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Joan O’Donovan and Her Misfit Spinsters

Cover of Argument with the East Wind by Joan O'Donovan

“Your time’s your own, and don’t you forget it, my girl: for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can do what you bloody well choose,” Eva Wotton reminds herself at the start of Argument with the East Wind (1986), the last of Joan O’Donovan’s three novels about older single women trying to find the place in the world that fits them. “So what was she going to do with today? It was hers and empty; and they could so easily slip through her fingers, those minutes, those hours, leaving nothing but a deposit of waste and regret.”

Sixty, just retired from a dreary office job, she wakes up unsettled from a dream and unsure how to approach this first day of the rest of her life. Back from a Mediterranean holiday with friends, she scans her surroundings, taking inventory of her situation: a postcard from her married lover Alec, its tone reminding her of his affectionate lack of commitment; a notice to pick up her first OAP (Old Age Pension) check; the roar of an airplane overhead reminding her that this house is both her property and no one’s idea of Nirvana; the scratched sofa reminding her of Pussy, the cat she still talks to, though dead and gone for years. And then a clatter outside reminds her she’s forgotten to ask the milkman to resume delivery.

Bob, the milkman, is a good-natured, loquacious sort who’s happy to supply a pint nonetheless. But he has a new young helper, Harry, and as Bob natters on, Eva sees Harry reach down and rip out two tulips from her next-door neighbor’s (a West Indian couple) garden — and worse, hears him mutter, “N——s,” as he spits and tosses the flowers away. Enraged, she switches into attack mode, only to end up a moment later flat on her back, her robe caught up in a briar bush, the pint shattered and spilled on the sidewalk.

This is just the first in a series of unexpected events that, over the course of a week, both throw Eva’s world into disarray and provide her with the means and motivation to set it right and to her satisfaction for perhaps the first time. She goes to visit Nora, her oldest friend, in a care home, only to be informed by the matron, a model bureaucrat, that Nora had died the week before:

“As you know,” Matron was saying, “our rules don’t normally allow…. But as we were unable to contact you and at that point didn’t know there was a…. So it happened in one way as she would have wished, and I’m sure that will be a comfort to you in time to come. That she died here, in her own little room, I mean. And very peacefully at the end, very peacefully indeed. She knew nothing,” Matron assured Eva earnestly, “ab-so-lutely nothing, my dear.”

The shock of this news, like Eva’s rush to the defense of her neighbors against a mean little racist and the end of her mean little affair with Alec, comes as an unexpected shock. Harry the young milkman turns out to be the nephew of the local councilman Eva argued with a year or two before when he came canvassing “to put a stop to this insidious invasion of our shores by foreigners.” She soon finds “N—— LOVER GO!” spray-painted across the front of her house. But these shocks also spur Eva to action, and in the end — without revealing any of several major plot twists — leave her a much different woman and in a much better place than she was at the start of this first week of retirement. And Joan O’Donovan helps carry us through the many bumps and swerves along the way by creating an astute and funny, if at times excessively self-critical, narrator in Eva.

Cover of She Alas! by Joan O'Donovan

Argument with the East Wind was preceded by two novels whose spinster protagonists ended up in less happy places. In She Alas! (1965), Jane Franckis is a Canadian woman living in a small town south of London who’s never moved on from being left by her dashing RAF pilot lover. She gave up the child from their affair and gave up trying to fit into her town’s insular culture. If anything, she goes out of her way to irritate the locals, exaggerating her Canadian accent and idioms, taking a superior tone, shutting herself up in her house with a bottle as company. Her slow rot is interrupted by the arrival of Ivy Gravy (yes, that really is the name O’Donovan chose), her NCO aide from her time serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

She Alas! seems a bit like a dry-run for Argument. The two books have similar ingredients, but the resulting dish in the case of the first is less satisfying. While Jane, like Eva, is both narrator and protagonist, she lacks Eva’s resilience and tenacity. Where Eva’s humor is grounded in a belief in man’s fundamental goodness (despite the presence of a few bad apples), Jane’s is laced with wormwood. And where the comic figures in Argument are mostly recognizable characters from everyday life, the supporting cast in She Alas! was described by several reviewers as Dickensian — and not in a complimentary way. As one Australian critic wrote, “The pathos is not finely shaded enough to stand up strongly in the company of the book’s bludgeoning comedy.”

Cover of The Visited by ! by Joan O'Donovan

Joan O’Donovan’s exploration of spinsterhood began in 1959 with her first novel, The Visited. If there is any comic strain here, it’s black indeed. This time, the spinster is Edith Crannick, in her mid-thirties and “miserable as hell.” Hoping to be diverted by a holiday in Dublin, she’s only been reminded once again that in the eyes of society, she is undesirable, worthless, or invisible. And then Leopold Darkin, also English and also traveling solo, introduces himself in the lounge of their hotel.

It turns out they are neighbors — of a sort, a few blocks apart. Leopold is a bit coarse, separated (or divorced? It’s not clear, he mentions a daughter). But he’s company and amusing enough, nice enough, and, well, randy enough to put an effort into courting Edith. They spend some happy days together in Dublin, then head their separate ways home. Leopold promises to keep in touch. Edith promises herself to make sure he does.

And the rest of The Visited is the story of how Edith keeps that promise. What she hasn’t shared with Leopold is that she is not only sensing all hope of marriage, if not love, rapidly slipping away, but also still living with a mother who’s suspicious, controlling … and failing in health. Leopold is her Plan A. She has no Plan B. And so with an intensity that keeps ratcheting up the narrative tension, she sets to carrying out her plan. Woe be to anyone who gets in her way.

While hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, mid-century English fiction hadn’t seen many scorned women lately when The Visited hit the scene. A few reviewers found the whole subject distasteful. J. B. Priestley, on the other hand, wrote that O’Donovan “stands out, among so many messers-about and muddlers in story-telling as Pancho Gonzales would in a suburban tennis club,” and Penelope Mortimer reported that the book “frightened and moved me and I honestly couldn’t put it down.” I confess that my enthusiasm for The Visited was dampened a bit by the terrible quality of my Ace paperback edition (the few remaining copies of the Gollancz hardback sell for $75 and up). This is a story that deserves a printing equal to its quality.

Joan O'Donovan, 1986.
Joan O’Donovan, 1986.

Joan O’Donovan’s life had a few parallels of its own with that of her spinsters. She had a long affair with the Irish writer Frank O’Connor (while he was still married to his first wife) and bore him a son, Oliver, now a distinguished Anglican scholar. She took his real last name when she published her first book, the story collection Dangerous Worlds in 1958, though the two had parted ways well before that. She published several story collections, along with the three novels, and settled in France sometime in the 1970s. There, she became acquainted with the writer David Garnett and eventually became his caregiver until he died in 1981. I haven’t been able to determine when or where Joan O’Donovan (Joan Knape) died.

The Visited
London: Victor Gollancz, 1959

She Alas!
London: Victor Gollancz, 1965

Argument with the East Wind
London: Macmillan, 1986

Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin (1952)

Cover of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin by Kataryn Loughlin

History is written by the winners, George Orwell said, and this goes for family history, too. After finishing Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, you sigh in relief that the adage is true in this case. If Kataryn Loughlin and her little sister Esther survived to adulthood, it was despite the best efforts of their Aunt Abby.

“Aunt Abby” sounds far too familiar for this forbidding woman. She was, Loughlin writes, the “final synthesis of eight generations of Puritan ancestors, the last member of an intermarrying tribe who had persistently adhered to a family code of Pedigree, Prudence, Pride, and Purse.” Intermarrying is putting it lightly: not only did the Fitches and Martins and Fitch-Martins have a tradition of marriage between first and second cousins, but they also recycled first names, particularly Abby and Pliny, making Loughlin’s first chapter, “Family History,” a bewildering read.

But you can skip that, for soon the cast is pared down to the essential few. Kataryn and Esther are the survivors of the four daughters of Katherine Fitch-Martin, Abby’s half-sister, and the Marine of French-Canadian origin she married. When Katherine dies in a fire, the girls are left to their closest relatives: their grandfather, his daughter Abby, and his son James (from his second marriage and therefore, despised by Abby). When the girls arrive at the family home in Whitesboro, New York, Abby makes their situation clear: “You are the unwanted, unfortunate products of my half-sister’s ill-advised marriage and are only here temporarily, to humor my father.”

She then shuttles the girls to an empty, unheated bedroom and locks the door behind her. Kataryn is five. Esther is four. This is just the first of many nights they will spend cold and hunger in a household with more than ample means to provide for them generously. But Miss Abby Fitch-Martin is a pathologically mean and cold woman who proceeds to spend nearly twenty years denying them any form of material or emotional comfort.

Hers was a Puritanism distilled to its extreme. Meat was eaten once a week, and then it was a one-pound piece of steak divided into five portions with Abby always reserving the largest for herself. Kataryn and Esther were given one set of clothes, one pair of boots, one cotton coat for the bitter upstate New York winters. If their clothes were torn or became threadbare, Miss Abby gave needle and thread and instructed the girls to mend the garment themselves. If a classmate invited them in for a snack after school, Miss Abby forbade the girls from entering anyone else’s house and sent them to bed without supper. If a sympathetic parent gave them some trinket — a marble, a playing card — she confiscated and destroyed it, calling the girls thieves.

One summer when Kataryn was just eight years old, she so angered Miss Abby with some trivial infraction that her aunt threw her first belongings in a bag, took her to the train station, and put her aboard a train to Montreal, where the girl’s long-missing father was known to have some family. Miss Abby gave Kataryn a nickel and instructed her to “Find a relative in the phonebook and call them.” Miraculously, Kataryn made it to Montreal, given food along the way by fellow passengers, and with help from a kindly station agent, was able to locate a great-uncle with whom she was able to stay for a few months. But even that meager reprieve ended and the girl was returned to the “care” of Miss Abby.

Even a small school prize — a five-dollar gold piece — would be confiscated and disappear into what James called, “Aunt Abby’s insatiable maw.” She kept accounts meticulously and made a point to charge everything possible against Kataryn and Esther’s eventual inheritance: “A good quarter of her long life was spent at her desk, estimating and recording the minutiae of daily life.” In 1914, for example, she noted the fares for six hundred tram rides to Utica and back, all of them debits against the girls, as were the wages for the cook, half the food expenses, and all of the coal, water, and electricity used in the house.

If there was any relief from Miss Abby’s relentless neglect, it was thanks to their uncle James. A brilliant if eccentric man (he worked on a number of Esperanto dictionaries) and alcoholic, he convinced Abby on several occasions to allow Kataryn to “chaperone” him on a trip to a sanitarium in Colorado for “the cure.” On one of these trips, Kataryn grew so bored that she talked a couple from Arizona into taking her along when they returned home and she spent two months in the warm, relaxed atmosphere Flagstaff. Among other things, this book is testament to Kataryn’s incredible ability to avoid disaster.

Even when Kataryn managed an escape, earning a scholarship to college and covering her living expenses through a variety of jobs, Miss Abby’s thirst for retribution could not be satisfied. Just before the girl’s first year of study ended, Miss Abby traveled to campus and presented herself to the school’s dean, informing him that the only way Kataryn could have made her money was by “thieving and whoring.”

Kataryn and Esther married and freed themselves of Miss Abby’s control, but she then directed her still-generous supply of venom at poor Uncle James. After falling and breaking a hip at age 81, she insisted on being treated as an invalid, with James her only full-time carer, despite reports from neighbors that she could occasionally be glimpsed moving around the house on her own feet. When he finally collapsed and died of a combination of exhaustion and hunger, Miss Abby left alone — and triumphant:

She had regained her pinnacle. That her whole life had slipped by in the waiting was utterly unimportant. At long last, it was all hers again: the money, the property, and most of all, the sacred name. She, who had valued it the most, was the last ever to possess it.

Kataryn Loughlin, author of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin
Kataryn Loughlin, from the dust jacket of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin.

One might ask, “Why would anyone read a book about such a nasty, petty person?” Well, for me, the answer is two-fold. For one, Miss Abby’s meanness is of such a magnitude and intensity that it fascinates in the depth of its blackness. She could easily take a place besides the worst of Dickens’s villains and leave them quaking. And for the other, Kataryn Loughlin is a fine writer who keeps her resentment simmering without ever letting it boil over. A good Christian woman, she married a sexton and the two of them cared for the Methodist church and cemetery in Vernon, New York, for over thirty years. Though she wrote hundreds of articles on local history during that time, Miss Abby Fitch-Martin was the only book she published. Kataryn Loughlin died in 1965 at the age of 57.

Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin
New York: Coward-McCann, 1952

Five Star Final, by Louis Weitzenkorn (1931)

Suggested ad layouts from the pressbook for Five Star Final.
Suggested ad layouts from the pressbook for Five Star Final.

For the last couple of years, I’ve closed most nights by watching one of the hundreds (thousands?) of early sound movies made in the period commonly referred to as Pre-Code, from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s to the adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code (often called the Hays Code) in 1934. Technical limitations aside — and these have as much to do with the quality of film stock and the blasé attitudes of studios towards preservation as with the shortcomings of the recording equipment of the period — these films manage to squeeze a lot of story into 60- to 75-minute packages.

But recently, I’ve begun to explore the literary roots of Pre-Code, gathering some of the stories, novels, and plays that provided the source material for many of these movies. Although studios did use original stories devised by member of their writing staffs, the majority of Hollywood A-list movies (and a healthy share of the B-movies) were adapted from existing literary properties. Often, the adaptations wandered far afield from the original works. A notorious example is the 1934 film based on Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady, which transplanted Marian and Captain Forrester from 1890s Nebraska to 1930s Chicago, jettisoning almost everything except character names and a skeleton of the plot along the way. Cather was so disgusted with the result that she forbade further use of her work by Hollywood for the rest of her lifetime.

Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five Star Final, which debuted in New York in December 1930 and was transformed into a film starring Edward G. Robinson that was released by Warner Brothers nine months later, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cather’s A Lost Lady. Both play and movie are scathing attacks upon “yellow journalism” — the unscrupulous practices of tabloid newspapers that, sadly, continue to be seen today. A veteran of New York City newspapers, Weitzenkorn came up through the ranks until he became editor of one of yellow journalism’s worst offenders, the New York Evening Graphic, which was known by its critics as the “Porno-Graphic.” He only lasted a few months in the job, though, finding it too hard to stomach the necessary ethical compromises. One of his colleagues on the Graphic, Frank Mallen, later wrote that, “He never liked anything about it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know why in hell he ever got tangled up in it.” After tendering his resignation, Weitzenkorn boarded a ship for France and decided to work out his feelings about the Evening Graphic and its ilk in dramatic form.

Five Star Final debuted in December 1930 and was a critical and popular success. Over a year after the Wall Street crash, theater-goers in New York still had an appetite for social criticism, and Five Star Final delivered it fast and unfiltered. As John W. Perry wrote in Editor and Publisher, the play is “a venomous, sullen, and bitter castigation of that sensational fringe of American newspaper making which has only one god — circulation — and which, for the sake of this god, will sacrifice honor, decency, and self-respect without the quiver of an eyelash.” Arthur Pollock, a widely-syndicated critic, said the play “froths at the mouth considerably” and would have been more effective with a little toning-down. The Daily Worker’s reviewer took a strict Marxist view: “Since it is bourgeois criticism and not workers’ criticism, it mixed in a lot of snobbish disgust at the workers,” characterizing the Gazaette’s readers as “soda jerkers and fat chambermaids.”

In Five Star Final, Weitzenkorn portrays the transgression and redemption of Randall, his fictional counterpart, editor of the Evening Gazette. Prodded by a circulation-hungry owner, he agrees to run a serial about a scandal from 20 years past, in which a distraught young woman named Nancy Voorhees murdered the employer who had seduced and impregnated her and then refused to take responsibility for his act. Found innocent by a sympathetic jury, she slipped from the public spotlight and seemingly disappeared. Randall soon manages to track her down though, and his publicity tears down the facade of a normal life Nancy and her husband have created. The relentless sensationalism of the Gazette’s coverage ultimately leads the couple to commit suicide.

