Cover of the Macmillan (UK) hardback edition of The Roundabout.
This year, I have been running the Wafer-Thin Books reading group with James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic) and promised myself that I would take this as an opportunity to be more succinct in my posts. But I quickly discovered that, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, it’s often harder to write something short than something long. Nevertheless, I will attempt to keep this and subsequent posts about some of the neglected wafer-thin books (under 150 pages long) that I’ve been reading this year.
Cover of U.S. paperback edition of Neighbors.
I’ll start with one I just finished, a tattered and price-stickered paperback published by Modern Promotions (“A Division of UniSystems”) in 1969 under the title of Neighbors. Neighbors is the American title of The Roundabout, originally published in the UK by Macmillan in 1968. I doubt I would have picked it up were it not for the following blurb from Brigid Brophy:
I greatly admire Neighbors [I’m sure she wrote The Roundabout], which takes up the universal nightmare feeling, “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong” and spins it into a very elegant, economical and scarifying little trap for the imagination.
Brigid Brophy, in my opinion, was a writer whose critical judgments you can take to the bank, so I was happy to spend a buck on the book and add it to my growing pile of wafer-thinners in anticipation of this year.
This morning, I picked it up to get a dozen or so pages tucked in and ended up reading it straight through. This is a riveting little book that manages to squeeze three different narrators and at least four different perspectives into 138 pages. There aren’t a lot of books on the theme of “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong,” but boy, do they tend to be good ones: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. And you can add this one to the list.
Cover of U.K. paperback edition of The Roundabout.
Mathew, a naive and odd young man, takes a room at Mrs. Haines’ house. Within his first day there, he notices, through the curtains in the window of the house next door, just fifteen feet away, that someone is watching him. He learns that this is Mrs. Shawburn, a heavy-set middle-aged woman whose husband is blind and almost deaf. He speaks to her over the backyard hedge, has tea with her and Mr. Shawburn, who’s obsessed with horse-racing, and believes she tries to kiss him impulsively as she shows him out the door. He becomes convinced that Mrs. Shawburn has designs on him and then, when he notices that the couple isn’t taking their usual walk on Wednesday evenings, that she’s murdered her husband.
Some of this is true. Or partly true. Some of it is utterly, totally mistaken. The root problem is fundamental in our make-up as humans: what you see and what I see can differ dramatically. And as dramatic as the relevations are by the halfway point in The Roundabout, there are even bigger ones waiting in the second half. This is a delicious wafer-thin slice of nastiness, a superb evening’s read.
Michael Allwright, 1968.
Michael Allwright was a South African journalist who said that he came up with the idea for The Roundabout from playing a game of “What If?” with a friend. Though his dustjacket bio says he was working on a second novel, I can’t find any evidence that one was ever published.
The Roundabout is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
The Roundabout by Michael Allwright London: Macmillan, 1968 London: Panther, 1969
Published in the U.S. as Neighbors New York: Walker and Company, 1968 New York: Modern Promotions, 1969
I’m often asked how I find the books I write about. And no matter what I say, I know the only truthful answer is, “Serendipity.” It’s hard to look for something you don’t know about. Instead, you stumble across it. This is one reason I love a well-stocked used bookstore, particularly one that’s only loosely organized. I’m fortunate in living just down the road from one of the West’s hidden treasures, the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton. I’ve probably scoured its shelves at least twenty times over the years, but interesting things still pop up out of nowhere on every visit.
Most recently, I came across Soul Wounds, subtitled A Novel of the World War. That subtitle alone told me that it was published before world wars had to be numbered. But what intrigued me was the fact that it was published here in Missoula, Montana. This is not a hotbed of publishing and never was. The Missoulian Publishing Company devoted its energies to putting out the town’s newspaper and only rarely published books and then mostly local interest items. There was no information about the author and if there’d ever been a dustjacket, it was long gone. So this was an unknown quantity — but then, so was the very first neglected book I ever discovered, which was also a novel about World War One: W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks.
Like Other Ranks, Soul Wounds opens in media res. Hagen, an infantryman, is slogging through the mud and the dark as his company works its way up to take position in the front line of trenches just prior to an assault. It’s still winter, so this is one of the first American units to go into combat after America’s entry into the war. Aside from a few weeks’ stay in hospital to recover from a leg wound, Hagen will remain in or near the front lines almost continuously until the Armistice and take part in at least five major assaults.
The youngster in his company — still a teen and kept out of the brothels by the other men in his unit, Hagen will, by the end of the war, be considered one of the “old men,” one of the few from the original company to survive. He will endure shelling, gas attacks, relentless gunfire, and suicidal assaults across No Man’s Land, and even manage to overtake and capture a German machine gun nest.
Like many volunteers, Hagen comes to war with naive notions. Raised in a town on Flathead Lake in Montana, his one exposure to the military prior to joining up was when his mother sewed him a little soldier suit out of a cousin’s former uniform. Herrick, a poet who was living in Paris when the war broke out, tries to straighten him out: “You check your body, your mind, your soul, at the entrance, and you leave the check as a fee for admission. Once you get in you cannot get out.”
Herrick may have been a poet before the war, but there is no poetry in Soul Wounds. Schak writes in staccato, almost telegraphic prose:
A flash, a roar, beside him. His ears almost burst. The mud reeled as something pushed him over into it. There was a sting in his left knee, his forehead felt numb and heavy. He was faint. Another roar and flash, another, another, not so near him. A shot spat into the mud in front of him. His leg was burning. Shots struck, sput, sput, the parapet before him, flicked the mud near him. They’ll keep it up, he thought, and one of them’ll get me.
Only once does Hagen knowingly kill a man. In the final weeks of the war — not final to Hagen and his fellow Doughboys, for whom the Armistice comes as a surprise — he shoots a German who has come close enough to speak to him. By then, Hagen is numb with combat fatigue:
He did not think of it for a long time. Whether he was too utterly tired to fel anything, or whether the ceaseless horror and misery had calloused him, or whether he had become so dulled by the terrific pounding on his nerves and mind and body that he had lost some of the attributes of a human being, he never knew. He never found such questions entering his sickened mind. He was to completely overwhelmed by the front to wonder what was happening inside him.
When the war does end, however, the duty does not. Hagen’s unit is among the first Allied forces sent in to occupy the Rhineland. They spend months in a Germany town near Koblenz and Hagen is billeted with a German family. He sees the photo of a German soldier on the mantelpiece — an uncle killed in the war, he learns — and begins to see the human side of his former enemy while he awaits orders to return home.
Aside from the this final chapter about the initial occupation period after the war, there are many parallels between Other Ranks and Soul Wounds. Both focus on a single young infantryman, both stay tightly bound to the experience of being in the front lines, being in combat, with few and brief episodes of rest in the rear. Both are written in spare, artless prose. And both books are highly autobiographical with few nods to fiction aside from the change of names.
Al [Bernard Alfred] Schak was born in Minnesota in 1899 to Danish immigrant parents, one of five children. His family moved to Bigfork, Montana, when he was still young. He enlisted in the Montana National Guard in 1916, even though he was underage and slight of build, and was assigned to the 163rd Infantry Regiment. His older brother Walter also enlisted after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, and the two brothers sailed for France on the S. S. Leviathan in December 1917.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (L) and Al Schak, Missoula, Montana 1938.
Al served in the 163rd and later in the 26th Regiment under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He fought in six major engagements: Montidier, Cantigne, the Marne, St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, and the Meuse. He was wounded several times as well as missing in action, resulting in his mother twice being notified of his death in combat.
Sometime in the early fall of 1918, Al Schak felt the impulse to write a poem. As he later related, he borrowed a pencil, used the envelope of a letter from home, and wrote the following, which was published in the Literary Digest in October 1918:
NEAR NO MAN’S LAND
There wa’n’t no bugler there a-blowin’ taps; The regimental chaplain, tho, was ‘round; An’ I’m a tellin’ you as how I’m feelin’ blue, ‘Cause they put my rookie Buddy in the ground.
I showed ‘im how to do “right shoulder arms” An’ told him all a doughboy oughta know; We slept together, but to-day he sleeps Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud an’ snow.
He said ‘is ma an’ sister back at home Kissed ‘im a dozen times in fond good-bys, An’ when ‘e talked about ’em I could see .” That look o’ longin’ shinin’ in his eyes.
I hate to think o’ how ‘is mother feels — A mother’s loneliness is worse ‘n mine. I’d write ‘is folks a letter, only that This writin’ business ain’t much in my line.
I don’t know what to do when I’m off post. My Buddy’s gone; an’ seems like all I know I’d like to put a flower on ‘is grave Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud and snow.
Like Hagen, after the Armistice, Schak crossed into Germany and served with the occupation forces until he was repatriated in 1919. He had a difficult time adapting to civilian life at first and received relief from the Montana Veterans’ committee several times. He and his mother moved to Missoula around 1921 and he enrolled at the-then Montana State University (now University of Montana) as a special (i.e., not assigned to specific graduating class) student.
He seems to have thrived as a college student. He was the sports editor for the campus paper, The Sentinel, and published several stories in the university’s literary magazine, The Frontier. He joined the Sigma Phi Episilon fraternity and served as its chapter secretary. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in journalism.
Al Schak’s brother Walter was assigned as a motorcycle dispatch rider after the 163rd arrived in France, and he was wounded when a shell landed nearby as he was carrying orders just prior to the attack on Cantigny. Al Schak describes the incident in Soul Wounds:
It was late in the afternoon. The head of Hagen’s company was approaching a crossroads. A cloud of dust spurted out of the woods and a motorcycle with a sidecar zipped past the crossroads. It had not gone fifty yards past when a shell sent the driver hurtling into the field alongside the highway. Odds and ends of the machine flew up in a cloud of smoke and dust. The sidecar was obliterated.
In the novel, Hagen later learns that the motorcycle rider was his brother (also named Walter). Hagen is able to visit Walter at his field hospital, but his wounds are too severe and he dies and is buried in France. In reality, Walter Schak was returned to the U.S. and cared for in an Army hospital in Utah, but he died of complications in 1920 and was buried with honors in the town cemetery in Kalispell, Montana.
