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Some Candidates for the #1920Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1920Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration organized some five years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 13-19 April, read a book published in 1920 and write something about it.

You can see an example of the diverse titles and perspectives that come together under this umbrella from the very first such event, the #1924Club.

There were some truly canonical books published in 1920: The Age of Innocence; Main Street; This Side of Paradise; Women in Love; Chéri; R.U.R.; Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno.

But every time I go into the university library and wander down the aisles of English and American literature, I have to wonder: Does the world really need yet another bit of writing about Edith Wharton or D. H. Lawrence or F. Scott Fitzgerald? These writers are like those hotels with 10,000 reviews on Tripadvisor. Checking today, the current count on Goodreads for The Age of Innocence stands at 134,391 ratings and 6,378 reviews. Stop. Just stop. Will yet one more opinion make any difference?

I don’t pretend that every book I write about on this site is a masterpiece. I hope no one feels obligated to read anything I’ve featured here. But I do try to shine a little light on the things that few or none have read and written about for years, often decades. That, in its own humble way, seems to be adding something original to the world.

I want to encourage you to do the same. Go off-piste, as they say in skiing. Read and write about something from 1920 that no one else will. Maybe it’ll just be ho-hum, no life-changer, maybe too flawed to recommend to anyone else. Some books are neglected for good reasons, and you will do the reading public the service of warning them off. Maybe it’ll surprise you: who knew Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote straight fiction before she got into writing mysteries? Tell the English reading public about Polish novelist Zofja Nakowska’s first major novel, Kobiety (Women). Do you agree with Orlo Williams that Storm Jameson’s first novel, The Happy Highways, is just full of “Talk, talk, talk”? Is Stephen Hudson the English Marcel Proust? Chances are good that you’ll be the first, or at least one of the very few, to have traveled down that piste in many, many seasons. Every rediscovered masterpiece has to have its first rediscovery.

So here are a selection of long-forgotten titles from 1920 you might consider exploring as your contribution to the #1920Club. In most cases, you can find the book on the Internet Archive for free and easy downloading. I highly recommend downloading a PDF version rather than Text, EPUB or Kindle: these are usually unedited OCR’d versions with many, many errors. As I explained in this post from 2018, a PDF version, a good PDF viewer, and a nice-sized tablet computer are all you need to have a reading experience that’s the next best thing to holding the actual book in your hands.

Cover of Invincible Minnie by Elisabeth Sanxay Holdin

• Invincible Minnie, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Her first novel, about a tenacious if unlikeable woman. “She is a short, plump, dowdy little woman … stupid, unsympathetic, unimaginative; but somehow she always had her own way…. If Invincible. Minnie had been written by a man instead of a woman he would probably have been lynched before this. … [But] there was no doubt after the second page that the book would prove utterly captivating, for there Mr. Peterson is described as having a ‘long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat’s;’ and reading on a matter of two or three pages, we encountered that ‘ridiculously coy old skeleton,’ the Defoe horse. It is inconceivable that a person capable of immortalizing horses and moustaches at a stroke could fail to do superlatively well with human beings.” — Constance Murray Greene, The Bookman “The book is firm and muscular, ripe and complete. No first novel of such intellectual or creative energy has appeared in this country for some time.” — William Curtis in Town and Country.

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• In the Mountains, by Elizabeth von Arnim

First published anonymously, which is why some von Arnim fans may not be familiar with it. The diary of a woman as she sits in an isolated chalet in the Swiss Alps. “The opening confession of a woman broken by some disappointment in love … lead one to expect a series of admirable, sometimes profound, reflections of the usual introspective order.” Instead, “a mind well stored with generous knowledge of human nature, both sore and soft with painful memories, and, above all, with a sweet and racy humour which lights up every page…. Poignant, rich in comedy, lit by that rare sense of humour which almost touches tears, while behidn the hearts and minds so vivivdly drawn stands the unintentional revelation of the writer’s personality, setting the little tale in an atmosphere which deserves the adjective already used — inspiring.” — TLS

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Rockwell Kent and Son from Wilderness by Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent and Son. Illustration from Wilderness
• Wilderness, Rockwell Kent

The story of the artist’s six-month stay, with just his nine-year-old son for company, on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, profusely illustrated with drawings by Ken and his son. “It is not only a narrative of a simple and natural life in these days of a complex civilization, but it is a frank revelation of the ideas, thoughts, aspirations, and conceptions of an unusually artistic temperament.” — em>The Bookman

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• The People of the Ruins, by Edward Shanks