Ad for the original New York production of Five Star Final.
Ad for the original New York production of Five Star Final.

Five Star Final ran for 175 performances on Broadway and several touring companies took the play around the country in the following months. Warner Brothers bought the film rights for $25,000 and began lining it up as a feature for Edward G. Robinson, the studio’s hottest star from the success of his protrayal of the Al Capone-like Rico in Little Caesar. Warners’ most productive director, Mervyn Le Roy (six feature films in 1931 alone), was assigned to direct. There was a slight delay in the film’s release, however, because Weitzenkorn’s contract prohibited Warner Brothers from going out to theaters until the last touring run of the play ended.

As scripted by Byron Morgan and Robert Lord, the film may represent the closest thing to a faithful adaptation short of an actual filmed stage production. After reading the play — one of the relatively rare examples of a Pre-Code source play that was published — I watched the film again, following along from the book, and was struck by how extensively Morgan and Lord reused Weitzenkorn’s text. Indeed, more than just dialogue, whole pages of which are essentially reproduced word-for-word, but also the act/scene structure and even staging directions.

Use of split screen in Five Star Final
Use of split screen in Five Star Final.

Although Weitzenkorn had no film experience when writing the play, his staging made the film easy to translate into a shooting script. While there are just seven locations used in the play’s 19 scenes and Weitzenkorn called for the use of a revolving stage floor that would allow several scenes to be performed in two or three locations simultaneously. This was innovative for theaters but Le Roy could easily reproduce the effect using the split-screen technique perfected early in the sound era. Le Roy also eliminated several brief scenes from the play that had less to do with advancing the plot than with creating the atmosphere of the Gazette’s typical readers.

Dropping one in particular — set in “Trixie’s flat” — avoided running afoul of state censors with its unsubtle suggestion that Trixie and her flatmate are prostitutes. Another, in “the apartment of a colored couple,” makes the film a bit less offensive to current sensibilities than the play. Its omission, on the other hand, probably leaves today’s viewers wondering what the references to “Clearing House numbers” was all about. (See this item from the Harvard University Press blog for an explanation of how numbers rackets in Harlem used the daily transaction totals from the New York Clearing House as the basis for the daily betting.)

Edward G. Robinson's character washing his hands in Five Star Final
Edward G. Robinson’s character washes his hands in Five Star Final.

One aspect of the film that draws the attention of viewers now, on the other hand, is absent from the play. Several times in the film, Robinson is shown diligently washing his hands. Robinson and Le Roy came up with the idea, and it works well on several levels. Although the term obsessive compulsive disorder hadn’t come into widespread use at the time, the behavior not only shows the stress Robinson’s character feels in continually being forced to engage in duplicitous and exploitive practices but symbolizes his desperate attempts to cleanse his guilty conscience. Its last instance also provides the set-up for one of film’s best lines when Aline MacMahon, playing Robinson’s secretary, castigates him, saying that “You can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.

Five Star Final (the play) has not shared its film version’s longevity. One watches the film now for its brisk direction (despite running nearly 90 minutes), sharp dialogue (much from the play), and ensemble acting. Frances Starr and H. B. Warner, Warner’s stock players are particularly effective as Nancy Voorhees and her husband, one of more believable examples of marital love onscreen from the time. Tabloid journalism is every bit as awful now as then, but at least we’re saved from the onslaught of papers attempting to produce three, four, five, or more editions in a single day. And so while the film still works as entertainment, Weitzenkorn’s play is only of interest as a historical artifact today.

Five Star Final the film was even more successful than the play, making a profit of $500,000 over its costs and earning a nomination for Best Picture at the 5th Academy Awards (it lost to Grand Hotel). Warners recycled the story in 1936 in Two Against the World, with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and the setting changed somewhat awkwardly (the age of 24-hour news broadcasting was still almost 40 years away) to a radio station. Louis Weitzenkorn moved to Hollywood for a few years, contributing to screen plays for 24 Hours (1931) and Men of Chance (1932), before returning to New York and the newspaper business. In the early 1940s, he moved back to his home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and tried writing another play, but he died in 1943 when his clothes caught fire as he was fixing a pot of coffee in his apartment.

Five Star Final: A Melodrama in Three Acts, by Louis Weitzenkorn
New York: Samuel French, 1931

La Douleur, by Marguerite Duras (1986)

Cover of the UK edition of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras.

Marguerite Duras is hardly a neglected writer, having at least a dozen books currently in print in English and having kept a number close to that in print since first hitting her stride with English readers in the 1960s. Her 1984 autobiographical novel L’Amant (The Lover), which won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into over 40 languages, is considered a 20th century classic. And several parts of La Douleur (The Pain), which was published in the U.S. as The War: A Memoir, were incorporated into Emmanuel Finkiel’s 2017 film, Memoir of War. Yet despite Duras’s fame, the film, and the book’s profound power, the American edition of La Douleur (New Press) dates back to 2008 and the British edition (Flamingo) to 1987.

La Douleur collects six texts, two straight memoir, two autobiographical fiction, two wholly fictional, so the book’s American title is somewhat misleading. In addition, the texts are presented not in chronological order, but — in my opinion, at least — in order of merit, and the first three are far better than the last.

The book takes its title from Duras’s first piece, La Douleur, drawn from the diary she kept over the weeks when she waited for news of her husband, Robert Antelme. A writer and member of the Resistance, Antelme had been arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944, just six weeks ahead of the liberation of Paris by Allied forces, and like thousands of Resistance members before him, sent from Fresnes prison to a concentration camp in Germany.

Duras’s and Antelme’s marriage had already been strained by the death of their child in 1942, and by 1944, Duras was involved with the editor Dionys Mascolo, referred to as D. in the book, and intent upon divorcing Antelme. This fact hovers over her narrative, contributing to her anxiety and sense of survivor’s guilt.

In April 1945, as the Allies advance into Germany and begin liberating prisoner of war camps, French prisoners start arriving in Paris and Duras’s hopes lift. But at the same time, so do images of Buchenwald, the first concentration camp reached by American and British troops: the piles of corpses, the ghost-like skeletons of the surviving inmates. She associates one photo in particular with Antelme: “In a ditch, face down, legs drawn up, arms outstretched, he’s dying. Dead.” A few of Antelme’s associates, mere shadows of their former selves, return from Buchenwald and speak of seeing him but losing him in the chaos of the camp’s last days.

Then, in May, François Mitterrand, referred to in the book by his Resistance name, Morland, calls from Germany. Assigned by General De Gaulle as a liaison to the American forces liberating camps in Kaufering and Dachau, Mitterrand was passing through one of the blocks at Dachau when he heard his name spoken, so faintly he barely processes it. He recognizes Antelme — and recognizes that the man is perhaps hours from death. He enlists the help of Mascolo and another friend, and quickly arranges paperwork and uniforms so the two men can drive to Germany and help smuggle Antelme out of the camp. Mitterrand understands that the man is too weak to survive the Americans’s usual regime for reviving inmates.

The whole passage of Antelme’s discovery, rescue, and return to Paris in the back of Mitterrand’s car takes perhaps five pages, but they’re among the most suspenseful and emotional I’ve read in many years. Just blocks from Duras’s apartment, Mascolo stops to telephone: “I’m ringing to warn you that it’s more terrible than anything we’ve imagined.” When she sees Antelme’s body being carried up the stairs of her building,

I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry.

Then begins the slow, painstaking process of bringing Antelme back to life without killing him. In the first days, he cannot even eat, merely taking in sips of pale broth. “His legs look like crutches…. When the sun shines you can see through his hands.” For days, his survival is in doubt and Duras thinks, “My identity has gone. I’m just she who is afraid when she wakes.”

But survive he does, and as Antelme regains his strength, Duras must test it by breaking the news: “I told him we had to get a divorce, that I wanted a child by D.” By August, they are able to travel to the Savoy for a holiday and Antelme is able to read a newspaper: “Hiroshima is perhaps the first thing outside his own life that he see.”

Antelme and Duras did divorce and Mascolo became the second of three husbands. Antelme wrote a memoir of his time in the concentration camps, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race) in 1947, after which, Duras writes, “he never spoke of the German concentration camps again. Never uttered the words again.”

The texts that follow “La Douleur” jump back in time. “Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier” relates the cat-and-mouse game that the Gestapo agent who arrested Antelme plays with her in the weeks before the liberation. Rabier appears to be a French collaborator but Duras believes him to be German. He entices her with promises to ensure Antelme will be treated well but she suspects his real aim is to get her to betray other members of the Resistance — Mitterrand in particular.

It’s a potentially lethal game they play. “Every time I’m going to see Rabier — and this is to go on right to the end — I act as if I were going to be killed. As if he knew all about my activities. Every time, every day.” As days pass and the Allies near Paris, however, Rabier’s own situation grows more complicated. She looks at him and thinks, “I suddenly see him as an extra in a farcical tragedy…already stricken by a death that is itself devalued, not genuine, deflated.” Mascolo tells her the Resistance plans to kill Rabier, but in the end, he is arrested and Duras testifies at his trial. And then he goes “completely out of my head…. He must have been shot during the winter of 1944-1945. I don’t know where.”

In “Albert of the Capitals,” the last of the three strongest texts, Duras relates an episode in the first days after the liberation, when the Resistance exercised summary judgment on some collaborators. She and another Resistance member hold a waiter, a man known as Albert of “The Capitals” (a café), as a hostage, expecting him to be executed. It’s almost the mirror image of the Rabier piece: Duras recognizes she holds the power of life and death over the man and the dubious ethics involved in the situation. She watches as Albert is savagely beaten in an attempt to get him to disclose how he communicated with the Gestapo.

The story is written in the third person. Duras is Thérèse, she tells us in an opening note, and the approach may have been necessary to enable her to deal frankly with her own responsibility for Albert’s torture. Set in the context of the two preceding pieces, it completes a portrait of the moral and ethical intricacies involved in the Occupation of France and the retribution against collaborators in the first weeks after liberation.

If it were up to me, I would reissue these three pieces separately and encourage them to be read widely, particularly by Americans. One thing I observed in twenty years of life in Europe is the resistance of many Europeans to view the world in black-and-white terms, and I suspect this stems at least in part from the experience of living under various occupations — German, Soviet, Allied. As Duras shows in La Douleur, simple distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong, are luxuries that people have to abandon to survive under an occupation. Even if it’s as petty as doing a little bartering in the black market, trade-offs between ideals and practical needs are constantly being negotiated. Duras tries to understand her choices in La Douleur, but she does not forgive them completely, and this seems the best that anyone who looks back to such times can expect.

I watched Memoir of War after finishing La Douleur, and it seemed like a case study in the problems of adapting books too faithfully to the screen. For one thing, it’s hard for me to believe in the realism of a film shot in color with the polish of today’s commercial productions when this is a time I know best from grainy black-and-white newsreel footage. For another, it’s almost impossible for today’s actors to convey the sheer frailty of people who’d lived under rationing for years, even less under the severe deprivations of concentration camps — or their costumes the decrepitude of clothes that have been lived in for years, mended and threadbare, shiny from wear. And finally, in holding to the framework of Duras’s first-person diary and memoir texts, Finkiel has to rely heavily on voiceover by his star Mélanie Thierry when voiceover is a technique best used infrequently and sparingly. One doesn’t go to a movie to listen to someone read from a book — something Irving Thalberg or Sam Goldwyn probably said more than once.

La Douleur, by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray
London: Collins, 1985
Published in the U.S. by Pantheon as The War: A Memoir

The House of Childhood, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1956/1990)

Cover of the U. of Nebraska Press edition of Marie Luise Kaschnitz's The House of Childhood

“Where is the House of Childhood?” A stranger stops the narrator of Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s short novel in the street to ask this question. “What is it? A museum? A school?” The stranger isn’t sure. The narrator herself has never heard of it. Yet, as she walks on, puzzling over the encounter, there she sees it.

It’s not a particularly distinctive building: big, gray, “without any special adornment except for a kind of Jugendstil embellishment placed above the portal and below which the name was written in golden letters.” She moves on. She’s not particularly interested. “The mere word childhood makes me kind of nervous. It’s amazing how little I remember from my childhood and how much I dislike being reminded of that time by others.”

But then it turns out that the House of Childhood is actually located quite close to her apartment. But she finds the entrance, a tiny foyer leading to a security window, probably under constant surveillance by a security camera, off-putting: “Things of that sort remind me of the Gestapo.” Anyway, the past is dead: “The only thing that’s important is the present.”

Still, it nags at her. Might as well have a quick look, she thinks. She walks in. Now the entrance leads to a courtyard, sort of a garden, scattered with exhibits: “Disorderly, even chaotic, but not at all sinister.” Intrigued, she returns again and again. The rooms seem to be under constant reorganization. Displays appear, disappear. Exhibits target specific senses: smells, tastes, sounds. Some are quite disturbing:

Yesterday, for example, I heard in a dark room one single scream that went right through me, and today I blindly ran into a veil of iron, hurting my lips, while smelling powder and the fragrance of violets…. The urgency of impressions like that is almost painful, maybe even more so because you don’t just pass from one to the next but are forced to experience, I might almost say practice, each one several times. Five or six times in succession, the scream without any additional sounds reverberating in the air, just as many times the quiet scratching of the veil on my lips; behind that, dead cold, as from fog-shrouded skin.

With repeated visits, some things in the House of Childhood begin to seem familiar to this woman who’s so intently put the past behind her. “Again and again I hear my mother singing.” Not songs, but little phrases: “Have you not seen your father?” — even though her father is in Russia.

As she grows more obsessed with the House, parts of her current life seem to slip away. Things in her apartment are moved. She takes a seat in a cafe and the waiters all ignore her. She rushes to the House and finds it closed — not just closed but giving the impression of having been shuttered permanently.

Marie Luise Kaschnitz in the late 1950s.
Marie Luise Kaschnitz in the late 1950s.

Kaschnitz wrote The House of Childhood while she and her husband were living in Rome in the mid-1950s and some German critics have suggested the book was a symbolic attempt to explore the childhoods that were lost to younger Germans during the Third Reich. (Renate Rasp would take a much darker satiric look at the same subject years later in her novel A Family Failure, reviewed here in 2019.) In a monograph on Kaschnitz, Elsbeth Pulver speculated that the novel is a metaphor for the process of undergoing psychoanalysis, and the random-yet-progressive nature of the narrator’s experiences in the House, the movement from general to specific and intimate memories (or, perhaps more correctly, sensations) certainly resembles what numerous patients who’ve gone through extended psychoanalytic treatments report.

Kafka’s The Trial is an obvious influence, but I think Kaschnitz moves well beyond imitation. Kaschnitz is best known among English-language readers for her short story, “The Fat Girl,” and a fascination with the pathologies of childhood is a theme in several of her other stories. Like Kafka, Kaschnitz knows that the absurd only works when the bizarre illogical of any situation is anchored in the specific and realistic, and throughout The House of Childhood one finds images and sensations that trigger one’s own memories. I think it’s a brilliant work that much deserves more attention and study.

Das Haus der Kindheit, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1956), translated into English as The House of Childhood by Anni Whissen
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990

Escape from Berlin by Catherine Klein (Käthe Cohn) (1944)

Cover of Escape from Berlin by Catherine Klein

Catherine Klein stands in Berlin’s Tiergarten station saying farewell to her husband, who’s leaving on a train to Amsterdam, a visa to England in hand. Both Jews, after years of attempts, he has managed to secure safe passage out of Germany by virtue of being a doctor, one of the few skills considered worthy of emigrant status by the British. She will have to wait until he can arrange for her to join him. It’s the first of August, 1939.

Klein’s memoir of her experience of living as a Jew under the Nazi regime and her near-miraculous escape in 1942 is easily the most gripping book I’ve read in many months. Even before the war starts just a month after her husband’s departure, she details the succession of measures that progressively restrict the rights of German Jews — sometimes moving at glacial speed, then, as after Kristallnacht in 1938, in a sudden brutal sweep. At first, they comply, turn inwards, try to cope.

