When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.
If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:
We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.
These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.
“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.
Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.
During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.
Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.
Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.
The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.
The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,
It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.
Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:
[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.
There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”
After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.
The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”
With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.
All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966 London: Heinemann, 1966
As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.
Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.
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Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.
Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.
The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.
In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.
Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:
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Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.
The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.
There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.
Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.
Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick London: , 1921
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.
I have known of Norwegian author Sigrid Undset all my life. My parents got my name from Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, a monumental achievement for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1928. The novels were still popular in the 1950s, when my parents met, and their mutual love of the trilogy’s eponymous heroine forged an early bond. I confess I didn’t read Kristin Lavransdatter until well into adulthood, but like my parents before me, I found myself captivated by the story of Kristin, a complex, headstrong, passionate woman struggling to live a life of faith and truth in 14th-century Norway. Kristin Lavransdatter has fallen in and out of fashion over the years and garnered renewed interest recently thanks to Tiina Nunnally’s fresh translation. The rest of Undset’s prodigious literary output remains less well known, however, including a previous medieval saga, a biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, a memoir of World War II, and novels about women whose convictions and desires conflict with societal expectations. One such novel is Jenny, published in 1911, first translated into English in 1921.
Jenny’s opening pages display a hallmark of Undset’s style: vivid descriptions of the material world that establish the scene for the story that follows. “The music surged up the Via Condotti just as Helge Gram turned onto the street in the twilight,” the novel begins, as Helge, a Norwegian graduate student newly arrived in Rome, absorbs the dizzying array of sounds, smells, and sights that surround him:
It was The Merry Widow, played at a preposterously fast tempo, making it resound like a wild fanfare. And small, dark-haired soldiers stormed past him in the cold afternoon, as if they were no less than part of a Roman cohort which, at a furious double time, was about to fall upon the barbarian hosts rather than peacefully return home to the barracks for supper. Or perhaps that was exactly the reason they were in such a hurry, thought Helge with a smile; for as he stood there with his coat collar turned up against the cold, an oddly historical feeling came over him. But then he began humming along—‘No, a man will never understand women’—and continued down the street in the direction where he knew the Corso must be.
The line from The Merry Widow that Helge hums proves prophetic when he meets two other Norwegian expatriates in Rome, Francesca Jahrmann and Jenny Winge. Soon he becomes part of their coterie of artists amid the warmth, flora, food, and drink of an idyllic Roman spring. While Helge initially, and timidly, pursues Francesca (who has changed her given name, the old-fashioned Fransiska, to the Italian spelling), her hot-and-cold demeanor and interest in other men prompt him to turn his attentions toward Jenny, with whom he quickly falls in love. One sunny day, Jenny and Helge wander away from a picnic with the others and settle down in the grass, Helge’s head in Jenny’s lap. Against her better judgement, she gives in to his relentless begging for a kiss, and although she has qualms about their becoming involved, she gradually falls in love with him, and they plan a future together.
From this point on, the novel unfolds through Jenny’s perspective, and she proves to be one of the most intriguing fictional women I have ever encountered. The narrative describes her as tall, pale, thin, and graceful, with long blond curls and gray eyes. She wears white, gray, or black dresses and adorns herself with a simple necklace of pale pink beads—a cool exterior that belies her inner turmoil. We learn that she had a difficult childhood and harbors complex feelings toward her mother, “who had been widowed at the age of twenty and had nothing else in life but her young daughter.” Jenny has no memory of her father and lost a kind stepfather to an untimely death when she was a teenager. She was isolated and lonely at school, although she admits that her own arrogance stood in the way of making friends. “Superior and indifferent,” the narrative states, “she had smiled at the taunts and scorn of the whole class, feeling a silent and irreconcilable hatred that set in between her—who was not like the others—and all the rest of the children, who for her became a uniform mass, a many-headed monster.” As an adult, her yearning for a life of emotional and artistic integrity butts up against disheartening realities.
Back in Norway, Jenny and Helge must recalibrate their relationship amid complex family dynamics. Helge lives with his parents, and Jenny feels smothered in the toxic atmosphere of their profoundly dysfunctional marriage. “If only they could spend some time together again—just the two of them,” she muses, but they cannot, for, as she and Helge are engaged to be married, she is expected to spend an inordinate amount of time with her future in-laws. “She tried to think about their spring in the south, and she remembered the heat and the green campagna and the white flowers and the delicate silver mist on the mountains and her own joy. But she couldn’t seem to pull up an image of Helge from those days—the way he had looked to her adoring eyes.” Matters grow increasingly complicated when Helge’s father begins visiting Jenny in her studio and asks her to keep their meetings a secret from his wife. Frustrated and fed up, Jenny takes solace in her painting and in her friendship with a fellow artist, Gunnar Heggen, with whom she has long conversations about history, art, women, and men.
Sigrid Undset in 1911.
These conversations, along with a series of grim events, perhaps shed light on why Jenny is not more widely read. When Jenny asks Gunnar for an update on Francesca, for instance, problematic ideas emerge on all sides. A married woman now, Francesca only half-heartedly pursues her art and proves to be an inept, slovenly housewife, according to Gunnar. “If they have any children—and I’m certain they will,” he states, “you can be sure that Cesca will be done with painting. And it’s a damned shame. I have to admit, I think it’s sad.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny replies. “For a woman, having a husband and children . . . At any rate, sooner or later we start yearning for that.” Women are “by nature” meant to be wives and mothers, she claims, and she admits she would give up everything, including her painting, for the right man—because “that’s the way we were created—all of us!” she exclaims.
For his part, Gunnar expresses what even in 1911 must have been considered sexist notions. “I won’t even talk about female morals, because they don’t have any,” he tells Jenny, and he laments that women are only career-minded until they achieve their goal of marriage. If no suitable man turns up, however, “Then you start neglecting your work and go around looking worn out and unhappy and dissatisfied,” he says. Jenny nods. He later states, “Women don’t have souls—that’s a fact.” Most of the men in Jenny’s life infantilize her, calling her “little Jenny,” although she is 28 years old and fiercely independent when the novel begins. They treat her like a simple child nevertheless available for their sexual pleasure. Much to her mortification, she sometimes enjoys such oppression.
Unpalatable ideas, to be sure, but the novel addresses urgent questions of the time vis-à-vis changing gender roles, sexual double-standards for women and men, and the opportunities or lack thereof available to ambitious women. Jenny lets Gunnar do most of the talking during the aforementioned scene not because she has nothing to say but because she thinks before she speaks and chooses her words carefully. Throughout the novel, we find her solemnly contemplating matters relevant in any time, such as the role of art, the nature of love, wherein happiness lies, and how to know and be true to oneself. Undset imbues her characters, especially Jenny, with complex interiority and a longing for meaningful connection with others, which, sadly, often proves elusive.
My copy of The Unknown Sigrid Undset, in which Jenny appears, belonged to my mother. My father inscribed it and gave it to her for Christmas in 2001. Sigrid Undset remained a touchstone for my parents throughout their long marriage, and I think of them, both recently deceased, while on my own journey through her works. Kristin Lavransdatter is magnificent, but before it, there was Jenny, remarkable in its own right and worth getting to know.
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry have been published in a variety of venues, and she has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
Jenny, by Sigrid Undset, in The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works. Edited and with an introduction by Tim Page, with new translations by Tiina Nunnally South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press, 2001
Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.
Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.
Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.
Adeline Sergeant, from Notable Women Authors of the Day, by Helen C. Black (1893).
So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.
From the Daily Mail, 25 April 1901.
But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.
The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).
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As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in Three Guineas, the only area of work where women were allowed to compete with men, because of its low pay and prospects, was the world of writing, the world Sergeant chose for herself. The Work of Oliver Byrd records the lives of professional women writers at the turn of the twentieth century and is to some extent, a feminist response to George Gissing’s famous critique of the writer’s life, New Grub Street (1891). Where the literary men of New Grub Street have to battle with populist taste, uncomprehending publishers and critics and lowbrow journalists, the women in Sergeant’s novel have to start by deconstructing their very selves. Women who want to be taken seriously as writers either have to marry a publisher against their better judgement or to conceal their feminity and write under a male pseudonym. The Work of Oliver Byrd follows two women who explore these routes to pursue their writing, the act of which is presented as a grand passion, a vocation that none who is called can resist, no matter the risk. And the risk, with a predatory, exploitative male editor, is great. While these women writers accept being under-paid, even plagiarised, , the worst risk is that of being found out to be a writer at all. For while women were indeed able to scratch out livings with their pen, the woman writer still attracted social opprobrium, hence the widespread use of male pseudonyms at this time. Oliver Byrd, it is no spoiler to reveal, is actually a woman called Avis Rignold, who goes to great lengths to disguise her indentity, using Post Office boxes, false addresses and avoiding in-person meetings.
There is a great detail of autobiography in the novel: while writing it Sergeant was living at the Chenies Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, a haven for single, intellectual women including the Quaker campaigner Emily Hobhouse, archaeologist Mary Brodrick and the historian Charlotte Fell-Smith. The most important room in the apartment of one of the professional women in the novel is described by Sergeant in loving detail:
It was lined on two sides with books – heavy, ponderous, learned-looking tomes, the bindings of which were darkly, yet richly coloured like leaves in autumn, lit with gleams of gold. A substantial writing-desk, with drawers and pigeon-holes innumerable, stood near the middle of the room, and before it stood a circular-backed, leather-seated armchair, which formed Eleanor’s usual seat when she had work to do.
Be still my beating heart. Perhaps, with the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, I haven’t read an earlier depiction of the woman writer at her desk, striving to call words down from the heavens to translate onto paper:
What should she write about tonight? What had she to say? Her head throbbed, her eyes burned: she wanted to lie down quietly and go to sleep. But the wants of the public had to be satisfied and for this she must take up her pen and weave together laboriously the light fancies, the vague dreams of her better hours…she threw on a dressing-gown, turned up the gas and sat down to write.
There is a feminist message to the novel: the women writers are presented as either serious campaigners for justice or as uniquely able to capture “knowledge of the human heart”, while the dastardly male editor only seeks to repress them or pass their work off as his own. Written at a time when few women writers – including Sergeant herself- were taken seriously, it is a passionate plea to women to be proud of their work and continue fighting the fight. I wonder if Oliver Byrd, written towards the end of Sergeant’s life is some kind of letter of regret, that she didn’t allow her talent or novels to breathe, instead chasing one after the other after the other in a phenomenal sense of urgency that prioritised quantity over literary immortality. For she certainly could write – her prose is as easy and pleasant to consume as a jar of warm honey – and her novels are bursting with sparkling and contemporarily urgent ideas on social justice, women’s equality and the plight of the poor in wealthy imperial London. Maybe, like Avis Rignold, she didn’t quite have the courage to say: “This is who I am, and no one else.”
The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant London: James Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1902
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.
“Have you heard of the lady who writes under the name Edith de Born — an Austrian-Hungarian-Jewess I suspect – married to a French banker called Bisch?” Evelyn Waugh asked his friend Nancy Mitford in 1953, adding “She writes in English quite beautifully.” Waugh had spent several days as a guest of the Bisches in their elegant apartments opposite the Parc Royal in Brussels. Jacques Bisch was then a director of the Belgian office Société Générale, one of the leading French banks. Waugh confided that he had mistaken Jacques Bisch for a Belgian for most of the visit and had “dropped brick after brick” in his typically less-than-circumspect comments about the French.
Waugh’s suspicions about Mme. Bisch, however, were right on the mark. He probably had no idea, though, why she had chosen to write novels in English. It was a decision that came about, more than anything, through the disruptive effects of history.
Born on her family’s estate outside Vienna in 1901, Edith Ausch Kemengi was raised in the privilege of the most prominent members of the Austo-Hungarian court. Like the narrator of her semi-autobiographical novel Felding Castle, hers was “a world so different from that of my grandchildren that it might have been several hundred years ago.” Her father came from noble families in Hungary (Kemengi, more often spelled Kemenyi) and Austria (Ausch) and was a counselor and lawyer to the royal household of Emperor Franz Joseph. Sixty years after the fact, she remembered watching her father marching in one of the annual court parades from the window of their house in Vienna. Her mother was Jewish, but from a family of sufficient wealth and distance from the Orthodox faith to be considered acceptable in court society.
After the end of World War One and the collapse of the Hapsburg dynasty, however, Count Kemengi found himself land rich and cash poor and put most of his estate up for auction. Société Générale, like other French banks, saw the opportunity to swoop up some choice real estate for almost nothing and sent a young agent, Jacques Bisch, to bid on them. He took away with him not only the title to thousands of acres of Austrian land but also the Count’s daughter. By then, Edith had begun working as a writer, publishing theater reviews and short stories in Vienna and Berlin under the name of Edith Ausch.
She put her writing career on hold for the next twenty years, however, concentrating on assimilating into Parisian society and performing the role of wife and hostess in support of her husband’s career. Jacques Bisch rose quickly in the bank. The couple spent the early 1930s in London, where they were leading members of the colony of French expats. When King George V attended the memorial service for French president Raymond Poincaré at Westminster Cathedal in 1934, the Bisches were in attendance.
Their comfortable life in Paris was discrupted when the Germans invaded in 1940. Despite Edith’s Jewish ancestry, however, they remained. Edith put her language skills in service of the Resistance, having become fluent in French and English in addition to German. She translated communiques to and from the Special Operations Executive, an experience she later said gave her confidence in handling the nuances of English prose.
Her first novel, Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, was published in 1950 and demonstrated her ease in navigating the ways of European society. Most of the book consists of a conversation between Irina, the Russian-born widow of Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Marie has invited Irina to her villa above Lake Geneva out of courtesy, but really to probe Irina’s intent regarding what she considers an estate belonging to Gaëtan’s family as a whole. Soon, however, the topic shifts from property to love. Marie, it turns out, was in love with her cousin and crushed by his decision to marry a Frenchwoman (Irina is his second wife).
I thought Gaëtan quite a fine short novel when I wrote about it back in 2019, but it received only mildly positive reviews. Her next novel, The Bidou Inheritance (1951), her first published in the U.S. as well as England, made a bigger splash. The story of a small town French shopkeeper and the intrigues regarding his estate won glowing praise from Harper’s chief reviewer, Katherine Gauss:
Miss de Born, an Austrian married to a Frenchman, writes in almost flawless English with quiet distinction, and there is a classic sense of tragedy in the way in which she shows, through two generations, how the child against its own will apes what it most hates in the parent. She is a most perceptive and able new novelist
The Saturday Review put the book to a severe test by assigning it to Henri Peyre, then professor of French at Yale. Peyre noted that the subject of family members keeping a protective eye on a potential inheritance had been “a favorite of French fiction since the Revolution.” His assessment of de Born’s strengths and weakenesses may be the most succinct and accurate from all the reviews her subsequent sixteen novels received:
If she cannot be called a great writer, or at least not yet, she is undoubtedly a skilful one who, with great simplicity and artistic restraint, without any of the “modern” features of philosophy, any delving into the subconscious, morbid eroticism, fiashy juggling with time and logic, has composed a wellmade, a convincing, and an honest work of fiction.
While wellmade, convincing, and honest are admirable qualities, they tend not to be those that assure a writer’s place in literary history.
De Born’s skill in writing fiction in English was often, at least in the first decade of her career, considered the most notable feature of her work. The novelist Francis King, who became a close friend of de Born, recalled his own reaction to the book:
When the author presented me with a copy of the book (The Bidou Inheritance) some twenty years ago, my first astonished thought after devouring a single page was “How beautifully this woman writes!” Why astonished? The answer to that is that Born was an Austrian, who married a Frenchman (Jacques Bisch) and lived much of her life in Belgium, but like Conrad, Nabokov and Julian Green, she miraculously wrote better in her adopted language than most people in the language to which they were born. My second, much later thought was that she dealt with the cupidity of the French bourgeoisie with all the vividness of a Francois Mauriac or a Julian Green….
King later learned that Edith relied on help from a friend in England, the wife of a Norfolk vicar, to clean up and copy-edit her prose, so that unlike Conrad and Nabokov, her English was not a solo production. However, she shared with them what King called a sense of “foreignness”:
… though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreignness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.
Still, de Born’s prose was good enough to impress Waugh, whose own is considered some of the best of his time. Waugh reviewed her third novel, Daughter of the House (1953) — before staying as her guest — and found it her most mature novel so far:
Madame de Born has already attracted the admiration of the fastidious by her two previous works; brief, severly elegant, classical contes. In Daughter of the House she has spread her wings full span. It is a haunting, highly original story; an authentic work of art, classical in form and . Without once transgressing her self-imposed limits, the author produces an effect of breadth and intensity quite unusual in a modern novel, and worthy of comparison with the masters of her craft. It is a complete book, from which nothing could be taken and to which nothing could be added, without loss.
