The Neglected Books Page

Betty Swanwick, Artist and Subversive Novelist

26 December 2023

Portrait of Betty Swanwick by Clive Gardiner (c.1948).

If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would probably prefer to be remembered, since she resigned from her long professorship at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in 1970 to pursue her unique style, a blend of traditional realism and somewhat exaggerated modernism.

Cover of *Selling England by the Pound* by Genesis, cover painting by Betty Swanwick.

But it would be an injustice not to celebrate her brief but distinctive career as a novelist. Whether she decided to write novels as a vehicle for her illustrations or as an outlet for her literary inclinations, between 1945 and 1958, Betty Swanwick wrote and illustrated three slim novels that gleefully subvert many of the tropes and conventions of the 19th century novels and more than deserve recognition themselves.

Born in 1915, the daughter of a professional draughtsman, Swanwick entered Goldsmith’s College at the young age of 15 and studied under two masters, Edward Bawden and Clive Gardiner. She fell into a long-term relationship with Gardiner, who helped get her a teaching position with Goldsmith’s after her graduation. It was a job she held for over thirty years, though she ultimately saw it as an obstacle to her own creative development.

She supplemented her teaching income by taking on occasional illustration jobs for clients ranging from London Transport to Strand magazine and, less frequently, illustrating children’s books such as Marjorie Seymour’s Camille Cat, “the story of a cat who liked green figs far too well.” Perhaps she felt she could do just as good a job with the words as the illustrations, for in 1945, she published her first novel — or, more properly, novelette, as specified in its subtitle, since it’s just 64 pages long.

The Cross Purposes opens in the manner of any good Victorian novel, with the Reverend Robert Randall and his sister Esmeralda traveling to take a vacant curacy in the prosperous town of Frogs Copping. The beautiful and eligible Esmeralda catches the eye of Frederick, son of Sir Edward Chalmers, the town’s most prominent nobleman, and everyone assumes that the Reverend Robert will pair up with Chalmers’ ward, the lovely Hermione Beauchampers.

Nothing in a Swanwick novel ever turns out quite as planned, though. Hermione is beautiful, cruel, and conniving and more than happy to lure the Reverend into matrimony, but she is no match for her governess, Miss Whistle:

Miss Whistle, mark you, was a woman of shrewd perception and quick ideas, and, being of an uneasy age, seized the possibility of being a respectable married woman with both hands. What more could a plain, intelligent woman require than a plain, egotistical husband with settled means? It was a very good and manageable catch, thought Miss Whistle to herself whilst saying her prayers at night.

Soon, two engagements are announced, and Hermione departs to the Continent in search of wealthier fish. Sir Edward plans a betrothal ball that sets his “noseholes quivering with lively anticipation.” Swanwick knows how to draw her story to an end according to the formula: “There now only remains the winding up of this story to universal satisfaction and cosmic gratification.” This doesn’t, however, mean that everyone lives happily ever after.

Swanwick is too much a realist to risk going into details about what happens after the dual wedding. She sides with Sir Edward, who would be just as happy to see the vision of the two couples at the altar in the lavishly decorated church prolonged indefinitely, “until the whole of them, the bridal party and all, were slowly consumed by death, standing up in a breathless trance in the Floral Chapel.”

Paddy Rossmore’s catalogue raisonné, Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary, lists few works between The Cross Purposes and her next novel, Hoodwinked (1957). Rossmore notes that this is more likely due to the fact that she concentrated on teaching and commercial work and the latter, held by the Society of Illustrators and Artists, was discarded in the course of moves and reorganizations. In any case, when she turned to fiction again, it was to revisit the theme of matrimonial mismatches — but this time brought up to current day and with even more subversive twists.

Cora Fox and Madeleine Mudie are old friends with a common problem: uncooperative children. Cora’s older daughters, Laurel, Flora, and Philippa are mad about jazz and are only interested in improvising and jitterbugging. Her youngest, Gemma, is the loveliest and most conventional in her attitudes … aside from her penchant for lying and cheating. Madeleine’s son, Castor, is handsome, of age, and an ideal candidate to be matched and married off … aside from his disinterest in everything except designing womens’ wear. The solution in obvious to both women.

And its urgency increases when Gemma arrives home, having been expelled from her boarding school for egregious cheating. The shadow it casts upon the family name leads Mr. Fox to take his life in front of Gemma (Swanwick illustrates the scene in case we have trouble picturing it). Gemma sighs with relief at the sight of her dead father. “Phew! Well, that is that,” she says, “very coolly fanning the smoke fumes from her eyes.” Castor and Gem are hastily brought together in hopes of kindling sparks.

Unfortunately, Castor prefers older women. Cora, to be specific. While he goes through the motions to please his mother, he insinuates himself into Cora’s companionship, and finds her love-starved and not entirely unwilling. At the same time, an enormously wealthy and utterly socially inappropriate Indian Rajah buys the estate next door to the Foxes. Gemma may have cheated on a fair number of her subjects, but arithmetic was not one of them. You can see where Swanwick is going. All it takes is the sudden death of the distraught Madeleine to remove the remaining obstacle.

Cover of *Beauty and the Burglar* (1958).

A year later, Arthur Barker Ltd. published her third novel, Beauty and the Burglar, while kicked the Victorian matrimonial formula to the curb for good. Once again, an eligible pair — this time, the ward Palma Purre and the earnest reformer Bernard Follow — are brought together through the machinations of guardians and parents with the aim of achieving a quick and socially profitable match. Palma is not entirely unwilling, but Bernard’s feet are so rooted in the 19th century that it’s hard for her not to get a bit exasperated. “It is to be hoped that we shall see a good deal of each other in the future,” he tells her.

I would find it satisfying to develop you in other ways also: of course, it goes without saying that we refer to the higher ways. There will be much gratification from these services that I am more than willing to render you. Whenever I am free from tours and lectures, I shall endeavour to see you and train you for the proper purpose in life.

Luckily for Palma, one night a cat burglar named Rowland Swagger sneaks into her bedroom to steal her jewelry. Instead, he falls instantly for Palma — and she for him — and the two abscond to his hideout, which happens to be a school where he is teaching a new generation to carry on his dishonorable profession. Rowland proudly shows Palma around his Royal Academy of Crime, allowing her to observe classes ranging from safecracking to the art of proper coshing.

Rather than taking exception to Rowland’s criminal enterprise, Palma is inspired by its educational potential and proposes to deliver a lecture to the students on the “Art of the Golden Section,” aided by an attractive and scantily clad model. The lecture gets a tremendous response and before we know it, the R.A.C. begins transforming into the G.C.C. — the Golden College of Culture. All ends happily at the altar again, or rather the bridge, as Rowland and Palma and Bernard and the thoroughly inappropriate Melba find themselves before an old sea dog named Captain Blott.

John Betjeman found Swanwick’s novels “Strange, startling, funny, and with a weird beauty.” Other reviewers struggled to categorize her books, drawing on everyone from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins to David Garnett and Damon Runyon in hopes of finding a familiar point of reference. Angela Milne probably described them best by writing that they were “small and funny in the way [Daisy Ashford’s juvenile comic novel] The Young Visiters was funny” — but “not unintentionally so.” In fact, she argued, everything Swanwick did “points roundly to its adulthood.” And it would be wrong to dismiss these three little novels as pastiches. If anything, I’d say they looked forward, not back, towards 1960s satires of long-standing British traditions such as Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Swanwick was not just saying that those Victorian tropes were dead but standing in front of their grave and saying a derisive, “Good riddance.”

Betty Swanwick died in 1989 from complications due to cancer. None of her novels has ever been reissued, but several can be had for under $50 if you’re interested. They’re lovely little packages of subversive fun.

Three novels by Betty Swanwick:
The Cross Purposes (1945)
Published by Editions Poetry London
Hoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958)
Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel (1961)

8 December 20237 December 2023

The Darkened Room by Hilde Spiel (1961)

“Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it’s just a big firesale, the whole rutten thing.” Hilde Spiel quotes this line from Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as an epigraph to her novel The Darkened Room (1961), about a group of Europeans who’ve washed up in Manhattan as jetsam from the firesale known as World War Two. Lele, the narrator, is a young Latvian woman whose parents were victims of the war: her father shot by the Soviets as a member of the intelligentsia (he ran Riga’s water system), her mother dead of starvation, one of the thousands abandoned by their Nazi captors in the final weeks before surrender. Seduced by an Italian in a displaced persons camp, she arrives in New York with a toddler son and an introduction to Mrs. Langendorf, an Austrian Jewess now working in New York as a psychiatrist.

Lele soon learns that Mrs. Langendorf may not have official credentials as a therapist, but she is a master of messing with people’s heads, and she moves on to work as housekeeper for Lisa, another expat Austrian Jewess. Lisa’s background is even murkier than Mrs. Langendorf’s. She spent the war in Rome as — even the relatively naive Lele figures this out — the mistress of a black marketeer. Her closets are full of designer Italian outfits, expensive paintings, priceless figurines and objets d’art. She escaped punishment when the Allies liberated the city by entrapping a well-meaning Army captain, Jeff, into marriage and is now installed in her apartment as the queen bee of a hive of fellow Central European refugees.

Lisa is neither beautiful nor friendly but somehow she manages to keep all around her in thrall, hosting parties paid for by selling off odds and ends of her Italian booty. She spends days huddled in her bedroom “like the oyster in its shell, surrounded by her scent bottles and her jewelled monocle and her books and her birds and her indecent Pompeian pictures, while she supped from her Louis Seize table and cowered on her gold-shot bedcover or lain in her pink sheets.”

Lisa seems to be, for Spiel, the embodiment of the decay and death of the culture of pre-war Europe, the world of cafes, liberal humanism, and carefree decadence. She draws in people with her intensity, but as Lele ultimately discovers, it’s an intensity fueled by heroin and an increasing fear that she is irrelevant in this new world. Lele comes across a note on which Lisa has scribbled, “Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous.” [Live? Our valets will do it for us.] As her physical and mental condition deteriorates, she still hosts her parties, but now she is less the maîtresse d’salon than a “somewhat deranged invalid who must be humoured and flattered, and whose odd behaviour must be glossed over with a lot of small talk.”

The Darkened Room has a certain morbid fascination perhaps not dissimilar to that exercised by Lisa over her circle of followers. Hilde Spiel’s motivation for writing the book, however, are perplexing. Spiel, like Mrs. Langendorf an Austrian Jew with some experience in psychological research, won the Julius Reich Prize for outstanding Austrian literature with her first novel, Kati auf der Brücke, in 1933 but emigrated to England in 1936. There, she married Peter de Mendelssohn, a descendent of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and became a naturalized British citizen.

After the war, she lived in England but spent increasing amounts of time in Austria, ultimately settling again in Vienna. She published a number of books in English as well as German. She never lived in the U.S., aside from a few visits. So why write this book that is such a condemnation of the European culture that she clearly embraced again? Looking around Lisa’s bedroom after her death, Lele thinks,

Europe, with its vice and its wisdom, its horror and its fascination, its cruelty and its refinement, was, like the evening sun, sinking down beneath the horizon. At last I was shaking free from the beautiful monster which had eaten my father and mother and pursued me across the ocean to lure me back, to ensnare me with the help of its rarest and most bewildering spectres.

Spiel appends a postscript in the voice of Paul Bothe, a popular German novelist who has become a permanent resident of the U.S. Bothe visits Lele and Jeff, now married and living happily and quietly in San Francisco. “By all outward appearances,” he writes, “they are two delightful people, typical of the artless, uncomplicated youth of the United States.” Wondering how the two could have been caught up in Lisa’s death spiral, he has to admit that, “As far as can be seen, there are no traces of it left.”

This is an odd conclusion to a very odd novel. In making the somewhat innocent Lele her narrator, Hilde Spiel draws us in as effectively as Lisa does her coterie, but then she buries the rotting old corpse of Europe and sends Lele, Jeff, and little Mario off to sunny California and a life that could come straight out of an ad in a 1949 issue of Saturday Evening Post. One wonders if she wrote The Darkened Room — in English, not German, by the way — in the old world comfort of the chalet in Saint Wolfgang im Salzkammergut that Wikipedia tells us she owned from 1955 on. It reads almost like an exorcism, yet after writing it, Spiel seems to have been content to reside in the lap of the evil spirits she had cast out.

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel
London: Methuen, 1961

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin (1941)

29 October 202329 October 2023

Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)

This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.

I can’t imagine many biographical novels about anarchists begin with the subject lying in bed as a child, hand between thighs, pleasuring herself. But Ethel Mannin’s Red Rose (1941), a fictionalised biography of the Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) does just that. Goldman’s childhood crush, a teenage boy called Petrushka, looked after the family’s ‘horses, and tended the sheep and cows in the field. Petrushka was tall and strong; quiet and gentle,’ Mannin writes. She then describes a game the young Emma played with him in which he,

lifted her up and suddenly flung her above his head, catching her as she fell and pressing her against him as she slid to the ground, so that she knew the body smell of his shirt and the animal smell of his coat, the warmth of his strong hard body, and the grip of his rough gentle hands. …there was no fear in this excitement, it was pure ecstasy.

Then Mannin paints this scene:

And it came again in the warm dark secrecy of the nights, so that childish hands pressed down between the remembering thighs in an attempt to recapture the sensation, and the darkness would be alive with Petrushka’s brown smiling face, the smell of horses, cattle, sweat, and the fields. Petrushka became her last thought on falling asleep and her first on waking.