Then coping is not enough: “Whisky, sedatives’ and bridge cards become necessary commodities.” Her husband’s practice is taken away, then their apartment, then their belongings inventoried. They are harassed on the streets, friends are beaten up, arrested. When he leaves for England, she writes every day, expecting their separation is temporary. Then Germany invades Poland, Britain and France declare war in response, and they are trapped on different sides. “Every bomber setting out from here may bring death to you every bomber you watch taking off may mean death to me,” she writes in a letter she knows cannot reach him. “I am not defeatist, you know that better than anyone, but I now believe that we will not see each other again.”

Alone now, she has fewer resources, fewer defenses as the war provides the rationale for stepping up the pace of persecution. She has to find a room in a “non-Aryan” house. Along with other healthy Jewish women, she is pressed into work at a factory supplying equipment for the Army. The rationing and restrictions on movement experienced by all Germans are imposed even more strictly on the Jews, and in 1941, she is forced to wear the yellow Star of David so that conductors can keep her from using busses and trams, shop owners refuse her entrance, Aryan doctors refuse to treat her. When her father suffers a severe heart attack one evening, she spends hours trying to find a doctor who will come to his bedside. By the time she succeeds, she returns to find him dead.

Jewish couple in Berlin wearing yellow stars, 1941.
Jewish couple in Berlin wearing yellow stars, 1941.

An American reporter befriends her, invites her to parties at the embassy, passes her goods — peanuts, coffee — now considered contraband. He begins to concoct various escape plans, but the war manages to foil them all. A visa to Switzerland with the possibility of a ship from Genoa? Italy’s declaration of war against France and Britain in June 1940 rules that out. Passage across Russia to Vladivostok and a ship to America? Hitler’s invasion of Russia a year later cuts off that route. Then, Germany’s declaration of war against the United State in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 lands the reporter and other Americans in internment as enemy aliens.

Early in 1942, she is awakened by screams and cries of pain from somewhere nearby. “A pogrom!” she thinks, fearing that the Nazis had decided to abandon all pretense and simply exterminate the remaining Jews in their beds. She discovers, however, that the sounds come from a former schoolhouse just down her street. Puzzled, she asks a neighbor about the sounds.

“Do be quiet, for God’s sake,” she whispers fiercely. “You will lose your head if you go on talking like that! You know just as well as we do what it is.”

“But I don’t, Frau Schultze. Honestly I don’t.”

“You must have noticed that the school has been turned a temporary hospital, haven’t you? That is where our soldiers are sent when they come back from Russia with legs, hands, noses and ears frozen off. Even morphia is no use for pains like theirs. But I’ll give you a bit of advice: you haven’t seen anything, you haven’t heard anything and as for me I certainly haven’t told you anything.”

Despite the relentless propaganda of Joseph Goebbel’s machine, ordinary people still manage to retain some skepticism about the endless reports of victories. “Good news,” an Aryan supervisor at her factory remarks one day. “There were 20 British bombers in last night’s air raid, and the Luftwaffe managed to shoot down all 25.”

With every day, however, she sees her factory workroom growing emptier. More Jews are being picked up and put on trains bound for the rumored camps in Poland. She realizes that she must find a way out. “In my present situation all I can expect from life is certain death. Why not gamble for it?” she reasons. Recalling one of the more fantastic schemes mentioned by the American reporter, she contacts a man in the Italian embassy said to be amenable to selling passports and visas. He proposes to sell her the real passport on an Italian woman living in Berlin and arrange for a transit visa for Switzerland. To pay for it, she has to give him — and the woman — most of the few personal items left to her.

Käthe Cohn (Catherine Klein), 1942.
Käthe Cohn, 1942.

Even this proves extraordinarily difficult in her circumstances. How to obtain a passport photo, let alone twelve copies? Where to find a suitcase — and how to explain why it’s needed? She begins to fear that the train she will board will be one bound for a camp in the east, not Basel.

It’s unnecessary to go into the series of last-minute crises and lucky breaks that enable Klein to make it to Switzerland. The fact that this book exists already tells us that her escape attempt ultimately succeeds. But there are a few important facts that Klein had to omit in the interest of protecting people still in Germany at the time her account was published in 1944. First, her name. In a paper presented to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1997, Charles Rubens, a relative by marriage, disclosed that Catherine Klein was Käthe Cohn, born in 1907 and married to Doctor Ernst Cohn in 1928. Even her translator, Eva Meyerhof, author of A Tale of Internment, reviewed here recently, had taken the pseudonym of Livia Laurent for the same reason.

Ida Gassenheimer, 1946.
Ida Gassenheimer, 1946.

More extraordinary, however, is the story Klein/Cohn omits completely from this book. While she describes her father’s last days and death, there is no mention of her mother. As Richard N. Lutjens, Jr. writes in his book, Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945, the last great round-up of Jews in Berlin was held in March, 1943. On March 2, 1943, Klein/Cohn’s mother, Ida Gassenheimer, went to her bank to take out a little of the money she was still allowed to keep on deposit. “Frau Gassenheimer! You’re still here?!” exclaimed the clerk. “I have information that by March 5 there won’t be any Jews left in Berlin!”

According to “My Underground Life in Berlin,” a memoir she wrote with the help of her daughter, Ida Gassenheimer was advised by a sympathetic Aryan doctor to take the name of an Aryan German woman he knew was within days of death. Taking temporary refuge with friends, she wrote to registrar in the woman’s hometown and was able to obtain a copy of her birth certificate, pleading that she’d been bombed out of her home. With this, she was able to obtain an identification card and ration book and then to obtain a room — really more of a coal storage closet — in the apartment of an invalid Aryan woman. Here, she managed to survive until the Russian troops arrived in May 1945, and better, to find herself in the American sector when the Allies divided up the administration of Berlin. With the help of the occupying military government, she was able to emigrate to England in 1947 and join her daughter in 1947.

She remained there until her death in 1963. Doctor Ernst Cohn became a well-respected GP and his patients included the novelist Colin Macinnes and several members of the Rolling Stones. He died in 1979 and Käthe Cohn died in 1981. Escape from Berlin has never been reissued.

Escape from Berlin, by Catherine Klein
London: Victor Gollancz, 1944.

A Tale of Internment, by Livia Laurent (1942)

Title page of A Tale of Internment by Livia Laurent, 1942

“The tribunal has decided that this young lady is to be interned until further order.” So read the notice delivered to Livia Laurent in July 1940. It was, she writes, “a queer thing” that came on top of years of queer things: finding herself an outcast in her own country (Jewish in Nazi Germany); having to uproot herself and navigate the bureaucratic and financial challenges of leaving Germany; making her way to a new country (England) and absorbing its language and ways. And now, despite the seemingly self-evident fact that a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany was unlikely to pose a security threat to England, finding herself labelled an enemy alien and ordered to report to Holloway Prison for confinement.

A Tale of Internment is a wafer-thin story of Laurent’s year behind bars and barbed wire for the crime of being foreign. Like Paul Cohen-Portheim, whose Time Stood Still was featured here in 2014 and has since been reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, Livia Laurent’s entrance into internment was marked by the goodwill and bad advice of her jailers. Her warder said she would be sent (like Cohen-Portheim, at first) to the Isle of Man — “A beautiful place, I went there on my honeymoon” — and advised to pack a bathing suit (“Essential. Sunglasses, no”).

Unlike men like Cohen-Portheim the war before, the women internees of 1940 were housed in hotels or boarded with residents. They were free to roam the streets and fields of the town, but barbed wire barricades and guard posts marked the perimeter within which their movements were restricted. The Babel of voices Laurent encountered on a typical walk represented the extent of Hitler’s conquests: “French, Italian, German in all dialects, including Austrian, Czech, Polish, Dutch.”

But even though the women were treated civilly, allowed to receive parcels and correspond with people outisde the camp, even given a small weekly allowance for cigarettes, cosmetics, or sewing items, they never forgot that their only crime was holding the wrong king of passport:

That fact alone was sufficient to overshadow any other consideration for their personal value, their own integrity. And they accepted it. The terrible thing was their own acceptance of it, making it possible for a technical matter to influence their character, their courage, touch their very souls. To watch them in the offices, waiting patiently hour after hour, where there should have been no waiting necessary at all. To see a woman of sixty being servile towards a girl of twenty, who in the ordinary course of events might have been her employee, being servile because the girl belonged to the staff and could give or withhold a permission. And watching the girl being conscious of her power, enjoying it, using it.

After a long grey, monotonous winter, the administrative machinery begins to turn, and one by one, the women’s cases are reviewed for possible release. Some hear in a few weeks. Others wait months. It’s pointless to inquire, of course. And to further complicate the situation, a decision is taken to bring in known Nazi sympathizers and confine them in the same town-camps. No one expected the Nazis to be released, but now arose the danger of becoming the victim of a whispering campaign. The mere suggestion of a favorable attitude towards the genuine enemies is enough to have an application for release rejected.

In the end, though, Laurent’s request is approved. Yet, when she reads her release certificate, she realizes her freedom remains conditional: “Exempted from internment until further order.” She was interned “until further order”; now, another “further order” hangs over her head.

A Tale of Internment, like Time Stood Still, shines with humanity, good humor, and a recognition of the inherent absurdity of most blunt-force administrative actions. Even its publication required a request by the Jewish Refugee Committee and approval by the Secretary of State, and even then its author chose to use a pseudonym (her real name was Eva Meyerhof) to protect remaining internees and relatives still in Germany.

A Tale of Internment, by Livia Laurent (pseudonym of Eva Meyerhof)
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander (1912)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.

He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.

There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.

Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.

It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.

Advertisement for Mightier than the Sword.

For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.

Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:

Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…

This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.

In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.

Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.

The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.

Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’

Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.

An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.

Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912

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

Neglected Circadian Novels

I had the opportunity to give a short talk on neglected circadian novels to the British Association for Modernists’s Ephemeral Modernisms conference recently and I thought it was worth offering here a rundown of the various books I mentioned.

A circadian novel takes place within a 24-hour period or a portion thereof. The first scholar to catalogue the circadian novel, David Leon Higdon, preferred this term to that of “one-day novel” for the simple reason that there are many examples of books where the narrative takes place over more than one calendar day: Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a self-evident example.

Not being well-versed in critical theory, I won’t attempt to philosophize about the significance of circadian novels in the context of modernism or of critical writing on the ephemeral and the experience of everyday life, of which Bryony Randall’s 2016 article, “A Day’s Time: The One-Day Novel and the Temporality of the Everyday,” from New Literary History, is a good place to start. Randall quotes Michael Shearingham, who observes that “the figure of the day can provide access to the totality which is the everyday,” and several novelists have commented on the practical utility of a single day or a 24-hour period from a dramatic standpoint. Reflecting on his novel, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), Barry Hines observed, “It seemed like a natural way to do it. I compressed a number of incidents which had taken place at random over a number of years into one day to strengthen and speed up the narrative.”

Higdon proposes three “focal points”–what might more accurately be called structures–that comprise the majority of circadian novels:

• A Typical Day
Two of the greatest modernist novels, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses are examples of these.

• The Last Day
The last of the protagonist (e.g., Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil) or of someone close to the protagonist (e.g., Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day)–although, ironically, in most cases, it’s only the author who knows in advance that the character is going to die that day (damned writers playing God again).

• An Eventful or Event-filled Day
The distinction here is between a novel set on a historically important day (e.g., Christa Wolf’s Accident, which takes place on the day of the Chernobyl nuclear accident) and one set on a day full of personal events (think of Carson McCuller’s The Member of the Wedding).

The value of these categories are limited, though, as there are plenty of cases where a circadian novel fits into more than one. Is Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa Dalloway’s typical day or Septimus Smith’s last day–and does it matter?

In any case, here are some of the lesser-known circadian novels I mentioned:

Cover of Pay Day by Nathan Asch

• Pay Day by Nathan Asch (1930)
Asch could easily have called this, his second novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Jim, a clerk, picks up his pay and heads home to change for a night on the town, hoping for some adventure that will reward his daily drudgery:

Something wonderful was going to happen in a little while. Maybe in the subway, maybe home, or later in the evening. Coming out of the office, through with work for the day, the time absolutely his own until the next day at nine ‘clock, he felt happy, he was excited.

This Saturday happens to coincide with the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, but Jim has no interest in larger events. He wants to get drunk, hold a woman close, have a few laughs. Throughout the night, though, the execution intrudes into his consciousness, regularly triggering the thought: is there something I could be doing? In the end, he surrenders to the assumption that he is too small to make a difference: “It was too damned bad these two were killed if they were innocent, but some people said they did it, and it didn’t make much difference anyway. Tomorrow he’d have to go to the office just the same….” Pay Day is a fascinating snapshot of life in New York City in late Prohibition as well as a portrait of a man choosing to turn away from a chance to look beyond his immediate needs.

Asch’s 1925 novel, The Office is also a circadian novel, one I wrote about here back in 2006.

• Twenty-Four Hours by Louis Bromfield (1930)
Twenty-Four Hours opens as a dinner party at the home of Hector Champion — “seventy-one and soft” — is breaking up. Everyone is bored, most unhappy, a few drunk. The guests slowly drift out the door and into the night, but none of them to bed. Jim Towner will wander the speakeasies in hopes of staying drunk and numb, eventually ending up in the apartment of his mistress, the nightclub singer Rosie Dugan. By the time he wakes up the next morning, she will be dead.
Historian Henry Seidel Canby wrote that Bromfield was “an observer and a summer-up of current custom, current type, and current ideas and his series of novels is likely to be often excerpted from by those writers who in the next age will try to describe the America that was in the eaily nineteen hundreds.” Well, no one much remembers Bromfield for these novels now, but I’d argue that Twenty-Four Hours is still worth a look. Jim Towner could easily have been one of Tom Buchanan’s drinking buddies, his wife Fanny someone with whom Daisy comiserated over cocktails. It’s a powerful portrait of emptiness.

• Doctor Serocold by Helen Ashton (1930)
Doctor Serocold is a GP in an English country town. His day starts with an early morning call to the deathbed of his former partner and continues through a dozen or more house calls and his usual surgery hours, until it comes to an end late that night with the delivery of a baby. Ashton uses this construct to create a portrait both of the doctor, an able if not exceptional professional, and the community he serves. Across all this, the doctor is anticipating with dread the receipt of results of his own medical test, certain that he has stomach cancer. As Amy Loveman wrote in the Saturday Review, it’s “Not in any way a dazzling book…but distinguished in its clarity of conception and smoothness of execution.” Doctor Serocold was Ashton’s most successful novel, particularly in the U.S., where it was picked up as a Book of the Month Club featured title.
Ashton liked to build her novels around structures — literally, in the case of her 1932 novel, Belinda Grove, which told the story of a fictional Regency house north of London and the generations of its inhabitants — including a ghost.

• The Mere Living by B. Bergson Spiro (Betty Miller) (1933)
As I wrote here back in 2019, “One clue to the nature of The Mere Living can be found in the author’s maiden name, for she was a close relative of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was best known at the time for his theory of time. Bergson argued that there were essentially two different times: clock time, the regular, rhythmic, linearly progressing dimension measured by the clock; and time as experienced by individuals, which in our perceptions can speed up or slow down based on factors that may have nothing to do with the ticking of the clock.
The Mere Living is, in one way, an illustration of Bergson’s theory, as the author takes through one day in four progressive stages — Breakfast Time; Lunch Time; Tea Time; and Dinner Time — but at widely different paces as experienced by the four members of the Sullivan family: Henry, the husband and father; Mary, the wife and mother; Nancy, the daughter (19); and Paul, the son (17).

Miller took her title from a line from Browning’s “Saul”: “How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ/All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!” And The Mere Living vibrates with energy generated from a world filled with other people. For Miller, the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James called the infant’s impression of the world is part and parcel of modern life for old as well as young.

• Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (1937)
With editions now available in nine different languages, Gentleman Overboard is somewhat less neglected than when I first wrote about it here in 2009. Yes it’s worth mentioning as an example of the Last Day circadian novel, since all the action takes place within the hours between Henry Preston Standish’s stroll on the deck of the Arabella and his slip and fall into the Pacific and the last time his slips beneath its surface, never to come up again. From a structural standpoint, Lewis follows the parallel narrative lines of Standish’s thoughts through what proves to be his final day on Earth and the reactions of the passengers and crew of the Arabella as they gradually become away of his disappearance — and begin constructing explanations and motivations for the event.
Lewis’s 1940 novel, Spring Offensive, is also a “last day” circadian novel that I wrote about here in 2009.

• David’s Day by Denis Mackail (1932)
David’s Day could compete with Ulysses in the complexity of its structure. As I wrote here in 2021, “With each chapter, Mackail sets character caroming off character, producing effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some fall in love, some fall in ruin, some take a step up the social ladder, some take a tumble down…. From time to time, Mackail doubts his own ability to keep his clock ticking. ‘Would the chain break off here, just because a manager did or didn’t boast, or because he did or didn’t so something with his fingers?’ And indeed, there are moments when the links grow tenuous, when the pace of this day of orchestrated chaos slows….” Nonetheless, Mackail is a wise and amiable choreographer and David’s Day is a thoroughly entertaining book, with an ending that arrives like a cherry atop a splendid dessert.
Like Helen Ashton, Denis Mackail was fond of simple structural frameworks. He also used the eventful day model in his novels The Flower Show (1927) and The Wedding (1935)–and like Ashton, he also wrote a house-centric novel (Huddlestone House (1945)).

• The Sixth of October (1932) and The Seventh of October (1946) by Jules Romains
These two novels bookend the twenty-seven volume series of Jules Romains’ massive work known in English as Men of Good Will in both a physical and literal sense. The first takes place on Tuesday, October 6, 1908, the second twenty-five years later on Friday, October 7, 1933. But beyond this frame, Romains reproduces in large part the chapter-by-chapter structure of the first book in the last. People watch sign-painters at work in 1908, watch an actress in her bath in a silent film in the first; in the last, they gather around an avertisement for false teeth and watch another actress, now in a sound film. Perhaps a bit too obvious and artificial, the approach at least provided Romains with clear starting and ending points for the intricate movements of his hundreds of characters over the course of the thousands of pages of Men of Good Will.

• The Chase by Horton Foote (1956)
The Chase began as a play (1952) that Foote expanded into a novel — and which Lillian Hellman later adapted into a 1966 film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Marlon Brando and Robert Redford. It works well as a novel, with each chapter focusing on a particular character as Foote leads us through the reaction of a Texas town to the news of the escape of Bubber Reeves, a convicted murderer and one of the town’s former bad seeds. Of the three different versions of the story, the novel best serves Foote in bringing out the character of the town and its web of self-righteousness, self-service, and pervasive prejudice. A fast-moving and gripping read.

• The Last Hours of Sandra Lee by William Sansom (1961)
I confess that I haven’t read this novel, which takes place on the day of the Christmas party at Allasol, a London company involved in miscellaneous chemicals. But Peter Green’s description from his Saturday Review piece on the novel makes it sound like great fun:

Liquor available includes South African sherry, peppermint cordial, brown ale, sparkling cider, ginger wine, Spanish Chablis, Australian Burgundy, Cherry Heering, British port, Irish whiskey, Advocaat, and a brew unknown to me called Pineapple Fortified. On this phenomenal alcoholic basis the whole staff lakes off like a squadron of superjets. From jollity they pass to lechery, from lechery to bitchiness. Some are sick, others caught with their pants down, others again utter unforgettable and unforgivable home truths.

It also sounds like a bit of 20th century mythology, rather like the boisterous conventions full of exuberant drunk sales reps from the Midwest that appear in Hollywood movies from the 1930s through the 1960s. Let’s bear in mind, however, that we’re in the hands of William Sansom, one of the English masters of the short story form and not a writer given to pointless ornamentation.

The Last Hours of Sandra Lee was the basis of the 1965 film, The Wild Affair starring Nancy Kwan as Marjorie (not Sandra) Lee.

• The Horrors of Love by Jean Dutourd (1963)
In the 600-some pages of this novel, two men carry on a conversation about the case of Roberti, a politician convicted for murdering his mistress’s brother. They wander around Paris, lunch, take a coffee at a café, an evening drink at a bar, come to no great conclusions, but cover a great deal of intellectual territory, from the idea of France to the place of fiction in the modern world:

HE: Fiction has always exerted an influence on manners, you know, especially love stories.

I: Yes, but in the old days fewer people knew how to read, there were fewer novels and they weren’t reinforced by the movies. It is interesting to note how in this age of technics, industry, trips to the stars, atomic fission, population explosions, rabid nationalism, the cold war between socialism and capitalism and all the other horrors which I shall refrain from naming, the rights of the little human heart are proclaimed with just as much persistence and diversity.

HE: I have my own ideas about that.

I: Tell me:

HE: I believe heart-throb magazines and sentimental movies are patent medicines.

Yet when asked to recommend a book worth reading, novelist Diane Johnson wrote, “My first choice would be Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love, which is translated into English and was published in the sixties. It is an incredible tour de force — a dialogue running to more than 600 pages, between two men who are walking through Paris, talking about the fate of a politician friend of theirs who was brought down by an erotic entanglement. Urbaine, wise, humane, funny, even suspenseful — this is a worthy successor, as someone said, to Proust.” Historian John Lukacs seconded this recommendation, writing, “It is a delicious and profound work of art, from beginning to end. Andre Maurois likened it to Proust; but in some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and more imaginative. The language itself is superb.”

• One Day by Wright Morris (1965)
One Day takes place on Friday, November 23, 1963. The news of President Kennedy’s death hits the town of Escondido, California — likely based on Mill Valley, where Morris lived — but at its own small level, other dramatic events reverberate as well: a baby abandoned at the animal shelter; a doctor has a traffic accident that forces him to remember the one twenty years before when he struck at killed two hitchhikers; a local mortuary’s first television ad debuts with unfortunate timing; an elderly woman is found dead in a car when it rolls into an ice machine. Some of what happens is absurd, some tragic, some touching: throughout the novel, we are constantly reminded that throughout his career Morris could never quite decide whether humanity was something to laugh at in its insanity or weep at in its folly.

Verity Bargate and the Revenge for Lies

Cover of the program from "An Evening for Verity Bargate" at the Soho Theatre, 1981.
Cover of the program from “An Evening for Verity Bargate” at the Soho Theatre, 1981.

Verity Bargate wrote three short, savage novels — No Mama No (1978), Children Crossing (1979), and Tit for Tat (1981) — before dying too, too young at the age of 41 just as reviews for her third novel were coming out. I found three cheap, battered Fontana paperbacks of Bargate’s books in a London bookshop years ago, but something about the cover of No Mama No gave me the impression that it was about child abuse and so for years I was put off reading it.

I deeply regret my reluctance now. Not only was my impression quite mistaken, but once I started No Mama No a few months ago, I soon discovered why Lynda Lee-Potter once wrote in the Daily Mail, “I can only read Verity Bargate at one sitting without stopping for secondary considerations like food or sleep.” I read No Mama No at a sitting and did the same with Children Crossing and Tit for Tat the next two days. It helped that all three books are under 160 pages each, but with this year being dedicated to wafer-thin books, I have an office full of such books, most of which I manage to ignore as the months pass.

But there is something so gripping and unique about Verity Bargate’s fiction that I fell into her world for three days and came out wondering how these little sticks of dynamite have managed to be so forgotten. I don’t use the word dynamite lightly (or originally). This is what Isabel Colegate wrote of her approach: “Verity Bargate has her machine gun on her hip and is spraying bullets before she even dynamites open the door.”

Cover of Fontana paperback edition of <em>No Mama No</em> (1979).
Cover of Fontana paperback edition of No Mama No (1979).

I generally dislike the queasiness of some readers and reviewers at anything that hints of being a plot spoiler, but this is one time I must take care not to disclose the gut-punches that await anyone who picks up one of Bargate’s novels. For not only are they all unexpected and powerful, but each embodies the special quality that makes these books seem decades ahead of their time. In her TLS review of No Mama No, Anne Duchene aptly described what Bargate does in each story: she “opens, very calmly and very skillfully, like a blade going through flesh, a door from enraged normality into raging perversity.”

Jodie, for example, the narrator of No Mama No, having given birth to a second son, finds herself not just feeling no love for the child but actively repelled by him: “that rather old aubergine they had thrust at me in the name of motherhood.” With one son still a needy toddler and the other an unwelcome addition, with an unsupportive and uninterested husband (of course, she became pregnant so quickly because he finds birth control in any form an assault on his manhood), with the weight of post-partum depression crushing down upon her, Jodie is on the brink of what I dreaded when first inspecting the book: neglect, if not violence against the children.

Then an old beloved schoolmate reconnects after years and invites Jodie to come down to Brighton for a day. On the train to the seaside, Jodie takes her boys into the toilet, changes their outfits, and begins to feel suffused with happiness. When she meets her friend Joy at the station, they embrace warmly and Jodie says, “Oh Joy, I forgot to tell you. This is Willow and this is Rainbow. My daughters.” It isn’t entirely a conscious decision: “It wasn’t I who had changed their clothes, it was someone else, and that someone else had effectively blocked off my escape route.” That sense of detachment in the act of taking a bizarre, irreversible step, is shared by all three of Bargate’s heroines.

But this is not the spoiler. Over the next weeks, the visits to Brighton become a regular respite from the domestic tedium of life in London with two unloved boys and a mostly-absent husband. Is Jodie’s lie about her boys being girls pathological? As Bargate tells it — through Jodie’s perspective — it seems palliative, the one way she can find to get through this difficult time.

No, the spoiler is how David, Jodie’s husband, reacts when he learns of Jodie’s deception. His reaction is not that different from that of some reviewers. Selina Hastings found the improbabilities of Bargate’s plots “monstrous.” Stephen Glover felt that Children Crossing suffered from “a vein of unlikelihood and angst which would make the deepest sceptic blanch.” In his review of Tit for Tat, John Braine showed himself an Angry Young Man become a Fussy Old Critic. The book, he wrote, “breaks the prime rule of the novel, which is that we must be able to sympathize with the central figure.”

Cover of Fontana paperback edition of Children Crossing (1980).

Reading Bargate’s reviews now, I saw that her critics fell into two starkly divided camps: those who found her heroines and their actions horrifying and incomprehensible; and those who “got it.” The “it” that Bargate’s enthusiasts got was the possibility — no, the probability — that women could have less than gracious and compliant responses to betrayal. Jodie in No Mama No feels betrayed by a husband who sees a family as something his wife is obligated to produce with the predictability — and the lack of effort on his part — of a worknight dinner. Rosie in Children Crossing feels betrayed by her pianist husband, who finds her the drudge who makes life away from the excitement of concert tours an unpleasant burden. And Sadie in Tit for Tat feels betrayed by Tim, the boyfriend who pressures her into getting a dangerous abortion and then escapes into an affair with another woman with whom he’s decided he wants to form a family.

Perhaps part of response of critics who found Bargate’s books disturbed and disturbing was a reaction to what they saw around them as the assault on conventions of sexuality and marriage by second-wave feminism. The world, especially the male one, was still tightly bound to those conventions. In Children’s Crossing, for example, Rosie says of her husband, “He thinks, by leaving me, he will regain his freedom. What he doesn’t realize is that he never lost it. I dread him discovering that.” But for Bargate, those conventions have become almost farcically hollow. When Sadie tell her boyfriend Tim that she’s pregnant, he tells her flatly, “You are not going to have this baby. I will marry you, but no baby now. Okay? Deal?” At which she thinks, “I half expected him to pust a contrat towards me. But my silence is not my signature.” That could almost serve as a slogan of passive resistance: “My silence is not my signature.”

From a distance of forty-plus years, the behavior of Bargate’s heroines seems far less bizarre and more understandable. Anyone who’s seen Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman, for example, will likely recognize the need of a victim to seek revenge for violation — even if the need, as in the case of Cassie in Promising Young Woman or of Sadie in Tit for Tat goes beyond the bounds of sanity (or the law).

The toxic waste of lies is the central theme in Bargate’s fiction, as she readily admitted herself:

The kind of lies I use in my books are ones which I don’t approve of. But I try to show the motives. I’ve been the recipient of a lot of lies and a lot of half-truths. In a way it’s may me almost honest: that sounds really wanky, doesn’t it? But I think I know how hurtful they can be — more than a theft or physical abuse. There’s a conspiracy of lies. Liars recognize each other. They don’t like to each other but they lie in front of each other. I don’t know what you call it. A leprosy of lie.

This attitude was an outgrowth of her own experiences. Bargate’s parents divorced soon after her birth and she grew up in what she once called “a middle class version of a child in care”: placed in a boarding school run by nuns before she turned six and shuttled off to holiday camps and homes to minimize the time her mother or father had to spend around their daughter. Her father was a high-ranking who “was always telling me that I was ugly, that my hands were huge.” Her mother considered her homely and slow. Her mother died when Bargate was a young nursing student; she cut off all contact with her father after their last meeting at the funeral.

In her mid-twenties, having left nursing, burned out from too many contacts with death and suffering, she married Frederick Proud, and with him founded Soho Poly, a ground-breaking theater devoted to one-act plays by rising young writers. After having two sons, she and Proud divorced and she took over running the theater on her own. Though a critical success, the work took a toll and in her late thirties, Bargate developed cancer. Bob Hoskins, who performed and wrote for Soho Poly, remarked to a reporter at the time, “A bird is running a theatre, the top one-act play theatre in the country, probably the world, she writes three novels, she’s running a home, bringing up two kids, and dying of cancer — she’s got my toast, anyway.”

One of the playwrights spotlighted by Soho Poly was Barrie Keefe. He and Bargate fell in love and began living together. She credited him with encouraging her as a writer. “I wrote the book because I was in love with Barrie and he wanted me to. It’s like winning the fruit machine.” Even so, she worried that readers would think that No Mama No was autobiographical, that Jodie’s attitude toward her sons reflected her own feelings toward her own sons Tom and Sam.

Cover from the Fontana paperback edition of <em>Tit for Tat</em> (1982).
Cover from the Fontana paperback edition of Tit for Tat (1982).

At the same time, the parallels between Bargate’s protagonists and her own life are unmistakable. In No Mama No, Jodie is a child of boarding schools whose only positive relationship is with her old classmate, Joy. Sadie in Tit for Tat has also grown up in the care of others, ignored by her mother and loathed by her father. As Andrew Sinclair, who knew Bargate, wrote of her books, “they spring from a deep well of early pain and dread that goes beyond the immediate circumstances and suggests the operation of some malignant force from which there is no escape.”

The pain that Bargate may have harbored from her own childhood, perhaps exacerbated by the experience of divorce and struggle with the theater, enabled her to distill in her fiction a tremendous intensity of emotion that clearly scared off some in the first generation of her critics. But a few, like Hermione Lee, recognized what makes her fiction exceptional: “What Bargate can do like no one else, is to tackle head-on, with controlled dramatic force, the relationship in her women’s lives between physical and emotional pain and deprivation. And it hurts.”

Sinclair suggested just what was lost with Bargate’s death in 1981: “The author might achieve almost anything if she were to leave the scrutiny of the anatomy of melancholy for the surgery of society.” And it’s heartbreaking to think of the novels that Verity Bargate might have produced if that passion, that intensity, and that courage to follow a story into very dark places had survived to take on larger subjects. Nevertheless, even with the three slim sticks of dynamite she left sizzling on the shelf, I think today’s readers, today’s women in particular, will find that Verity Bargate is a writer of unforgettable and unique power.

I will add that I was so impressed by Bargate’s work that I contacted the agency handling her literary estate about reissuing No Mama No as part of the Recovered Books series that I edit for Boiler House Press. Unfortunately, we were not able to offer terms sufficiently lucrative to reach an agreement. I do hope that some press with deeper coffers takes an interest in bringing these remarkable novels back to print.