Al Schak worked as a reporter for the Missoulian after graduating from college, but he struggled with alcoholism and health problems — problems that would likely be diagnosed as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder today. He worked for years on Soul Wounds (an apt euphemism for PTSD), which may have been published as a goodwill gesture by his old paper, for there appear to have been no reviews of it anywhere.
Twenty-seven years after the war, with France liberated and the French Army settling back into its pre-war routines, the paperwork for the award of the Croix de Guerre medal was located and Al Schak was finally decorated. The citation read in part,
Private Schak, still in his teens, came across a man from his unit shot in both hips and pulled him to cover. Unable to move him without help, he called to other members of the outfit. When they ignored him, he drew a .45 revolver and pointed it at the nearest men and told them to put the soldier on a litter and carry him back to comparative safety. Private Schak went with them, and when one of the litter bearers was killed, he grabbed one end of the litter and they took the wounded man to medical aid. He then rejoined his outfit and started forward through the bursting shells.
Headline from Missoulian article about Al Schak’s death, November 15, 1945.
He had little time to enjoy his belated recognition, however. During the night of November 14, 1945, a lit pipe he had forgotten in a living room chair caused a fire that destroyed his house. Firemen found his body in the kitchen. Luckily, his mother, who lived with him, was visiting a daughter in California. Al Schak was buried with military honors in Missoula, though his gravestone states a unit he never served with. He was 46.
Al Schak’s gravestone.
Soul Wounds, by Al Schak Missoula, Montana: Missoulian Publishing Co., 1934
If you ever want to experience what it was like to take a train in Europe in the mid-1930s, read Via Bodenbach. Ferenc Körmendi wrote it as an experiment in the use of interior monologue, taking the reader, through the thoughts of George Kovacs, a Hungarian engineer, moment by moment, as he travels from Budapest to Berlin. We walk along the platform to the compartment he’s tipped the porter to hold. It’s an early train, going via Prague and Bodenbach, allowing him to reach Berlin in time for a good night’s sleep at a hotel. He wants to be fresh for his visit to the factory where the electrical device he’s invented will be manufactured. With any luck, this device will make his fortune.
He’s early, so early he regrets tipping the porter. Few passengers have boarded, there are plenty of compartments. He decides to get a paper, a German film magazine — something to read. When he returns to the compartment, there is a woman just settling in. “A girl, no Hungarian, quite pretty.” She apologizes in German for shutting the window (it’s cold). Not German, either, probably Czech. A boy enters, followed by an older gentleman. There is the settling of bags and overcoats, apologies in Hungarian, then in German. Everyone understands German? Yes, then they’ll stick with German.
The train begins to pull out of the station. “It’s moving. Daddy, the train’s moving,” the boy says excitedly. So, they’re father and son. “Dear little boy,” the woman says, “How well he behaves.” Oh, he’s not little: almost thirteen. Father prods the son to introduce himself. There are introductions all around. The Szabos. The woman is Alice Morek: yes, definitely Czech. “May we ask where you are going to?” says the father. “Podmokly,” she replies. He’s puzzled. “Bodenbach, you probably know it by that name.”
On the one hand, this is all mundane, just minutiae. The chit-chat continues, gracious but not overly friendly. How many more pages of this? you may wonder. But Kovacs is suspicious, petty, insecure. Not pathologically, just … well, human. And so a low-keyed, superficially polite battle of the stags begins. The elder Szabo is bound to lose, of course. He and his son are changing trains in Prague. Kovacs will still be in the compartment with Alice Morek after they leave.
In the course of the next few hours, Kovacs subtly edges out Mr. Szabo. Alice agrees to dine with him in the restaurant car. They head down the corridor, edging past the first diners. A couple of aristocratic men who pass “at their distance of five hundred years’ exclusivity, aloof and distant.” Cross from one coach to the next:
Second-class coach corridor empty a compartment door half open smoke tall blonde woman in red slippers lying not sleeping alone sleeping all the way to Berlin I might have come along here too lazy it doesn’t matter now I’m not so badly off where I am empty compartment here they’ve already gone to the restaurant car two suit-cases in the rack another empty compartment lots of luggage the door opposite’s open cold wind it’s going to rain these have gone as well or there wasn’t anybody here oh yes there was luggage and newspapers on the seat a half compartment one man alone eating sandwiches on the table in front of him no need of railway food for poisoning another coach if it crumpled up the end of the train’s empty another empty compartment one suit-case on the rack he was eating from a plate his wife must have packed it another. .. .
They lunch, have coffee. She is friendly now, but not yet warm. But Kovacs slowly grows obsessed. Each bit of information she offers he places like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, trying to construct her story. On the way back from lunch, he forces her into an empty compartment, forces a kiss on her. He begins to think: maybe I will get off in Bodenbach, take her to a hotel, seduce her, run off with her.
What he’s considering is mad, of course, reckless, but now it’s like each thought follows the next faster and faster, like we’re descending a spiral staircase, picking up speed, until we’re running, taking terrible risks. Will Kovacs abandon his carefully planned journey, go flying out of his neat and comfortable life in pursuit of Alice Morek? She has given him no encouragement, even protests that his conduct was abusive. When he tells her he’s going to get off in Bodenbach, too, that he intends to run off with her, she protests: he’s mad, she wants nothing to do with him. But will he persist? We cringe as Kovacs keeps stepping closer and closer to disaster.
Via Bodenbach is something of a tour de force. On the surface, it’s an extraordinarily detailed and precise account of one man’s journey by train through three countries, from early morning to after midnight. Underneath, though, it’s a walk along a tightrope strung between a complacent life in Budapest and the prospect of a successful partnership in Berlin suddenly complicated by the presence of this woman, a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman. Kovacs is not a sympathetic character, but that’s one of the reasons the narrative develops such compelling momentum: we know we wouldn’t be heartbroken if he goes tumbling off the rope and ends up a broken, bloody heap. A fascinating experiment — and a journey I’d be willing to take again.
(And yes, if you’re keeping score, this is the second Hungarian novel I’ve written about in which a man in a train meets a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman (see Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar. Coincidence? Plagiaristic inspiration? A common trait among Ferencs? Who knows?)
Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1935
I found a copy of Ferenc Molnar’s little novel Farewell My Heart in Ravenswood Used Books while visiting Chicago recently. It was the sort of book that’s easy to miss on a shelf: no dust jacket, the spine broken and its lettering faded. For me, though, sitting between familiar titles by Vilhelm Moberg and Toni Morrison, it was an orphan crying out for a closer look. I recognized Molnar’s name but only knew him as a dramatist (Liliom, later made into the musical Carousel, among others). I soon found more than enough reasons to buy it: its size (8″x5″, just about the ideal for a book that’s pleasant to hold AND read; the nostalgic disclaimer “ABOUT THE APPEARANCE OF BOOKS IN WARTIME” on the colophon page; and a couple of opening lines that guaranteed I’d want to go on:
“Religion?” The Italian officer in the Fascist uniform asked, holding my passport in his hand.
The train had been standing at the border station between Switzerland and Italy for a long time.
Wherever this story was going to go, I was willing to follow.
And did. However, let me disclose up front that though I thoroughly enjoyed Farewell My Heart, it cannot be held up as anything more than an entertaining minor novel. In fact, it reminded me of those times when I’ve been in the mood to see a movie and taken whatever happened to be showing without being too discriminating — and been rewarded by something unexpected and memorable if not quite a masterpiece. Many years ago, I had to quickly shepherd some younger cousins out of my grandparents’ house to get them away from a family meltdown. I took them to the nearest multiplex and into the next available showing — Breaking Away. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was not only far better than sitting through a screaming match but a movie I’ve been fond of ever since.
Farewell My Heart is about the unexpected, too. Its unnamed narrator is a fifty-something Hungarian journalist, a Jew who’s managed to shift some money to America without losing it in the Crash — enough to qualify for that rare and coveted object, an American visa. As he travels from Budapest, “At every border the poor, underpaid passport officials had started with that same strange expression at the American visa. As if it were some foreign coin which, though it had no value in their own country, they felt was very valuable.”
His train stops at Lausanne and a young red-haired woman boards and takes the seat next to him. She is also Hungarian, he learns, a twenty-year-old named Edith, and has a ticket on the same ship leaving Genoa for New York. She is pretty — but, he is quick to tell us, “let’s be absolutely frank, she was conventionally pretty — and let’s be even franker, there was something in her character, in her appearance, in her look, in her voice, that was reminiscent of the typical Budapest streetwalker.”
Edith soon abandons him for a Finnish diplomat — younger, more confident, better dressed than the narrator — until their itineraries diverge and she takes up again with the journalist. This pattern will be repeated on board the ship to America, in the cheap hotel they take rooms in upon arrival in New York, and over their first months in the new country.
The narrator is a cautious man, careful with his money and his health, having already been diagnosed as having a weak heart. He avoids leading Edith to think he has any interest in her other than as a companion, and when she decides to latch onto a young Hungarian dancer and go with him to try their luck in Hollywood, he offers her only a little money and encouragement. Not long after, he suffers a heart attack and while rehabilitating, meets and marries a gentle American woman closer to his age.
Married, eligible for citizenship, financially secure, he is in a perfect position to live out a life of quiet and moderation. And then Edith returns. And Molnar reminds us of one of the reasons we read fiction: to follow as people make terrible, foolhardy, self-destructive choices. Choices most of us wouldn’t be dumb or daring enough to take. And in this case, for no reason at all, for nothing more than the feeling the narrator had when Edith first sat beside him in that Swiss train compartment:
And still, when she sat down beside me and said softly, “It’s cold,” and pushed closer to me, and her shoulder and hip touched me, I felt unerringly that we two belonged to each other for all that remained of life. This was a fearful new element in my experience, this suddenly born thought which had taken possession of me with such overwhelming force, for no reason at all.