Throughout her life, Goldman had an active sex life and many lovers. In her younger years she was in a ménage a trois with her soul mate, the anarchist and writer Alexander Berkman, and an artist who lived with the couple. They were not lovers for long, but their deep spiritual and political union lasted for the rest of their lives. As she aged, Goldman felt increasingly bitter about the uneven opportunities for men and women on what we would now call ‘the dating scene’. Berkman (the fictional Sasha in the book) had fallen in love with 20-year-old Emmy (Elsa in the book) whom he’d met in a café in Berlin when he was 52.

They were together until he died by suicide in June 1936. Mannin describes this as a thorn in Goldman’s side: ‘A man could age and lose his looks,’ she writes channelling the voice and mind of Goldman, ‘and still command the passionate love of the young and beautiful; it was not easy for a woman. Her business was not to desire but to be desired, and when her desirability was ended her desires were expected to die automatically—and the tragedy was that they didn’t. No one thought it wrong for a middle-aged man to desire a young girl, but everyone was horrified if a middle-aged woman showed other than a maternal interest in a young man.’

Mannin is sympathetic to Goldman’s desire not just for a fairer world but for a fairer playing field for women. A committed socialist and feminist herself, Mannin was also no stranger to love affairs. Like Goldman, she came from humble means; her father was a postal worker and her mother was a farmer’s daughter. Born in 1900, she supported the anarchist cause and fought for sexual liberation. In between her two failed marriages, she had affairs with W. B. Yeats and Bertrand Russell. Part of the pleasure of reading Red Rose, is the satisfaction of reading the life of a complex and politically driven woman as constructed and shaped by a female author who one senses has a strong kinship with her subject.

The first two thirds of Red Rose feel more like a straightforward biography than a work of fiction because in these segments Mannin is basing her novel closely on Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life, which ends in 1928 – twelve years before Goldman’s death. The latter part of Red Rose had no memoir to rely on. Those final years of Goldman’s life needed to be ‘reconstructed from various sources—including imagination’, Mannin tells us in her short introduction. ‘And it is precisely that part of her life which I have had to reconstruct which has most interested me as a novelist, and which she urged I must “one day” write.’ This explains the tonal shift in the final third of the book which is imbued with a stronger imaginative power and a more novelistic sweep.

The two women met in the late 1930s when they were working on behalf of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) – the anti-fascist faction fighting against General Franco’s Spanish Nationalists. There is no historical documentation of their meeting, but there is one photo of them, from 1937, when Goldman came to Britain to speak at a London meeting in support of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).

Ethel Mannin chairing a meeting in support of the Spanish anarchist CNT-FAI, with James McGovern, MP, (left) and Emma Goldman (right). Friends’ House, London, February 1937.

In the photo, we see Emma Goldman, aged 69, standing, shoulders back, delivering one of her fiery speeches. Ethel Mannin, hair pulled back severely would have been 38 in this photo – she looks off to the distance, wearing a serious expression. James McGovern, an MP, is furiously making notes. A year after this photo was taken, Emma Goldman would die from a stroke suffered in Toronto. Her body was allowed back into the US and she was buried in Chicago.

Goldman’s many affairs and two failed marriages feature prominently in Red Rose. Her second marriage was to the Welsh Miner James Colton (Jim Evans in Red Rose) is mentioned only three times in Goldman’s memoir, whereas Mannin brings in her novelist’s eye to this episode turning it onto a somewhat bittersweet affair. There was never any hint of a sexual relationship between the couple, and Mannin describes how after the registry office wedding, ‘When the marriage was affected,’ Emma ‘was impatient to get away. She realised that it meant disappointing Evans, and to “compensate” him she slipped him a ten shilling note on the station platform, urging him to “treat” himself and one or two of “the boys” to the pictures.’ There is a sense in Mannin’s description that the fictional James Colton, was in some ways humiliated or at the very least disappointed by Goldman’s perfunctory approach to their union. As an anarchist himself, he was committed to the cause and felt honoured to be able to do something for the famous Emma Goldman, but Mannin writes, ‘He stood there, troubled, confused, fingering the note she had forced upon him, overriding his bewildered objections.’ It’s in moments like these, when Mannin inhabits the interior world of her characters, that Red Rose fully comes alive.

Goldman’s life, according to Mannin, was one of passion and struggle. She was incarcerated for inciting a riot but only served several short prison sentences. Most of her struggles centred around money: she never had enough of it and was often hungry and homeless. In order to feed herself and to fund her travels and lectures to spread the anarchist message, Goldman took on whatever work she could. As a young woman, she worked making corsets and then in a glove factory. She trained and practiced as a nurse, set up a massage parlour and had two failed attempts at running an ice cream shop. She had a go at being a street prostitute on 14th Street in New York which ended in ignominy. The gentleman who took her for a drink noticed that she was not cut out for the job. He took pity on her, and after buying her a drink, gave her ten dollars for the trouble it took her to put on a fancy frock.

Much of Goldman’s energy is taken up with fund raising, which Mannin, as a self-made woman describes with a profound understanding. Reading Red Rose is a glimpse into the life of Goldman and into the mind of Mannin. The novel doesn’t completely work as a piece of fiction, and yet, it does re-imagine how a life can be documented and how pushing the boundaries of imagination are crucial to creating a successful work of fiction – even one that sticks so close to biography. In feminist politics there is always a sense of a trajectory, of history moving with the times, but what we see here is not history as a passive inevitability progressing from one idea to the next but a sense that history can be shaped and created by women with the aim of a fairer world. It is the fact that Ethel Mannin took on such a vital and important subject and had the courage to fill in the gaps of Goldman’s life with her own imaginings that makes Red Rose such an important work in the library of women’s – and the world’s – struggles.

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin
London: Jarrolds, 1941

Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).

The Colours of the Night, by Catherine Ross (1962)

19 October 2023

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .

Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.

It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.

71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”

A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.

Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.

But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:

“But what shall we do about us?”
“What about us?”
“Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.”
He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.

And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross - paperback edition

From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia’s cigarette lighter that it’s just a matter of time before flirting becomes romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another operational tour).

But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone switchboard operators.

Betty Beaty, AKA Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell — Betty Beaty, alias Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell.

Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross, then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she published nine Harlequin romance novels.

The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable tale that’s rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War Two.

The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)
This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke (1931)

15 October 2023

starke - born into captivity

I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’s The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”

Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.

But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.

More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”

On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”

Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”

The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”

Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.

The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”

A. T. Simon III and Helen Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960 — A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960.

Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931
London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge (1934)

7 September 2023

Advertisement for Fortune Grass by Mabel Lethbridge — Advertisement for *Fortune Grass* from the *Daily Telegraph*.

“Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns his father has cut him off without a penny.

“Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Which could well serve as this remarkable woman’s motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed into those years!

Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly (mirroring her parents’ marriage), her mother took the children to Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school — a stay that was short-lived.

With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see, cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good cause.

Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she lies again — to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is sewing uniforms — and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the women working there were never more than a stray spark away from death. “That’s the last shell, by the time you’ve done that the milk will be here,” one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. “The last shell! The last shell!” she thinks. And then:

… a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being ’hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother! Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn’t someone come? Wouldn’t someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers pierced my consciousness.

When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other women in her hut are dead.

Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her side. But Mabel’s greatest fear is for her mother: “Oh, Tattie, Tattie,” I sobbed, “I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won’t tell Mother, will you?”

For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire — at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change how her family viewed her condition. “Don’t you realise you are a cripple?” her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of hand-me-downs — a skirt with a large burn in the back: “That’ll do for Mabel, she never goes anywhere.”

But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse, climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable women’s hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay away.

The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants — widows and spinsters who “exuded an air of tragedy” — combined with the tedium of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs, relationships, and living arrangements.

Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations, cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion. She co-habits with “Daddy,” the demobbed Army officer with whom she’d started a correspondence during the war — despite the fact that he’d married another woman in a mad moment — then falls in love with his cousin Noel, who moves in with them.

“Peggy the chair girl,” from the *Sunday Pictorial*, December 3, 1922.

In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel, “Peggy the Chair-Girl” expands her business in the space of a year to one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.

Article about Noel Kalenberg’s failed suicide attempt, 1922.

Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly suspected of murder.

Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is carrying his child, but that doesn’t prevent him from knocking her around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his allowance.

Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent (1934).

Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she’s vending chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work, carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other. And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And she’s just 28!

Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she died, she’d been the subject of a “This is Your Life” television show and included in the historic BBC “Great War Interviews” series.

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as “Granny Mabel” in the 1960s, just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to Milan:

I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in Cornwall at Granny Mabel’s when a leg sprang out and hit me, and it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn’t like you to miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War when she was sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel, who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.

So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your shoes — one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1968)

19 July 2023

Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for <em>A Jingle-Jangle Song</em> by Mariana Villa-Gilbert. — Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for *A Jingle-Jangle Song* by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.

Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.

Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.

Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.

The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:

“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)

Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.

Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.

A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.

In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.

In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”

The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.

A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.

Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.

Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.

What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane (1935)

12 July 2023

Dust jacket of first edition of Faith, Hope, No Charity by Margaret Lane

This is a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale.

The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936, beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you’ve probably never heard of it.

Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges’ deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane’s novel Faith, Hope, No Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You’ve probably never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless you’re a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist). Competing against Lane’s debut novel for the prize that year were Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that year, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E. Bates.

The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about £4,000 in today’s money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until 1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee’s criteria were that the winning novel should be a ‘strong and imaginative’ work, that the author should show promise for the future and that there should be something in the novel that should reveal the ‘true character and spirit’ of Englishness to French readers.

What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as if they were separated by vast oceans.

Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for *Faith, Hope, No Charity* in July 1937.

Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily Express and then Daily Mail, writing ‘descriptive’ pieces about events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels in 1933). Lane’s reporter’s eye describes in great detail a divided world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy inhabitants of the West End:

Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance. They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more hands… The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.

It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams, married to Ada, one of the book’s female protagonists. Lane implies this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a different class: Ada, an ostler’s daughter, the lower classes; Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd, the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny. Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three, boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a damp country house.

None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative effort:

The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in its white globe purred hoarsely.

They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these women may lead fulfilling and free lives.

The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers, surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in London’s East End, it is also ‘otherland,’ an extraordinary island of Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead: Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion, disappointment and its examination of the ‘new public woman’ gives Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix Femina committee.

The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the novelists Kate O’Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd, Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.

One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished submission from a literary point of view as ‘a journal kept by a lunatic.’ Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene’s A Gun for Sale as: ‘a bogus book. Intensely insincere.’ Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell, saying: ‘As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant personality.’ And so it seems that Margaret Lane’s ‘promising’ novel was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.

It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make are forced upon them and thus their ‘freedom’ lacks agency; their experiences are not transformative. The dropped ‘aitches’ of the working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional characters.

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935

Dr Sarah Lonsdale Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Margaret Boylen and her Odd Outcasts

17 May 2023

Margaret Boylen was a writer ahead of her time. Her three novels were published in the age of Eisenhower and Father Knows Best, when men like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs could get away with writing about outsiders and fringe lifestyles but women had to conform to stricter stereotypes. Though a few critics appreciated what she tried to do, most found her choice of characters and plots too weird for literary fiction yet not weird enough to fit with a genre label like horror or science fiction.

The opening lines of Mary McGrory’s review of Crow Field, Boylen’s first novel, in the New York Times captures what might attract some readers and repel others: “Anyone who things that a Dali canvas should be wired for sound or that the Ancient Mariner would be the perfect dinner guest should be entirely charmed with Crow Field. Readers whose simpler tastes run to a desire to know what an author is talking about will probably leave off after a few pages, pleading seasickness.” She described Boylen’s prose as “a heaving sea of words” and “an epic verbal bender.” Martha Schlegel of the Philadelphia Inquirer thought that Boylen’s conception outstretched her talent: “This novel combines a mystery story with a stream of consciousness technique to present a symbolic struggle between good and evil, the whole meanwhile being used as a vehicle for comment on the state of humanity. The result … collapses under its own weight.”

Crow Field is set in a New England country town in the middle of summer stock season and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. Ella Kinney comes to design sets for the resident theater company but is actually intent on figuring out the reason that the theater’s previous designer, Clem, disappeared. The actors and director think he just ran off out of artistic pique. Ella, aided by premonitory dreams, is certain he was murdered.

In none of her books does Margaret Boylen follow a straight line in her narrative or sentences, but Crow Field is by far her most circuitous work. If you’re looking for a story, you’ll probably not make it past the first chapter, which is a bit of a rapturous description of the town of Crow Field and its surroundings, sort of Thomas Wolfe channeled through Thomas de Quincey after a particularly good snack of opium.

But just as some travelers prefer wandering off the beaten path, some readers will relish Boylen’s meanderings. Here, for example, on her way back to her boarding house, Ella sees some children playing:

High on a heap of ashes, flapping her arms and crowing like a rooster, stood the little girl, the King of the Hill, empress and protector of all the children. She was their ideal; hers were the treasures of romance, imagination and daring. Aristocratic, greedy and generous, she bestowed favors of withheld them as she chose, for she knew everything in the world that could be done and could tell about it afterwards, saying that which was not, unchallenged, for in her mouth lies turned into fables. She stood on the ash pile crowing, and her followers brought her empty bottles, queerly shaped pieces of broken china, and the first violets of spring. She was a tidal wave that gathered to itself the whole ocean of childhood and strode inland like a mother, full-skirted and towering, to cast her watery brood on a friendly and unpeopled shore. There was nothing to hold or to bind her, it was the time of bliss and grace, she took the world by storm.