No Mama No
London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.
Children Crossing
London: Jonathan Cape, 1979
Tit for Tat
London: Jonathan Cape, 1981

Five Wafer-Thin Slices of England Going to Pieces

This post also appears on WaferThinBooks.com.

There have been plenty of novels about some cataclysmic disaster overwhelming England, but aside from J. G. Ballard’s first three novels about the disaster taking the form of wind (The Wind from Nowhere), water (The Drowned World), and drought (The Burning World), most are well over the wafer-thin limit. So, if you’re in the mood for taking your dystopia in pocket-sized form (and not getting enough from the daily news), here are five mostly-neglected ways you can ruin an evening or two.

 


After the Rain by John Bowen (Ballantine Books, 1959, 158 pages)
An attempt to break a drought in Texas becomes a global disaster. Slowly. The narrator, an advertising copywriter, like many London commuters, learns to don wellies and slosh his way into the office, where the management exhorts its staff to “Get flood-conscious copywise.” But soon the rising waters flood the Underground, streets turn into rivers, and our chap and his mate get their hands on a dinghy and row their way out of London. Within weeks, England becomes unrecognizable and largely uninhabited:

So we went on through that flooded countryside. The water covered the fields, and the flat bottom of the dinghy sometimes scraped the tops of hedges. We had left the Thames valley, and we were lost more frequently as we worked our way westwards along the troughs of water that lay between the hills, until every now and again hills would come together, so that we had either to back or slosh through the mud and rain, dragging the dinghy to the next stretch of water.

During those days we saw neither animals nor people. Those animals which had not been drowned would long ago, we supposed, have been eaten, and the people the villages would either be dead or have been evacuated to areas more easily supplied with food. Only once,
the grey of evening grew deeper before nightfall, we came across a little hillock surrounded by water, from which a single gaunt beast—a child’s pony, by its size—stared at us. We drew nearer, and it lifted its head, and neighed. As we paddled on into the twilight, the sound pursued us for long after the pony itself had vanished from our sight.

Eventually, they encounter other survivors and together they assemble a raft that becomes their new home, their new land—with all the old problems of people attempting to get along in a too-small space. A solid story with some amusing satirical moments. Bowen, who was also a screenwriter and playwright, turned After the Rain into a play several years later.

 


One by One by Penelope Gilliatt (Atheneum, 1965, 187 pages)
A mysterious plague overtakes England. In scenes eerily reminiscent of the first months of the COVID pandemic, half-measures and confusion lead the crisis to spin out of hand and an ineffective government quickly puts its own survival over that of its citizens: “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Overwhelmed, people resort to denial: “Not many of us believed in our own death.”

People have many instinctive motives for protecting themselves from a knowledge of catastrophe. Some of them are evasive; others have to do with a man’s conception of his duty, or his very genuine and deep-bitten feeling that if ill-fortune is already having a whack at his world he had better not incite it to worse by noticing it. The distemper struck England as if sent by some blast of the stars, and for a long time most of us tried to ignore it. We disbelieved it, blamed it on official carelessness, diverted our buried panic into vicious reprisals upon the West Indians or the Jews and felt sure that there must be a pill for it, though probably not on the NationalHealth.

A shortage of medical staff results in the narrator’s husband, a veterinarian, being enlisted, first as a nurse and soon as a doctor. Returning to London by train one evening, she sees an orange glow in the distance and realizes it’s the light from a bonfire of burning corpses.

A common problem that faces any writer who chooses to create a great catastrophe is how to end it. Do you let it run amok and wipe everyone or almost everyone out? Does it somehow resolve itself? Do you simply exit, leaving the characters to sort themselves out? As anyone who’s read Stephen King’s massive apocalyptic novel The Stand knows, the collapse is the fun part; putting things back together is anticlimactic and had spelled the death of many a promising narrative arc. And, sadly, One by One is another victim: a terrific start; a disappointing finish. However, it may still rate as England’s best COVID novel until someone writes a better one.

I wrote about One by One here back in 2020: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=6609 

 


Leftovers by Polly Toynbee (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966, 189 pages)
The French film director René Clair made a silent called Paris Qui Dort (English title, The Crazy Ray) in which a group of people aboard an airplane manage to be the only people to avoid being frozen in sleep by a mad scientist’s rays and then spend days cavorting around Paris, picnicking on the Eiffel Tower and stealing valuables, until a few decide to try to bring the city back to life. Polly Toynbee’s novel Leftovers had a similar premise: when London falls victim to a powdery gas that kills everyone who inhales or touches it, a handful of young people manage who happen to be in an odd corner of the Underground survive. When they emerge, like the passengers in Paris Qui Dort, they proceed to have themselves a jolly good time, ransacking Buckingham Palace and having sex in the most luxurious settings. When all that frolicking leads to pregnancies, however, they find themselves reverting to the values of the establishment they’ve just spent months flaunting. Toynbee published this at the age of 19, before she’d even attended university, and rather like Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, it is better appreciated as work of fun than as a work of fiction.

 

The Time of the Crack (republished as The Crack) by Emma Tennant (Jonathan Cape, 1973, 142 pages)
One lovely summer evening, London is shocked by an enormous noise and a great trembling of the ground as a crack appears in the middle of the Thames and the northern suburbs rise up above the city behind a gigantic cliff. In the subsequent hours and days, people panic, flee, take refuge in luxury hotels, or generally run amok. Society quickly breaks down. A group of mentally-ill children escape their therapist guardians and take over an abandoned hospital:

The five-year-olds, led by Neddy and Mary, a brother and sister who were regressing together (and who before their rescue by Thirsk had been  respectively at Wormword Scrubs and Holloway) were playing doctors in the emergency wards. Neddy, brandishing his scalpel, was striding impatiently from bed to bed as Mary prepared the patients for their operations. He had decided to amputate the leg of a man with a serious heart condition, who was attached to various complicated-looking machines….

The crack continues to grow wider and wider and the bands of survivors in the ruins between the highlands of the North and the river fragment into various cliques: hundreds of women follow a wild-haired seer called Medea Smith; a few wealthy developers assemble an army of enforcers that gathers and herds others into concentration camps as laborers for their grand project to construct a bridge across the crack. And everyone watches the people and cars that pass back and forth in the distance on the Other Side and fantasizes about what awaits there. One man, a die-hard leftist, builds a balloon to transport his family there:

Jeremy Waters worked hard, his fingers trembling with impatience. It was clear to him now that if he and his family reached the other side, they would at last find the life which he had hoped to find in Hampstead. At last, a society in which ecology and socialism went hand in hand. A society of brothers, fighting together to preserve the strange and beautiful structures thrown up by the Crack, and treating each other with decency and respect. Communism without a dictatorship! And the worst of it was that Waters might be too late. Everyone else had got there first.

But Nature tolerates neither vacuums nor the Crack, and a greater disaster looms just a few pages further. Having witnessed her first novel, The Colour of Rain, published pseudonymously, be trashed by the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia as the embodiment of the decline of English fiction, she set aside her pen for nine years until she was inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard and decided to try again. Ironically, though the two writers were leading a revolution in science fiction, they offered her mundanely pragmatic advice: structure the book in four parts of 40 pages each; sequence events up to a climax; introduce and develop a core set of characters. She later described The Time of the Crack as “very carefull plotted,” and it certainly avoids the problem of the post-catastrophic letdown.

 


They by Kay Dick (Penguin, 1977, 94 pages)
They appeared as a Penguin original in 1977. With a simple black-and-white cover, a literally wafer-thin spine (under half a centimeter) barely able to hold text, and printed in perhaps 1,000 copies or less, it quickly disappeared, despite winning the South-East Arts Literature Prize. I found my copy in a bookstore in Antwerp only when it showed itself squashed to the back behind several thicker volumes by Joan Didion. I suspect most of the originals that survive have likewise slipped to the back of bookshop shelves and been forgotten.

My copy of the Penguin edition of They, barely thick enough to squeeze the ISBN on.

Luckily for Kay Dick’s legatees, two keen “archives moles,” Lucy Scholes, who was still writing her Re-Covered column for the Paris Review, and Becky Brown, Curtis Brown’s head of heritage copyrights, both stumbled across it in early 2020 and a five-way bidding contest for the publication rights ensued, with Faber and Faber (UK), McNally (US), and Knopf (Canada) emerging as winners. The rediscovery was splashed across just about every major English-language journal with a book section and many thousands more copies that Penguin ever printed have been sold. So They is certainly not neglected anymore.

Kay Dick was a woman notorious for cultivating quarrels like a winemaker perfecting a vintage and even with the rediscovery of They, Dick is finding both champions and critics among its readers. It is a deeply ambiguous novel (indeed its ambiguity is reminiscent of Olga Ravn’s recent novel, The Employees (at 125 pages, also wafer-thin). Related in nine episodes by its narrator, it tells of the encroachment upon and isolation of the artists and poets of England by increasing numbers of sinister figures apparently associated with the state and intent upon, well, dumbing down the country. Their methods grow more ruthless and brutal. They gut the National Gallery. They take a woman who continues to paint from her home and blind her. They hound the dwindling survivors into ever-more-threatened pockets. It’s not surprising that many see in They an allegory for the gutting of some of England’s most vital public services, from the NHS to the water system, or for the ham-fisted censorship and assault on reproductive rights and queer lives in states like Texas and Florida. But it can also be read as a dismissal of the masses as brutes too ignorant to deserve their right for a voice in a democracy. Either way, if you like to be unsettled by a book, you won’t go wrong with They.

 

 

 

An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith (1992)

An Honourable Death by Iain Crichton Smith

Iain Crichton Smith is best remembered now as a poet, but he published a dozen novels over the space of 25 years, starting with Consider the Lillies (1968), a now-classic tale of the Clearances of the Scottish Highlands in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like his poems, Smith’s novels are mostly short, spare in their use of words, poetic in their choice of the few telling details that reveal far more than many writers working on much larger canvases.

An Honourable Death is a superb example. It’s a fictional portrait of Hector MacDonald, a lad born in a Ross-shire croft who rose through the ranks of the British Army from private to Major General before being destroyed by insinuations that he was a homosexual who was grooming teenage boys and taking his life in a Paris hotel in 1903. It’s just 135 pages long but manages to span three decades, a half-dozen wars, and three continents.

Convinced the Army is his destiny, he walks out of the tartan shop where he’s working and into a recruiter’s office, thence to be dispatched to a training garrison without a word to his employer or parents. He finds himself in his natural element, drawn to the precision of the parade ground and its regimen:

Hector loved drill and was good at it, as he was at all the tasks he had .to do, including shooting and PT. But it was drill that attracted him most and most moved him. There was about it a mystique, a definiteness, an accuracy that enchanted him. The barked commands evoked exact responses from him. He could see as he looked around him shapelessness becoming form, a pure, severe order emerging.

Sent with his regiment to India, he soon distinguishes himself in battle and earns a commission. Though he understands how to play the Army as a winning game, he is an outsider in the officer class. “They had the casual code, the casual radiance of the privileged. They could sniff each other out. They knew instinctively who was one of them.” Hector is not. He survives by cultivating an air of taciturnity, retreating in a “fortress of silence in which he would make no errors.”

Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald in 1901.

He fights in most of the Empire’s little wars of the late 1800s: Afghanistan, South Africa, the Sudan. He understands war. He is fearless and quick-thinking under fire. His instincts serve him well. It is peacetime that unsettles him. At loose ends in a posting to a garrison in Edinburgh, he is attracted to a lively young woman and is persuaded by her parents to marry her. It is a secret marriage, as the Army forbids officers to marry until they reach the rank of captain. And though his wife bears him a son, it is largely a celibate and distant marriage: ten years can pass without seeing each other.

Meanwhile, the Army sends him on rounds of its standard posts. To India, to South Africa in the final days of the Boer War. His exploits earn him a knighthood and general officership, but he is too much the outsider to be brought into a central leadership role. Instead, he’s sent abroad, to India again, to an official tour of Australia, and finally to Ceylon as the senior officer in the colony. He is bored with training the reserves, irritated by the narrow society of the planters and merchants. He befriends the sons of a Portuguese merchant, takes them on outings, showers them with expensive gifts. There are suggestions, as the Governor General advises him, of “something improper going on.” He is recalled to England, then ordered back to Ceylon to be court-martialed–though the unspoken order is that he “do the honourable thing.”

An Honourable Death follows the historical record faithfully but not slavishly. Years are skimmed in a paragraph. Scenes that other writers would devote a chapter to are dispatched in a page or less. Days of a treacherous sea voyage are summed up in a perfect phrase: “The water was like an infinitude of roofs collapsing.” Millennia of warfare in Afghanistan leaves a land awash with “an ancient, careless, brutal mortality.” It’s a brilliantly written portrait of a man with a limited vocabulary of self-awareness and a world simple and inflexible in its strictures, a thoroughly satisfying creation. I look forward to reading more of Iain Crichton Smith’s work.

An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith
London: Macmillan, 1992

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry (1990)

Another Present Era by Elaine Perry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Days of Floyd Warner: Fire Sermon and A Life, by Wright Morris (1971, 1973)

Fire Sermon and A Life by Wright Morris

Wright Morris is, in my opinion, the least-appreciated great American writer of the 20th century. How under-appreciated? Well, the last book-length critical study of his work was published in 1985 and his only biography, Haunted: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris by Jackson Benson, was self-published. Fire Sermon and A Life are among his finest works, a pair of novellas that tell the story of the last weeks in the life of 82-year-old Floyd Warner. We first see him through the eyes of Kermit Oelsligle, the eleven-year-old boy who’s come to live with him after his parents were killed in an accident:

It is a long city block to the grade school exit where the old man gleams in the sun like a stop sign, and that is how he looks. He wears a yellow plastic helmet and an orange jacket with the word STOP stenciled on the back of it. The flaming color makes the word shimmer and hard to read. He might even be a dummy—the word GO is stenciled on the front of the helmet—but anyone who knows anything at all knows it’s the boy’s great-uncle Floyd.  He’s actually pretty much alive but those who don’t know it cry out shrilly, “Are you a dummy, Mr. Warner?”

Floyd Warner is a man of set habits and few words and he and Kermit had achieved a truce of sorts, living in the oldest trailer in a trailer court full of old people in a seaside California town. But then Floyd’s sister Viola (“who had faith enough to save half the people in hell”) dies and the two have to travel to Nebraska to deal with the estate. They hitch up the trailer to Floyd’s 1928 Maxwell and creep their way east.

They manage a few hundred miles a day, mostly traveling after the sun goes down, but Floyd finds himself relying more and more on Kermit, who ends up doing most of the driving. After passing a couple of hippies a dozen times or more along the way, Kermit stops to pick them up, which infuriates Floyd, but he hasn’t the energy to kick them out. And so the four of them make it to the mostly-deserted town, surrounded by prairie, where the farmhouse where Floyd grew up and Viola died stands, full of abandoned furniture. One of the hippies knocks over a lit kerosene lamp and the place burns to the ground.

Disgusted with everything, Floyd unhitches the trailer and drives off in the Maxwell. At this point, Fire Sermon ends and A Life begins. Now Floyd travels south and west, to the New Mexico ranch he bought as soon as he could be rid of Nebraska and where he and his wife lived until she died of cancer nearly forty years earlier. With his old, slow car, he has to drive the back roads, but that suits his temperament:

It was a comfort to Warner to be off the freeway and back on a road where the turns were at right angles. One reason he had put the car up on blocks in California was that the winding roads were confusing. In the space of ten miles the sun in his eyes would be around at his back. The lack of any right angles made it difficult for him to find his bearings. With the angles gone, what did a man have left but up and down? It now occurred to him that up or down pretty well covered his available options, up to heaven with Viola, or straight to hell with everybody else.

As he passes through Kansas, he picks up George Blackbird, a native American just discharged after serving with the Army in Vietnam. Neither he nor Blackbird are talkers, but Blackbird’s company starts to open Floyd up to the richness of the life he mostly let pass by:

Gazing in the direction from which he had come, he seemed to see his life mapped out before him, its beginning and its end, its ups and its downs, its reassuring but somewhat monotonous pattern like that of wallpaper he had lived with, soiled with his habits, but never really looked at.