A time travel story. The hero is projected from the General Strike of 1924 into the future. The ability to use technology has been lost incomptence of later generations. Progress has been replaced by a surrender to decay and entropy. A former Army artilleryman, the hero enlisted by the Speaker, the Ruler of England, to aid in the civil war with the Chairman of Bradford and the President of Wales. ‘To appreciate the story the reader must follow it in the same gusto for adventure, and he will be repaid with a very pleasant entertainment.”–Orlo Williams in the TLS

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• Hagar’s Hoard, by George Kibbe Turner

Set in Memphis during the city’s battle with an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878, about a miser trying to protect his material wealth against an invisible killer:

And now, near and far away, across the town, the light of the Fever fires came out again, like evil flowers blossoming in the night. Not lighted in early all the cases now. As time went by, they gave that idea up. But now there were so many deaths everywhere, only an occasional fire, lighted here and there, made a great lot in the town.

“Before Hagar’s Hoard was twenty-one pages old I knew I was in the grip of a conqueror. Mr. George Kibbe Turner may be a new writer but he is already a master. Just that handful of pages, and my nerves were crawling with the secret and unconjectured fear that came to Memphis in ’78.” — W. Newton Douglas in The Sketch. Warning: in keeping with the fashion of the time, some characters make prolific use of the N-word.

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• Happy Highways, Storm Jameson

Orlo Williams’ review in the TLS really sells this one: “We cannot help feeling glad for the sake of Mr. [sic] Storm Jameson that he has got The Happy Highways off his chest. It must be a great relief to have discharged so much matter into the form of a novel…. Talk, talk, talk — this long book is a deluge of talk on every controversial subject in modern society, which makes the brain reel long before the end…. He seems to be writing down a flood of memories, lest he should forget them, for the satisfaction of his own soul…. When Joy, Mick and Margaret are just a little bit older, they will realize that there is a great deal of difference between being young and being extremely young. Extreme youth must rant and rage and tear the world to bits, without the world’s being harmed or benefited thereby. It all blows away like the spindrift cast up by the storm.”

In her autobiography, Journey from the North, Jameson wrote that the book only had two readers she knew of: an American convict and John Galsworthy. Galsworthy wrote her editor, Charles Evans: “This authoress has done what none of the other torrential novelists of the last ten years has achieved — given us a convincing (if not picture, at least) summary of the effervescence, discontent, revolt, and unrest of youth; the heartache and beating of wings. I should like to meet her. She must have seen and felt things…. To an old-fashioned brute like me, of course, the lack of form and line and the plethora of talk and philosophy pass a little stubbornly down the throat and stick a little in the gizzard, but the stuff is undeniable, and does not give me the hollow windy feeling I get from a German novel….”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Cover of recent edition of Kobiety

• Kobiety (Women); a novel of Polish life, by Zofja Rygier Nakowska

“This very unusual book reveals the secret springs of all human life.” Well, that might be setting the bar a bit too high. “To read it after a long course of the mediocre, superficial writing through which a reviewer, in the course of his duty, must wade is like emerging from the subway and drawing pure air into the lungs.” Uncredited critic, New York Times The TLS was more measured in its assessment: “The book is indeed surprisingly uneven; subtle and extravagant, balanced and preposterous in turn, always stifling in its moral atmosphere, yet redeemed by a malicious sort of candour which endows the heroine herself with something akin to probity and extorts for her a certain respect.”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• The Romantic Woman, by Mary Borden

The story of a failed marriage between the daughter of a Chicago millionaire and an English nobleman (in contrast to Borden’s own long and successful marriage to Sir Edward Spear). New York Times: “Where its author has been most successful is in the atmosphere of dull discontent, of poignant disillusion, which she evokes throughout. She gives a depressing picture of the utter cynicism of the English high society into which her heroine falls, against which she sets with telling effect the rawness and childishness of the ultra rich set of Chicago. There are neat characterizations, epigrammatic bits of phrasing and some passages written with unblushing frankness — in fact, for frankness concerning things usually veiled or ignored in conventional conversation the book stands high even in this age of audacity in thought and language.”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link.

• Richard Kurt, by Stephen Hudson

Stephen Hudson’s novels, according to his own Wikipedia entry, “are now almost entirely forgotten.” Hudson was the pseudonym of Sydney Schiff, who was one of the first Englishmen to celebrate the work of Marcel Proust. Schiff took over translation duties from the ailing C. K. Scott Moncrief and was responsible for the translation of Time Regained that most English readers who made it that far through In Search of Lost Time will have read. He hosted a famous 1922 party at which Proust was introduced to James Joyce, an event celebrated in Richard Davenport-Hines’ 2006 book, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Party of 1922.