Farewell My Heart will take you just an evening or two to read. If you happen across it on a shelf someday, do pick it up. But if not, there are other good books a few inches further along.
Farewell My Heart, by Ference Molnar, translated by Elinor Rice New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945
A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a tiny and dirty attic room.
When he opens the man’s passport to note down his details, however, he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of Germany’s oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to come wandering out of the woods from Germany.
In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the feudal culture are still respected by most of the family’s former subjects.
Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for suggesting that an etching by Dürer is not a symbolic forecast of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig’s older brother is appointed to a high regional post in Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry, zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.
Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however, the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.
Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the prison’s hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten. When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig is certain he’s being taken out to be shot.
Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the 1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace: events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous cliffhanger-type situations.
I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism until it’s overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.
But they’re also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual, commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and frightening.
Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie could be made from this book.
The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on the Internet Archive: link.
Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks New York: Viking, 1937 Closed Frontiers London: Macmillan, 1937
Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)
This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.
I can’t imagine many biographical novels about anarchists begin with the subject lying in bed as a child, hand between thighs, pleasuring herself. But Ethel Mannin’sRed Rose (1941), a fictionalised biography of the Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) does just that. Goldman’s childhood crush, a teenage boy called Petrushka, looked after the family’s ‘horses, and tended the sheep and cows in the field. Petrushka was tall and strong; quiet and gentle,’ Mannin writes. She then describes a game the young Emma played with him in which he,
lifted her up and suddenly flung her above his head, catching her as she fell and pressing her against him as she slid to the ground, so that she knew the body smell of his shirt and the animal smell of his coat, the warmth of his strong hard body, and the grip of his rough gentle hands. …there was no fear in this excitement, it was pure ecstasy.
Then Mannin paints this scene:
And it came again in the warm dark secrecy of the nights, so that childish hands pressed down between the remembering thighs in an attempt to recapture the sensation, and the darkness would be alive with Petrushka’s brown smiling face, the smell of horses, cattle, sweat, and the fields. Petrushka became her last thought on falling asleep and her first on waking.
Throughout her life, Goldman had an active sex life and many lovers. In her younger years she was in a ménage a trois with her soul mate, the anarchist and writer Alexander Berkman, and an artist who lived with the couple. They were not lovers for long, but their deep spiritual and political union lasted for the rest of their lives. As she aged, Goldman felt increasingly bitter about the uneven opportunities for men and women on what we would now call ‘the dating scene’. Berkman (the fictional Sasha in the book) had fallen in love with 20-year-old Emmy (Elsa in the book) whom he’d met in a café in Berlin when he was 52.
They were together until he died by suicide in June 1936. Mannin describes this as a thorn in Goldman’s side: ‘A man could age and lose his looks,’ she writes channelling the voice and mind of Goldman, ‘and still command the passionate love of the young and beautiful; it was not easy for a woman. Her business was not to desire but to be desired, and when her desirability was ended her desires were expected to die automatically—and the tragedy was that they didn’t. No one thought it wrong for a middle-aged man to desire a young girl, but everyone was horrified if a middle-aged woman showed other than a maternal interest in a young man.’
Mannin is sympathetic to Goldman’s desire not just for a fairer world but for a fairer playing field for women. A committed socialist and feminist herself, Mannin was also no stranger to love affairs. Like Goldman, she came from humble means; her father was a postal worker and her mother was a farmer’s daughter. Born in 1900, she supported the anarchist cause and fought for sexual liberation. In between her two failed marriages, she had affairs with W. B. Yeats and Bertrand Russell. Part of the pleasure of reading Red Rose, is the satisfaction of reading the life of a complex and politically driven woman as constructed and shaped by a female author who one senses has a strong kinship with her subject.
From the cover page of Red Rose.
The first two thirds of Red Rose feel more like a straightforward biography than a work of fiction because in these segments Mannin is basing her novel closely on Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life, which ends in 1928 – twelve years before Goldman’s death. The latter part of Red Rose had no memoir to rely on. Those final years of Goldman’s life needed to be ‘reconstructed from various sources—including imagination’, Mannin tells us in her short introduction. ‘And it is precisely that part of her life which I have had to reconstruct which has most interested me as a novelist, and which she urged I must “one day” write.’ This explains the tonal shift in the final third of the book which is imbued with a stronger imaginative power and a more novelistic sweep.
The two women met in the late 1930s when they were working on behalf of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) – the anti-fascist faction fighting against General Franco’s Spanish Nationalists. There is no historical documentation of their meeting, but there is one photo of them, from 1937, when Goldman came to Britain to speak at a London meeting in support of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).
Ethel Mannin chairing a meeting in support of the Spanish anarchist CNT-FAI, with James McGovern, MP, (left) and Emma Goldman (right). Friends’ House, London, February 1937.
In the photo, we see Emma Goldman, aged 69, standing, shoulders back, delivering one of her fiery speeches. Ethel Mannin, hair pulled back severely would have been 38 in this photo – she looks off to the distance, wearing a serious expression. James McGovern, an MP, is furiously making notes. A year after this photo was taken, Emma Goldman would die from a stroke suffered in Toronto. Her body was allowed back into the US and she was buried in Chicago.
Goldman’s many affairs and two failed marriages feature prominently in Red Rose. Her second marriage was to the Welsh Miner James Colton (Jim Evans in Red Rose) is mentioned only three times in Goldman’s memoir, whereas Mannin brings in her novelist’s eye to this episode turning it onto a somewhat bittersweet affair. There was never any hint of a sexual relationship between the couple, and Mannin describes how after the registry office wedding, ‘When the marriage was affected,’ Emma ‘was impatient to get away. She realised that it meant disappointing Evans, and to “compensate” him she slipped him a ten shilling note on the station platform, urging him to “treat” himself and one or two of “the boys” to the pictures.’ There is a sense in Mannin’s description that the fictional James Colton, was in some ways humiliated or at the very least disappointed by Goldman’s perfunctory approach to their union. As an anarchist himself, he was committed to the cause and felt honoured to be able to do something for the famous Emma Goldman, but Mannin writes, ‘He stood there, troubled, confused, fingering the note she had forced upon him, overriding his bewildered objections.’ It’s in moments like these, when Mannin inhabits the interior world of her characters, that Red Rose fully comes alive.
Goldman’s life, according to Mannin, was one of passion and struggle. She was incarcerated for inciting a riot but only served several short prison sentences. Most of her struggles centred around money: she never had enough of it and was often hungry and homeless. In order to feed herself and to fund her travels and lectures to spread the anarchist message, Goldman took on whatever work she could. As a young woman, she worked making corsets and then in a glove factory. She trained and practiced as a nurse, set up a massage parlour and had two failed attempts at running an ice cream shop. She had a go at being a street prostitute on 14th Street in New York which ended in ignominy. The gentleman who took her for a drink noticed that she was not cut out for the job. He took pity on her, and after buying her a drink, gave her ten dollars for the trouble it took her to put on a fancy frock.
Much of Goldman’s energy is taken up with fund raising, which Mannin, as a self-made woman describes with a profound understanding. Reading Red Rose is a glimpse into the life of Goldman and into the mind of Mannin. The novel doesn’t completely work as a piece of fiction, and yet, it does re-imagine how a life can be documented and how pushing the boundaries of imagination are crucial to creating a successful work of fiction – even one that sticks so close to biography. In feminist politics there is always a sense of a trajectory, of history moving with the times, but what we see here is not history as a passive inevitability progressing from one idea to the next but a sense that history can be shaped and created by women with the aim of a fairer world. It is the fact that Ethel Mannin took on such a vital and important subject and had the courage to fill in the gaps of Goldman’s life with her own imaginings that makes Red Rose such an important work in the library of women’s – and the world’s – struggles.
Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin London: Jarrolds, 1941
Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).
Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.
There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.
Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.
The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:
Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.
As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”
This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.
There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:
To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.
He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.
If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.
What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.
René Clair on the set of an early sound film.
When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:
How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!
Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”
What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.
If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.
Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.
The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.
Star Turn, by René Clair London: Chatto & Windus, 1936
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.
Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.
Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.
Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.
The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:
“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)
Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.
Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.
A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.
In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.
In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”
The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.
A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.
Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.
Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.
What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.
A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968
The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936, beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you’ve probably never heard of it.
Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges’ deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane’s novel Faith, Hope, No Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You’ve probably never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless you’re a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist). Competing against Lane’s debut novel for the prize that year were Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that year, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E. Bates.
The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about £4,000 in today’s money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until 1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee’s criteria were that the winning novel should be a ‘strong and imaginative’ work, that the author should show promise for the future and that there should be something in the novel that should reveal the ‘true character and spirit’ of Englishness to French readers.
What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as if they were separated by vast oceans.
Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for Faith, Hope, No Charity in July 1937.
Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily Express and then Daily Mail, writing ‘descriptive’ pieces about events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels in 1933). Lane’s reporter’s eye describes in great detail a divided world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy inhabitants of the West End:
Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance. They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more hands… The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.
It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams, married to Ada, one of the book’s female protagonists. Lane implies this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a different class: Ada, an ostler’s daughter, the lower classes; Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd, the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny. Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three, boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a damp country house.
None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative effort:
The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in its white globe purred hoarsely.
They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these women may lead fulfilling and free lives.
The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers, surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in London’s East End, it is also ‘otherland,’ an extraordinary island of Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead: Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion, disappointment and its examination of the ‘new public woman’ gives Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix Femina committee.
The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the novelists Kate O’Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd, Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.
One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished submission from a literary point of view as ‘a journal kept by a lunatic.’ Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene’s A Gun for Sale as: ‘a bogus book. Intensely insincere.’ Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell, saying: ‘As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant personality.’ And so it seems that Margaret Lane’s ‘promising’ novel was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.
It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make are forced upon them and thus their ‘freedom’ lacks agency; their experiences are not transformative. The dropped ‘aitches’ of the working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional characters.
Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
Joan Reid would have sympathized with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate). “How shall I fill up my years?” she asks as she stands on the threshold of adulthood:
“Paint,” said my mother. “I will have you taught.”
