Neil Bell

Let me admit at the start that I bought this book because of its cover. Let me also admit that I only finished it because of what I paid for it.

In a recent class, we discussed Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, and I raised a question I’ve asked in every class where I’ve studied Homer: how come we never hear about the bad Homers? I count myself among those who say that Homer’s epics came down through a tradition of oral literature, evolving through years and generations of orators, eventually captured in the texts we have now. But it’s safe to assume that there were fringe versions of the epics and less-than-sterling orators who recited them. And maybe if your town wasn’t on the hot orator circuit, you had to listen to the bad Homers. The ones whose renditions had less, shall we way, artistry about them? “What’s he talking about now?” “Genealogy stuff.” “Oh, Zeus! Not again with the genealogy!” “He likes his genealogy.” “Enough already with the genealogy! Get back to the war scenes!”

I mean no disrespect to Neil Bell as a hard-working, hugely prolific writer who put food on his family’s table and kept a roof over their heads. But had he been living back in ancient Greece, I suspect he would have been considered a bad Homer. I’ve read a few of his books now, and I can see a definite pattern of stylistic bad habits emerging.

One is that Neil Bell apparently thought there was no such a thing as a bad story. Characters in his book are constantly popping up and, within a page or two of being introduced, launching into a story. “Shall I tell you how I came by this pipe?” the man asks, and we’re off for the next five pages on the saga of the man, his unhappy childhood (all Neil Bell childhoods are unhappy), his troubled youth, his encounter with some fascinator of uncertain origin, some nasty scrape, perhaps a romantic entanglement, and somewhere in the midst of it all the gaining of a pipe.

Now, once in a while, once in a book, this thing can be delightful. The first few times I encountered it in one of Neil Bell’s books, I was reminded of the scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie where the soldier comes up to the women in the restaurant and says, “Let me tell you about a dream I had….” In the movie, the sheer brazen non sequitur-ness of it is stunning.

But the sixth or tenth time it happens: Oy, vey!

Well, Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock is almost a babushka doll of these moments. We start with the story of how Frank Rawleigh got a job with Hamford’s [read Foyle’s] bookstore, rose through the ranks, married, and was living a comfortable life until one day he mysteriously disappeared.

Then we’re off on the story of how poor Mrs. Rawleigh copes with Frank being gone. A few months. A year. Years.

How she does it is with the aid of her live-in help and Jill-of-all-trades, Mrs. Paradock. When Frank’s money runs out, they have to find a way to make some more. They buy a chicken farm. Soon turns out they’ve been swindled (but not before getting a good long story about how the farm came to be up for sale).

So they try … well, I lost track along the way, but there was a massage parlor and a fortune-telling operation somewhere in there. Each involving oddball characters who wander in and sooner or later begin, “Let me tell you about a dream I had….”

Until one day, seven or eight years later, when Frank shows up at Mrs. Rawleigh’s door. Where has he been all this time?

“Let me tell you about that,” he begins. You need not hear the rest: it’s long, convoluted, and pointless. Nobody wants him around the place, anyway, and he’s out the door faster than leftover fish.

And the point of all this was …?

Oh, yes, and Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock both meet nice guys they decide to marry. Good for them.

But still, the point of all this was …? Besides a few hours killed in search of one?

And here we get to Neil Bell’s worst habit. Pointless stories are bad enough. Pointless commentary, though?

Now, there is nothing wrong with taking a detour or two along any narrative way to offer some interesting commentary. With some writers, the commentary is better than the story itself.

But what about when it’s not? What if it’s just a detour?

Let me offer just a small example of what I mean.

So Frank Rawleigh has returned. His wife sends him away to find a hotel for the night (this is not Odysseus and Penelope reunited at last). Now she waits with her new, good boyfriend (John, the doctor) for Frank to return and have “the big talk.”

“What time was it?” John asks (what time is Frank coming back):

“Nine sharp.”

“Ten minutes. Let’s drop it. Play me something.”

“What shall I play?”

“Something rollicking to clear the air. O by God no. He might hear you coming in. No, don’t play anything. Whatever it was it might be wrong. To him. We’ll read the evening papers. One can always escape into the news. I’ve often see men waiting to go into the theatre for a major operation poring over a newspaper. I suppose it’s the best way of escaping from one’s thought ever devised.”

