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Virginia Faulkner

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961)
By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.
The Baron and Baroness von Büllop on their honeymoon.
Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.

• Quail in Aspic (1962)
By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton
Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.
Elsa Maxwell as Count Charles Korsetz.
This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.

 

• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981)
By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.
Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:

Tring, tring
Shoestring, heating
Bloating, fourteen
Umpteen, thumping…

Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.

 

• Lord Bellinger (1911)
By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.
Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.
I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.

 

• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961)
By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.
Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.

Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.

 

• I Think I Remember (1927)
By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall
A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”

There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.

 

• Water on the Brain (1933)
By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).

 

• The Way Up (1972)
By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).
The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.

 

• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937)
By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.
The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.
And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.

 

• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp
By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.
Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.

 

• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940)
By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.
Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:

I was wearing an original Déclassé (salvaged from the wreck of my wardrobe), of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cufflinks, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which also could be used for water-divining.

Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner (1940)

Cover of My Hey-Day by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner

In a just world, Princess Tulip Murphy would have a place in America’s honorary royalty alongside Emperor Norton, King Kong, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In the course of the fifteen years or so when her updates, as faithfully reported by Virginia Faulkner, appeared regularly in Town & Country magazine, Princess Murphy was America’s leading royal. She boasted genuine red-white-and-blue blood: her grandmother was “the first white woman to be called ‘Madam’ west of Rock Island, Illinois” and her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, reveals in the heat of a barroom brawl that he is descended from a long line of Irish kings. In true American do-it-yourself fashion, Princess Tulip assembles these ingredients into an invitation into the finest circles of international society.

At first, she does resort to a little blackmail ease her way in. A month or two working as a chambermaid in an exclusive Riviera hotel and some spying into the diaries and doings of the various millionaires and noblemen and -women staying there, a few suggestions about the potential damage of a tip or two to the gossip sheets, and soon she has a string of invitations to the finest watering holes in Europe. “Before the afternoon was over, they understood that my friendship was indispensable and my social position was assured.”

From here, we travel along through My Hey-Day on Princess Tulip’s seemingly neverending round-the-world tour: from Scandanavia to India via Russia; from Egypt to Hollywood; from the 1939 World’s Fair to the supposed site of the Garden of Eden in Iraq. All along the way, we meet a hodge-podge of personalities:

… an unfrocked monk from Athos; a Rumanian gun-runner; a stranded Anazc ventriloquist; a Macedonian pimp; a honey-bee salesman from Hymettis; Raymond Duncan; a two-headed brown-and-white goat; and twenty-seven Levantine streetwalkers — to say nothing of a wandering band of Russian wolf-boys….

We also meet such nobility as Lady Crystal Scum, the Bedad of Nawab, Lord Beastie of Kelp, Grand Duke Slavko (the Nero of the Neva and author of What to Do Till the Dictator Comes), and the ex-King of Jugo-ourway.

Princess Tulip Murphy
Princess Tulip Murphy, shown signing her contract for My Hey-Day

If the changing scenery and cast are not enough, we can also enjoy Princess Tulip’s ever-evolving wardrobe:

I was wearing a taffeta middy bloud with a halter of passementerie; an accordion-pleated backless sarong; stout, hand-twisted fondant-colored ski shoes (ideal for dry weather); and a jaunty parka made of the skins of dozens and dozens of elves from the Irish Free State.

In circles where quick-wittedness was considered a prime virtue, Virginia Faulkner had one of the fastest tongues in the business. Gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky often reported one of her sarcastic quips. On an over-exposed actress: “She had established herself in the public eye, ear and hair.” On a particularly ghastly Hollywood actress’s palace: “The decoration was not so much period as exclamation point.” She delighted in the public’s appetite for dished dirt and was not averse to inventing some of her own to keep things lively. Of a scandal involving an actress on Broadway, she remarked: “There have been conflicting stories — all mine.”