“Medicine,” said an aunt.
“Secretary,” said a friend.
“Photography,” said someone else.
“Plastics,” I wanted to add.
“But surely I should feel something?” she replies. “Some purpose which I must fulfil?”
Because this is fiction, or the Fifties, or both, Joan manages to land a job as a reporter with a regional newspaper in a small city on the Channel coast based on little more than the ability to type and spell. She sets out for life with a capital L with an exchange that’s one of the best leavetakings in literature:
“Goodbye,” I said to my parents, as they handed me over to myself.
“Goodbye,” I said, taking possession.
Everyone at the paper is very nice and very helpful and there is not a whiff of sexism or misogyny, which suggests that either Joan is oblivious to it or Henriques never actually worked for a newspaper, for both were certainly as pervasive as the clouds of cigarette smoke in such places back then.
Indeed, these two paragraphs encapsulate the brightest and dimmest facets of Love from a Convict (its U.S. title was Love for a Convict, though why just the preposition was changed is anyone’s guess). At its best, Henrique’s narratorial voice is snappy, clever, unexpected, and funny. Joan, however, is often too dense or too earnest to merit Henrique’s brio.
How earnest? Earnest enough to fall in love in the space of five sentences and even fewer minutes. Stranded out on the moors by a bitter storm, she and a colleague seek shelter at the only structure that seems inhabited: a prison. A warder lets them into the visitors’ waiting room and fetches a convict, who comes into to light the stove. And the lightning strikes:
His nose was fairly straight; it had a slight twist as it neared his nostrils, which sloped back gently, sensitively. His mouth was straight, the upper lip very slightly overlapping the lower. His chin was square. He was a very attractive looking man I he sort of man I would want to love.
And that is pretty much all there is to it. By the time they make it back to the office, Joan is certain that she is in love with Richard, the inmate. Several visits in the following weeks only set her mind more firmly, though Richard seems an unpromising candidate. Soft-spoken, well-mannered, and attracted in kind to Joan, he is also prone to sudden bursts of rage. And on the day when his sentence is up, he attacks the guard bringing him the civilian clothes he’s about to be released in.
Joan’s parents are, understandably, concerned, despite her open optimism in sharing her news:
“I am in love,” I wrote my parents.
“Who? Do bring him home,” they wrote.
“I can’t,” I answered. “He’s still in prison.”
Her fellow reporters also try to dissuade her, but Joan is convinced. “If I didn’t love him, would I know so surely?” she challenges them. A cousin of Richard’s she meets tells her that he is a vicious man, “constantly exploding with belligerence.” Richard’s parents, who she visits in search of answers, have written him off: “We have our own lives to live, and we have accepted the fact that Richard is better in prison than out.”
None of them manages to change her mind. Even when the prison’s governor advises her that Richard is likely to keep adding years to his sentence through his outbursts, Joan remains steadfast. And here we leave the story, with Joan and Richard stuck in their respective limbos.
For me, this stuckness was what kept Love from a Convict from rising to the level of Veronica Henriques’ frequently-sparkling prose. Reading it was like listening a light and swinging jazz tune on a scratched record, where tune returns again and again and again to a particular two-bar passage. [Some youngsters make have to Google “record skipping” to understand that analogy.] Stuckness is a problematic state to end a novel in — indeed, Love from a Convict seems almost unfinished.
Ironically, the structural aspects were what Kingsley Amis thought most successful in the book. His problem was with Joan, whose willful naivete he could barely tolerate:
I had barely caught sight of Love from a Convict before starting to object to it, and certainly there can be few books more energetically not my cup of tea.
I can just about stomach the idea of a sensitive girl reporter on a provincial newspaper falling in love with a noble-savage convict, but her only identifiable motive for what she does about it turns out to be, not love, but a half-hidden desire to be though shocking by some people and ‘interesting’ by others, and at this point the last of my sympathy expired. It is with all the more emphasis, then, that I must praise the book, firstly for the unusual vigour with which it puts of its (to me antipathetic) state of feeling, and secondly for its grasp of technique, flair for exposition, adroitness in scene-shifting and the rest of the how=d’ye-do — whatever it is that makes the reader detect some kind of sense of vocation in a novelist. So when the next one from this stable appears I shall, reluctantly, have to get hold of it. (The Spectator, 18 February 1955)
Other reviewers were generally as positive as Amis, most of them singling out the freshness of Joan’s voice and perspective. “A little tour de force in the sense of honesty,” wrote Newsweek’s critic.
Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of Love from a Convict.
Veronica Henriques was 24 when Love from a Convict was published. The daughter of the novelist and founding member of the British Commandos, Robert Henriques, she went on to write four more novels in the next dozen years. By the 1970s, however, she had become more interested in painting and printmaking and began showing her work under her married name of Veronica Gosling. She continues to create and foster a space for art and community in her Studio 36 in Exeter.
Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques London: Secker & Warburg, 1955
“He met her on the Danube Corso, on the 29th of August, 1936.” The scene is Budapest before the horrors. He is Aladar, a 30-something businessman, divorced, seeking an escape from the oppressive heat. She is an attractive peroxide blonde (“a Jean Harlow type,” he thinks). Their cafe tables abut and their glances lead to a conversation. Her Hungarian is accented, sketchy. She is Lalla, an Italian, a nightclub singer and dancer, or so she claims. He doubts her words. There is a certain frailty about her and sense of unworldliness.
He invites her to dinner but she declines, saying she needs to get home. As he helps her onto the tram, he slips his business card into her hand.
And for weeks thereafter, he returns to the same cafe in hopes of seeing her again. “Like most solitary people,” Boros tells us, “he is a creature of habit.” His persistence doesn’t pay off.
Then one day, a letter arrives in his office. It’s from Lalla, who invites Aladar to visit. “I am laid up with a cold” at the Pannonia sanitorium on the outskirts of town. She is a tuberculosis patient, he realizes.
Cover of The Doll’s Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids.
Boros, who grew up in Budapest and who was herself a patient in such a clinic, captures the safe but fraught atmosphere in which some stay for years and some hemorrhage and die overnight.
Hospitals, like prisons, create their own time. Weeks pass unnoticed, while minutes seem to last for hours and days. You are aware of this change in the rhythm of time as soon as you enter the place. It affects you unpleasantly, like the smell of disinfectants and drugs. It feels like anxiety. You glance at your watch, for instinctively you know that there is something wrong with the time; that you have to come too early or too late. And you begin to wonder how long your visit is supposed to last. You are already counting in minutes and in seconds; the afternoon is never going to end. . . .
Like us, Aladar is, at first, uncomfortable seeing Lalla in her bed, walking her along the ward, sitting her on the terrace. But the ease of her talk and the friendliness of the other patients she introduces him to — bright young Franciska, charming Kati, the unassuming Count, who has been in and out of the clinic (mostly in) for decades — soon overcomes his awkwardness.
He returns the next weekend, and the next, and the next after that (creature of habit, remember?). He takes Lalla out for rides in his car, proud to be seen with a young, beautiful woman. Aladar comes during the week to meet with Lalla’s doctor (days before healthcare privacy regulations), looking for assurance that she will eventually be cured. He wants to take her away, marry her, add her to his treasures. “Yes, she is improved,” the doctor responds, careful not to confuse improved with cured — though Aladar instantly does.
Gradually, we realize the meaning of Boros’s title. Aladar has no more chance of taking Lalla away from the sanatorium for good than the prince has of taking the mermaid from sea. She understands this. On a trip into Budapest, he urges her to spend the night in town. “But remember that no hotel would accept me,” she reminds him, “What with my sputum-mug and all that.”
When Aladar does finally come to some acceptance of the situation, it is almost wholly selfish. “She couldn’t exist without her illness… She was made by her illness, she was her illness.”
The Mermaids is, as one can predict from the moment Aladar reads Lalla’s letter in his office, a tragic romance. But not a melodrama, thank God. Eva Boros is far too skillful and subtle an artist for that.
In fact, the pleasure of The Mermaids is that of putting ourselves in the hands of a masterful minimalist. Reading this book is like taking a glass of wine in the sun-dappled shade of a continental cafe. The experience is one to be savored, not indulged in. We take one glass and sit for an hour or so. Not two, and never three.
The U.S. edition of The Mermaids came with a long — and rare — tribute from Eudora Welty. “Thank you for letting me read this beautiful novel,” she wrote, likely in response to an advance copy. The book, she wrote, was a “sensitive, haunting work of a quality distinctly its own. While it probes deeply for unsparing truth, it is delicate as a flower to the senses.”
Most critics shared this view. Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing the book in The Tatler and Bystander, remarked that Boros, although Hungarian, wrote “far better English than many of us command!” She applauded the descriptions of the sanatorium’s atmosphere and residents and found that the novel “has a beauty hard to pin down. This book, I can only say, haunts me: I must re-read it.” Her fellow novelist Antonia White was equally impressed: “It is exciting, if a little disconcerting, that a Hungarian, writing her first novel in a language not her own, should produce a small gem of English literature.”
In the U.S., Granville Hicks, always an insightful and supportive reviewer, found The Mermaids “is completely unified by the mood that the author creates, and the writing has a kind of purity that takes the breath away.” On the matter of the inevitable comparisons with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hicks argued that “Miss Boros, of course, is trying to do something very different from Mann, something much smaller than he attempted, but on her own scale she has been quite as successful, and that is a great deal to say.”
Eva Boros in Vienna, 1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.
Though she set The Mermaids in 1936, Eva Boros had left Hungary years before. In 1928, she moved to Vienna, where she met the young German-born British photographer Bill Brandt. Like Boros, Brandt had spent time in a T.B. clinic — in his case, in Davos, the setting of Mann’s novel. Brandt fell for Boros — 21, blonde (natural), beautiful — and the two married … eventually. Brandt’s love life was never less than complicated and Boros eventually lost her taste for competition.
