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prison

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques (1955)

Cover of Love from a Convict by Veronica Henriques

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 <em>Love from a Convict</em>.
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

Passage from the Red Sea, by Zofia Romanowicz (1962)

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962, from the Archiwum Emigracji, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Toru?, Poland
Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962

This post belongs in an as-yet uncreated category called “Scarcer than Hens’ Teeth.”

According to AddAll.com, there are exactly two copies of Passage Through the Red Sea available for sale, the cheapest starting at over $700. If you can read French, you can find more copies, including one autographed by the author, for $15-25. For those with access to a university library, WorldCat.org reports several dozen copies available in the U.S. and elsewhere, including one at the high school library in Chinook, Montana, in case you’re passing through there.

So I will not claim to have read this book, but I think it’s worthwhile on occasion to bring a little attention to truly, madly, deeply neglected books while there’s still a chance.

Zofia Romanowiczowa, to use her proper Polish surname, the author of Passage Through the Red Sea, was seventeen when the Germans invaded her country. Arrested by the Gestapo in early 1941 for aiding the resistance movement, she spent most of the rest of the war in a series of prisons and concentration camps, ending in the Flossenbürg subcamp of Neu-Rohlau in Bohemia. She and a friend escaped during an evacuation march and she was eventually able to make contact with the Red Cross and be taken into the American Zone.

She settled in Paris, where she met and married Kazimierz Romanowicz, owner of a bookstore and publishing company, Libella, serving the expatriate audience. The two became leaders in the Polish cultural community, founding the Galerie Lambert, an exhibition and performance space. She continued to write, eventually publishing a dozen novels, of which Passage Through the Red Sea is the only one to have been translated into English.

The English translation, by Virgilia Peterson (whose bilious memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, I discussed here back in 2007), was published as a Kurt and Helen Wolff book by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1962. It recently relatively few reviews (the New York Times passed it up) and soon disappeared. But here are a couple of the reviews that did appear:

• Kirkus Reviews:

It would be quite just to call this odd, repellent little book a strangely powerful novel. The narrator (we are not told her name or anything else which is not absolutely necessary) spent her adolescence in a concentration camp. While there she was kept alive, and also permanently crippled emotionally, by her love for and dependence upon an older girl named Lucile, who was married to Paul, who died in another camp. The narrator loved and still loves Paul, too, in much the same tortured, adolescent way. After their liberation, after Lucile has abandoned her, the narrator takes a rather crass (her opinion of him) lover named Philippe. When the book opens, years later, Lucile is coming halfway around the world in answer to the narrator’s desperate letters. Lucile, the narrator’s “”salvation””, is quickly attracted by Philippe, her “”doom””. When the narrator murders them both it is “”so that she (Lucile) would cease not being Lucile.”” It is a very sick and often moving portrait of a warped soul whose only reality lies in the dead dreams of a childhood ruined by war. The main fault to find is technical: the book is all self-analysis and private symbolism, repetitious to the point of fetishism: the tense drama of the actual events is present by implication only. But after all, that is precisely the narrator’s tragic condition.

• The New Yorker:

A strange, sorrowing short novel that deals with the reunion of two women — the nameless narrator and Lucile, who is somewhat older — some years after their release from a Nazi concentration camp. The narrator discovers that Lucile, whose help she needs and has always needed, has become an empty, posturing copy of her former self, and for a horrifying reason: in prison, the narrator, through her own dependence and frailty, has permanently drained Lucile, leaving only a husk. This nightmarish plot is accentuated by an oblique, dreamlike narrative (there is almost no dialogue), written in a chanting, doubling-back-on-itself prose, which may or may not be the author’s style but which is nevertheless just right.

• Elizabeth Cade in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This beautifully written memoir of a Polish girl’s imprisonment in a Nazi slave labor camp, her intense bond with another woman, and their respective adjustments to freedom takes a unique place in contemporary writing. It touches, in a new and two-sided approach, the questions which have concerned the existentialist school of thought: personal integrity and the usage of freedom.