Over the next twenty-five years, Edith de Born published at a steady rate. Seven novels in the 1950s, seven in the 1960s, and four more in the 1970s. Two of her novels — Felding Castle (1959) and The House in Vienna (1959) — came closest to her own experience. In the first, a young girl named Milli has her first romances in the days just before the outbreak of World War One. The second takes Milli forward a decade, to a Vienna where noble families are now scraping by. Those who have some property left are selling it off, like de Born’s father did. Those still young enough to hope are leaving for Berlin or Paris or America. And many, desperate and bankrupt, are forced, like Fraulein Hertha von Branner, to write begging letters in hopes of finding work:
I have heard that you seek a gouvernesse for your children and so allow myself herewith to offer you my services. I write you in Englisch because it is a langwitsch which I have always spoken and written with great plaisure. My dear Father was two years at Eton, the famous Englisch school…. I mention him only as a guaranty for my standing, he was a Sektionschef in our Ministry for the Inside. Naturally I am ready to furnish you with every otherwise desired reference.
Although Felding Castle and The House in Vienna were advertised as the first two books of a trilogy, the next book she published, The Flat in Paris has no connection with their stories. Indeed, The Flat in Paris is one of her stodgiest books, perhaps because she forgot that she wrote at her best when the themes of love and property were intertwined. When she wrote of love alone, the result reads somewhat like the experience of driving a car with underinflated tires. One can reach the destination all the same, but it’s a tedious and inefficient journey.
Francis King once observed that like Edith Wharton, de Born “belongs to the world that she describes and yet has been distanced from it by an exceptional sensibility,” adding that,
Edith de Born’s books have almost invariably been concerned with civilised, if not intellectual, people, who have no difficulty in expressing themselves richly and succinctly. To write about such people — tended by devoted by dwindling bands of servants in large houses often full of objets d’art in the taste of a bygone age — is something that few novelists can now do with any conviction.
And the kind of adjectives reviewers used to describe de Born’s work lead one to think that she belongs in the school of followers/imitators of Henry James: “mature, authoritative, and genuinely sensitive”; “sensitive and delightful”; “lightly and subtly done”; “curiously tantalizing”; “elegant fable.” Peter Ackroyd wrote that one of her later novels, Mutual Observation, was “written with great intelligence and charm,” then closed, cuttingly, “and one can recommend it to one’s grandmother.” Anita Brookner, who often mentioned de Born as a writer she admired, also watered down her praise with such remarks as “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived” and that de Born “writes like a lady.”
But though de Born certainly knew exactly which fork to use in any dinner service, as well as which wine to serve with any dish, she was willing to delve into subjects that would not have been considered proper for conversations at her table. The Penalty of Exile (1964) is about a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — is found murdered in her dingy flat near Brussels’ Gare du Midi. State of Possession (note the reference to property and ownership in the title) is about a woman attempting to prove herself the mother of her illegitimate child.
In The Imperfect Marriage, Roger Warnier, heir of a wealthy family in the industrial north of France, returns from years as a prisoner of war in Germany and informs his wife that he is now in a relationship with one of his fellow prisoners and intends to remain so. Already unhappy with the grey life in their factory town, after growing up in the vineyards of the sunny south, she considers leaving but decides in the end to live in a form of coexistence that maintains a fine veneer of propriety — as well as her status in society. It was not surprising, Christopher Wordsworth once observed, that William Trevor sang praises for de Born’s work, “since both are considerable specialists on what survives and seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”
De Born did return to her unfinished autobiographical trilogy, if indirectly, in her 1968 novel Scars. Although the lead character is now Mitzi, not Milli, the two women share similar histories. Mitzi is now an older woman, living in London, cut off by the First World War from the Austria she knew as a child, cut off from many of her Jewish relatives by the Second. As was de Born herself in Brussels, Mitzi’s may be a comfortable exile, but it is an exile nonetheless, an exile in both time and space.
In the book, a visit by an old Viennese friend forces Mitzi to reflect on the life she had left behind when she fled Austria following the Anschluss. But she also finds that she and Egon, the friend, share more than a past. They share the experience of being refugees:
They had crossed psychological as well as geographical frontiers and experienced the fact that national achievements could not be carried from one land to another. Famous men in German-speaking countries were asked elsewhere to spell their names; others, normally in a position to grant favors, were reduced to begging for the smallest privilege. People who had refused all forms of compromise were forced to accept the most uncongenial surroundings and humiliating conditions in order to subsist.
De Born understands, however, that losing one thing in life often means gaining something else. Having survived the tragedy of disrupted lives,
… they had become aware of new realities. Obliged to revise their standards of thought and value, both of them had developed from exiles into explorers of new moral fields. They had become pioneers of a world in which the nation was an anachronism. Gradually the frontiers they had crossed were replaced by unforeseen invisible boundaries, which could reveal wide chasms between people who still persisted in thinking in terms of the past and others who belonged to the future.
Although Edith de Born wrote and spoke English fluently, hosted the likes of Evelyn Waugh, and became a close friend of the historian Alethea Hayter, she never lost her sense of foreignness in the eyes of the English literary establishment. A critic as esteemed as V. S. Pritchett might say that her novel The Engagement was “An uncommonly good novel,” but the general assessment was that she was, at best, a minor novelist of manners. Someone to read between doing the shopping and mending socks, as a character in Jane Gillespie’s Envy does, and not, as in Anita Brookner’s dismissive judgment, someone whose novels need to be revived.
Indeed, it’s ironic to see Brookner making this judgment, given the significant role that the experience of exile plays in several of her novels. It’s hard to think that Brookner failed to see that it was precisely this experience, which was purely second-hand to her, that gave Edith de Born the power to see what “seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”
Edith de Born published her last novel, The Negligent Daughter in 1978. She and her husband moved from rue Royale to a grand townhouse in the rue Marteau decorated with priceless paintings by Picasso, Miro, and Paul Delvaux and run by superior Flemish housekeeper. She died in 1987.
When it comes to books, good things often come in misleading packages. This is particularly true when it comes to pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were sold at newsstands and drug store check-out lines, where the key to a sale was more about catching the eye than conveying truthful information about content. And the demand for new titles to push into those display racks meant that publishers tended to be undiscriminating about content.
Sometimes, this means the content is pure formula, nothing more than a rush-job assemblage of one-dimensional characters, hackneyed plots, and ineptly written prose. Sometimes — not too often, but sometimes — this means the content is pure gold. A masterpiece in disguise. And sometimes, this means the book is just, well, interesting.
Interesting. Yes, that’s the word our mothers taught us to use when we couldn’t think of anything nice to say. But to me, interesting hasn’t lost all its meaning. Interesting here means that the book is perhaps not fully successful yet still worth reading, often because it leaves me wondering about what might have been.
The minute I saw The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress (1961), I knew it would at least be interesting. “Ginsburg – Kerouac – MORHAIM” announces the banner at the top of the back cover. Morhaim? you ask. So did I. But this was a somewhat rare (for Signet Books) original novel, not a reissue of something from a major publisher, so it looked promising.
And promising it certainly is. The girl of the title is Rena, an undergraduate at UCLA (or something like it) who’s unhappy with the choices that life is presenting her. Which is understandable, given that we first see her heading off to a frat party with a superficial honor student too dumb to realize what an unusual woman he’s with.
For one thing, while he’s wearing the same sportscoat/tie/loafers combination as every other male in sight, Rena is wearing a hand-tailored dress made out of glove leather the color of wheat. She’s a knock-out in it and she knows it. So she’s not surprised when Tom, a football player and one of the alpha dogs of the fraternity, tries to steer her into his bed. The scene is the same pathetic melodrama played out every Friday night by undergraduate men all over the world:
“Oh, honey, help me, help me,” he said. His voice was as spoiled as a child’s begging candy. “Help you what?” “You know.” “Say it.” He struggled for a moment, not wanting to verbalize his desire. Then he said, “I’m so excited.” “You want to …” began Rena, pausing for him to finish the sentence. “… make love,” he said. “That’s a lie,” said Rena, her face showing scorn. “You don’t want to make love, you want to screw.”
Rena rejects him, pointing out that football is “merely a society-approved sublimation of homosexual impulses.” This happens in the book’s first ten pages. I knew I wanted to see where Victoria Morhaim would take Rena.
Rena is at an experimental stage in her life. She’s willing to sleep with a man when she feels the attraction (as with the maker of the gold leather dress) and just as willing to turn them down. She will drink or smoke pot if she’s in the mood or toss someone from her apartment for offering either when she’s not. That apartment reflects the unsettled state of her life: “At times Rena would suddenly see the tangle of things and feel a desperate need to straighten them out, but that desire never lasted long and the apartment remained untouched.”
Her parents are ready for the experiment to end. Actually, her mother is more than ready. After calling Rena a slut, her mother ejects her from their house, telling her to “Take the stench of your way of life and your mind with you. Don’t ever come back here again.”
As many young people discover, knowing what you don’t want doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to knowing what you do, and this is both Rena’s dilemma and the source of Morhaim’s difficulties in turning The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress into a coherent work of fiction. If one had to predict what will happen after the first few chapters, it would be natural to guess that Rena will go through a series of relationships that will ultimately lead to either happiness (with some form of Prince Charming) or wisdom (with some form of acceptance that Prince Charming doesn’t hold the key to happiness).
And while that’s essentially what does happen, the problem lies in the execution. At several points in the book, Morhaim switches from Rena’s point of view to that of one of the men she’s involved with. These transitions are neither well-executed (the men are names without character) nor useful for advancing the narrative.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Morhaim doesn’t trust her own creation. Rena lacks no confidence when it comes to her opinions. When Dr. Altman, an older “more sophisticated” history professor, invites her to his home, he proudly displays his collection of books on early American history, expecting her to be in awe. Instead, she’s in shock:
“Look at this, this collection of prints.” Rena lifted the leather cover. “It’s pornographic. Look at those pictures: scalpings, burnings, murder, mutilations.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Look, look here.” She pointed at one particularly gory print. An Indian was in the process of decapitating a pioneer woman. “This is the most perverse thing I’ve ever seen.”
Yet within another twenty-some pages, we see Dr. Altman coming to Rena’s rescue, calling her “Rena girl” as she begs, “Help me, Leonard. Please. Help me.”
A similar problem exists with Morhaim’s second novel (also a Signet original), The Girl Who Had Everything. Here, she offers us a portrait of a woman a few years older than Rena but none the wiser. Samara — Sammy to everyone — is a former homecoming queen from the San Fernando Valley now working for an electronics firm in San Francisco. Though she’s “just” a secretary, she is, in fact, the administrative glue that holds the marketing department together, and not long into the book is offered the job of running it.
Unfortunately, Sammy has completely bought into the idea that a wedding ring is the key to happiness. Worse, she also accepts wholeheartedly the myth that men have all the brains in business.
Around the same time that the door to career advancement opens, Sammy meets the perfect man. Charles runs his own company, owns a fabulous home with a bay view, knows the maître-ds at all the best restaurants in town, and — very much a stereotype of the “sophisticated man” in those days — confidently knows what to order for Sammy without asking her. She’s as giddy as a baby on a swing when he asks her out for the first time.
“Yippeeeeeeee,” she screamed. “My God, what was that?” Maxine appeared suddenly in the doorway. “That, Maxine,” said Sammy, “was a man. Man, man, man!”
To which we can only respond, “Oy, oy, oy!”
Things too good to be true usually are. Beneath Charles’ man of the world mask is a petty, violent, jealous boy. So it’s no surprise when, suspecting Sammy of having another lover — her gay interior decorator, of course, because jealousy rarely improves discernment — Charles shows her that he must be the only one to control her in a predictably adolescent way: he rapes her.
Once again, Morhaim makes her heroine weak and unstable. Sammy has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Rolfe, on a regular basis for over five years. “He helps me live through the week. I don’t think I could make it without him,” she tells a friend. In truth, Dr. Rolfe is a model of the kind of shrink who turned a generation or more of women into therapeutic co-dependents. When Sammy tells him about meeting Charles, he dismisses her enthusiasm:
“No, my dear girl, that is not the answer. You don’t need another man right now. You need something to get rid of all that hostility that is in you…. I have told you many times that it does no good to be angry at me. I am only the voice of your conscience.”
Dr. Rolfe’s answer to Sammy’s problems: “Why don’t you join a dramatic group?” And with that, he sends her on her way, reminding Sammy, “Don’t forget the check next time.”
Instead of encouraging Sammy’s development into emotional independence (she has, after all, already achieved financial and social independence), Dr. Rolfe’s guidance ultimately sends her into a literal regression. She returns to her parents’ house and, digging through her high school and college souvenirs, reverts to Homecoming Princess and “Queen Samara, SDM Fraternity,” imagining herself in a white ballgown, descending the staircase to awaiting admirers: “All the best, the blond and the dark and the young.”
Morhaim’s trilogy of conflicted feminism concludes with the most misleadingly packaged of her books, Casebook: Nymphomania — “Based on Actual Case Histories,” the front cover declares: “A Book that Probes Beneath the Skin of Four Women Ruled by Sexual Compulsion.” The book includes an introduction by Dr. Albert Ellis, then a prominent psychotherapist and prolific author on sexual topics, to encourage the reader to think this is some sort of clinical text.
It would be more accurate to describe Casebook: Nymphomania as a collection of four linked short stories, four sketches of women for whom sex is a major source of unhappiness. Unhappiness because each, in her own way, seeks fulfilment or advancement through sex, only to find the resulting relationships shallow, unsatisfying, or downright harmful.
Whether what any of them exhibits is a form of nymphomania is beyond my ability to answer, but if any reader was expecting to be titillated or shocked by Casebook: Nymphomania, they were certain to be disappointed. The book is about as sexy as a manual on venereal diseases. These not four vixens. These are four miserable women.
“Angelique Adams,” for example, the first story in the book, tells about an ambitious and calculating beauty who sleeps her way into Hollywood stardom, starting by allowing a powerful agent to rape her at the age of fifteen on his proverbial casting couch. Angelique considers herself an opportunist, choosing her partners and the occasions based on the advantages she expects to realize as a result. Unfortunately, she has no exit strategy, and at the ripe age of 38, finds herself more and more isolated: like “she was living in an elevator — going up and down endlessly, but never getting off at any floor, never exploring the world beyond the confines of the elevator.”
“Lois Love,” Morhaim’s second subject, grows up in a family that has apparently arrived at emotional exhaustion without ever venturing to any other destination. Morhaim’s description of a Love family dinner is grim:
Mrs. Love sighed deeply as she reached for the bowl of stew. It was not that she had worked hard to prepare dinner and was now sighing over the quick disappearance of so much labor … no, she had opened several packages of frozen stew, and heated the contents a quarter-hour before the meal; rather, she was sighing over the rapidity of the entire operation. She prepared, the family ate, and then each disappeared to his own corner. But she, herself, was incapable of bringing any warmth to the ritual of dinner and so she submitted, with that sigh, to the machine-like process of feeding her family.
With no model to ground it in, Lois’s initial attempts to find love are unsuccessful, if not self-destructive. Where Rena pretty ruthlessly rejected the football star, Lois goes along with a good-looking boy at a frat party and ends up being gang-raped. She bounces through several other short affairs until she ends up in an awkward arrangement with a wealthy bisexual man named (creepily) Dad. In the end, the most satisfying relationship she experiences is with a cross-dressing lesbian she initially mistakes for a man.
The writing in Casebook: Nymphomania is often strong. Carefully chosen words, striking images, little muddling around in making a point. We cannot help but feel sympathy for these four women. But I found it unsettling how consistently Morhaim treats her women as victims. To her credit, she does not suggest that there is a single or common reason they become victims. To paraphrase Tolstoy, she believes that every victim is victimized in her own way. Taken together, these three books offer a comprehensive catalogue of the factors oppressing the lives of women in the early 1960s. But in none of them do we see women moving beyond victimhood or exploring other ways of staking out an identity for themselves. And so, I would argue, Victoria Morhaim’s fiction from the early 1960s is of greater sociological than literary interest.
Morhaim went on to publish further under a variety of names. As Victoria Kelrich, she wrote two pulp paperbacks, Charades (1978) and High Fashion (1981). As Victoria Reiter — taking the name of her second husband — she published another thick soap opera-ish novel, Big Hawaii in 1977, and then translated several of the novels that Daniel Odier published under his pseudonym of Delacorta, including Luna (1984) and Vida (1986).
The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress New York: Signet Books, 1961 The Girl Who Had Everything New York: Signet Books, 1962 Casebook: Nymphomania New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964 All by Victoria Morhaim
“A hundred women came to paradise and a hundred angels fell” reads the tagline on the cover of the Red Seal/Gold Medal paperback original edition of Nancy Morgan’s 1952 novel City of Women. It was an obvious attempt to repeat the success of Gold Medal’s edition of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks, a memoir of life among the women of the Free Free forces in London, down to its cover by Barye Phillips, the same artist, showing women in much the same variety of déshabillé.
Beneath the surface, however, the two books had little in common aside from the fact that both were clearly based on lived experience. In Morgan’s case, however, the experience was that of living in the large complex erected near Pearl Harbor to house the hundreds of civilian workers brought to Oahu after the declaration of war.
