woman writers

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry (1990)

Another Present Era by Elaine Perry

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales has been on the trail of neglected Black writers for a number of years, first with his feature The Blacklist for Catapault and now with CrimeReads. More recently, he was instrumental in getting the short stories of Diane Oliver, whose life was cut short at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident, published for the first time in Neighbors and Other Stories, just published in February 2024 by Grove Press. He wrote about his latest discovery, Elaine Perry’s 1990 dystopian novel Another Present Era, in CrimeReads just last month.

I was fascinated by Michael’s article. “Another Present Era,” he wrote, “touches on many of the same subjects (global warming, corporate greed, racism and disease) as [Octavia] Butler’s more well-known Parable of Sower, but that book wasn’t published until three years later.” It was Perry’s only published novel, though an article in Perry’s hometown Lima, Ohio News from 1990 quotes her as working on a second novel, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die, which she said was “about the civil rights marches in the South during racial strife in the 1960s.” Whether it was the few and cursory reviews that Another Present Era received, frustrations with her work in progress, or just, well, life, Elaine Perry chose soon after to put her brief career as a writer behind her. Just the initial hardcover edition of Another Present Era was published and used copies are few but not (yet) unreasonably priced. It’s also available on the Internet Archive (link), which is how I read it.

The book opens with Wanda Higgins Du Bois looking out from the 58th floor of the Savings of America building lower Manhattan at a New York City beginning to show signs of the impact of climate change:

No one is out on the streets. Searchlights sweep across the sky and the fog above the neighboring blocks of four- and five-story buildings and the hypnotic stream of headlights and taillights on multilane West Street. Civil Defense klaxons wail, indicating the severity of the flood warning. Four long blasts followed by a brief silence, repeated endlessly. On her nightstand is the booklet every New Yorker has, explaining why and when the klaxons sound and what to do.

Wanda is an architect working on an ambitious proposal for the Toronto waterfront. She is alone, or so she finds her colleague and boyfriend, Bradley, is there as well. Though he greets her warmly, he soon produces a gun, spins its cylinder, and points it at his mouth. Wanda stops him, but Bradley’s distress becomes just one of the streams of psychological conflict running through her life. Bradley is distraught over the fact that he, like Wanda, looks to be a textbook Nordic Aryan when they are both African-Americans. Wanda’s mother is Black; her father the son of one of Hitler’s rocket scientists, an Air Force colonel working on the space program who used to beat Wanda with a steel ruler when she let slip that her mother was neither white nor dead.

The ambiguity of identity is a major theme in Another Present Era. Wanda looks white and identifies as Black. She soon meets an elderly German man who introduces himself as Werner Schmidt, though she recognizes him as Sterling Cronheim, a Wisconsin-born artist who became a member of the Bauhaus school in Germany and who disappeared sometime after the fall of France in 1940. Sterling pretends to be straight and pursued a brilliant physicist named Lenore Hayden throughout his time in Germany in France, despite the fact that she knew he spent many nights crusing the streets of Berlin and Paris for rent boys.

Elaine Perry, photo by Steve Bryant, from the dust jacket of Another Present Era.

If Another Present Era shows signs of first novel weaknesses, it’s primarily in how Perry deals with a complex and intricate narrative in which few steps are straightforward and sequential. This is far more a work of atmospheres and undercurrents, and Perry does not shy away from weaving her way through decades of history, scattering enigmatic and passing references as she goes. I can imagine obsessives constructing a long and elaborate concordance of all the characters, places, and cultural references in the book, much like those that have been creating for Lord of the Rings or Gravity’s Rainbow.

With its mentions of the Nazi rocket programs and the Weimar Republic, it’s easy to sense the influence of Gravity’s Rainbow in Another Present Era. Like Pynchon, Perry works on a maximalist scale when it comes to history. And she takes advantage of her futuristic setting to play with the relativity of history. People talk to each other over video phones and watch streaming television services (the German silent movie channel) while they also listen to big bands (Eddie Heywood and his Orchestra) playing on the radio live from the rooftops of New York hotels as if it were 1939. And Wanda still clings to idealistic visions of the future that certainly wouldn’t have survived the troubles of 1968:

Wanda believed in the future, not a future of space exploration, but one of the harmonious and cooperative society human-rights leaders always talked about.She really thought everyone would be like her some day, neither black nor white, but something in between. It might take decades or even centuries, but it would happen. And sooner than that, racism and the concept of race itself would become completely obsolete.

There is much about Another Present Era to applaud. Time and again, Perry tosses off remarks that shows a deeper recognition of the impact of global warmingthan most of her contemporary writers. As Wanda works on her design, she muses, “So much fanfare and civic pride pouring into the Toronto Harbourfront, but the ocean will swallow all the buildings in a matter of decades or even years.” A new generation of Hoovervilles are popping up on the landfills constructed to keep the Atlantic from swamping the streets of Manhattan, populated by climate and economic refugees, while the rich find ever more expensive ways to distract themselves. Perry’s treatment of race and identity and their complexities, innovative in 1990, seems familiar today. There is more than enough material to populate a few PhD dissertations here.