Though Doubleday tried to entice readers by promising “the excitement of literary discovery,” Crow Field was forgotten within weeks of publication. It took nine years for Boylen to return to print, this time with a new publisher (Random House), but yet another odd young woman as her heroine.

In The Marble Orchard, Lovey Claypoole, who was blinded by an explosion in her father’s workshop as he was tinkering with one of his many impractical inventions, regains the ability to see just before her grandmother’s burial in the cemetery — the marble orchard — atop the hill overlooking her Iowa town. There are echoes of Huckleberry Finn in the hideout Lovey makes for herself in the cemetery and later shares with the town’s renegade, Robber Jim, and a climactic flood to bring the town together at the end.

Boylen was a little more successful in attracting readers this time around. The New York Times book editor, Orville Prescott, confessed that he only read the book because it was pressed on him by his daughter. “I had to find out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily.”

It didn’t grab him at first: “The opening pages are enough to set one’s teeth on edge because they are so overwritten.” How overwritten? Well, here’s an early sentence:

When the supply of tombstones ran out and new upstart families had set up a rival cemetery on the other side of town, a cemetery whose polished and tinted marbles sparkled like wedding cakes in the sunshine, the First Families of New Hoosic (for such was the town’s inaccurate name), most of them, like mine, played-out, down-at-the-heel, the heel bruised by stones not left unturned in the bumsteered search for Grace, scurried around until they found, living in a tar-paper shack near Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City, an old-timer, a stone cutter who delighted in the prospect of scaring the daylights out of quick and dead alike.

Overwritten? Meandering, certainly, but no longer wrapping itself in the cloak of Thomas Wolfe.

Nevertheless, The Marble Orchard soon won Prescott’s heart. The book was, he cheered, “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” On the other hand, he acknowledged, it might not: “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.” Amen, brother!

The Times’s assigned reviewer, Victor Hass, saw the book as a quirky, corny country comedy: “Mrs. Boylen has recreated a time and a place and a people with wit, strength and an admirable economy of words [did he read the same book as Prescott?].” He then condemned the book to a New York reviewer’s Purgatory: “The result is an excellent regional novel.” These were the days when Willa Cather was still referred to as “a fine regional novelist.”

The best thing about The Marble Orchard is Lovey Claypoole’s voice, as distinctive in its perspective and diction as Mattie Ross’s in Charles Portis’s classic, True Grit. When Robber Jim — who is, in reality still a teenager himself and just a few years older than Lovey — tells her he plans to escape if sent to reformatory school, she despairs:

Misery. The good old-fashioned Number One Dilemma. Even setting aside the peculiar impossibility of it — or being but children, sexy, but children — the horned dilemma lowered at us. It often happens that two people who cannot be with each other cannot be without each other. But they have to, anyway, one thing or the other. And not pine away and die of it, either, nor lace it up in a suicide pact. Why not? Because it’s out of fashion, that’s why, and when a thing is out of fashion and has no style, you’ve lost the hang of it and don’t know how to do it anymore. But these are deep waters and God knows Lovey [Lovey often refers to herself in the third person] and her persnickety Robber were not in them. Just water-bugging over the surface, for the nonce.

The Marble Orchard sold slightly less poorly than Crow Field, but it did at least earn Boylen a Guggenheim Fellowship. Even with that, though, she struggled to progress on her third book. “I’m off to a party at the drop of a hat,” she told one interviewer. Still, she managed to return to print after five years — and with the same publisher — with A Moveable Feast. Although A Moveable Feast was a fresh title at the time, its use three years later for Ernest Hemingway’s bestselling posthumous memoir of Paris in the 1920s helped guarantee its disappearance.

A Moveable Feast (1961) is an Edward Gorey-esque take on Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers books. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to the five Mortrude children, who attain a gruesome bit of early fame when their parents are both killed in a tractor accident that has to be read to be believed. Orphaned and penniless, they are rescued and raised through the collective generosity of their hometown of Clorinda. Or at least, that’s what their guardian and the book’s narrator, Will Calhoun, would have everyone believe.

Uncle Will has hopes for the five Mortrudes as he attempts to raise them (Chapter Two, “How They Grew”) and then, years later, when four of them (Little Od having died trying to fly from the roof of their house) return to Clorinda (Chapter Three, “Why They Grew”). Located just down the road from the Claypoole’s New Hoosic, Clorinda aspires to be a version of Lake Wobegon, a town where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Instead, as the four big Mortrudes demonstrate, reality comes closer to William Carlos Williams’ vision than Garrison Keillor’s. These pure products of Clorinda go crazy, each in his or her own way. Like a remarkable number of Midwestern boys, Farnham heads straight for the coast and becomes a hard-drinking, far-traveling, tattooed sailor. Gidley rises high in academia but proves obsessed with minutiae. Jessica becomes a great beauty of Broadway who needs a third of a fifth to get through an evening.

And Eleanor becomes, perhaps, a proxy for Boylen herself. “Eleanor has still to learn that the shortest distance between a subject and a predicate is the simple declarative sentence,” Calhoun observes after reading an “unfairy tale” she sends him. In fact, as the Mortrude’s return to Clorinda approaches, he begins to see that his reality and theirs have been on separate planes for a long time: “Buffaloed. They had me buffaloed; from the very start, and my fear of the Reunion comes on apace.”

Several reviewers described A Moveable Feast as a Grand Guignol comedy set in a cornfield, but I think they missed what’s really going on in the book. It’s true that Boylen fills her pages with extravagant declarations and exuberant eccentrics. Like The Marble Orchard, it’s a book that would appeal to fans of Gorey, Charles Addams, and Lemony Snicket. But Boylen’s Midwest gothic has just as much in common with Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic: beneath its surface of the odd and the extreme runs a bedrock of moral granite. For Boylen, the real freaks are the ones struggling the most to maintain a facade of normality.

Margaret Boylen was just a year or two too early for the wave of black humor that became one of the high points in 1960s American fiction. And her chances of establishing a place alongside Bruce Jay Friedman, J. P. Donleavy, and Joseph Heller may also have been undermined by health problems. She died of a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 46. Her work has never been reissued.

The Room Opposite by F.M. Mayor (1935)

17 December 202310 May 2023

Cover of the Solar Press edition of *The Room Opposite and Other Tales* by F. M. Mayor.

This is a guest post by the founder of Solar Press.

By rights, F.M. Mayor should be one of England’s most beloved novelists. The Rector’s Daughter was a bestseller upon its initial release and her other books were moderate successes. Virginia Woolf and John Masefield admired her work, Bertrand Russell was a friend, and her one and only short story collection for adults — released posthumously in 1935 — received a glowing endorsement from M.R. James, arguably the world’s greatest writer of ghost stories.

And yet, F.M. Mayor is not a household name. There have been no films made of her books, no BBC miniseries. Though everyone who reads her work seems instantly to become a fan and evangelist, she never seems to break through into the mainstream. Her relatively recent critical reappraisal, primarily within academic circles interested in early 20th century women writers, seems to be the closest Mayor has come to a mainstream breakthrough since the original publication of The Rector’s Daughter in 1924.

Despite many attempts over the years — from Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press to the Penguin Modern Classics series, Virago, and, most recently, the always wonderful Persephone Books — Mayor’s work seems destined for obscurity.

And none of Mayor’s work has proved more obscure than her final (posthumous) release: The Room Opposite & Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

There is little information available online about the collection, beyond a handful of blog posts and M.R. James’ endorsement of the work — notable as M.R. James, a noted reactionary and literary traditionalist, rarely praised (more often, he openly criticised) contemporary literature. Like many others, James’ endorsement of a work was enough to intrigue me; unlike most others, I became so fixated on the work that I wasn’t deterred by its unavailability and instead sought the work out at the British Library.

When I finally read the collection, James’ praise made complete sense. Not only are Mayor’s short stories a masterclass in the form, but, as has been noted by others, there is a definite conservative, almost reactionary, streak within Mayor’s work that James would certainly have appreciated.

Though Mayor associated socially with notable feminists, she herself does not seem to have identified as a feminist — much of her association with feminists seems to have stemmed from her status as a spinster. But, while many of her friends and associates were spinsters by choice, Mayor was a spinster through tragedy.

As is reflected in her work, Mayor was a romantic. She viewed love as something spiritual, sublime, superhuman, supernatural — variously with the power to revive or destroy those who fall under its spell. When her fiancé, Ernest Shepherd, far away in India, died suddenly in 1903, she was devastated — receiving word of his death by mail as she was closing down her life in England and preparing to join him.

Already sickly, for Mayor the loss was a blow from which she never recovered. After Shepherd’s death, she moved in with her sister and lived her remaining years quietly, splitting her time between writing and local charitable work. There is no record of her ever having another romantic relationship, and the residues of Ernest’s death are clearly visible in her writing — most notably in her story “The Unquiet Grave,” the story of a lover who loses his betrothed while trapped miles away, unable to visit her; and “Le Spectre de la Rose,” in which a woman is haunted by a man who is the image of perfection, immortal, distant, never ageing, and unattainable; her devotion to him gradually destroys her.

As noted, Mayor’s stories have a reactionary streak, often showing a clear distrust of “progress” in the political sense. In her stories, family and tradition are valued for their own sake; folk knowledge is respected and folk traditions are considered a logical extension of this knowledge. By contrast, social progressives, atheists, reformists, and rationalists are (at best) misguided utopians. There is never any contempt for these individuals — Mayor’s work is too inherently compassionate for that — but there is a fear that, in man’s rush to modernise himself and his society, his soul may be in danger. While this is most explicit in “Mother And Daughter” — the closest any of the short stories comes to open polemic — it’s a constant theme throughout.

Despite this, Mayor’s reactionary streak, much like M.R. James’, could hardly be labelled a one-note ‘of the time’ Christian conservatism. This same collection features stories where those fighting against tradition and society for a more spiritual kind of true love, those who murder righteously to protect or avenge, and those in the country still clinging to their ancient witchery and occult practices are presented at least compassionately, and frequently heroically.

Mayor’s morality is less obviously political than it’s often presented, more self-directed, spiritual, almost pagan—in contrast to her publicly expressed Anglican religious sensibilities. It’s hard to pin her down as having any worldview in particular, beyond being distrustful of the rapid, radical social change happening all around her, and an innate belief in the Chesterton’s Fence idea of tradition.

Despite its reputation and M.R. James’ endorsement, The Room Opposite is not, as it is frequently discussed, just another hard-to-find volume of Edwardian ghost stories. In fact, only around half of the sixteen stories are tales of ghosts or the macabre and the mysterious. The other eight are powerful, emotionally resonant dramatic pieces. Like many posthumous collections, The Room Opposite & Other Tales collects stories written across a period of Mayor’s life, covers various settings and genres, and often serves as a way to display the author’s own conflicted attitudes toward various elements of the world around her.

One of the more harrowing examples of this is “A Season At the Sceptre,” a highlight of the collection. It’s a story of sexual impropriety, harassment, and cruelty that takes place within an acting troupe. In it, a fast and loose modernity destroys innocence through the clash of world-weary city starlets and a naive aspiring actress from the country. The results are devastating. Reading letters Flora Mayor wrote while working as an actress herself, it becomes obvious that this particular tale was almost certainly inspired by her own experiences, first in Hastings (“Conversation in the dressing room is not inspiring … it really does seem to me rather immoral in places, and the tone is low throughout”) and later at the Lyric Theatre in London (“There is a great deal more pawing and squeezing from the managers than one is used to”).

Another dramatic highlight is “Christmas Night at Almira”, a beautifully written yet heartbreaking rumination on the cycles of life, from the freshness of youth, through to the decay of old age. It’s staggeringly honest about it all, and contains some truly haunting passages — not least during its climax, in which the story’s carefree icon of youth is brutally confronted with that ultimate endpoint of elderly decline: death.

As for the pulp macabre, while those tales tend to be rather more hit or miss, they do most clearly show Mayor’s development as a writer. This is most visible when looking at the stories which bookend the collection.

The title and opening story, “The Room Opposite,” while far from bad, is one of the collection’s weaker offerings. A relatively run of the mill, traditional mystery piece which does little to stand out. Though fun, it’s unremarkable. By contrast, the final story in the collection, “Le Spectre De La Rose,” is a masterpiece. Combining the “weird” and the Gothic with a more romantic, emotional, female-centric theming, rare for stories of this type — the result is something, which, while calling to mind no mythology in particular, feels distinctly mythological; it has an air of Wilde to it, without ever feeling like a riff or pastiche.

Other highlights of the macabre include the gloriously gothic “The Dead Lady,” and the almost cosmic horror “There Shall Be Light at Thy Death'” Both stories which I will highlight but not describe, to protect the impact of reading them.

And now, you can finally read them.

Inspired by what we’ve now come to believe is F.M. Mayor’s true masterpiece — and our desire to reprint other “lost”, scarce, and out of print books — we established our independent publisher, Solar Press, in early 2023.

We released this book, our first book, on April 5th of this year and we are extremely proud of the achievement.