A Life transforms as we read from a terse, sparse comedy to a mythic journey. Floyd Warner, the old man unsatisfied and unimpressed with the people and places he’s spent his years with, finds a resting place in an ending that is both bleak and beautiful. Like his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, Wright Morris writes things that are so simple on the surface and so deep and complex underneath (though unlike Cather, Morris can be laugh-out-loud funny). This was the third time I’ve read Fire Sermon and A Life and they only grow richer with each reading.

Eight Doorstoppers for #1937Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1937Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration started some years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 15-19 April, read a book published in 1937 and write something about it.

I posted a list of ten short novels from 1937 on the Wafer-Thin Books site, but some of the most interesting books from the year are doorstoppers weighing in at 300 pages and up (and The Old Bunch crushing the scales at over 950 pages). I doubt anyone will have time to squeeze one of these in during the week, but they’re worth keeping in mind if you’re looking to sink your teeth into a big fat slice of 1930s prose fiction.

• Low Company by Daniel Fuchs

Low Company is the third novel in Fuchs’ trilogy set in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, an area where the first generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are watching the second assimilate the ways and morals of the new country. In this case, however, the scene shifts slightly, to what Fuchs calls Neptune Beach (used as the title of the British edition) but is recognizable as Coney Island. As Jonathan Lethem wrote in his introduction to the 2006 David R. Godine reissue of the trilogy, “Fuchs’ Williamsburg is full of Communists and bookies, wanna-be Edisons hoping to make a fortune, young lovers trysting in McCarren Park on hot nights, Talmudic scholars, jewelers, and crooks — he wrote a world, now a lost world.” The story takes place over two days and centers on a soda parlor frequented by numerous characters high and low, including Shubunka, the operator of a string of cheap brothels, Moe Karty, a bookie running an off-track betting shop in the back, and Spitzbergen, a tenement landlord. There’s racketeering, robbery, murder, and enough desperation to fill two decent films noir. So it’s not surprising that Hollywood bought the film rights to the book and lured Fuchs out west to work as a screenwriter (among his credits is the Burt Lancaster-Yvonne de Carlo scorcher Criss Cross, one of the very best noirs, IMHO).

• The Chute by Albert Halper

The chute in Halper’s novel is the funnel through which tens of thousands of packages drop every day in the Chicago mail order house in which the story is set. It’s surprising that no one has reissued this novel recently, or at least commented on how accurately it presages Amazon’s massive warehouses and its brutal attempts to turn its workers into machinery. The Chute may have been written seventy years before one-click shopping, but Halper’s descriptions will seem sickeningly familiar to anyone who’s read an account of an Amazon warehouse:

The door had brought him upon the proscenium of a vast disorder, a jungle of belts. High and low belts stretched and criss-crossed, carrying merchandise in streams; and rollers, moving the belts swiftly, made a sound like angry surf. Into this world he went forward, threading his way. Suddenly he caught sight of the chute terminal and stood rooted, seeing a tremendous black mouth! Towering eighteen feet above the floor level, the opening was immense, the biggest mouth on the earth! Merchandise was pouring from it like lava, rushing into troughs. Mounted high on a wooden platform, and working desperately, a crew of ten separators were diverting the flowing mass with long wooden prongs. They stood there, long-armed, rangy young fellows, prodding the merchandise on. The troughs radiated cunningly, going to all corners of the vast floor. The packages, falling of their own weight from the chute-mouth, zoomed along the inclines at breakneck speed. It was uncanny seeing so many bundles, of their own volition careening with such dispatch. From the mouth, the merchandise, rushing out, zoomed forth with a roar. A landslide was falling, a landslide of goods.

Decades before workplace safety became regulated, the employees of the Golden Rule Company take terrible risks to keep up the expected pace of collection, packing, and shipping (that great black chute will be fed), knowing that the root of the problem is the company’s attempts to cut corners by reducing staff. One worker jokes to a visiting efficiency expert, “I could work twice as fast with four hands!” “I can’t say I like the spirit of your personnel this morning,” the expert remarks to the floor manager. The Chute could probably stand a bit of editing (558 pages), but it’s a Dreiserian feast of characters and commerce, both mostly seen at their worst.

• Pie in the Sky by Arthur Calder-Marshall

This is Calder-Marshall’s magnum opus, nearly 500 pages long, a mosaic cutting across 1930s England from high to low. His title comes from the I.W.W. song that mocks the attitudes of industrialists like the factory owner in this novel: “Work and play/Live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!” Calder-Marshall captures England beginning to feel the force of organized labor, beginning to overturn the status quo of the Industrial Age:

In the old days, the atmosphere in the mill and the office had been at least superficially pleasant. Antagonisms were turned outwards, against other mills, producing, so the Yorke people maintained, inferior good at sometimes higher prices. But now the enemy was within: not the competitor or rival business, but the employer, the man at the top. Even Joynson, whose technical training had led him to identify his interests with Carder’s began to veer over to his subordinates. Like most educated subordinates, he became discontented as soon as he lost the illusion of not being a subordinate.

Calder-Marshall was no Orwell, however. Though he captures the mood and tone of everyone from the factory owner perplexed by his now-combative workers to the workers themselves, to idealistic Communists and camp followers merely in it for the thrill of rebellion, to the workers falling further and further behind as their wages fail to keep up with the cost of living, he has empathy for all his characters and none of the discontent of the I.W.W. song he quotes. Pie in the Sky is a rich but perhaps not fully satisfying meal.

• The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner

In his introduction to the 1990 Merlin Radical Fictions edition of The Wild Goose Chase, Andrew Cramp includes among Rex Warner’s influences in the book “Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Eisenstein, and Fritz Lang.” There is something for everyone in the nearly-700 pages of this book. Warner later translated numerous works of classical Greek and Latin and retold classical myths in modern English, and all of his novels share a certain timeless character. The book’s title, however, is literal: in the opening chapters, three brothers, Rudolph, David, and George set out on a hunt for a wild goose. Except it’s also a metaphor. As the book goes on, each leaves their home town on a search for something like the meaning or purpose of life. David’s is a spiritual quest; George’s is both political and sexual; and Rudolph…well, Rudolph is what we’d call an upperclass twit, the sort of airhead who sets out on his quest with a near-empty tank of gas. Warner dabbled in Communism, partly influenced by his friend, the poet C. Day Lewis, but his own vision was of a world beyond politics. When George rises up to speak to a crowd of demonstrators near the end of the book, his target is not something concrete like industrialists or totalitarianism but a hodgepodge of the major and minor:

What our old leaders most respected we chiefly despise a frantic assertion of an ego, do-nothings, the over-cleanly, deliberate love making, literary critics, moral philosophers, ballroom dancing, pictures of sunsets, money, the police; and to what they used to despise we attach great value — to comradeship, and to profane love, to hard work, honesty, the sight of the sun, reverence for those who have helped us, animals, flesh and blood.

I confess I have never managed to finish The Wild Goose Chase, not managing to find quite enough of the first three influences cited by Andrew Cramp.

• Spanish Prelude by Jenny Ballou

Mostly forgotten in the wake of the Spanish Civil War is the revolution of October 1934, which shifted the still-new Spanish republic sharply to the left following a series of violent strikes and fostered the reactionary movements that culminated in Franco’s revolt and the civil war three years later. Spanish Prelude is a large canvas on which the lead-up to the October 1934 revolution are portrayed. It won a Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship for Ballou, and although the book is not strictly autobiographical, it’s fiction based heavily on personal experience, the years Ballou spent in Spain in the first half of the 1930s. The timing of its publication, however, was unfortunate: by the time the book came out, Spain was at war and no one much cared to read about what happened beforehand. Especially when many of her characters were well-intentioned by ineffectual intellectuals neither willing to confront the status quo nor willing to side with it. If anything, Spanish Prelude may remind some of Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War trilogy with its cast of eccentrics very much swept up by the broom of history:

Julia’s husband was one of those critics who in a long journey in art had lost all their critical senses. The discoverer of the already discovered, his criticisms were learned, ecstatic, and mediocre. The only time I was able with any sincerity to congratulate him on the appearance of an article, Julia confessed to me she had given him the main idea. For she had none of that coarse loyalty that makes women pretend publicly to a slavish admiration of their husbands in order to further them in their careers. She aired all his faults, lovingly, and said she knew him as well as though she had given him birth. In her frank criticism, she admitted that it was she herself who was the most keen psychologist of our times and that her own intuition for art was infallible.

The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

• The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

This is the saga of the first and second generation of Jews in Chicago. Levin follows a group of twenty high school friends and classmates from their graduation in 1920 through the closing of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934. Two become doctors, one a lawyer. Others go into politics or journalism. Some of the women marry, happily or not, one ends up as a prostitute, another as a slum landlady. One becomes a union organizer, another a strike buster.

There was a model of an atom. Stemming out on wires from the dense nucleus were little corks representing electrons. And in life, all were in motion. Exactly like the planets — in the solar systems, Alvin reflected; the electrons moved in their excited orbits, turned and whirled on themselves. There was only one simple pattern, repeated in various dimensions, — in various thematic treatments, in the shapes and movements — of life. And if the electrons in a body-atom moved on the same general scheme as planets in a sky-system, why couldn’t you say that the human being, on his social plane, moved in the same kind of pattern? Why couldn’t you view society as a physical pattern, and people as these excited electrons, circling around their nuclei? And each bunch of electrons, forming a social atom, joined in motion with similar atoms, forming a class of society; and the classes of society, whirled into a planetary unit, were humanity, and where was humanity going?

Alvah Bessie, then a Communist and later a member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, gave it a rave review in New Masses, calling it “long an infinitely satisfying. Another reviewer said it was “required reading for any understanding of Jewish life in America.” James T. Farrell, himself no slouch at writing large and complex Chicago novels, wrote that The Old Bunch was “one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists.” In a survey of novels of Jewish American life, Harold Strauss called it, “a landmark in the development of the realistic novel.” Several questionable paperback reissues (from presses with such inspiring names as Rancho Lazarus and Waking Lion) have been published in recent years, but you’re better off looking for a cheap version of the 1937 hardback or the hardback reissue put out in 1959 to coincide with Levin’s best-selling novel based on the Leopold & Loeb murder, Compulsion. The Old Bunch will keep you going for the better part of a month and it’ll be worth it.

• Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts

The four-thirty train from Victoria on which Cecil Roberts’ passenger depart is headed for Austria and then on, in separate collections of cars to Rome, Athens, Budapest, and Istanbul, and his novel would have been a perfect companion for this trip. It’s a classic Ship of Fools or Grand Hotel formula: take a diverse set of characters, each with agendas hidden or overt, pack them into a (relatively) small space for a while, and watch what happens. And this is certainly a diverse set: a great Austrian conductor; a great lady from Belgravia; a war hero still suffering from combat stress; a conniving waiter; a pregnant stowaway; a mysterious Turkish millionaire; even the King of Slavonia (1937 was too late for Ruritania):

When the express was divided at Buda-Pest [bonus points for any novel that spell it Buda-Pest], one part going east towards Brasso for Bucharest, the other south for Belgrade and Nish, branching thence for Salonica and Athens, or Sofia and Constantinople, little Prince Sixpenny was fast asleep, for it was midnight. He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, served in their private compartment, and eaten in the presence of M’sieur Stanovich and Colonel Tetrovich. The meal finished, Miss Wiison had appeared and put him to bed. He was train-weary and had scarcely eaten all day. He had got the truth at last from M’sieur Stanovich. His father had been killed by a bomb thrown under his horse as he had ridden out from the Palace to attend some Army manceuvres. He had been killed instantly. So he was now the King of Slavonia.

There is nothing the least bit serious about Victoria Four-Thirty — nor should there be. Seriousness is quite out of place here. Arthur Hailey wrote this book thirty years later, only he called it Airport. There is a proper place in the world for novels that are chock full of characters, enormously entertaining, and will never change the world or your mind. This is one of them.

• Imperial City by Elmer Rice

… And here’s another, perhaps my favorite guilty pleasure read of all. Back in 2014, I wrote this about Imperial City:

It’s got something for nearly everyone: a murder in a crowded night-club; a race riot; a raid on a high-class whore house; adultery (both hetero- and homosexual); a solo flight across the Atlantic that ends tragically; a protest by undergraduates at Columbia; an unsuccessful hold-up and high-speed getaway; a black-out that cripples Manhattan just as a sickly child is undergoing an emergency surgery. Something’s happening on nearly every page, and with close to 600 pages, that’s a lot of action.

A good New York City novel ought to be bursting at the seams with energy, and that’s definitely the case with Imperial City. Here is just one paragraph out of thousands, as a foursome of wealthy socialites goes slumming on the boardwalk at Coney Island:

They strolled along in the laughing, voluble crowd. Everyone’s jaws were moving; those who were not munching ice cream cones and hot dogs or licking lollypops were industriously chewing gum. The air was thick with the smells of brine, pickles, sauerkraut, spiced sausage-meat, sizzling lard and human exhalations. People shoved and trod on each other’s toes to reach the booths where stentorian vendors extolled the merits of popcorn and pink spun sugar and Eskimo pies. Spectators stood five deep behind the players of skee-ball, Japanese ping-pong and coney races. There were long queues waiting to buy tickets for the Old Mill, the Love Ride, the jolting little electric auto-racers, the barrel in which a mortorcyclist risked death, the créche where prematurely born babies were displayed in incubators. In the swimming pools of the large bathing establishments the divers shouted and splashed. Elinor hated it all.

Imperial City is too long to squeeze in during the #1937Club, but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a big, fat novel that lets you escape to 1930s Manhattan for a couple of weeks. It’s no worse than Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and a lot more grown-up fun.

The Roundabout by Michael Allwright (1968)

Cover of the Macmillan (UK) hardback edition of The Roundabout.

This year, I have been running the Wafer-Thin Books reading group with James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic) and promised myself that I would take this as an opportunity to be more succinct in my posts. But I quickly discovered that, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, it’s often harder to write something short than something long. Nevertheless, I will attempt to keep this and subsequent posts about some of the neglected wafer-thin books (under 150 pages long) that I’ve been reading this year.

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of Neighbors.

I’ll start with one I just finished, a tattered and price-stickered paperback published by Modern Promotions (“A Division of UniSystems”) in 1969 under the title of Neighbors. Neighbors is the American title of The Roundabout, originally published in the UK by Macmillan in 1968. I doubt I would have picked it up were it not for the following blurb from Brigid Brophy:

I greatly admire Neighbors [I’m sure she wrote The Roundabout], which takes up the universal nightmare feeling, “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong” and spins it into a very elegant, economical and scarifying little trap for the imagination.

Brigid Brophy, in my opinion, was a writer whose critical judgments you can take to the bank, so I was happy to spend a buck on the book and add it to my growing pile of wafer-thinners in anticipation of this year.

This morning, I picked it up to get a dozen or so pages tucked in and ended up reading it straight through. This is a riveting little book that manages to squeeze three different narrators and at least four different perspectives into 138 pages. There aren’t a lot of books on the theme of “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong,” but boy, do they tend to be good ones: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. And you can add this one to the list.

Cover of U.K. paperback edition of The Roundabout.

Mathew, a naive and odd young man, takes a room at Mrs. Haines’ house. Within his first day there, he notices, through the curtains in the window of the house next door, just fifteen feet away, that someone is watching him. He learns that this is Mrs. Shawburn, a heavy-set middle-aged woman whose husband is blind and almost deaf. He speaks to her over the backyard hedge, has tea with her and Mr. Shawburn, who’s obsessed with horse-racing, and believes she tries to kiss him impulsively as she shows him out the door. He becomes convinced that Mrs. Shawburn has designs on him and then, when he notices that the couple isn’t taking their usual walk on Wednesday evenings, that she’s murdered her husband.