Her life remained intertwined with Brandt’s, though. In the 1950s, he entered psychoanalysis with a therapist named Barbara Lantos and suggested that Boros, now divorced from him but living in London as well, become her patient as well. Later, when Lantos was dying of cancer, she told her husband, a Hungarian emigre named Sandor Rakos, that he should marry Boros after her death — which he did.
Paul Delany, Brandt’s biographer, speculates that psychoanalysis may have cured Boros of the compulsion to write. The Mermaids was her first and only novel. It has never been republished.
The Mermaids, by Eva Boros New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956
This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned today, it’s inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if either of his novels enters the discussion, it’s probably in a footnote. This is not entirely unjust.
Biggs (Princeton ’18), Fitzgerald (’17), and Edmund Wilson (’16) became friends through their passion for writing and editing Princeton’s two literary magazines, The Tiger and The Nassau Literary Magazine. Biggs would serve as managing editor for both, though he quickly realized that Fitzgerald was the better (and more prolific) writer. He and Fitzgerald shared a room during FSF’s last term at Princeton before entering the Army in late 1917.
The 1917-1918 staff of the Princeton Tiger. John Biggs, Jr. center front and F. Scott Fitzgerald behind him.
Biggs later admitted that while he was “a literary snob, Fitz was a snob’s snob.” Despite the fact that Biggs came from a far wealthier family, Fitzgerald somehow managed to dress in the best clothing available from Brooks Brothers and Jacob Reed. When Fitzgerald needed someone to get him out of jail after a bender, though, it was Biggs who inevitably provided the bail.
Both men enlisted in the Army after American entered the First World War. Neither made it overseas. While Fitzgerald married and moved to New York after his discharge, Biggs returned to Princeton to graduate and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard. Biggs and his wife traveled to Paris for their honeymoon but then headed back to Delaware, where Biggs followed in his father’s footsteps and established a successful law practice.
Although he was not even a year older than Fitzgerald, Biggs became something of an older brother figure for the writer. Biggs arranged for a house in Delaware when Fitzgerald needed to dry out and he took an increasingly active role in handling Fitzgerald’s legal matters. In return, Fitzgerald introduced Biggs to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s.
Biggs wrote a long untitled novel while at Harvard that Fitzgerald shopped to Scribner’s, Putnam, and eventually, H. L. Mencken. “To my mind it has the most beautiful writing — and I don’t mean “fine” writing — that I’ve seen in a ‘coon’s age,” he told Mencken. “I don’t believe anyone in America can write like this — and the novel is also remarkable in the objectivity of its realism….” Mencken did not agree. Not only did the book never get published but Mencken, who crossed paths with Biggs socially from time to time, considered him dull and officious.
Scribner’s accepted Biggs’ next novel, Demi-Gods (1926), which reviewers found an awkward mix of American eccentric religious mysticism (there are two attempts to found a cult in the book) and Gilded Age tycoonism. Perkins accepted the book for Scribner’s but was measured in his feedback to Fitzgerald.
Perkins’ opinion of Biggs’ third novel, Seven Days Whipping, was much higher. Scribner’s publicized the book in all the major reviews. A shorter version was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and prefaced with this potpourri-like teaser:
In describing the book, one is at a loss for comparatives. One thinks of James Joyce, of Edgar Allen Poe, even of that fantastic play, “Beggar on Horseback.” None of them fits, although all of them suggest something of the truth. Seven Days Whipping has certain qualities of Joycean introspection, the fascination of Poe’s stories, an atmosphere of fantastic mystery, a revelation of forces hidden deep in the primitive in all of us.
Fitzgerald was delighted at its apparent success. “I loved John’s book,” he wrote Perkins after receiving a copy. “It’s his best thing and the most likely to go. It’s really thought out — oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner.” He did acknowledge, though, that “From the first draft, which was the one I saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don’t know.”
The book did not sell well, however, despite generally favorable reviews and Scribner’s support. And almost two years after his initial enthusiasm for the book, Fitzgerald — who was likely off on Biggs and all stable people in general, given his own troubles at the time — confided, “Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless. Demigods was simply oratorical twirp.”
I have to agree with Fitzgerald on Seven Days Whipping. That odd title, by the way, is the name of a Delaware tribesman whose sudden and dramatic appearance — with the aid of a tremendous hurricane-like storm — provides the climax of the book. In contrast, Bigg’s protagonist, Stawell — a Puritan throwback, perhaps (Stay Well)? — Ball La Place, is the opposite of dramatic. He is sober as a judge, which is fitting, since he is a judge (as Biggs himself would later become).
As dark clouds mass to the east, Judge La Place travels from his court in Wilmington to his family estate on the banks of the Red clay River. There, his wife awaits, expecting to deliver their first child at any moment. She is a late mother and La Place frets about her health and the birth. As they sit down for supper, the storm breaks with a violent fury. The telephone goes out and he decides to drive to fetch the doctor.
With sheets of rain and earth-shaking bursts of thunder battering him, La Place is startled to meet with a tall Indian, half-naked and carrying the body of a dead deer. What happens next is neither respectable nor colorless, but it is largely unbelievable unless you’re willing to accept that the mixture of an expectant wife and a melodramatic encounter in the rain would be enough to send a middle-aged judge into a murderous hysteria. A hysteria which evaporates as soon as the sun rises, the baby howls, and Seven Days Whipping manages to come back to life.
John Biggs, Jr. was not unfamiliar with hysteria and other forms of mental illness. He dealt with numerous cases involving commitment to mental asylums at a time when the power in such cases lay heavy against the individual and in the 1940s, he became the chair of the American Bar Association’s committee on the rights of the mentally ill.
He may not, however, have had the temperament to put himself fully into the mind of a man who goes mad, even if just briefly. Reading Seven Days Whipping, I was reminded of something James Baldwin once said in an interview: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” Whatever that something is, John Biggs, Jr. resisted it. If he wanted his readers to believe that Judge La Place becomes mad, he only succeeds in convincing us that he becomes histrionic.
Fortunately for Fitzgerald, Biggs was a far better lawyer and friend than he was a novelist. As Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and money problems grew worse, Biggs staunchly defended his interests and protected the writer against bankruptcy. Before his death, with Zelda in and out of institutions, Fitzgerald named Biggs executor and guardian of their daughter Scottie, and proximity to Biggs was one of the reasons that she settled in Washington, D.C. after leaving college.
I have to admit that I knew nothing about Seven Day’s Whipping when I started it. I was merely intrigued by the title and happy to give it a try when I spotted a cheap copy. In the end, it was more interesting as an entree to the story of John Biggs, Jr. — a good man, a good lawyer, a good judge, but a merely adequate novelist — than on its own merits. But such is the nature of reading forgotten old books: they’re not all masterpieces.
Seven Day’s Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928
“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.
The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candor of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.
John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”
Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”
“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.
But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patroling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.
For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.
If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organize a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.
Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.
Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.
The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognized as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.
It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.
The Pole and Whistle, by George Moor London: The New English Library, 1966
“One must never place a loaded gun on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” Anton Chekhov is said to have told aspiring playwrights. In Central Stores, Vicki Baum’s novel, not one but two pistols are introduced in early chapters. Any reader who’s ever heard about Chekhov’s gun will know to expect something explosive to come: a shooting, a robbery, a suicide, perhaps. By the time Der große Ausverkauf, the German original of Central Stores, was published in 1937, Baum had written 19 books in as many years, a production rate she kept up for another 20 years, amassing nearly 50 novels to her name.
Few writers can be this prolific without resorting to a few formulaic tricks, usually in the way of plots and characters. In Baum’s case, her plots tend to be variations on “Ship of Fools,” a warhorse from the Middle Ages that served many 20th bestselling authors (e.g., Arthur Hailey in Airport) well: put a batch of people with conflicting motives in a confined setting and let the inevitable chain reactions take place. This served her very well with her best-known and most successful novel, Grand Hotel (1929). So well, in fact, that these plots are usually referred to as “Grand Hotel” stories.
But by Central Stores, its limitations were becoming evident. Central Stores is a large Macys-like department store in midtown Manhattan, with twelve floors of everything from fish to furs. In fact, the first character in the book wafts into the china department with the smell of the fish on sale that day in the grocery department.
She was one of those customers who are always on the search for something cheaper. Shop-soiled blouses, leaky coffeepots, discoloured leather bags, clearance sales of imitation silk stockings — that is the sort of thing they go after. They are the wives of underpaid clerks, those worried and fretful women who never get anything which is worth the price they pay for it.
In Baum’s scheme, this woman is a secondary character. Though she will reappear to help frame the story, she is really just a device. Therefore, Baum has no need to tell us any more about her.
We can easily tell Baum’s primary characters. They all have names, ages, hair colors, physical assets or impediments, mannerisms. And like the pistols, if Baum mentions any of these, it’s a given they will serve some function in the course of the book. Mr. Philipp, the house detective, is in his sixties, balding, with a drinking problem and a pistol. Which means, we know, that he’s probably going to mess up and get fired and do something desperate. Lillian Smith, one of the models in the store’s haut couture department, is stunningly beautiful but perhaps a bit too slickly gorgeous and wears too much of a cheap perfume. These, too, will be used. Baum is a most utilitarian writer.
This is not to suggest that Central Stores is not an entertaining book. Although we can see her constructing a house of cards in the first two-thirds of the novel, just how it collapses and where the cards fall still comes as a surprise and the narrative’s momentum builds to the point where we keep turning the pages through the climactic chapters. I figured it would take me 4-5 days to read it; I finished it in two.
Several reviewers commented that Central Stores was perfect material for a film, and as I was reading it, I could picture Van Johnson as Eric, the tall window dresser married to Nina, the pretty young saleslady (Teresa Wright or Donna Reed). James Gleason, of course, has to be Mr. Philipp. Lillian Smith might be harder to cast: she needs a blonde, brassy femme fatale type, but not someone like Lana Turner who would become an A-lister. Lizabeth Scott, perhaps?