The minutes dragged away. Neither knew what they were reading. Suddenly Ann said, “Here he is,” and a moment later the bell rang and presently Norma opened the door and Frank came in.

Now, no one ever keeps a stopwatch on a scene in a novel. There is no reason why Neil Bell couldn’t have cut right from Ann and John talking to Frank came in.

So why did he tell us that there were ten minutes to spare?

For no other reason than to mention this completely extraneous and irrelevant observation that reading a newspaper is a good way to kill time.

That’s it. There was utterly no other reason to put those words into this book. This was a thought that occurred to Neil Bell sometime in the writing of Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, and by God he was going to work it in.

This sort of thing happens on stage when there’s an unexpected delay, when an actor is late walking on. If Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock were a play, the actors playing Ann and John might ad-lib a few lines to kill the time until the actor playing Frank walked on stage.

But this is a novel. Neil Bell is playwright, cast, and stage manager. He’s deliberately holding up Frank so John can say these pointless lines about reading a newspaper.

Nothing more. Not a colorful anecdote. Not a witty aside or pithy observation. He’s going to hold up the show just to tell us that reading a newspaper is a good way to kill time. And he’s going to actually make the reader kill time to do it.

“What’s he saying now?” “That reading a newspaper is a good way to take your mind off things.” “Enough with the newspapers! Get back to the freakin’ story!”

And this is why Neil Bell would have been one of the bad Homers.

Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, by Neil Bell
London: Alvin Redman, 1958

I’m not sure how I managed to consider myself an expert in neglected books and remain ignorant of Neil Bell and his massive oeuvre until recently, but it was only the sight of the striking cover of one of his posthumous story collections, The Ninth Earl of Whitby in a local bookstore that led me to him. By the time Bell (born Stephen Henry Critten) published his autobiography, My Writing Life (1955), he’d racked up 75 titles, variously credited to Stephen Southwold, Miles, Stephen Green, S. H. Lambert, Paul Martens, and, of course, Bell.

As I’ve probably written here before, I’m from the “There must be a pony in there” school. While I’m suspicious of the quality standards of any author who can manage to write 75 books in the space of about 35 years (and would produce enough more before taking his life in 1964 that his publisher, Alvin Redman, was still issuing Neil Bell titles for nearly ten years after his death), I wasn’t really to dismiss Bell as a hack without some further investigation. My initial searching quickly revealed a few facts. None of Bell’s books is currently in print. He wrote all over the map: historical novels, mysteries, romances, family dramas, science fiction, and many, many tales of the supernatural. He started writing children’s stories, wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, then stopped abruptly after getting married (more about this later).

One of the few relatively mentions of him in the Internet era can be found in a 2010 post on China Miéville’s website, where he quotes at length from what he describes (in to me irresistible terms) as “Neil Bell’s more-than-passingly strange Life Comes to Seathorpe.” Miéville mentioned the book again in a 2011 listicle for the Guardian and a 2012 interview on Weird Fiction Review, which led me to think it was as good a place as any to start.

In My Writing Life, Bell recounts that editor Douglas Jerrold told him that the first six chapters of Seathorpe “were the dullest he had ever read.” I didn’t share Jerrold’s opinion to that extreme, but there was a fair bit of wandering around in search of a plot. We start with Warren Passmore, upstanding member of the English gentry, and his story up to the point where he gets blown up on the Western Front and comes home an invalid, blinded and paraplegic, and decides himself unfit to continue as either husband or father.

Then we switch to Mark Passmore and his story up to the point where, having worked his way to to star reporter status on Fleet Street, heads to the sleepy Suffolk seaside town of Seathorpe to rest and try his hand at writing fiction. Seathorpe is an outpost of tradition resisting the tides of change, where “the indigenous plebians, from their most tender age, knew their places and kept to them.” Where no one had taken notice of things “since the Spanish Armada.” Wandering around the town, he spots a vision of loveliness and is overcome by “the conviction that he was going to marry the girl,” quits his newspaper job, buys a cottage, and settles down. So we appear safe to assume this is going to be a book about Mark Passmore and his romance with the vision.