I must admit that I had a selfish motive in rushing to read Another Present Era. It’s exactly the sort of unique, utterly forgotten, and deeply intriguing book we’re publishing in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, and Michael Gonzales was kind enough to communicate my interest to Elaine Perry. Although she chose not to entertain a reissue at this time, I hope we will see Another Present Era return to print sometime in future. For the moment, I strongly encourage anyone looking for a strikingly original novel to track down a used copy before they become the stuff of antiquarian and rare book dealers.

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss (1933)

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The Midst of Life is subtitled “A Romance,” but knowing a bit about Mina Curtiss, I read it assuming it was a work of nonfiction. I was surprised, then, to discover than Houghton Mifflin marketed it as a novel, for aside from the change of a name or two, this is drawn directly from Curtiss’s life. Born into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family (her younger brother Lincoln rates a 700-page biography by Martin Duberman), she grew up in Boston and graduated from Smith College, where she taught French for over ten years. When she was 30, she married Henry Tomlinson Curtiss, an heir to the Spaulding sporting goods fortune, but Curtiss, who had suffered from lung problems all his life, died suddenly of pneumonia after less than two years of marriage.

“Why shouldn’t I write to you, dead as well as alive,” she asks on the first of June, 1932. The Midst of Life is a widow’s attempt to process her husband’s death. “Of course, I shall write to you — every day. I shall tell you everything, everything you would want to know.”

Mina Curtiss, 1933. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Though she says, “I shall write you to remind you in your other world of the simple happiness of this one, its casualness and its excitement,” we soon realize that the one being reminded in Curtiss herself. While she and Henry were married, they wrote each other every day when apart. The act of writing to a ghost is preferable, she admits, to her initial ways of coping with his loss. “At first, I fancied you were in the next room, that accidentally you had left it just before I entered. Then I used to expect to meet you in the street.” She once felt an almost irresistable impulse to stab a man in the street simply for his expression of utter indifference to her pain.

And so, she writes every day, or nearly every day. Not like a wife sharing her day with her husband — such conversations tend to be more about exchanging information than emotions. She shares her impressions and, inevitably, the memories they trigger. Henry was a great lover of gardens, so we hear about the day lilies and delphinium, about the tomatoes and squash in the large gardens around their country home in the Berkshires and her joy or disappointment in their growth. The two of them were avid riders, so we read of the moments when Mina is able to lose all sense of herself in a gallop and of her sadness at having to put down her aging stallion Sandy.

As the summer moves into August, Mina finds herself sifting through her memories of Henry’s last days. Struck down in a New York hotel, he lies struggling to breathe, too frail to be moved to a hospital, his doctors holding out little hope for recovery. For years, she has taken some comfort from believing that his last word to her was “Beautiful.” But as she examines her memories closer, she realizes that what he actually said just before losing consciousness was, “Go away. Leave me alone.” And Mina finds this not the devastating rejection she has feared. “Leave me alone,” was right, she decides. “Man is born into the world alone, he leaves it alone, and in a way he lives in it alone, too.”

In her last letter, on the 10th of October, as the frost comes and forces her to harvest the last fruits and vegetables from the garden, Mina recalls a conversation she had with Henry early in their relationship. He is driving her to the station so she can catch a train back to Smith when he notices her glancing nervously at her watch. “Why do you do that?” he asks. If she misses one train, she can catch another. “Aren’t you happy here and now?” And that, she concludes, is the only way in which she can hold onto something of the love they shared: by concentrating on the moments of happiness she still has the opportunity to experience, even without him.

If Mina Curtiss was able to publish these letters by calling The Midst of Life a novel, so be it. As readers we might do well to think of it as a novel, too. For there are things here that are almost too intimate to be shared with strangers. A fine and touching book.

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

Breathe Upon These Slain by Evelyn Scott (1934)

Cover of the first US edition of Breathe Upon These Slain.

I had the chance to speak recently with David Madden, whose anthology Rediscoveries was a primary inspiration that launched my quest to seek out neglected books and authors decades ago. We talked about the fact that I completed an MA program in biograpy and creative nonfiction at the University of East Anglia a few years ago, which led, inevitably, to mention of W. G. Sebald and, in particular, his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. And this, in turn, led to his suggestion that I read Evelyn Scott’s Breathe Upon These Slain (1934).

In October 1932, the American novelist Evelyn Scott and her second husband, the English short story writer John Metcalfe, having grown sick of life in London, moved to Lowestoft on the coast of East Anglia and rented a cottage from a spinster named Miss Henderson. As they settled into the cottage for the winter, Scott began to wonder about the family whose pictures hung in every room. Some of the pictures were prints of such once-popular subjects as the death of Cock Robin or the ride of the Bengal Lancers.