Lynn and her husband Mack have come from Kentucky on a ship full of troops and civilian workers. The idea of taking war work in Hawaii was entirely hers. Mack, we soon discover, is a small-minded, embittered man who should never have left home, let alone gotten married. Had Mack ever been happy? Lynn wonders soon after they move into a bleak, nearly unfurnished apartment in the married quarters. “Perhaps he had been before he married her. He had told her so many times that he was.” Mack is utterly out of place in Hawaii: “He hated it, the sun hurt his eyes, and he was affronted by the sensual warmth.”
Lynn, on the other hand, quickly comes to love her new situation. She’s good at her job, desired by the thousands of single men on the island, even desired as a friend by the women she’s become acquainted with on the ship.
Though Lynn decides to move into the single women’s quarters after Mack throws her clothes out the window in a jealous fit, it takes Morgan another two hundred pages to make their break permanent. For her part, the process is made easier by meeting a handsome, understanding lieutenant, though this only provokes Mack further into his fortress of surliness. She starts to receive anonymous letters: “Watch your step. We know what you’re doing and what will happen to you if you don’t stop seeing that lieutenant. You’re a filthy whore and we find ways to get rid of women like you.” “We” is clearly Mack and his buddy Toby, who probably resent most of all not having a nice basement to chain Lynn up in.
Much of the book is taken up with the other dramas that arise among Lynn’s barrack-mates, most of which we can predict. An unwanted pregnancy, a romance with a married officer, and a case or two of island fever. There is also the somewhat more “scandalous” element of a happily predatory lesbian, but Morgan is too unsure of, if not uncomfortable with, same-sex relations that it’s not much more than a novelty item. Neither does she treat her exotic setting as much more than a backdrop. Nancy Morgan may have been writing from firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be a civilian worker living in Hawaii during the war, but for all she makes of it, City of Women comes off as no more interesting than a week or two’s worth of General Hospital.
City of Women, by Nancy Morgan New York: Red Seal Books/Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), 1952
“The first 36 pages of The Monkey Puzzle excited me more than any first novel I have read for years,” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, Peter Green. “Here, I thought, is a real winner.”
So did I when I first started the book. It opens in a philosophy tutorial in Professor Marble’s rooms. It’s one of the hottest tickets at this London university, with students squeezed into various forms of seating, increasing in discomfort as they decrease in seniority. Marble has disposed of individuation and problem of identity and is launching into negation. “What is ‘failing to find?’ my cigarette-case?” he asks. “Is it finding my paper the books the ashtray plus the rider that these are all the things on the table? How do we verify ‘my cigarette-case is not on the table’?”
Professor Marble is, as several biographers have pointed out, a fictionalized version of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, under whom Veronica Hull (then Veronica Benton) studied at University College London in the mid-1950s. Though it was later claimed that The Monkey Puzzle satirized Ayer’s affairs with numerous female students, I suspect the people who say this never read the book. When, on several occasions, Hull’s protagonist Catherine says she’s in love with Professor Marble, it’s obvious this is intended with a healthy dose of self-mockery.
Catherine, sitting in one of the more uncomfortable chairs at the opening tutorial, is struggling with the problem of ‘failing to find.’ “She had failed to find anything.” In fact, she is struggling with pretty much everything in her life. She’s taken to attending Mass every morning “in order to give God a last chance to reveal himself.” He has not. Her hairdresser hacks her curls into an Iris Murdoch-like pageboy cut. Her step-mother disapproves of her decision to study philosophy, expects Catherine to transform herself into a completely conventional housewife, and offers no practical or emotional support.
When she fails a critical exam, she becomes so distraught she finds herself admitted to a mental asylum. She awakens to a ward full of unhappy faces that stare back at her “munching and uncomprehending like cows.” They and the nurses are drowning in a slough of despond and Catherine’s greatest concern, even more than how to get out, is how to avoid being strapped down for a dose of E.C.T..
She gradually realizes that there is, in fact, a code of conduct among the inmates,
… the most honourable one she had yet encountered…. United against a common double oppressor, their madness and the hospital authorities, they rose above trivialities and did everything they could to help each other when the nurses weren’t looking. Catherine noticed many instances — a hot-water bottle passed on among four patients, a surreptitious puff of a Woodbine in the lavatory, such possessions as they were allowed to share, and always encouragement which if eccentric was well meant.
Though she frustrates her psychiatrist by preferring to talk about metaphysics than masturbation, Catherine manages to get herself released before experiencing the worst horrors of the asylum, but it soon proves only the first loop of a scarifying rollercoaster ride.
She spends a few weeks at a dismal, unheated boarding school in the North. Friends get her a job as a live-in teacher for the children of a couple of hyper-sensitive intellectuals in Essex: “She had expected them to be dirty but friendly; she found them dirty but extremely unfriendly.” She spends a few weeks homeless in London, going from cafe to cafe, and bar to bar in Soho, “where poets, painters, intellectuals and bums gather in the community of drink.” Her diet of cadged drinks leaves her wound up tighter than a violin string and she falls ill and spends time in a hospital (not mental this time).
All she really wants is “time to look at people and understand.” Everyone around her takes this as a lack of sufficient career-mindedness. What she’s trying to do is to learn to “live with my dirty brain,” to avoid becoming one of “the people I was brought up with” — the people who “hid trouble under a bank balance.” In the U.S., Catherine would have been considered a member of the Beat generation. In the U.K., perhaps one of the Angry Young Men — if she’d been a man. As a woman, however, she’s a bit too early for 1960s’ feminism and too independent to conform to the stereotype of a housewife and mother. (She does end up as both wife and mother, but only according to her own model.)
Catherine provides Veronica Hull with a wonderful vehicle for sharp and satirical observations and The Monkey Puzzle is one of the funnier novels I’ve read in quite a while. Unfortunately, Hull undermines her own work by failing to give the book sufficient backbone. Peter Green of the Telegraph thought the book lost steam after the first chapter. I think it holds up for a good four-and-a-half. but then, instead of keeping a tight focus on Catherine, she wastes her time and ours on characters none of us cares about. Like John, the “interesting” working-class philosopher, who never seems to open his mouth without going on for at least 2-3 pages. Like Adrian, her husband, who might be gay or might be a petty criminal but is probably just the ambiguous blob he seems. In the end, Catherine is not sadder but wiser than she started, just duller.
Not everyone agreed with Peter Green (and me) about The Monkey Puzzle’s diminishing returns. Angela Milne felt that Hull wrote “with an excellent colloquial simplicity, telling dialogue and a biting wit. This novel (her first) may not seem to have much shape, but it reaches its final comment decisively.” Angus Wilson remarked that “I have seldom read scenes at once so comic and so terrifying….” The book met V.S. Naipaul’s demanding standards: “The book is full of good things,” he wrote, though he added that “the early chapters are the most impressive.”
The Monkey Puzzle was Hull’s only published foray into fiction. She wrote several works of history and worked as a translator of French and German. The novelist Robin Cook, who lived with her for several years in the early 1960s, said she “had a brain like a bandsaw” and described himself as “one of her few survivors.” One wonders what might have come from Hull’s having a more supportive editor or a less sexist philosophy tutor.
The Monkey Puzzle, by Veronica Hull London: Barrie, 1958
Proximity is often what leads me to discover a neglected book. Whenever I look into reviews of something I’m planning to write about, I scan through the other titles discussed. This is most useful with reviews in British newspapers and magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s, when it was the habit of the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other journals to have a reviewer — and sometimes, quite prominent writers such as L. P. Hartley, Angus Wilson, or Anita Brookner — to cover three to five new works of fiction in the space of an 800-word article.
In this case, it was Angela Milne’s review of Veronica Hull’s novel The Monkey Puzzle that led me to No Bedtime Story (1958), the last of a half-dozen novels that Mary Nicholson, née Crawford, published between 1932 and 1958. Milne described the book as “told by a small boy of a nameless oppressed country” in the days following a popular uprising against the ruling regime. In light of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and on the heels of reading a similar account of a revolution in a nameless European country and its refugees, Monica Stirling’s Sigh for a Strange Land, I was intrigued. While there were almost no used copies available, they were cheap, so I bought one.
Were No Bedtime Story to be published today, it would probably be categorized as a young adult novel. The story is narrated by a boy named Jacko, probably around nine or ten, living with his mother, father, and little sister Vicky in the capital of a country that might just as well be Hungary or any other landlocked European state. (All we know is that the sea lies somewhere across the border.) His father is an activist, a leader of the printer’s union, which seems to be organizing against some status quo, some combination of political and economic forces, and he often hosts meetings — sometimes attended by men with foreign accents — at their apartment.
But all we see and know is through Jacko’s eyes and thoughts. And for him, the story begins when the radio announcer says she is sorry: “Children’s Hour was cancelled. She said we weren’t to be cross about going to bed without our bedtime story.” The next morning, Jacko’s father leaves early. “It’s a day of great events,” he tell his family. His mother sends Jacko to school with Vicky, but the streets seem mostly deserted aside from a figure or two rushing along.
When Jacko and Vicky arrive at the school, there is talk of the “great events,” but no one quite knows what is going on. Everyone is sent home. From their apartment window, Jacko sees crowds rushing down the streets carrying flags and policemen chasing after them, knocking down and arresting a few. His mother puts on her green overcoat and leaves, telling Jacko that she’s going to do some shopping. She does not return.
The next morning, knowing no better, Jacko dresses and feeds Vicky and the two head to school again. Now, there is no one but Christina, a student teacher, and Banger, a neighborhood delinquent. Leaving Vicky in their care, he heads to the city’s main center to try and find his mother. He comes across some men loading bodies into a truck. A skirmish breaks out and he jumps into the truck with the men, who drive to the edge of town. There, he sees hundreds of bodies:
They were arranged tidily in rows, so I was able to walk down between them, when I had dodged out of sight of the lorry, looking for the green coat. I didn’t think it was any use looking at the faces, because some of them were not like faces. The clothes were torn, too, but not so much.
I found the green coat at last, and the face, which was not bloody at all. But it was white and glossy like a candle, and though it looked like my mother, it was also quite wrong. I might not have been certain it was her, except that she still had her string bag, helf-full of fading spinach, twisted round her wrist.
This passage captures what is best about No Bedtime Story, which is Crawford’s skill in capturing the mix of concrete details and incomplete comprehension with which a child might perceive a chaotic situation. We know that some kind of revolution is going on, that tanks are rolling down the streets, that people are either huddled together in their apartments or trying to escape to safety in another country. There are scenes we are all too familiar with: a tank knocking down the wall around a suburban garden, blowing a hole into a family’s home; people running away from gunfire; roads clogged with people fleeing and airplanes swooping down to spray them with bullets.
The disarray and confusion that occurs when a war crashes into a civilian population is amplified by Jacko’s youth and lack of a frame of reference. When he hears a great screaming noise, sees a great shadow pass over him, feels the blast of heat from an explosion, it takes him a moment to understand that a plane has been shot down. When he then comes across a man in a fly suit, a parachute strung out behind him, crawling feebly to drink from a pool of water, he doesn’t know if this whose side the airman is on: he simply acts on instincts and pushes the man into the water, drowning him.
I found the simple details and abstract setting of No Bedtime Story highly effective. It was hard not to project images from the war in the Ukraine onto some of its scenes. Several contemporary reviewers, however, had reservations about Crawford’s decision to use a child as her narrator. Anthony Cronin, writing in the TLS, acknowledged that “the story is told skillfully enough; there is no obvious insincerity.” “Yet,” he wrote with some suspicion, “we have the feeling that use is being made of a child’s eyes for an adult purpose.” He felt that Crawford was pushing an agenda, probably a liberal one: “We know of course that all political action leads to evil but there are ways and ways of telling us.”
Portrait of Mary Crawford by Elizabeth Henderson, from the flyleaf of No Bedtime Story.
Angus Wilson, on the other hand, considered the novel a “tour de force that completely comes off,” but had reservations about the consequences of Crawford’s choice: “Nevertheless, even the greatest novel seen through a child’s eyes can never, I believe, be more than a tour de force.” “The vision is too limited,” he argued. “What the author gains by the brilliance of imposing this limitation accurately, he loses in the intellectual and imaginative scope of what can be told.”
To me, this is the objection of a writer who simply could never see himself making the same choice. Every narrator — even supposedly omniscient ones — is, in effect, a lens that focuses or disperses light in a particular way. In this case, I think Crawford has chosen a lens that accurately captures the experience of finding oneself in the midst of chaos. People say of such an experience that everything happens in a blur. But that isn’t true. Many things seem to be in a blur, while a few things stand out in perfect focus. And that was very much the feeling Mary Crawford conveys in No Bedtime Story.
No Bedtime Story by Mary Crawford London: Putnam, 1958
Photo of the cover of Laugh a Defiance courtesy of Sarra Manning.
I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.
To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.
Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”
Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.
Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”
Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.
Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.
Article on Mary Richardson’s slashing of the Rokeby Venus, from The Daily Mail.
Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.
She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:
I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.
Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:
Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.
Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.
She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.
Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.
In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.
In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.
And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.
I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.
“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.
And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.
As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”
But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.
Mary Richardson speaking for the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”
I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.
The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance
Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953
Sense and Sensuality is a novel caught somewhere between Queen Victoria and Dr. Kinsey. Richard and Laura, a young upper-middle class couple living in London in the late 1920s consider themselves sophisticates in taste and morality. Richard, a publisher, recognizes the growing appeal of modernism and Laura knows this means one should appreciate the work of Gertrude Stein, though she can’t find the patience to read it.
Had they existed in real life, Richard and Laura would undoubtedly have been a part of the Bright Young Things, and they will remind some readers a good deal of Tony and Brenda Last of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, though that novel came five years later. They are out almost every night at parties or clubs while a servant takes care of the tiresome details of raising their child. Laura in particular adores the company of the ever-changing cast of handsome young men. “When she was jolly and happy, she enjoyed kissing strange young men. And it never occurred to her to have a bad conscience about it.”
Laura enjoys playing the coquette, though at times she has a hard time knowing “how much was pretence and how much was true.” Richard, on the other hand, is a bit suspicious of many new ideas like psychoanalysis (“It’s too easy, somehow”). Yet they both feel themselves almost obliged by modern mores to experiment. One of Richard’s friends tells him that “One ought to have three women. One for a companion. One to feel romantic about. And one to make love to.” “It sounded silly,” he thinks, “but as a matter of fact it also contained a good deal of truth.”
In reality, what appeals to him is less a modern notion of an open marriage than the good old-fashioned double standard of chauvinism. So, when he begins an affair with April, a pretty younger woman a bit in awe of his worldliness, he considers it “a bit off” when Laura objects. And so she, in response, begins an affair with the shallow but funny Julian.
But neither is prepared to accept infidelity as just another part of modern life, like air travel or jazz. Julian is a better dancer, a better lover, than Richard, but somehow Laura longs for her husband’s solidity. Richard enjoys playing with April but would never for a moment think of ending his marriage to be with her. Laura struggles to make sense of the situation: “The Victorians thought they ought not to commit adultery, and did! We think we ought not to be jealous and are!” “Am I just being a suburban wife?” she wonders.
Critical acclaim for Sense and Sensuality.
To the give-and-take drama between Richard and Laura, Salt adds an updated version of the Greek chorus in the form of letters from Daisy, their maid, to her friend Nellie:
The drawing-room here has got pictures of naked women. I suppose it all depends on what one likes. I was never one to like that sort of thing. It’s not that I’m what you’d call narrow-minded, but I’ve got my feelings like anyone else and I never did like dirt. I believe Mrs. L. would run about the house without a stitch on. She’s not sensitive like I am.
Nellie isn’t terribly upset at Laura’s carrying on an affair (“with some women, one man is never enough”), but she doesn’t think much of her choice in lovers (“He’s got something sly in his face”).
How to resolve this situation? Around the time that Sense and Sensuality was published, Evelyn Waugh and his first wife dealt with it the “modern” way: they divorced. Salt, however, reached back to a tried-and-true denouement from the Victorian era: tuberculosis and tragic death. And for all its cleverness, Sense and Sensuality is ultimately undermined by Salt’s apparent preference for the mores of the previous century. The first time Laura coughs, you know where this story is headed.
Sarah Salt was the pseudonym that Coralie Von Werner Hobson adopted in the late 1920s for some reason. She’d already published several somewhat well-received novels under her own name, beginning with The Revolt of Youth in 1919. She’d previously used it as a stage name when she’d spent a season as part of a touring theatrical company — an experience she twice put to fictional use: once with Revolt and the second time with Joy is My Name (1929) (published as Sarah Salt). She published several more books as Salt, ending with Murder for Love in 1937. She died in 1946 at the age of 55.
Sense and Sensuality, by Sarah Salt (pseudonym of Coralie Hobson) London: Victor Gollancz, 1929 New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been invited to lecture on ‘The Modern Novel’ as a highlight of the festival held at the University of Sheffield.