The narrator is still a young and idealistic girl when she is deported. In the camp she meets an old school pal, Lucile, who becomes her friend, protector, and above all, the guardian of her self-respect. “Let go” is Lucile’s motto, whenever her younger friend is about to give up wht last vestige of human dignity and sink to an animal level in the despair brought on by hunder and physical suffering. It is Lucile’s belief that survival must not be bought at any cost.

Freedom seemed to justify such moral strength. They “cherished the image of freedom as a higher and more just form of existence … a paradise of perfection where the lion and the lamb would lie down together, where everything would be given back to everyone.” When confronted with the realities of the world, in which compromise seems to be the accepted modus vivendi, both women take different paths in utilizing their hardwon survival.

The novel switches with flashbacks to the camp days to its locale in post-war Paris, winding up in a dramatic climax. Brilliantly translated by Virgilia Peterson, this is a fascinating exploration of human relationships and values.

• Polly Saunders in The Newport News Daily News:

For those of us who never spent time in a concentration camp this intense novel might seem to be an exaggerated account of morbid emotions. If we sharpen our imaginations, however, we can appreciate it as a small masterpiece written by a survivor of just such an inferno.

… Lucile was the elder of the two. She had been the younger girl’s only reason for being. “Lucile had known more about me than I knew about myself and sometimes, thanks to her, there came to life in me whole worlds the existence of which, until now, I had not suspected.”

This attachment is so powerful that it carries over into her present life in Paris. She still needs Lucile’s support and nostalgically recalls their camp days (despite their horrors) when she basked in her warm protection and love. The anticipated reunion finally takes place and there is utterly crushing disillusionment when she finds a changed Lucile. Lucile’s strength now lies in her ability to forget the past. She is interested only in wrenching from her present life whatever pleasures present themselves. References to their former life are taboo. Meantime, her worshipper practically dissolves in her disappointment.

The writing is intense. Sentences are long and repetitious and, for this reason, often monotonous. The story is depressing, but it is powerful in its turbulent outpouring from a young girl’s heart.

The best source on Zofia Romanowicz is a 2016 article by Alice-Catherine Carls from World Literature Today blog titled “The Renaissance of Zofia Romanowicz,” which includes a link to four poems newly translated into English.

Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914-1918, by Paul Cohen-Portheim

Paul Cohen-Portheim, 1931

“This book tells of the experiences of a German civilian interned in England,” wrote Paul Cohen-Portheim in the preface to Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914-1918, “and it is the author’s aim to describe nothing except what he actually saw and experienced.”

This understatement is both typical of Cohen-Portheim’s remarkable humility and an utterly inadequate synopsis of this remarkable book, for Time Stood Still is, in its way, a monument of humanism–the cosmopolitan, cultured, enlightened humanism exemplified by Stefan Zweig, Jules Romains, Thomas Mann and others–that flourished in Europe until exiled or exterminated by fascism. Countless times while reading this book I was awed by the depth and character of the author’s perspective.

Born in Berlin of Austrian parents, Paul Cohen-Portheim was educated in Geneva, took up painting, and was living in Paris when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914. Despite the increasing rumors of war, he carried on with his life and traveled to England to spend a few weeks with friends in Devonshire. When England declared war on August 4th, 1914, he found himself stranded: “My flat and my belongings were in France, my relations in Austria and Germany, I myself with summer clothes, painting materials, and £10 in an England one could not leave.” The next day, he discovered he was now an “enemy alien.”

For the next ten months, he lived in a sort of limbo, unable to leave England, unable to move from one location to another without official permission, unable to hold a job legally. He joined with other expatriates to form a makeshift opera company and busied himself with sets and costumes until, on May 24th, 1915, he received notice to report to the local police station the next morning to be interned.

“What shall I pack?,” he asked the policeman. “I would pack as if you were going for a holiday,” the man replied. And so Cohen-Portheim loaded his luggage with “white flannels, bathing things, evening dress, etc..”