This is the first reprint of the work since its original publication in 1935 — for the first time since 1935, you no longer have to pay for a rare collectable first edition (averaging £800 – £1500), or take a trek out to London to visit The British Library’s reading rooms.

Mayor is one of the unsung literary greats, and we’re thrilled to finally make such a wonderful collection accessible to a new generation of readers.

Solar Press is an independent publisher based in Bath, UK, focused on reprinting lost, out of print, and forgotten classics.

The Room Opposite is available for purchase for £12.00 at www.SolarPressBooks.com.

Cressida Lindsay, Bohemian

5 April 2023

A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and everything gear fab. “A young girl alone in London’s swinging night world,” with a picture of a mophead and his bird sipping from what appears to be a glass of water, and from all appearances very much in love. So one might expect this to be something of a mod rom-com.

Alice is just under 18, secretly loves Elvis (considered very old school by then), and is in London to experience life. She is intrigued by, then attracted to, then fully under the sway of Matthew, just over 19 and quite full of his own worldly-wiseness. Alice moves into his flat. Only it’s not entirely his flat. There is also David, a student, and Al, a somewhat older Jamaican man.

Matthew and Alice is a match made in Soho. Which means that Matthew sometimes has to work the streets as a rent boy while Alice sips endless espressos while wedging herself into crowded tablefuls of loud artists and drama students and people of ambiguous employment. This relationship swirls around with the current for chapter after chapter, with the only episode of real interest being when Al gets beaten up by a group of white fascists protesting against immigrants. At the end, Alice declares to Matthew, “I don’t want to marry anyone but you,” to which Matthew replies, “Don’t let’s get bored, Alice.”

While No Wonderland is not particularly interesting or successful as a novel, it’s scattered with moments of genuine observations. Like how awkward it is for a young man to pretend to enjoy dancing with a stranger while her boyfriend has disappeared, obstensibly in search of a drink, or how exhausting to sit and pretend to be interested in the conversation of people strenuously trying to win an ennui competition. In fact, what struck me most about No Wonderland was how most of this life that Alice seems so eager to experience is tedious and uninspiring.

And yet, there was something that made me want to give Lindsay another try. No John, No (1966), her third novel (No Wonderland was first published in England in 1962), is about another woman, just a bit older than Alice, and her search for love. “This is a novel about what it is like to be poor, rootless, intense, and lesbian, trapped in a desperate bohemian life on the wrong side of Notting Hill,” the book’s dust flap tells us. Well, at least we know not to expect a rom-com.

“At the moment,” Kate tells us, “I’m living with Terry who is a girl like me and I rather love Terry in a way.” Although Terry is in her 30s, Kate is pleased that she’s “not like most lesbians who get broad in the hips when they pass the age of twenty-nine.”

This is from the second paragraph on page one. Two paragraphs later, we read that “Kate as usual is doing nothing, she bites her fingernails and is waiting for me to do everything for her.” So, now this is Terry speaking. A page later, the author tells us that “Kate and Terry shared a flat near the Portobello Road market.” Then we’re back with Kate, then over to Terry, then back to the author, and so on for roughly half the book, until Kate meets Anne and now we get four perspectives.

Telling a story through multiple narrators is nothing new, of course. Changing them from paragraph to paragraph is somewhat more challenging, but it tends to be less so when what the author is trying to do is help the reader see the complexity of the story. Unfortunately, the story in No John, No is actually quite simple: Kate wants to be in love and, if possible, be loved in return, though that is of secondary importance. The switches of narrators is more distracting than revealing, particularly when the characters themselves seem preoccupied with figuring out their own identities.

The one person in the book who seems to see things clearly is Kate’s married friend, Helen. Helen finds Kate’s good-natured muddle-headedness infuriating, not endearing. “Do you want me to be like you, then? Are you worried that I’m different?” Kate asks her. “No, I don’t want you to be like me,” Helen replies, “but I don’t want you to do things without understanding why, and there is a reason, something to do with your past, a psychological reason Kate.”

Cressida Lindsay and her son Simon, 1963.

Helen may have been addressing her author as much as Kate. For Lindsay’s life was a journey full of abrupt changes of direction. Her granddaughter, Tanya Perdikou, reflected on its erratic course in a 2021 article for the Wellcome Collection:

She received little love from either of her parents and reacted by spurning obligation to others, spending many years erratically pursuing her own desires. Her rejection of the traditional role of ‘mother’ was extreme: she moved from home to home, lover to lover, descended into alcoholism, neglected her five children and ended up founding The Old Rectory, a commune in rural Norfolk.

At the time No John, No was published, Lindsay’s fourth child had just been born. Its father was Anthony Blond, who published Lindsay’s second novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces. Blond was quite deliberately pulled by Lindsay into a complicated triangle with her and her lover, Mark Hyatt. Recalling the bohemianism of her grandfather Norman Lindsay, Blond writes that:

She was equally bohemian in outlook and had three children by three different men. When she met me she decided I was to serve as papa no.4. She stalked me with delicacy. Her current lover, papa no. 3, was a gypsy and a poet called Mark Hyatt. He was beautiful…. A sensuous poetic face, tender lips, eyes you could swim in and a faultless nose…. Of course I fell for him.

After sleeping with both Lindsay and Hyatt, Blond bought her the country house she longed for — The Old Rectory — and was dumped by Hyatt for a tall younger man named Atom. Some time later, when Blond was visiting Lindsay and the chidren there, Atom arrived to say that Hyatt had committed suicide after learning that he was about to be left for a woman.

The dramatically different covers of the UK and US editions of *Lovers and Fathers*.

She married Peter Hammerton in 1968 and had her fifth and last child by him. Her next novel, Lovers and Fathers (1970), is something of a fictional account of how she ended up with five children and at least as many lovers. Lindsay, the American publisher’s blurb tells us, “has always been completely open to love in whatever variety it presented itself, whether casual, Freudian, heterosexual, lesbian, forced, seductive, or literary.” Whether we’re quite sure of what all of those adjectives refer to, we certainly get a healthy sample of the frenetic and eclectic nature of Lindsay’s love life:

For six months I had lived with the children and a few lovers. For a week I had fallen in love with a journalist because his eyebrows hung over his eyes like a moustache, and his mouth was red and he had life so well organised…. Then for weeks I liked sleeping with me…. one evening I fell in love with a tall man who had green eyes….
And then there was Bill, off to Canada the next day, he talked of the forests and pines and he drank beer very quickly…. Also Robin. Sometimes he stayed and he was good to hold, and also to be held by. One day, he said, “I’m glad your Jason affair has burned itself out.”

Then we’re on to Thomas and Gloria and Robin and it becomes like trying to remember faces on the sidewalk from a seat in a fast-moving bus. Around the time of Lovers and Fathers , John Swinfield visited Lindsay at The Old Rectory and filmed a short piece for Anglia Television that is available for viewing (if you’re in the UK) on the BFI Player. It shows a vibrant if chaotic community of writers, artists, and musicians centered around the rough country house, with children wandering on and off camera and talk and music and laughter filling the air.

If Lindsay’s like was full of children and lovers and friends at the time, it was also full of alcohol. What she couldn’t silence with the noise and energy of the people around her she could try to numb with drink. Perhaps a clue to the demons she was struggling with can be found in her second and best novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963).

At least one reviewer joked that the book’s title tells us all we need to know about its plot. But plot is of secondary importance here. “This book makes shocking reading,” the paperback edition’s blurb tells us. Shocking is the wrong adjective, though. Shocks are sudden. They have lingering effects, but they are usually brief, like a bolt of lightning. Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces is like fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by an exhausted but relentless prizefighter.

When the book opens, ten-year-old Rachel has found a purse with some cash on the street. She takes it home but know better than to tell her mother Lucy about it, for Lucy will just take the money down to the pub to get drunk and probably come home late that night with a man she’d picked up. Much of the world may still be a mystery to Rachel, but she knows that money buys food, which she never gets much of.

Rachel’s father has gone to war. We gather from a few things Lucy says that he was probably taken prisoner in the British Army’s retreat from the German blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but it’s clear that Lucy has given up hope and Rachel is trapped in a limbo of deprivation and neglect. She has a few other children to play with and together they built a little shelter that becomes a refuge for Rachel, but it’s a rough sort of refuge. Stan, a thuggish boy just turning teen taunts Rachel as a “Lying Jew puss” and attempts to force himself on her.

Lucy’s drinking progesses to the point she staggers home one night in a fit of DTs and her ravings become so loud and violent that the police are called and take her away. Rachel is then sent to what she’s told is a girl’s school but is obviously a reformatory. The attendants, known as rats, feel free to insult, mock, and slap the inmates. “This is not a rest home for young ladies, you know,” one of the rats tells her.

Her situation improves a bit when she is moved to a Catholic convent, though the sisters inflict a form of religious abuse by hounding her with the need to memorize the catechism and prepare herself for conversion. Rachel spends almost four years here, but they pass in a few pages. Then one day, a balding man in a thick overcoat and a grubby shirt shows up to take her away. “Are you Daddy?” she asks. “I never expected such a grown-up daughter. And quite pretty,” he tells her. What follows are the worst three pages in the book.

Though Cressida Lindsay may not have experienced quite the level of abuse and poverty that her character Rachel does, she did have a childhood marked by extreme highs and lows. Her father, the novelist Philip Lindsay, was friends with many celebrities and a lively figure in London creative society, but he had trouble holding onto money and Cressida spent more time with the sisters at her convent school than with her parents. The title Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces may give some indication of the abandonment she may have experienced and explain why she so fervently sought the company of others, seeking a level of contact and commitment that not all of them were willing to give.

After over decade at The Old Rectory, Lindsay and her husband Philip moved into the city of Norwich. She became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and cared for Philip when he began to suffer from dementia. After her death in 2010, her son Dylan Hyatt discovered the manuscript of a fifth novel, written around the time of her move to Norfolk, and arranged to have it published as an e-book. The Mole and the Mountain is available from Amazon.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler (1956)

29 March 2023

Cover of the UK hardback edition of *The Paper Dolls*.

Ida Erickson, the central figure in Laura Beheler’s first novel, The Paper Dolls, is a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed child. Despite the Depression, both her mother and father have good jobs and can treat her to new dresses, cokes, and store-bought cakes when many of her classmates wear hand-me-downs and go without lunch. Every day, Ida comes home and, the good little girl she is, goes to her room and plays. Which suits her parents, who are usually fighting behind their locked bedroom door. Without her parents, Ida is effectively alone:

Her grandmothers and granddaddies were all dead; they never even knew she got alive. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Damned old women sat around her kitchen table and slurped up her cokes. Ida rocked from side to side, tears wetting her arms, rolling down her chin, falling in small droplets onto the grass. Whispering blearily, she moaned. Was there ever anybody in the whole history of the whole world who didn’t have anybody?

Cover of the US hardback edition of *The Paper Dolls*.

With no real friends, Ida has provided herself with her own friends, the characters she keeps in her Universal Theme and Composition Book (No. S-1055). Sometimes they are just the head and shoulders taken from a Montgomery-Ward catalog; sometimes a full-length figure cut from a copy of The Delineator magazine. Beside each, she notes the name, vital statistics, key facts:

Sands Chutney — 14 years — 5 feet 1 inch tall — 109 pounds — English aristocrat — very rich.
Agnes Eaves — 15 years — 5 feet — 97 pounds — blond hair — very educated.
Dan Davis — 15 years — 5 feet 3 inches — 110 pounds — plays violin — is orphan.

Ida lives in a world so devoid of emotional or social interaction that her paper dolls are not only her source of entertainment and comfort but, as the years go by, more real than the real people in her life. When her father, apparently an inveterate philanderer, leaves to take a job in another city, abandoning Ida and her mother, Ida replaces him with a new doll (Fritz Robinson — 15 years — 5 feet, 2 inches — 120 pounds — shipwreck survivor). When her uncle Johnny, a musician, comes to stay for a while and shows more interest than any adult has before, Ida has a brief reprieve from the relentless dreariness of her non-imaginary like. But when Johnny moves on, Ida replaces him:

The first night he was gone, Ida found herself restless in a sea of aloneness. She got out the Universal notebook, laid out a few characters. For a long time she stared at the line-up, wondering what to do with it. Finally she decided Sands Chutney was named Sandy Chutney, and he played a clarinet.

Asked what she’d done on her summer vacation, Ida has only her paper dolls to fall back on:

“Well uh, I have this friend Sands Chutney who’s from New York. He came to see us, and he brought his girl friend with him. Her name’s Agnes Eaves. Well, he plays a real good clarinet, and she plays piano. And they taught me to play drums and guitar. Sands Chutney owns this httle night club back in Memphis, and that’s where he met Agnes Eaves. Well, they kept begging me to go back with them and play drums and guitar in the band. Two or three times I thought maybe I would, but I decided . . .”

Though Ida finishes school, gets a secretarial job, becomes an adult, the world of her paper dolls remains the focus of her life. Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters the war. But to Ida, the war “was simply an incontestable fact, not a penetrating experience.”

Until she meets Allan, a Navy ROTC cadet, who quickly falls in love with her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he falls in love with his impression of Ida. At a superficial level, Ida understands what is expected of a young woman in the social rituals of romance and is capable of playing her part. But at some level, Allan is nothing more to her than a three-dimensional doll, and to him, she is much the same.

