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Rodney Garland

Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus (1944)

Adam de Hegedus.

This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown

‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.

De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’

Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.

In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.

On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’

De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.

‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’

‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’

‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’

Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.

De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’

It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.

During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.

Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.

The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.

At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’

Cover of an English edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus).

Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.

Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.

Notes
1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).

2 The Heart in Exile is available from Valancourt Books.

Works by Adam de Hegedus:

  • Hungarian Background, non-fiction, 1937
  • Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, non-fiction, 1944
  • Rehearsal Under the Moon, novel, 1946
  • The State of the World, non-fiction, 1946
  • Patriotism or Peace?, non-fiction, 1947
  • Strangers Here Ourselves, non-fiction, 1949
  • Home and Away, non-fiction, 1951
  • The Struggle with the Angels, novel, 1956

Works as Rodney Garland:

  • The Heart in Exile, novel, 1953
  • The Troubled Midnight, novel, 1954

Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk

Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus
London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946

The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison: Solved

Covers of four novels by Jessamy Morrison

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison” that surveyed four of the six novels published between 1963 and 1972 by a writer of that name. Aside from the fact that the British Library’s catalogue listed “Jessamy Morrison” as a pseudonym, I hadn’t been able to determine anything more about Morrison’s true identity. Indeed, although the pioneering lesbian critic and publisher Barbara Grier considered two of Morrison’s early books, The No Road (1963) and The Girl from Paris (1965) among the best books on gay themes in their respective years, certain aspects of the books made me wonder whether Jessamy was, in fact, male.

Soon after I posted the piece, the British novelist and editor Eric Brown emailed me. “Now this is a long shot,” he wrote, “and I suspect it might come to nothing — but I wonder if there is a possibility that Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym used by Peter de Polnay?” Eric felt the descriptions of Morrison’s novels seemed “like synopses of works by Peter de Polnay: upper middle-class characters, continental settings, unpleasant female characters, and sex.”

I’ve been fascinated by Peter de Polnay for some time and wrote de Polnay’s Wikipedia biography several years ago. Born into a Jewish-Hungarian noble family, he and his sisters were raised mostly by governesses and caretakers in Switzerland and England. After a series of misadventures in Austria, Argentina, and the French Riviera, de Polnay settled in Paris and began writing novels in English. His first book, Angry Man’s Tale (1939), was described by one critic as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward.” De Polnay tried to blend into the woodwork when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 but eventually chose to flee, making his way south through Spain to Gibraltar, from where he was evacuated to England — an experience he recounted in his 1941 book Death and Tomorrow.

De Polnay tried to assume the life of an English country gentleman, renting Boulge Hall, formerly the home of the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (responsible for the hugely popular English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam). He soon found this lifestyle unaffordable and after his first wife died in 1950, he spent most of the rest of his life circulating through Spain, France, and southern England. And all the while, he wrote like a demon, amassing something like 80 books under his own name before his death in 1984.

Peter de Polnay.

I’ve written about several of de Polnay’s books. All that I’ve read are short, spare, speedy, and utterly cynical, leading me to refer to him as “a poor man’s Georges Simenon.” Poor because de Polnay is not quite the master that Simenon can be at his best. As a novelist, de Polnay lacks something of Simenon’s ruthless efficiency. None of the de Polnays I’ve read so far is without an extraneous character or two, or a narrative detour down what proves to be a dead end. And unlike Simenon, de Polnay was not working in his native language (which he’d probably say was French rather than Hungarian, in any case). Now, that alone is not necessarily a handicap (viz. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov to name just two who put many native English writers to shame), but combined with the speed with which de Polnay wrote (averaging 3-4 books a year), it led so some stylistic tendencies that Eric Brown felt might offer further hints to Jessamy Morrison’s identity.

The moment I read Eric’s first email, I knew he had to be correct. “It seems obvious now that I think about it. Many similarities. Many,” I replied. However, I was also checking with other sources to see what I could find. The Humanities staff of the British Library diligently looked through their records but found no further clue to why their catalogue listed Jessamy Morrison as a pseudonym. The Society of Authors drew a blank as well, and so did several agencies I contacted.

