris, and he told me he had a vivid image in his mind of what the Devil looks like. He believed in the existence of a great number of minor devils, and to them he put down many of the terrible things which happen to human beings in this world.
Other names are now long forgotten. Louise Michel, then an aging Communard, whom Belloc Lowndes visited in a sordid garret she shared with “eight or nine cats, as well as a sickly monkey.” Paul Déroulède: a great French patriot perhaps, but his Chants du paysan and Chants du soldat are probably justly neglected in any language. The Comtesse de Martel, Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau, known by her pen-name of “Gyp.” Belloc Lowndes calls her “By far the most original, eccentric, and, in every sense of the word, brilliant woman writer I have known.” Gyp’s Wikipedia entry describes her as “as a fanatical anti-Semite & anti-Dreyfusard.” Let us move along.
One name–Rimbaud–is somewhat disdainfully dismissed. Belloc Lowndes sniffs that none of the respected men of the time “would have admitted Rimbaud had genius. All would have followed Jacques Blanche in describing him as un mauvais petit drôle” (a nasty little creep).
Perhaps because the world it described was so much different from the one it was published in, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt was warmly received. The New York Times’ reviewer gushed, “There are so many gleaming points and glowing facets to this gem of personal reminiscence that one is puzzled which to omit in a brief account of it.” And in The Saturday Review, R. Ellis Roberts called it “fully as rich in recollection, as evocative of the past as the book to which it is the sequel.” I think, however, that Mary Crosbie was closer to the mark, writing in her Guardian review that “There is less charm–less coherence of effect–in the second than the first book.”
The focus of the next volume in this series, The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946), shifts to London, where she returned as a newlywed in 1896.
Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, by Marie Belloc Lowndes London: Macmillan, 1943 New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944
Digging for Mrs. Miller (1941) illustrates how, in the right hands, simple, undramatic, and limpid prose can have a stunning impact. Originally published as Post D in England, Digging for Mrs. Miller is John Strachey’s thinly-fictionalized account of his experiences working as an air raid warden during the most intense months of the Blitz in autumn 1940.
Strachey, who had been one of the most active members of the radical left in England in the 1930s, became a warden somewhat by accident. After one raid in September 1940, he came home to find his house roped off because of a nearby delayed-action bomb. Unable to sleep there, he bunked at the air raid post down the street, helping out with a few tasks to justify his place, and a few days later, he enrolled as an unpaid and part-time warden. His uniform was just a pair of overalls and a steel helmet. His equipment consisted of a flashlight (which had to be used sparingly in the blackout), a gas mask, some bandages, and a note pad.
Night after night, he would sit at an upstairs window in the house that served as the post for his sector–an area of perhaps 6-8 square blocks. The house belonged to his neighbor, Miss Sterling, who was also the head of Post D. Night after night, he would hear–and then see–the German bombers coming over London. And when a high explosive or incendiary bomb fell, he and the other wardens would run to locate the site, see if anyone was injured, and coordinate the work of the firemen, stretcher bearers, rescue workers, and the rest of the team that quickly appeared on the scene.
One of Strachey’s first realizations was how much working as a warden did for his own morale:
The main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own, and one’s companions’, safety. And this is inevitably demoralizing. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organized (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her own safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as, “Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?” The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads, or stretcher-bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her.
Though I’ve read several history books that dealt with the Blitz, Digging for Mrs. Miller was the first thing that really conveyed the sense of what it was like. Contrary to the impression one gets, the bombing was not on the level of the massive Allied raids against Germany. The Luftwaffe knocked out buildings more often than whole blocks, and Strachey’s team more often responded to single bombs than to wide scale destruction.
On occasion, though, a single large high explosive bomb could destroy the better part of a block. Strachey devotes 48 pages–nearly one third of the book–to “The Big Bomb,” a chapter detailing the hours of scrambling around and digging through the enormous piles of rubble left after a particularly large bomb exploded near their post. Hour after hour, working with no light and soaked with rain, he and other men tunneled their way in to locate victims, hauling away endless baskets full of rubble. In one case, it took the rescuers over 26 hours to reach a young woman buried under a small mountain of debris.
Strachey left the warden service at the end of 1940, when he joined the R.A.F.. Though he eventually wrote over a dozen works of political philosophy and advocacy, I suspect this short, simple tale is his finest legacy as a writer. It’s certainly one of the best books dealing with World War Two I’ve ever read.
Digging for Mrs. Miller, by John Strachey New York: Random House, 1941
If you loved Clive James’ 