Central Stores is a bit of a puzzle in Baum’s oeuvre. When I first read about it, I just assumed that it, like most of Baum’s novels that were translated into English, would have been published and sold well in both the U.S. and England. But, in fact, Central Stores has never been published in America. Even its English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, appears not to have put much of a push behind the book, based on the few and small ads I’ve been able to locate. Was the perception of Baum as a German writer a factor? But she was, in fact, an Austrian Jew whose books were banned by the Nazis. It’s hard to tell now, but from what I can see, Central Stores was a natural for American readers and would have been a guaranteed bestseller. Unfortunately, this means that used copies are much scarcer in the U.S. now. Fortunately, the book is also available for reading on the Internet Archive (link).
This is a contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s#1940Club, the latest increment of their twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year.
Central Stores, by Vicki Baum London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940
A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and everything gear fab. “A young girl alone in London’s swinging night world,” with a picture of a mophead and his bird sipping from what appears to be a glass of water, and from all appearances very much in love. So one might expect this to be something of a mod rom-com.
Alice is just under 18, secretly loves Elvis (considered very old school by then), and is in London to experience life. She is intrigued by, then attracted to, then fully under the sway of Matthew, just over 19 and quite full of his own worldly-wiseness. Alice moves into his flat. Only it’s not entirely his flat. There is also David, a student, and Al, a somewhat older Jamaican man.
Matthew and Alice is a match made in Soho. Which means that Matthew sometimes has to work the streets as a rent boy while Alice sips endless espressos while wedging herself into crowded tablefuls of loud artists and drama students and people of ambiguous employment. This relationship swirls around with the current for chapter after chapter, with the only episode of real interest being when Al gets beaten up by a group of white fascists protesting against immigrants. At the end, Alice declares to Matthew, “I don’t want to marry anyone but you,” to which Matthew replies, “Don’t let’s get bored, Alice.”
While No Wonderland is not particularly interesting or successful as a novel, it’s scattered with moments of genuine observations. Like how awkward it is for a young man to pretend to enjoy dancing with a stranger while her boyfriend has disappeared, obstensibly in search of a drink, or how exhausting to sit and pretend to be interested in the conversation of people strenuously trying to win an ennui competition. In fact, what struck me most about No Wonderland was how most of this life that Alice seems so eager to experience is tedious and uninspiring.
And yet, there was something that made me want to give Lindsay another try. No John, No (1966), her third novel (No Wonderland was first published in England in 1962), is about another woman, just a bit older than Alice, and her search for love. “This is a novel about what it is like to be poor, rootless, intense, and lesbian, trapped in a desperate bohemian life on the wrong side of Notting Hill,” the book’s dust flap tells us. Well, at least we know not to expect a rom-com.
“At the moment,” Kate tells us, “I’m living with Terry who is a girl like me and I rather love Terry in a way.” Although Terry is in her 30s, Kate is pleased that she’s “not like most lesbians who get broad in the hips when they pass the age of twenty-nine.”
This is from the second paragraph on page one. Two paragraphs later, we read that “Kate as usual is doing nothing, she bites her fingernails and is waiting for me to do everything for her.” So, now this is Terry speaking. A page later, the author tells us that “Kate and Terry shared a flat near the Portobello Road market.” Then we’re back with Kate, then over to Terry, then back to the author, and so on for roughly half the book, until Kate meets Anne and now we get four perspectives.
Telling a story through multiple narrators is nothing new, of course. Changing them from paragraph to paragraph is somewhat more challenging, but it tends to be less so when what the author is trying to do is help the reader see the complexity of the story. Unfortunately, the story in No John, No is actually quite simple: Kate wants to be in love and, if possible, be loved in return, though that is of secondary importance. The switches of narrators is more distracting than revealing, particularly when the characters themselves seem preoccupied with figuring out their own identities.
The one person in the book who seems to see things clearly is Kate’s married friend, Helen. Helen finds Kate’s good-natured muddle-headedness infuriating, not endearing. “Do you want me to be like you, then? Are you worried that I’m different?” Kate asks her. “No, I don’t want you to be like me,” Helen replies, “but I don’t want you to do things without understanding why, and there is a reason, something to do with your past, a psychological reason Kate.”
Cressida Lindsay and her son Simon, 1963.
Helen may have been addressing her author as much as Kate. For Lindsay’s life was a journey full of abrupt changes of direction. Her granddaughter, Tanya Perdikou, reflected on its erratic course in a 2021 article for the Wellcome Collection:
She received little love from either of her parents and reacted by spurning obligation to others, spending many years erratically pursuing her own desires. Her rejection of the traditional role of ‘mother’ was extreme: she moved from home to home, lover to lover, descended into alcoholism, neglected her five children and ended up founding The Old Rectory, a commune in rural Norfolk.
At the time No John, No was published, Lindsay’s fourth child had just been born. Its father was Anthony Blond, who published Lindsay’s second novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces. Blond was quite deliberately pulled by Lindsay into a complicated triangle with her and her lover, Mark Hyatt. Recalling the bohemianism of her grandfather Norman Lindsay, Blond writes that:
She was equally bohemian in outlook and had three children by three different men. When she met me she decided I was to serve as papa no.4. She stalked me with delicacy. Her current lover, papa no. 3, was a gypsy and a poet called Mark Hyatt. He was beautiful…. A sensuous poetic face, tender lips, eyes you could swim in and a faultless nose…. Of course I fell for him.
After sleeping with both Lindsay and Hyatt, Blond bought her the country house she longed for — The Old Rectory — and was dumped by Hyatt for a tall younger man named Atom. Some time later, when Blond was visiting Lindsay and the chidren there, Atom arrived to say that Hyatt had committed suicide after learning that he was about to be left for a woman.
The dramatically different covers of the UK and US editions of Lovers and Fathers.
She married Peter Hammerton in 1968 and had her fifth and last child by him. Her next novel, Lovers and Fathers (1970), is something of a fictional account of how she ended up with five children and at least as many lovers. Lindsay, the American publisher’s blurb tells us, “has always been completely open to love in whatever variety it presented itself, whether casual, Freudian, heterosexual, lesbian, forced, seductive, or literary.” Whether we’re quite sure of what all of those adjectives refer to, we certainly get a healthy sample of the frenetic and eclectic nature of Lindsay’s love life:
For six months I had lived with the children and a few lovers. For a week I had fallen in love with a journalist because his eyebrows hung over his eyes like a moustache, and his mouth was red and he had life so well organised…. Then for weeks I liked sleeping with me…. one evening I fell in love with a tall man who had green eyes….
And then there was Bill, off to Canada the next day, he talked of the forests and pines and he drank beer very quickly…. Also Robin. Sometimes he stayed and he was good to hold, and also to be held by. One day, he said, “I’m glad your Jason affair has burned itself out.”
Then we’re on to Thomas and Gloria and Robin and it becomes like trying to remember faces on the sidewalk from a seat in a fast-moving bus. Around the time of Lovers and Fathers , John Swinfield visited Lindsay at The Old Rectory and filmed a short piece for Anglia Television that is available for viewing (if you’re in the UK) on the BFI Player. It shows a vibrant if chaotic community of writers, artists, and musicians centered around the rough country house, with children wandering on and off camera and talk and music and laughter filling the air.
If Lindsay’s like was full of children and lovers and friends at the time, it was also full of alcohol. What she couldn’t silence with the noise and energy of the people around her she could try to numb with drink. Perhaps a clue to the demons she was struggling with can be found in her second and best novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963).
At least one reviewer joked that the book’s title tells us all we need to know about its plot. But plot is of secondary importance here. “This book makes shocking reading,” the paperback edition’s blurb tells us. Shocking is the wrong adjective, though. Shocks are sudden. They have lingering effects, but they are usually brief, like a bolt of lightning. Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces is like fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by an exhausted but relentless prizefighter.
When the book opens, ten-year-old Rachel has found a purse with some cash on the street. She takes it home but know better than to tell her mother Lucy about it, for Lucy will just take the money down to the pub to get drunk and probably come home late that night with a man she’d picked up. Much of the world may still be a mystery to Rachel, but she knows that money buys food, which she never gets much of.
Rachel’s father has gone to war. We gather from a few things Lucy says that he was probably taken prisoner in the British Army’s retreat from the German blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but it’s clear that Lucy has given up hope and Rachel is trapped in a limbo of deprivation and neglect. She has a few other children to play with and together they built a little shelter that becomes a refuge for Rachel, but it’s a rough sort of refuge. Stan, a thuggish boy just turning teen taunts Rachel as a “Lying Jew puss” and attempts to force himself on her.
Lucy’s drinking progesses to the point she staggers home one night in a fit of DTs and her ravings become so loud and violent that the police are called and take her away. Rachel is then sent to what she’s told is a girl’s school but is obviously a reformatory. The attendants, known as rats, feel free to insult, mock, and slap the inmates. “This is not a rest home for young ladies, you know,” one of the rats tells her.
Her situation improves a bit when she is moved to a Catholic convent, though the sisters inflict a form of religious abuse by hounding her with the need to memorize the catechism and prepare herself for conversion. Rachel spends almost four years here, but they pass in a few pages. Then one day, a balding man in a thick overcoat and a grubby shirt shows up to take her away. “Are you Daddy?” she asks. “I never expected such a grown-up daughter. And quite pretty,” he tells her. What follows are the worst three pages in the book.
Though Cressida Lindsay may not have experienced quite the level of abuse and poverty that her character Rachel does, she did have a childhood marked by extreme highs and lows. Her father, the novelist Philip Lindsay, was friends with many celebrities and a lively figure in London creative society, but he had trouble holding onto money and Cressida spent more time with the sisters at her convent school than with her parents. The title Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces may give some indication of the abandonment she may have experienced and explain why she so fervently sought the company of others, seeking a level of contact and commitment that not all of them were willing to give.
After over decade at The Old Rectory, Lindsay and her husband Philip moved into the city of Norwich. She became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and cared for Philip when he began to suffer from dementia. After her death in 2010, her son Dylan Hyatt discovered the manuscript of a fifth novel, written around the time of her move to Norfolk, and arranged to have it published as an e-book. The Mole and the Mountain is available from Amazon.