She was looking forward to it. ‘They think a lot of me up there,’ she had written her friend, the director Lindsay Anderson, a few days earlier. ‘Know the Heads of Languages and they set my work for 3rd year students.’ Instead, she failed to show up. No explanation was ever given. Two members of the faculty appeared in her place and discussed Sully’s writing. It may have been the last time anyone discussed her work in a public form. For although she continued to publish for another seven years and lived nearly forty more, as far as English literary history is concerned, Kathleen Sully has vanished completely.
Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years. I first saw Kathleen Sully’s name in a list of 100 or so English woman novelists of the 20th century, a list running from Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf. It was the only name I didn’t recognize and given my hobby of tracking down forgotten books and writers, that fact immediately set me searching for more information. I quickly determined that she had written over a dozen books, that none of them were in print and few used copies were still available for sale. I located an electronic copy of her 1958 novel Merrily to the Grave on the Internet Archive and began reading.
Merrily to the Grave opens as Harold and Melanie Thydes, an elderly couple with ‘three small suitcases full of odds and ends, and each other,’ are wandering along the promenade in Brighton, cold, tired and desperately looking for a cheap place to stay. A policeman befriends them and takes them to Hesta Blazey’s. Hesta’s rooming house is not a desirable address: ‘It smelt of kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, soap, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.’
But it is a refuge of sorts. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shop girl, prostitute or thief, one thing unites the residents: failure. Rejected long ago by a fiancée returning from the Great War, Hesta expresses her love through acceptance. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ she maintains. Though her tenants have reached rock bottom in the eyes of society, some of them learn there are even lower depths to which a person can sink: ‘other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime’—the depths where the quality of compassion is lost.
Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. I was eager to go further. I located cheap copies of more novels, gulped them down, posted my initial reactions and became obsessed with learning more.
These were not like anything I’d read before. There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’
Canal centres on the Hoppes, a family with sixteen children living in a filthy house with a broken toilet and a pregnant goat in the kitchen. Horace Hoppe is soft-headed and idle, his wife Belle a fat sloppy former prostitute. Their children run wild. They steal. A little boy comes home with a ball smeared with the blood of a murdered young woman. Even the Dyppes, the ‘proper’ family next door, is dysfunctional: Mrs. Dyppe torments her spinster daughter about maintaining an upright reputation, all the while concealing the fact that Mr. Dyppe had committed suicide after learning he’d caught a venereal disease from his wife. This was beyond kitchen sink realism: this was toilet bowl realism.
Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’
The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England.
Seeing how little had been written about Kathleen Sully’s work, I decided to carry through to the finish. I tracked down the rest of her books, locating the rarest—Not Tonight (1966)—at the British Library, one of just a dozen libraries worldwide still holding a copy. It was clear that Sully followed in no one’s footsteps. This uniqueness unsettled reviewers when her books first came out; now, it was what intrigued me. Even relative to my own extensive knowledge of neglected writers, the extent to which Sully’s work had vanished seemed astonishing.
So, I began looking into Kathleen Sully’s life and critical reputation, trying to understand why she had gone from being such a prolific and original writer to being utterly forgotten. Aside from contemporary reviews when her books were first published, critical assessments of her work are virtually non-existent. Walter Allen, part of the bedrock of the English literary establishment of his time, considered her work worth mention alongside that Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and future Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing in his 1960 survey, The Novel To-day. Ironically, Allen’s short paragraph on Sully is still the only critical consideration of her work to appear in print in the last nearly-sixty years. Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.
One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game. She was the wrong age: too young for the generation of Greene, Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, too old for the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and the Angry Young Men. Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, then rising stars in a new wave of gritty, ‘kitchen sink realism’ theatre, were so impressed with her early novels they chose her first play to initiate a bold new series of Sunday night ‘productions without décor’ at the Royal Court Theatre in London—but remembered her years later as a ‘middle-aged woman standing in the wings.’
She didn’t write the sort of domestic dramas and comedies that were considered standard middlebrow fare. There is not a lot of tea being served in china cups and saucers in her books. Sully’s characters ate bread and drippings huddled around the kitchen table. They didn’t fit the mould of other fiction of her time. ‘Her people constantly say the untoward thing, move strangely against conventional furniture,’ as one reviewer put it. But they weren’t rebels, either. Sully’s novels are utterly a-political and virtually a-historical: while they’re mostly set in mid-20th century Britain, they provide few references to events that might allow one to pin the story to a specific time.
And her work itself didn’t fit in. ‘Every now and then a novel comes along which appears to possess outstanding merit, and yet to fit into no known category,’ read the fly-leaf blurb, and for once the publisher’s statement wasn’t hyperbole. ‘Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?’ asked Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler. ‘I have never read anything like it,’ John Betjeman wrote in the Daily Telegraph. John Davenport, in The Observer, was equally baffled: ‘I don’t, quite honestly, know what to make of it.’
As further books followed, reviewers seemed to reach consensus on two points. First, that Sully was a powerful storyteller: ‘It is impossible to stop reading Miss Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,’ wrote Siriol Hugh-Jones of her fifth novel, Burden of the Seed. And second, that no one knew how to take her. ‘Kathleen Sully beats me,’ Karl Miller confessed in reviewing Shades of Eden for The Observer. Even after she’d published nine books, they remained stumped. ‘Kathleen Sully is another mystery, which on the evidence of her new novel [The Undesired, 1961] I can’t solve,’ confessed Ronald Bryden.
In his survey, Walter Allen precisely assessed the cost of her uniqueness: ‘Kathleen Sully is a novelist very much on her own, which may account for her comparative lack of critical recognition.’ By her eleventh novel, The Fractured Smile, The Times Literary Supplement—‘that British bastion of highbrow book culture,’ as Publisher’s Weekly once called it—seemed to have found a way to deal with her: ‘Miss Sully has established a reputation as something of an eccentric among novelists.’ By her 14th novel, the TLS simply stopped reviewing her work entirely.
A selection of Kathleen Sully’s novels.
Sully did little to ensure her own legacy. She donated no papers or manuscripts to any archive for eventual research. If she had any friendships with other writers of her time, none of them considered her worth mentioning in their own letters or memoirs. I looked through biographies of the literary figures of her time, from Kingsley Amis to Angus Wilson, and found not one mention of her. And from the story about the Sheffield Arts Festival we know that she didn’t show up on the one occasion when her work was publicly recognized by academics. Whether she was flouting the school, taken ill, caught up in some personal crisis or simply the victim of an automobile breakdown doesn’t matter now—she never got another opportunity.
Kathleen Sully lived for over thirty years after her last novel, Look at the Tadpoles, was published in 1970, and yet at that point, as far as the literary world was concerned, she vanished forever. Even her own literary agency lost track of her. In 1986, the Curtis Brown agency published a notice in the Times trying to locate her in connection with the renewal of American publication rights.
None of the journals that reviewed her novels noted her death at the age of 91 in September 2001. When I began to investigate Kathleen Sully’s life for a biographical entry on Wikipedia, I soon found that the fifteen years she spent as published novelist were an anomaly: aside from her books and their reviews, there seemed to be nothing. If I wanted to find any record of her life beyond the books, I would have to look in other places: genealogical databases, census records, civil registers and telephone directories. I would also have to locate surviving members of her family, if there were any.
By picking through public records, one can sketch the bare facts of Kathleen Sully’s first thirty-two years. The second of seven children, she was born Kathleen Maude Coussell in a poor neighbourhood on the south side of London in 1910. Her father Albert was a skilled mechanic, credited in a 1910 issue of The Engineer with the design of an automotive device, but that didn’t appear to have improved his family’s economic status. Between 1911 and the 1929, the family moved at least six times—mostly back and forth between poorer parts of London (Peckham, Lambeth, Camberwell) and market towns in Cambridgeshire (Wisbech) and Norfolk (Downham Market).
If Sully’s fiction contains any traces of her childhood, it suggests the Coussell household was poor, overcrowded, and chaotic. Canal in Moonlight centres on a family with sixteen children living in squalor with dogs, cats, rats, goats and even a broken-down horse. Overcrowding and families with odd assortments of generations and relations are constant themes in her early books. These were, in fact, among the first aspects of her work to draw the attention of reviewers. ‘[T]he house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats,’ Isabel Quigley wrote in her Spectator review of Canal in Moonlight.
Children in her books are often left to fend for themselves. In Through the Wall, Celia Wick sleeps on a filthy sack of straw, has one pair of dirty, ripped underpants, and is handed over to another woman to raise when her mother remarries. Stephanas in Burden of the Seed steals from a pair of senile aunts to buy food for himself. Sully may have taken liberties in her fiction, but families living in poverty on the fringe of society are such a constant in her work it seems reasonable to assume that she experienced something of the same in her own childhood.
At twelve, Sully was sent to the Barrett Street Trade School, where she studied dressmaking. She left the school at fifteen and worked in a garment factory in East London. She was still living at home when she married Charles Sully, a skilled mechanic like her father, in 1932. Within a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, and a second daughter, Shirley, followed in 1934. Charles and Kathleen carried on with the itinerant lifestyle she’d grow up with. Victoria (Vicki) was born in Paddington, Shirley in Billericay in Essex. In the 1939 register, they are listed in Weston-Super-Mare on coast of Somerset. Then a civil register records the birth in 1942 of a son, Fraser, listing Charles as the father, in Southend-on-Sea—back in Essex.
From here, the facts are hard to find and harder to verify. Many of the official records that could provide dates and addresses to trace her life over the next sixty years have not yet been released. Much of the rest of the available information came from Sully herself. In a short ‘About the Author’ sketch printed on the dust jacket of Canal in Moonlight she reported that ‘At 38 years of age’—around 1948—she attended Art College for two years and then ‘went on to a Teacher’s Training College to take a teaching post (Art and English).’ A biographical sketch taken from Sully’s response to a questionnaire included in Contemporary Authors (1966) further specified ‘Art College’ as Taunton Art College and St. Alban’s Art College and ‘Teacher’s Training College’ as Gaddesden. This last fact helps narrow the timeline somewhat, given that Gaddesden Training College operated just from 1946 to 1951.
This list of dates and places would not have been particularly illuminating had it not been supplemented by an email I received from Paul Hunt, Vicki’s son, in March 2019. He had seen my posts about his grandmother’s novels and confirmed that the information in her Wikipedia entry was correct to his knowledge. ‘I think I can help in explaining why she faded,’ he wrote. According to Paul, Kathleen and Charles Sully’s marriage was ‘rancorous’ and marked by separations. Sometime before the start of World War Two, Kathleen took the girls to a cottage in Paignton, Devon, where she tried to run a dress shop. She then reunited with Charles and they lived in Weston-Super-Mare as recorded in the 1939 register.
Not long after, the couple had ‘a furious row’ and Kathleen took the girls to Denbigh in Wales. Charles pressed to be allowed to visit his daughters and Kathleen relented. She would regret this decision. As Paul wrote:
My mother remembers the event clearly. They were living in a small cottage in a village close to Denbigh. Her father came to visit and when her mother left for work, he threw the children’s clothes into a suitcase and then rushed them to the station. She believes they left by train. He had nowhere to live and so his mother came and cared for the children. They all lived for some time in a room in a house in Hereford.
‘Much as I loved my grandfather, I knew him as an uncompromising person and I could imagine him doing this,’ Paul added. This account also seems credible considering a few other facts: Vicki married in Newbury, Berkshire in 1957; Charles died there in 1997; and Shirley died there in 2008. So, Charles stayed in Newbury for decades, while Kathleen moved from place to place, almost always near the sea, always miles from Newbury. In Kathleen Sully’s entry in Contemporary Authors, it states, ‘children: three.’ There is no mention of her marriage.
If the story of Charles abducting the girls is true, it does raise questions about Fraser Sully. If Charles was father, as stated in the birth register, why didn’t he take Fraser as well? Or did the incident take place before Fraser was born? Was Fraser illegitimate, as Paul speculates, conceived in an affair that took place afterward? Regardless of the boy’s paternity, however, picturing Kathleen Sully as a single mother raising a son—possibly without any financial support—provides a context that helps make sense of the few available facts about her life after 1942. Financial considerations and the need to care for her son, for example, would likely have been her foremost concerns after 1942.
With no family money, no university degree, and a young son to look after, Kathleen Sully would have few options. ‘Almost every mother of fatherless children has to find work to help in their support,’ Leonora Eyles wrote in her1947 book Unmarried but Happy. ‘On the whole, it is better if a single woman with children can earn money in the home,’ she continued, recommending child-minding, typing, keeping a small shop, dressmaking, graphic arts and writing as possible ways to earn money working in the home.
In her ‘About the Author’ sketch, Sully devoted the most space to listing the many jobs in her ‘varied career’: ‘domestic, lift attendant, dress model, dress cutter, dress designer, dress-shop owner, professional swimmer and diver, canvasser, bus conductress, cinema usherette, free-lance artist and writer, tracer in the Admiralty, dressmaker.’ She later repeated this list in her Contemporary Authors questionnaire, adding ‘owner of antique shop and now full-time novelist’—which correlates with a remark in her June 1963 letter to Lindsay Anderson: ‘I have finished with shops and all else other than setting down the human agony and joy.’
Looking at this list alongside Eyles’ Unmarried but Happy, I wondered if Sully had her own copy of the book. My suspicions only increased after reading the following: ‘There is only one art that is blithely taken up without training, without discipline and without the appreciation of difficulty with which one approaches even the learning of knitting, and that is the art of writing.’ We know that writing was one of Sully’s first ventures as a working single mother because her first book wasn’t published in 1955 but in 1946, when Edmund Ward, a children’s book publisher, released Small Creatures and Stony Stream, listing Kathleen M. Sully as the author. Small Creatures contains two stories, about a dormouse and a dragonfly; Stony Stream is about fish. Neither the stories nor the style is noteworthy, but the books did get reprinted at least four times each. They appear to be her only attempts at juvenile fiction.
How did Sully get from ‘It was a warm day in Spring, and the East Wind blew gently through the grasses growing in the meadow’—the opening line of Stony Stream—to the fierce and tenacious rats that greet the reader of Canal in Moonlight? Perhaps she found, in her arguments with Charles, in their separations, in having her daughters stolen from her and in her effort to support herself and Fraser, that she had to be fierce and tenacious herself. In her June 1963 letter to Anderson, she reassures him, ‘You will find me much changed: not so arrogant and childish,’ and closes by saying, ‘it is so good to hear from one who was my first friend.’ Did she really spend those years before the success of her first novels friendless? Or did she attack would-be friends like one of Bikka’s rats?
Kathleen Sully, from the dust jacket of Merrily to the Grave.
A clue to Kathleen Sully’s temperament—and stunning evidence of the anger and pain wrapped up in her separation from Charles—can be found in a poem that Vicki shared with me. Written in the late 1980s after she attempted to visit her mother, who was by then living in Camborne in Cornwall, it was part of Vicki’s extraordinary effort to restart her life after her traumatic childhood and an unhappy early marriage. I reprint the poem here in full (and with Vicki’s permission) because it reveals so much that lies beneath the sparse facts.
Lost Person
The first time I lost her I was six in a whitewashed cottage in Wales my father came to visit he said but he threw my sister’s and my things into a suitcase and rushed us to the station
the second time came after twenty years I found her on the back of a book a middle-aged woman and the name was right I wrote her letter said why see me now I am successful and not before
the third time my son tracked her down and she said I could meet her too with her dark eyes and beauty she resembled my sister not me my mentally ill sister both with long white hands not like my gardening ones
she told me of her struggles, her travels in Spain and her achievements she didn’t ask about mine she said my hair and clothes were wrong she gave advice on diet and lifestyle I must put castor oil on my eyes to prevent cataract I was drowning in words when my letters went unanswered I knew I had lost her again years later I found her new address and phoned she said I could visit rain was forecast and the air was heavy with sour scent of cow parsley as I drove the pre-motorway tangle of roads to her terraced house in Camborne weeds straggled over her doorstep when I knocked, a ragged curtain jerked at the grimy window the front door inched open
hunched over a frame her eyes glittered up at me and with a voice reverting to the cockney of her youth she said I have two things ter say ter yer one is Go Away and the other is Piss Orf the door slammed shut cold rain began to fall and I left
In this poem, ‘the first time’ is clearly Charles’ abduction of Vicki and Shirley; ‘when I was six’ fixes the time as late 1939 or early 1940. The ‘second time’ would have been around 1959 or 1960, after seeing Kathleen’s photograph on the back cover of Merrily to the Grave—the only book on which it appeared. If Sully did write ‘why see me now I am successful,’ one can hardly imagine a more ‘arrogant and childish’ response by a mother to her long-separated daughter.
Paul Hunt incorporated the ‘third time’ into Mahogany Rose, the novel loosely based on his family that he published as ‘Paul Sully.’ I say loosely because Paul merges the stories of his grandmother and mother into his character Suzy. Much of Suzy’s story—living in Ghana at the time it attained independence, working in a defence laboratory, participating in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – comes from Vicki. But there is also the visit to Kathleen at the house in Cornwall and elements of the bitter relationship between Kathleen and Charles.