If the following, from The Nation, is accurate, Hudson/Schiff was clearly influenced by Proust in his own fiction: “Mr. Hudson is quite unconscious of the noisy and dazzling things that fill the day and die; he addresses himself with infinite quietude and patience to study and record the permanent foundations of human nature. Richard Kurt is very coolly and closely written, very exact and unemphatic, and quite long…. We are given indirectly, and wholly through Richard’s perceptions, presentations of his father and of his wife, that are astonishingly penetrating in vision and concrete in effect…. Rarely as a riper first novel appeared. It is solidly founded in its observation, built with a serene sureness of touch, careless of vain graces, disdainful of all appeal save that of its inner veracity.” (Note: published in the U.K. in 1919, in the U.S. in 1920)

Available at the Internet Archive: Link.

I’m keeping my own selection for #1920Club a secret — until next week. Happy reading.

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born (1950)

“Gaëtan consists of a 100-page discussion between the wife and the mistress of a Frenchman who has been killed in a car accident,” wrote Julian Symons in his terse review of Edith de Born’s first novel. It’s an accurate description, but also a spoiler, for through much of the book, we only know we are eavesdropping on a conversation between Irina, Gaëtan’s Russian-born second wife, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing — a brave officer in the First World War, a successful manufacturer, a covert agent of the Resistance in the Second — is gone now just a few months, and Irina has come to Marie’s villa outside Geneva to recuperate. From the very beginning, we know that there will be little relaxation during this visit, the two women’s first meeting.

As Irina takes her seat across from Marie by the fireplace, she takes in — and condemns — the decor. “The worst were the pictures. Boring landscapes, mountains and mountain lakes, displayed a depressing lack of personalisty and meagre craftsmanship in pretentious gilt frames.” She feels herself “caught in an unnatural and translucid atmosphere through which no sound could pierce.” But neither woman is on safe ground: “They took each other’s measure, appraised their mutual impressions, and both were disappointed.”

And indeed, what follows is a pause in limbo before the final judgments are passed. Over the course of the evening, their polite dialogue provides a poor disguise for what is really an interrogation. Mostly it is Marie doing the questioning. She is clearly offended that her fine well-born cousin married this short, plump Russian émigré, even if her family stood in the nobility before the Revolution. Marie notes that Irina still speaks with an accent, and “She doesn’t look youn either.” But Irina slips in a few pointed inquiries of her own, and she makes no apologies for being willing to humble herself to survive as an otherwise penniless refugee in Paris.

Irina has spent decades toiling in the backrooms of some of the most exclusive couturiers, and she has learned to appreciate both the skill involved in creating high fashion and the sweat:

I longed to be able to get away from the atmosphere of women dressing and undressing. At times the smell of their skin, their sweat, their scent, seemed to cling to me; I couldn’t get rid of it, I was nauseated by it, it stayed in my nostrils. Day in day out I watched them pitifully cheating their own selves. I heard them deliberately deny their most obvious imperfections. I saw them go through agonies of hidden pain in their desperate fight against ugliness or age. I listened to them, endeavouring to believe in the miracle expected from the new frock. That daily routine, perpetually repeated, had begun to get me down. Oh, that monstrous procession of wretched women!

Marie, on the other hand, has spent the same decades living in peace and comfort in her solid, dull villa on the slopes above Lake Geneva. She has servants to clean, feed, and care for her and money to pay for their service. Yet, as the stock-taking continues into the night, she begins to reveal the pain she has long kept hidden under the smooth surface of her own life. “Don’t try to tell me how happy, full, rich, and so on, the life of a single, independent woman can be. It is a tune I know by heart. I used to sing it to myself at first. Later I only sang it to other people.”

Part of a Chapman and Hall advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement from 1950
One contemporary reviewer wrote that Gaëtan is, “Good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.” I have to disagree. I think Gaëtan goes as far as it needs — and stops. In the end, it becomes clear that neither woman finds the need to pass judgment on the other. The real stock-taking is of the places into which men have put women. “All women form one chain-gang,” Marie tells Irina. “You cannot be in the company of a man, even though only on rare occasions, without incurring obligations.”

Edith de Born was the pen-name of Edith Bisch, who by the time that Gaëtan was published was living with her husband, Jacques Bisch, a French banker, in Brussels. Born Edith Ausch in Vienna in 1901, she had grown up in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an experience she wrote about in a number of her novels, including a trilogy that traced her own journey: Schloss Felding (titled Felding Castle in the US) (1959); The House in Vienna (1959); and The Flat in Paris (1960). She is recorded as having played some role in the French Resistance during the Second World War, and she and her husband hosted Evelyn Waugh in their flat just around the corner from the royal palace in Brussels. I haven’t yet been able to learn why she chose to write in English or even why she began writing fiction after the war, but she went on to publish at least fifteen novels — all sadly now out of print — before her death in 1987.