Cover of the UK hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.
Ida Erickson, the central figure in Laura Beheler’s first novel, The Paper Dolls, is a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed child. Despite the Depression, both her mother and father have good jobs and can treat her to new dresses, cokes, and store-bought cakes when many of her classmates wear hand-me-downs and go without lunch. Every day, Ida comes home and, the good little girl she is, goes to her room and plays. Which suits her parents, who are usually fighting behind their locked bedroom door. Without her parents, Ida is effectively alone:
Her grandmothers and granddaddies were all dead; they never even knew she got alive. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Damned old women sat around her kitchen table and slurped up her cokes. Ida rocked from side to side, tears wetting her arms, rolling down her chin, falling in small droplets onto the grass. Whispering blearily, she moaned. Was there ever anybody in the whole history of the whole world who didn’t have anybody?
Cover of the US hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.
With no real friends, Ida has provided herself with her own friends, the characters she keeps in her Universal Theme and Composition Book (No. S-1055). Sometimes they are just the head and shoulders taken from a Montgomery-Ward catalog; sometimes a full-length figure cut from a copy of The Delineator magazine. Beside each, she notes the name, vital statistics, key facts:
Sands Chutney — 14 years — 5 feet 1 inch tall — 109 pounds — English aristocrat — very rich. Agnes Eaves — 15 years — 5 feet — 97 pounds — blond hair — very educated. Dan Davis — 15 years — 5 feet 3 inches — 110 pounds — plays violin — is orphan.
Ida lives in a world so devoid of emotional or social interaction that her paper dolls are not only her source of entertainment and comfort but, as the years go by, more real than the real people in her life. When her father, apparently an inveterate philanderer, leaves to take a job in another city, abandoning Ida and her mother, Ida replaces him with a new doll (Fritz Robinson — 15 years — 5 feet, 2 inches — 120 pounds — shipwreck survivor). When her uncle Johnny, a musician, comes to stay for a while and shows more interest than any adult has before, Ida has a brief reprieve from the relentless dreariness of her non-imaginary like. But when Johnny moves on, Ida replaces him:
The first night he was gone, Ida found herself restless in a sea of aloneness. She got out the Universal notebook, laid out a few characters. For a long time she stared at the line-up, wondering what to do with it. Finally she decided Sands Chutney was named Sandy Chutney, and he played a clarinet.
Asked what she’d done on her summer vacation, Ida has only her paper dolls to fall back on:
“Well uh, I have this friend Sands Chutney who’s from New York. He came to see us, and he brought his girl friend with him. Her name’s Agnes Eaves. Well, he plays a real good clarinet, and she plays piano. And they taught me to play drums and guitar. Sands Chutney owns this httle night club back in Memphis, and that’s where he met Agnes Eaves. Well, they kept begging me to go back with them and play drums and guitar in the band. Two or three times I thought maybe I would, but I decided . . .”
Though Ida finishes school, gets a secretarial job, becomes an adult, the world of her paper dolls remains the focus of her life. Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters the war. But to Ida, the war “was simply an incontestable fact, not a penetrating experience.”
Until she meets Allan, a Navy ROTC cadet, who quickly falls in love with her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he falls in love with his impression of Ida. At a superficial level, Ida understands what is expected of a young woman in the social rituals of romance and is capable of playing her part. But at some level, Allan is nothing more to her than a three-dimensional doll, and to him, she is much the same.
When Allan ships off with the Atlantic fleet, Ida moves to New York to wait for him. She dominoes through a series of jobs until she lands one as a day clerk in the Waverly Hotel. Like many of its residents, the Waverly is “a lost and seedy aristocrat.” A bitter 4F Jew named Wally Safferman — well, befriends is too strong a word, so let’s say he attaches himself to Ida. She’s willing to buy drinks and listen, even if she doesn’t really like him much.
The problem with Wally is that he does see Ida for who she is: “‘Ida, you are so …’ He paused, looking for words, then finished, ‘You are so unborn.'” Wally understands the difference between simple innocence and raw naïveté. Ida is still cocooned in the illusions she’s built up around her dolls. “Did you ever go through that stage where you watched with horror while your childhood dream world collapsed?” he asks her in astonishment.
Unfortunately, before Wally can burst Ida’s bubble, Allan writes to say that he’s returning. He has a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas and expects Ida to report for duty:
I’m the man in this outfit. Therefore, where my job is simply has to be the place we go. This whole thing has been crazy long enough, and I’m tired of it. So here it is straight and simple: will you come to Topeka and marry me?
Will she, readers? Well, let’s just say that it comes down to a choice between Allan in Topeka and Sands Chutney in a dark Manhattan bar.
Some reviewers found The Paper Dolls too close to a case study to be fully successful as a novel, but Laura Beheler offers a convincing case for fantasy as a survival mechanism that gets a person through a lot of bleak days. Few readers will reach the end, however, without seeing its long-term limitations. Which is why the other things reviewers called The Paper Dolls was a horror story. If it is a horror story, it is entirely because we cannot help but empathize with Ida, the lost little girl.
Laura Beheler, from the dust jacket of The Paper Dolls.
Laura Beheler was no Ida Erickson. Raised in Fort Worth, she served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and a copywriter for Neiman-Marcus, took up fencing and became a regional champion. In the late 1940s, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became a junior high school teacher and wrote three published novels starting with The Paper Dolls. She never married, remained in Santa Fe until her death in 2008 at the age of 87, and presumably never kept a notebook full of paper dolls.
The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956
“Do you mean to say I didn’t give you anything to eat yet?” one character asks another several hours into their wanderings around Paris in Monday Night. At this point, the pair has visited three or four bars and had at least a few drinks in each one of them. And the night is just beginning.
If you’re not one for drinking on an empty stomach, Monday Night may remind you of that time when you made the mistake of going out on the town with someone who considers bar nuts an entree. Bernie Lord, a medical student, arrives in Paris fresh off the train from Le Havre and meets up with a slight acquaintance from Chicago named Wilt Tobin who’s been living in France since before the First World War. His mission is to meet a man named Jean Sylvestre who has become world famous as a forensic toxicologist (though this was before the job had a name). Bernie is in awe of Sylvestre’s technical wizardry and hopes to learn a bit of the master’s craft.
Wilt is the only person Bernie knows in Paris. Literally anyone else would have been a better choice. Wilt is a writer, but somewhere along the way the pleasure of enjoying an aperitif at a sidewalk table outside a charming café has become a compulsion. Writing is now only a means to get money to drink with — that and cadging a glass or five off anyone who will listen to him. Stepping off the train in a crisp new blue serge suit, Bernie is shocked at his first sight of Wilt: “The cracked brown shoes, the grey trousers with no shape left in back or front, the paunch buttoned into the waistcoat, the shirt, the twisted tie, the soft, bristled jowls, the dark small almost fervently set eyes….” Wilt not only has “no sign of youth to recommend him, but no look left in eye or teeth to recall that he ever had been young.”
Still, Wilt feels some obligation to his friend. Luckily for him, though, their first stop, the pharmacy where Sylvestre got his start, is close to the Gare St. Lazare. When they fail to produce any further information about the man than the fact that Monsieur Sylvestre never comes there anymore, Wilt steers Bernie into the nearest bar to discuss next steps. This sets the pattern for much of the plot of Monday Night. The only difference between Bernie and Wilt and Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that they’re looking instead of waiting. Oh, and drinking. In fact, each stage of looking tends to be preceded by around a half dozen drinks.
By around ten P.M., Wilt advises Bernie that it’s now either too late or too early to eat:
“The time we should have started in eating, if we were going to eat at all, was right after the first drinks, the first two or three drinks, right after the gin fizzes we had at the brasserie.” The darkness stretched before him as he walked, facsimile of that obliteration unpunctuated by mood or time that life itself and action had become…. “So now we’ll just have to hold off awhile until the red wine is out of the system,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick the first night we’re out together. I want to take care of you, Bernie.”
Wilt not only seems to run solely on the promise of another drink but as the night wears on, he begins to take over Bernie’s quest as well. Early on, Bernie explodes at Wilt’s complete ignorance of the feats of Monsieur Sylvestre and the murderers condemned through his testimony. “My God, Wilt, don’t you know? Don’t you know about it? I thought everybody — anybody who read the papers, anyway — I thought there wasn’t anybody who–” But Wilt becomes convinced that Sylvestre is hiding a dark secret, that he is motivated less by objective truth than by revenge.
The two men head for Malmaison, on the outskirts of Paris, where Sylvestre now resides in a villa surrounded by large estate. Wilt begins to construct a psychological portrait of the chemist, examining his motivations, wondering at what it must be like to know your words will send a man to the guillotine. When they reach the villa, they learn that Sylvestre is in Lyons on a case, but his servants invite them into the kitchen, where a game of Monopoly is underway. More drinks are had as Bernie finds his will to live fading and Wilt cagily pries out information about Sylvestre.
Wilt and Bernie’s journey takes them out and back into Paris and through Monday night to early Tuesday morning. As with a bad hangover, the world they return to seems both fuzzy and jarring. Bernie no longer knows why he wanted to meet Sylvestre in the first place, and Wilt finds the solution to Sylvestre’s mystery in a newspaper headline spotted as they wait in the Gare St. Lazare for Bernie’s train back to Le Havre.
Monday Night has been described as an unusual detective story. If you accept this, then Boyle’s ending will seem abrupt and ill-prepared. But that’s the wrong way to look at the book. Boyle tells us what Monday Night is really about in its dedication, which comes from one of her unpublished stories called “The Man Without a Nation.” In that story, she writes of the “secret code” of the expats she had come to know in the course of — by that time — fifteen years in Europe:
Those who speak it follow no political leader and take no part in any persecution or conquest; nor have they to do either with a vocabulary of the rich or the poor or any country or race; it being simply one way of communication between the lost and the lost.