Faulkner was often in demand to supply rapid-fire comic dialogue for Broadway shows, radio, and the movies, but at times her tastes went beyond the conventional limits. It’s unlikely that Winchell or anyone else would have quoted Princess Tulip’s report from Russia:

I want to go on record that no matter what you hear about Russia their beauty parlors are most economical. You can get a shampoo, wave, massage, facial, manicure, and abortion all for about seven rubles ha’penny.

In his 1962 book, The Image, the historian Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” In My Hey-Day, however, Faulkner/Tulip portray a world in which everyone sought to make their knownness ever more splendid in its isolation. “If you don’t already know who someone is, why on earth would you want to meet him?” Princess Tulip asks. “I have never been introduced to most of my intimate friends.” She admires the standards of Baroness Burper, who never consented to set foot in an establishment which did not boast at least one heated moat.

Even Princess Tulip could not be unaware of the great events unfolding outside the heated moats of high society. She acknowledges at several points what she refers to as “the unpleasantness” which was making travel in Europe ever more difficult. In keeping with the American pioneer spirit, however, she devised ways to accommodate the new circumstances — wearing, for example, a specially-designed frock which, “with a little manipulation can be converted into an air-raid shelt, with room for one other, or a good book and three square meals, if you are the cool, practical type.” War and the rumors of war were driving the International Set to taken extreme measures: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of one hand.” Others are closing their apartments as … gasp! … “moving into their homes!”

My Hey-Day was published in 1940 and you might think the fall of France would have brought Princess Tulip’s adventures to an end. There remain, however, uncollected and out of print, a further half-dozen or so of the princess’s stories that Faulkner published in Town & Country over the course of the war and after. This material is crying out to be assembled with My Hey-Day into the complete memoirs of Princess Tulip. It would be a work that deserves a place on the shelf next to Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, and Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography.

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner
New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940

The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner (1935)

Cover of The Barbarians by Virginia Faulkner

If we were to trust Virginia Faulkner, the “Lost Generation” had no desire to be found. In The Barbarians (1935), her account of the Bohemian life of expats and war veterans set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1922, to be “disoriented, wandering, directionless” was more fun than having to be tied down to any particular plan. The Barbarians — a loose cluster of creative types — painters, a sculptor, a writer, a pianist, and a gigolo — value independence over all:

Because their work was concerned with the forms of things, they had little time to bother with problems of behavior when in the presence of substance. They possessed great singleness of purpose, and because they found simplicity in all that they most admired they tried to regulate their lives as simply as possible. What they disliked they avoided or ignored, or pretended was non-existent. Life all students of reality, they were experts at make-believe. Like all people who must live intensively, they were sometimes cruel and impatient. Like all specialists, they had a good many blind spots.

This sounds remarkably insightful coming from a writer who was all of 22 when The Barbarians, but bear in mind that Faulkner was nine years old in 1922 and had spent less than a year in Europe, mostly attending a tony girls’ finishing school in Rome. So, there’s far more in this book one has to attribute to precocious powers — of either observation or imagination or probably both. “Tauchnitz had taken the place of experience,” Faulkner writes of one particularly naïve young woman, but it might have truer for the author herself than she might like to admit.

Faulkner later wrote scripts for Fred Allen’s radio show and dialogue for Hollywood comedies, and her talent for rapid-fire conversation in an absurdist vein takes center stage in much of The Barbarians.

“There are so many things to think about. For instance, did it ever occur to you that there are an equal number of hands and feet in the world — at least to start with?”

“And the thumb is the strongest of the fingers?” said Phip helpfully.

“And monkeys have knuckles,” contributed Beppo. “At least, I think they do. Funny how you never associate a monkey with a knuckle.”

“And if we didn’t have fingernails, what would we scratch with?” said Marie.

“Do you suppose if we weren’t subject to itching we’d have fingernails?” inquired Andreas.

“Pulling off the fingernails was a medieval form of torture,” said Sarkesso.

“The Chinese take great pride in long fingernails,” said Lise valiantly.

“And short feet.”

“And many a foot is not twelve inches long.”

“And there is a kind of worm called the inch-worm.”

“And it is very hard to tell one end of worm from the other.”

“Can worms back up?”

This provoked quite a long discussion which ended by Lise and Beppo going out to get some worms….

