“I always thought refugees were other people” are words none of us would ever want to say.
But no one ever chooses to become a refugee on a whim. Instead, as we witnessed just this week in Afghanistan, refugees usually have to grab what they can carry and leave in a rush. Their motivation is less to run towards than to run away, usually from violence, persecution, or simply chaos.
Resi, the teenage girl who narrates Monica Stirling’s 1958 novel Sigh for a Strange Land, awakes one morning to find a policeman at her apartment door. He informs her that her Aunt Natasha has been injured and is lying in the city hospital. Hurrying to see her aunt, Resi notices that the streets are oddly quiet. There are no queues outside the shops and the few people who pass look at her with shocked expressions.
Aunt Natasha’s only injury is a hangover from celebrating too hard the night before and she and Resi are soon headed back to their apartment. Now, however, the streets are full of noise, with groups of men running down sidewalks and the sounds of gunfire in the distance. Turning into their street, they see their apartment block going up in flames. The revolution has begun.
Seeking out the only friend they have, a horse trainer named Boris, Resi and Natasha soon find themselves on an overloaded truck headed for the frontier. After a long journey through the night, they climb out to face a table of Red Cross workers. Each of them is handed a piece of cardboard with a word on it: “REFUGEE.”
Some of their companions react in shock and disgust. “Refugees! My family’s an honorable one,” says one. “I’ll have you know, my grandfather founded our shop, built it up from nothing, and it’s been in the family ever since — wars, risings, strikes, upsets, nothing’s been able to dislodge us. And now . . . ”
If Resi, Natasha, and Boris are somewhat less surprised, it’s because their lives have been punctuated by displacements. Natasha and Boris grew up as members of the Russian imperial elite before the revolution of 1917. Natasha followed the White Russian diaspora to Paris and Italy. Boris joined a circus and found himself a citizen of an itinerant nation. Resi, left to Natasha’s care after the death of her parents, carries the blood of four nations in her veins: Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France. And none of them has any papers, of course. “Could we ever prove I’m me if we wanted to?” Resi asks at one point.
Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution being processed at an Austrian reception center.
Although Stirling never names the country from which the trio is fleeing — which adds to the sense of displacement that pervades the book — one cannot help but assume it’s Hungary, whose abortive revolution against a Soviet-backed regime in 1956 led to over 150,000 Hungarians seeking asylum in the West.
Resi, Natasha, and Boris sneak out of their temporary refugee center and enjoy a brief holiday taking in the opulence of what is clearly Vienna:
Halfway down the next street—which was full of traffic, I’d never before seen so many motor vehicles in one place — we were attracted by a prodigious delicatessen store. The vast window’s centerpiece was a glass-fronted silver machine in which a chicken roasted on a revolving spit. Either side stood massive hams, their outsides neatly breadcrumbed, their insides the color of dark pink roses. Spread around these in tiers were shallow white china dishes containing black and green olives, soft-fleshed tan mushrooms, smooth-skinned coppery sausages, the harlequin colors of vegetable salad, artichokes with gray-green mauve-topped leaves firm as if sculpted, beets with their darkly crimson juice turned cherry-color where it dissolved into a moat of sour cream, pies with richly glazed and crusted tops.
They pool their few coins and manage to buy coffees, cocoa, and pastries at a café. “Cafés are apt to outlast governments,” observes Boris.
Soon, though, they are back sleeping with hundreds of other refugees on a gymnasium floor, and Natasha, who is probably closer to 70 than the 50 she looks like, takes ill. The odd little family unit that has sheltered Resi through her childhood falls apart, and she is forced to decide for herself what place she will adopt as home.
Stirling quotes from a 1958 essay by V. S. Pritchett in which he wrote, “In the last hundred years half the world’s population has become uprooted, expatriated from class, race or nation. We live on frontiers.” Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, short story about people accustomed to that frontier existence. For this trio, nation and home have become concepts as slippery as a bubble of mercury.
Portrait of Monica Stirling by Stanley Parker, from Tatler and Bystander 1958.
And Stirling, who saw a great deal of displacement as a correspondent during World War Two and its aftermath in Europe, is fundamentally distrustful of these concepts. “I’ve never understood why anyone finds it difficult to believe chairs and tables are made of constantly moving atoms. Nothing is reliable in this moving world but love,” Resi comments early on. “All I’m interested in writing about is love,” Stirling once told her friend The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner — another veteran expatriate. “Private life,” Boris tells Resi, is “the greatest resistance movement of them all.”
Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, moving tale that manages to weave two disparate themes together: the unstable, transitory nature of home and nationality, and the strong, unwavering bonds of love. It’s a tale that resonates in this moment every bit as it did over fifty years ago. It’s available on the Internet Archive (link) and I’ve had it in my Calibre library for years, but it was only when Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow recently posted about Monica Stirling that I thought to take a serious look at it. I was hooked by the opening line: “The day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk,” and had to keep going.
The whole time I read the book, I kept thinking that it could quite plausibly have been written within the last ten years: it has that sort of timelessness, aided no doubt by Stirling’s choice to minimize her specific geographical and temporal references. I do have to agree with David Williams of the TLS, who wrote when the book was first published, “The first part is so god that one’s disappointment over the other two is keener perhaps than it ought to be”: there is a faint scent of sentimentality that lingers over the middle section and lasts until near the very end, when Resi has to confront her situation without the support of Natasha and Boris.
But overall, it’s a superb and taut novel. As John Davenport in The Observer, “Miss Stirling knows how to be exquisitely brief.” It’s a welcome skill in an age not lacking in loose baggy monsters.
Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling London: Victor Gollancz, 1958 Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958
Lady Eleanor Smith with circus folk, from The Sphere (1933).
This is a guest post by theatre critic and researcher Julia Rank. In this article, the term ‘gypsy’ is only used when quoting directly from Lady Eleanor Smith’s work.
‘I was born dead’ is the ominous first sentence of Lady Eleanor Smith’s 1939 memoir Life’s a Circus. The doctors at the scene of her birth pronounced her dead without checking for any signs of life and threw themselves into attempting to save her mother. The midwife, with nothing to lose, had the bright idea of massaging the newborn with gin and slapping her repeatedly until she elicited a wail. Mother and daughter both survived and Lady Eleanor grew up to become a Bright Young Thing, journalist, publicist and novelist, with a particular devotion to the circus and scenes from Romani life.
Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945) was the daughter of Conservative MP Frederick Edward Smith, ennobled as Earl of Birkenhead when appointed Lord Chancellor in 1919, and Margaret Eleanor Furneux (a granddaughter of Joseph Severn, painter and friend of John Keats). The young Eleanor enjoyed a privileged upbringing with ponies, dancing classes and Christmases spent at Blenheim Palace (her father was one of Winston Churchill’s closest friends). Despite growing up in the heart of the establishment, she was drawn to Romani culture from an early age, teaching herself the language and making the serendipitous discovery that her paternal great-grandmother was a Romani woman named Bathsheba (apparently the Lord Chancellor was proud of his ‘romantic’ origins rather than trying to conceal them, while at the same time exaggerating the humbleness of his middle-class Birkenhead upbringing).
Like her contemporary Nancy Mitford, Smith’s formal education was centred around learning to speak French. A happy experience at Queen’s Gate School, South Kensington, alongside lifelong friends and fellow Bright Young Things Allanah Harper and Zita Jungmann, was not to last. She was sent to boarding school but ran away, after which she completed her education with an extended stay with an aristocratic Belgian family who lived at the Museum of the Congo outside Brussels. On her return to England, she refused to ‘come out’ as a debutante as was expected for a young lady of her background and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.
Through her social connections, Smith landed a role writing a twice-weekly ‘Women’s Gossip’ column for an evening paper but disliked “publicising a loathsome clique of nitwits”. She then worked as cinema critic, which she found more convivial. Highlights included introducing Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner to British audiences(and being introduced to Hitler’s policies by the Austrian-Jewish Bergner).
Cover of first US edition of Red Wagon.
A stint travelling with a circus as a publicist provided ample research opportunities for Smith’s first novel Red Wagon (1930). Red Wagon is far from culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, it stands up as a gripping yarn even today.
Inspired by Victorian showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, “one of the finest types of English circus man”, the novel tells the life story of self-made and (mostly) benevolent circus dictator Joe Prince in flashback form. In the novel’s present day, the circus is no longer the national institution it was in previous decades nor is Joe Prince quite the “roistering king of the road, a plutocrat among nomads” he once was. One of his daughters has settled in suburbia and the other, to her father’s disapproval, wants to showcase her equestrian skills for cinema.
The action then flashes back to the 1860s when Joe is five years old and his acrobat mother is killed in a fire during an American tour. After a period of fostering by a Thénardier-esque clown, he’s sent to a Dickensian orphanage. He escapes in his teens, joins a circus, works his way up through the ranks and eventually sets up his own circus, always living by the mantra ‘Circus first’.
Ad for the US edition of Red Wagon.
According to the Scotsman, ‘The book stands as a challenge to all those who doubt woman’s ability to write a ‘straight’ tale unmarked with the stamp of ‘feminine’ psychology’”. The novel features a male protagonist who isn’t prone to self-reflection and who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Joe Prince is defined by his relationship with the circus and its nomadic life rather than by his romantic relationships. The novel is ‘romantic’ in terms of its setting rather than its love story.
A life-changing romance does occur, but it’s near the end and is one-sided. It’s hard not to be creeped out the way in which Joe, in middle age, marries the much younger Romani princess Sheba (surely named for Smith’s ancestor Bathsheba), the daughter of Starlina, his first crush. Sheba, who is “bought from her people for the sum of fifteen pounds”, can’t settle into the role of circus chatelaine and eventually abandons her husband and daughters to return to her community.
The depiction of Romani characters is the most troubling aspect of the novel. ‘Gajo’ (non-Romani) circus folk and Romanis are not allies. “Joe, in common with most circus children,” Smith writes, “had been brought up to despise and hate this dark race […] sometimes they attached themselves to circuses and brought disgrace to any show”. Despite Smith’s personal identification with Romani people and Joe’s coming to admire them, her Romani characters are strongly ‘othered.’ Sheba and the other Romani in the book are described as ‘wild’, witch-like,’ ‘savage’, ‘brazen’, ‘tawny’ etc. The circus itself is also described in disruptive terms, as something that allows ‘the English to take their pleasure not sadly, but almost savagely, with a boisterous brutality that would endure long into the night.” Smith feared that “It will be a dreadful day when the circus decides to become social” (but noted that she had never personally seen a mistreated circus animal).
Vita Sackville-West, writing for Common Cause, hailed Red Wagon as “a brilliantly successful first novel” and Oliver Wray of The Graphic commented, ”‘I have not read so satisfying a novel since Mr Priestley’s The Good Companions.” The Yorkshire Post found Joe Prince “a most human and likable creature… a real relief after the fantastic figures of most novelists who have touched his kind.” Of course, Smith’s title and her father’s fame may have had some influence on the praise it received. Lord Birkenhead was appalled to learn that his daughter was writing a novel and assumed it would only be published because of who he was – but he eventually changed his tune and gave her a ruby and diamond brooch representing the red wagon shortly before his death later the same year.
Article on banning of Red Wagon, from the Oakland Tribune, 8 July 1930.
Alongside the positive literary reviews, Red Wagon was the subject of a minor cause celebre. The book was banned by Glasgow public libraries when an elderly councillor proclaimed that the 28-year-old Smith “knows too much for her age” and should have “shown more reticence” in her handling of the “love incidents”. I would hazard a guess that this complaint refers to the scene in a seedy Montmatre hotel room in which Joe loses his virginity to Rose, a worldly American equestrienne: ‘He wanted her and would apparently take her without wasting any time on preliminary dalliance. He pulled her on to his knee, burying his face in the daffodil shower of her hair, kissing her wildly, roughly, madly, holding her so tight that he hurt her and she cried for mercy’. Publisher Victor Gollancz responded, “I have had many funny experiences during seven years of publishing, but this is much the funniest.” He quipped that the real reason for controversy was the title, with ‘Red’ suggesting political sympathies at odds with those of Glasgow council. Which seems unlikely: Gollancz was himself a socialist but Smith was her father’s daughter politically. The novel went into its fourth printing despite the Glaswegian objections.
Poster for the film version of Red Wagon.
Joe Prince may have disliked the cinema, but the epic scope and flamboyant setting of Red Wagon made it ideal for filmic treatment. In 1933, it was adapted by Elstree’s British International Studios, directed by the Austrian-born Paul L. Stein and starring the American actor Charles Bickford (who went on to be a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor) as Joe. It was an ambitious production by British standards of the time, running 50% longer than average — 107 minutes long as opposed to the usual70 minutes.
As the author of the source material, Smith felt that she was regarded ‘the lowest form of animal life” on the film set. But she also acknowledged that novelists were not suited to adapting their own work for screen and that specialist scenario writers were required. Feeding an appetite for melodrama with exotic settings, several of her subsequent novels were turned into film, including Ballerina (The Men in Her Life), Tzigane (Gypsy) and Caravan, starring actors such as Loretta Young, Chili Bouchier and Stewart Granger.
Lady Eleanor Smith, from The Sketch (1932).
Smith cultivated a fey, uncanny image of herself in the press and in her memoir. Life’s a Circus related childhood encounters with a ghost dog called Gyp and grisly tales told by a nanny who attended the last public hanging in Britain. In the 1930s, she lived in a flat off the King’s Road with a black cat named Satan (despite the fact she was a Roman Catholic – probably a reference to her 1932 short story collection Satan’s Circus). She conjures up images of an aristocratic, urban version of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s heroine Lolly Willowes. She died at the age of 42 after a long illness and her most enduring work is probably her Regency-era novel The Man in Grey, albeit mostly by virtue of the Gainsborough Studios’ film adaptation starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.
Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, julia-writes.com.
I often go trawling through old book reviews in search of lost treasure. It’s usually not the reviews that feature words like “best”, “greatest”, “finest” that hint at something remarkable worth discovering. More often, there’s a certainly hesitancy in the reviewer’s tone, a suggestion that a book is, well, not bad exactly, but a little askew. A little hard to fit into a particular mold, a little awkwardness in the constraints of prevailing notions of what fiction or nonfiction should be. These are the clues I look for.
In the case of Music in the Listening Place, Gloria Rawlinson’s one and only novel, it was Majorie Grant Cook’s caution in her TLS review that “Readers who dislike the introduction of tiny supernatural beings among average-sized human creatures … will impatiently give up this novel and thereby lose a pleasure that is like biting into a strange new fruit.” Now, I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels, but Cook’s brief description of Rawlinson’s characters — a young woman who’d “lost her wits,” a beloved brother lost in an accident, an earnest young man named Edgar Pullsides — intrigued me and I hunted down one of the few used copies to be found for sale (all in Australia and New Zealand).
“I first heard of the strange little people called Turehu from my mother,” Rawlinson wrote in an introductory note. The Turehu were half-sized, pale human-like creatures — “little white faces with russet-coloured hair.” Although she was writing less than three hundred years after the first white settlement in New Zealand, even among the Maori, the Turehu had already become mythical, something that only the very old and very superstitious still believed in.
Although Rawlinson herself refers to the Turehu as fairies, as we learn in the course of the story, their powers are less magical than psychological. In ways that even they seem mystified by, they are, on occasion — but oh, how these occasions do matter — capable of grasping insights and memories that have eluded the people they help.
Rawlinson was just twenty when Music in the Listening Place was published, and even if the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had been given that label at the time it’s unlikely she would have used it. And yet, she understood it well, for the real story in Music in the Listening Place is not about the wondrous powers of the Turehu but about how deeply wounded people begin to heal.
The Parks are a family in shock. Mr. Park, a solicitor, forgets his keys, sets out for town on foot instead of by car, has to check his collar before leaving home to make sure there’s a tie underneath it. Mrs. Park hides inside in fear of visitors, conscious that any old friend or neighbor who stops by will observe how large she’s become from years of overeating. And their daughter Aroha storms in and out of the house, sniping belligerently at meals and claiming domain over their back yard as a haven for weeds, bugs, and birds. Throughout the day, she peers at the window of her brother Rollo’s bedroom, anxious to be ready with something to please him: a slice of ripe watermelon, or a sandwich.
Only gradually do we learn that Rollo isn’t an elusive hermit. He’s never coming out of his bedroom because he’s been dead for years, killed in an accident after Aroha insisted he take her joyriding on a neighbor’s motorcycle. Aroha has blanked out all memory of the accident and Rollo’s death save a lingering sense of guilt. She’s stuck, still acting fourteen, still pretending that Rollo is alive, if unseen. And as long as Aroha is stuck, her parents are stuck, too. Even their neighbor, Edgar Pullsides, is himself something of a basket case. Although he makes a little money selling a patent cleanser of his own invention, he spends most of his time hiding in his workshop, building puppets and toys.
On one of his infrequent sales trips around the North Island, Edgar meets a group of Turehu led by the distinguished and nattily-dressed Academic Gentleman. Although the Turehu look upon the mundane interests of the white men with some distain, the Academic Gentleman insists that Edgar must take his wife Peg, a queer leathery-skinned Turehu, back to his home. “Now, Peg, my dear Peg, my lamb, you must try and remember,” he instructs her:
Surely you can remember! It comes to this that there will be no peace in the village if you do not remember. You were the one to catch the thoughts, and are, therefore the one on whom all the responsibility rests. I wash my hands of it all. Anakthe!”
Anakthe, we come to see, is Turehu for, variously, Strewth!, Inshallah!, and “I wash my hands of it all.”
Back home, Edgar hides Peg among the puppets in his workshop, but soon Aroha — his one confidant and fellow daydreamer — learns of Peg’s existence. For some pages, neither Rawlinson’s characters nor we quite know why she’s placed this unusual catalyst in the midst of her unstable cast, but her purpose eventually reveals itself.
Had Rawlinson been exposed to Freudian psychology, we would have good reason to say that Peg’s role is to trigger a cathartic memory, the trigger that Freud and Breuer thought had the effect of “reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed.” But it seems implausible that even a precocious New Zealand woman of twenty with a book of poetry already to her credit would have been familiar with their work.
Instead, we have to trust that Rawlinson knew that even the deepest hurts can only be borne so long. And when Peg does finally remember, reminding Aroha of Rollo’s last words as he sped toward his certain death, she releases the Parks (and Edgar) from the limbo in which they’ve been trapped for years.
Gloria Rawlinson, 1935 (age 17).
As a young writer, Rawlinson shows a certain respect for the conventions of fiction that now seem to place unnecessary restraints on her imagination. But as a young white woman writing at a time when respect for the ways and wisdom of New Zealand’s indigenous people may have been at its lowest, she demonstrates striking empathy. The Maori characters in her book see much farther and more clearly than their colonizers. They know that the North Island is the remnant of a giant fish that surfaced in prehistoric time, that they owned and cared for the island before Captain Cook arrived, and that the Government still owes them the return of the lands stolen by law and gunpowder.