He and several hundred other German and Austro-Hungarian men between the ages of 18 and 65 were loaded into railway cars and then ferried to the Isle of Man, where they were interned at Knockaloe, which was the largest camp set up in England during World War One. A few months later, however, he and about sixty other inmates, considered by the British to be “gentlmen” were transported to a new camp in Lofthouse Park, near Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Here he was to remain until mid-1918, when he was sent to the Netherlands to await the end of the war in another form of limbo.

To the authorities responsible for setting up Lofthouse Park, “a gentleman was a man prepared to pay ten shillings a week to them for the privilege of being there.” Cohen-Portheim had been able to contact his mother in Vienna and set up a weekly allotment while at Knockaloe, so, like the other inmates of the camp, he was able to order books and art supplies and to pay for sundries at the camp store. He was able to obtain more suitable clothing, and, as this picture from the Wakefield libraries collection shows, to dress in a manner befitting a gentleman. Other than being confined to the camp, served tasteless but adequate food, and mustered multiple times a day to be counted, he was largely left alone by the authorities and guards.

wakefield

“Were you treated well?” friends asked him after the war. Cohen-Portheim’s response was carefully qualified: “I am not prepared to say what British treatment of prisoners of war or of interned civilians was–fair, correct, brutal, inhuman, indifferent–I can only speak of my own experience,” and that was that the treatment was “standardized.” He understood that internment was politically motivated, moderated entirely by public perceptions of the treatment of British internees in Germany, and bureaucratically administered.

This was the first war in which there was large-scale confinement of enemy civilians, and the lot of those in England was far better than that of their counterparts in France (as recorded in Aladar Kuncz’s 1934 book, Black Monastery). But, in Cohen-Portheim’s analysis, it was still a brutal and cruel system. Its inhumanity was not based on physical abuse or deliberate psychological mistreatment, but on a more fundamental truth: this was not how humans are meant to live.

Take, for example, the factor of time. Cohen-Portheim chose his title carefully: “One must remember that there was absolutely no limit to be foreseen to the duration of the war and of my imprisonment, not could one know to what one would then return, if one lived to return to anything.” The inmates were well aware of the events going on outside the camp, the progress and set-backs of each side in combat, but they were frozen in time. “The past was dead, the future, if there should be a future, was a blank, there was nothing left but the present, and my present was the life of a prisoner.” This condition was, in his view, unnatural: “where there is no aim, no object, no sense, there is no time.”

Yet it was not the fact of being imprisoned that made the experience horrible. “What was horrible was that one had ceased to be an individual and had become a number.” Any decisions made about the conditions in the camp were made based on an abstract concept of the enemy alien prisoner, and not on any aspect of his individual actions or nature. Cohen-Portheim saw this as a fundamental effect of war: it creates “an abnormal state in which no one can be honestly considered responsible for his actions.”

The obliteration of personal responsibility “undoes what education has built up in years of struggle, or rather in many centuries of effort.” This observation illustrates the particular perspective evident throughout the book. Cohen-Portheim upheld the humanist ideal of man as a rational being with a free will moderated by morality and empathy. And the fundamental crime of internment is that it is inhuman. The fact that the camp population was of such a narrow demographic–male, upper class, German or Austrian, adult, with no women, no children, no other nationalities or classes–by itself made the situation inherently abnormal.

But there was also, “no privacy, no possibility of being alone, no possibility of finding quietude.” The men were cooped up together 24 hours a day, day in and day out, with no end in sight. Because of this, “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated”:

It is not the men of bad character or morals you begin to hate, but the men who draw their soup through their teeth, clean their ears with their fingers at dinner, hiccough unavoidably when they get up from their meal (a moment awaited with trembling fury by the others), the men with dirty hands, the man who will invariably make the same remark (every day, year after year) as he sits down–and who is quite an inoffensive good-natured soft of creature otherwise–the man who lisps, the man who brags,, the man who has no matter what small defect or habit you happen to object to. You go on objecting quietly, for one does not quarrel about such silly trifles, and the thing gets on your nerves, becomes unbearable by the simple process of endless repetition, until you hate the cause of your torture with a deadly hatred.