When Allan ships off with the Atlantic fleet, Ida moves to New York to wait for him. She dominoes through a series of jobs until she lands one as a day clerk in the Waverly Hotel. Like many of its residents, the Waverly is “a lost and seedy aristocrat.” A bitter 4F Jew named Wally Safferman — well, befriends is too strong a word, so let’s say he attaches himself to Ida. She’s willing to buy drinks and listen, even if she doesn’t really like him much.

The problem with Wally is that he does see Ida for who she is: “‘Ida, you are so …’ He paused, looking for words, then finished, ‘You are so unborn.'” Wally understands the difference between simple innocence and raw naïveté. Ida is still cocooned in the illusions she’s built up around her dolls. “Did you ever go through that stage where you watched with horror while your childhood dream world collapsed?” he asks her in astonishment.

Unfortunately, before Wally can burst Ida’s bubble, Allan writes to say that he’s returning. He has a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas and expects Ida to report for duty:

I’m the man in this outfit. Therefore, where my job is simply has to be the place we go. This whole thing has been crazy long enough, and I’m tired of it. So here it is straight and simple: will you come to Topeka and marry me?

Will she, readers? Well, let’s just say that it comes down to a choice between Allan in Topeka and Sands Chutney in a dark Manhattan bar.

Some reviewers found The Paper Dolls too close to a case study to be fully successful as a novel, but Laura Beheler offers a convincing case for fantasy as a survival mechanism that gets a person through a lot of bleak days. Few readers will reach the end, however, without seeing its long-term limitations. Which is why the other things reviewers called The Paper Dolls was a horror story. If it is a horror story, it is entirely because we cannot help but empathize with Ida, the lost little girl.

Laura Beheler, from the dust jacket of *The Paper Dolls*.

Laura Beheler was no Ida Erickson. Raised in Fort Worth, she served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and a copywriter for Neiman-Marcus, took up fencing and became a regional champion. In the late 1940s, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became a junior high school teacher and wrote three published novels starting with The Paper Dolls. She never married, remained in Santa Fe until her death in 2008 at the age of 87, and presumably never kept a notebook full of paper dolls.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle (1938)

23 March 2023

“Do you mean to say I didn’t give you anything to eat yet?” one character asks another several hours into their wanderings around Paris in Monday Night. At this point, the pair has visited three or four bars and had at least a few drinks in each one of them. And the night is just beginning.

If you’re not one for drinking on an empty stomach, Monday Night may remind you of that time when you made the mistake of going out on the town with someone who considers bar nuts an entree. Bernie Lord, a medical student, arrives in Paris fresh off the train from Le Havre and meets up with a slight acquaintance from Chicago named Wilt Tobin who’s been living in France since before the First World War. His mission is to meet a man named Jean Sylvestre who has become world famous as a forensic toxicologist (though this was before the job had a name). Bernie is in awe of Sylvestre’s technical wizardry and hopes to learn a bit of the master’s craft.

Wilt is the only person Bernie knows in Paris. Literally anyone else would have been a better choice. Wilt is a writer, but somewhere along the way the pleasure of enjoying an aperitif at a sidewalk table outside a charming café has become a compulsion. Writing is now only a means to get money to drink with — that and cadging a glass or five off anyone who will listen to him. Stepping off the train in a crisp new blue serge suit, Bernie is shocked at his first sight of Wilt: “The cracked brown shoes, the grey trousers with no shape left in back or front, the paunch buttoned into the waistcoat, the shirt, the twisted tie, the soft, bristled jowls, the dark small almost fervently set eyes….” Wilt not only has “no sign of youth to recommend him, but no look left in eye or teeth to recall that he ever had been young.”

Still, Wilt feels some obligation to his friend. Luckily for him, though, their first stop, the pharmacy where Sylvestre got his start, is close to the Gare St. Lazare. When they fail to produce any further information about the man than the fact that Monsieur Sylvestre never comes there anymore, Wilt steers Bernie into the nearest bar to discuss next steps. This sets the pattern for much of the plot of Monday Night. The only difference between Bernie and Wilt and Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that they’re looking instead of waiting. Oh, and drinking. In fact, each stage of looking tends to be preceded by around a half dozen drinks.

By around ten P.M., Wilt advises Bernie that it’s now either too late or too early to eat:

“The time we should have started in eating, if we were going to eat at all, was right after the first drinks, the first two or three drinks, right after the gin fizzes we had at the brasserie.” The darkness stretched before him as he walked, facsimile of that obliteration unpunctuated by mood or time that life itself and action had become…. “So now we’ll just have to hold off awhile until the red wine is out of the system,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick the first night we’re out together. I want to take care of you, Bernie.”

Wilt not only seems to run solely on the promise of another drink but as the night wears on, he begins to take over Bernie’s quest as well. Early on, Bernie explodes at Wilt’s complete ignorance of the feats of Monsieur Sylvestre and the murderers condemned through his testimony. “My God, Wilt, don’t you know? Don’t you know about it? I thought everybody — anybody who read the papers, anyway — I thought there wasn’t anybody who–” But Wilt becomes convinced that Sylvestre is hiding a dark secret, that he is motivated less by objective truth than by revenge.

The two men head for Malmaison, on the outskirts of Paris, where Sylvestre now resides in a villa surrounded by large estate. Wilt begins to construct a psychological portrait of the chemist, examining his motivations, wondering at what it must be like to know your words will send a man to the guillotine. When they reach the villa, they learn that Sylvestre is in Lyons on a case, but his servants invite them into the kitchen, where a game of Monopoly is underway. More drinks are had as Bernie finds his will to live fading and Wilt cagily pries out information about Sylvestre.

Wilt and Bernie’s journey takes them out and back into Paris and through Monday night to early Tuesday morning. As with a bad hangover, the world they return to seems both fuzzy and jarring. Bernie no longer knows why he wanted to meet Sylvestre in the first place, and Wilt finds the solution to Sylvestre’s mystery in a newspaper headline spotted as they wait in the Gare St. Lazare for Bernie’s train back to Le Havre.

Monday Night has been described as an unusual detective story. If you accept this, then Boyle’s ending will seem abrupt and ill-prepared. But that’s the wrong way to look at the book. Boyle tells us what Monday Night is really about in its dedication, which comes from one of her unpublished stories called “The Man Without a Nation.” In that story, she writes of the “secret code” of the expats she had come to know in the course of — by that time — fifteen years in Europe:

Those who speak it follow no political leader and take no part in any persecution or conquest; nor have they to do either with a vocabulary of the rich or the poor or any country or race; it being simply one way of communication between the lost and the lost.

Wilt is one of these lost souls, one who has realized that he has stayed too long to be considered a tourist and can never stay long enough to become French. “It didn’t take me very long to find out I was in the wrong country,” he jokes to Bernie. “Only about eighteen years.” Boyle signals this awareness of being a displaced person (before that became an official term at the end of the next world war) in the book’s very first line: “You might have recognized it as a drugstore except for its situation in what might generally be called the wrong country.”

Kay Boyle based the character of Wilt on Harold Stearns, a man she and her second husband, Laurence Vail, came to know in Paris. Legend has it that after reviewing the proofs of a collection of essays by American intellectuals and artists that he edited titled Civilization in the United States, Stearns immediately booked passage to England, convinced that the United States had no civilization. In reality, it’s likely that a favorable exchange rate and the advent of Prohibition played a larger role in his decision.

As it was, he was only able to make it to Paris on the strength of a loan from Sinclair Lewis, who was in awe of Stearn’s potential. It was a loan that Stearns never repaid. Lewis later got something back, however, by referring to Stearns (indirectly, mind) as “an important habitue of the Cafe de Dome in Paris living these many years as a grafter on borrowed money.” Asked to respond by an American reporter, Stearns said he’d like to come back to the U.S. for the privilege of punching Lewis in the face.

Peter Pickem story — A “Peter Pickem” story from the *Chicago Tribune*, 1923.

For a while after arriving in Paris, Stearns was able to get by working as “Peter Pickem,” the Paris track correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. But then his drinking got so bad that he started to go blind and he lost that job and survived on a combination of betting on the horses and the generosity of his drinking partners. As he later wrote in his memoir, The Street I Know (1935), Stearns learned that few friends will buy you a meal, but plenty will buy you a few rounds at the bar. In his book Americans in Paris (1977), Tony Allan wrote that Stearns’s “shabby, unshaven figure was pointed out to newcomers as a warning of the dangers of the Latin Quarter.”

Hemingway was the first to commemorate Harold Stearns in fiction. In The Sun Only Rise, Jake Barnes encounters a friend named Harvey Stone in Stearns’s favorite café:

I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Sélect. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.
“Sit down,” said Harvey. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just looking for you.”
“Been out to the races?”
“No. Not since Sunday.”
“What do you hear from the States?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”
He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.
“Do you want to know something, Jake?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”

Stearns wrote in his memoir, “I would stay up at the Sélect until dawn crept through the windows, drinking champagne and watching the boys and girls do their vaudeville stunts.”

Stearns himself described the Sélect as “a seething mad-house of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter drunks, and sober maniacs (most of whom were on the wagon only temporarily, of course, because of unkind medical favors of the fickle goddess, Venus).” It was, he wrote with bittersweet reflection, “a useless, silly life — and I have missed it every day since.”

But by 1932 — not Wilt’s 18 years, but a little more than ten — Stearns, like Wilt, knew he had stayed too long. “I was just an uprooted, aimless wanderer on the face of the earth. And a lonely one, too. I didn’t like that; I hated it. And, since there was nothing else to do, I would go into the bar and take another drink and try to forget.” With the arrival of the Depression and exodus of easy American money, however, even drinking to forget was becoming harder and harder. “With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money,” Stearns wrote, “I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country — and to try to start all over. Everything about Paris had suddenly become distasteful to me; I suppose because I felt so alien and alone.”

If you’re a fan of 1930s detective fiction, you will certainly find Monday Night unsatisfactory. Sylvestre’s is not that much of a mystery. It’s really just the excuse for Boyle to send her lost soul, Wilt, and his naive companion Bernie, on their hallucinatory odyssey through the Paris night, an odyssey that will ultimately lead them both, like Stearns, back to America.

Monday Night represented both a structural and stylistic departure for Boyle. Although the plot takes place in the space of less than 24 hours, her night will seem endless to many readers. Though she sketches the people they meet in quick, precise strokes, it is Wilt and Bernie — and really just Wilt — who remains on camera, in focus, throughout the book. And in describing their wandering, Boyle switches back and forth between Wilt’s streetwise newspaperman’s chatter and rich, impressionistic descriptions of the Paris streets, scenes, and shadows. Reviewing the book in The Nation, Louis Kronenberger felt the latter “achieves strong and even beautiful effects, but shows too little restraint and has some of Faulkner’s and Wolfe’s tendency to overwrite.”

Most critics noted admirable qualities in Monday Night but felt it too much of an oddity to take as seriously as her previous novels. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic called Wilt “a sort of lost-generation Don Quixote.” Time’s reviewer found Boyle’s cast “a bunch of puzzling neurotics” and Alfred Kazin dismissed them as “manikins who walk through the book as on hot beds of coal.” Kronenberger, on the other hand, felt that part of the problem for reviewers was that their easy labels were ill-suited for Boyle:

Call her decadent and you will find an imagery that is vital and under almost perfect control. Call her lush and you’ll find prose with the delicacy, discipline, smoothness to the touch and good hard grain of carving in ivory. Call her a necromancer and then see by what homely undeniable things she sets up her rhythms and the overtone of their effect.

Monday Night has always had a small but loyal set of fans. Dylan Thomas called it “the best novel of the year” in a review for the New English Weekly and wrote Boyle a gushing fan letter that was reprinted on the cover of a 1970 reissue of the book. Doris Grumbach and James Laughlin of New Directions Press both named it one of their candidates for rediscovery in their submissions to Bill and Linda Katz’s 1983 guide to neglected books, Writer’s Choice. The editor Virginia Faulkner confided to Boyle that “Monday Night remains for me a landmark” in a letter written 25 years after the book first came out. And in the late 1940s, the actor Franchot Tone attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a film version of the book, saying that its “way of story-telling makes me tingle.”

Boyle herself felt the book represented something of a breakthrough and said that she “liked it the best of my novels.” Perhaps this is, in part, because it is so overwhelmingly a book about men, about their actions and thoughts and desires. Her next few novels — Primer for Combat (1942), Avalanche (1944), and A Frenchman Must Die (1946) — would also take the world men as their focus — in combat, in mountain climbing, in wartime espionage and resistance. But most critics would agree that these attempts to create, if you will, lyrical action stories, are substantially weaker books when compared with Monday Night. Not much happens in Monday Night — if you set aside the drinking and walking — but within its small frame a moving and unsettling portrait of a lost soul can be seen.

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (1940)

13 March 20231 March 2023

Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.

And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”

She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:

This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.

Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”

How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.

Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.

But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.

Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”

Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.

One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:

Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.

Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:

After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.

If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.

Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:

After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.

(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.

Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.

Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.

Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:

While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.

“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.

No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.

Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.

Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.

Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.

Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers)
London: Peter Davies, 1940

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow (1946)

23 February 2023

Anne Goodwin Winslow was born during Reconstruction and died not long after the launch of the first ICBMs. She was 71 when her first novel, Cloudy Trophies, was published. To say, therefore, that this is a novel enriched by a lifetime’s worth of living is an understatement.