Perhaps Rawlinson understood the Maori’s perspective better than most New Zealanders of her time because she spent her first years living on the island of Tonga, where there was less of a divide between the handful of white settlers and the Tongans and she learned their language alongside her own English. Perhaps she also felt empathy because she was a victim herself, having contracted polio at the age of six, which left her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Music in the Listening Place came and went with no more than a few reviews, some perplexed, others appreciative, and has never been reissued. By the time the book was published, Rawlinson had fallen under the aura of the intense, talented but erratic Iris Wilkinson, who published under the name of Robin Hyde. After Hyde committed suicide in London in 1939, Rawlinson took on the role of curator of Hyde’s literary legacy, spending decades writing a biography that was finally published by Hyde’s son Derek Challis several years after Rawlinson died in 1995 at the age of 77.
I suspect that today’s readers, benefitting from the wealth and increased appreciation of fantastic fiction in the decades since the book’s first appearance, will find Music in the Listening Place, as I did, a powerful work that blends myth, psychology, and respect for indigenous cultures in ways that are quite remarkable given the time and age at which Gloria Rawlinson was writing. If it were published today, critics would not hesitate to call it a tour de force.
Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1938
Stella Gibbons’s first novel Cold Comfort Farm still resonates, if vaguely, in the popular mind. “Wasn’t there a movie?” Or, “didn’t I see that on TV?” In England, “something nasty in the woodshed,” the phrase invoked by the supposedly mad Aunt Ada Starkadder, proprietress of the farm, is still a cultural touchstone almost 90 years after the book was first published.
But as wonderful a satiric comic masterpiece as Cold Comfort is, the dozen or so of Stella Gibbons’s later novels that I have read are just as — if not more — rewarding because they allow a deeper experience of Gibbons’s greatest literary character: herself.
That is not to say that she wrote the same book again and again, as so often happens with writers who strike the jackpot with their first published work; rather, she creates in each book a different prism (and sometimes more than one) through which she reveals different aspects of herself. To read multiple Stella Gibbons novels is to get to know her better and better, and she is a very satisfactory companion.
She was born in 1902, the first of three children of a quiet and sweet mother who died suddenly when Stella was in her 20s and a volatile father of Irish extraction, a “bad man, but a good doctor” (as she described a character thought to be based on him). Her childhood home life was marked by her father’s rages fueled by his unsatisfied career ambitions. In his 1998 biography, Out of the Woodshed: the Life of Stella Gibbons (Bloomsbury), Stella’s nephew Reggie Oliver quotes a letter from Stella’s daughter Laura (his cousin):
Every few weeks it was ‘That name is not mentioned in this house,’ with an accompanying shudder and pursed lips, as one or other member of the family indulged in some escapade of which the other disapproved. Consequently, sides were taken….
Stella was old enough to be affected by the experience of two world wars and the accompanying changes in British culture and society, as well as by the concomitant destruction of the English countryside and the rise of highways and car culture, all of which bothered her greatly.
Well-educated herself, and a writer who honed her skills on more than 10 years of meeting newspaper deadlines, she lets slip literary references easily understood by any conventionally educated English school graduate; she asserts unapologetically the inherent differences between men and women, the value of marriage and the power of beauty–male and female; money is usually on people’s minds, and she shows she knows how to live on meager earnings. She values tidiness and order, well-turned fashions, and sensitivity to children.
That catalog of subjects and attitudes could lead one to expect a stuffy, garrulous, old-fashioned storyteller. Instead, she takes the dross of mundane lives and spins it into fairy tales that are also down to earth. She peoples her novels with men and women whose aspirations have run aground, but who inhabit a world of metaphysical rebalancings and animistic forces that permit them some escape.
——
Cover of 1935 edition of Bassett.
For the purposes of this essay, I am drawing on only two novels, Bassett (1933) and The Woods in Winter(1970). They come near the start and end of her writing career. And they offer the clearest example of characters that reflect herself.
Bassett was the “conventional” book she was contractually obligated to write in order to convince her publisher to take Cold Comfort. The Woods in Winterwas the last book she wrote for publication, though two other novels appeared posthumously.
Bassett opens with a typically succinct Gibbons observation:
There is a simplicity which comes from living too much in the world, as well as a simplicity which comes from living out of the world.
Hilda Baker belongs to the latter group. She is one of Gibbons’s shabby heroines of no great intellectual shakes or culture, but still worth knowing better. “Sensitive and intelligent people will refuse to believe that Miss Baker could be happy. However, Miss Baker was happy.”
She is also a beneficiary of one of those coincidences Stella regularly employs: Miss Baker (who has no living relatives) has suddenly inherited 200 pounds from a distant uncle. Added to her 180 pounds of savings from her paltry salary at a paper pattern office, she is faced with a dilemma of what to do with so much money. She fears it will “Dribble Away” (Gibbons’s caps) unless she makes a plan.
She responds to an advertisement soliciting “another lady, with some capital” to invest in converting a faded country estate to a boarding house. The response, from a Miss Eleanor Amy Padsoe, is postmarked “Bassett.”
And so we are off.
The letter from Miss Padsoe leaves Miss Baker “in some bewilderment,” and indeed, it is a masterpiece of flighty asides and unintelligible confidences. However, Hilda decides to visit. Once in the village, she accepts a ride from a handsome young man in a smart roadster, a silent girl at his side.
Miss Baker learns that the girl is Queenie Catton, another of Stella’s unlikely heroines and another partial stand-in for the author herself. Raised in a loud, activist socialist household, Queenie doesn’t fit in. She is, as her family admits, “our quiet one….So far she had effortlessly resisted all attempts to make her be anything…”
When Miss Padsoe and Miss Baker eventually meet, it does not start well. They are each horrified by the other, but of course do not say so. They eventually get along, and the flowering of their unlikely friendship is a pleasure to behold.
The young man who gives Miss Baker the ride is George Shelling, half of a cold-blooded aristocratic brother-sister duo who dream up sophisticated amusements while living in the country with their widowed mother. According to Reggie Oliver, Stella admitted she modeled the Shelling menage on the family of the man who ended their engagement; he, too, lived with his sister and mother and traveled in the “free love” set.
Queenie is the bridge between these two storylines as the hired helper to Mrs. Shelling and a loyal supporter of the two Misses.
In contrast to the louche brother and sister, Miss Padsoe and Baker pursue simple pleasures with beneficial results. “At eight-thirty precisely the two ladies, washed, dressed and trim … sat down to their eggs or sardines…. The afternoon was passed in more washing up and in cutting bread and butter for tea at half-past four, and then at half-past six it was time to begin preparing for supper at half-past seven. By ten … they ate cocoa and cake like schoolgirls, and fell into bed at eleven, drunk with unaccustomed work, and slept all night.”
In typical Gibbons fashion, Bassett climaxes in a whirlwind of loose ends being tidied up in a way that is satisfying but not always expected.
Cover of the first edition of The Woods in Winter.
The Woods in Winter, the last novel Gibbons wrote for publication, seems an intentional bookend to Bassett and an autobiographical coda. She sets it in roughly the same period as Bassett , the early 30s. The early action takes place in two settings familiar to her, the seamy precincts of the North London of her girlhood and Hampstead Heath, where she lived much of her adult life.
Its beginning is once-upon-a-time-ish: “Some forty years ago, there used to be in North London a place called St. Philip’s Square…. It was not a true square, but a rectangle, open at one end to a main road, along which trams and buses ran up to Hampstead Heath; a drab yet swarming place….”
As in Bassett , Gibbons creates two characters far apart in social standing and education but reflecting two aspects of herself: Helen Green, the young aspiring poet (Gibbons’s first book was a collection of poems, favorably viewed by important figures of the time), and Ivy Gover, the old fabulist.
Helen is well-educated and moves in high-brow Bohemian circles but is not quite a part of them; Ivy is a barely literate char who has gypsy-like powers and a proletarian sureness of where she stands (she always thinks of Helen as “Miss Green”). Ivy and Helen are connected by the fact that Helen employs Ivy to clean the small, dark cottage she is renting from a mother of a friend of hers; it’s located in the Vale of Health, the same stretch of Hampstead Heath that Gibbons lived in.
Again, as in Bassett , a bit of luck visits a penurious city-dwelling lower-class female of a certain age. Ivy’s great-uncle, whom she hasn’t seen since her girlhood, bequeaths his rundown cottage in the country near where Ivy was born and where she was sent to char for the gentry at age 11.
For Ivy, the Square is a hectic place: “The Square simmered in the early autumn plague of heat, sending up its shrieks and shouts and heavy footsteps to a pair of small ears that carried two beads of heavy gold, chased with a design that looked ancient, on delicate lobes.” In contrast, Helen looks out on “a prospect very different…. a quiet little street, made up of grey pavement and a long brown wood fence, above which looked the innocent head of a may tree whose berries were just beginning to redden, all lit faintly by the gold of the ascending moon. A bird was singing, far off in the dark woods of the Heath–perhaps even a nightingale–anyway, it was a heartbreaking sound, and Helen thought that she was exceedingly unhappy.”
Ivy, suspicious of the lawyer’s big words, goes to Helen to have her read the letter about the bequest. Helen reassures Ivy that the offer is valid and that she is lucky to have it.
By the time she wrote The Woods in Winter, Gibbons had perfected the technique of dueling interior and exterior dialogs, where each participant is saying what they don’t think and thinking what they don’t say, as in this exchange between Ivy and Miss Green:
“Just think, Ivy. It’s beautiful country there. I … know it well…”
Ivy was not interested in what Miss Green knew.
This being a Stella Gibbons novel, there are a number of pairings both theoretical and actual and various courtships, not all successful. Marriage is one of Stella’s interests. Though she shows sympathy for those who take a more transactional approach, she comes down on the side of marrying for love. In this novel, there are two such marriages by its end.
Of Helen and Ivy, Ivy is the more compelling character. Here she is in her first full night in the cottage, with her dog Neb. Ivy has just said farewell to a friend of her late husband who has delivered her mattress in his van and put it in the bedroom upstairs. Just before he takes his final leave, he suggests she air it out.
Ivy ran up. Up the stairs she raced, light as a leaf, with Neb after her, and in a minute down tumbled her mattress, almost into the fire … straightening it with determined kicks from her sturdy small boot. “Airin’! It don’t need no airin’, do it, beauty?…”
The story never leaves the country setting once Ivy is settled there. The characters Stella has created play out their dances under her masterful direction.
Her final chapter brings us to the present of 1970, as Stella is entering the winter of her life (she was 68 when it was published). Helen makes a final visit to the quaint village near the woods of the title. The High Street of Nethersham is now a tangle of automobile traffic, rooftop television antennas and suburban villas.
Helen escapes the traffic and noise to walk to the hilltop demesne of the old Lord (long dead). Helen encounters one of her friends from the old days and asks about the characters whose fates we do not know. Gibbons writes, “Helen had not quite yet come to that age when one hesitates to ask after a contemporary not seen for years. But she was one the edge of it.”
Helen takes one last look at the Lord’s hill and its beeches as she heads toward “the flat, beetle-like tops of the cars, jerking, stopping, jerking, stopping, behind the hedges whose lower branches were clotted with litter and grey with dust.
There they stood, high above her and far away, solemn and still in the waning fire of sunset; towers and castles of rustling green; benign father-gods of the woods; filled with their gently-stirring life in the blue air of summer or roaring slowly in winter’s gales….
The last passage is a word-for-word reprise of Helen’s private musings some 40 years earlier when she proffered her congratulations to Ivy on her good fortune in inheriting the cottage (which Ivy rejected silently). This constancy of Helen’s attitudes within the span of the 40-year narrative is matched by Gibbons’s constancy in her outlook over the nearly 40 years that separate these novels; this is what makes Gibbons’s appeal timeless, just like a fairy tale.
In her monumental reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, New York.1976), Katharine Briggs notes that the term “fairy” is relatively recent and is derived from “the classical three Fates … supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men ….” Stella and her fictional stand-ins were deeply concerned with getting other people’s lives properly sorted out and in conformance with Gibbons’s deeply felt morality. Following her efforts over the decades is a source of pleasure.
Stray cattle in a harsh landscape rarely fare well, let alone survive. The same could be said of stray novels in an unwelcoming market. So it’s not surprising that No More Giants, Joaquina Ballard Howles’ story about a young woman growing up on an isolated ranch in Nevada in the late 1940s attracted little attention and has been utterly forgotten.
It came out in 1966 as part of Hutchinson’s New Authors Series, an admirable series of first novels brought out by the U.K. publisher Hutchinson’s between 1958 and 1970. I’ve never seen a full listing of the New Authors Series, but from what I’ve been able to uncover, there were at least three dozen novels — and a handful of memoirs — issued under this imprint. Hutchinson formed the imprint to help “the new author, who has something of genuine importance to say” (in the opinion of Hutchinson’s unnamed judges). Hutchinson also declared that the series would only publish first books by writers who are members of the British Commonwealth. “No established writer, no author who has any other book to his credit (with such exceptions as a school text book, etc.) will be eligible for consideration.”
Times Literary Supplement article announcing Hutchinson’s New Authors scheme in October 1957.
Authors were paid a rather modest royalty of ten percent up to the first 5,000 copies sold (and there don’t appear to have been any that broke this mark), with an advance of £150. Relatively few of the authors whose first books benefited from this scheme saw a second book reach print. Exceptions include Maureen Duffy, whose That’s How It Was was published in 1962 and J. G. Farrell, whose debut The Man From Elsewhere came out in 1963.
Even among the diverse array of novice authors in Hutchinson’s series, Joaquina Howles was an outcast. An American, she qualified as a Commonwealth writer by marriage: her husband Geoffrey Howles was an Oxford graduate and banker specializing in oil investments whose work took the couple to Alberta, Canada, New York, and London. Like Jenny, the young woman in her novel, she had grown up on a ranch north of Reno. Unlike the girl, however, who gets pregnant by her first lover, a Basque ranch hand, and is sent to a home for unwed mothers, Howles attended Mills College, then the West Coast’s elite women’s school, and won several scholarships.
Photograph of Joaquina Ballard Howles from the dust jacket of No More Giants.
As No More Giants makes clear, though, her time at Mills and as an expat executive’s wife didn’t erase her memories of the good and bad aspects of life on a ranch. The hard work, surprisingly, is at the heart of the good. Long rides to herd grazing cattle allow her views of vast landscapes in shifting colors through the day. Chores provide a routine to distract her from her troubles: “The simple things, the milking, feeding, carrying, which we did with our hands, helped us both. Doing was the major part of living, and once as we both lifted the same bale of hay, I knew that we were healing ourselves.”
The biggest source of her troubles are her parents, an unhappy mix of personalities:
To my father, life ran in straight lines, and though they might run deep, they remained parallel, crossing only in the chaos of some unrecognised infinity…. My mother’s lines crossed, tangled, lost themselves in limbo, without colour, precision, or design.
“I wish I could have identified with Mama,” Jenny laments. If her father is the tall, laconic, gentle giant in her world, her mother is the fearsome one, “powerful as the sky can be in times of terror.” Lila, the spinster aunt who lives with the family, offers no consolation: “Aunt Lila lived in the world of terrible possibilities.” One of the few lessons she has to teach Jenny and her brother Brian is how to act if they find themselves kidnapped: “If we couldn’t phone when we were taken away we were to remember our names, ages, and address, so that sooner or later — perhaps even years later — we could escape and return home.”
The harsh landscape of the high desert is mirrored in the harsh emotional climate of Jenny’s home. Her mother hates her father for dragging her to the remote ranch and saddling her with unrelenting work and her father, in return, hates his wife’s failure to be a compliant helpmate. Their hatred is as much an environmental given as the desert’s dryness — “so familiar I had never thought of naming it.”
But even deserts are susceptible to sudden, unpredictable deluges:
Continuing hatred is a level thing, a line of monotony like telephone poles going across a valley, dwindling away out of thought. But sooner or later there is a break, a turn, a mountain where the line goes up or down or is broken, and then one sees it again and remembers the many poles in the valley.
Like the deluges that wash out bridges and brush fires that wipe out a season’s harvest, emotional crises rise up swiftly and with devastating force in No More Giants. It’s very much a novel of its place, a sparsely populated, unforgiving part of the American West unfamiliar to most British readers. If it could be said to resemble any other work of its time, it would be Joan Didion’s first novel Run River, another account of an unhappy ranch family in the West. Never published in the U.S., No More Giants gained a few brief and unexceptional reviews. The usually sharp-eyed Marigold Johnson of the TLS even got the author’s name wrong, referring to her as “Mrs. Knowles.”
Whether it was lukewarm reviews, disappointing sales, or some other reason, Joaquina Ballard Howles followed the path of many of Hutchinson’s new authors and gave up writing after publishing No More Giants. Or at least, so it was for over fifty years. In October 2020, however, a new novel titled Brighter Later appeared on Amazon. Apparently self-published, the book is described as a story of forgiveness about “a middle-class family living in one of London’s more affluent artistic communities, who encounter alcoholism and a horrifying secret along the way which rips their family apart.”
I’ve tried to track Mrs. Howles down, but my leads dry up variously in the U.K., Reno, and Palo Alto, California, so if anyone can tell us something about her current situation, please let me know. No More Giants is too good to leave out on the range as a stray.
No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles London: Hutchinson (New Authors), 1966
The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. They’re poised like a driver at a red light in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knowing they’ve got to make a decision: Left? Right? Straight? The only thing that’s clear is that backing up is not an option.
In the case of Sophie in Tonks’s last novel, The Halt During the Chase, as the book opens, she’s left her job as an administrator at a language school in Kensington and is wondering whether she truly loves Philip, the rising star in Treasury. As the book opens, she’s also in the middle of a conversation about school knickers at her mother’s house in Hampstead.
In the book’s opening chapter, there in that Hampstead kitchen, Tonks perfectly captures the way the pendulum swings back and forth between affection and annoyance in an adult daughter’s conversation with her mother. The shared memories then painful, now comic: “The regulation dark blue knickers. And they were knickers too!” The mother’s desire to see the daughter settled, the daughter’s chafing at the spectre of entrapment. And the mother’s long-developed and now deadly skill in wielding the weapons of conversation. Such as that simple and deceptive question: “How’s it going?”
“How’s it going?” So childish, so shrewish, that I had to answer on the same level: “How’s what going?” She would then draw her face into an expression of nauseating complicity, just like a mime who only has one second to portray some human failing and so has to do it with decisive vulgarity. Heaven knows what underworld theatre she got the expression from, but it was invaluable.
Sophie’s mother is also a bottomless well of advice and life lessons, on everything from religion to noses:
A woman’s nose has to be small and neat. But a man is quite different. If a man hasn’t got a good nose, he should sit down and grow himself one, because he’s going to need it!
Backing up is most definitely not an option for Sophie.
The nearly as bad cover of the UK edition of The Halt During the Chase
In fact, after two hours in that kitchen, she feels suffocated. Desperate just to get out the front door and to the freedom that lies outside, even on the sidewalks of Hampstead.