We then get several chapters of Mark settling in and getting to know the various characters in town, learning the girl’s identity, arranging to spend time with her at the village fête. Then the vicar tosses a monkey wrench into the works with a little anecdote:

“But let me tell you. Cook discovered when she went to the pantry this morning a large pool of liquid on the floor. Quite a large pool. The pantry window was open. She did not think it was water. She said it did not feel like water. An odd remark, perhaps, but corroborated by the maid who presently wiped it up…. Quite an intriguing little mystery.”

So intriguing, in fact, that we soon see that Neil Bell intends to take us all down this narrative path for the rest of the book. The “life” that has come to Seathorpe is not the energetic and lovestruck young reporter but something far more sinister. More puddles are found — not like water. Marks are found in the sands — not like any known animal’s. A sheep is attacked and killed. The womenfolk grow concerned, the menfolk organize nightly watches. Sightings are reported: largish creatures, piglike by one account, crablike by another. Then an infant is found dead in his crib, which is soaked with the weird water-like substance.

Now, back when we were wandering around quaint old Seathorpe with young Mark Passmore, we listened as he had a visit with the town constable, who confided his great admiration for “rare books” — by which he meant books “their authors never before or afterwards did anything like … nor any other author.” The first of these he discovered was H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. One of Well’s early — meaning science fiction — novels, about a mad scientist who takes over a remote island to experiment in creating new forms of life, part human, part animal.

Well, Mr. Bell is giving us a hint of where we’re going, but it’s not surprising that it might get missed. For Neil Bell — if Life Comes to Seathorpe is any proof — never met a detour that wasn’t worth taking. Actually, you don’t have to take Seathorpe as proof, as Bell himself provides it in his very discussion of the book in My Writing Life. After mentioning Jerrold’s assessment of the book’s first chapters, he then launches into a meditation upon how infrequently (or too frequently) intercourse occurs in marriage. A page and a half later, he writes, “To return to Douglas Jerrold and Life Comes to Seathorpe.” Jerrold told Bell that “the rest of the book was as good as anything Wells had done in that kind.” Bell bristles at the comparison. “I like to think that as a writer I am unique, in a class by myself. And this is true, for no-one writers, or can write, or could ever have written, my books.” Nevertheless, there are, let us say, more than a few Wells-like aspects to this one of Bell’s books.

There is, however, one obvious way in which Life Comes to Seathorpe is nothing like one of Wells’ science fiction novels. Those books were written before Wells had fallen in love with his opinions and are pretty trim. They’re plot and nothing but plot for the most part. Walter Allen was blunt in his review of the book in The Spectator: “Shall we say it’s the germ of an early Wells story stretched out to the length of 120,000 words?”

“How does Mr. Bell manage to spin it out to such length?” Allen asked. “By giving us his views on a number of things.” So, for example, when Bell lifts the veil off the mystery of the puddles through the device of Seathorpe’s own mad scientist’s journal, we are moving along through the preliminaries of the man’s life up to the point he began attempting to create life (using some form of electrolysis, it turns out) when we take a left and wander down a five page detour about the evils of flogging: “All men who flog are brutes; they are frequently beasts; and often filthy beasts.”

As Paul McGrane writes in a fascinating article, “The Pseudonymous Mr. Bell,” in the Autumn 2014 issue of The Book Collector, Bell’s novels “explore suicide, murder, mental and physical catastrophe, and nightmarish visions of the end of humanity.” This leads McGrane to wonder “if there are pointers in his private life to his obsessions.” In the case of flogging, there certainly was. During Bell’s own time in school, he witnessed the flogging of a ten year-old classmate by a schoolmaster. “It seared my mind forever…. All my work for years had been devoted to pillorying such beastliness,” Bell later wrote in an unpublished memoir. Having survived a harsh childhood and four years as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front meant that Bell, as McGrane writes, “had no illusions about what human beings are capable of and, in his fiction, he set about describing it with a brutal honesty.”

On the other hand, Neil Bell could have benefited from applying the same brutal honesty to editing his own writing. That Life Comes to Seathorpe is a fascinating and “more-than-passingly strange” novel is undeniably. But so, unfortunately, is the fact that it’s not a particularly good one.

Life Comes to Seathorpe, by Neil Bell
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946