But then, if there is anything that characterizes Winslow’s work, it is understatement. She came of age when daughters of good families, particularly in the South, were raised in a manner not that different from that experienced by Jane Austen’s heroines. There was no formal schooling and social graces and embroidery were considered as or more important skills for young women to develop than literacy. From the shelter of her family’s estate, Anne Goodwin entered into marriage with a promising West Point graduate (first in his class), Lieutenant Eben Winslow, descendant of a Winslow who arrived in America on the Mayflower. With him she spent twenty-five years as an Army wife, mastering the art of surviving a series of posts almost airless in their social rigidity.

By the time she took up writing, however, first a little poetry and later a memoir (The Dwelling, and finally fiction, that world had largely been destroyed in two wars, revolutions, and a depression. More to the point, the intricate Victorian prose styles of Henry James and George Eliot had been given way to a variety of modernist styles, from the lean words of Hemingway to the visceral complexities of Joyce and Woolf.

What this meant for Winslow is that her sensibilities had not changed — but her sentences had. Where James might have used a paragraph or page to dissect the nuances of a character’s entrance into a room, Winslow chose to confine herself to a sentence or just a careful choice of adjective or verb. Or simply to leave it to the reader to discern the significance of a gesture or a statement from its context. She had, after all, spent decades in social circles where what was not said often spoke louder than conversations that had the substance of a butterfly’s flutter.

The events of Cloudy Trophies include a child’s death — possibly a murder — and a mother’s death — likely a suicide. Neither is taken head-on, though. On the other hand, they also aren’t tip-toed around. Instead, there is at most a stroke or two of the pen … and the assumed intelligence of the reader. Winslow writes like a classical Japanese painter paints, with light strokes instead of layers of colors. And for this reason, her fiction can given a reader the impression that nothing happens.

When Orville Prescott reviewed Cloudy Trophies for The New York Times, he wrote that Winslow “Promises much, but produces little. The beauty and the wisdom and the wit it offers would have been ever so much more effective if condensed into a short story or elaborated in an essay.” The charge is not entirely unfair: Cloudy Trophies is much more about what doesn’t happen than what does.

Richard Steele is a Senator from the South. Carolina? Georgia? Alabama? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s a wounded land, where “often they would pass a place where the house had burned down, only the tall brick chimneys left standing.” The Senator’s time at home at the manor of a former plantation is consumed by trying to sustain a fragile network of sharecropped farms and an estate falling into increasing disrepair.

His wife, Laura, is considered an elegant jewel of Washington society. This is Washington society at the height of its elaborateness. Is this the 1880s, the 1900s? We’re never told, but when she and the Senator are in town, in their house facing Lafayette Square and a short walk from the White House, her mind is consumed with “calling, or staying where they could be called on, when the proper days rolled round.” And with “the Cabinet and the Supreme Court and Congress and their own days — the Senate — and the Legations,” almost every day is a proper day.

Laura is stifled by the vacuity of Washington society, compared to what she sees as the authencity of life in the country. “She still found herself saying, ‘Isn’t it a pretty day?’ to people who had evidently not noticed whether it was or not.” By contrast, “In the country the weather was more important than almost anything else.” To Laura, “Not mentioning the weather seemed a loss somehow. It was like not noticing the moon.”

Laura and Richard have lost a child, their only child, a son, Rickie, drowned in a pond near the manor. She suspects it may have been an act of vengeance by a disgruntled sharecropper. Richard, however, dismisses this as unlikely, irrational, and most important, a failure to move on. Unlike Laura, he craves his time in Washington. The demands of his job and the superficiality of Washington society offer him ways to escape from his pain.

One could read Cloudy Trophies and see it as a quadrille, an elegant dance in which the characters come together and part, never touching more than fingertips, following precise and predetermined steps, and conclude, with Orville Prescott, that it’s a short story padded out to 230-some pages.

But that would be mistaking the brush strokes for the picture. This is a story about how the death of a child can destroy a mother and father, can leave them shattered, fragments of themselves, struggling to find ways to survive. But it’s not Anne Goodwin Winslow’s way to jab her finger at the heart of her story and shout, “This is what it’s about!” Despite her relatively unadorned prose, hers is still a Jamesian sensibility. She aspires to be a person on whom nothing is lost, and she expects the same of her readers.

Cloudy Trophies is the third of Winslow’s novels I’ve read, and while her inexperience with the form shows in some aspects of the book’s construction, I remain in deep admiration for the assurance of her artistry and her respect for the intelligence of her readers. Hers is the kind of quiet art that is perhaps the easiest of all to become overlooked and forgotten.

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (1932)

16 February 202315 February 2023

As much I base most of my choices for this site on research, my heart belongs to my first neglected book love, the browsing of library and bookstore shelves in search of unfamiliar titles. As physical used bookstores become ever rarer in the U.S., I have to resort to online equivalents. A favorite technique is to select a publisher and date range and simply scroll through the listings that come up on one book site or another.

Which is how I came across Perplexities, a book I suspect I would never have found through research or physical browsing. It came up, quite simply, as the cheapest copy of a Faber & Faber title from the early 1930s I could find on AbeBooks.com. So I ordered it. I was pleased when it arrived with its dust jacket relatively intact, since this usually drives up the price.

Now, frankly, given my inveterate book buying, I tend to place my new arrivals in one of the teetering stacks scattered around my office and only return to them months or years later. But the writing in Perplexities is so spare, so lacking in artifice — so naked, if you will — that I began reading immediately:

I must write. It may be a way of fixing my mind on a logical sequence of ideas. It is ridiculous to allow one’s thought’s to run round within a desire like a squirrel in a cage.
I am the slave of an emotion, whereas I believed, not so long ago, that I had won freedom.

Perplexities’ unnamed narrator is, we learn, a French-born woman living in London and in love with a man from the North named Peter. In love — but not head over heels. No, she has seen too much for that. And so she tries to examine this new love, this new relationship, this possible future, in the context of the loves and relationships of her past.

The first of these, of course, is with her mother. A vain, beautiful Parisian, a widow holding herself to a higher standing than her husband’s legacy can support. And aspiring to a higher romantic standard as well. Protective of her prospective suitors, her feelings to her daughter are early on complicated by jealousy and a ferocious defense of her primacy as the object of desire in the house. “Whoever loved my mother ceased to know freedom for as long as they loved her.” For longer, in fact: “After she had lost the power to confer joy she retained the power of inflicting pain.”

Her mother is, in today’s vocabulary, an expert emotional abuser. “Her strength was in her tongue. She could hurt amazingly with her tongue.” Yet she also positioned her daughter to maintain and, indeed, improve her social and economic status: a good Catholic education in convent schools, proficiency in English with time spent with an English family, the Giffords.

Observing the Giffords adds to her understanding of the minefield of emotions lurking at even apparently placid family dinner tables. “Mrs. Gifford was a hard-working, devoted, conscientious wife and mother,” the narrator acknowledges. “I often wondered why her family did not leave the house in a body.” For Mrs. Gifford’s husband and children live in abject fear of her ability to inflict guilt in retribution for the smallest perceived slight:

I believe that more pain and suffering have been inflicted in the name of love than under the frank panoply of hate. Hate, at least, does not paralyse its victims by calling on their chivalry at the same time as it strikes. An enemy does not use as a shield the loud warning that he himself will be hurt if we are not careful.

This is, I think, an observation of striking insight — and striking currency. This is precisely why the damage done by parents who abuse through martyrdom is fundamentally different from that inflicted by direct abuse.

The narrator of Perplexities is in her early 40s. Her husband, an Englishman she married for love, was killed in the war over a decade earlier. Her two children, to whom she admits she was at best only adequate as a mother (“The passion of motherhood is a closed book to me”), are grown, living their own lives, and not looking to her for emotional or financial support. Nor does she expect it: “To expect gratitude seems a commercial appreciation for returns which has nothing to do with love.”

She has a job — and likes it:

I thoroughly enjoy work myself. I can enjoy almost any kind of work, provided it aallows me to put into it the whole, no more (not for long at least), but no less.

Her male colleagues, she thinks, fail to understand this balance. Some try to fill their time away from work with hobbies, seeking fulfillment they lack at work. Others are what we would now call workaholics:

I think one of my colleagues, Smith cannot fail to return after his death, day after day, to his desk, to watch his successor going on with his work. Smith loves the office, he loves coming to it in the morning, he is the last to leave it at night, he does not know what to do with unexpected holidays, he is always ready to postpone the expected ones.

It is the independence she has won through work, widowhood, and given her own children their freedom that ultimately allows her to recognize the trap that a relationship with Peter, her Northerner, would be. He is not an equal opportunity lover: “Mutual pleasure in sex does not enter Peter’s calculations.” Even worse, he’s a thirty-something man walking around with an umbilical cord. Proposing a seaside holiday, he adds that his mother, of course, will be joining them.

Perplexities is, effect, one woman’s inventory of her experiences of love and life in an attempt to decide what to do with the rest of it. And her choice is a courageous one: “Above all, I must try to conquer fear before I die.” This, she believes, is “a crusade on which all the remaining forces of a solitary woman with a love for freedom might well embark.”

Perplexities was marketed as a novel, but even Faber & Faber struggled to classify the book. “Whether one regards it as fiction or a transcript from real life, Perplexities is a very unusual book” declares its dust jacket. Too unusual for some reviewers: “There is some championing of the cause of prostitutes and perverts, a great deal of muddled thinking, rather tediously recorded, and a complete absence of a sense of humour,” observed B. E. Tood in The Spectator.

The Bookman’s critic was one of the few to acknowledge that the narrator’s perspective was more common than some might think: “Many women will share the author’s perplexities, and will enjoy a sense of fellowship in reading this book. A sensitive, critical mind is brought to bear upon the peculiar problems of modern life, especially women’s problems, which are discussed with such sincerity and common sense as should help to clear fresh paths through the tangles of convention.”

In some ways, Perplexities anticipates by almost fifty years Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman, another book written in an attempt to take stock of a life and decide whhere to go with it. Koller had foresaken romantic love after an early failed relationship while in graduate school and was already intellectually prepared to embrace a solitary life (though with a German shepherd as companion), and it was a path she stuck to until her death almost forty years later. But as much as I admire Koller’s book, I have to say that I suspect more readers today would respond to the simple, succinct prose and the fearless candor of Perplexities.

E. R. Leigh, according to copyright records, was the pseudonym of Jeanne Berthe Julie Rigaud, a French woman born in Paris in 1881, who married Harry Footner, a civil engineer, in 1902. Like her narrator, Jeanne Footner had two children, both of whom were in their twenties when she wrote her book. And like her narrator, she lost her husband in the war — on August 1, 1916, one month to the day after the start of the Battle of the Somme. She took her pseudonym from her husband’s middle name, Erlegh. Perplexities was her only book. Perhaps, also like her narrator, its writing helped her reach some decision. She never remarried and she died in Portsmouth at the age of 70 in 1952.

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (pseudonym of Jeanne Rigaud Footner)
London: Faber & Faber, 1932

The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd (1916)

25 January 2023

The Woman's Harvest by Anna Floyd

This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to deal with the situation of women on the home front in World War One. And at first, that’s what it proved to be.

Harvey Brunsdon is a floorwalker in a department store on Kensington High Street when the war breaks out in August 1914. Married and with an infant daughter at home, he decides it’s better not to volunteer for the Army out of purely practical concerns: how will his wife manage on 12 shillings a week when they’ve been living on £170 a year — or worse, on 9 shillings a week if he gets killed? After being shamed as a coward by a young woman presenting him with a white feather, though, he and his wife decide it’s better to do the patriotic thing.

Harvey enlists and his wife leaves the child in the care of her mother goes back to work. The independence and power of being an income earner seems to compensate for her loneliness — more than compensate for it, in fact: “If Elsie Brunsdon could have analyzed her tangled emotions during the autumn of 1914 she must have admitted that, contrary to all her expectations, she was enjoying every moment of her life.”

When Harvey is mustered out and returns, he finds it hard to return to the dressed-up interior work of the store and he seeks out the widow of his regimental commander, who has an estate in need of farm workers. Despite his lack of experience, he moves the family to the countryside. He takes to it like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres, while Elsie is less enthusiastic. In the course of a year, hard work and good old English pluck turn Harvey into a proven landsman.

Then, in Chapter IX, as Elsie is finally warming to rural life, Anna Floyd throws in this bombshell:

A disbanded regiment, nearly all young students and professional men, mustered in civilian clothes in Trafalgar Square, marched in silence down Whitehall, and hanged four members of the Cabinet on the lamp facing the entrance to Downing Street. The ringleaders, a major, two sergeants, and a private soldier, surrendered themselves and were arrested at once. They were sentenced to death, and on the evening of their trial four more prominent politicians dangled from the same lamp. The Prime Minister, arrested in his own official residence, was taken to see the bodies and informed that whilst the four men lay under sentence, four politicians would hang punctually every evening.

I did not see that coming.

Ad for The Woman's Harvest by Anna Floyd — Ad for *The Woman’s Harvest* by Anna Floyd.

Floyd goes on to tell us that England then experiences a renaissance of the land and within two years achieves near-total self-sufficiency in food production as thousands of veterans turn their swords into ploughshares, with commensurate benefits for Harvey Brunsdon as an early adopter, and we are back into his story, the most violent and tumultuous revolution since Oliver Cromwell having been introduced and passed over in the space of three pages.