More air! I couldn’t get enough of it — I wanted a cold, flowing river of it past my cheeks. Drink it down, white stuff, and get rid of all the vinegar inside you that makes you trembling and irresolute, afraid that you ‘re not rich enough for your lover, whom you love too much on one level and doubt on another.
Moving foward is the only choice, but how is still in doubt. The obvious answer seems to be marriage with Philip. Brilliant, fit, handsome, and obviously destined for a future KCB, Philip is also the safe choice: “the sort of man with whose life nothing could possibly go wrong; decisions were permanent, and ended at death.” Philip is a precursor of the Tony Blair Labourite: socialist, but not in a sweaty way. His socialism, Sophie thinks, is “so snobbish, so exclusive, so bogus.”
How snobbish, she suddenly realizes, when, lying together in a hotel bed after making love, Philip tells her, “I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can’t promise you there won’t be an emotional bust-up in five years’ time. And then you’ll be less well off financially than you are now.”
To Philip, this is both pragmatic and empathetic. What better demonstrates how much he cares for Sophie than his consideration for how hard it will be when he dumps her? To Sophie, this is soul crushing. Trapped beside Philip in that perfectly equipped, airtight hotel room, she feels herself being swallowed whole. Again, she finds herself suffocating. She claws through the heavy curtains, manages to crack up the window, and drinks in the air. “I have never tasted anything like it. Through that gap in the plating of the hotel, I began to carry on my life once again.”
In his perfect dispassionate way, Philip has pushed Sophie out into that intersection, forcing her to make a choice.
Here, however, we find the one thing that distinguishes Sophie from Tonks’s other heroines. She’s begun to realize she’s got a soul. She’s started attend lectures by Mr. Ruback, Hampstead’s resident mystic. She may not fully understand how she will develop her spiritual self, but she knows that it will not be Philip’s way — having all the right opinions, furnishing one’s life with all the right accessories. “Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?” she wonders.
The Halt During the Chase is not only Rosemary Tonks’ funniest book but it’s also her deepest. Or rather, it’s a book that hovers on the edge of depth. By the time the book was published, Tonks had entered a period of soul-searching that had been triggered by her mother’s death in 1968. As Neil Astley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi ‘seekers’ before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.”
One opens the book thinking the chase of the title is the hunt of one sex for another. Sophie does turn from Philip to take some interest in his half-brother Guy, but the real quest is a spiritual one. “They taught you that it was your job to develop yourself, as the primary purpose of life,” she says of Ruback’s lectures: “the chase is inward [Emphasis added].” It clear that this is Sophie’s most likely direction when she exits her intersection.
Though Tonks ultimately returned to Christianity years later, she dismissed her own writing as something as pointless as buying new lampshades. She burned an unpublished novel and if she’d had her way, would have seen to it that every copy of her published books saw the same fate.
If one knows nothing about Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase is a remarkable work, studded like a bejeweled belt with shrewd and funny observations and perceptive about the quandaries of women looking for ways to make a life not centered on a man and family. But once you know her story, it’s hard to read Halt without sensing the spiritual direction in which she was about to turn, without knowing that she would soon want to destroy the very words we are reading.
The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks London: The Bodley Head, 1972
It’s not hard to think of fiction set in Cambridge, from E.M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913-14, published posthumously in 1971) to Dusty Answer (1927) by Rosamund Lehmann and, more recently, Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (2015). But I’m convinced that well-written nonfiction can bring an authentic story to light in a way that no novel can. My research is on Cambridge’s first women students, university wives and college tutors (link) and there’s nothing like hearing their own voices, in the form of memoirs and biographies based on their letters and diaries. Here I focus more closely on two of these books.
Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember was published by Cambridge University Press, 1947. It’s a slim volume, only 50 pages long, with a jaunty introduction by the historian G.M. Trevelyan who writes:
If people who knew not the Victorians will absent themselves from the felicity of generalising about them for a while, and read this short book, they can then return to the game refreshed and instructed.
What I Remember begins, as many good stories do, with a happy childhood. Mary’s was spent in a rose-covered country rectory, where her father Reverend Thomas Paley encouraged his daughters’ education: ‘We had a father who took part in work and play and who was interested in electricity and photography’, she recalls. She moved to Cambridge in 1871 as one of the University’s earliest women students and one of the ‘first five’ at Newnham College; Girton College had begun two years previously. The idea that unmarried women could live apart from their parents and attend lectures was, as Paley Marshall said herself, ‘an outrageous proceeding’ at the time.
Soon after she arrived in Cambridge, she became fascinated by Political Economy because of Alfred Marshall’s lectures. He was ‘a great preacher,’ she observes, who spoke passionately about the need for women’s equality in education and quoted from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. With his encouragement, Mary was one of the first two women to sit for the University’s final year exams in 1874 and she became Newnham’s first residential lecturer.
By the mid-1870s the Pre-Raphaelite era of colour in dress and house decoration had dawned all over England. As Florence Ada Keynes later wrote: ‘Newnham caught the fever. We trailed about in clinging robes of peacock blue, terra-cotta red, sage green or orange, feeling very brave and thoroughly enjoying the sensation it caused’ (By-ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1956, first published 1947)). The college room that Mary studied and slept in was, like those of her students, papered in William Morris designs and hung with Burne-Jones prints. At the age of twenty-five she was that rare thing in Victorian times, an unmarried woman who lived independently from her parents and earned a good income doing a job she loved.
Then she and Alfred Marshall married and accepted posts at the newly founded University College, Bristol, where they taught and together published a textbook on The Economics of Industry (1879). Their working marriage seemed the ideal of an intellectual partnership that Mary had dreamed of, and What I Remember describes the happy years the Marshalls spent in Sicily and in Oxford before returning in 1885 to Cambridge. Alfred was made a Professor and published The Principles of Economics (1890) and Mary returned to her post at Newnham, where her inspiring teaching would have a great influence on one student: Winnie Seebohm.
‘This is the true story of a young woman who lived in the later part of Queen Victoria’s reign,’ Victoria Glendinning writes at the beginning of A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, her biography of Seebohm.
But do not be misled into thinking that because it is history it has nothing to do with you. 1885 is yesterday. It is probably tomorrow too. — From A Suppressed Cry
The prize-winning biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Leonard Woolf, among others, Glendinning took as her first subject her Victorian great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, but the book is no less powerful for Seebohm’s obscurity. A Suppressed Cry was not much noticed when it was published in 1969 and it disappeared from view until it was reissued by Virago in 1995 with a new introduction by the author.
The issue at the heart of A Suppressed Cry is how a young woman from a close-knit Hertfordshire family rebelled against their loving claims on her and achieved her ambition to study at Cambridge. The Seebohms were linked to other Quaker clans in what Glendinning describes as ‘a tight genealogical spiral’ with banking and scholarly connections. Winnie’s father was the economic historian Frederic Seebohm, and she grew up with her siblings and invalid mother in an idyllic house called the Hermitage in rural Hitchin. Despite her obvious intelligence, Winnie was expected to be a ‘good daughter’, contented with flower-arranging and visiting her Quaker relations until a suitable husband was found for her. But she decided that ‘no woman (it is not my business to consider a man’s life) has any excuse for living a life that is not worth living’.
So, in 1885, at the age of 22, she took the gruelling Cambridge entrance exams and won a place at Newnham. A Suppressed Cry reproduces some of the touching letters and diary entries she wrote there. Winnie was thrilled with her college room, her new friends and the freedom to spend her days reading books and writing essays. She adored her tutors, particularly Mary Paley Marshall, who taught Political Economy ‘from a philanthropic woman’s point of view’. ‘She is a Princess Ida,’ Winnie told her sister, thinking of the heroine of Tennyson’s poem The Princess who founded a university for women.
She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind –very deep-set large eyes, a straight nose – a face that one likes to watch. Then she is enthusiastic and simple. She speaks fluently and earnestly with her head thrown back a little and her hands generally clasped or resting on her desk. She looks oftenest at the ceiling but every now and then straight at you.
Winnie wanted to become a teacher just like the marvellous Mrs Marshall, but her time as a student was heartbreakingly brief. After just six weeks at Cambridge, she fell ill and was brought back to the Hermitage to be nursed by her family. ‘How queer it looks to see everybody so leisurely here!’ Winnie wrote to her classmate Lina Bronner, confessing how she longed to return to Cambridge. ‘I imagine you lingering on dear Clare Bridge, and King’s spires will be looking grey and sharp against the sky.’
Her kindly tutor Mary Paley Marshall also wrote to her. She was the only woman Winnie knew who seemed to have it all, combining fulfilling academic work with her role as a wife. ‘If she is the woman of the future, I am sure the world will do very well,’ Winnie wrote in her diary. It was one of the last things she wrote. She died after a severe asthma attack – though she may also have had undiagnosed anorexia – just a few weeks later. Expected from childhood to suppress her ambitions and put others’ needs first, Seebohm was, in Glendinning’s memorable description, ‘left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century’.
Mary Paley Marshall’s married life was far from the ideal that Winnie perceived. In the early 1880s Alfred turned against the idea of women at Cambridge: ‘it is not likely that men will go on marrying, if they are to have competitors as wives’ he told LSE founder Beatrice Webb. He insisted that The Economics of Industry, the book he and Mary wrote together, should be pulped and in 1897 he voted against women being awarded Cambridge degrees. But unlike Winnie, Mary was a survivor and she had the final word. After Alfred’s death in 1924 she co-founded Cambridge University’s Marshall Library of Economics. She worked there for nearly twenty years and her portrait now hangs above the library staircase opposite his.
What was left out of (or ‘forgotten’) in Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember is at least as interesting as what was put in; and the cheering counterbalance to Winnie Seebohm’s sad story is the continuing success of Newnham, which celebrates 150 years as a women’s college this year.
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at AKennedySmith.com.
Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is resigning herself to gradual blindness.” Edward Field recalls seeing her at the Yaddo writers’ colony around the same time, a tall elderly woman in a white dress and an outsized sun bonnet. At the time, Field was in his early thirties; she was in her seventies.
The other writers at Yaddo must have felt they had little in common with this aloof woman born in another century. Those who recognized her name knew it from the critical success of her three novels: Do I Wake or Sleep? (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952), which had been nominated for the National Book Award. Far fewer knew that it was a pseudonym.
By the time she published her first novel as Isabel Bolton, Mary Britton Miller had become accustomed to being an outsider. But she’d started at the center of American society, born at the Madison Avenue mansion of her father Charles Miller, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Grace (née Rumrill). Charles, considered a rising star on Wall Street, was largely a self-made man, having overcome the scandal of his father’s suicide in 1847.
From the New York Daily Herald, 16 March 1847.
It was through Grace Rumrill that the Millers gained most of their status. Her father was a prosperous manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts and her brother James was a vice president of the Boston and Albany Railroad, having married the daughter of its founder, Chester Chapin. James and his father-in-law also founded and were on the board of the Chapin National Bank in Springfield. With a large summer house on the shore of Long Island Sound in New London, Connecticut and a mansion in Springfield, James Rumrill and his wife Anna Chapin Rumrill were among the wealthiest and most influential members of New England society.
Mary Miller and her identical twin sister Grace joined two older brothers and one sister in a bustling household full of servants that followed the common routine of autumns, winters, and springs in the city and long summers at the Rumrill-Chapin estates in New London. It was there, while playing tennis at his brother-in-law’s house that Charles Miller fell ill in August 1887, just two weeks after Mary and little Grace’s fourth birthday. Pneumonia quickly set in. Tending to her husband, Grace also became ill, and the two died within hours of each other a few days later.
From the Fall River Daily Evening News, 22 August 1887.
Their deaths not only left their children orphans but paupers. Having rushed back from vacation in France upon receiving the news, James Rumrill was appointed executor and soon discovered that Charles Miller’s practice was based largely on goodwill and promissory notes. He settled matters with his brother-in-law’s creditors and took the children to Springfield to live with his mother. Rebecca Rumrill tried her best, but she was in her late seventies and in poor health and died a little over two years after the five Millers’ arrival.
Writing as Isabel Bolton eighty years later in her memoir Under Gemini, Mary recreated the impression her death left on the twins:
Everything was at sixes and sevens. Grandma had gone. We could no longer find her in the library sitting beside the fire swinging her slipper on the end of her great toe. We could not find her in her room or in the dining room. There was a feeling among us all that we were not so safe and sheltered as before.
With Grandmother Rumrill gone, the children became the wards of James Rumrill and his wife Anna. James, who Mary remembered as “the most remarkable miniature gentleman anyone could imagine,” dapper and full of good humor, left the real decision making to Anna. She, in contrast, loomed over them like the judge in the supreme court of their lives. “Whatever charm and geniality she might have had,” Mary recalled, “was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed.”
Anna saw the Miller children as a problem to be solved. She had no desire to bring them into her fine house on the hill above Springfield, so Anna hired a former teacher to move in as their custodian. She was Desire Aurelia Rogers. As Mary later wrote,
Desire — who could have thought up a better name for her? What hopes, what dreams she must have had before she came to live with us. What lovely pictures must have floated and dissolved and built themselves again in that sad and hungry heart.
Unfortunately, Desire Rogers was outnumbered and outgunned. The five Miller children buzzed with more energy than she could match. The boys mocked her, the older sister Rebecca ignored her, and the twins alternated between tormenting and adoring her. She learned to trust their uncle’s characterization of them as “sprigs of Satan.” Life at the house on Maple Street became more and more anarchic. And Miss Rogers had no hope of support from Anna Rumrill, whose only interest was in keeping the orphans at arm’s length.
When Philip, the oldest of the orphans, was ready to go to college, Aunt Anna saw her opportunity to push the Millers even farther to the margins of her life. James arranged for Philip to attend his alma mater, Harvard (which continues to offer a James A. Rumrill scholarship) and Anna convinced her brother to take James, the younger Miller son, to Europe for a year’s study at a preparatory school in Geneva. Rebecca was to be sent to live and study with a music teacher in New York. The twins learned of these decisions when they returned home from school one day and found a sign reading, “THIS PROPERTY TO BE SOLD” planted on their front lawn.
They were to be packed off even further from Springfield than Geneva: Long Island. Mary and Grace, then just short of 14, were sent to live with a family in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island. Though sad at being parted from Miss Rogers, they enjoyed their summer freedom, going off together around the countryside or swimming in the large lagoon.
Just ten days after their 14th birthday, while swimming at the mouth of the lagoon, they were caught in the current of the outgoing tide and were pulled away from their rowboat. They both struggled to swim back to the boat, but as Mary recalled in Under Gemini,
… this we saw was hopeless, a futile thing to do — to waste strength necessary to swim ashore. We were lost and terrified — Grace’s strength already spent. Was she clinging to me? No, she was not, she was still beside me in the water, swimming still. What was it she was saying? Clearly, I heard her voice; as though I myself were speaking the words, she said, “My darling Mary, how I love you….”
From the Brooklyn Standard Union, 14 August 1897.
News of Grace’s drowning made headlines in New York papers the next day. It left a permanent scar on Mary’s being. She had spent fourteen years with more than a constant companion. As she wrote in Under Gemini, as identical twins, Mary and Grace saw themselves as a single collective being:
Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of us happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.
The death of her parents and the death of her sister Grace were the tragedies that bookended Mary Miller’s childhood. Together they had an impact so profound that she wrote the story of these events and the years between twice.
Her first account, published as Mary Britton Miller, was In the Days of Thy Youth (1943). Reviewers lumped the book in with Life with Father and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, both much more nostalgic and comical accounts of life in the 1890s. The Chicago Tribune’s critic called the book “Charming, incredibly egotistical, beautifully remote,” but also “as antidiluvian as the dinosaur.” In a review titled “Gilt Gingerbread”, the New York Times recommended it mostly “For those who want to escape the headlines of today.”
Mary Britton Miller, around 1948, and the cover of Do I Wake or Sleep.
Unhappy that the book “made no ripples in the pond,” Bolton took a friend’s suggestion and adopted the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton for her next novel. It proved a lucky choice. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised as one of the best novels of its decade. Edmund Wilson reportedly fell for his fantasy of the young, pretty, and talented Isabel Bolton and was nonplussed when the stately older woman, walking with the aid of a cane, approached the bench where they’d arranged to meet in Central Park and introduced herself.
Her subsequent novels, The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions, were equally praised. Though some critics such as Stanley Edgar Hyman dismissed the acclaim for Bolton’s work as an aberration, most agreed with Diana Trilling that she was one of, if not the best, “woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Rose Field, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, ranked her alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Ann Porter, and Kay Boyle. “Miss Bolton’s talent is clear,” she wrote.
None of the people applauding the arrival of Isabel Bolton, from what I can determine, bothered to learn anything about Mary Miller. There was no mention of the several volumes of poetry, mainly sentimental in nature, she had published earlier nor did anyone give In the Days of Thy Youth a second look. They certainly didn’t know that the tragedies that framed that story came from her own life or that her sister’s drowning in 1897 did not mark the end of her woes.
Alone after Grace’s death, Mary attended a New England girls’ boarding school and then was shipped off to Europe to stay with her cousin Marguerite Chapin, who was studying music in Paris. It’s not clear if her aunt Anna Chapin Rumrill had any more intent than to get her out of the way. Mary may have returned to Europe a few years later, spending time in Italy where Marguerite, having married Price Roffrello Caetani, was now, officially, Princess of Bassiano and Duchess of Sermoneta.
Edward Field claims there were rumors that Mary had become pregnant while in Italy and given birth to an illegitimate child that she gave up for adoption. I’ve found nothing to substantiate this. Laurie Dennett barely mentions Mary in her 2016 book An American Princess, The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani, even though the two cousins remained in touch through the decades and Marguerite was to publish one of Mary’s stories in an early volume of her literary journal Botteghe Oscure.
Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Mary decided to settle in New York City, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became active in social reform and led a study for the Consumer’s League of the conditions of children working in homes in New York slums. In her report, she wrote that “It is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of young children in New York who ought to be in school who are hidden away in East Side tenements by their parents and often locked in so that they may be forced to do the awful home work outside factories, which the present laws do not forbid.” The situation, she argued, was effectively a sanctioned form of slavery.
From the Daily People, 30 December 1912.
After their grandmother’s house in Springfield was sold and the Miller children sent their separate ways, the siblings never found another home. Philip, the eldest, took a law degree and moved to Illinois, though he eventually returned to New York to join the prestigious Sullivan, Cromwell law firm. Rebecca married a Canadian doctor, Edward Farrell, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for years.
From the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, 11 May 1916.
James, the younger of the two boys, had been taken under the Chapin wing and brought up through the ranks of the family bank in Springfield after graduating from Harvard. In 1915, he became president of the bank and was beginning to exert some influence in Massachusetts state politics. Within a year, however, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He eventually recovered enough that he was allowed to go for walks on his own. Early on the afternoon of 11 May 1916, a gardener at the Swan Point Cemetery next door found his body with a revolver laying nearby. Like his grandfather Ezra Miller, he’d taken his life with a shot to the head.