Some of this is true. Or partly true. Some of it is utterly, totally mistaken. The root problem is fundamental in our make-up as humans: what you see and what I see can differ dramatically. And as dramatic as the relevations are by the halfway point in The Roundabout, there are even bigger ones waiting in the second half. This is a delicious wafer-thin slice of nastiness, a superb evening’s read.

Michael Allwright, 1968.

Michael Allwright was a South African journalist who said that he came up with the idea for The Roundabout from playing a game of “What If?” with a friend. Though his dustjacket bio says he was working on a second novel, I can’t find any evidence that one was ever published.

The Roundabout is available on the Internet Archive: Link.

The Roundabout by Michael Allwright
London: Macmillan, 1968
London: Panther, 1969

Published in the U.S. as Neighbors
New York: Walker and Company, 1968
New York: Modern Promotions, 1969

March 1, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain (1936)

“Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light colored girl. Must be neat and obliging.”

“Well, Lydia,” said the woman seated at the desk, “what’s happened? Didn’t that job do?”

The young coloured girl stood before her, quietly dressed, straight and tall, her colour light as a Spanish beauty’s.

‘Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I didn’t take that job. I just didn’t take it. That’s all.”

The woman rapped the desk with the end of her pencil.

“You know you can’t pick and choose in times like these,” she slid sharply. She picked up a card from the box-index, and read it out with bitter emphasis: “Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light coloured girl. Must be neat and obliging. Now what,” she said impatiently, “did you find to object to?”

“Nothing,” said the tall girl. “I didn’t do no objecting at all. He wanted a girl to sleep there at night. I likes to go home. That’s all.”

“Well,” snapped the woman at the desk, “if you want work, Lvdia, you’ll have to make some concessions.”

“I makes concessions every day I lives,” said Lydia, “but I do like to sleep the night alone. This doctor, he don’t want to sleep alone. That’s what the neat and obliging means.”

The woman’s face flushed dark with anger.

“You people have no sense of truth!” she said. “Don’t come here talking about an eminent man like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such an excuse!”

This sketch, from the the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, is one of the most powerful in the entire book. Pregnant with her third child, Boyle found herself with the burden of filling the many gaps in the collection left by contributions that were never submitted and contributions fundamentally out of keeping with the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day. And so, perhaps in desperation as pieces failed to arrive in response to requests, she began reaching out to everyone she knew — friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and in this case, her mother, Katherine.

It makes me long for the book Katherine Boyle never wrote. “I makes concessions every day I lives” is such a stunning statement. Matter-of-fact, resigned to the situation yet never failing to bear witness to its fundamental injustice. It’s a perfect example of the kind of breathtaking writing that jumps out of the pages of this remarkable collection.

365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936

We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them

A surveyor ready to explore the wilds of southern California, circa 1890.

Apoorva Tadepalli published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times recently, titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them.” As anyone who’s familiar with this site can imagine, this was an article I read with interest. For over forty years, I’ve been fascinated with looking for forgotten writers and reading their books, a fascination that I’ve used this site since 2006 to share, a fascination that led in 2021 to the creation of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press and my own rescue of a few of my discoveries. So I was eager to learn what Tadepalli had to say and agreed enthusiastically with some of it. But I hope she will allow me the right to quote some of her points and offer my thoughts in response.

“Critics,” she writes, “play a role in determining which books published today should be branded ‘instant classics,’ which authors are best described as ‘little-known’ and which books published in past decades or centuries merit re-examination.”

Ah, if it were this simple. The role of critics in the publishing process is almost entirely post-natal. When a book is first published, critics can influence its sales and its reception by the reading public by what they say in reviews, but few publishers consult any critic when deciding to reissue a book that’s been out of print — and in most cases, consequently out of any critical conversation — for some time. What a reissue publisher, at least any not exclusively targeting an academic audience and sales to university libraries, considers are three questions foremost: Is the book good (meaning of sufficient merit to justify being associated with the imprint)? Is the book in the public domain or are the rights attainable for a reasonable price? Will enough readers buy the book to recoup costs and, with some luck, earn a profit?

The first question — merit — is in the critic’s territory only to the extent that the football is in the territory of a fan watching the game. Except in this case, the stands are deserted, aside perhaps from a lone die-hard or two. We owe the rediscovery of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, for example, to the fact that Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler, two of the more prominent critics of the time, both named the book as one of “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years” when queried by The American Scholar magazine. Their enthusiasm for Roth’s novel, along with Irving Howe’s (another influential critic) convinced Avon Books to reissue the book — accompanied by a remarkable amount of advertising, for a paperback edition of a forgotten book, in places like The Saturday Review of Literature.

In the same American Scholar article, however, Morris Bishop, who brought Vladimir Nabokov to Cornell and whose credentials as both critic and scholar are equal to anyone else’s in his generation, recommended Geoffrey Dennis’ The End of the World, a survey of postulations about how the world would end that won the 1930 Hawthornden Prize as the best work of “imaginative literature” published in the U.K. Geoffrey Dennis wrote nine books between 1922 and 1957, all of them getting favorable reviews and none quite like the others in subject, genre, or style. But Morris Bishop’s recommendation did nothing to change Geoffrey Dennis’ fate. All but his as-yet unpublished last book, Till Seven, were out of print in 1956; almost 70 years later, all his books, including Till Seven, are out of print now, and I doubt any working critic on either side of the Atlantic knows his name, let alone the merit of his books. (I have four of his books, by the way, and I would say they’re all intriguing but not immediately gripping, which is why I haven’t made it past page 20 in any of them.)

The second question — availability of rights — is of no interest whatsoever to the critic. If a book he or she loves remains out of print due to difficulties in obtaining the necessary permissions, it may frustrate them but it probably won’t inspire them to set off on the hunt. Unfortunately, for a publisher interested in staying out of civil court, it’s a crucial consideration. Even in the U.K., which has the advantage of a national database of wills, it can be practically impossible to track down who has inherited the copyrights from a dead author. The database, for one thing, is incomplete. There are millions of wills missing. There are plenty of writers who failed recognize their copyrights as inheritable assets and didn’t bother to mention them in the will. And there are plenty of writers who simply didn’t bother to have a will drawn up in the first place. Every publisher involved in the reissue business can name a dozen or more writers they’d love to publish, if only they could find legatees empowered to sign the necessary contracts.

So, we come to the last question: Will enough readers buy the book? This is always a bit of a gamble. Some publishers who specialize in reissuing forgotten books — Persephone, for example — rely heavily on brand loyalty, on a body of readers who will buy a new title out of a base of positive experience with previous books. People scan lists of forthcoming titles from NYRB Classics because they’ve come to trust that their books are going to be well-written, of original style and subject, and well-packaged. Readers operate to a great extent on what statisticians call persistence. If I’ve read three Agatha Christie novels and enjoyed them, I am much more likely to continue buying Agatha Christie novels. Publishers know this and play to it in their choice of books and their presentation of them. Harper Collins uses design templates to make sure that one Poirot novel looks like another. Harlequin Romances and their ilk are the extreme examples of publishing for persistence. I remember once overhearing a conversation between two Harlequin fans in a bookstore (“Oh, 47! I’ve been looking for this!” “You’d like 63, then, or 94”).

But how does a publisher get a reader who knows nothing about the book, the writer, or the publisher’s reputation to look at, let alone buy it? If the publisher has a respectable checking account, they can flood critics, bloggers, BookTok influencers, magazines, and stores with copies and marketing materials to try to win precious review column inches or display table space or staff guinea pig readers. If the publisher is just getting by — which is most of them — then it comes down to developing a reputation, word-of-mouth enthusiasm, and luck.

To summarize, reading forgotten books, and even writing and talking about them, does almost nothing to get anyone else to read them. Just look at this site. Of the hundreds of books I’ve featured here, most are still out of print and forgotten. Once in a while someone reads a piece here that inspires them to go out and find a used copy and read it, and sometimes they even contact me to let me know. But, I am sorry to inform Tadepalli, it’s not enough to read forgotten geniuses. They truly do have to be rescued. And that is the role of the publisher.

She also argues that the literary world overuses “unjustly neglected” as way of trying to justify why a writer’s work is being brought back to print, or worse, of trying to shame critics and readers into paying attention. Which is an absolutely fair criticism. Too often, this comes with a mantle of victimhood. The writer was neglected due to a prevailing prejudice or even some conscious or unconscious conspiracy to slight his or her work and preserve the prestige and sales of established favorites. This is often a simplistic and unhelpful interpretation, however, because it ignores practical factors that often play an even more important role in whether a writer stays in print or falls into oblivion. Herbert Clyde Lewis published a remarkable anti-war fable, Spring Offensive, set in the no-man’s land between France and Germany during the “Phony War.” It hit the bookstores on Monday, May 6, 1940. On Thursday, May 9, 1940, Germany invaded France, ending the Phony War and eliminating most Americans’ interest in anti-war fables. Hitler certainly wasn’t concerned about Herbie Lewis’ little book. It was just a matter of bad timing.

But Tadepalli is looking at the situation through the wrong end of the telescope. The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between.

If people today are going to read a book that lies in the dark, overgrown thickets on either side of the path of the canon, someone has to pick up a machete and start exploring. That exploration is not guaranteed to be fruitful. Just like scientific experimentation, reading a long out of print book, even one that got rave reviews when it came out, isn’t necessarily going to result in another “unjustly neglected” masterpiece worthy of being read today. But without the search, nothing that isn’t already familiar will ever be found.

I have been searching for neglected books for over forty years and the one thing I can say with unshakeable confidence is that there are more great (and even just seriously good) books out there in the thickets off the beaten path of the canon than I or anyone else can ever hope to discover. Because that is the fate of most books and writers: to be forgotten — regardless of their merit or whether they “resonate” with today’s readers. “Unjustly neglected” is not an overused trope of academia and the publishing world: it’s the lot of many, many more writers than all of today’s reissue publishers will ever be able to bring back to print, more than all of today’s readers will ever be able to appreciate.

But that doesn’t mean those books don’t exist or don’t matter or don’t have connections to the canon or don’t illuminate some aspect of our lives. Their writers just weren’t lucky enough to make the journey from being new and unknown to being securely established in the canon seamlessly in the way that Charles Dickens or T. S. Eliot or Doris Lessing did. This is the problem with the canon: it’s short-sighted, erratic, and unreliable. As Tadepalli notes, even Moby Dick, which some would call the greatest American novel, was out of print and forgotten for decades until it was recognized as “unjustly neglected” and rescued by Lewis Mumford, and published as #119 in the Modern Library series.

It’s true that the books and writers that make it into the canon and stay are, generally, good and relevant. But the corollary to this principle is not: what’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected. Which leaves us with label “unjustly neglected” to apply to the works that we pull from the vast territory of forgotten book and bring back into today’s conversation. If it seems to be overused, that’s only because some folks fail to recognize that there’s more good literature that’s forgotten than not. “To only consume art that was created in our lifetimes is a terrifying thought,” Tadepalli writes. I would say that the same is true if we only consume art that is considered to be in the canon. But many readers won’t go looking beyond what’s familiar (hell, many men still don’t bother to read anything written by women), which is why we need searchers and reporters to find what’s been forgotten and reissue publishers to bring it back into the realm of the familiar.

Repent in Haste (1945): John P. Marquand and the Context of No Context

Repent in Haste by John P. Marquand (1945)
Cover of first edition of Repent in Haste.

There was a time when John P. Marquand was considered the best novelist of manners in America, even — according to a Chicago Sun review quoted on the dust jacket of Repent in Haste, “the best novelist in the country.” He never made such claims for himself, and regretted Little, Brown’s decision to use the Chicago Sun quote, since it only encouraged critics to sharpen their quills, and particularly unfortunate when used to sell so slight a book.

Just 152 pages long, Repent in Haste is undermined by several things, starting with its title. It’s obviously a play on the adage, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” and its slender plot is about a Navy pilot who marries a pretty, convivial blonde soon after meeting her at a dance, and then learns that while he’s been out in the Pacific, she’s taken up with an old boyfriend. In fact, it’s not even slender: it’s threadbare and an unsteady skeleton upon which to hang the real story, which is about the death of chivalry.

Well, chivalry may be too grand of a word to put on it. Marquand grew up on a poorer fringe of proper Boston society, the long-standing Old New England establishing where the Lowells talked only to Cabots, and the Cabots talked only to God, as they used to say. They being people like Marquand who lived on the fringes, since the core members of Boston society were so entitled that they were oblivious to their entitlement. As a young man in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he had to go hat in hand to the home of Mr. L. P. Dodge to beg for one of the scholarships given by the Harvard Club to needy young Newburyporters. He didn’t get it, though his family did manage to scrape together enough money to send him anyway.

Marquand was just three years older than F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in comparing the two men, those years put them into different generations. Marquand graduated from Harvard in 1915, which meant he was able to join the National Guard and serve in France as an artillery officer after the U.S. entered the war, while Fitzgerald never got closer to the trenches than Long Island. Where Fitzgerald achieved huge success with his first book, This Side of Paradise, Marquand spent almost twenty years churning out workmanlike magazine stories and adventure novels, including his Mr. Moto detective books, before attaining critical and commercial success on a scale equivalent to Fitzgerald’s with The Late George Apley (1937). Apley, which was a conscious satire of proper Boston society, along with his next novels, Wickford Point (1939) and H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), all of them set around Boston, forever marked him as a specialist in a certain time and place.

But that characterization is a mistake. What Marquand is, more than anything, is a specialist in the experience of being on the brink of change. And that’s where the comparison with Fitzgerald is most illuminating. Both Fitzgerald and Marquand would make enough money from their writing to buy their way, at least temporarily in Fitzgerald’s case, into a “better class.” The difference is that Fitzgerald quickly lost any illusions about the qualities of this class. Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby smash up things and creatures and then retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess.”

Marquand and most of his protagonists, on the other hand, may no longer really believe in the old orders but when they look into the future, they see a nihilism that causes them to grab the few certainties they still understand and hold on for dear life. William Briggs, the correspondent who takes Marquand’s place as the observer in Repent in Haste, wants to believe that Lt. Jimmy Boyden, the Navy pilot he befriends, holds onto the same certainties:

They both must have read the American Boy magazine, and The Adventures of Frank Merriwell, and the works of the late Ralph Henry Barbour. They both must have learned not to lie, and not to go back on the crowd. No matter who you might be, you were exposed to certain precepts of conduct. You learned the Lord’s Prayer, and that Christ had risen from the dead, and that you must pledge allegiance to the flag, and that we had fought the British and gained our independence because we could lick anybody in the world.

But the war Marquand and Briggs had known in 1917-1918 and the one experienced by millions like Boyden were fundamentally different. As Marquand had seen on his reporting trips to the Pacific, the scale of the operations could only make one thing in terms of machines and factories producing on a massive scale. The flotilla Briggs sees before the assault on Ulithi “was the greatest concentration of warships that the world had ever seen. They extended over the rims of the horizon, so many that he wondered how an organization could exist that could supply and group and count them and send them on their way.” No wonder that Briggs finds himself thinking not of the soldiers and sailors as individuals but as “a bulk of expendable human material.”

Repent in Haste - Bantam paperback edition
Repent in Haste – Bantam paperback edition.

Briggs first meets Boyden at a press conference organized at Pearl Harbor, where reporters hear from a dozen or so recent medal winners about their exploits. Except the men are embarrassed and taciturn and the reporters frustrated at the attempt to feed them material. “These boys would never be able to put their thoughts into words,” Briggs thinks. He runs into Boyden later, though, and the flyer cajoles Briggs into paying a visit to his parents and wife in East Orange, New Jersey when he returns to New York City.

When he does, he finds Boyden’s parents and their home stereotypes of mid-century American middle-class life, with all its accoutrements: “There were antimacassars on the parlor chairs and the radio had Jacobean legs and an inlaid front and the gas stove would cook without watching and there was an automatic electric toaster and an electric percolator in the breakfast nook.” When he visits Daisy, the wife, however, he finds her having an open affair with another Navy officer and intent on getting a divorce as quickly as possible — and she convinces Briggs to carry the bad news back to the Pacific.