Vicki’s poem offers some further clues into Kathleen Sully’s life and the family’s emotional traumas. Vicki refers to ‘my mentally ill sister’—Shirley. Looking for more information on Shirley Sully, I located a letter she wrote in 1986 to an imaginary lover named Frederique, which the artist Lisa Marie Gibbs posted on her blog in 2016 in tribute to ‘My mentor, my friend, my inspiration.’ Gibbs confirmed that Shirley lived with her father and struggled with mental illness as an adult. Shirley’s letter quotes Stevie Smith’s poem ‘The Frog Prince’—‘I have been a frog now/for a hundred years’—and adds, ‘As I have not had a family to look after, I have tried to make as many things as possible–my clothes, sculptures, paintings.’
Vicki shared with me a set of poems that she wrote after Shirley died. Through these, we can trace not only Shirley’s troubles but the parallels between her and Kathleen. In her ‘prologue’ Vicki writes,
we sisters shared a map shared the haemorrhage of streaks and runs and patched-up places
After taking the girls from Kathleen in Wales, Charles – who was working as a contractor for the Royal Air Force and moving from airfield to airfield – left the girls in the care of a Mrs. Crane, ‘the lonely woman/who cared for us/a bit/when she was sober.’ Vicki married, mostly as a means of escape, she says, and Shirley was left to deal with Charles, who was, according to Vicki, an angry, controlling, and violent man. She displayed a talent for art and was able to get work in London, where she soon fell in with a group of friends as full of vices as they were of promises.
She also began suffering from a combination of alcoholism and mental illness and was forced, on more than one occasion, to beg Charles to return to live with him. During these years when Shirley’s life was punctuated by various crises, she made contact with Kathleen and even went to stay with her in Cornwall briefly. This must have been in the late 1960s, for the sole dedication in all of Kathleen’s 17 novels appears in 1969’s A Breeze on a Lonely Road. It reads ‘For Shirley—My Daughter.’
Kathleen Sully letter to Lindsay Anderson from June 1963, courtesy of the University of Stirling archives.
It’s not clear if Kathleen Sully ever shared the loss of her daughters with people who knew her as a writer. There is no hint in her few letters in Lindsay Anderson’s archives that she had any children but Fraser. In her June 1963 letter, she writes that Fraser is finishing his first year at the University of Manchester, which meant ‘I am free to go where I like and do what I like.’ Fraser’s attendance at university might also explain why she could be ‘finished with shops and all else,’ and why there was a break of nearly four years between the publication of The Undesired in 1961 and The Fractured Smile in 1965.
Did the furious rate at which she first published—ten books in the space of less than six years—have something to do with Fraser’s situation? Was Sully paying for school fees? In my copy of Canal in Moonlight, I found a short letter she wrote from Brighton in early 1957 and was able to confirm that the address had been a rooming house at the time—possibly the inspiration for Merrily to the Grave—suggesting she might have been living alone while Fraser was at boarding school. Her June 1963 letter to Anderson, on the other hand, was sent from a house in The Lizard, a hamlet at the southernmost tip of Cornwall, which she had recently purchased as ‘a permanent home (retreat).’
This period between books may also have been when she took ‘her travels in Spain’ mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Two of her subsequent books—Horizontal Image and Island in Moonlight—largely take place in Mediterranean settings. Within a year or so of failing to show up for the Sheffield Festival, however, Sully resumed writing at an even more fevered pace, publishing another seven novels in just five years.
There is a noticeable difference in these books from her first ten—a difference in tone and in intensity. The Fractured Smile is an infidelity farce, Dear Wolf a limp comedy about a small-town Lothario. Not Tonight was described as a ‘whimsy, flimsy piece of sugary shockingness’ by one reviewer. Christopher Wordsworth, in The Guardian, found that The Fractured Smile ‘meanders artlessly’ and Dear Wolf displayed ‘a rather simpleton humour.’ Mary Holland was scathing in her assessment of Not Tonight: ‘At best it is the novel one might expect from an aunt who had been told once too often: “You write such droll letters, you should put it all down in a book.”’ By 1968, when Horizontal Image was published, The New Statesman’s reviewer complained, ‘She is prolific and seems to have created a standard expectation in her readers—the deadliest way of paralysing critical faculty.’ Both Sully and her critics were, it seems, becoming exhausted. Where her early books were reviewed in major periodicals by top-flight reviewers, her last few barely received notice.
Why does the list of books end in 1970? Did she lose her readership? Did her publisher lose interest? She didn’t stop writing. On New Year’s Day in 1992, she informed Anderson ‘Am still writing—but you know how things are in the publishing business—and my work has become more controversial.’ In the same letter, she mentions that Fraser ‘is very well—works full time and held on as a member of staff’ and implies he is living with her. This letter is addressed from Camborne, very likely the same terraced house mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Paul Hunt believes that the reason Kathleen stopped publishing was that her energies became consumed in dealing with Fraser’s schizophrenia. Mahogany Rose includes a conversation in which Matt (Charles Sully) tells Paul’s fictional counterpart that Fraser (whose name, interestingly, is not changed) hung himself in his bedroom in the Camborne house. Paul did later acknowledge to me that ‘I never met him [Fraser] so I could not be sure of this fact.’
Paul’s disclaimer raised my suspicions because, at the time, I’d been unable to find any record of Fraser Sully’s death. When I ordered a copy of Kathleen’s death certificate from the General Register Office, I decided to search for Fraser’s as well, and soon obtained information that both disproved and proved what Paul had written. Fraser Sully did not commit suicide. He died of heart failure at the age of 76 in May 2019, just two months after Paul’s email. However, according to his death certificate Fraser died at Woodtown House at Bideford in Devon, a care home that, according to its website, ‘provides nursing care and rehabilitative support for 28 adults experiencing complex mental health needs.’ Although the staff at Woodtown House could not discuss Fraser’s condition, they did acknowledge that he’d been living in the home for nearly twenty years—probably from the time that Kathleen entered the care home in Camborne where she died. It’s safe to assume that Fraser’s care would have consumed much of his mother’s time and energies in the years before she had to seek full-time care for herself.
So perhaps Paul was right, after all. Perhaps the reason Kathleen Sully vanished from the literary world had less to do with institutional prejudices and more to do with the simple fact of a mother struggling, with few resources and little support, to cope with her son’s mental illness. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ Hesta Blazey says in Merrily to the Grave. Kathleen Sully had been isolated from her family for decades. She had few connections to the literary world to start with. Her few letters to Lindsay Anderson may, indeed, represent the only ones to have survived the buffeting and knocks that would have been the daily life of an aging woman caring for an adult son with schizophrenia. Orwell said that history is written by the winners. It’s easier to win when you’re not isolated, out on the margins, old and out of print. Perhaps, in the end, there is no mystery why Kathleen Sully vanished.
I thank Vicki Sully and Paul Hunt for their generous cooperation in my research on this article.
Advertisement for The Journey in Publisher’s Weekly.
Of all the muses you might expect a young woman novelist to be channeling in 1933, Henry Fielding is among the last. Yet the closest parallel one can find to Rose Caylor’s second novel, The Journey, is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. In both books, a young innocent, a tabula rasa personality, travels to a great city where that blank slate is scribbled over by various forms of iniquity and sent home sadder and wiser.
But plot isn’t the primary point similarity between Tom Jones and The Journey. It’s the authorial voice. Tom Jones would be about a third as long and not one-tenth as enjoyable were its fairly thin story enriched by Fielding’s gentle, amused, and worldly-wise commentary. By the time Rose Caylor sat down to write The Journey, she’d been a newspaper reporter, PR agent for the American Medical Association, business report publisher, and actress in the Leo Dietrichstein’s traveling company, for which she had jumped into stage volcanoes, got shipwrecked on a desert island, and flounced around in crinoline and hoop skirts as “the Spirit of the Old South.” In his memoir Gaily, Gaily, Hecht compared Caylor to “a combination of Laurette Taylor, Sarah Bernhardt, and Geronimo.” Not quite the same as Fielding’s years as a magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners, but close in terms of street savvy, I suspect.
The actual story in The Journey could easily be squeezed onto about five pages without much abridgement. A Chicago reporter names Jimmy Dyrenforth sweet-talks Caryl Fancher, a typist in his father’s office and the two get married on a whim. Coming out of City Hall, Jimmy panics and rushes to a pay phone, where he talks the friendly editor of a New Orleans newspaper into giving him a job. Jimmy bolts for the first train to New Orleans, leaving the virginal Caryl to her own devices, hoping she will give up on the marriage before it’s even started.
Instead, she assembles a trousseau and heads off to New Orleans in pursuit. Though Jimmy meets her at the station, his welcome is mostly intended to persuade Caryl to leave as quickly as possible. Whether obstinate or just obtuse, she persists as he variously ignores and insults her, and eventually the two hop in bed and Caryl ends up pregnant. Though Caylor wrote her share of happy endings as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, there’s none to be found here. Caryl gives up eventually and heads to New York for an abortion after brow-beating Jimmy into borrowing $200 from his father.
So much for the narrative arc. What you can’t get from this synopsis, however, is any sense of why this book is 483 pages long. Perhaps an excerpt from Caylor’s introduction of the reader to Jimmy will help:
We take it that the reader will be glad at length to meet one of our characters who is not a fool. However, the reader may well turn and ask “What is her?” In attempting a valuation of our favourite masculine character, we must first state some of our concepts and premises, to which he must measure up. Thus:
To have convictions –! that is the true, the high, human importance. To feel that one’s beliefs matter, to attain them through moral force, to give them up with a struggle when one has become convinced they are false, that is living a worthy, possibly even noble, life. We truly believe that convictions, hard won and hard relinquished, are the only possessions that lend a passing importance to man, and dignity, etc., to his transitory estate. Our hero, however, hadn’t any hard-won convictions or any he wouldn’t give up at the drop of a hat. Opinions blew through his head like drafts. He no more bothered to knew where he got them than were he got a cold in the head, and he no more knew the reason why he gave them up than he could give the reason for a sneeze.
This is followed by nine pages of further reflection on Jimmy’s character, its development, and the nature of modern man, while Jimmy and Caryl wait side-by-side in a cab for the plot to move along. The Journey may take place in a time of trains, planes (well, a few), and automobiles, but its pace is solidly grounded in the 18th century. Thirty pages later, the couple is just sitting down to their first meal together. The consumation of their marriage is still at least three hundred pages off.
And this, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by a reader who decides to take Caylor’s journey. One reviewer called the book “irritating and entertaining,” and that’s precisely the mixed bag it offers. This is not a book you read for the story or even much for the characters, so if you don’t fall in love with Caylor as tour guide, I can’t imagine you’re likely to hang in past Chapter Two.
I think we have to accept that Caylor miscalculated how far she could stretch her story’s thin fabric over its complex scaffolding of commentary. I stuck with her to the very end because reading books like this is part of the price of my obsession. Given how rare this book is in the first place (perhaps a dozen copies in libraries worldwide and zero copies available for sale), I suspect few who even bother to read this far are likely to track down The Journey for themselves.
Yet, I must remind you that irritating was only one of the adjective used to describe this book. The other was entertaining. For, in the midst of many pages of reflections and discursions that often made me grumble, “Oh, just get on with it!”, there are also wonderful set-pieces. Like the literary discussion where a roomful of New Orleans belles dames debate whether Gulliver’s Travels is “fornographic” and gush over their latest reads, the titles and authors of which none of them can quite bring to mind. Or this description of the earnest authoress Rose Entwhistle and one of her attempts at research:
Today, Miss Entwhistle is very tired, and for a most perlexing reason. Having heard a salesgirl remark the other day, in answer to her own statement that a department store was very fascinating, that it was “a good place to learn human nature,” she had immediately (quite secretly of course and incognito) obtained a job in this same store and for that very purpose. Today, having worked a week there, having been rather disappointed in human nature, and having quit the day before, she suffered greatly in her feet, but especially there was a strange disquiet in her memory. Famous for her many stories dealing with department store life, she was beginning to wonder whether it was not she herself who was the author of that statement about department stores being “a good place to learn human nature,” and could it be that she had been taken in by a quotation from herself?
And, on occasion, Caylor can be refreshingly telegraphic in her approach. Take, for example, Chapter 32, which reads, in entirety, “We have no room in this book for the savageries of Caryl’s sister-in-law, Hazel.”
The Nation’s reviewer, Florence Codman, loved The Journey in all its digressive beauty, dismissing her own brief description of the book as “an offering of nickels where millions are to be enjoyed.” Well, perhaps not millions, but something in the mid-hundreds at least. Do these make The Journey worth the investment of a couple of weeks to read it? I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks to help with these decisions.
The Journey, by Rose Caylor New York: Covici, Friede (1933)
It would be natural for Women in a Village to be compared with Rebecca West’s masterpiece about her travels in the former Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both West and Louisa Rayner were Englishwomen writing about a land and people relatively unknown to most of their readers. But West was never anything but a visitor to Yugoslavia.
Rayner, on the other hand, was a resident. Fascinated by the country on her first visit in 1936, she returned the next year, when she met and married a Belgrade fuel dealer named Stojan Božic. She would no longer be able to see the country “as a picture; I should not be able to stand back and disparage or admire. I was going to become a Yugoslav woman; I was stepping into the picture.”
That step may have ensured her survival after the Germans invaded in 1941. By then, she had become fluent in Serbian and fully assimilated into the culture, serving slatko and coffee to her husband and his friends as they sat and talked in their living room, working in the kitchen in the early fall as they canned great quantities of tomato sauce.
In 1944, she and her husband decided to flee Belgrade with their six-year-old daughter, joining a great exodus of civilians leaving the city as it became a target for regular Allied bombing raids. He chose Rušanj, then an isolated village along a hillside roughly ten miles south of Belgrade. Life in the village was so rustic that there was no notion of rent: the villagers simply took them in and made them part of the household.
Having reconnoitered the situation beforehand, Stojan chose to approach Savka, a grandmother, who was already sharing a two-room hut with two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Savka’s hut had only an earthen floor and everyone slept together in a single bed. The hut had no chimney; there was simply an opening at the peak of the tiled roof through which the smoke escaped. Instead of a stove, Savka cooked on an iron dome suspended over the fire.
Rayner, who’d taken a degree in classics at Cambridge, recognized the central room of Savka’s hut as what the Greeks called a melathron — a black room. “… [M]ore than a kitchen, but hardly a living-room and not quite a hall in the medieval sense. The walls and beams of this room of Savka’s were black with soot, for the smoke from the hearth visited every cranny before drifting out through the room.” She later wrote of her comparison between Savka’s hut and those of Homer’s time in an article titled “Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece,” published in The South African Archaeological Bulletin in December 1956.
“I did not stay with Savka in her melathron in order to study Homer,” Rayner wrote. But “in that precarious and primitive way of living I found Homer a most cheering companion. Homer had gone through all this. Homer knew. And in all this smoke and dirt and toil Homer had kept his poise and his refinement.”
Rayner’s classical sensibilities are evident throughout Women in a Village. The way of life in Rušanj was closer in many ways to that of ancient Greece. Even before the war, the village operated more on a barter basis, and as the war made currencies fleeting phenomena with fluctuating values this became all the more so. As a refugee with little more to offer than labor and occasional contributions of food or cloth, Rayner focused on doing all she could to assimilate.
Thus, unlike Rebecca West, who could afford to be subjective, picking and choosing among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, Rayner is at all times an empathetic observer. Reference to Homer was one of the ways in which she could deal with the radical changes forced by her situation. So she doesn’t recoil at what occurred after each meal:
A sketch of Savka’s house, from Louisa Rayner’s article in The South African Archaeological Bulletin.
… there was a black dog and his chocolate-covered mother. They served no purpose at all except to bark and lick the table clean after meals. The table (sofra) was about a metre in diameter and perhaps a foot in height. When the dogs had cleaned it, it was leant up against the wall out of the way. I suspect that the “table dogs” of the Odyssey also licked the tables and were not simply fed at table.
Rayner soon learns the merit of rustic ways, switching to wearing a wooden yoke after her first experience of hauling two bucketfuls of water from the well nearly a kilometer away from Savka’s hut. And when she finds the corpse of one of the neighbor’s chickens floating in a bucket, she simply extracts it and carries on. She comes to understand the importance of cattle in plowing even the smallest field and the tragedy of losing one of a matched pair. “She is a left-hand cow!” Savka chastises Rayner when she suggests borrowing one of another farmer’s spares. With many of the men having been conscripted into the Army or the partisans or forced labor in Germany, it is the women who do most of the work.