Though the three remaining children were reunited in the early 1920s when Rebecca returned to New York City and her husband took a position on the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, tragedy continued to haunt their lives. Edward Farrell was struck by an attack of peritonitis and died before he could be operated on. Rebecca suffered from a crippling form of depression and died a few years later at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx.
When she was in her forties, Mary became writing poetry. Most of her poems were simple and transparent, written for children. Her first book, Menagerie (1928), was a collection about animals illustrated with woodcuts by Helen Sewell. Her poem “Cat” (“The black cat yawns/Opens her jaws,/Stretches her legs,/And shows her claws.”) has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of cat poems. Even after her success as Isabel Bolton, she continued to publish collections of children’s poems, the last, Listen — the Birds appearing in 1961.
The remainder of her poetry was ethereal and religious, often invoking Jesus or the spirit. If there is a common theme through these poems, it is loss. In one of her “Stanzas to Spring” in Intrepid Bird (1934), for example, she cannot greet the season without some dread:
My eyes are worn with watching, and my heart is filled With unavailing knowledge. Underneath your bough Too much extortionate trust has been expelled For aught but apprehension to invade me now
Her reservations about looking back are clearest in “On Remembering One’s Childhood”:
If to these fonts and springs That joyed my soul When I was young I could return To be made whole again, I would discover Mint and fern And cresses green And flowers fresh and fair — But should I dip my hand Into the candid stream What flower or leaf or fern Would I recover there?
Reading this in light of her own experiences, one has to wonder if Mary Britton Miller ever fully recovered from the losses of her childhood.
She was forty when she took up poetry, sixty when she took up fiction. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she took up prose. For In the Days of Thy Youth is fact with the names changed and the occasional assistance of an omniscient narrator. Dedicated to “G. R. M.” (Grace Rumrill Miller, her drowned sister), the book opens with the death of their parents as perceived by the four-year-old twins. At first, there is only the commotion, the appearance of unknown relatives, the murmurs in the parlour. The adults try to explain the situation:
From their faces and the tones in which they spoke the twins got a sense that the world was coming to a sudden end, that a calamity so dire was about to overtake them that everything to which they were accustomed, light, air, food, shelter, the very business of living with these good things — was about to be whisked away from them. So when they finally realized that what they were being told was that their parents — their mother, their father were dead, “tot,” it did not seem so very terrible.
In the Days of Thy Youth is the story of the orphaned Millers (here called Marshalls) vs. the powerful Chapins (and their Rumrill followers), a contest doomed from the start. Although the little girls are relieved to be welcomed by their familiar grandmother, they can sense that the odds are against them. “Five orphan children, a bereaved old lady. You couldn’t set this outfit up against these Arnolds [the Chapins] who always managed to marry the right people and who felt in each other’s society such boundless assurance, energy and joviality.”
Their security grows more fragile with their grandmother dies. The twins find only a morbid pride to hold up in the face of their comfortable, better-off cousins:
“You have never had a funeral in your house.” No,” said Julia regretfully, she had not, and she continued to stare. “We’ve had three,” said the twins, lording it over Julia.
To the Chapins, on the other hand, the orphans are a cross they are only happy to bear when it allows them the leverage of superior self-righteousness over their neighbors. Otherwise, they are sure to make it “as obvious as a brass band” to the children “that they were a chronic source of trouble and responsibility.”
The fact that reviewers compared In the Days of Thy Youth to light-hearted memoirs of the “Gay Nineties” shows how little they understood it. Mary may have described wonderful summer days playing on the wide lawns of the Chapin/Rumrill estates on the shore of Long Island Sound, but she never forgot that the Millers were poor relations hosted with reluctance and some suspicion. The children might be invited to elaborate Christmas feasts at the Chapin mansion in Springfield, but then find themselves standing in the entrance hall afterward, abandoned. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaims one relative. “Why didn’t you go home?” “We didn’t go home because nobody sent for us,” Philip replies.
Mary was able to see the potential for psychological devastation in the Chapins’ treatment of the Miller children and their concerns through their Aunt Anna’s effect on their guardian, Miss Rogers [the one name unchanged in this book]. When the twins are told that their grandmother’s house is being sold and their siblings farmed out to the care of others, they see in an instant the consequence for her:
They knew that from the moment she passed over the threshold of life with them at Maple Street Aunty Dee would cease to exist as a substantial human being. She would be Miss Nobody, Miss Nowhere, Miss Nothing-at-all. She’d be a ghost, calling on other ghosts to see, to hear, to speak to her. Nothing she said or did or even thought would be real, and nobody in any way connected with the bitter, defeated creature locked up inside this phantom lady could communicate with her. They might put out their hands to touch her, but to no avail. Miss Rogers would be ghost — wholly ghost.
By the time she was writing this, Mary was becoming something of a phantom in the eyes of others herself. Not long after In the Days of Thy Youth was published, Philip, her last remaining sibling, died of a heart attack while sitting at his desk on Wall Street. A year later, she would burst upon the literary world as Isabel Bolton, but she’d already lost most of her family and friends.
Those who looked closer, however, would see a woman still vitally connected to her world. Though her eyes were failing, she kept up with current literature by hiring readers. She fired one for balking when he came to the word “fuck” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. She published five books of children’s poetry between 1957 and 1961, each with a different theme and illustrator. Jungle Journey (1959) was illustrated by one of her closest friends, Tobias Schneebaum and drew, in part, on his experiences living with indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (later retold in Keep the River on Your Right (1969)).
Mary dedicated her next book as Isabel Bolton, Under Gemini, to Schneebaum. In it, she returned to the story told in In the Days of Thy Youth, but with a much tighter focus. This time, instead of hovering over her cast in the third person, she wrote in the first person, giving her world a fixed center: the being formed by her bond with her identical twin.
It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins — I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.
“There is a legend,” she wrote, “that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed.” Their nurse grew flustered. She called for their mother, who declared that one was Mary, the other Grace. Thus, Mary’s words eighty years later: “This may be so.”
“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,” Plato wrote in The Symposium. Grace Miller’s last words to her sister before drowning were, “My darling Mary, how I love you.” To Mary, so many years later, these words were a confirmation that they had found that whole in each other:
That business in which we are all perpetually engaged — the making of an individual soul — is an enterprise of memory. In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.
“I am an old woman now and full of many memories,” Mary wrote “but those which I have here evoked have for me still the strange and wonderful completeness of having lived another’s life that was at the same time my own.” If the people who saw Isabel Bolton sitting in a corner at a cocktail party or floating through the rooms at Yaddo saw her as something of a ghost, perhaps they could sense that she was walking through the world with the shadow of her sister at her side.
Mary Britton Miller was born in the horse and buggy era and wrote her memoir of her life as a twin in a time of ballistic missiles and Mutually Assured Destruction. But she had become familiar with destruction and loss early on in her life, and her awareness of life’s fragility pervades every page of her work as Isabel Bolton. As she wrote in Many Mansions,
… [T]here was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide.
When David and Blanche, the two old friends in Mary’s last novel as Isabel Bolton, The Whirligig of Time, sit together, meeting in their eighties after a separation of decades, they feel themselves moving “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.” Perhaps Mary Miller wrote this because she knew just how close we always are to unimaginable catastrophe.
If you’re a theater lover like me, All Star Cast is the next best thing to the thrill of seeing a live performance. That’s because it’s about a live theater performance as experienced by both actors and audience.
Its premise is simple: a young theater critic, David Winters, arrives at the Empress Theatre in a taxi with a fellow critic, O’Hara. They’re there to attend the premier of a new play, The Ace of Wands, by the veteran playwright William Renishaw. And over the course of the next 270-some pages, Naomi Royde-Smith takes us through that experience.
We watch the audience dribble in, take their seats, converse with each other, anticipating the curtain’s rise. We follow the action on stage through three acts, hear the dialogue, watch the actors come and go, observe the sets and the use of props, feel the tension grow as it comes to seem as if the wrong person is going to be sent up for murder, sense the tragic relief as the right person arrives at the decision to admit guilt. And then, after the cast takes their bows, we join the slow stream climbing the stairs to the lobby, sharing reflections on the performance.
Fin.
When All Star Cast was first published, more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that no one had ever come up with the idea before. It’s not the same thing as reading a script. Royde-Smith includes all, or virtually all, the dialogue, but instead of stage instructions to the director and cast, she describes the action as seen by the audience — in particularly, by David Winters, who, though new to the job of critic, is an experienced and keen-eyed theater-goer.
An action, for example, as simple as a character picking up a small table lamp and placing it near another character is more than it seems:
“Queer bit of business with the lamp,” whispered the little man, as Rawlinson left the stage, “I wonder what it has been done for.”
“I wonder,” murmured David, not attempting to express his own recognition of the change in lighting effected by this simple and obvious gesture. The pillar of white light between the still unclosed doors in the centre of the background now showed faint and grey like the plinth of some vague funereal monument. The light from the shaded lamp on the ground made a round pool on the rug by the chesterfield, and threw a diffused circular glow upwards, changing the shadows of the room.
Is this something in the script or something the director has added? Something incidental or intentional?
Well of course, in a good performance, as this one seems to be, nothing is incidental, and a few pages later, we see that the lamp allows the murderer — and the audience — to see a crucial prop: a tarot card, the Ace of Wands. The Ace of Wands shows a hand holding a staff emerging from a cloud. Right-side up, it signals promise, a new opportunity; reversed, it warns of misfortune to come. Which way the card is read, and when and to whom the card appears, becomes instrumental to the plot twists that follow the murder in Act One.
We, like the audience, are surprised that the victim is the difficult Russian wife, played by Vera Paley, “famous for wearing to-day what every fashionable woman would be trying to wear next week.” It is she who enjoys the play’s star entrance:
Critics had been known to complain that, whether she played Rosalind or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she was never anyone but Vera Paley; but the salvo of applause with which she was greeted from the stalls as well as from the more discriminating parts of the house showed that she held a wide public under some kind of spell. She paused, holding the door open with her left hand, outstretched at full arm’s length behind her, so that the player with whom she was talking as she entered was hidden from the audience. Without bowing or losing her pose, she smiled as the applause increased in volume. She let the play cease while she, as Vera Paley, took her reception.
Within the next twenty minutes, she will be lying dead on stage, an antique Indian dagger through her heart.
“But darling,” David overhears a woman saying as the audience files toward the bar at the interval,
“Vera Paley can’t be killed in the first scene of Act I. She’s the leading lady.”
“Oh! So you think she’ll recover — or come back as a ghost and haunt them all?”
“Recover — ofcourse. Vera’d never do any highbrow spookery stuff. She’ll be ill in the most marvellous négligé — and then there’ll be a perfectly terrific love scene…”
Instead, as David learns from another critic at the next interval, Vera Paley is paying a favor to the producer and will be gone by the end of the first week to start rehearsals for a showpiece of her own.
This is just what makes All Star Cast so fun. You get to experience not just the play but all the trappings and all the threads that come together to weave a unique evening at the theater.
Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.
Naomi Royde-Smith knew her subject from all angles. She’d been a theater critic herself through much of the 1920s and had written several plays that were produced in London’s West End. Her husband, Ernest Milton, was an actor, a stalwart of the Old Vic’s company for over twenty years. And, as she conveys so effectively in her account of The Ace of Wands’s opening night, she understood just how complex were the sensations and interactions of a night at the theater:
It was difficult enough to form an opinion on a play, seen for the first time, that would not cry to be revised or restated when once you saw your own words in print. You could go back, re-read, check, verify when reviewing a book: but a play acted itself without repeating any passage, noteworthy or obscure, and while it told its tale, demanded attention on three counts. Its appeal was too complicated. You were bound to miss some point, while under the impression made by another, in a scene which you had to see, to watch and to hear in one and the same unrelenting minute. You had to pass judgment on playwright, players, scenic artist and producer at one sitting, while their combined work was set in movement before your eyes and made its continuous appeal to your ears as well.
“How flat and stale these journalistic phrases were in comparison with the state of mind in which the play had actually left him!” David Winters despairs. And it’s a tribute to Naomi Royde-Smith’s skill that All Star Cast succeeds so well in putting us into that state of mind — and longing for the chance to return to a theater ourselves.
All Star Cast is fairly rare, but luckily it’s available online from the Internet Archive: Link.
All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1936
This is a guest post by the writer David Quantick.
“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”
There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.
In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.
Kathleen Withers and S. J. Simon, courtesy of their family.
Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.
Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)
When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.
S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.
It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.
By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).
Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).
For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.
[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]
Stories on Kathleen Withers’ death from the Daily Mail and The Times.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Never assign a young man to review an old woman’s book. If only the book editor of the New York Times had heeded this advice when he assigned James Childs to review Isabel Bolton’s novel The Whirligig of Time. At the time the book was published, Bolton was 87, Childs at least 50 years younger. He had little patience for Bolton’s subtle and deliberate approach: “[T]here is so much treacle running throughout these pages”; “[W]hat should be a novel of some realism is transmogrified into a fantasy of life without logic or meaning, and held together only by a Victorian prissiness”; Bolton “creates characters who possess much sap and little dimension” and “resolves the plot in such a fashion as to lead the reader to suspect that the author herself was beginning to tire of the whole project.”
Childs’s review torpedoed the good ship Whirligig. The book received few other reviews and quickly disappeared. When Bolton died a few years later at the age of 92, none of her books were in print. In the late 1990s, the Steerforth Press (and Virago in the UK) reissued her first three novels — Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions (which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1952) — as New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach (who was herself 80 at the time). Grumbach opened with an adage that could serve as this site’s motto: “It is one of the accepted truths of the publishing world that many good books appear, are critically praised but attract few readers, fall between the cracks of their time, and are never heard of again.” Grumbach quoted Tobias Schneebaum, a friend in Bolton’s later years: she was “imperious, sharp-tongued, demanding, witty, often a delightful conversationalist, and always difficult.”
Bolton’s style is often compared to Henry James. Her sentences are often long and complex, probing their subjects from multiple angles. Though she was 40 years James’s junior, their worlds were not so far apart. They both lived among the wealthy and worldly, where appearances mattered and yet could be so deceptive to the untrained eye. Manners and words were the basic tools of its defense, and in experienced hands could also be used for surgically precise and deadly offense.
The Whirligig of Time is an artefact from this world. Its two primary characters, Blanche Willoughby and David Hare, were raised in it and now, meeting again in their eighties after decades of separation, are its survivors, adrift in the Atomic age. They met as children in another century and another New York, a New York where their parents and grandparents lived in elegant brownstones and maintained private parks to keep out the riffraff and the Irish.
It was in one of these parks that the principal cast of The Whirligig of Time comes together for the first time. Blanche and her sister Lily, orphans, meet David as he plays under the watch of his mother Laura. “Willoughby, Willoughby,” Laura muses when the two girls are introduced. “I think you’re David’s second or third or fourth cousin, several times removed perhaps.”
They also meet Olivia Wildering, a girl of precocious self-confidence who, in the course of that afternoon, faces down a bull. The bull, left to graze in a corner of the park by one of its subscribers (again, it was a different New York), gets a notion to charge the children at play, only to be stopped by the force of Olivia’s outrage at his sheer presumption. The children, and David most of all, leave the scene in awe of Olivia’s willpower.
But the brief rush of Mr. Pickering’s bull is the only action in this book. Everything else happens indirectly and on the margins. In fact, most of the book takes place in flashbacks over the course of the two days before David and Blanche finally meet again. David arrives at Blanche’s doorstep on page 187; the book ends four pages later.
But these are two people with a rich past in common:
The past engulfed them — vibrations of the nerves connecting memory with memory, instantaneous transport from childhood to youth to maturity; they seemed to be moving together from place to place, from scene to scene, from year to year. Places, rooms wherein momentous conversations had been exchanged, faces of the dead reanimated by thoughts of them, moments, the appearance and disappearance of familiar presences, sounds, fragrances.
Blanche and David may be survivors, but neither is unscarred. Blanche fell under the spell of David’s beautiful mother Laura and came to act as sort of an emotional nursemaid after she realizes — as, apparently, no one else in their circle does — that Laura has refused the great love of her life. Laura meets a passionate and handsome Frenchman when married, a mother, and bound tight by conventions. She tells the man their love must remain unrequited. David, in turn, becomes bound to Olivia, drawn like a magnet by the force of her personality. The two marry in a “wedding of the season” and head off to begin their marital bliss.
At which point David quickly realizes “the sad fact that he had married an incorrigible bore.” To Olivia, David is merely an appendage. A necessary appendage in the eyes of their society, but one of little intrinsic value. He annoyingly insists on taking her around Europe to look at works of art he loves and which she finds, without exception, in bad taste. As their honeymoon continues, David finds himself having “to endure her conversation as one might listen to the ceaseless buzzing of a fly on a faultless summer afternoon.” She, in turn, longs to return to New York so she can organize the affairs that will keep her at the center of society’s attention.
Their marriage falls into a uncomfortable sort of limbo. And then David finds himself in a situation much like that his mother: madly in love with someone not his spouse. In his case, however, he does the disrespectable thing:
To remember his madness was in a measure now to recover it again. Helen Brooks — his need to see her, to talk with her, had devoured him. He had been quite ready to shatter his domestic life, to forfeit all responsibility for his child, to deal his mother the severest sorrow of her life, to ruin his position in society, to throw all chances for a reputable career to the winds on the dubious chance of winning her love.
Bolton shared Henry James’s view that there are no happy endings in this life. The shared memories that bring Blanche and David together after decades are not fond. The world they had known as children was “so safe and so parochial.” Their early adult lives, however, were marked by disappointments and failures, and as they grew older, they saw themselves “in an age that we had made and were unprepared to meet.” And looking ahead, the sense that they were moving, with the rest of the world, “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.”
Bolton does not view the world of her youth nostalgically: both Blanche and David recall its pains, slights, and injustices. But neither does she shy away from the flaws of the New York of glass, steel, and Civil Defense shelters. As Tess Lewis wrote in Hudson Review, “She wrote novels of manners when the manners she had known had already disintegrated. Her characters, adrift in an uncertain world, know better than to glorify the past, but cannot help longing for the lost security of their often unhappy childhoods.” The Whirligig of Time is an elegaic novel of quiet, delicate, and deeply moving power. But it’s not a young man’s novel.
Bolton herself was a Blanche Willoughby with no David to share her sadness. Bolton was a pseudonym that Mary Britton Miller chose after her first novel In the Days of Thy Youth (1943) failed to sell or gain critical attention. Born an identical twin into the family of a prosperous New York lawyer, she and her four siblings were orphaned when both her parents died of pneumonia when she was four. Ten years later, she watched her twin sister Grace drown as they swam together in Long Island Sound. Her elder brother committed suicide in 1916. By the time Bolton achieved some success as a novelist with Do I Wake or Sleep, she was the only surviving member of her family. Having never married, she had lost all her friends from youth by the time she undertook to write The Whirligig of Time. By then, she had learned things about disappointment and endurance that were still in her New York Times reviewer’s future.