Faulkner also tries her hand at romantic farce involving mistaken identities and hiding under beds à la Feydeau and proves herself a quick study. The Barbarians collectively foil Baroness Von Schanzburg’s attempt to arrange a marriage between her daughter and a passing American millionaire (“An income for herself from the son-in-law was not essential but would be acceptable,” she muses) and spirit her off to their Left Bank suite of garrets.

With no apparent talent aside from looking beautiful, she’s soon convinced by a ne’er-do-well to join him selling fake native artworks to tourists in the middle of the Sahara. Faulkner may have taken a page from Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust in that the girl finds herself held prisoner by an especially sadistic local trader. Unlike Waugh’s Tony Last, however, several Barbarians come to the rescue, and the comic crew rides laughing into the sunset.

Virginia Faulkner 1935

When it came time for The Barbarians to be published, however, it was Faulkner herself who was the butt of jokes. As the story came out in May 1935 when the New York Supreme Court granted her an annulment, one night two months before Faulkner had been entertaining friends, including Tallulah Bankhead, at her hotel. As more drinks were poured, the party flowed out of the hotel and into one or more nightclubs, until at 3 A.M. the next morning, she was standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Harrison, New York pledging to love, honor, and obey one Everett Weil, whom reports identified as a “cotton converter,” whatever that is/was. Hours later, Faulkner awoke, finally sober, to find Weil bringing her breakfast in bed. Faulkner, who was likely gay and in any case in no mood to get hitched, fled the scene and began a frantic search for the fastest route to an annulment. A few papers picked up the story in March, but when the court ruling came out on 15 May 1935, The New York Daily News gleefully put its best headliner writer to work:

NY Daily News headline - Highball Elopement Scotched by Bride
Headline from The New York Daily News story on Virginia Faulkner’s short-lived marriage

“Fifteen Scotch highballs preceding a dawn elopement mystified Virginia Faulkner so thoroughly that she didn’t know what was happening until the blissfully happy bridegroom, Everett V. Weil, revived her with a platter of scrambled eggs of his own making in his apartment at 42 W. 74th St. Then she fled,” the article opened. You can hear the copy writer chuckling as he went to town on this story. “He Scrambles, She Scrams,” quipped a subheading. It ended with testimony from her application: “All she remembers of the honeymoon’s final chapter, she deposed, was that the bridgegroom gave her his card and phone number as she was leaving his apartment, and said: ‘Call me up some time.'” Not even Faulkner ever managed to come up with a story quite as wild as that.

The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935

Friends and Romans, by Virginia Faulkner (1934)

When Virginia Faulkner published her first novel, Friends and Romans, she was 21 and managed to sound like 41. Or 37, to be more precise. Faulkner narrates this wise-cracking romance through the voice of Marie Manfred, just past 37 and taking a hiatus from her busy career as the world’s greatest concert pianist. To get away from the world, her manager finds a villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome. She is also trying to get away from the publicity generated by a tell-all biography, Gaudy Calliope, written by a former lover. The Romans she encounters are all confused by the book’s title: they all associate it with the muse of poetry, when it’s actually a jab at her piano-playing style, suggesting it’s akin to a bunch of steam-powered locomotive whistles.

Virginia Faulkner, 1935
Of course, in declaring, like Garbo, that she wants to “be alone,” Marie is inviting half the civilized world to descend upon her. First to arrive is her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Hamilton Cotter Frewitt, wife — or shall we say, soon-to-be ex-wife — of the British military attaché. She brings in tow her current lover, Count Gustaf (Tavo) von Keinlohe, a garden variety fortune-hunting gigolo and, as it turns out, also a former lover of Marie’s. The international set of 1934 ( whose crack-up Faulkner would later recount, through the memoirs of her comic creation, Princess Tulip Murphy, in a little comic masterpiece from 1940 titled My Hey-Day), it turns out, is a close, and often tight, little community.