Rušanj is so far removed from its century that the villagers do not even observe St. Vitus’s Day, the day still held sacred by most Serbs, marking the death of the last Christian king in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. “It’s only a national holiday,” one of them remarks. The significance of that comment stunned Rayner:
Try to grasp the idea of the distance of stars. If you are not a scientist your mind faints in horror at the attempt. So in horror did my mind faint when I tried to comprehend the awful slowness of change. How long does it take for a new idea to be adopted — six hundred years? A thousand? Well, there is some hope. But how much more time is needed for that new idea to oust a new one? That is like the distance of stars. How long had it taken for the people of Rušanj, wherever they may have been living, to learn to worship oak trees — or the sun, or their ancestors? And how many millenia had they needed to forget whatever ideas they had before that? The mind faints.
Yet when it became clear that the Russians and Tito’s partisans were going to succeed in forcing out the Germans, the villagers adapted quickly to the emerging balance of powers — placing Rayner’s situation at risk. “It followed that a newly-converted partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other Communists by denouncing someone who had spoken a word in favour of the British.” And even more so if the denounced were a British citizen.
Rayner and her husband returned to Belgrade soon after the Germans evacuated, but their stay would be short. By late 1945, they realized they would not be allowed to resume their former bourgeois ways and one or both could face imprisonment. Stojan arranged for visas through a friend in the French embassy and they left in January 1946, never to return.
Women in a Village was published in England in 1957. The book received enthusiastic reviews. V. S. Pritchett considered it “a most remarkable book…. Something quite new and original: war as it is seen by a distinguished, level-headed and sensitive woman. It is most interesting and well-written.” Most reviewers cited the author’s compassion and understanding. “Here is the drama of life and personality told with intelling perception in fascinating human detail and all on a level of taste and values calculated to excite the mind and heart at once,” wrote Monni Adams in the The Montreal Gazette.
Isabel Božic in 1986, photo by Dragoslav Simic.
By then, Stojan and Rayner had parted ways, she settling back in Cambridge. The book soon fell out of print and was forgotten. In 1986, however, it was translated into Serbian and serialized in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. This led to a journalist, Dragoslav Simic, tracking down Rayner, who was by then retired in a small village near Diss in Norfolk. Born Isabel Foster, she had kept her married name and had been known as Isabel Božic in England. Simic traveled to Diss and interviewed Isabel Božic, who explained that she had taken her mother’s maiden name of Louisa Rayner as a pseudonym. Simic then visited Rušanj, where he found one of Savka’s surviving daughter-in-laws, Vuka. A translation of Simic’s story can be found online at http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html. Isabel Mary Foster Božic died in 2004 at the age of 90.
Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (Isabel Mary Foster Božic) London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1957
Brooks Peters, who had a wonderful website devoted to neglected gay writers before he lost it to Russian hackers, wrote me back in 2008 to recommend Jane White’s 1967 novel Quarry:
It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society
Photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry.
The post I wrote building on Brooks’ recommendation produced far more comments than usual. Some were about the book, but most were about White herself — including one from her son Martin Brady, a specialist in German literature and film at King’s College London. White was her maiden name and she was known in real life as Jane Brady, who taught at St. Catherine’s School in Surrey. She wrote seven novels between 1967 and 1979, as well as a memoir, Norfolk Child, published in 1973. She contracted multiple sclerosis in her forties, however, and was forced to stop teaching and writing. At a time when treatments for MS were few and ineffective, and, in her son’s words, “made what I believe was a brave decision to get out before things got (more) unbearable,” dying in 1985 at the age of 51.
I’ve long felt that Jane White greatly redeserved rediscovery, but must confess that while I collected all her books, I read none of them until last year, when I took Norfolk Child along when we spent a long and quiet Christmas break at a house located about ten miles from the isolated Norfolk farm where White grew up. I then tucked into Quarry, which is also set in the Norfolk countryside.
There is nothing bucolic about this novel, however. In fact, it simmers with sense of the danger that’s fostered by apathy. Early in the book, three teenagers — Todd, Randy, and Carter — persuade a younger boy to come with them to a cave in the side of an abandoned quarry near their town. The boy, who’s never given a name and who seems to lack any parent or guardian to notice his absence, is nothing but an abstract victim for them to toy with. “Who do you think he is?” Randy asks Todd.
The question never gets answered. Nor does the boy help. He seems, in fact, to be happy to leave his identity ambiguous. “But who are you,” Todd asks him after a few days. “You know who I am,” he replies. When asked for his name, he answers, “Fred. Or Bert. Or Jim. Anything will do — I really don’t mind.”
The friends aren’t even quite sure what they intend to do with the boy. All three are products of the 1960s, when parents let children — or at least boys — spend most summer and weekend days running around outside with little sense of how they spent the time. “Well? Where’ve you been?” Cater’s mother asks him. “Up at the quarry.” “Oh, the quarry again,” she concludes, moving on to another subject. And so, it’s easy for them to smuggle small amounts of food that they take to the boy.
Cover of first US edition of Quarry.
White deliberately leaves the boy’s situation abiguous. He’s not quite free to leave but neither is he restrained like a prisoner intent on escape. They soon decide, though, to build a cover for the cave that’s both shelter and jail. This being the 1960s, Carter is able to get the materials by simply sneaking into a nearby construction site one evening and taking what he needs. They see the building of the wall as a “Boy’s Own” project: “You’re making a good job of that, Randy,” says Carter. “I like doing it,” Randy tells him. “I like making things.”
The first casualty, however, isn’t the boy but a girl who wanders into the quarry and begins exploring. They chase her away, through a woods, and onto a road where she’s knocked down and killed by a passing motorcycle. Carter’s mother reads the news of the accident with as little interest as if looking at yesterday’s temperature.
The apathy of the adult world toward the teenage boys creates a vacuum which they are allowed to fill with their own fantasies, some sinister, some as childish as playing at being pirates. Randy and Todd, however, are near the end of secondary school, soon to be pushed out to join the adults. They look upon that prospect with complete uninterest. Far better to remain in the limbo of teenage life, able to take a parent’s car for joy-riding but never expected to pay for the fuel.
Cover of US paperback edition of Quarry.
Their toying with the boy, however, must come to an end, and when it does, the result is brutal but almost anticlimactic. The boy’s death seems almost as unreal as has his weeks of uncomplaining imprisonment.
Brooks Peters wrote, “I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.” I think he was half-right. I think that Quarry isn’t about the breakdown of society but about a society that has already broken down without realizing it. Most of the adults in the book seem to be sleepwalking through their lives. If there is a voice at the back of their heads to urge them to look a little more closely into what their children are up to, it’s tiny and faint, almost inaudible.
It was perhaps unsurprising that Quarry was compared to Lord of the Flies by numerous reviewers. Golding’s stranded schoolboys, though, had far richer imaginations than White’s teenagers. The violence of Randy, Todd, and Carter is not savage but mundane. Their captive boy is a welcome diversion from their otherwise tedious lives, but when he becomes an impediment, they have no choice but to make him go away, like disposing of the sheet of newspaper after finishing a packet of chips.
At the time it was published, Quarry seemed shocking to readers and reviewers, but after Columbine and countless other school shootings in America, after the murder of James Bulger in England, I suspect it will seem either prescient or all too numbingly familiar. What it will not seem like is the work of a private school English teacher in her offtime.
Quarry, by Jane White London: Michael Joseph, 1967 New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967
I’m not a great reader of mystery novels. I have nothing against the genre, but even its most loyal fans will have to admit that it has a healthy share of workmanlike prose, two-dimensional characters, and predictable plots. And let me be clear from the start that Stanton Forbes (one of several pennames used by Deloris Stanton in the course of her 40-year career) wrote plenty of the first two. Having read a half-dozen of her novels and sampled a dozen more, however, I can say with some authority that her books almost never come out the way you’d expect.
What overcame my usual resistance to reading mysteries when it came to Stanton Forbes, though, was the one aspect in which I’d argue she has no equal in the field: her titles. Here is a sample of just a few:
If the contents of these books doesn’t always live up to the quirky charm of their titles, they’re usually not half bad. Forbes published over 20 novels as Forbes in the space of about 25 years while also producing nearly as many under the pseudonym of Tobias Wells in the same period, so it would be a bit much to expect brilliance and originality throughout. But I got the sense that Forbes never took what she was doing too seriously.
Forbes usually starts with one of the most frequently-used situations in all fiction: collect a half-dozen or more mismatched characters in some artificial situation (yes, a grand country house is a favorite setting), toss in a corpse or two, shake vigorously, and let human nature do the rest. She also draws upon some of the signature motifs of Alexandre Dumas père: switched infants, the high-born in low places, and the low-born in high places. But she never seems to have gotten too hung up about plausibility.
Cover of Welcome, My Dear, to Belfry House
In Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House (1973), for example, there is no good reason why the grand actress Deirdre Dunn would be holed up in a grand Gothic mansion on an isolated, windswept beach with a house full of former vaudevillians and circus performers. She is, after all, THE Deirdre Dunn:
Deirdre Dunn as Catherine the Great, Deirdre Dunn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Deirdre Dunn in plays by O’Neill, Ibsen, Shake¬ speare, Moliere, in adaptations of novels by Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara. “Deirdre Dunn dances . . . Deirdre Dunn sings . . . Deirdre Dunn laughs.” Deirdre Dunn as Sarah Bernhardt, Deirdre Dunn in a new Hitchcock thriller, Deirdre Dunn in everything!
Nor are we really expected to believe that a handsome young chiropterologist would just happen to arrive at the house at the same time as the sweet young orphan who has just learned that Deirdre Dunn is her grandmother. Or that he would be coming to study a rare species of bats that nest in the … you guessed it … belfry.
In All for One and One for Death, the cast is a set of female quintuplets and five matching male celebrities: a baseball player, an artist, a movie actor, a pop singer, and a nuclear scientist. Forbes has the girls tell their side of the story, followed by the boys, with her small town sheriff taking center stage in Act III to solve the puzzle.
The whole point, after all, is see how Forbes can pull off another feat of legerdemain. Will the rightful heir be the chauffeur or will the plain, self-effacing housekeeper turn out to be a vicious she-wolf from Hell? In fact, after the first few of her books, I learned to keep an eye out for her MacGuffins. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Forbes was fond of throwing her readers off the scent.
She often sets her reader up to be tricked by starting out with a suspicious death or two already having occurred. “Did one Alvaro Rojas, gardener by profession, and one Cecilia Jenks, housemaid, die by accidental drowning off Belfry House within eighteen months of each other?” she asks early in Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House. Did the millionaire Harrington Hartford Lake really die of a heart attack, causing all his potential heirs to gather at the start of Bury Me in Gold Lamé? Or was he poisoned by his twenty-something fourth wife and former stripper — sorry, artistic dancer — Kohinoor Diamond Lake? Or is he even dead in the first place?
In Go to Thy Death Bed, which takes place among the members of a vaudeville troupe in 1890s Philadelphia, the preceding murders are the unsolved hatchetings of Marguerite’s mother and grandmother — naturally begging the question, is she our fictional Lizzie Borden? If she is, and I can’t honestly say, having only skimmed this one, it certainly won’t be for any of the reasons we’ll have been led to believe for at least the first 150 pages.
Cover of Some Poisoned by Their Wives
When Forbes executes her trick well, she manages to squeeze more than one turn of the table into her last twenty-some pages. Some Poisoned by Their Wives appears for most of the book to be a hunt for an elusive black widow who’s bumped off several innocent G.I.s stationed around El Paso, Texas during World War Two to gain access to their death benefits. Except that whole plot turns out to have itself been a grand MacGuffin orchestrated to kill off a character barely even visible on the radar. And then, just because she can, Forbes flips the table again and tosses in a final Verbal Klnt/Keyzer Söze twist to make us wonder just what was going on all along.
Sometimes, however, Forbes has to resort to the same sort of drawn-out mechanical explanations of the crime that make the last chapters of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels so tiresome. It defeats the point of a superb feat of magic to have someone come on stage afterward and explain in detail how it was done.
Cover of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End
And there are times when the ridiculousness of the situation overwhelms Forbes’s ability to pull of the trick. As much as I love the title of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End, it’s not a particularly good murder mystery. We are expected to believe that once a year, the drama students at a local college all dress up and run around town playing pranks. OK, that’s not so bad. But this year in particular, there are thirteen pairs dressed up as Laurel and Hardy running about, and one of them managed to race into the office of the CEO of the town’s biggest company and murder him. Or are there more than thirteen pairs? Or was that just a coincidence? Or was it someone completely different, someone wanting to steal his company or his prototype computer (BABY)? I finished the thing and can tell you the correct answer is none of the above. But save yourself the trouble and skip the book in the first place.
Cover of Grieve for the Past.
Not all of Forbes’s novels involve such far-fetched premises. In fact, her first book as Stanton Forbes, Grieve for the Past (1963) is closely rooted to her own upbringing and probably her best book overall. Born in Kansas City in 1923, Forbes was raised in Wichita, Kansas during the Great Depression, and this is the book’s setting. In it, Ramona Shaw, a bookish fifteen-year-old girl likely not that different in interests and personality from Forbes herself, begins to question why a devout elderly couple in her neighborhood were murdered. Her parents, neighbors, and the police are all convinced it’s the work of one of the many jobless, homeless drifters who pass through the town.
You can tell that Forbes was at home not just in her setting but in Ramona’s voice. She has yet to experience much beyond her own neighborhood, let alone town: “Next to the Farmers was the Bragdon house and then the Webster grocery store. That was my world — except from school, of course. That was my world — in that time.” She already understands the subtleties of Midwest values: “Caroline was prettier. Not pretty. Just prettier.” She fantasizes that some wealthy benefactor will learn of her detective work and decide, “Now there is a girl I should send to college.” But she also knows that her aspirations are seen as futile:
This was the way everybody treated me. As if they were saying inside, Isn’t that nice? The child has ambition. She’ll learn, of course. She’ll find out. She’ll find out that wanting is not getting.
Ramona turns out to be shrewd but not ingenious. She does figure out the likely murderer, but she’s unable to do anything about it in the end. Which she finds maddening. “I mean — crime doesn’t pay. You can’t let someone kill and get away with it,” she complains to her grandfather, a former lawman. “That’s a fine theory,” he replies, “only it doesn’t always work out. I wish it did. I wish we could mark a neat little SP after every crime, S for solved, P for punished.” “There’s many a murderer loose in this world, Ramona,” he cautions her. “And that’s the truth.”
Cover of She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter.
A similar sense of groundedness pervades other novels set in small towns. Although She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter takes place in Texas, Forbes’s Yarrowville is as believable a small Texas town as the Thalia of The Last Picture Show. Anthony Boucher, the New York Times’s long-standing crime fiction critic, distinguished between Forbes’s naturalistic novels and those he called “tailored-to-order.” The characters in the latter, he argued, never came close to the credibility of the ones in the realistic novels, and Grieve for the Past certainly supports his case. But I wonder whether she ever intended for the two to be compared.
Perhaps the answer can be found in the novels she published as Tobias Wells. These all feature Knute Seversen, first as a Boston homicide detective and later as chief of the Wellesley, Massachusetts police. While not quite so unflappable as Inspector Maigret, Seversen can usually be relied upon to keep his head when all around are losing theirs. And he seemed to allow Forbes/Wells to work in a middle ground between grounded realism and near-farcical flights of fantasy. So, the victims, the circumstances of their deaths, and the cast of suspects tended to be unusual, they still had to retain some amount of plausibility. No quintuplet/celebrity matchups allowed anywhere near Plymouth Rock.
Stanton Forbes in 2003. Photo by Dennis Wall, Orlando Sentinel.
Counting her first four novels, which she co-wrote with Helen Rydell as Forbes Rydell, Stanton Forbes published over 45 mysteries by the time she died at the age of ninety in 2013. And if the unpublished manuscripts listed in the finding aid for her papers at Boston University are any clue, she came nowhere near running out of terrific titles: Mother Goose Was Stuffed, Mother Goose Was Cooked; The Hippie-Yippie Murder; Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed; When the Hearse Goes By, Jack and Jill Hill Kill, Fall of the House of Snodgrass, Mary a Pickle Makes a Mickle….
Going Under is a story of physical comfort and emotional and psychological suffering. Nina Sergeyevna, a translator, arrives at Litvinovka, a writer’s retreat somewhere outside Leningrad, for a few weeks’ state-approved rest in the middle of winter. She’s provided with three meals a day, the freedom to walk through the neighboring countryside and forest, and, most importantly, time to think and write in her room. This last is most precious of all because, like many Soviet city dwellers, she has to share a communal apartment in which privacy is essential unknown.
Yet she will find nothing to shelter her from the pain of her memories. She’s decided to take advantage of this time to “go under.” Going under means to immerse herself in the past — specifically, into the time of Stalin’s purges and show trials of the late 1930s, when her husband Alyosha was arrested and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.
Since Alyosha’s arrest, Nina has no contact with him. Like other women whose husbands and sons were sucked into the vortex of the Soviet penal system, she’s stood in line for months outside the prison where he’s supposed to have been taken, to ask of his whereabouts. The answers she was given were vague and always shifting. “There are no foundations for a review of the case.” “When he serves out his sentence, he will write to you himself.” “Maybe he’s alive, maybe dead. How would I know?” Finally, she’s told that he’s been sentenced to a special camp for “ten years without right of correspondence.”