The Whirlgig of Time, by Isabel Bolton (pseudonym of Mary Britton Miller) New York: Crown Publishers, 1971
Small town Minnesota farm girl moves to the big city of Minneapolis/St. Paul in the depths of the 1930’s Depression. The girl works in a speakeasy, lives with a prostitute, and falls in love with one of the more handsome petty criminals. He gets her pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. She then agrees to be the wheelman for a bank robbery. The robbery fails, with enough blood and guts spilled to leave her alone and having to fend for herself and her unborn child in a dark cold world.
The book is not a complete success as momentum slows significantly after the ramp up to the bank robbery.
But the words ring true, full of a poetic oral realism of the era.
At the time she wrote the book, Le Sueur was a member of the Communist Party. But the book didn’t find a publisher until the 1970s, when John Crawford, who had started a new publishing house, the West End Press, got Le Sueur’s consent to rifle thru her basement for musty treasures.
When Le Sueur had tried to get left-wing publishers interested in the book back in the 1930s, they didn’t like it. It showed “lumpen tendencies,” portrayed “degenerates” rather than “virtuous Communist women,” had too much cursing and sex, used the Lord’s name in vain, was “defeatist in attitude” and “lacked revolutionary spirit and direction.” In other words, it was true.
She was then blacklisted in the 40-50’s, unrepentant before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
Not Communist enough for the left, too communist for the right.
The Girl was written by splicing together a number of oral histories from different women who participated in a workers’ alliance writing group in the 30’s, sharing their personal stories with Le Sueur. She took one piece from a bank robbing wheel(wo)man, one piece from a bootleg shootout widow, one piece from a girl birthing a child after escaping an asylum, and so on.
“Some samples of the prose, which, once again, I really dug”:
“Better be hiding, I said, better be running, better be on the lam, better fade away. Yeah, he said, better not be seen, and I saw his terrible eyes looking, shaking like dice–snake-eyes.”
“Ganz suddenly brough his huge mutilated hand back and struck me full in the face. I fell down, I thought, forever, into the dark earth. I thought the light would never be so bright again.”
“But keep your mouth buttoned up, he said to me. You keep yours, I said. And I ran out and down the stairs, past the clerk at the desk, and into the street, and I looked back and saw all the windows behind me brightly lighted and the smooth furniture inside and the nice beds. I always wanted to see what they did in there. Now I knew. I ran into the park and I touched the trees and I leaned down and picked up some dirt and ate it. It tasted bitter…..And I kept walking and looking at men and now I knew something. This is what happened. Now I knew it. I was going to know more. Nobody knew anything that didn’t do it. Down below you know everything and there are some things you can never tell, never speak of, but they move inside you like yeast.”
“You can’t sit in a barroom alone after it’s quiet. I got desires now, wild, like the dark sweet fruit of the night that breaks on your tongue. How can you sit down now in any room, and mend your stockings and polish your nails and maybe think about your mother, with your flesh like the wild breaking of spring, like a tree after a storm, weighted to the ground and rainwater in your throat and your hair springing wild out of your skull and the strong root terrible in the earth with bitter strength?”
West End Press published three editions of The Girl, first in 1978, then in a revised edition in 1990, and a third in 2006 after the University of New Mexico Press had picked up the West End Press catalogue. Sadly, the only books by Meridel Le Sueur that appear to be in print now are the two from the UNM Press: The Girl and I Hear Men Talking, a collection of her short stories.
Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing firm. A man bumps into him, then disappears into the crowd. When von Ufermann reaches his gate, he finds his ticket, his passport, his wallet are gone.
At that point, most people would contact the police, try to arrange for replacements, contact the bank in Frankfurt. But von Ufermann surrenders to fate. “Oh, well! I don’t suppose old Hebenwerth would have given in anyway!” he shrugs, and hails a cab to take him back into the city. The theft has presented him with an opportunity to step away from the pressures of money, work, family, social status, the chaotic German economy. A hiatus, a moment of suspension:
Ufermann was almost ashamed of himself, but he could not help it. He was actually delighted at not having flown to Frankfurt. Slowly he paced a few steps. Now he had plenty of time at his disposal, the whole morning belonged to him and not to the business. No matter how many people rang him at the office, sorry he wasn’t there, he was away. No need to inquire about Irmgard’s health or dictate any letters, nor would he see the gloomy face of old Boss, who knew everything, who knew things that only a confidential clerk could know and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. No need to consider when and where to tell Gierke to pick him up. He was simply going for a walk, just like anybody else. The sun shone, it was actually bright and warm.
And then the plane von Ufermann was supposed to be on crashes.
In No Right to Live, the novelist offers her protagonist a chance to escape from his life. A bit like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Ernst von Ufermann gets a chance to see what the world looks like without him. For his widow and business partner, the cloud has a silver lining: a life insurance policy worth millions of marks, enough to bail out the firm and leave the grieving wife even wealthier than before.
With only the spare change in his pockets, however, von Ufermann soon finds himself grappling with the practical matter of survival. His mistress, a small-time actress, put him up for a night or two, then introduces him to a petty criminal who arranges for von Ufermann to travel to Vienna, complete with a borrowed passport and a new identity of Edgar von Schmitt, to deliver a mysterious packet to contacts there.
In Vienna, “Herr von Schmitt” finds he’s moved from relying on the goodwill of crooks to navigating the complex loyalties of a group of young National Socialist fanatics:
“Death to the Jews.” He was no Jew, he wasn’t even interested, he had never bothered about such things. Death! An ugly word. Death. Perhaps it really did mean something to him. In the street they were now singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. Did that concern him? Death, death.
He also realizes that every day he continues to allow the lie of Ernst von Ufermann’s death to play out he implicates himself ever more deeply in a case of insurance fraud. What he’d imagined at first as a momentary break from the demands of his life proves to be a descent into an ever more powerful vortex of chaos. And when he does eventually manages to make his way back to Berlin, he learns that, unlike George Bailey, everyone seems quite a bit happier without him.
His only respite are the moments when he can become completely anonymous:
Who was the man in the leather jacket leaning against the dirty corridor-window with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Did no one know him? No, no one knew him. He gazed out at the black fields, the black woods flying past in the white and wintry air. The roofs of humble cottages stood out black and the pine-trees, stark and bare, were black too. The sound of voices came from the compartment. They scarcely noticed when he left the hot, stifling atmosphere in which they sat. They showed no surprise at his not taking off his shoes at night or propping himself up against his neighbour and snoring with half open mouth as they did. They never thought of saying “sorry” or “excuse me.” It was more by luck than anything else that they did not drop their greasy sandwich-paper on his lap. No, no one knew him.
No Right to Live illustrates the problem with the fantasy of escaping from a life you find unbearable. First, there’s no guarantee that the new life you devise is any better than the first one. And second, if you do then try to step back into the life you left behind, it’s like trying to eat off a plate that’s been shattered and pieced back together. These stories never end well.
Wishart advertisement for No Right to Live
When it was published by Wishart in England in 1934, No Right to Live was almost guaranteed to be forgotten. Wishart’s ad claimed the book had been banned by the Nazis, but in reality, the German and Austrian publishers knew well enough not to bother even trying to get it passed the Party censors. Even Wishart was concerned not to aggravate the German authorities and their sympathizers in England by pressing the book’s anti-Nazi content too far and chose not only to delete certain passages from Gwenda David’s translations but to insert a few things of their own.
Even without comparing No Right to Live with its original German text, it’s not hard to see that something was lost, if not in translation, then at least in publication. There are several points at which the narrative jerks forward somewhat unexpectedly, almost as if pages are missing. It’s not surprising, then, that there were almost no reviews of No Right to Live in the English press.
By the time No Right to Live appeared, its author had herself escaped from her old life and taken on an assumed name. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1895, Maria Lazar grew up among the elite of Austrian culture alongside Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig. Oskar Kokoschka painted her posed with a parrot in his 1916 Dame mit Papagei. Thomas Mann dismissed her first novel Die Vergiftung (The Poisoning) for its Penetranter Weibsgeruch (“penetrating woman smell”).
In 1923, Lazar married a Swedish journalist, Friedrich Strindberg, which gave her Swedish citizenship and the means to later flee her native country safely. The couple separated and in 1933, living in Berlin and uncomfortable with the prospect of living under Hitler’s regime, she accepted an invitation from the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis to spend the summer at her home on the island of Thurø, where they were soon joined by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel. Lazar never returned to Austria.
She adopted the pseudonym of Esther Grenen, which she thought sounded more Nordic, and Lazar and her daughter Judith later moved to Stockholm in 1939. She died there in 1948, having committed suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal case of cancer.
German and Dutch editions: Leben Verboten! from Das Vergessene Buch and Leven Verboden! from Van Maaskunt Haun
The original German text of the novel did not appear until 2020. A young Austrian and fan of neglected books, Albert C. Eibl, had published Lazar’s first and last novels, Die Vergiftung and Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut (The Natives of Maria Blood) through his one-man publishing house Das Vergessene Buch (The Forgotten Book). He was able to obtain Lazar’s typescript from the estate of Lazar’s daughter Judith and published the book, accompanied by a commentary by Prof. Johann Sonnleitner of the University of Vienna, in March 2020.
It is amazing with what clairvoyance and sharpness Maria Lazar describes the rise of National Socialism at the beginning of the thirties. The novel moves on rapidly, sometimes even has comical sides and is still oppressive in the description of the inhuman, ideologically cruel underpinned plans of National Socialism. One follows this — officially dead — Ernst von Ufermann through the days and weeks, as the political climate heats up threateningly. The book, which is a crime story, a psychological study and a political thriller at the same time, plays with the literary means of confusion, double life and more or less big rip-offs and impresses with quick scene changes and striking dialogues across all levels.
According to WorldCat.org, there are just nine copies of No Right to Live available in libraries worldwide. I obtained a PDF of the book courtesy of Meta Gemert, a Dutch writer, translator, and publisher, who will be releasing a Dutch edition, Leven Verboden! based on the original German manuscript from her Van Maaskant Haun Publishers in October 2021. Meta tells me that she’s trying to convince NYRB Classics to contract a new English translation of Leben Verboten!. If she does, it would follow the path of Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, which was a best-seller when it was reissued in Germany, in Dutch by Van Maaskant Haun as De Effingers in March 2020, and is rumored to be slated for publication by NYRB Classics in 2023. In the meantime, however, if you’re interested in reading No Right to Live in PDF, despite its shortcomings, drop me an email at [email protected].
No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar) London: Wishart & Co., 1934
This is a story about two novels. When Mary Lee Settle published Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday in 1964, she wasn’t happy with the reviews or how her publisher handled the book. Settle saw the book as part — the conclusion, in fact — of a larger series she’d begun with O Beulah Land (1956) and Know Nothing (1960), which ultimately became known as the “Beulah Land Quintet.”
Her plan was to trace the story of a family not unlike her own and those she grew up with: landed white people in West Virginia who could trace their lines from religious and political dissidents who left England for America in the 1600s, through the pioneers who drove their wagons into the hills of Appalachia and what would become West Virginia, who fought (on both sides) in the Civil War, who started the coal mines and fought in the battles between the miners and the owners (again, on both sides) in the early 20th century, and who saw the introduction of strip mining.
In 1964, an outside might have thought that this was a story that ended on a high note, at least for the owners and their descendents. Strip mining was pulling coal from the earth faster than any lot of troublesome miners could and the money that came in could be spent at exclusive country clubs, resorts like The Greenbrier, and shopping trips to New York and Europe.
Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.
But Mary Lee Settle was no outsider, and she must have had the sense that there was going to be a price to pay for raping this land. She picked up on clues that are sprinkled throughout Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. And so, almost twenty years later, after writing the beginning of the story (Prisons (1973)) and the penultimate chapter (The Scapegoat (1980), about the violence between the miners and the owners around 1912), she returned to update her ending with The Killing Ground (1982).
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday appears relatively intact as the middle section (“Before the Revolution, 1960”) of The Killing Ground, which begins in 1978 and ends two years later. So, it can be read as a work in progress or a fragment. Personally, I think neither of those interpretations is correct. Fight Night and The Killing Ground tell fundamentally different stories. The Killing Ground is truly the culmination of the Beulah Land quintet, which is a larger story, a story about people and generations and their land. Fight Night, on the other hand, is a snapshot in time, a story about individuals, set over the course of little more than a weekend. And as a result, I think, a better and tighter book.
The book opens with a late night drunken phone call from Johnny McKarkle, the wealthy but aimless son of a family with coal money, to his sister Hannah in New York City. Johnny is in a phone booth in Canona, their home town in West Virginia. It’s Saturday night, “the night for a man to fight free to the surface of his life, not caring how he did it or how much hate he dragged up and let fly.” Johnny wants to confide in Hannah about his problems — marriage, meaningless job, unlistening parents — and to coax Hannah down to cut loose with him. The next call Hannah gets, a few hours later, brings the news that Johnny is dying, his head having been bashed in while he was sobering up in the town’s drunk tank.
Johnny is clearly painted as a tragic figure and Hannah isn’t much better off. But at least she’s had the sense to leave town, and when she gets off her flight from New York the next morning, her senses are alert for the signs of getting pulled back. Friends stop by her parents’ place — “set sentinel on the hill above Canona” — to express concern on their way home from church, but she knows they’re just looking for fuel for the gossip mill:
They would take whatever words I stammered out, piece an “inside” story together, their unkissed mouths breathing the smell of cigarettes and coffee into their telephones, making little secretive sounds to each other. I remembered how small termite mandibles were, and how, if you lean close and pinpoint attention, you can hear them, how their combined tenacity can crush a building. These women were moving close to trouble, chewing at it because they had, that week, none of their own to feed the others with.
These are the three best-written sentences I’ve come across in a long time. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is full of them. There are dry pages and a few ill-crafted passages in this book, but it’s worth reading just for sentences that cut to the bone like a switchblade in the hands of a killer with a swift and sure mastery of her weapon. Hannah on her father, a man who’s spent his adult life in the shadow of a domineering wife: “How could I ‘go easy’ with my father — a man whom I had never seen separately, as you see, in a split second of love or even horror, in all my life? Christ, I knew a two-day lover better than I knew my father.” On her mother, putting herself together after the shock of learning of Johnny’s death: “She began to take her own shape, hiding the woman again behind the lady.” Or Johnny’s relationship with Hannah: “Usually he loved me as you live in spite of.” Or the atmosphere of the Greenbrier (called Egeria Springs in the book): “Egeria’s smell, from the gate on into the rooms, a smell compounded of expensive secluded mountain air, hand-ironed linen, polish, huge, glossy, well-fed plants, and thick notepaper, I recognized later wherever I smelled it, and it brought me back to Egeria Springs. It was the clean, crisp new smell of protected American money.”
At times, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday made me wonder if Balzac had been reincarnated as a woman from Charleston, West Virginia, for Settle deals with the relationship between families and money in a way few American writers — and even fewer of Settle’s generation — equalled. What she knew better than any of her characters was that families and money are always moving together in one of two directions, up or down. There is no stasis.
Johnny’s head is bashed in by one of his distant cousins, a hard scrabble farmer still trying to hold on to a poor patch of hill farm. Jake Catlett is from the unlucky line that got stuck with the rocky hillsides when the McKarkles got the rich bottom land along the river. A few decades of coal-mining wages wasn’t even to prevent the Catletts’ slow slide into deeper and deeper poverty.
But neither are the McKarkles secure in their grand house above Canona. Coal mining is starting its decline. Owners who failed to make the switch to strip-mining have already seen their fortunes evaporate:
Money disaster had a phrase: You ran through with every last thing. I could see people fleeing down River Street, running through it, shoveling money, until they threw the last thing, the last dollar, and having at last committed the unpardonable sin, they were stripped as if they had shed their clothes, left naked, turned away from, cut from the minds, except in moral stories or in late-night memories.
In the case of the McKarkles, this disaster is lurking somewhere in the future. Having lost his illusions during the war, Johnny — the heir to the McKarkle fortune, such as it is — has done nothing to avert this: “Without land to till or people to care for, Johnny had been caught in a parody where the land had shrunk to a genteel suburban house he wasn’t even needed to work for.” And with his death, that fate becomes certain.
The coming money disaster is paralleled by the disaster becoming evident in the toll that coal has taken on the landscape. That awareness is just setting in: “The river was too dirty with chemical and coal waste for many fish to survive in it. But they kept on trying.” As Settle sees it, however, in a perspective that at the time was just beginning to be expressed, the land was going to be the ultimate victim:
We had cut down its trees, and the water had poured down its naked gulleys and swept itself clean. We had stabbed too hard, and in those places it had shrunk back baring its rock teeth. Arrogance and lack of care toward its riches had grown into arrogance and lack of care for each other. The crash of the grabber at the coal face had exploited, grabbed, as we had grabbed. We had left a residue of carelessness, and the hatred that grew in it had made a fist.
When Settle returned to Canona and fit the small story of Johnny McKarkle into the fabric of the “Beulah Land” series when she incorporated Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday into The Killing Ground, the consequences of coal mining on both land and people had become clear. The two books, however, take very different views on their subject. In The Killing Ground, we see the decline of Canona and the McKarkles as if through a telescope, in the larger context of history. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, we see in small dimensions: one weekend, one family, one death. The larger context of history is only the background to Hannah McKarkle’s close observation. And when the writer is a cold-blooded and skilled knife fighter like Settle, used to feeling her victim’s breath as the blade goes in, the larger context of history doesn’t stand a chance.
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle New York: The Viking Press, 1964
When you reach the end of Mundome, you may think you’ve misunderstood it completely and need to go back and read it again. That’s not only the sign of a great book about insanity but exactly what A. G. Mojtabai had in mind.
Mundome is about Richard, a sane, sober, faithful brother, and Meg, his sister trapped in some form of madness that leaves her in a near-catatonic state. Released after twelve years in an institution, Meg is now living with Richard. Each day, he struggles to pull Meg out of her fugue. He sits her at their dinner table despite the fact that her hands are bunched into fists so tightly that she cannot even hold a fork, let alone bring it to her mouth. He tries to engage her in conversation about the events of his day even though she stares ahead blankly. He sits Meg in their living room as if the two of them were an ordinary couple reading quietly after dinner, though they’re clearly not:
That evening Meg sat in the green armchair, the lamplight flaking round her shoulders. On her lap I placed the latest copy of Life magazine, open. On the page facing the story of interest was a luscious lobster dinner, a mayonnaise advertisement, complete with potato salad and pickle. Meg stared at the ad with some fixity, pursing her lips and raising the page closer to her eyes. Then she began to help herself, diving into the salad, tearing it to bits and stuffing her mouth with it. Clacking, chewing, coughing and spitting followed. I forced my hand into her mouth and cleared it, then ripped the magazine from her hands.
To distract himself from Meg’s stony isolation, Richard takes up writing, but he never gets past the beginning of stories that seem really to be about himself: “I am living at the bottom of a well. It is really very comfortable here and I see no point in moving.”