Lunch with another acquaintance, the Principessa Colosini, leads to an introduction to the Principessa’s younger brother, the dashing and devastatingly handsome Don Ricardo dei Retti. Sparks fly. Animal magnetism takes its effect. He whisks Marie off to a quiet dinner in his discreet seaside villa. Unfortunately, on her way back, Marie discovers that Don Ricardo is more than vaguely connected with Mussolini: he is, in fact, on the hit list of the still-active Fascist resistance movement. They would, so to speak, like to put him at #1 with a bullet.

Danger, however, only adds to Don Ricardo’s allure. A week or two of entanglements, interrupted by periodic calls to vague affairs of government (eventually explained when it’s revealed that Don Ricardo is, in fact, Mussolini’s chief of intelligence), ensues. Marie is convinced that this is the man worth abandoning her career for. Only to run into the very chauvinistic side of Italian raffinatezza: as … come se dice? … a woman with una storia, Marie would be perfect as a mistress. As a wife … eh, non così tanto. As Marie tells herself early in the book, “Most men regard women as the hunter regards the game — precious and exciting during the chase, but after the kill one begins to look for blemishes in the pelt.”

Less than a year after publishing Friends and Romans, Faulkner followed with a second novel, The Barbarians (1935) — but a comparison of the two books suggests that Barbarians was probably the first to be written. There are numerous references to “the Barbarians” — a loose-knit collection of artists and musicians in Paris — throughout Friends and Romans and Marie and Tavo are prominent characters in the book. I shall have to read and report back soon.

At the time she wrote the two books, the sum total of Faulkner’s international experience was a year at Miss Moxley’s finishing school in Rome and a bit of time in London, Paris, and the Riviera after that. Yet she managed to come off as sophisticated and worldly wise as one of the queens of the international set, Daisy Fellowes (and a far better writer). No wonder she was soon writing for America’s poshest magazine, Town and Country, and trading quips at the Algonquin Round Table not long after. A rival to Dorothy Parker, she left her mark on Broadway and in Hollywood as well, but unlike Parker, she pulled herself out of a downward spiral somewhere in the early 1950s and returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she became a key member of the staff of Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press. She died in September 1980 while watching Monday Night Football. Definitely a life overdue for recognition.

Friends and Romans, by Virginia Faulkner
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934

Catching Up: The Dogs by Ivan Nazhivin; Mary’s Country, by Harold Mead; My Hey-Day, by Virginia Faulkner

Life does get in the way of one’s hobbies at times. NeglectedBooks.com has had to suffer the fate of its subjects since mid-December, and even now I fear this post will have to be more telegraphic than usual–if I can manage that. I have to side with Pascal in believing that it takes longer to write less.

Here, at least, is a recap of recent rediscoveries:

Cover of first U.K. edition of 'Mary's Country'

Mary’s Country, by Harold Mead
London: Michael Joseph, 1957

I learned of Mary’s Country when browsing through the archive of Ken Slater’s “Something to Read” columns from Nebula Science Fiction. Slater gave the novel a big thumbs-up, writing, “All in all, whilst this may not be the happiest book of the moment, it is by far the most interesting and the most powerful. Highly recommended for a one-sitting reading. Don’t start it until you have the time to finish it . . . it is dangerous!”

Had 1984 and Lord of the Flies not been published within the decade prior to Mary’s Country, Slater might have been justified by adding that it was the most original novel of the moment. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with them would find it hard not to view Mead’s work as a mash-up of the two books. The novel opens in a state not unlike that in 1984, in which a ruling class keeps a prole-like population in check through drink, prostitution, and cheap entertainment while waging war against the hated “Dems”. As part of its master plan, the state is practicing a form of eugenics, separating out the finest physical specimens at birth and raising them to be future rulers.

Mary’s Country follows a group of such children as they watch the state collapse around them through the effects of biological warfare. After all their masters and many of their classmates have died, they band together and trek to an unknown paradise that Mary, one of the older children, has described to them. Unfortunately, as disease and chaos has destroyed their civilization, they are forced to arm themselves and fight off other bands of survivors. As they trek into the countryside, their means and moraes grow more primitive, and they adopt a totem they dub “the Watchman”. Here shades of Lord of the Flies can be seen as a new, more violent, tribal culture emerges.