“Such an atmosphere is thoroughly poisoned,” he concluded.

What is most impressive about Cohen-Portheim’s account of his experience, however, is that despite all of these wrongs, he could write, “I cannot honestly say that it has harmed me.” Indeed, his time at Lofthouse Park turned his passion from painting to writing, and one of his books, The Message of Asia (1934), was based on material began in the camp. He saw himself as an exception case, though, and was careful to caution in his preface that this must not “induce my readers to think that I call good what in itself is evil.”

After the war, he became a journalist and travel writer, and published such books as England, the Unknown Isle, The Spirit of France, and The Discovery of Europe. Time Stood Still was published in 1931, and like W. V. Tilsley’s outstanding novel, Other Ranks, published the same year, suffered from critical and popular weariness over war memoirs. The Saturday Review’s reviewer dismissed the book as “a ‘document’–by which I mean a piece of writing what has not quite succeeded in becoming literature.” Looking back on Time Stood Still from a distance of eighty years, however, I would place it on a shelf with some of the finest pieces of writing about life behind barbed wire.

You can find a length set of excerpts from Time Stood Still, about his time at Knockaloe camp, on a website devoted to the Isle of Man, at http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/tst1932.htm. There are no copies currently listed on Amazon and only about a dozen, starting at $37, Internet-wide, according to Add-All.com. However, his travel book, The Spirit of London, first published posthumously in 1935, was reissued by Batsford in 2012.

Update: “Enemy Aliens,” a long piece by Andrea Pitzer, author of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, on Cohen-Portheim’s experiences during the war and his interment, appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Time Stood Still, by Paul Cohen-Portheim
London: Duckworth, 1931

The Prisoners, by Orhan Kemal

prisoners
Business travel took me through the Istanbul Airport for the fifth time since the start of the year, and I had enough time to check the same bookshop where I found Nazim Hikmet’s wonderful Human Landscapes from My Country. In the small section of Turkish literature in English translation dominated, naturally enough, by Orhan Pahmuk, I found Orhan Kemal’s slim novel, The Prisoners (72. Koğuş or Ward 72 in the original).

Kemal, a prolific and popular writer specializing in novels about the lower classes, was a contemporary of Hikmet and served time with him in the same jail–an experience he recounted in his 1947 book, In Jail with Nazim Hikmet. His most famous book, The Idle Years, now available from Peter Owen Ltd. with a preface by Pahmuk, is a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman. Like Hikmet, he died in exile–in Bulgaria, in his case–and his works have since become recognized and accepted as some of the best Turkish literature of the 20th century. A substantial site, including an English language section, is available at www.orhankemal.org, and Everest Publications, a Turkish press, has brought many of his books, including a few English translations, back to print.

The Prisoners tells a classic tale of human hopes and tragedy. Ahmet, known a “Captain” by his fellow inmates from his time as a merchant seaman, receives a little money from his mother while serving a sentence for the murder of two men who’d killed his father. Against his instincts, he’s talked into gambling it in the running crap grame controlled by another prisoner, Solezli. He wins some, and treats the other inmates of Ward 72, a filthy hole to which the lowest tier of prison society is resigned, to a little food, some beans and meat.

The taste of warm, filling food soon leads Captain to return to the crap game. He wins again, and soon is off on a winning streak. Ward 72 is transformed with his takings. He becomes a force in the prison. He begins to have hopes of a life after his sentence is up decades in the future.

Nothing good lasts forever, of course, and it all comes to a grim end. You know this from the moment Captain comes back to Ward 72 with cash in hand, but Kemal succeeds in making the story fresh and gripping. Despite the bleak and ruthless prison setting, The Prisoners is as simple and powerful as a classic short novel such as The Red Badge of Courage.