His job is another daily battle with insanity. Richard is an archivist at a city library. The library itself is stuck in limbo:
The acquisitions department continues to select books, to fill in the myriad order blanks, white, pink, green and yellow, to make out the invoices; they are as busy as spiders spinning, but the orders are never sent, the invoices are only filed away.
“This place is a warehouse, cold storage,” one of Richard’s colleagues tells him. “No action, nothing moves. It’s dead. Unreal.” Patrons die as they sit looking emptily at books and are only discovered at closing time. Answering reference desk requests, Richard finds himself going down endless threads of cross-references:
… see Marianna, an Idyll. Formed by an English Hand. Marianna: see An English Hand. An English Hand: see An Hue and Cry after the Funda mental Rights and Duties of Englishmen. An Hue and Cry: see Hymn to Wealth, a Satyr. Hymn to Wealth: see….
He chronicles the histories of the librarians before him who sat at the desk he now occupies: “Ada Nog. December 1958-May 1959…. After an uneventful day at work, Miss Nog put on her wrap, said goodnight, went home and put her head in the oven. No explanation offered or sought.” Yet despite this atmosphere of ennui, the library staff is taut with anxiety at the rumor of a visit from an efficiency expert, a ruthless streamliner who will cut through their ranks like a man with a scythe.
All this is driving Richard to his own form of breakdown. One night, as he looks at himself in the mirror, he makes hopeless attempts to restore his connection with his emotions: “I spent the better part of an hour making faces at myself, practicing love, hatred, anger, fear, envy, lust, grief, feeling none of them but giving a careful rendition just the same.” Meg’s psychiatrist becomes concerned with Richard’s mental state, hints at the possible need for hospitalization.
All along, your heart goes out to Richard. He’s a decent, serious individual fighting to overcome powerful forces of madness and chaos.
Or is he?
As one account of Mundome puts it, “The novel has two settings — inner and outer — which fuse at the end, and only one main character, or perhaps two main characters who fuse at the end.” Are Richard and Meg, in fact, two sides of the same person? Mojtabai later said that she meant all along to leave the reader in doubt, yet until the last few pages, we accept the explanation that most fits with our sense of what’s normal. Her design becomes more obvious when we know how Mojtabai approached writing her novels: “I work backwards from the ending,” she told an interviewer. “I usually begin with a haunting final image — a recognition scene — and proceed by unpacking the implications of that image as I go.”
Mojtabai came up with her title by fusing together two words from a Latin saying: In hoc mundo me extra me nihil agere posse, which she translated as “In this world I can affect nothing outside myself.” As she notes in an introductory comment, “Mundome is a deliberately ungrammatical construction, a forced juxtaposition of words that cannot fuse without some connective of action or relation.” Which is not unlike what she does with Richard and Meg, two characters who appear polar opposites until Mojtabai forces us to see the possibility that they might actually be the same person.
The Washington Post’s reviewer Jonathan Yardley, who called Mundome one of the best novels of 1974, described the book as “an intelligent whodunit,” but admitted that was a misleading label: “One is left in the end not with the answer to whodunit, but with a complex of questions that linger in the mind.” Even if some reviewers were irritated at the book’s lingering ambiguity, most saw Mundome as an exceptionally well-constructed and written first novel. Margaret Atwood called it “an extraordinarily pure novel, pure as the contained landscapes inside glass paperweights in which the snow falls endlessly on minute figures, preserved from dust and decay by the absence of air.” Time’s reviewer said the book “erupts with dramatic clues that flare backward and forward through the narrative like thin, ignited trains of gunpowder,” and the Antioch Review called it “The most remarkable first novel published in America during the past several years.” (Mojtabai was, for the record, an Antioch alumna.)
A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.
Mojtabai drew inspiration for the novel from two sources. While an undergraduate at Antioch, she worked one summer as an intern at the Chestnut Lodge Sanatarium in Rockville, Maryland. There, she dealt with a woman diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia who’d been a patient at the clinic for over twelve years. Mojtabai found her sense of the woman transformed over the weeks of dealing with her. Shocked by her condition, she then began to think her more sane than the clinic’s staff, capable of moments of striking clarity. But later, Mojtabai came to distrust her own impressions. “Again and again,” she later wrote, “I had to confront the fact that my attempt to understand her condition was a devious way of probing my own condition. When I left the job, I was in a very shaky state and my patient was no better.”
Mojtabai was also a veteran of the strange world of a large metropolitan library. After her divorce from an Iranian man she met at Antioch, she returned with her daughter to New York City, where she taught at Hunter College before taking a job as a librarian at Columbia, where she earned her MLS in library science in 1970. She was working at the library of the City College of New York when she wrote Mundome, her first novel. As she told UC Irvine professor Dr. Carol Booth Olson, Mojtabai based her descriptions of Richard’s library and its patrons on her observation of the daily activities of the main branch of the New York Public Library.
A. G. (for Ann Grace) Mojtabai went on to write eight more novels after Mundome. Her most recent, Thirst was published by Slant Books in February 2021. It draws upon material from both her 1994 novel Called Out, about a Catholic priest dealing with the aftermath of an airliner crash outside a small West Texas town, and Soon, a collection of sketches based on Mojtabai’s own work in a hospice.
Mundome is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974
Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train (1977). Two years later, Christopher Isherwood sees her walk into a Berlin nightclub on the arm of Tania Kurella, a German woman who met the Anglo-Irish writer James Stern that evening and later married him.
In 1948, Malcolm Lowry gets drunk at a party at the house outside Paris she shared with her then-lover Joan Black. Her name pops up in accounts of Julia Child, Richard Olney, James Beard, and other culinarily-minded Americans who clustered around Child’s villa, La Pitchoune, outside Cannes. Even in Quicksand (2005), a memoir written by Sybille Bedford, with whom she lived for twenty years, Eda rates less than three pages.
She only emerges from the margins in two places: in her three brief and largely autobiographical novels — Childsplay (1961), A Matter of Choosing (1963), and Extenuating Circumstances (1971); and in Selina Hasting’s just-published biography of her long-time lover and companion, Sybille Bedford: A Life (2020). Through Eda’s first two novels we can follow her story up to her early twenties; Hastings fills in many of the gaps thereafter.
Eda grew up in material, if not psychological, comfort. She was born in 1907 in Durango, Mexico, where her father, Harvey Hurd Lord, a former Olympic athlete, managed a copper mine. In late 1910, her father and mother were forced to flee from Mexico on horseback, taking Eda with them, when miners and peasants turned on the Americans who owned much of the land Durango in one of the early incidents in the Mexican Revolution.
Cover of UK edition of Childsplay
Though Harvey Lord came from a wealthy family, he had an unfortunate knack for investing in unproductive mines. As a result, in her childhood Eda became accustomed to moving from place to place — a pattern revealed in the chapter names in Childsplay: Joplin, Missouri; Neosho; Webb City; Okmulgee, Oklahoma; Embreeville, Tennessee. The one constant was her grandmother’s home in Evanston, Illinois, where she spent most summers. Her mother died of cancer when she was three; her father remarried but Eda was never really accepted by her stepmother, and when Harvey Lord died in 1920, Eda became a ward of her grandmother Eda Hurd Lord.
Eda Hurd Lord was something of a force of nature. Daughter of the abolitionist lawyer and Chicago pioneer Harvey Hurd, she became a real estate developer, building up Evanston, Illinois as one of Chicago’s first suburbs. She was a patron of the arts, purchasing works by Winslow Homer and others and contributing money and paintings to museums. She was not, however, interested in matters of the heart. When Eda’s father died and her future was uncertain, her grandmother put the choice to thirteen-year-old Eda in business-like terms:
She said I had a lot to think about. She wanted me to make a decision, but I must do it slowly and carefully. I should not answer at once; tomorrow would be soon enough. She said she did not want to influence me one way or the other; I should make up my own mind. Did I want to stay on with her and remain a member of my own family? Or did I want to go to Oklahoma and live with my stepmother?
Her grandmother warned Eda, however, that “if I did decide in favor of my stepmother, she could no longer have anything to do with me. She could not.” “My grandmother might be cold,” Eda later wrote, “but at least you knew where you stood with her.”
As the title of Eda’s second novel A Matter of Choosing suggests, her grandmother continued to treat her as an autonomous being rather than a child in her care. Eda Hurd Lord moved from Illinois to California, first Glendale and then La Jolla, for its environment. She gave her granddaughter the choice of attending a public or private school. Eda chose private, entering the Bishop’s School in 1922.
Eda Lord, from the Bishop’s School yearbook, 1924.
Still busy with investments, her grandmother was often away and Eda became accustomed to the company of adults. One, a financier, took her along on trips down to Tijuana. Here she became acquainted with what she called “the idiot world of Prohibition drinking:
… the crazy behavior, the stumbling walk, women in evening dress out cold and carried off on stretchers. No one lifted an eyebrow; the Hamiltons did not even look up. I was learning not to be surprised at anything.
Unfortunately, Eda’s own drinking habits came to be modelled on what she witnessed in Tijuana.
With her talents and precocious sophistication, Eda became the “It” girl of the Bishop’s School. When Mary Frances Kennedy (later M. F. K. Fisher) entered the school in 1924, a year behind, Eda was the vice president of the Junior class, a member of the Debate and Thespian clubs, editor of the literary annual, and a player on the basketball, hockey, and baseball teams. “She could always do anything, anything at school better than we could,” Fisher later wrote; “she was more exciting and brilliant than any student had ever been.” Not surprisingly, Fisher developed an intense schoolgirl crush, an “awkward, bewildered, confused” love for Eda.
Eda then went to Stanford — her grandmother’s decision this time — where she quickly earned a reputation for flouting the rules. On a whim she and a fellow student paid $5 for a ride in an airplane, which resulted in a counseling from the women’s dean. This was just the start. Before the end of her first year, she was put on “social probation” (prohibited from speaking to other students on campus). As a sophomore, she began making outings with male students. One evening, after visiting a speakeasy in San Francisco, the car she was riding in was involved in an accident. Though everyone covered it up, word eventually reached the school administration and she was expelled. “They tell me that you break the laws of our country, as well, that you have taken to drink,” her grandmother confronted Eda upon her return. “Do you enjoy muddling your words?”
Intent on gaining independence from her grandmother, Eda got a job in the advertisement office of a department store in Los Angeles and took an apartment. A middle-aged bootlegger took a fancy to her and soon she was making the rounds with him almost every night. He was proud to be seen with a fresh-faced college girl on his arm. After a few months of this, however, she was ready to move on: “With Pat, I had seen it all; I was familiar with every used car park, gas station, restaurant, street corner. Los Angeles was an uninspired, sprawling, provincial conglomeration.”
She decided to try her luck in New York City. Her grandmother took the news in her usual matter-of-fact fashion: “Experience cannot be passed on to others,” she said. “Each human being has to find out for himself.” Eda was able to find work in New York but soon grew restless again. She met Karl Robinson, a young executive with an American oil company operating in China and the two were wed in early 1930. Soon after the couple arrived in China, however, Eda realized that married life was not for her. She journeyed north to Vladivostok and made her way to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway.
Eda eventually made it to France, where she met her old classmate Mary Frances Kennedy, now married to Alfred Fisher. She ingratiated herself into the budding gourmet with a ten-pound tin of caviar she’d bought in Moscow. Mary Frances in turn introduced Eda to Lawrence Clark Powell, who was renting a room from them while studying at the University of Dijon. Eda and Powell had a brief affair, little more than a few days together. Powell was infatuated, Eda less so. As he recalls in The Blue Train, she said there was little “an old drunkard like me” could offer:
Besides, you’re my last man. I intend to live with women after this. Anyway, I’ll be dead of lung cancer before I’m forty. Look at my fingers. You’d think I was Chinese. What could I give you? A child? No. The good father took care of that. He told me it was an appendectomy when he destroyed my ability to bear a child. My best gift to you would be my body in alcohol.
In his retrospective account, Powell made Eda older and a redhead to enhance her allure and mystery.
From France, she headed to Berlin, where she began working as a writer. The city’s pre-Nazi Cabaret decadence suited her perfectly. She may have had an affair that led to her having an abortion (Powell suggests this came earlier), but she began sleeping with women and frequenting nightclubs. It was in one of these that Sybille Bedford first met her. Sybille was in the company of Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, Eda with her lover Tania. Eda later said that Bedford seemed “occupied and preoccupied.” Sybille, on the other hand, claimed that she “mostly sat prim and shocked — reading a review.” The two women went on their separate ways.
They met again briefly at a cocktail party in Paris in early 1939. The web of attractions at this affair was complicated to say the least. Sybille met Allanah Harper, a wealthy and worldly Englishwoman who would become her partner through the war years and later her supporter in many practical matters. Eda was with Joan Black, also a wealthy Englishwoman, with whom she would be involved through the same period. Sybille was interested in Joan and Eda. Though the two couples parted, lines between these four women would cross in numerous ways in the years after the war.
Sybille and Allanah sailed to America shortly after the Germans invaded in May 1940. Eda and Joan Black were trapped in France. Their different fates did much to determine the direction of Sybille’s and Eda’s careers. Eda and Joan made their way to the south of France, then under control of the Vichy government. They struggled with all the challenges of life under occupation — food shortages, fuel shortages, suspicion and harassment — but at least Eda’s status as a neutral foreigner offered some protection until Hitler declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.
The contrast between the account of living under occupation Eda tells in her last novel, Extenuating Circumstances, and the evidence of history is intriguing. In the book, Eda foregoes the first-person narrator of Childsplay and A Matter of Choosing for an impersonal third person. Her lead character, Letty, the widow of a British Army veteran, survives through a combination of ingenuity and good luck. A wealthy American couple leave her with the keys to their villa, which provides Letty with relative comfort and privacy — privacy enough to act as a safe house for escaping Allied airmen on occasion. The story as a whole carries a bit of a Swiss Family Robinson air as Letty and her friends overcome difficulty after difficulty by improvising solutions and outwitting the Vichy police and Gestapo. In the end, after Liberation, one character observes to Letty, “You have come a long way.” “I have,” she replies, “And you won’t catch me looking back.”
Compare this with Hasting’s description:
To those who knew Eda in the post-war period, she appeared a timid, fragile creature, shy and retiring, clearly reluctant to attract attention or to express any opinion that might be considered remotely contentious. In her younger days, however, Eda had presented a very different image, a dark-haired beauty, sociable, intelligent and high-spirited, attractive to both men and men, eager for adventure and determined to make a successful career as a writer.
Elsewhere, she writes that Sybille found Eda “pale and thin, very anxious and shy, clearly traumatised by her wartime experiences.”
What separated Eda from the fictional Letty was the reality of her experiences during the war. She and Joan were ill-prepared to deal with deprivation. Their life in Paris had been one of sleeping late, partying long, and drinking heavily. “We were too hazy with drink to notice a kerb,” Eda later wrote. Though they made their way to the Riviera, they didn’t end up in the comfort of a luxurious villa. Instead, they found a humble country house prone to the worst of the Riviera’s wet grey months: “dampness everywhere, between one’s ribs, dripping from one’s fingers, mud all over the floor. It corrodes one’s very soul.”
And instead of the Famous Five-style adventures of Extenuating Circumstances, Joan and Eda found themselves, in March 1943, interned along with hundreds of English and American women, in Cavaillon, one of the towns “approved” for them to live. As Eda wrote in an unpublished account that Selina Hastings most generously shared with me,
Cavaillon is the mouth of the funnel of the Rhône Valley and, in consequence, is the suction vent of mistrals blowing throughout the south. Wind shakes the ugly raw-blown houses and for weeks on end, wind flings dust everywhere: into eyes, mouths, nerves.
A few days later, however, they were rounded up and loaded onto a train. No one explained what was happening or where they were going.
Women at a Vichy French internment camp.
They ended up being offloaded into a camp on the outskirts of Paris where English and American women from throughout Vichy France, nearly two thousand in all, were being held for transfer to a German Internierunslager. In some ways, Eda felt more at peace there than at any time in the south:
In this prison life I was startled to discover a curious sense of leisured ease. There was no possibility of outdoor exercise: we were not allowed out; not necessity of wangling for food: we were given so much and no more, but, even so, more than we could buy outside. I walked from the dining room back to my bed and lay down with a book, savouring the peace and luxury of it. There was nothing I could do about anything.
… Outside, I could have been shot for no reason. Here I was known, named, numbered, and certainly under someone’s care and responsibility.
After a few weeks of this, however, the internees were told that they were being shipped back to Vichy with instructions to return to their places of enforced residence. Ironically, this news was nearly as bad as being handed over to the Germans. “It was as though a steel band had snapped,” Eda wrote. “The team spirit had been broken. People began grumbling.”
The women were transported back to the south of France to live, effectively, under house arrest. “We were a present from Vichy to the Germans, but they didn’t want us,” as Eda later put it in the words of a minor character in Extenuating Circumstances. The remaining months until the Allied landings in August 1944 were dreary, anxious, and hunger-filled. Eda later said that Joan took to reading cheap English mysteries for their descriptions of food and drink. “Literary bacon and eggs,” however, “are not very sustaining.”
Following Liberation, Eda and Joan made their way back to La Cerisaie, the farmhouse near Giverny that Joan owned. There, the women reconnected with friends from before the war and Joan began drinking great quantities of cheap red wine. For Eda, on the other hand, the one positive outcome of the wartime lockdown was recognizing that she was an alcoholic:
It was then that I had to decide that I must give up all alcohol and completely. Because that was the only real trouble: my liver had long before given up in despair and the alcohol went immediately into my blood stream, poisoning me, puffing me up, giving my mind strange illusions. I did this in as unobtrusive a way as I could, so that even now most people don’t know whether I drink or not.
Eda kept herself sober, as Sybille later put it, “with unrelenting effort — and the crutches of cigarettes and caffeine.” Eda would come to be known among acquaintances for her habit of arriving at parties with a thermos of coffee in hand. It seems as if Sybille saw Eda’s alcoholism as a purely a weakness rather than acknowledging her general success in maintaining sobriety.
Eda continued to write but published little. Malcolm Lowry praised a story she wrote titled “The Pig,” based on her experiences during the Occupation. “As a story perhaps it has, in one way, a kind of intolerance or lack of centre, even when it is being most subtle,” he wrote a friend, but admitted that “perhaps this imbalance is the clue to the author’s talent, or one clue.” He even suggested that Eda might pull together a collection of stories about “the gruesomes & comedies of the occupation.”
It was not until August 1956, after several more encounters, that Sybille and Eda became lovers. The relationship started with crash. Driving south from Paris, they were involved in an automobile accident that left Sybille with a broken hip. They recuperated at La Bastide, a villa in the hills above Cannes that Allanah Harper — a former lover of both women — was restoring with her husband. In many ways, La Bastide became the closest thing to home that Eda was to experience in her adult life.