But wait: there’s more.

At this point, we are precisely at the halfway point in the book and can be excused for wondering where this is all going.

And the answer is … polyamory.

Over the next 100-some pages, two of the local women disappear for months at a time — to France, to a clinic for “fatigue” — and return with infants of mysterious origin. A foundling. A dead cousin’s orphan. We learn that Harvey has been sowing his seeds in more than the land. In fact, there’s a third affair well underway. When Elsie finally figures this all out, Harvey chastises her. It was her own fault: “You’ve never offered me love of your own free will.” And it’s certainly not the fault of the other women: “They’re victims of the war. You ought to feel sorry for them. You are the fortunate one amongst your unfortunate sisters.” Elsie needs to understand that Harvey is merely doing his patriotic duty — and chill. Turn your head and think of England, in other words.

Though she was writing when the war had been raging for less than two full years, Anna Floyd seems to have been certain that it would result in the loss of a generation of English men and that her country’s future lay in a massive return to an agricultural economy and a massive embrace of sexual freedom … for men. And thus we discover what she meant by The Woman’s Harvest.

I was hoping this book would be a glimpse into how English women, recently emboldened by the Suffragette movement, responded to the early effects of the war. Silly me. The critic Gerald Gould called The Woman’s Harvest “unreadable.” I found it highly readable, blazing through in little more than a day. Highly readable — and highly ridiculous.

The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd
London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1916

French Polish, by P. Y. Betts (1933)

30 April 202318 January 2023

This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.

SWISS MOUNTAINS AND WELSH HILLS

“I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there’s nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm.”

No, this is not Bridget Jones or one of her ilk but Virginia Odell, a young American at a Swiss finishing school which occupies much of P.Y. Betts’s novel French Polish, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933. To read it again is to be as startled as I was when first doing so, early in 1985, in the Round Reading Room, as it then was, at the British Library. I could not help but give whoops which startled sedulous thesis-writers either side of me.

Diligent curiosity had brought me to this seemingly frivolous perusal of a long-vanished novel — and would take me far from that sedentary perch in Great Russell Street. That winter I was at work compiling and introducing an anthology from the weekly magazine Night and Day, which lasted for only the second half of 1937 in a bid to be a London equivalent — with equally wonderful cartoons — of The New Yorker. Its demise is often attributed to a lawsuit brought against it by Twentieth-Century Fox after co-editor Graham Greene had written in no uncertain terms about the sexual stance displayed by nine-year-old Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie. In fact, funding had been low from the beginning, with modest fees paid to an array of authors who would, around the world, become better known down the years.

There were also some who faded from sight after appearing in such glittering company where they, too, made an equal showing. Among these was P. Y. Betts who wrote entertainingly about French life and food, as well as supplying “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”, which anticipated Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U controversy by two decades. What could have become of such a talent? Try as I might, I could not discover anything much about her — and lamented this en passant in the long introduction to the volume which appeared later in the year.

Naturally, this anthology, with the first republication in five decades of Greene’s film review, brought interest from the hills around Los Angeles -– and, with the publication a few years later of Shirley Temple’s splendid memoir Child Star, her saying that Greene had in fact been accurate in his description of her sultry parading in that film and two others. That made a pleasing symmetry to the work on the anthology (if I say so myself, I am thanked in Child Star). Meanwhile, and perhaps all the more exciting, Michael Davie in an Observer column had picked up my reference to the seemingly fugitive P.Y. Betts. This led to the biographer of publisher Edward Garnett (the friend of Lawrence) getting in touch with an unpublished letter in which Garnett, as a reader for Jonathan Cape, had taken against Samuel Beckett’s early Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women (“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole!”) but urged that the publisher take P. Y. Betts’s novel.

No sooner had I read about this unexpected literary confluence than Lady Eirene White got in touch from the House of Lords to say that she had been at St. Paul’s Girls’ School with Betts (as she was known) and that after growing up near Wandsworth Commons before the Great War, Betts had travelled around the world in the Thirties before joining the wartime Land Army which she quit around 1944 to live, alone, in a remote Welsh smallholding which she had never left.

And she was still there.

By this time, not only had electricity been installed there (in 1970), but also a telephone. Never had I thought that I should be talking upon it with somebody whom I had – dare I say it — thought might easily be dead.

Her conversation across those hundred of miles was as vivid as her writing.

Hearteningly, a little later, Veronica Wadley of the Daily Telegraph (and herself now in the Lords) readily agreed that I should travel there for an interview. This was quite a journey, without signposts through narrow lanes with high hedges in a motor-car at low gear (top gear was always a novelty for a window-flapping Citroen); when I did see anybody and asked directions, there was astonishment that I was going to visit P. Y. Betts (“we’ve heard of her but never seen her!”). Eventually I got there, at one end of a long track where I was greeted by a goat of an uncertain disposition and, after a struggle between tyres and mud, parked beside a low, thick-walled cottage from which, followed by a cat and dog, Betts emerged with pails in hand to feed others of the various animals which lived upon her tranche of hillside.

A far cry from the afternoon when Shirley Temple’s husband telephoned me about her imminent memoir (which she wrote herself). This was quite a place. We soon ate, while her talk roved across a Great War childhood near Wandsworth Gaol (an early memory was of watching people walk along the pavement to be in time to stand at its gates when a hanging was due) and looped around life in the Welsh hills, many tales of which reached her in that seclusion (the area was a redoubt of those who had returned from a flower-power trail along the road to Katmandu). As she went out again, the sky darkening, to feed the animals, I scribbled notes of all this, and her words echoed through my mind during the long journey back. There was something marvellously heartening about her conversation borne of long experience (and visits by the mobile library where she put in for so many new books); she was savvier about the world than those who are eternally, wirelessly connected. All of this I wrote up, and it appeared complete with a photograph of her beside one of those animals: a seemingly stray peacock.

And that was not that.

One morning I received a telephone call. A woman said, “Mr. Hecht would like to speak with you.” All right, I replied, puzzled, curious. This turned out to be the owner of independent publisher Souvenir Press, whose outwardly elegant office, chaotic within, was opposite the British Library on Great Russell Street. He had chanced to see the Telegraph piece – and wondered whether Betts would like to write a second book, one about the upbringing she had described to me.

This was an inspired notion, to which she readily agreed, and she wrote it – People Who Say Goodbye — through a Welsh winter. And, as chance also had it, this was published around the same time as Shirley Temple’s book. I asked Greene if he would give a quote for the cover, which he happily did, and, one way and another, the book got about: it was read in eight instalments on national radio, which, one Saturday, also sent an interviewer to her, while Dirk Bogarde (a man whose film career had begun a few years after she took up that life in the hills), who had found it in a Chelsea bookshop, made it one of his books of the year. It went into several paperback incarnations and is still in print.

She died in her nineties, after a stroke, which meant that — after living alone for so long — she had, ever pragmatic, to agree to a carer in that cottage where, as I found on another visit, there were now fewer animals but her spirit was still vivid — as it remains, so wise, so funny, and this sequence of events always makes me thankful that I had made the initial foray to the Reading Room.

You never know what might happen. And so it is that I have now gone back to that novel French Polish which she wrote in her early twenties, and can again hear that voice from decades later. She gave me a copy of it and signed it – a novel now exceedingly hard to find (many have tried to do so after relishing People Who Say Goodbye).

For its first half or so, events take place in that Swiss finishing school before an excursion takes some of the girls with one of the mistresses to life in a pensione – and that amatory imbroglio which had been so much a source of discussion and speculation by the girls during days and evenings when they were meant to be pursuing regular studies. As Betts herself must have done, for the narrative finds room for quotations in several languages as well as extracts from one of the girl’s anthology-in-progress (“anything remotely lunar will do”) about references to the Moon, whose varying appearances in the night sky make it very much a character in a novel where due emphasis is also given to such matters as “those privy to the esoteric abracadabra of contraception” and a page of improvised stream of consciousness.

Time and again, one finds such descriptions as “when she laughed she opened her mouth so wide and displayed teeth so long and white and powerful that it was almost with a sense of incongruity that one glimpsed behind them a squat human tongue and not the darting scarlet tatter of a flop-eared puppy”. That very word “tatter” has one reaching for a dictionary of slang, and, to say the least, the novel is a repository of words and phrases which would make Anthony Burgess redouble his efforts to impress.

To pick out some, here are a “bourden of voices”, “dispharetic travelling”, and in a nightmare towards the end one of the teachers had seen a woman “apparelled in scarlet and monstrously mounted upon that heptacephalous progeny of hell”. And of course, in the opening pages, it is said of one of the girls that “a rufous challenge sparkled in her eyes, and her hair flamed like a November sun in the shadowy room”. There should be a revival of this expression for removing one’s dress: “she skinned it over her head”. And one could discuss until humans beings cease to exist the subsequent observation “have you ever noticed that people who are quite disintegratingly beautiful in the nude are often dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?”

And what can one say of Penelope “who had discovered that morning at prayers that j’ai sucri did not mean ‘I have sugared,’ but was French for Jesus Christ”? With all the precocity of youth, one is informed that ballet and ballade share a root. Amidst the current British crises, can it any longer be given credence that “they had such beautiful pink skins that Penelope thought they must be Etonians”? One such character, when asked if he is growing a moustache, replies, “at present it is only visible in certain lights, like the sheen on velvet”.

One reads on avidly, while pausing to ponder “coprolitic spirals” – and with passing time and “scrannel spirit”, one must marvel at the protracted metaphor made from the speed of life being akin to the long outer grooves of a 78-rpm disc shortening as the needle reaches the label: “on the record the last two inches really are covered in less time, though the tempo remains the same”. Once again, two pages in, here is that paragraph which, in the Round Reading Room, had me reading on. “Here, from a central parting of impeccable rectitude, uniform waves of iron-grey hair flowed towards the orderly roll at the back of the head with the beautiful inevitability of creation moving to one far-off divine event.”

Now, when Katherine Mansfield is rightly lauded, it is an interesting point of view that, a decade after her death, one of the precocious adolescents could say of her that she “bores me frightfully. She’s so conceited and vapourish, taking it for granted that everybody will be interested to read that on such-and-such a night she woke up and felt passionate. She was a beast to the Gaudier-Brczeskas, anyway.”

No apology for quoting so much from the novel. Otherwise how could readers gain a taste of something which led me to traverse all those miles, making it across the Severn Bridge, in a vehicle whose windows flapped open at the slightest breeze? The novel is sought after, and yet there are those who might cavil at its reappearance. The opening section lays some emphasis upon a Black woman’s arrival among the School’s pupils for a while. “On her ears were gold earrings of about the bigness of half-crowns and a coruscation of bracelets of strikingly extra-European workmanship gauntleted her bare forearm almost to the elbow.”

Some will decry this, and an element of debate would be that many others are regarded askance, such as a teacher who “had only once put her foot down, when a young man from Milwaukee had raped from her chalet a lavatory seat elegantly intagliated with edelweiss entwined with bells of gentian, with Alpenrose and the modest camomile. Since this incident, unique of its kind, Americans had not been encouraged”.

What place would such a lavatory seat find in “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”?

Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).

French Polish, by P. Y. Betts
London: Victor Gollancz, 1933

The Biff and Netta trilogy, by N. Warner Hooke (1934 -1938)

28 December 202228 December 2022

Close of Play by Nina Warner Hooke — Cover of U.S. edition of *Close of Play*, the second book in the Biff and Netta trilogy.

I wish I had more time to write this piece, for this trilogy not only amounts to nearly 900 pages but represents one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever come across. When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. “A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!” declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month.

I can’t imagine anyone comparing the trilogy to Wodehouse, Rabelais, or anything remotely funny if they knew how its story ends. Though I am not usually one to take care to avoid spoilers, in this case I won’t go into details, except to say that the final pages of Own Wilderness (1938) are the most heart-breaking I’ve read in many years.

In her foreword to Close of Play, the second volume, Nina Warner Hooke wrote that she felt compelled to continue the story of Biff and Netta after being asked to so many times by readers of Striplings. “I do not yet know what is going to happen to my striplings…. Perhaps there will be more to come. Perhaps not,” she concluded. Yet to me, the narrative arc — hell, the narrative momentum — seems inevitable and irresistable, as certain as the fact that two leaves that fall into stream will be pulled downstream by its current.

So, who are Biff and Netta? Biff, eleven, is the son of Hugh Tamlin and his wife Georgina. Hugh, who “used to have something to do with the Rubber World,” now spends his days cloistered in a workshop in his estate — The Place — in Sussex, supposedly working on inventions but in reality simply hiding from the truth that his world is crumbling around him. The fine house in London he has inherited is now rented to a family of Greek Jews whose monthly checks are almost the only income he has left. He can no longer afford repairs on the buildings or grounds of the once-grand Place, is in arrears with his property tax, and has had to reduce the staff to almost nothing.

His marriage is in even worse shape. His wife Georgina has taken a lover, Henry Arthur Pybus-Glanville, known as Uncle Pi, who lives at the estate on weekends and is the only functional adult in this highly dysfunctional family. And even his affair with Georgina is largely a thing of the past, as her only interest is in riding around the country on Warrior, her prize horse, likely the only asset of real value remaining. The only part of the affair not left in the past is Netta.