It’s now been over twelve years. There’s been nothing. Many nights, Nina finds herself dreaming of Alyosha in prison, in a labor camp, being interrogated, sometimes even being executed. The uncertainty eats away at her psyche.
She wants to put down her thoughts to restore the sense of closeness with her husband that’s grown weak and thin over the years: “The book was me, the sinking of my heart, my memories, which nobody could see…. In creating it, Alyosha’s voice … would permeate” its reader’s soul. Nina is haunted in particular by the thought of his death. “What was his last moment like? How had they turned a living man into a dead man? … And where was his grave? What was the last thing he had seen as life abandoned him?”
Arriving at the retreat with Nina is Bilibin, a writer of comic stories who’s been rehabilitated as a member of the Writers’ Union after serving a term in the gulag. She is desperate to speak with him: “Until now I had never met anyone who had come from there — from a concentration camp.” Bilibin is flattered by Nina’s attention but wary of her questions. He suffers from angina; his heart is weak from the strain of his years in camp.
Finally, however, he reveals the truth:
He was never taken anywhere, he had never suffered from cattle-trucks or dogs. Everything was over long before that. According to Nikolai Aleksandrovich, “ten years without right of correspondence” simply meant execution by firing squad. To avoid repeating at the windows “executed”, “executed”, and so on that there should be no howling and crying in the queue.
Bilibin also confides that he is working on his own account, a book about the things he has seen in the camps. Nina is thrilled to have an ally, and solicitous of Bilibin’s fragile health, especially after he suffers a mild heart attack. As their time nears its end, Bilibin modestly offers his manuscript to Nina.
At first, she read with great excitement. “Yes, his writing was more powerful than his conversation.” Though Bilibin’s story is set in a mine, Nina recognizes some of the men from the camps he’s told her about. Perhaps it’s an allegory to avoid the censors. As she reads on, however, she realizes that Bilibin has written nothing more than a conventional piece of socialist realism: earnest workers, conscientious supervisors, a happy collective. “You’re a coward. No, you’re worse, you’re a false witness.” “Why did you not have the decency to remain silent,” she asks.
For Lydia Chukovskaya, there were only two legitimate choices for Soviet writers: tell the truth or remain silent. Her greatest scorn was for those who tried to follow a compliant middle way and appease the authorities. Going Under is really Chukovskaya’s own story, one she wrote in 1949 after learning of the fate of her own husband.
Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.
The daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a children’s writer who was perhaps the best-known and most beloved literary figure inside the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya had married a Jewish physicist and mathematician, Matvei Bronstein, in the mid-1930s. Bronstein and Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova’s son, were arrested. Gumilyov was set to a labor camp. Bronstein in all likelihood never made it out of basement of the NKVD’s building in Leningrad.
Chukovskaya and Akhmatova stood in the same lines described by Nina Sergeyevna in Going Under, the lines in the introduction to Akhmatova’s great poem “Requiem”:
In the black years of ezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the prison lines. One day someone recognized me. Then, a woman with blue lips who stood behind me woke up from the trance into which we all fell and whispered in my ear: “And this, can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.” And then something like a smile glimmered on what once had been her face.
The two women became close friends and over the subsequent years Chukovskaya took notes of their almost daily conversations, note that were later published as The Akhmatova Journals, only one of whose three volumes has been translated into English.
In the decades after her husband’s arrest, Chukovskaya became one of the most vocal critics within the Soviet system. She supported Pasternak when he fell out of Stalin’s favor. She wrote in support of Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuri Daniel when they were arrested and tried in the 1960s and in support of Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Sakharov when they were persecuted. She was a friend of Solzhenitsyn and let him hide in her flat for a time before he was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. She was herself expelled from the Writers’ Union soon after.
Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.
She even had the courage to sue her publishers after they balked at publishing Sofia Petrovna, her short novel about a mother whose son is arrested during the purge. Although the book was accepted for publication in 1962, when it came time to be released in 1963 after Khruschev’s fall from power, the Soviet authorities banned it. Chukovskaya argued that her publishers were in breach of contract. Her publishers alleged that the book was not in the public interest, to which she responded,
Literature must illuminate what happened in 1937 in a profound way and from every angle. But this is beyond the powers of a single work. Only our literature as a whole can do that. And that is why we must not stop printing Solzhenitsyn. On the contrary, many more books about that time need to be printed, including my novel.
Amazingly, the court found in Chukovskaya’s favor and ruled the publisher had to pay her the outstanding share of the royalties. A samizdat copy of Sofia Petrovna was smuggled out and published in Paris as The Deserted House. It was not until 1988 that the book was published in the Soviet Union.
She once told an American reporter that she felt compelled to speak out against injustice in the Soviet system: “If I don’t do it, I can’t write about the things that matter. Until I pull this arrow out of my breast, I can think of nothing else!” Chukovskaya had great faith in the future. When she was expelled from the Writers’ Union, she responded in a public letter,
Always, when performing acts like this, you have forgotten — and you are now forgetting — that you control only the present and to some extent the past. There is still another court with jurisdiction over the past and the future: the history of literature.
What do they do — those you have expelled? Write books. After all, even prisoners have written books, and are writing them. And what will you do? Write resolutions.
Like Sofia Petrovna, Going Under was published in the West decades before it came out in Russia. The Chekhov Publishing Corporation released the book in Russian in the US in 1972 and an English translation by Peter M. Weston came out from Barrie &Jenkins the same year.
Reviewing the book for The New Statesman, Germaine Greer wrote, “Chukovskaya’s calm prose shakes the heart with grief and outrage for one of the greater man-made calamities of our time.” It was, she concluded, “a very important book indeed.” Valentin Terra argued that Going Under was “artistically neater, tighter, and more subtle” than Sofia Petrovna.
Anatole Broyard, the New York Times’ reviewer, however, savaged the book. He snarked that Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiastic blurb for the cover of the US edition “evades literary evaluation, either by accident or design.” Going Under, he wrote, was “dull, stodgy, amateurish and almost wholly bereft of ideas.” He was so sure of himself that he even ventured to say, “while I have not read The Deserted House I am convinced, in my heart, that it cannot have been a good book.”
Fortunately, the “history of literature” that Chukovskaya believed in has proved a better judge than Broyard. Although the book has never been reissued in English, it’s been translated into numerous languages. The book’s page on GoodReads includes positive reviews from readers in Germany, Spain, Finland, Latvia, and Armenia.
Lydia Chukovskaya died in February 1996. She was 89 and had lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union. Her body was buried in the cemetery at the writer’s colony of Peredelkino, not far from the grave of Boris Pasternak.
Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Peter M. Weston London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972
I’ve been collecting neglected books for decades and writing about them here for over 15 years and I still get surprised by books I’ve never heard of. I first came across a mention of It’s a Great War! in a 1935 newspaper article reporting on a talk about novels of World War One. The speaker, a professor at an Illinois university, singled it out as one of the “truest, most powerful” books written about the war and noteworthy for having been written by a woman: Mary Lee.
I quickly Googled it and was stunned to learn that Robert Lovett, one of the three judges for the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, considered it that year’s best book: “It is the biggest piece of fiction I have read, and comes nearest to satisfying the last conditions of which I was notified, i.e., ‘preferably a novel presenting the whole atmosphere of American life.’” Lovett ended up supporting the decision to award the prize to Oliver La Farge’s novel of Navaho life, Laughing Boy. It was not the only award Lee was short-changed on.
Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.
Daughter of an old Boston Brahmin family (she once informed a Boston College student that the Lees arrived in Boston two hundred years before the College), Lee was caught up in the fervor that accompanied America’s decision to enter the war in 1917. A recent graduate from Radcliffe College, she responded to an Army call for women to serve in administrative positions and sailed for France in the fall of that year as part of the staff of a field hospital. The hospital deployed near Bordeaux and Lee worked there for some months before being enticed to take a secretarial job with an Army Air Corps office in Paris. Then, growing uncomfortable with the relatively luxurious conditions in Paris, she joined the YMCA and took a post running a field canteen for an aviation unit near the front. She decided to stay on after the Armistice and set up and ran several canteens serving American Army units in occupied Germany, returning home to Massachusetts in late 1919.
Lee later said she wrote the book to tell women the truth about the war. “They think that war is a pure, wonderful crusade,” she told reporter Eleanor Early. “Fine young men and women, fighting for Justice…. If people really knew what it was like — if women knew –.” Following her own experiences with few fictional variations, her story took 200,00 words to tell. And when she finished it, she found no one interested in publishing it. So she put the manuscript on the shelf.
Then, in 1928, to mark the tenth anniversary of Armistice Day, Houghton Mifflin and the American Legion sponsored a contest offering $25,000 for the best novel about the war. Lee retyped the manuscript, leaving off her name as the rules required, and submitted it.
Most of the contest judges — all of the civilian judges, that is — considered Lee’s novel by far the best of the candidates. Retired Major General James Harbord, Pershing’s head of supply at the war’s end, however, thought the book “unseemly” in its content and inappropriate for an award sponsored by the Legion. Unwilling to go against the general, the other four judges agreed to a compromise and split the award between Lee and William T. Scanlon, who’d submitted a more conventional novel about combat during the battle of Belleau Wood, God Have Mercy on Us!. Scanlon and Lee each took home $12,500.
Rank and file Legionnaires objected to this compromise. Or rather, they objected to Lee’s selection. Ten years after the fact, veterans appeared, like General Harbord, to chafe at Lee’s mention of such unheroic aspects of the doughboys’ time overseas as prophylactic stations, drunkenness, and the abandonment of children they fathered with French women. Several Legionnaire posts, including one near her hometown of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts wrote letters demanding she forfeit the award, criticizing the book for its “frivolity”.
Ad for syndicated version of It’s a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.
Ironically, this was exactly the sort of thing Lee intended to document. “War is not a romance,” she protested. “As long as romances are fabricated about war, it will remain a noble, worthy, beautiful adventure for youth. As long as war is made romantic, it will go on.”
Nevertheless, there is a certain air of romance in the early chapters of It’s a Great War!. Anne Wentworth, Lee’s fictional counterpart, departs for France, she is full of idealism: “Wasn’t it a noble gesture…? They were starting out to make the world safe again…. This was a War to End War, –”
That idealism begins to fade as soon as her ship docks in Le Havre. There, all along the quai, lie stretchers with the British casualties being loaded onto a transport headed for England. “There was nowhere you couldn’t hear them…. See them…. Logs of wood, going slowly, one after another.”
And the reality of the women’s quarters at the hospital in Bordeaux are not the sort of thing mentioned in the recruitment literature: “Black fleas hopped…. Women taking clothes off. Hideous underwear. Fat legs and thin ones. Hairs…. How could anyone ever choose to look at women’s bare limbs…?” The expression “It’s a great war!” quickly turns from enthusiasm into sarcasm. It becomes a running joke. Anytime conditions are lousy, supplies are short, or Army bureaucracy infuriatingly pig-headed, someone will quip, “It’s a great war!”
Even more disheartening is Anne’s realization that she, a bright, intelligent young woman, is just as much a faceless number expected to keep quiet and follow orders as any soldier. “They thought you couldn’t be trusted, did they…. Sent you out here, fed you on horse meat, and then refused to trust you.” Though she enjoys a brief reunion with her brother, a lieutenant serving with an infantry unit, the hospital proves too dreary and too dull, being too far from the front. When Anne is offered a position with an Air Corps staff office in Paris, she jumps at the opportunity.
Paris seems a different world after the rural isolation of the field hospital. “Dresses, in shop windows, — soft and colored…. Through the glass, handkerchiefs, diaphanous, frail things with colored borders….” In the staff office, officers in smartly tailored uniforms and shining Sam Browne belts and boots rush in and out of meetings, trying to obtain airplanes from the French, supplies from America, and most importantly, attention from Pershing’s staff. Anne stays at the home of a French noblewoman, is invited out to restaurants and the Opéra Comique, goes for rides into the country in a general’s staff car.
There are occasional German air raids to dispel the illusion, of course. “Men, up there, in the darkness, trying to kill you…. Others trying to kill them….” Lee reminds us that air warfare was a grim novelty back then: “The sky, no longer an empty place you didn’t have to think of…. Human beings, skimming through the great dome….” She stoops to pick up a piece of shrapnel that falls at her feet. Her friend quickly ushers her under the arch of a bridge for safety.
Ad for It’s a Great War! from the Guardian.
The samples I’ve offered so far demonstrate an aspect of Lee’s prose that many found hard to take. One British reviewer compared the experience of reading It’s a Great War! to “riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” “A book about war cannot move smoothly, swiftly,” Lee later countered. “War moves in jerks.”
Now that we have seen many more writers work in such fragmented, impressionistic prose (Céline most obviously comes to mind), however, we should not be put off by Lee’s style. Instead, we should recognize the mastery with which she uses it to capture the fragmentary nature of intense experiences. This excerpt, describing Anne’s first flight in an airplane, seems a perfect example of what makes this book as palpable, as immediate, as some of the finest scenes in Tolstoy:
She held her breath, mouth open. The bumping earth, falling away below you…. Falling, falling…. Wind, filling your mouth, blowing furiously against you…. But you weren’t moving…. Moving means things that rush past…. Here there was nothing…. Nothing but that furious, high wind…. And the old earth, a purple map below there, sinking, sinking…. The great wing tipping, tipping…. You’d fall out. A great, swirling dip, — the earth going from one wing to the other, — God, you were upside down…. Breathless…. The world whirling…. Down, down….
As the fall of 1918 approaches, Anne grows concerned about her brother, whose unit fought in the battle of Château-Thierry. She scans casualty reports and asks anyone she meets who’s been to the front, but it is only a month later that she receives a letter from a nurse she knows: “The regiment was frightfully shot to pieces, but no one will be a greater loss than Geoffrey.”
Her brother’s death causes Anne to question the value of her work in comfortable Paris, and she decides to take a post with the YMCA where she can serve close to the front. The work seems trivial — every evening, she cooks up great batches of cocoa and bread and butter that she serves up to the soldiers and airmen who come into her canteen. It seems “like throwing things into a bottomless pit.” Yet she soon learns of its importance for morale — and health. Her little YMCA cafe provides the men with an alternative to getting drunk, sleeping with prostitutes, or simply lying in their bunk going mad with boredom.
And she gives the men an illusion of home. “Men will tell you that you remind them of their wife,” her first supervisor cautions her. In most cases, this is just a harmless flirtation. But Anne learns not to take her safety for granted. Lee recounts a scene in which Anne walks to her quarters late one night after closing the canteen. She spots a drunk American soldier staggering out of an estaminet. The man begins to follow her down the dark street. Though Lee doesn’t use the word, the possibility of being raped takes over Anne’s thoughts and she rushes in fear to the safety of her doorway.
Feature story by Eleanor Early on It’s a Great War!.
Among the many aspects of this book that impressed me was Lee’s candor in dealing with the realities of sex and violence in war. She not only mentions the presence of brothels near the front and the prophylactic stations run by the Army to deal with the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the number of children fathered by soldiers who seduced local women. “I’d like to see people start saying, ‘Johnny, this is a photography of the French girl your father had an affair with,'” she later told Evelyn Early.
She also writes of the threat of sexual assault that always hovered around any woman serving around large numbers of men. At one of her posts in occupied Germany, several junior officers conspire to ensure that Anne is never left alone with their unit commander, a colonel they recognize as a violent sexual predator. “This town’s no place for a decent woman,” one warns her, encouraging her to seek a different posting.
A book of over 600 pages can pack in a lot of detail, and I must pass over many for the sake of brevity, but the range of material Lee covers in this book is extraordinary. In some ways, the variety of her postings during and after the war exposed her to more than any typical soldier would have seen. It’s a Great War! may be the first novel to have captured one of the realities of 20th Century warfare: namely, that much of the activity in war has little to do with actual combat: “For every day at the front, three or four were spent at the rear,” she later remarked. “For every man at the front, seven or eight were at the rear.” She writes of the impact of the influenza pandemic, of seeing more soldiers buried from the flu than from wounds. And she devotes over a hundred pages to Anne’s time during the US occupation of the Rhineland following the Armistice, an operation few Americans today are aware of.
And she records the difficulties faced by those who return home after months or years away. When the train pulls into her hometown’s station, Anne is startled to realize that it was “entirely unchanged.” “Stations,” she thinks, recalling all those she saw in her journeys around wartime France (and post-war Germany), “were places with great holes blown in plaster, and roofs half fallen off.” Serving “Mr. Wilson’s cause” in the war, she also lost contact with the fundamental motivators of peacetime life: “Money. We forgot in France how life revolves round money.”
Her many months living in tents, working with make-shift cafes, walking miles from villages to encampments, made her wary of spending her days sitting in some office. “God, Life must have fresh air, and movement in it, — you mustn’t get tied to jobs that kept you indoors,” she thinks as she flees an interview at an insurance firm.