One copy of The Prisoners is available on Amazon for the ridiculous price of $231, but you can order it for much less at Amazon.de or from the Turkish bookstore chain, D&R.

The Prisoners, by Orhan Kemal, translated by Cengiz Lugal
Istanbul: Everest Publications, 2012

Diary of a Self-Made Convict, by Alfred Hassler

Cover of the first US edition of 'Diary of a Self-Made Convict'In the spring of 1944, nearly two and a half years after registering with the Selective Service as a conscientious objector, Alfred Hassler was sentenced to three years in Federal prison for refusing to accept the draft or participate in an approved civilian program. Had his hearing been held a week later, he would have been released, as the Selective Service stopped drafting men of his age (34). Instead, however, he spent almost a year in the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania penetentiary, until he was pardoned in March 1945.

Hassler assembled his Diary of a Self-Made Convict from his prison journal and letters to his wife and friends. The book wasn’t published until almost ten years after his sentencing. It’s a unique document, as Hassler was far from a typical prisoner. A member of the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest organization in the U.S. devoted to nonviolence, he was married, well-educated and, as his title indicates, something of a self-made convict in that he could have chosen to serve as a conscientious objector without going to prison.

Hassler wasn’t separated or isolated from other prisoners, and mixed freely with bank robbers, racketeers, rapists, and murderers. It’s clear he was an approachable guy who gained the trust of a wide variety of men–both prisoners and prison officials–easily, and he recorded the stories of dozens of his fellow inmates: from a black man busted for heroin use to “Nucky” Johnson, one-time political boss of Atlantic City. At the time, Federal prisons were full not just of “traditional” prisoners but also draft-dodgers, deserters, conscientious objectors and suspected spies such as members of the German Bund. As a result, Diary of a Self-Made Convict portrays a remarkable cross-section of 1940s American society, or at least a peculiar subset of it.

Although Hassler seems by nature to have been a discreet and gentle man, he is frank about the worst aspects of prison life. He notes that effeminate men are preyed upon and is approached at least once by a prisoner looking for a homosexual partner. Masturbation–or, as one of the prison’s psychologists refers to it, “learning to live with yourself”–he finds “widely–almost universally–practiced.” Racism is institutionalized, with blacks segregated from the white inmates through a variety of Jim Crow measures. He observes theft, brutality, and intimidation–and also despair:

Last night some wild geese passed overhead, flying low. Their honking was quite clear as they flew south, and for just a moment I caught a glimpse of the long “V” of their flight silhouetted against the patch of sky visible from my cubicle. At the very moment of their passage, from some other near-by cell I could barely hear the deep, almost silent sobs of one of my fellow convicts. It is no longer a novel sound, but it wrenches my whole spirit with wretchedness whenever I hear it. During the day, the men maintain the cloak of bravado in which they wrap their self-respect; at night, alone in the darkness, their grief and fright sometimes become too much for them to bear.

I suppose that the very unpopularity of their subject keeps prison books from staying in print for too long. Malcolm Braly’s classic, On the Yard, is out again as a New York Review Classic, but that’s something like the third or fourth time it’s been reissued over the course of the last forty-some years. Still, I’m surprised that Diary of a Self-Made Convict hasn’t attained at least an equal or better standing. It’s a simple, honest, objective and well-written account of prison life that makes it quite clear that even a man who made a deliberate choice to go–and then served less than a year–found it a soul-testing experience. If learning about prison is part of a basic education in life, and I think it is, then it would be tough to find a better basic text than Diary of a Self-Made Convict.

[Diary of a Self-Made Convict is, in fact, in print from a company that calls itself Literary Licensing, LLC. and appears to be a small-time operator in the direct-to-print, copyright-free publishing business. But I recommend finding a used copy instead via Amazon or AddAll.]

Diary of a Self-Made Convict, by Alfred Hassler
Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1954