For much of their time together over the next twenty years, Eda and Sybille lived on the move, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. As Sybille wrote in Quicksand,
… [W]e were living in years’ or half-years’ snatches in rented houses or flats in Dorset, in London, in Portugal, in Essex, then London again, then Italy: the Browning Villa at Asolo, an intolerable mistake with a sudden recourse to where we should have started: the South of France. And there we found the only both loved and permanent home I ever had: a conversioned annex built on Allanah Harper’s property.
This period, however, represented Bedford’s most productive time as a writer, as she published two novels, several collections of reportage, and a two-volume biography of Aldous Huxley. And Eda, who’d never written more than magazines and short stories, finally got down to work on a longer piece. She may have intended to write something about the Occupation: in one of Sybille’s letters, she writes that Eda is working on a piece about Marseilles and that “it is like a door burst open, then freedom and imagination and originality of the writing, filled with joy.”
Cover of US edition of Childsplay
What Eda published in the end, though, was Childsplay, which was essentially her autobiography up to the time of her father’s death in 1920 (though she places the event in 1917). Childsplay was published to good reviews in both the U.S. and England. The New York Times’ reviewer singled out Lord’s spare, elegant prose style. “She writes with great clarity and is able to make each separate scene count for exactly what she intended.”
Monica Furlong, writing in the Guardian gave the book its most enthusiastic review: “Masterpiece, tour de force, work of art — all the silly rave words of reviewers fail one utterly, yet the fact remains that here is a writer who uses language as if it had just been invented, who remembers precisely what it was like to learn to read, to get stuck on a roof and not be able to get down, to mistake a puppet for a real monkey. Miss Lord has no self-pity, no sentimentality, no vulgarity. Her greedy appetite for life takes a well-judged bite at America in the early years of this century….” Furlong later named it as one of the books she’d most enjoyed during the year, saying the book’s “vivid, singing prose” had “haunted me for months.”
Cover of US edition of A Matter of Choosing
Eda followed two years later with A Matter of Choosing, which carried her story forward to her arrival in New York City in her early twenties. Like Childsplay, it was written in a frank, unsentimental first-person voice that was as tough on herself as on those around her. The book displayed a remarkable level of constraint — not reticence, mind, but a maturity that recognizes the danger in making sweeping statements. As one reviewer put it, Lord’s prose was “cool and spare and always beautifully exact both in what it says and what it implies.” Only Anne Kelley though, writing in Chicago Tribune saw through Lord’s reserve to the vulnerable orphan she really was: “The sense of loneliness in the midst of so many people is overwhelming.”
M. F. K. Fisher, who saw Eda in the late 1950s after a break of many years, recognized that time had taken its toll on her. “I know that you are everything I recognized in you so long ago,” she wrote Eda in 1959, “tempered and refined and of course wearied by those processes.” Martha Gellhorn, who was a close friend, cautioned Sybille that “Eda will never decide anything because she cannot, and her motives are not what you think (gratitude, duty, affection) but plain terror.”
It was Sybille, not Eda, who took the lead in things. When Eda returned to the U.S. for the first time in over thirty years in early 1964, it was because Sybille had agreed to report on the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, for LIFE magazine. While Sybille attended court, Eda went on to California to stay with M. F. K. Fisher, where, as Sybille wrote after they met again in New York City, Eda had “put on some weight, thank God.”
Once back in France, however, Eda found it hard to get back to work on her long-delayed novel about the Occupation. Living with Sybille when she was working on a deadline was “like living with a caged tiger.” Eda had to take on most of the domestic duties. “I’ve been nurse, housekeeper, errand boy,” she complained, along with having to do most of the work in the large garden that Sybille wanted but could not care for. But Eda was also suffering from depression. Sybille wrote a friend that Eda refused to discuss what was going on: “That wretchedness was neither admitted, nor discussed; it was concealed.”
By the summer of 1968, however, Eda was dealing better with depression, thanks in part to effective medication. She returned to her third novel “without great faith but with tenacity and courage,” as Sybille put it. Deep into her research for the Aldous Huxley biography, Sybille traveled to the U.S. with Eda again. The two women spent some time with her aunt Margaret Burnham, the last of Eda’s father’s siblings. Sybille the experience stifling: “the days are spent in maddening slow rounds of trivia.” Aunt Margaret disapproved of Eda’s smoking and made a point to say so frequently. Yet she also insisted that her niece take part her busy social life, which left Eda “shrivelled with boredom” and with no energy to work on her book. The only relief was a visit to M. F. K. Fisher in Napa Valley, although Eda’s frailty worried her old friend: “I feel as if she is nourished on cobwebs,” she wrote afterward.
Cover of U.S. edition of Extenuating Circumstances
Eda finally finished Extenuating Circumstances in October 1970. Sybille’s long-time editor Robert Gottleib was happy to accept the book for Knopf. By now the story had only a loose connection with Eda’s own experiences during the Occupation. Instead of a grim account of survival and deprivation, it had become, as one reviewer put it, “a wry comedy” in which the heroine — seen through the distance of an impersonal narrator — was transformed from “starveling to spiv entrepreneur.” It was as if the only way Eda could put that time down on paper was to step out of the story completely.
Eda grew more and more reluctant to leave the annex of La Bastide that had become their home. She continued to struggle with depression, took no interest in eating — which would have been difficult for Sybille, who always relished good food and wine, of which there was plenty to be had with friends like Julia Child and Richard Olney nearby. Eda was likely dealing with a serious case of agoraphobia. As one can imagine, it was difficult to be around someone with such dark moods — hard to show love, harder to feel it. Reading the account of Sybille and Eda’s relationship in Hastings’ biography, you realize that while we may not have progressed much in the priority we give the treatment of mental illness, we are at least better at recognizing it. Neither woman was well prepared to deal with Eda’s depression.
And Eda’s smoking began to take its toll. She finally gave it up, but the damage had already been done. She was diagnosed with throat cancer. Worse, after suffering a hemorrhage, Eda was told that she needed to undergo a hysterectomy. Already weakened, she had no reserve to draw on for recovery and she died soon after. M. F. K. Fisher later raged at the decision about the operation: “It was cruel to make Eda submit to an obviously useless surgical interference so late in the game. After that biopsy, why not just keep her warm and as comfortable as possible? DAMN.” In the last days, Sybille wondered just what connected her with the woman she’d lived with for two decades: “The difficulty with Eda is that she is so hard to know. I feel that I do not really know her (which makes everything even sadder).”
Sybille survived Eda by almost thirty years. In contrast to Eda’s grim decline, she enjoyed her greatest recognition, earning an OBE in 1981, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989 with her novel Jigsaw, wining a Golden PEN award in 1993. After dedicating several of her books from the 1960s to Eda, Sybille finally addressed their relationship, if only briefly, in her 2005 memoir Quicksands. Now, fifteen years after her death, most of Sybille’s books are in print and likely to gain more readers as a result of Hastings’ outstanding biography. Eda Lord, on the other hand, is likely to remain where she is: on the margin of other lives.
My sincere thanks to Selina Hastings for her help with this piece. Her biography, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, is available from Penguin/Random House (U.S. and U.K.)
Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.
“Are you a lesbian?” a man asks the narrator of Shirley Schoonover’s novel Sam’s Song.
“No,” she replies. “But I’ve been called a unicorn. A zebra. I have a cousin who is an onion.”
Whatever Sam is, the only thing that’s certain is that’s she’s not happy with it. “I don’t quite know who I am,” she thinks. “Even after thirty years of living with me, I don’t feel familiar with myself.”
Everything about Sam’s Song is wildly out of place. Sam, the thirty-something mother of three who’s separated and in the final stage of divorcing her husband, in her own skin. “I find myself to be a bitch. But in a world of bitches, I don’t want to hand on to my children the ugliness that is in me.” She’s out of place in her community. Having chosen — unfathomably in the eyes of most of the people she knows — to leave her children in her husband’s custody, she’s the woman that other women talk about at cocktail parties.
Yet she’s unwilling to let her soon-to-be ex’s new girlfriend get ideas: “I’ll kill you, you bitch, before you’ll mother my children.” Restless and horny, she picks up men in bars knowing they have no interest in staying with her: “I can make love. Fuck, if you will. But, my God, I have the secret knowledge that I have been fucked with shit.” When they ask her name, she answers, “I am no-name.” She even dresses up as a man and goes to bars where gay men hang out. “I smell cocks and peacocks, cut booze, and brothers lusting for their brother’s cocks.” She drinks — hard. “You use up Scotch like other people use water,” observes Martha, Sam’s last remaining friend.
They fucked her up, her mum and dad. She’s Sam, not Samantha, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. “Girls are no good on a farm,” her father said. She admires men for their ability to take what they want, material or sexual. That same selfishness is one of the few things she’s sure of about herself. “Yes, I am selfish,” she admits to her son one afternoon as they swim together. “Fuck you,” he replies.
That stops me. I tread water again, looking at him. He stays out of my reach; I read his eyes. He knows I can feel his anger. At this moment he feels hate. He hates me because I left them with their father. No, just because I left them.
Which reminded me of something Nora Ephron once wrote: “You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” Yet as confused and unhappy as Sam may be, she’s clear-sighted when it comes to the potentially toxic effect she could have on her kids if left responsible for their day-to-day care.
Not that Sam is in ecstasy, let alone in Hawaii. Nor does she expect her life to be turned around by the freedom of the single life. “Living alone, unloving, I will shrivel and dry into an ancient sterile turd,” she thinks.
As these quotes suggest, Sam’s Song is a long way from the safe, nice housewives of 1960s sitcoms. When she wrote the book, Shirley Schoonover was herself the mother of three, living in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the process of divorcing her husband. That didn’t mean that the book was autobiographical, though. “I didn’t go to bed with any sailors, I didn’t pick men up off the street, I didn’t have a homosexual lover,” she later said. “But the anger was real,” she warned. And so was her frankness. “We Finns are very blunt,” she told an interviewer. “We come out and say, no tact whatsoever, what we have to say. I guess a lot of people don’t understand that.”
Schoonover and her husband met in Iowa, where she had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel Mountain of Winter (1965), about a young Finnish-American girl growing up rural Minnesota, was closer to autobiography. Born Iliana Waisanen, she was given the name Shirley by her mother, who loved Shirley Temple and who wanted her daughter to seem “more American.” Schoonover hated the name.
Mountain of Winter was generally well-received. Bernard Bergonzi wrote that “its humanity, its breadth of feeling, and range and exactness of observation of men and nature, place it well above the ordinary run of first novels (or second or third novels, come to that).” The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and folks in Lincoln were so proud of her accomplishment that the manager of her local IGA grocery store even cleared space on an endcap for a display and hosted an autograph party.
She joked that a few of the customers, as they picked up a copy along with five or six cans of Campbell’s soup, that the book might be “dirty.” “Well, it was very frank,” she later said, “but not nearly as potent as Sam’s Song .”
Headline from the Lincoln Journal Star review of Sam’s Song, 2 March 1969.
When Sam’s Song came out, however, it was another story. “Sam’s Four-Letter-Word Symphony” proclaimed the headline of the Lincoln Journal Star review. “If it had not been assigned to me for review, I would not have read past the first 15 pages.” The reviewer — a man — judged that Sam “is as abnormal as any woman could be” and that her language “is worse than any attributed to the wharves of Liverpool.” He did, however, admit that the book might be useful for students of vocabulary: “If there is a four-letter word used to describe sex in its most perverted form, it can be found in this book.”
Coward-McCann’s dust jacket blurb didn’t help. It promised that the book featured “sexy sex, sick sex, homosexual sex, racial sex, even religious sex.” The Journal Star’s reviewer wrote that Sam’s Song “ranks with the stuff that is sold under the counter in shops which deal with pornographic works.” Most Lincoln bookshops preferred not to stock the book at all, on or under the counter.
Martin Levin, then one of the New York Times’ lead reviewers, argued that those who wrote off Sam’s Song as pornography were missing the point: “When is a dirty book not a dirty book? When it is a cri de coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality.” Contrary to the Lincoln Journal Star’s reviewer, he considered Sam “a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, and ethnic (Finnish) traces.” It seems that the bigger the city, the better the chances of Sam’s Song getting a favorable review. When the novel came out in paperback in early 1970s, the Chicago Tribune’s book editor observed cynically, “It is one of the most revealing books ever written about a woman. Which is probably why the hardcover edition vanished without a trace.”
If anyone picked up Sam’s Song in search of a thrill, they were bound to be disappointed. Sam is certainly profane, but it’s not pornographic. Sam does not “discover” herself through her sexual liberation. Sex is more like booze, a source of temporary relief from pain. Sam’s Song is more a four-letter-word rap than symphony: Sam’s profanity is visceral, a sign of the pain, anger, and unrest always simmering, always on the brink of boiling over. It may be the rawest book written by a woman in the 1960s.
By the time the book was published, Schoonover was ready to leave Lincoln. “I literally felt like a zebra in a herd of horses,” she later said. When her divorce from her first husband, Leroi Schoonover, was finalized, she headed to New York, where she joined the faculty at the University of Rochester. She took revenge on Lincoln with a “Letter from Nebraska” that was published in the New York Times after she’d moved to Rochester. “If you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.” Sam’s Song is nothing like My Antonia: it’s closer to Last Exit to Brooklyn.
When it came to Nebraska as a whole, Schoonover concluded that, “As far as I can tell, there is no literary life in Nebraska.” “You ask if writers talk to each other,” she wrote her imaginary correspondent. Since Karl Shapiro, who’d been the editor of the university’s long-running literary quarterly Prairie Schooner had left Lincoln in the mid-1960s, she replied, “I’ve been talking to myself; and you know that can become agonizingly lonely. That’s Nebraska. Beautiful but killingly lonely for the writer.”
After a few years at Rochester, Schoonover moved to Missouri, where she taught at Webster University in St. Louis. While there, she published her last novel, Winter Dream (1979) a folk tale set in Finland in the 15th century. “I wrote it for the child in me,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “I wanted to write something people could enjoy and whose characters they could love.” Schoonover moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in her later years to live near her son Noel. She died in 2004.
Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover New York: Coward-McCann, 1969
“Hot off the oven of our own time” was the verdict on new novel The Big Firm, according to The New York Times of 20th February 1938, in a review which also found it “unusually significant” and “distinguished as a work of literary art”. The novelist was the forty-three-year-old British writer and left-wing activist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who, although fulfilling the description of “neglected” today, in her lifetime was used to commanding press attention.
I began investigating Amabel’s story after visiting Plas Brondanw, the Snowdonia ancestral home of her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of the fantasy village Portmeirion, and seeing her name on a plaque commemorating their marriage in 1915. Though Amabel was described only as a daughter, sister, wife and mother in the guidebooks, I followed my hunch there might be more to her than that and began digging. I found that in a career spanning seven decades of the twentieth century Amabel had published over seventy books. Six of these were novels, mainly written between 1925 and 1939.
One sign of her present-day obscurity is the difficulty I have had in buying copies of these novels, and what follows relies on my memory and notes of reading the book in the British Library in pre-pandemic times, as well as my own research into her life.
Born in 1894, Amabel was the daughter of the influential editor-proprietor of The Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, and grew up in a family where celebrity was normal. Dinner with a prime minister, story time with Rudyard Kipling, chess with the governor of Egypt and tea with the explorer Mary Kingsley were normal experiences for a girl whose relatives included the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Simon Bussey.
From the French magazine Excelsior spread on the wedding of Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis in 1915.
When journalists and photographers turned up at her wartime wedding in a rural chapel in Surrey at an hour of the morning intentionally chosen to evade them, chasing the bride and groom down the hill to their getaway car, they came for her not Clough. She was both a Jazz Age socialite and an activist with serious politics and a steely work ethic. Despite the war being over and Clough being offered alternative employment as an architect, the Army refused to discharge her husband at the end of the war until he had written a history of the Tank Corps, so Amabel sat down and wrote it for him, finishing it just in time for the birth of their second child, Charlotte, in 1919.
The Big Firm(1938) was Amabel’s fourth novel. It was written in an atmosphere of increasing international tensions and crisis – Hitler’s annexation of Austria took place within weeks of its publication. Completion of the novel had been complicated by the concussion Amabel suffered when she was struck by a car while visiting her mother and her friend and author Margaret Storm Jameson helped proofread the draft for publication. The Big Firm tells the story of Owen Wynne, a scientist who works in microbiology research and his love affairs with two women, Caro and Nicola. The big firm of the title is Consolidated Scientific Products, which employs Owen and prevents him from publishing his research. Owen’s political leanings are left-wing; the plot concerns his attempts to prevent arms and scientific products being sold to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. The action moves remorselessly and thrillingly to the climax in which Owen and Nicola race to intercept a shipment intended for a mysterious cargo ship moored off the coast of North wales.
Characters who wrestle with strong political principles when others seek to corrupt them are a feature of The Big Firm. When Nicola, the wife of a Labour MP and committed member of the Labour Party herself, hears her husband preparing to compromise to gain a government post, her respect is lost. “This isn’t the moment when responsible leaders ought to stress our fundamental socialist policy,” he tells her. “We’ve got to soft pedal, otherwise the Labour Movement will be destroyed.” Nicola decides she must leave him. To her, his pragmatism is “false and horrible.” Her decision to end the marriage over this difference of political views might seem extreme to us, but in the context of the 1930s politics compromise could mean appeasing dangerous forces.
Amabel recognised the threat posed by Hitler to world peace when he came to power and advocated action to prevent full scale war. To this end, in July 1934, she travelled to New York to give evidence to the American Inquiry Commission, which was collecting information about conditions in Germany in the hope of getting the US government to take notice. Amabel described her missions to Berlin that year, the death threats she had received, and the treatment of Jews and Communists. “There is not only no right or justice in Germany, there is no truth,” she told the commissioners.
For the rest of the 1930s, Amabel campaigned against Fascism. She was put under surveillance by the British secret service as a result. Her son Christopher was killed in 1944 in Italy at the age of twenty-one, and she often wondered whether she had done enough to prevent the war. Amabel always suffused her writing with the issues which most concerned her, and in this light The Big Firm is part of the history of the anti-Fascist movement in the 1930s.
To the New York Times’ reviewer Jane Spence Southson, it was the scientific background of The Big Firm that stood out. A wife of one of the directors of Consolidated Scientific Products declares in a speech that although many people think of themselves as contemporary, they don’t have the first clue what is going on in the world of science. Southson notes that this will not be true for readers of the novel, which she considers more masculine in tone than any she has ever read by a woman because it is so detailed and knowledgeable on its subject. Reviewing Amabel’s memoir in 1983, Michael Holroyd noted that her working method was always to write a book in order to learn about its subject, and she would have been very much following her inclinations in the case of The Big Firm.