Mary’s Country is certainly a powerfully-written book, and I found myself drawn by its strong narrative. But I would be hard-pressed to recommend the book for republication when ignorance of Golding and Orwell would have to be a pre-requisite for any reader hoping to experience its full effect.

The Dogs, by Ivan Nazhivin
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1931

Nazhivin’s novel is a panorama of Russia from before World War One to the height of the Russian revolution as seen through the eyes and minds of dogs. The dogs mirror society, ranging from a pair of noble Borzois and the pampered lapdog of the Grand Duke Nicholas’ mistress to Siedoi, a mutt. Despite his questionable pedigree, Siedoi is the novel’s protagonist, and manages to travel from Moscow to the country estate of a family of Russian gentry to the trenches on the Eastern Front and a prisoner-of-war camp in Austria and then back again to the estate as the human society around him progressively collapses.

Time magazine’s review of The Dogs called it, “one of the most articulate books of Russia, of human and other natures, yet written in the Tolstoi vein,” and like Tolstoi, Nazhivin displays a remarkable ability to portray his characters–both dog and human–in all their faults without passing judgment. With one exception: Peter, whom we first see as a lax and cruel kennel keeper, then as a thief, liar, coward, cheat, rapist, and, finally, Bolshevik rabble-rouser. Though Nazhivin doesn’t gloss over the problems and corruptions of Tsarist Russia, it’s clear that Peter symbolizes all the evils brought by the Communists, and the only thing lacking in the caricature are horns and a tail.

Still, The Dogs is moving account of the destruction experienced at all levels of Russian society enhanced by the novelty and humor of being told from animal perspectives. And in the much-travelled Siedoi, a flea-ridden survivor with a romantic soul, Nazhivin creates one of most memorable characters I’ve come across recently.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'My Hey-Day'

My Hey-Day, or The Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy, as told to Virginia Faulkner
New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940

This book is pure froth–but it’s premium-quality froth. These are the purported memoirs of Princess Tulip Murphy, whose nobility is not the only thing about her of questionable provenance. After leaving her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, she manages through a combination of theft, seduction, and blackmail–though none of these offenses is so crudely named by their culprit–to elbow her way into “the International Set.” She then circulates among this amorphous band of royalty, heirs, heiresses, and hangers-on from Bajden-Baden to Cucamonga.

Each chapter recounts her adventures in a new place–Stockholm, where she meets Xerxes IX, Crown Prince of Jugo-ourway and his mother, Queen Carmen-Veranda; England, where she spents a dreary week at Sneers, the Spiltshire seat of the Earls of Quinsy; Pompei, where she takes her turn watching the famous painter, Pablo Paolo Pali at work on his prize-winning composition, “There Are More Ways of Choking a Cat than by Swallowing It With Butter, Horatio”; Mazatlan, where her friends Peter Frenzy Fripp and Olga Ostrogoth are tossed in jail for photographing an execution (“Nobody we knew,” the Princess hastens to add). Each spot offers her a chance to air yet more of her remarkable wardrobe:

I was wearing an original DeClassé of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cuff-links, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which could also be used for water-divining.

As the world edges closer to the outbreak of World War Two, her trek eventually leads her to a yurt in forbidden Tibet, where despite the company of Lulu Alabaster, Lady Crystal Scum, and Count Udo von und zu Vonundzu, and heated political debates (“You know as well as I that Germany is dictated–but not red,” observes the Count), she finds herself bored: “But to the teeth!” Even though “there are so many armies wandering around that trains and ships are said to be unpleasantly crowded,” she resolves to head off in search of the “European belligerents”: after all, she notes, “Everyone’s going.”

As Time magazine wrote of Faulkner’s first novel, Friends and Romans, My Hey-Day “… breaks nobody’s bones or butterflies, lets no threatening skeletons loose on a frightened world, hurls no manifesto, literary or political.” What it does is offer a steady stream of wise-cracks, puns, and other comic material that holds up remarkably well considering the many decades passed since it last saw the light of day.