But there were several family photographs — one in the east bedroom of four little girls, all dressed alike, from sometime in the previous century; one in the west bedroom of just three girls — older, in their teens. And her novelist’s imagination began to work.

I am not here to write stories, but to rest, and my knowledge of Suffolk is small — my knowledge of these people, nothing! — yet I feel queerly urged to give the four little girls their names.

“The four sisters shall be called: Cora, Ethel, Tilly and Margaret,” she decides. And with little more than observations of places and people around Lowestoft, a bit of history, and her powers of empathy, Scott created a story of their lives. The story of the Courtneys.

Not the story. Although she speculates that the Miss Henderson who collects the rent and occasionally checks in corresponds to one of the girls in the photographs, Scott wasn’t concerned with the facts. The term was decades from being coined, but what Scott decided to create was what we would now call a metafiction (or meta-nonfiction?). She never hides herself from the reader, nor does she ever pretend that the stories she tells about the family aren’t inventions.

Evelyn Scott, around the time of Breathe Upon These Slain. [Marks on the original.]

The absence of the youngest of the four girls from the photograph of the three older girls Scott explains through the story of Tilly. One drizzly autumn day when the coastal town is socked in with one of those grey mists that rise off the Broads and cut to the bone with a chill more penetrating than much colder winter frosts, Mrs. Courtney, a fastidious but impatient woman, sends Tilly outside to gain herself a bit of piece. Just seven or eight, Tilly obliges and heads out to the seaside strand, where she walks up and down for hours until soaked to the skin and near hypothermia. And promptly contracts pneumonia and dies.

This is just the first tragedy to befall the Courtneys. Ethel and Cora marry — Ethel to Patrick, a naval officer whose infatuation with her she never quite believes, Cora to a Harley Street surgeon. A brother, Bertram — another invention of Scott’s taken from a single photograph of a young man, a proud sahib someplace in India — is attached to the Indian Civil Service but finds he lacks the stiffness of upper lip it requires. Mrs. Courtney never sees how her fastidiousness in morals as much as manners drives her daughters off, Mr. Courtney — the owner of a fish packing company — never recognizes the unbridgeable gap that exists between himself and the shopkeepers and fishermen he lifts a pint with at the New Crown.

What blows the Courtneys to smithereens, though, is the First World War. Ethel’s husband’s ship is sunk by a German torpedo when cruising in waters that were considered submarine-free. Bertram, returned from India, is mowed down in one of the many pointless assaults during the Battle of the Somme. Devastated with grief over his son’s death and brutally isolated when he realizes that no one in the town can see beyond his status as “Courtney of Courtney’s Fish” to empathize with him, Philip Courtney takes his life. And Mrs. Courtney and Margaret — Meg, the spinster — are forced to sell their grand four-story house on the Strand and retreat to the cottage now occupied by Scott and Metcalfe. Yet even as try to build up a new world around this cottage, what comes back to haunt them is not Patrick or Bertram or Philip but little Tilly, who comes to seem a sacrifice offered up to the gods of Victorian conventions.

And Miss Henderson, who comes by bicycle to collect the monthly rent, is she Meg? No, Scott admits:

There has never been a Meg. And sometimes it seems as if there were, for each, only the idea lodged in a brain we term “actual” — the idea which can draw even modest men to murder and call themselves just!

While there is a certain daring in Scott’s willingness not just to acknowledge the artificiality of her invented lives but to insert her own presence in the Lowestoft cottage as a reminder that we should not fully suspend our disbelief, there is also a cost. Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike. Breathe Upon These Slain is a longish book — just a hair under 400 pages — and many of those pages are devoted to reflections on these character Scott has created as constructs rather than people.

Yes, all fictional characters are constructs. But the reason we love fiction and its characters is that in the hands of a good storyteller, we willingly take the leap of faith and believe in their existence, at least within the framework of the novel. As Time’s reviewer wrote, “Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike.”

Breathe Upon These Slain could easily be compared to Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which came out just a few years before and which follows another family, the Pargiters, through a similar span of time. But what separates The Years from Breathe Upon These Slain is that whatever ideas Woolf was attempting to demonstrate are always subordinate to her story and its characters, making her work a masterpiece where Scott’s is only an experiment. A remarkable experiment, and one that is often fascinating in its perspective and details. And while certainly one worth further study as a milestone in the development of metafiction and creative nonfiction, it too often lacks the breath of life it needs to rise to the level of a major work. Breathe Upon These Slain, Scott’s title commands. Yet, in the end, one has to conclude that it’s Scott who has slain the Courtneys.

Breathe Upon These Slain, by Evelyn Scott
New York: Smith & Haas, 1934
London: Lovat Dickson, 1934