I sent Eric a selection of chapters from Morrison’s novels to aid in his comparison with Peter de Polnay’s prose. “I’m convinced it’s Peter de Polnay,” he wrote back a few days later:

Even if we were to disregard the many stylistic similarities, it ‘feels’ like de Polnay: the narrative is leisurely and slapdash, interspersed with often irrelevant asides concerning the narrator’s relatives or acquaintances (a typical de Polnay trait.) The milieu is pure PdP. At the start of The No-Road he mentions shooting (he was a keen shooter) and the specialist phrase ‘walk up partridges’ – which has echoes with a character in his 1970 novel Spring Snow and Algy. He’s casually disparaging about stout women, and garrulous swearing women, who often crop up in his books.

Eric’s comparison of de Polnay’s prose with Morrison’s added to his conviction:

The stylistic similarities are telling. The prose is littered with ugly sentence splices; there’s an under-use of commas; minor characters are described coming and going to no real effect; he employs ‘whereby I mean’ and ‘As a matter of fact’ and ‘In short’ which crop up again and again in DpD’s novels; he combines in the same paragraph dialogue attributed to different characters which other novelists would lay out on separate lines; there are one or two instances of the absence of a comma between verb and gerund, a DpD trait; in dialogue, characters are oddly off-hand with each other.

Like de Polnay, Morrison had a predilection for splicing sentences:

We had a couple of hours to kill, Clarissa went off with the children, I called in on my club, and then we all met at the air terminus.

Like de Polnay, Morrison composes with a slapdash brush, introducing, as Eric put it, “willy-nilly, background detail into a section of dialogue, thus wrong-footing the reader when returning to the dialogue”:

My father had been a shipbroker in Leadenhall Street and my brother John and I inherited the business. In furtherance of our business I went abroad from time to time to places like Antwerp and Rotterdam and Hamburg. “That doesn’t come into it,” I added. Clarissa remembered she had something or other to do, so left the room, and if I come to think of it she never thanked me properly for agreeing to the holiday in Majorca.

And, like de Polnay, Morrison’s stage directions can be haphazard:

I said I intended to settle in the town. Before he could make some appropriate remark an ill-dressed old woman, in a not too clean apron, waddled in and asked for ten Woodbines. Meanwhile the man in the green hat had left. The landlord served the woman, the door closed on her and we were alone.

“He likes having minor characters wander off set for no reason!” Eric observed.

By this point, I was convinced as well. So, I wrote to Peter de Polnay’s son Greg, a retired actor now living in France. I’d interviewed Greg for the Wikipedia article on his father. “Yes, indeed Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym of my father’s,” he replied. “But I had no idea he had written so many novels.” Greg de Polnay’s relationship with his father had been difficult at the best of times — as evidenced by the fact that Peter de Polnay never mentioned his son in any of his autobiographies.

Chances are that Peter de Polnay adopted the pseudonym of Jessamy Morrison for two reasons. First, to avoid saturating the market. But more importantly, to avoid incurring the wrath of the Catholic Church, which still maintained its index of forbidden books. De Polnay had converted after marrying his third wife, Maria del Carmen Rubio y Caparo, daughter of a Spanish theater director and a devout Catholic.

And, by 1963, he had become accustomed to using a pseudonym. As Greg confirmed, his father published a number of novels for W. H. Allen under the name of Rodney Garland. Rodney Garland was itself a pseudonym, adopted by a fellow Hungarian emigre named Adam Martin de Hegedus. De Hegedus was a journalist and commentator who’d published several works of nonfiction between the late 1930s and early 1950s. He took the pseudonym when W. H. Allen published his 1953 novel The Heart in Exile (recently reissued by Valancourt Books). Now considered a landmark book for its candid and positive portrayal of the relationship between two gay men, The Heart in Exile risked condemnation, if not censorship, given the fact that homosexuality was still illegal under English laws.

De Hegedus died in October 1955, though the circumstances of his death are still in doubt. Soon after his death, W. H. Allen published a second Rodney Garland novel, The Troubled Midnight, which was undoubtedly by de Hegedus. Over the course of the next ten years, however, W. H. Allen published three more novels by “Rodney Garland”: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and Sorcerer’s Broth (1966). Greg de Polnay has confirmed that the last two were written by his father. I’m waiting on a copy of World Without Dreams to see if it passes the subject/style test.

So, there we have it: Jessamy Morrison was Peter de Polnay. I shall have to amend his Wikipedia page now.