Wilt is one of these lost souls, one who has realized that he has stayed too long to be considered a tourist and can never stay long enough to become French. “It didn’t take me very long to find out I was in the wrong country,” he jokes to Bernie. “Only about eighteen years.” Boyle signals this awareness of being a displaced person (before that became an official term at the end of the next world war) in the book’s very first line: “You might have recognized it as a drugstore except for its situation in what might generally be called the wrong country.”
Kay Boyle based the character of Wilt on Harold Stearns, a man she and her second husband, Laurence Vail, came to know in Paris. Legend has it that after reviewing the proofs of a collection of essays by American intellectuals and artists that he edited titled Civilization in the United States, Stearns immediately booked passage to England, convinced that the United States had no civilization. In reality, it’s likely that a favorable exchange rate and the advent of Prohibition played a larger role in his decision.
As it was, he was only able to make it to Paris on the strength of a loan from Sinclair Lewis, who was in awe of Stearn’s potential. It was a loan that Stearns never repaid. Lewis later got something back, however, by referring to Stearns (indirectly, mind) as “an important habitue of the Cafe de Dome in Paris living these many years as a grafter on borrowed money.” Asked to respond by an American reporter, Stearns said he’d like to come back to the U.S. for the privilege of punching Lewis in the face.
A “Peter Pickem” story from the Chicago Tribune, 1923.
For a while after arriving in Paris, Stearns was able to get by working as “Peter Pickem,” the Paris track correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. But then his drinking got so bad that he started to go blind and he lost that job and survived on a combination of betting on the horses and the generosity of his drinking partners. As he later wrote in his memoir, The Street I Know (1935), Stearns learned that few friends will buy you a meal, but plenty will buy you a few rounds at the bar. In his book Americans in Paris (1977), Tony Allan wrote that Stearns’s “shabby, unshaven figure was pointed out to newcomers as a warning of the dangers of the Latin Quarter.”
Hemingway was the first to commemorate Harold Stearns in fiction. In The Sun Only Rise, Jake Barnes encounters a friend named Harvey Stone in Stearns’s favorite café:
I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Sélect. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.
“Sit down,” said Harvey. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just looking for you.”
“Been out to the races?”
“No. Not since Sunday.”
“What do you hear from the States?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”
He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.
“Do you want to know something, Jake?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”
Stearns wrote in his memoir, “I would stay up at the Sélect until dawn crept through the windows, drinking champagne and watching the boys and girls do their vaudeville stunts.”
Stearns himself described the Sélect as “a seething mad-house of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter drunks, and sober maniacs (most of whom were on the wagon only temporarily, of course, because of unkind medical favors of the fickle goddess, Venus).” It was, he wrote with bittersweet reflection, “a useless, silly life — and I have missed it every day since.”
But by 1932 — not Wilt’s 18 years, but a little more than ten — Stearns, like Wilt, knew he had stayed too long. “I was just an uprooted, aimless wanderer on the face of the earth. And a lonely one, too. I didn’t like that; I hated it. And, since there was nothing else to do, I would go into the bar and take another drink and try to forget.” With the arrival of the Depression and exodus of easy American money, however, even drinking to forget was becoming harder and harder. “With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money,” Stearns wrote, “I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country — and to try to start all over. Everything about Paris had suddenly become distasteful to me; I suppose because I felt so alien and alone.”
If you’re a fan of 1930s detective fiction, you will certainly find Monday Night unsatisfactory. Sylvestre’s is not that much of a mystery. It’s really just the excuse for Boyle to send her lost soul, Wilt, and his naive companion Bernie, on their hallucinatory odyssey through the Paris night, an odyssey that will ultimately lead them both, like Stearns, back to America.
Monday Night represented both a structural and stylistic departure for Boyle. Although the plot takes place in the space of less than 24 hours, her night will seem endless to many readers. Though she sketches the people they meet in quick, precise strokes, it is Wilt and Bernie — and really just Wilt — who remains on camera, in focus, throughout the book. And in describing their wandering, Boyle switches back and forth between Wilt’s streetwise newspaperman’s chatter and rich, impressionistic descriptions of the Paris streets, scenes, and shadows. Reviewing the book in The Nation, Louis Kronenberger felt the latter “achieves strong and even beautiful effects, but shows too little restraint and has some of Faulkner’s and Wolfe’s tendency to overwrite.”
Most critics noted admirable qualities in Monday Night but felt it too much of an oddity to take as seriously as her previous novels. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic called Wilt “a sort of lost-generation Don Quixote.” Time’s reviewer found Boyle’s cast “a bunch of puzzling neurotics” and Alfred Kazin dismissed them as “manikins who walk through the book as on hot beds of coal.” Kronenberger, on the other hand, felt that part of the problem for reviewers was that their easy labels were ill-suited for Boyle:
Call her decadent and you will find an imagery that is vital and under almost perfect control. Call her lush and you’ll find prose with the delicacy, discipline, smoothness to the touch and good hard grain of carving in ivory. Call her a necromancer and then see by what homely undeniable things she sets up her rhythms and the overtone of their effect.
Monday Night has always had a small but loyal set of fans. Dylan Thomas called it “the best novel of the year” in a review for the New English Weekly and wrote Boyle a gushing fan letter that was reprinted on the cover of a 1970 reissue of the book. Doris Grumbach and James Laughlin of New Directions Press both named it one of their candidates for rediscovery in their submissions to Bill and Linda Katz’s 1983 guide to neglected books, Writer’s Choice. The editor Virginia Faulkner confided to Boyle that “Monday Night remains for me a landmark” in a letter written 25 years after the book first came out. And in the late 1940s, the actor Franchot Tone attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a film version of the book, saying that its “way of story-telling makes me tingle.”
Boyle herself felt the book represented something of a breakthrough and said that she “liked it the best of my novels.” Perhaps this is, in part, because it is so overwhelmingly a book about men, about their actions and thoughts and desires. Her next few novels — Primer for Combat (1942), Avalanche (1944), and A Frenchman Must Die (1946) — would also take the world men as their focus — in combat, in mountain climbing, in wartime espionage and resistance. But most critics would agree that these attempts to create, if you will, lyrical action stories, are substantially weaker books when compared with Monday Night. Not much happens in Monday Night — if you set aside the drinking and walking — but within its small frame a moving and unsettling portrait of a lost soul can be seen.
Monday Night, by Kay Boyle New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938
Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.
From the Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1968.
Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)
Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.
One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.
By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)
I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.
Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman New York: Doubleday, 1964
Though it takes place within the space of just an hour or two, a lot happens in Kenneth Fearing’s first novel, The Hospital. A suicide, a disfigurement, an act of vandalism and a power outage, an old man’s death and a young woman’s reprieve from tuberculosis. But even more happens off-camera, so to speak.
Although Fearing’s Hudson General Hospital is an enormous Manhattan hospital with hundreds of patients and thousands of staff members, in his hands it’s just a microcosm in a world churning with events. A dramatic rescue at sea. A contest between rival gangs over who controls the dockworkers’ union. The collapse of a a giant company. An illicit affair. An attempt to unionize the hospital workers.
But these things are only mentioned in passing, a sentence or two, and with little in the way of context or explanation. Over the course of the book, for example, we learn that Steve Sullivan, a first mate, was responsible for a rescue at sea that was later resented by his ship’s owner, leaving him without a birth. We only get bits of this story — from Sullivan, from his mother, from his wife as she waits to be operated on for breast cancer, from the woman he’s in love with — and never all the details.
In part this is because Fearing is an impressionist, not realist. He works in quick strokes, not painstaking reproduction. But also because The Hospital is a mosaic composed of what dozens of characters think, feel, and see. This was the technique Fearing used in all his novels.
The table of contents of a Fearing novel is a list of names: each chapter a moment or two as seen by that character within the book’s overall short duration. Some are major characters, such as Doctor Cavanagh, the surgeon who removes the tumor from the breast of Freya, Steve Sullivan’s wife — a surgeon who’s racking up more than his share of operating room deaths. Some, like Tom Pharney, an electrician, walk on, utter a few lines, and exit, never to be seen again. In The Hospital, Fearing even includes a few faceless extras in his cast: the crew of a city tugboat, the attendant at a police switchboard:
Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.
Every fire alarm in the city sounds up here, and it’s always going.
“Give me a description of the men. Yeah, describe them. Did they have a car? What kind of a car? Were they tall or short? Which way they went after they held you up?”
Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.
“Police Headquarters.”
Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong. On the box in front of me, Precinct 19 shows a green light Take it.
“Headquarters.”
“Narcotics Bureau.”
Put the call through. There is the yellow light of an outside wire. Take it.
“Police Headquarters.”
The approach is remarkably effective at conveying a sense of the swirling currents of activity that go on in a complex institution such as a major hospital. It’s an approach that many a film director has followed when trying to tell the story of a big event, such as the Normandy invasion in The Longest Day. It also reinforces the sense that the institution is large and the people small. At the scale of a whole novel, it’s a bit like looking down on a busy city street from a window on the 25th floor.
It also may have enabled Fearing to play to his strengths. No character’s chapter runs more than a few pages, some just a few paragraphs. This saves him the task of any real character development. His people are more cogs in his narrative machine than the actual engine of the narrative. Though Fearing gives us a salad full of bits of their stories, his story isn’t really about any of them. It’s about Hudson General Hospital as a artefact of modern society. Again, to use a film analogy, we could consider The Hospital for the Best Editing award, but none of its cast would get nominated for an acting award.
Of Fearing’s fiction, The Big Clock consistently gets the lion’s share of the attention and critical praise, but having read most of them now, I think there is much of a muchness about all of them. For what it is, it’s a very well done muchness, and I full expect to go on and read his remaining novels. They race with the manic energy of Fearing’s best known poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” with its shoot-out between the police and gunman Louie Glatz:
And rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat Muttered the gat Of Louie the rat, While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam!
The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing New York: Random House, 1939
Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.
And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”
She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:
This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.
Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”
How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.
Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.
But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.
Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”
Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.
One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:
Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.
Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:
After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.
If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.
Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:
After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.
(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.
Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.
Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.
Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:
While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.
“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.
No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.
Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.
Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.
Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.
Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.
Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers) London: Peter Davies, 1940
Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