The masculine tone Southson referred to may have been a reference to its descriptions of the inner workings of Owen’s employer, CSP, an environment rarely written about by women at that time. Amabel had a track record of writing about technical “male” subjects established when her first published book detailed the development of the tank as a weapon of war. When she wrote a careers guide aimed at boys and girls in 1933 called What Shall I Be? she visited work places personally and interviewed the people who worked there to gain insight into what their work actually entailed. At a chemical plant, she observed astringently, “for some unexplained reason women are hardly ever employed…. Probably this is just a custom of the trade, for their seems to be no other objection.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis in the 1930s. Photo by Howard Coster, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Amabel always said that if she had been a boy, she would have chosen to be a scientist. Given no formal education or encouragement to go to university by her parents, she became a writer instead, but ensured that her daughter Charlotte became a scientist after studying at Cambridge University. Charlotte’s daughter, Dr. Rachel Garden, also a scientist, told me that her grandmother had a well-hidden insecurity about her lack of formal education which she rectified by asking questions of experts. It is probable that this kind of research lay behind her convincing portrait of a research scientist facing moral dilemmas at work in commercial industry.
In her testimony before the American Inquiry Commission in 1934, Amabel made a point of saying that the Nazi regime was suppressing women’s rights, that Nazis held that women were to be wives and mothers in the home only, with the primary task being to raise “fine warriors.” In Britain at that time, opportunities for women were slowly improving but the belief that women had to choose between family and career was still dominant. As a writer, Amabel was always concerned with women’s feelings about their lives.
Both Caro and Nicola, the women in The Big Firm, are struggling with complicated emotions towards traditional female roles. When the novel opens, Owen is having an affair with Caro, a woman of whom her family say, “all girls want to elope with their schoolteacher or with the butcher, or eat hasheesh, or run away to sea. They all want to – but Caro does.” Caro is lost. She realises that clinging to Owen will not give her the purpose she craves. Married women confuse her: “Could she, did she even desire to become like them, so peaceful…so blank…annihilated?”
But what, she wonders, is her alternative?
“You remember I tried to be a Doctor once? It was too difficult . . . oh, well! Anyhow, I believe a lot of women don’t stick things because they find it hard to believe enough in themselves…to think the work that they do, is all that necessary.”
In the 1950s, Amabel would write bitterly about the way in which society’s “uncreating unbelief” in a girl’s “power to do anything worthwhile” held young women back from reaching their true potential. Perhaps this is what she was implying with the deeply unhappy Caro.
Meanwhile, Owen and Nicola have been working together as part of the Industrial League Against War. They acknowledge their love for each other on the journey to Wales to intercept the suspicious cargo ship. Nicola has realised she is pregnant with her husband’s child and looks at Owen with “the desperate eyes of a creature in a trap.” In the end, Nicola and Owen decide to be together and love the child nonetheless. It is not going to be an easy romance, but the reader feels it might be a successful one.
Both Caro and Nicola are wrestling with their roles in a society which is not built for their benefit. This was a theme Amabel would return to, most notably in her 1951 work of nascent feminism The Art of Being a Woman.
In the late 1930s, Amabel was a modern woman writing about issues which still resonate today. Why then, is she so unknown? One answer to this question could be the variety of genres Amabel wrote in. Her dozens of books include biography, politics, memoir, feminism, parenting, anthologies of fairy tales and science fiction, and non-fiction books for schools. By the time of her death in 1984 the novels, none of which were written later than 1951, were forgotten and (if her work was mentioned at all) she was considered “a writer for children.”
Another answer lies in the fact that she was a woman. A male reviewer of her autobiography (who complained that she failed to say enough about all the famous men she had known and talked too much about herself) decreed her a writer “fated to be known by her menfolk”. This was an unjust self-fulfilling prophecy, but the growing fame post World War Two of her architect husband Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion overshadowed Amabel’s own achievements. Portmeirion is such a flamboyant and colourful vision it is hard for Amabel’s narrative to have space within it, and the Williams-Ellis name today is synonymous with both the village and the pottery begun by Amabel and Clough’s daughter Susan.
Amabel herself recognised that her legacy might have fared better if she had written with her birth name when she called her memoir All Stracheys are Cousins. In the majority of Amabel’s books I borrowed from The British Library, the same pencilled hand had struck out Williams-Ellis on the title page and annotated “Strachey”. In the eyes of The British Library she was a Strachey.
A recurring note in Amabel’s writing is her hope for the next generation of young women. In The Big Firm, a schoolgirl called Lou tells Nicola that she wants her own life to be different:
“I should want to be able to say I was a something – you know, a doctor or a writer or a vet or something. I’m certain that if I was doing politics like you, I should want to be a member of parliament or in the cabin … not just a person who makes speeches.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis cared deeply about her family, but she was also very resoundingly “something” in her own right and The Big Firm is convincing evidence of this.
This is a guest post by Jayne Sharratt. Jayne is working on a biography of the writer and activist Amabel Williams-Ellis. Follow her on Twitter: @jayne_sharratt.
The Big Firm, by Amabel Williams-Ellis London: Collins, 1938
The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”
The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.
In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”
Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?
We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.
Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.
The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.
From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.
With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?
Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.
You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”
Joseph Brooke and his daughter Dinah in 1938. From Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.
In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.
“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.
There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.
Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,
So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.
So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).
Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”
Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.
Headline from Dinah Brooke’s article in The Guardian, 31 May 1982.
“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:
Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.
And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”
After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”
Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”
As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.
Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]
The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert, by Dinah Brooke London: New Fiction Society, 1974
Advertisement for Enter a Child by Dormer Creston.
Excerpt
There must, I suppose, have been wet days during the summer holidays at Hilldrop but actually, I cannot remember a single one. It may have been on these supposititious wet days that Uncle Reggie had out his toy engine; not for us to play with; it was far too expensive, also far too dangerous for that: Uncle Reggie’s engine was a grown-up toy, an engine of importance. All the male members of the family were pressed into the service of laying down the rails — which were heavy. In this Adam house the billiard-room, drawing-rooms, hall, library, and dining-room all opened out of each other: when all the double mahogany doors were thrown back there was revealed a charming landscape of room beyond room, the whole length suffused with streams of light from the windows at one side. But when the rails were all down, crossing every room, running through every doorway, it gave a most desolate look.
But still that was not the point; the point was to make the engine go, and for such an extremely grand and impressive toy I must say I never saw anything that demanded so much inducement, that necessitated so many people to attend to it, before it could be persuaded to perform. It appeared to require not only the encouraging presence of the entire family but that too of Randall, the carpenter (who was always sent for on engine-days as a matter of course), before it could be persuaded so much as to stir. The amount of discussions, tapping, screw-turning, adjustment, and readjustment that polished brass and green enamelled object required! Matches were lit … blown out … further matches lit … the smell of methylated spirits impregnated the air. The attendant family got tired of waiting … it seemed as if nothing would ever happen … as if there would never be any other show to look’ at than that of the two bending, arguing figures of my uncle and the carpenter hiding the engine from our view.
And then suddenly there would be a cry. “She’s off!” There would be a fizzing and a puffing, and actually, yes, actually, there was the little creature moving along the rails of its own accord … beginning to go quite quickly … quicker … now really fast; and my uncle, flushed with success, and brandishing a walking stick (which he used for poking into the engine’s tender when he wanted it to stop) would run along by its side, occasionally, for some strategic purpose, vaulting over the rails. The whole family, headed by Aunt Flora crying out, “Splendid, dear Reggie, splendid!” would try to rush after him. I say try because, (being so many, there was generally a jam at the doorways.
Uncle Reggie, meanwhile, by his leaps over the rails, invariably got left behind by the engine which, now at the height of its form, would rush from room to room, a terrifying demon that no one of us dared interfere with for fear — as was constantly impressed on us — that it would either explode, burn one’s fingers, or set the house on fire. For us it was this very diabolic quality that was the engine’s charm; the delicious feeling at the back of our mind that anything might happen at any moment. “Oh, Uncle Reggie — what’s that funny noise it’s making? Is it going to explode?”
“Get off the rails, dear child! Get off the rails!” And then, seeing the engine was nearing a side line on to which she was to be shunted, “Quick, Harry, she’s coming — quick, quick — the points!” To see all the grown-ups so excited seemed very odd. It made one wonder whether at bottom they were really so very different from oneself as one had imagined.
It’s been a long time since I opened a book and was instantly taken by the freshness of the writing. I stumbled across Enter a Child when it came up among the results when I went to the Internet Archive in search of a Patricia Traxler poem. It was about a woman’s memory of an abusive relationship and the only words I could remember were “kidnappers, burglars.”
Amazingly, Traxler’s 1994 collection, Forbidden Words was the first title returned, but what caught my eye was the one at the end of the first line of results: Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston.1 It came from the Public Library of India, which includes a wonderful assortment of books that appear to have been left behind in the officer’s libraries of various army outposts when the British cleared out after Partition in 1947. The phrase appears in the following sentence, which was by itself enough to make me want to keep reading:
My mind, stretching out all round me to get to know the kind of world I had entered, discovered through stories read to me, gossip, and teasing that, apart from the few home figures, it was peopled by a most sinister company: kidnappers, burglars, ghosts of many kinds, a witch who lived in the nursery bathroom, and a “little man” who, if I did not behave myself, would leap like an acrobat out of the chimney.
That “little man” made me remember with some shame a story we used to tell our children about the fearsome Turtle Lady. The Turtle Lady hid in the bushes around the front door of houses and jumped out and grabbed little kids who made the mistake of wandering alone outside after dark. She would snatch them with her great clawed hands and stuff them inside the empty turtle shell she carried on her back. I’m sure the Turtle Lady held a prominent place in the “most sinister company” that peopled the world of our children’s nightmares.
Enter a Child is structured in five sketches, but in reality, it’s just two parts, one dark and one light. The book opens in the dark, in the memories of the fears that filled the author’s early years as Dolly, the youngest daughter of an upper-class English family in the late 19th century. “As regards fear I was an expert,” she writes of those days.
Her one safeguard was her beloved nurse, Mary, in whose company she spent most of her days. Yet even Mary brought fears into the child’s life. Decades before, when Mary have been her mother’s nurse, she incurred the wrath of no less than Queen Victoria herself. While walking together in Hyde Park, the mother — then just seven — had broken away to run alongside the Queen’s carriage as she was out for a ride. Seeing the child, the Queen called for the driver to stop, then instructed a policeman to escort her back to her guardian. The man asked for Mary’s name and address, and ever after Mary remained convinced that at any moment, there might come an angry knock at the family’s front door.
The thought of Mary being taken away in irons became one of Dolly’s nightmares. Imagine, then, the girl’s anxiety when she was sent away from a few days in the charge of another maid. Why wasn’t Mary taking her? she wondered. And then to discover, upon their return, that Mary had vanished.
“Please, please tell me about Mary,” she begged her mother. “When will she be here? To-night? To-morrow?” Her mother gave evasive answers and tried to distract the child with a game of “Happy Families.” But her mother’s avoidance only increased Dolly’s panic. So, she sought out another maid, Ellen, Mary’s best friend among the servants. “Why, don’t you know, Miss Dolly?” Ellen answered, matter-of-factly. “She’s never coming back! She’s gone for good, she has!”
Dolly’s parents were classic Victorian in their attitude towards children. Many days, they neither saw nor spoke to their children aside from saying good morning or good night. Her relationship with her father, in particular, had only two modes: great periods of completely ignoring her, alternating with short bursts of fearsome discipline. “My father was one of the major problems of my life,” she recalls. “A problem in the sense that I was always making little bids to enter into friendly relations with him, which little bids were invariably repulsed.”
One of these bids, heart-breaking for most parents of today to read, was when Dolly heard that her father’s birthday was approaching. She felt compelled to offer him a present but having no money and no means to shop for him, decided to create one. She cut out several pictures of bowls from a newspaper advertisement and decorated them with the brightest colors in her paintbox:
My system of painting was first to ram the paint brush with all my force down on top of the paint, and then to twist the brush this way and that. I then pressed the brush with equal force on top of the drawing, splurged it round, and would note with satisfaction a spatter of paint arrive, more or less, on the object I wished to colour.
Then, when the happy day arrived, Dolly carefully laid out her offerings in front of her father as he read his newspaper at the breakfast table. He briefly glanced over at them then resumed reading. That was the end of it.
I could not believe that nothing more than this was going to happen. I stood there waiting. The clock ticked, the breakfast things lay glistening in the strong morning light, my father continued to read. It was driven in on me that the Great Moment had come, had passed. No more notice was going to be taken of my present: my father had not accepted it and was not going to: he did not think it even worth a thank-you.
“If Miss Creston’s parents had possessed as much common-sense as the ordinary farm labourer’s wife,” one of the book’s reviewers wrote, “she would have been a far happier child, but might never have grown into so acute a writer.” “Their cruelty was the more intolerable,” he continued, “because it was unintended, and their daughter could not console herself with hating them.”
Instead, the author sees her parents’ cool uninterest as their peculiar eccentricity, just one of the many forms of it she observed among her relations. Fortunately, charm rather than aloofness characterized the majority of her family’s eccentricities, and these — related through Dormer Creston’s vivid prose — brighten the sketches that comprise the latter two-thirds of the book. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy later wrote in his book The Unnatural History of the Nanny, “She manages to create, out of what must have been numerically a tiny proportion of her childhood months, the illusion that she had a perfect, radiant, sunny Edwardian girlhood.”
A bit of Dorothy Julia Baynes’ pedigree.
Gathorne-Hardy was mistaken, however, in placing the book in King Edward II’s reign. Its author had, in fact, come of age by the time Edward came to the throne. Dormer Creston was the chosen pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Baynes — Dolly in the book — born in 1880 and the beneficiary of not one but two baronetages. Her father Sir Christopher William Baynes was the 4th Baronet Baynes of Harefield Place, Middlesex; on her mother’s side, her uncle Charles was Charles Edward Hungerford Atholl Colston, 1st Baron Roundway and heir to Roundway Park, a large estate in Wiltshire. When she was in her mid-sixties, she applied by Deed Poll to change her name to Colston-Baynes to emphasize her pedigree.
Roundway Park — referred to in the book as Hilldrop — is the setting for four of the five sections of Enter a Child, and a stark contrast to the grim atmosphere of the stern Victorian London home where the book opens. Every summer, Dolly and her parents would travel there to relax with a dozen or more uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers. The grownups would relax in the cool interior while Dolly would explore and play outside in the baking August sun. “All this warmth, this glow, is within me as well as without,” and that warmth pervades these pages.
The house at Roundway Park around 1900.
Part of that spirit was due to her Aunt Flora, a spinster who’d sacrificed her life in “self-immolation” to Dolly’s grandmother, but who nonetheless served as a prime specimen of the art of living: “let life offer her a handful of dust and her exuberance would so irradiate it that it was dust no more.” At times, though — particularly sunset — Aunt Flora’s enthusiasm could grow tedious:
“Yes, beautiful. Aunt Flora,” I would say because I had been taught to be polite, taught, when a grown-up said anything was beautiful, to acquiesce, but in my heart hating this flaming wreckage of the day’s reassuring blue sky.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, dear,” Aunt Flora would murmur, disappointed in her proselyte, then, catching sight of my mother coming down the stairs, “Here, dear!” she would cry, “such a lovely sunset … you must come and look at it … did you ever see such colours!” And then, realizing I was about to slip away, “No, dear, don’t go yet, it’s changing every minute — you really oughtn’t to miss it!…Oh! Look at that long streak of yellow by the green!” And in her excitement she would drub on the glass with her fingers as if, could she only reach the sunset, she would like to pat it in approbation.
Eccentrics like Aunt Flora fill these pages with their well-meaning ridiculousness. As The Observer’s anonymous reviewer put it, they are all “strait-jacketed from the cradle in conventionality, and carefully trained to feel, as well as to be, useless.” Yet collected together and put to such activities as loading into carriages for a picnic or organizing themselves for a photograph or giving Uncle Reggie’s trainset a go, they become completely charming. “There is a lucent airiness in the writing that is often a delight,” wrote Marjorie Grant Cook in her review for the TLS.
“The essential merit of Miss Creston’s book,” Anthony Powell wrote in The Spectator “is that, although it may be … an account of a child who suffered from misunderstanding and loneliness, it is entirely free from any sense of obsession or feeling that the words have been written for the author’s gratification rather than the reader’s; a failing from which even a great writer like Proust is not entirely free.”
One reason no shadow of lingering resentment hovers over Enter a Child is that Dolly — or Doreen, as her friends came to call her as an adult — was not fundamentally out of sympathy with her parents and their values. When she was in her sixties, she would write a testy letter to the editor of The Spectator complaining about a William Plomer article proclaiming the merits of Surrealism. “As the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of culture is ‘the training and refinement of mind, tastes and manners,’ she wrote, “it can scarcely be used to describe Surrealism. Its whole motive is exactly the opposite of this definition.”
Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes, from a family photo.
Dorothy/Dolly/Doreen never married. She took up the penname of Dormer Creston out of discretion: like Hilldrop, few things or people in Enter a Child appear under their real names. After publishing a small volume of poetry in 1919, she took up biography and earned a solid reputation as a dedicated researcher and colorful writer.
Books about royals bookended her career: The Regent and His Daughter (1932), about Queen Charlotte and her domination by her father, King George IV, and The Youthful Queen Victoria (1952). Other titles included Andromeda in Wimpole Street: The Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fountains of Youth (1936), about the artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. Her best-received work, In Search of Two Characters (1946), about Napoleon and his short-lived son François, won a Heinemann Foundation Award Royal Society of Literature award. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of this book, “A sort of lyricism and freshness comes from so much of the material having been drawn from young minds. This is in the best sense — and how good that can be! — a feminine book.”
She lived most of her life in London, sharing a house on Lowndes Square with her sister Christabel. She was great friends of the writer and preservationist James Lees-Milne, who would often drop in her for tea and a bit of gossip. Doreen found a happy statis in her life. “She writes in bed every day till 1 o’clock, lunches alone, then walks at breakneck speed, she says often running; returns for tea to receive some friend or other; reads at dinner alone and retires to bed immediately” Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. “She says happiness consists in finding the right rut and never leaving it.” She suffered, however, each time her books were published. She told Lees-Milne that she went through “such agonies over reviews of her books that she often retires to bed for a week, with blinds drawn, silently weeping.”
Her sister Christabel, who died not long after Enter a Child was published, was even less fond of publicity. Lees-Milne recalled a guest at one of Doreen’s lunch parties going to the lavatory in her house and finding Christabel sitting on the toilet, a Pekinese on her lap, reading a novel. “I attributed this to the sister’s intense shyness and reluctance to meet Doreen’s friends,” he wrote.
Enter a Child proved Alfred A. Knopf’s adage that many a book dies on the day it’s published. It came out in October 1939, earned good reviews, and vanished. There are no used copies available online and only a dozen library copies listed in WorldCat.org. Fortunately, it is available on the Internet Archive in electronic formats.
1 Among the other titles containing the phrase is a fascinating 1935 study titled Children’s Fears by Arthur T. Jersild and Frances B. Holmes which catalogued and analyzed an impressive and unsettling list of fears that included “queer, ancient, wrinkled, deformed persons,” “being shut in a small space,” “going up or down in an elevator,” “being abandoned by parents,” and “darkness plus imaginary characters other than animals.”
Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston (pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes) London: Macmillan, 1939
Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, 
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at 
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, 