In her first months home, Anne struggles to adapt to these forces. Without the relentless pressure of her daily tasks serving the troops, she begins to suffer anxiety attacks — what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. She considers seeking medical advice — a Boston doctor she knew from the hospital in Bordeaux. But as she approaches his door, the grim prospect of what that age could offer in the way of psychological treatment chills her. “This thing might mean two years of sagging…. Limping…. Sanitariums…. Two years of being pitied…. Spilling your soul….” Anne turns around. “Soul, still her own, — thank God. Unspilled.”
The book ends with the election of Harding — and the mass rejection of those Wilsonian ideals she so believed in. If her future remains unclear, she has at least come to understand that there was no more chain of command to decide it for her.
Mary Lee in 1930.
Like Anne, Mary Lee rejected office work and the possibility of marriage to return to Radcliffe and take her master’s degree. She spent several years as a reporter for the New York Evening Post, one of the few women then on its staff, then went out at a freelancer for the New York Times and others, covering everything from society balls to sports events to a stint in Italy and Greece. Sometime during this period, she also wrote — and failed to interest publishers in — this novel.
By the time Lee won the American Legion contest and managed to get the book published, she appears to have settled back in her hometown of Chestnut Hill, living in her parents’ home. Though she did write another book, a history of Chestnut Hill, in the mid-1930s, she seems have devoted herself mostly to charitable causes, such as a fund to help Greek refugees during World War Two. Over forty years after It’s a Great War! was published, a reporter from the Boston College campus paper found her busy supervising a handyman working on her family home, which was now a rooming house for graduate students. She was reluctant to talk much about herself and refused to have her picture taken. “It seemed she had spent many of her productive years caring for her aging mother,” the reporter wrote. “Her life had grown quiet.” She died at the age of 90 in 1982, having left her home in Chestnut Hill only in her final months due to ill health.
Though Lee had to share the American Legion-Houghton Mifflin award, It’s a Great War! received considerable publicity. Most major US papers and all the national English papers mentioned and/or reviewed the book. As the sample below shows, most reviews were enthusiastic and a few agreed with the Illinois professor that it was one of the best, if not THE best, American novel about the war published until then. Of the reviewers who disliked the book, most were put off by the then-novelty of Lee’s prose style. After that, the most common criticism was that the book was too long and particularly that the final section, about Anne’s adjustments to peacetime life, were extraneous. Personally, I think the final section is one of the book’s best parts in that it’s one of the earliest examples of the kind of challenges we’re now accustomed to associate with the experiences of returning veterans.
It’s a Great War! sold well enough that both Houghton Mifflin and the English publisher George Allen & Unwin ran second impressions and the book was syndicated in abbreviated form in a number of US newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner. The American Legion’s backlash against Lee only proved once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Legionnaires’ distaste for the book piqued book buyers’ interest and improved its sales.
The book’s hold on the attention of both readers and critics was brief, however. It’s never been reissued and is rarely mentioned in discussions of First World War literary. I suspect that Paul Fussell, whose The Great War and Modern Memory remains the best-known survey of literature from the war, wasn’t even aware of it. In the dozen-plus studies of literature and women’s role in the war published in the last twenty years that even mention the book, most give it no more than a sentence or two.
The one exception is Stephen Trout’s 2010 book On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941. Trout focuses on the American Legion’s attempts to dismiss It’s a Great War! and positions this response in a cultural context. “The novel’s avalanche of details and modernist fragmentation,” he argues “suggests disconcertingly that the war had no center of meaning — the last thing that an organization built around collective memory wished to hear.” His literary judgment, though, is qualified: “For a World War I scholar, her text offers a treasure trove of details that few other writers bothered to recovered. However, as a novel, it is rough going.”
Yet It’s a Great War! is no longer and no more detail-filled than Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth. (Brittain, coincidentally, was perhaps Lee’s most vocal defender against English critics.) And its style is certainly far more accessible to today’s readers, accustomed to sound-bite driven media. I was also reminded many times of another modernist, immersive masterpiece that was being published around the same time: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which I covered at length back in 2016.
While Pilgrimage has held its place in literary history, it’s suffered in terms of readership from its length and relative obscurity. Although I personally consider Pilgrimage far more interesting and accessible than Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one in a hundred people who know Proust’s work are even aware that Richardson’s exists. To compare Testament of Youth and It’s a Great War! in the same way is laughable: hundreds of thousands or millions have seen the recent film version of Brittain’s book; for Mary Lee’s book, there are … well, me, a few First World War specialists — and now you.
American literature has its share of one-book wonders. John Leggett’s fine book Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies deal with two post-World War Two examples, Ross Lockridge of Raintree County and Thomas Heggen of Mister Roberts. In many cases, these authors’ lives and careers flame out early and destructively. Mary Lee, on the other hand, seems to have this one book burning to be written and by the time it finally came out, had already decided — or been forced by family circumstances — to focus on other things. Whether those things represented a compromise or a cause, only she could have said. But It’s a Great War! deserves as much as Raintree County and Mister Roberts to be remembered as a work of substance and importance. It may, arguably, be the best American novel to come out of the First World War.
Contemporary Reviews
“… the book conveys the sense of war’s horrible waste, its aimless, blundering stupidity, as powerfully as any novel I can recall, with the single exception of Remarque’s great book [All Quiet on the Western Front]. As an indictment of everything that war means it stands in the front rank.” — Bruce Catton, syndicated reviewer
“Those who can accustom themselves to the staccato style of the authoress, with her herky phrases, will realise that the novel is a sincere attempt to present the uncensored truth. Necessarily this is not all, or mostly, attractice. It treats of the obscenities of billet life, the contrasts between gay life in Paris and the misery and despair in the fighting lines, the disillusionments leading to an embittering cynicism.” — The Age, Melbourne, Australia
“It would be unbecoming in us to defend American soldiers against the humble opinion which Miss Lee formed of much of their conduct. But when it comes about that she or her heroine pretends that the British Army lacked the services and the solace of genteel womanhood, that the young women of France sat with idle fingers, we dare to say that she talks through her hat. As Count Schuksen might put it, in the politest manner in the world, the damned impudence of such pretenses, based on so trivial an experience, takes our breath away.” — The Morning Post, London
“Staccato in style, these impressions make reading somewhat of a nervous strain. At the end, however, they piece into a kaleidoscopic design which service men and women will recognize at once as war in its infinite detail.” — Maxwell Benson, syndicated reviewer
“It seems to me one of the really good books that have come out of the war. It makes absorbing reading, and what a glorious lot of bunk-exploding goes on in its half a thousand pages.” — Herschel Brickell, New York Herald Tribune
“It gives a wider view of the work back of the front than any book so far written. The style is so unique that it literally carries the reader through a moving picture of the war behind the lines…. The reader is made to realize what the service man had to undergo. He is conscious of the reason why so many men do not and will not talk of their experiences ‘over there’.” — Barend Beek, Miami News
“Frankly speaking, It’s a Great War! proved a vast disappointment. After reading the first few chapters the story, as a whole, becomes dull and monotonous. It was recommended to us with great gusto, and perhaps that is why we didn’t like it.” — The Burlington (Vermont) Daily News
“We recommend this book to you as the greatest and frankest panoramic view of the war that has yet been published, not even excepting All Quiet on the Western Front. If you were in the war, you will sigh with relief at reading the truth. If you were not an active part of the army in France and at the front, you will probably be very much hurt at the picture Miss Lee paints — hurt and rebellious and incredulous, because you won’t believe what your read…. Get your courage up and procure the book from somewhere. You will be sorry all your life if you miss it.” — Eleanor Evans Wing, Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent
“It’s a Great War! is a long book — over 500 pages [the UK edition was 690] — but it is easy reading. Miss Lee has hit upon a style that perfectly fits her material — disjointed, staccato sentences for facts that presented themselves more of less disjointedly, in flashes…. It is a fine book that leaves one much enlightened and with much food for reflection.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“In a staccato and rather confused style Miss Lee has managed to convey something of the gigantic bewilderment of those days in France, the seamy and sordid and disillusioning side of war, the bitterness and waste of life. She relies for her effect upon the diligent piling up of instantaneous and detached impressions.’ It is almost as if she had attempted a literal rendition of those vivid and disordered days. It’s a Great War is a powerful book, but it is too amorphous to be accounted a literary masterpiece.” — The Bookman (US)
“By far the majority of these six hundred and ninety pages are written in that manner, giving the reader the impression of riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” — The Bookman (UK)
“[Lee] writes in the historic present participle … she, writing … a style, very irritating … using jerks and dots…. Mr. Wyndham Lewis says somewhere that this is done by feminine types who wish to appear virile.” — Nation and Athenaeum
“I may as well say at the outset that it is one of the most irritating books I have ever read through to a tedious end. The author is a journalist, but she appears to have the vaguest grasp of the ordinary rules of rhythm in words, as well as of punctuation. Four dots appear to be the quota for each ejaculation. There must be ten million dots in this book…. Every step of this long narrative of events is recorded in a series of ejaculations. Most carefully of all are are set down the coarsest of details the heroine observes during her enforced contact with soldiers…. The whole book is an impertinence. To call it a novel is an impertinence. It is no more a novel than the columns of a sensational newspaper, slapped together, could be called a novel. As for the war — a little WAAC, swabbing canteen floors at Dover during an air raid, is as qualified to write about it.” — “Tobias Trott,” The Graphic (UK) [This and similar comments led Vera Brittain to write the following to the editors of Time and Tide: “Mary Lee’s gigantic novel, It’s a Great War!, seems to me to have been more unfairly treated by reviewers than any important book for a long time… I suggest, therefore, that women are not … bored with war-books, but that their, real interest has not yet been aroused. And it will not be aroused until a war-book is published which removes the impression that one sex only played an active part in war, and one sex only experienced its deepest emotions.”]
“In my judgment she has accomplished a masterpiece. In the last analysis the least part of war is the actual fighting. The great part of it is the effect it produces on the souls of those engaged in it. The former can be ably written by any little war correspondent sitting on a safe hilltop. The latter can only be written by one who has lived it and nearly died of it — whether that death be physical or spiritual. It is this latter and more important aspect of war with which Miss Lee deals; and in all the literature of the war which I have read — English, French, German — no one has succeeded better in recreating the gradual descent into hell which is the inevitable fate of the man who goes to war…. Miss Lee has been to hell. Because of it, every page of her book is the truth — terrible, heart-breaking, discouraging, if you like, but, so help me God, the truth!” — Hamilton Gibbs, letter to the New York Times
It’s a Great War!, by Mary Lee New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1929 London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930
Ad for The Red House from The New York Times, 1932.
Catching up with my friend the Dutch translator and publisher (Van Maaskant Haun) Meta Gemert, I learned about a neglected Austrian best-seller from over 100 years ago that’s beginning to experience a comeback: Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus, which was published in English in 1932 as The Red House. The English version, published in the U. S. by The Macaulay Company and in the U.K. by T. Werner Laurie, sold poorly and quickly disappeared, which is why the only way to get your hands on a copy is via Inter-Library Loan.
Jerusalem, born Else Kotányi to Hungarian Jewish parents in Vienna in 1876, was a pioneer in her interest in the sociology and economics of the sex trade, and The Red House was the result of her study of the operations of Vienna’s brothels. The book centers on Milada, who comes to the Red House, an apartment house in Vienna’s red-light district, when her mother Katherine, comes to the city from a small town in Bohemia after being cast out as an undesirable. Though she has a chance to send Milada away to a convent school, Katherine sees no point in trying to better her daughter’s lot: “Why should she be any better than her mother?” she asks.
Katherine dies when Milada is still young, but the girl becomes a fixture as the house changes hands and becomes more of an upscale brothel in the hands of Else Goldscheider. Mrs. Goldscheider introduces Milada into the business in her teens, first serving wine in the house’s lounge and later turning her into a working girl at the age of sixteen. Unable to remember life before the Red House, Milada is naive in her acceptance of the familiar atmosphere of depravity. “Poliska,” she asks the brothel’s housemaid, “Tell me … what’s a decent girl?” “Girl … what idea you got,” responds the maid. “But I want to know,” continues Milada, “Have we any here? Or doesn’t any ‘decent girl’ … ever come to a bordel?”
One of the house’s regulars, Horner, takes a liking to Milada and tries to educate her in the realities of how prostitution operates as an integral element of “decent” society. “Did you ever see a dunghill beetle … eruditely Scarabæus coprophagus?” he asks Milada.
It’s a pretty little thing, gleaming in green and gold. But if you take it in your hand it discharges a dark brown fluid and your prying nose is rewarded for its curiosity by a most malevolent stench.
The world needs its dunghills, he argues. They allow society to pretend that everything else is clean and proper.
Milada acts as Jerusalem’s eyes and ears inside the world of prostitution in Vienna, noting the range of clients, from middle-class merchants to dashing young noblemen to self-righteous city fathers. She also learns how Mrs. Goldscheider stays on the right side of the police and the sanitary inspectors through a mixture of obeisance, flattery, bribery, and deceit.
After a few good years, during which the Red House rises to the reputation of one of the better houses in Vienna, Mrs. Goldscheider sells the business to Miss Miller, a former housekeeper for a country parson and a woman ill-suited to the task emotionally and practically. She tries to pitch pennies at every turn, driving away the better class of clientele and turning her girls into workhorses.
The house’s decline continues when Miss Miller is replaced by Nelly Spizzari. Jerusalem saw the sex trade not only as a feminist but also as one familiar with Marxism, and Nelly Spizzari — with “more energy and less conscience than all previous owners” — represents capitalism at its most brutally efficient and exploitative:
Under the Spizzari System The Red House speedily lost its unique position among establishments of its kind. Rapidly it sank to the lowest grade. Mrs. Spizzari had no understanding of, nor indeed any use for, the atmosphere of middle class respectability which had been the main attraction in The Red House. She had no use for girls who would have fitted in such surroundings, for she demanded of them services that the former Red House inmates, down to the most reckless of them, would have refused with shudders.
Spizzari takes advantage of the desperate poverty of some Viennese families to procure new girls cheaply and in their early teens:
One pet enterprise of the energetic Spizzari was to buy very young girls from inhuman parents who gloated over the purchase price, whether as straight cash or a monthly rent. With these innocent unfortunates in her power, Mrs. Spizzari would perform all sorts of manipulations, operating on them herself, cutting and stitching. She had a special technique of virgin-exploitation, which she managed to keep hidden from the medical inspector….
Into this toxic environment comes a young doctor, Gus Brenner, a well-intentioned crusader from a good family. Though he avoids the attempts of some of the girls to seduce him, he and Milada fall in love. In the hands of a typical romantic novelist of the time, Brenner might have become the knight in shining white armor who rescues Milada. In the hands of the scientifically-minded Jerusalem, however, such matches are only the stuff of fantasies. If Milada does manage to escape from the Red House, it is not without carrying her share of emotional and psychological scars.
Early German edition of De heilige Skarabäus.
Der heilige Skarabäus became a best-seller in continental Europe, being translated into Hungarian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. It took over two decades, however, for the book to reach English readers, and then in an apparently abridged version. The Macaulay Company edition of The Red House runs to just over 300 pages, while catalogue records show that the original Austrian edition came to well over 600.
Ad for The Red House from Publisher’s Weekly.
Though coming after the Jazz Age, the English version, titled The Red House, still seemed too controversial for Anglophones. “Readers who can stomach the subject of this novel will find it exceedingly well done,” wrote one brief review in The Spectator. “Those who cannot (the theme is prostitution) are advised to leave it alone.” The New York Times’ review acknowledged that, “The moral tone of the book is unquestionably sincere and lofty, its revelation of conditions convincing in every detail, and its aunguished protest driven home with terrible and arresting truth.” Still, the reviewer cautioned, “There seems small likelihood of a book so exclusively indigenous and alien to the American reader’s ken meeting with a kindred acclaim in its English version.”
Soon after, the book fell into disfavor in Austria and Germany, but for political rather than critical reasons. In questioning the moral integrity of good bürger society, Der heilige Skarabäus was quickly banned by the Nazis and Jerusalem’s work joined that of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig on their bonfires.
By that time, however, she was no longer Else Jerusalem, having divorced her first husband and married an academic named Viktor Widakowich. She and Widakowich emigrated to Buenos Aires. Though she found Argentina largely lacking in cultural life, it soon become too difficult to consider returning to Europe and she died there in 1943.
Only recently has the book been resurrected for German-language readers. Austrian publisher Albert Eibl released a new edition, with an afterword by Professor Brigitte Spreitzer of the University of Graz, from his Das Vergessene Buch (the Forgotten Book) press. You may recall my mention of Eibl’s rescue of Maria Lazar’s novel Leben verboten!, which was published in English (also in an abridged version) in 1934 as No Right to Live.
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.
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry have been published in a variety of venues, and she has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