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, 1950

Two Lost Novels

I love to page through old issues of The Saturday Review, the TLS, and other book reviews of the past for the advertisements as much as for the reviews. Browsing through old copies of the TLS online recently, I noticed the following in the lower left corner of a full-page Hutchinson’s ad from 7 September 1940:

Hutchinson's First Novels ad from September 1940

Two of the books sounded interesting: Geoffrey S. Garnier’s Bargasoles and Phyllis Livingstone’s In Our Metropolis. Of Bargasoles, one of the very few reviews I was able to locate, from The Cornishman of 19 December 1940, said:

One usually associates the name of Geoffrey S. Gamier with those delightful etchings which have brought him into the first line of artists. The combination of a successful artist and novelist is a rarity, but the artist is evident in the author, by his deft etching of words, as we are accustomed to the lightness of his work in the realm of art. Those who were fortunate enough to secure copies of the Newlyn harbour sports programmes have already sampled tile shrewd dry wit of the author, and the adventures of George and his colleagues through the pages of Bargasoles form a complete antidote to the dark hours of black-out and the harrowing thoughts of war. This humorous novel is written in entertaining and light-hearted manner which succeeds in making farcical situations convincing. One of the characters, a Chestertonian figure of gargantuan proportions and unfailing wit — is a brilliant example of original creativeness. Readers will look forward with eagerness to the next product of this fertile and versatile brain, of one who appears be our most promising local author.

Another review, from the Liverpool Daily Post, was more moderated: “Some thoroughly impossible but most amusing characters populate Mr. Geoffrey S. Garnier’s entertaining first novel, Bargasoles. It is completely ridiculous farcical comedy, which revolves around football pools and patent medicines in delightfully inconsequential manner.”

Garnier and his wife, the painter Jill Garnier, lived in Newlyn, near Penzance in Cornwall. Garnier had an interesting technique of showing depths and distance through the use of planes of flat shades — a technique that later contributed half the prints that cluttered up American offices in the 1980s. John Branfield’s short biography, Geoffrey and Jill Garnier: A Marriage of the Arts, was published in 2010 but appears to be out of print now. The 1962 edition of Who’s Who in Art credits Garnier with a second novel titled Murdering Mabel, but there is no other evidence I can find that this book ever existed. According to WorldCat.org, there are all of four copies of Bargasoles to be found in libraries.

The second book, In Our Metropolis, is nearly as rare: five copies held by libraries. The University of Pennsylvania holds the only copy in North America. The description from Hutchinson’s catalogue makes the book sound worth reading:

This is a delightful novel with a light, amusing touch which is always realistic. It portrays a few months of life as led by two stormy everyday Londoners, with all their vicissitudes and absurdities. The author, a keen student of psychology, has shown the value of trivial and apparently insignificant incidents as being of extreme importance in their effect on human relationship — particularly that most intriguing of all — Man and Woman.

It received, however, even less notice than Bargasoles. I located three reviews in the British Newspaper Archive, one of which consists of a whole nine words: “Another first novel which has a sophisticated modern setting.” The Tatler ran an only slightly longer item as an excuse to print Livingstone’s picture and note the quality of her connections by marriage:

Phyllis Livingstone, from <em>The Tatler</em>, 23 October 1940
Phyllis Livingstone, from The Tatler, 23 October 1940

A new publication of Hutchinson’s is called In Our Metropolis, written by Phyyllis Livingstone, who in private life is the wife of Captain David Livingston-Learmonth, R. A., a godson of Lord Willingdon, former Viceroy of India, now going to the Argentine and other South American countries on a Trade Mission. The book has a light touch that will be welcomed by many readers, and is the story of modern married life in London Society.

The third review, from the Liverpool Daily Post, was the most positive:

In Our Metropolis by Phyllis Livingstone (Hutchinson, 8s 6d) is a good deal better domestic comedy than its dust-cover would suggest. The story concerns a young married couple, their impecuniosities and other family troubles, their squabbles and reconciliations, and their involvement in a triangle situation which becomes gloriously muddled. The tale is told with an excellent balance of irony and sensibility, and a very satisfying ability to observe and record with freshness the elements of character. This is a first novel. A writer who can begin so entertainingly should go far.

I find no evidence that Livingstone did go any farther in her writing career, however.

Bargasoles and In Our Metropolis were #103 and #110, respectively, in Hutchinson’s First Novel Library, which ran from 1933 to 1951, publishing a total of 139 titles. John Krygier lists the full run, with a few gaps, on his Series of Series website. If anyone has more information about either novel, please let me know.