Netta, eight, is the spit and image of Uncle Pi. “She had his blunt features. His nondescript hair. His throaty laugh. So there is was.” Rounding out the cast is John Johns, the sour chauffeur/gardener/handyman, and Miss Mudford, the governess. Muddy had once been a good governess, but now she is prisoner of her demons: bad teeth, “muddy skin, muddy voice, and muddy mind,” and “given to secret masturbation an pornographic literature.”

In their decay, the Tamlins have become isolated from much of the world around them. Hugh continues to receive copies of trade magazines but no longer bothers to read them. “Not many people ‘knew’ the Tamlins these days. Things were said about them. None too savoury things. The servants were a queer lot. And then there was Uncle Pi.”

The only vitality left at The Place resides in Biff and Netta, who spent their days foraging around its two hundred acres. They swim in its ponds, climb its trees, trap its rabbits and ferrets — they are almost feral in their freedom. Biff spends the summer in a single pair of shorts, literally unable to wash them unless he spends a day naked in bed. They are “extravagant children.” “They did everything with an extravagant largeness and a total disregard for consequences. They were extravagantly fond of one another.”

Too fond. Their mutual attraction is both a thing born of genuine innocence and love and one of the worms at the core of this apple, an apple destined to rot and disintegrate in a manner that is both horrifying and gripping to witness over the course of the trilogy.

If Biff and Netta are Warner Hooke’s Adam and Eve, their problem is not that they haven’t tasted the fruit of knowledge. It’s that Netta, at least, doesn’t care:

“You know I shan’t ever marry anyone but you!”
“We can’t be married, you fathead!”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because we’re related. We’re not allowed to. There’s a law about it.”
“Not allowed to? Why ever not?”
“Because we should have queer sorts of things for children.”
“Oh, Biff, what sort of things?”
“Well, things with two heads. Or six toes, or something. It’s called inbreeding. It happened to the chickens last year.”

Netta is not deterred. “We might have something with eyes all over its stomach. We might make a lot of money out of it. We could show it at Church Fêtes and charge tuppence to have a look.”

As Biff and Netta near puberty, the adults at the Place rally one last time. Uncle Pi agrees to pay for Biff and Netta to be sent off to boarding schools. Their experiences are very different. Biff grows leaner, harder, stronger — but is an outcast, treated as an oddity by his schoolmates, nursing his hatred of them, and longing to be reunited with Netta. Netta, on the other hand, no longer malnourished, puts on weight, fits in, makes friends, develops schoolgirl crushes.

When they meet again during the first school holiday, civilization in the form of conventions and moraes have intruded. Netta confides that her breasts are being to grow. “Let me feel,” Biff demands. “He thought he had never felt anything so soft.” Yet when he reaches out again, Netta draws back: “‘Don’t,’ she said.” “For the first time in their lives, they felt that a veil had descended between them.” The extravagance of their affection may have diminished, but the strength of their attraction never does. Biff abandons school, gets work as a farmhand, then runs away when he learns that Netta plans to spend her summer holiday with a classmate.

This is where Striplings ends. It’s hard for me to take Warner Hooke’s claim that she didn’t plan to carry on with the story seriously. In one of the rooms of The Place, there is a mural of a scene from a Greek myth slowly falling apart. Early in the book, Netta and Biff take guesses as to when the next piece will tumble to the ground. There are too many pieces in Warner Hooke’s narrative left dangling, about to fall, to treat it as a completed work. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she closes the book on the crash before we’ve had the chance to count the victims.

The pieces begin to fall in Close of Play:

Fifteen months later, early in the summer holidays, the horse Warrior put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, breaking his neck and Georgina’s back. Careless of Warrior. One would not have expected him to do a thing like that.

The dispassion in those lines hints at one of the peculiar qualities of Warner Hooke’s writing. She has a knack for eliciting our sympathies for Biff and Netta in all their rough tenderness — and yet can, a few sentences later, poke at her characters with the disinterest of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope. Most of Warner Hooke’s later work were stories about animals written for children, and her instincts seem to be those of a naturalist rather than a novelist.

Nina Warner Hooke, from the *New York Times*, 1934.

One of Stripling’s American reviewwers, Herschel Brickell, wrote that “Very few of the considerable number of contemporary novels that have attempted to explore the strange world of the young of the human species have been so honest, so forthright and so understanding….” And the American edition of Close of Play included a letter from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to its publisher in which she called it “one of the most real books I have ever read and the truest study of children and adolescence I’ve had the pleasure of reading in fiction form.”

The realism of Warner Hooke’s treatment of Biff and Netta’s story is all the more striking for the utterly bizarre reality of their situation. Working as a navvy on a construction site in Brighton, Biff hears of Georgina’s death and returns to The Place. Now taller, stronger, and callous of hands and manners, he is bound to act as an accelerant in what is already a highly combustible situation. Though Netta is in the midst of a teenage romance with a neighbor, Rodney Fletcher, she finds herself drawn again to Biff. And though Biff has been living in the roughest of workman’s lodgings, he can see that The Place is on the brink of collapse. Much of its forest has had to be sold off for lumber, and Hugh, referred to the children as D.M. (Deaf Mute, for his near-total lack of interaction with anyone), is almost catatonic in his isolation.

A child-man, Biff exudes a certain confidence and power that attracts followers, and both Rodney and Netta go with him when he decides to leave The Place again. He returns to his room in Brighton and the three settle in together. They have almost nothing, yet he ensures their basic needs are met through intimidation:

Biff they feared. He subdued them from the outset. They surrendered to him because they had no alternative. If he required an extra blanket or another cup, there was little use in stating that it was not available. He went downstairs to fetch it. And if the excuse proved to have been founded on fact, he went out and bought what he wanted and charged it to Ma [the landlady].

Of course, three into two won’t go, as they say, and after a few months of pretending to be a simple working man and attempting to understand the complexities of Netta’s relationship with him and Biff, Rodney returns to his familiar middle-class life. Rodney is hands-down the most normal character we will come across. No wonder he’s destined to be among the wounded.

At this point, Close of Play ends. The last book, Own Wilderness, opens in London, where Biff and Netta are boarding with a greengrocer and his family. Netta helps out in the shop, while Biff cycles through a variety of jobs, not all of them legal, until he settles in as a delivery truck driver. Warner Hooke’s cast grows to take in the whole family and the power of the narrative is weakened somewhat as she loses the tight focus on Biff and Netta.

That is, until Hugh dies and leaves The Place to them. Saddled with debts, its buildings now so decrepit as to be barely habitable, it still has the attraction of Eden to Warner Hooke’s strange Adam and Eve. Foraging, once their pasttime, now becomes their means of existence. And now that they are both of age, Biff and Netta begin to become aware of what their neighbors are saying about their relationship.

It’s enough at this point to say that we’ve left Wodehouse and Rabelais behind long ago. We are now deep in Thomas Hardy’s territory. How we got here isn’t entirely clear, and I’m not sure it was to Warner Hooke, either. She probably didn’t work according to a plan, probably didn’t know from one chapter to the next when Biff and Netta were going to lead her. But we should be grateful that she stuck with them.

In some ways, taken together, Striplings, Close of Play, and Own Wilderness resemble a 19th Century English novel more than a modernist one. Biff and Netta’s path meanders from time to time and Warner Hooke occasionally suffers from the naturalist’s tendency to note all phenomena, even the unimportant, when some details ought to be omitted. But taken together — and as hard as these books are to locate, I cannot overstress how important it is to read the three as a single work — this trilogy is a work of stunning power, and I just regret that I am giving it less than its due with such a relatively brief assessment. Absolutely unjustly neglected; absolutely worth tapping into your local Inter Library Loan service to get your hands on. (Note: Own Wilderness is avaiable through HathiTrust.org, if you have access.)

The Biff and Netta Trilogy, by Nina Warner Hooke (credited as N. Warner Hooke)
Striplings
London: Faber and Faber, 1934
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934
Close of Play
London: Putnam, 1936
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936
Own Wilderness
London: Putnam, 1938
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray (1968)

14 December 2022

The Twelve Days of Christmas by Venetia Murray

Venetia Murray’s novel The Twelve Days of Christmas (1968) has a reputation for being a cult novel, though I suspect that’s largely due to a certain passage that’s been quoted several times in potpourri books by Jilly Cooper and others. It comes from a scene in which two lovers are laying in bed in a discreet Paris hotel after making love. “I need some new pants,” the woman tells the man, which leads him to do a quick bit of the kind of mental calculus that’s one price of carrying on an affair:

After all, having committed himself to all this expenditure, he might as well get the best of it. And pants cost less than some things. But he was not looking forward to the moment when they would walk together down the Faubourg St Honoré. A happy thought occurred to him. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shops in the Rue St Honoré would be closed both on Sunday and Monday. This Sarah had forgotten. He realized this meant that he would have to keep her in bed for most of today.

Sarah is Sarah Yeates, in line to become Lady Yeates whenever her grandfather the Earl dies. The man is Simon Burford, a married publisher who’s told him wife that he’s attending a French publishing conference in Lyons. Which is just the sort of thing that French publishers organize … five days before Christmas.

But amorous complexities and moral quandries are the warps and woofs of Venetia Murray’s fictional fabric in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarah is divorced from her third husband and has had so many affairs that during her Paris getaway she has to stay two steps ahead of herself to avoid leading her current lover into someplace she’s been with one of the others. For Paris and London are small towns when it comes to people of their class and amatory habits:

There had been a memorable occasion in some restaurant in the King’s Road, where too many people who had crossed currents in their lives too often, had all run into each other having dinner at separate tables. Henry’s ex-wife had been there; she had been with a man with whom Suzy had once had an affair. Catharine had been there with someone she should not have been there with, since she was supposed to be a respectable married woman even if her husband was once again away. Some irrelevant Italian girl was there.

With so many matchings and mismatchings going on, some irrelevant man or woman is bound to find themselves the leftover in such scenes. When Simon flies off to Paris — sorry, Lyons — Catharine, his wife (second marriage for each) heads off to a psychedelic party at the Ritz and winds up falling for Mark, a novelist and leftover man. The party is being thrown by Catharine’s ambiguously trans(Atlantic) friend Elizabeth, who’s wealthy enough to persuade the management of the Ritz to look past the stoned half-naked bodies that litter the floor of her suite at the end of the party.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is certainly an artifact of the Swinging Sixties, but the irony is that the lion’s share of the licentiousness is in the hands of the monied/salaried/mortgaged thirty-somethings. Perhaps this is because the book is very much a roman à clef. According to Murray’s obituary in the Guardian, it was “a thinly disguised and pungent portrait of young, spoilt marrieds playing around in London in the early 1960s.”

At the time Murray wrote the book, she was between her second and third marriages and was part of a social set whose interconnections — marital, sexual, familial, and professional — were easily as intricate as any in the novel. The granddaughter of the renowned classicist and humanist Gilbert Murray and daughter of the journalist and politician Basil Murray (rumored to be the model of Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal), Venetia Murray had been among the more privileged child evacuees of Blitz, spending most of the war living with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife in Washington, D.C. and attending the exclusive Potomac School for girls.

When she was 18, she stayed with the novelist Nancy Mitford in Paris so she could attend a gala ball. Mitford wrote of Venetia to Waugh:

I’ve got a Beauty of 18 coming tomorrow which is a lovely treat, she came with her mother to buy a ball dress, which she has duly done, & I’ve persuaded the mother to leave her with me for a few days. She is called Venetia Murray, daughter of my dear old drunken cousin the late Basil M & she is an old fashioned Beauty, that is to say rather large & in a perpetual state of puppy like ecstasy which I find very attractive — like a puppy which wags itself rather than its tail.

Murray attributes to her character Sarah an incident that took place during her stay with Mitford:

Once upon a time when Sarah had been very young and in Paris she had been allowed, though only sixteen, to go to a ball with some young people. But she had been told to be back by twelve. She had been staying with her god-mother, a witty and well-known novelist but not a connoisseur of the behaviour of young girls. Sarah arriving back from the ball at five — in face she had only been having fun, not doing anything that in those days people like her god-mother would have called “wrong” — had run across the large courtyard in her ball gown, aware of how late she was. Her god-mother had been waiting up, worried that Sarah, in her charge, might have done something “wrong.” Her god-mother had said, “What is the use of running the last hundred yards when you are five hours late?”

I suspect that anyone familiar with the goings-on of London literati in the 1950s and 1960s could find many other examples of Murray’s appropriation of real-life characters and situations. Simon and Catherine rent a bedroom in their North London house to Suzy, an arrangement that sounds similar to the one Murray and Sally Newton, daughter of the actor Robert Newton, had in the house owned by poet and cricket writer Alan Ross. An annotated edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas would, in fact, likely be a valuable piece of social and literary history. As a work of fiction, however, it’s amusing but superficial — in its way as dated as a Regency romance (Murray later became a historian of the Regency) — and not a 1960s counterpart to Waugh’s early novels about the Bright Young Things of 1920s London.

Three novels by Betty Swanwick: The Cross Purposes (1945) Published by Editions Poetry LondonHoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958) Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel London: Methuen, 1961

This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin London: Jarrolds, 1941

The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931 London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968

This is a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale.

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935

This is a guest post by the founder of Solar Press.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers) London: Peter Davies, 1940

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (pseudonym of Jeanne Rigaud Footner) London: Faber & Faber, 1932

The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1916