The news proves harder for Briggs to deliver than Boyden to take. Boyden shrugs it off as just one of those things that happen during a war. Boyden’s nonchalance, his near-apathy toward the deaths of some of his fellow pilots and crewmen, staggers Briggs. “Did you ever get to thinking what anything was about?” Briggs asks — meaning, does he ever think about why he was fighting, what he hoped to see in the peace afterward. Boyden replies, “What the hell do you mean, what anything was about?” (When he had asked General George Patton a similar question during the battle for Sicily, Patton had snapped, “All this God-damn tripe about the four freedoms!”)

Repent in Haste - Popular Library edition.
Repent in Haste – Popular Library edition.

Neither Briggs nor Marquand knows what to do when faced with this utter disregard for the old certainties and values they had grown up with, had held onto for the lack of any others (chasing after material rewards and filthy lucre being, of course, beyond the pale, or at least, the domain of the lowest of all types: New Money). Edmund Wilson noted this failure in his New Yorker review:

The story creates suspense; it has point; it is based on first-hand observation and conscientiously accurate reporting; and it says something rather intelligent about the difference between the older generation of Americans and the young generation of the war. The only trouble is that, here, as elsewhere, Mr. Marquand hasn’t the literary vocation — or maybe metier is the better word. A novel by Sinclair Lewis, however much it may be open to objection, is at least a book by a writer — that is, a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modelling of a particular artist’s hand. But a novel by J. P. Marquand is simply a neat pile of typewritten manuscript.

That last comment stung Marquand. He didn’t claim to be a great novelist, but he felt his work was more than a pile of typewriting. But if Repent in Haste is a failure, it because neither character nor author could imagine how to carry on in a world where the old certainties were replaced by … nothing. As John Gross puts it in his survey of Marquand’s work, “If the Jimmy Boydens represent the future, then what kind of future could it possibly be with nothing surviving from the past which a middle-aged correspondent could recognize as familiar?”

This question ties to the subject of the book I read just before Repent in Haste, George W.S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context. Trow’s book — the 1997 edition, that is — is built around the title essay, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1980. Trow’s essay argued that television, more than any other development in his lifetime, replaced a system of values where context mattered with one where “the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.” Trow’s critical argument has not, I think, aged well, particularly since the world of television in 1980 is now as old and past as the world of George Apley and William Briggs was in 1980.

What is far more interesting about Trow’s book, particularly in the context (sorry) of Marquand’s book, is his introductory essay, “Collapsing Dominant.” Unlike “Within the Context,” this piece is far more autobiographical. And one of the autobiographical elements specifically relates to Marquand, whose son Trow knew as a classmate at Exeter and whose books were read by his father and his classmates’ fathers: the fedora-wearing men of the Establishment as it existed after the war. Trow calls Marquand’s Point of No Return (1949) the most important novel of the Marquand-John O’Hara oeuvre:

It tells the story of a man from the milieu I am describing whose values are in conflict. He has taken his liberal arts education (the one owned by the upper class) seriously; on the other hand, he is in competition for high office at his bank. Which way will he go? The story is poignant from the point of view of this moment. No one who showed the mildest suggestion of the kind of conflictedness Marquand’s hero was feeling could get in the door of his bank now.

In 1951, Philip Hamburger published a profile of Marquand in The New Yorker. Its subtitle, “A Portrait in the Form of a Novel” was inspired by Apley’s subtitle, “A Novel in the Form of a Memoir,” and even its cover design echoed that of Apley. In it, Hamburger deliberately aped Marquand’s style, both of prose and of structure, working flashbacks into the framework of one day’s journey from New York City to Newburyport that “Allison Craig” (Hamburger) takes with Marquand. The day culminates in Marquand’s presentation of a paper to the Tuesday Club at the very same house where he’d gone to ask Mr. L. P. Dodge for that Harvard scholarship. Now, he is no longer the supplicant. He has been accepted into the fold:

They told him quietly how fond of him they were; how glad they were that he had gone out to the far corners of the world, had written his books, and had brought back just such knowledge as he had displayed this evening. Marquand looked as gratified as a man receiving an honorary degree from the college in his home town. After all, it was something to have best sellers behind one, to read a paper, to be among friends, to have made good. And yet, Marquand felt in his heart a sadness about the past. The past was there, and the past was real, and it could never be wiped out.

And there we have it, the bow with which Hamburger neatly secures his portrait of Marquand. Marquand is the voice of those who feel that the past is here, the past is real, and can never be wiped out.

Others studied Newburyport in even more detail that Marquand. Over the course of two decades starting in the 1930s, W. Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt led a team of sociologists that conducted extensive interviews and surveys of the inhabitants of what they referred to as “Yankee City.” As reported in their first book on the project, The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941), Warner and Lunt saw this same attitude defining how traditions were not only passed along but used to enforce the status quo:

The young are dependent upon the old for learning the social tradition and for acquiring their social status. This domination of the young by the old insures social stability over successive generations and thus maintains the continuity of a social system

The subordination of the young by the old enables their indoctrination and preserves established values. But what William Briggs encounters in the Pacific is a situation in which the very expendability of the young gives them the privilege to reject those values.

George Trow saw this from another angle. The established values shaken by the war simply could not survive. What can never be wiped out is not the past but change: “I realize now that I am a man from a broken tradition who was convinced by the theater of a moment that his tradition was unbroken and that he was the heir to it.” When he and his classmates arrived at Exeter in 1957, they were “being asked to pretend that the moral dilemmas of a Marquand Hero were alive and kicking, which they were not.” By 1980, when his classmates had children the same age, none of them remembered what the dilemmas of a Marquand Hero were.

But neither Trow nor Hamburger give Marquand due credit for observing, if not fully understanding, as Edmund Wilson was. That paper Marquand delivered to the Tuesday Club at Mr. L. P. Dodge’s house in Newburyport, where the members of the club assured Marquand that the past was real, was “Ascension Island.” It’s reprinted in Thirty Years, and it’s worth quoting to illustrate that Marquand — like his fictional counterpart Briggs — could see the materialistic future, the future where the context was not “no context” but commerce in place of tradition:

Whenever I hear someone say that there is no unified national spirit and no culture in the United States, I think of our airports in Africa, India and the Pacific. It may be true that the Englishman far from home dresses for dinner and has his Number One Boy bring in his gin and tonic, but in all his centuries of colonizing he has never brought his civilization with him wholesale, as our armed forces have brought theirs in this war. Machine shops, plumbing, air conditioning, outdoor movies, ping-pong tables, boxing rings, Time, Newsweek, the weekly comics, Pocket Books, Gillette razors, Williams’ Aqua Velva, Rheingold beer, Johnson’s baby powder, Spam and Planters’ peanuts, all followed our army to the war for the edification of dark-skinned men in G-strings and for the shocked amazement of the French and British.

By the time Marquand presented this paper, he had taken the trip reported in “Return to the Stone Age,” also in Thirty Years. He returns to the same airfield on Kwajelein Island that William Briggs lands on in Repent in Haste. In just four years, all of this has become as expendable as Briggs’ human material:

It had been a boom town when I had seen it in the early months of 1945, one of the main crossroads of the Pacific, and it was a ghost town now. The temporary barracks, which except for the runways and roads, crowded nearly every available square foot of this coral islet, were not built for the moist and humid air of the central Pacific. Every bit of metal on the island was already in advanced stages of corrosion. Water coolers and letter files were crumbling. Typewriters only had a few months’ lifespan. Even a bronze plaque in the island chapel, placed to commemorate the dead in the island invasion, was already almost illegible. Worse still, the hardware, the nails and screws holding the buildings together, the locks and doorknobs, were all beginning to give way.

Marquand clearly saw the same evanescence of “tradition” and “the past” as George Trow. What Repent in Haste demonstrates, sadly, is that instead of attempting to understand what happens when the past is wiped out, he — like his heroes — just held on tighter to the very things that were disappearing.

Repent in Haste, by John P. Marquand
Boston: Little, Brown, 1945

Soul Wounds, by Al Schak (1934)

Soul Wounds by Al Schak (1934)

I’m often asked how I find the books I write about. And no matter what I say, I know the only truthful answer is, “Serendipity.” It’s hard to look for something you don’t know about. Instead, you stumble across it. This is one reason I love a well-stocked used bookstore, particularly one that’s only loosely organized. I’m fortunate in living just down the road from one of the West’s hidden treasures, the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton. I’ve probably scoured its shelves at least twenty times over the years, but interesting things still pop up out of nowhere on every visit.

Most recently, I came across Soul Wounds, subtitled A Novel of the World War. That subtitle alone told me that it was published before world wars had to be numbered. But what intrigued me was the fact that it was published here in Missoula, Montana. This is not a hotbed of publishing and never was. The Missoulian Publishing Company devoted its energies to putting out the town’s newspaper and only rarely published books and then mostly local interest items. There was no information about the author and if there’d ever been a dustjacket, it was long gone. So this was an unknown quantity — but then, so was the very first neglected book I ever discovered, which was also a novel about World War One: W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks.

Like Other Ranks, Soul Wounds opens in media res. Hagen, an infantryman, is slogging through the mud and the dark as his company works its way up to take position in the front line of trenches just prior to an assault. It’s still winter, so this is one of the first American units to go into combat after America’s entry into the war. Aside from a few weeks’ stay in hospital to recover from a leg wound, Hagen will remain in or near the front lines almost continuously until the Armistice and take part in at least five major assaults.

The youngster in his company — still a teen and kept out of the brothels by the other men in his unit, Hagen will, by the end of the war, be considered one of the “old men,” one of the few from the original company to survive. He will endure shelling, gas attacks, relentless gunfire, and suicidal assaults across No Man’s Land, and even manage to overtake and capture a German machine gun nest.

Like many volunteers, Hagen comes to war with naive notions. Raised in a town on Flathead Lake in Montana, his one exposure to the military prior to joining up was when his mother sewed him a little soldier suit out of a cousin’s former uniform. Herrick, a poet who was living in Paris when the war broke out, tries to straighten him out: “You check your body, your mind, your soul, at the entrance, and you leave the check as a fee for admission. Once you get in you cannot get out.”

Herrick may have been a poet before the war, but there is no poetry in Soul Wounds. Schak writes in staccato, almost telegraphic prose:

A flash, a roar, beside him. His ears almost burst. The mud reeled as something pushed him over into it. There was a sting in his left knee, his forehead felt numb and heavy. He was faint. Another roar and flash, another, another, not so near him. A shot spat into the mud in front of him. His leg was burning. Shots struck, sput, sput, the parapet before him, flicked the mud near him. They’ll keep it up, he thought, and one of them’ll get me.

Only once does Hagen knowingly kill a man. In the final weeks of the war — not final to Hagen and his fellow Doughboys, for whom the Armistice comes as a surprise — he shoots a German who has come close enough to speak to him. By then, Hagen is numb with combat fatigue:

He did not think of it for a long time. Whether he was too utterly tired to fel anything, or whether the ceaseless horror and misery had calloused him, or whether he had become so dulled by the terrific pounding on his nerves and mind and body that he had lost some of the attributes of a human being, he never knew. He never found such questions entering his sickened mind. He was to completely overwhelmed by the front to wonder what was happening inside him.

When the war does end, however, the duty does not. Hagen’s unit is among the first Allied forces sent in to occupy the Rhineland. They spend months in a Germany town near Koblenz and Hagen is billeted with a German family. He sees the photo of a German soldier on the mantelpiece — an uncle killed in the war, he learns — and begins to see the human side of his former enemy while he awaits orders to return home.

Aside from the this final chapter about the initial occupation period after the war, there are many parallels between Other Ranks and Soul Wounds. Both focus on a single young infantryman, both stay tightly bound to the experience of being in the front lines, being in combat, with few and brief episodes of rest in the rear. Both are written in spare, artless prose. And both books are highly autobiographical with few nods to fiction aside from the change of names.

Al [Bernard Alfred] Schak was born in Minnesota in 1899 to Danish immigrant parents, one of five children. His family moved to Bigfork, Montana, when he was still young. He enlisted in the Montana National Guard in 1916, even though he was underage and slight of build, and was assigned to the 163rd Infantry Regiment. His older brother Walter also enlisted after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, and the two brothers sailed for France on the S. S. Leviathan in December 1917.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Al Schak, 1938
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (L) and Al Schak, Missoula, Montana 1938.

Al served in the 163rd and later in the 26th Regiment under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He fought in six major engagements: Montidier, Cantigne, the Marne, St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, and the Meuse. He was wounded several times as well as missing in action, resulting in his mother twice being notified of his death in combat.

Sometime in the early fall of 1918, Al Schak felt the impulse to write a poem. As he later related, he borrowed a pencil, used the envelope of a letter from home, and wrote the following, which was published in the Literary Digest in October 1918:

NEAR NO MAN’S LAND

There wa’n’t no bugler there a-blowin’ taps;
The regimental chaplain, tho, was ‘round;
An’ I’m a tellin’ you as how I’m feelin’ blue,
‘Cause they put my rookie Buddy in the ground.

I showed ‘im how to do “right shoulder arms”
An’ told him all a doughboy oughta know;
We slept together, but to-day he sleeps
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud an’ snow.

He said ‘is ma an’ sister back at home
Kissed ‘im a dozen times in fond good-bys,
An’ when ‘e talked about ’em I could see .”
That look o’ longin’ shinin’ in his eyes.

I hate to think o’ how ‘is mother feels
— A mother’s loneliness is worse ‘n mine.
I’d write ‘is folks a letter, only that
This writin’ business ain’t much in my line.

I don’t know what to do when I’m off post.
My Buddy’s gone; an’ seems like all I know
I’d like to put a flower on ‘is grave
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud and snow.

Like Hagen, after the Armistice, Schak crossed into Germany and served with the occupation forces until he was repatriated in 1919. He had a difficult time adapting to civilian life at first and received relief from the Montana Veterans’ committee several times. He and his mother moved to Missoula around 1921 and he enrolled at the-then Montana State University (now University of Montana) as a special (i.e., not assigned to specific graduating class) student.

He seems to have thrived as a college student. He was the sports editor for the campus paper, The Sentinel, and published several stories in the university’s literary magazine, The Frontier. He joined the Sigma Phi Episilon fraternity and served as its chapter secretary. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in journalism.

Al Schak’s brother Walter was assigned as a motorcycle dispatch rider after the 163rd arrived in France, and he was wounded when a shell landed nearby as he was carrying orders just prior to the attack on Cantigny. Al Schak describes the incident in Soul Wounds:

It was late in the afternoon. The head of Hagen’s company was approaching a crossroads. A cloud of dust spurted out of the woods and a motorcycle with a sidecar zipped past the crossroads. It had not gone fifty yards past when a shell sent the driver hurtling into the field alongside the highway. Odds and ends of the machine flew up in a cloud of smoke and dust. The sidecar was obliterated.

In the novel, Hagen later learns that the motorcycle rider was his brother (also named Walter). Hagen is able to visit Walter at his field hospital, but his wounds are too severe and he dies and is buried in France. In reality, Walter Schak was returned to the U.S. and cared for in an Army hospital in Utah, but he died of complications in 1920 and was buried with honors in the town cemetery in Kalispell, Montana.

Al Schak worked as a reporter for the Missoulian after graduating from college, but he struggled with alcoholism and health problems — problems that would likely be diagnosed as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder today. He worked for years on Soul Wounds (an apt euphemism for PTSD), which may have been published as a goodwill gesture by his old paper, for there appear to have been no reviews of it anywhere.

Twenty-seven years after the war, with France liberated and the French Army settling back into its pre-war routines, the paperwork for the award of the Croix de Guerre medal was located and Al Schak was finally decorated. The citation read in part,

Private Schak, still in his teens, came across a man from his unit shot in both hips and pulled him to cover. Unable to move him without help, he called to other members of the outfit. When they ignored him, he drew a .45 revolver and pointed it at the nearest men and told them to put the soldier on a litter and carry him back to comparative safety. Private Schak went with them, and when one of the litter bearers was killed, he grabbed one end of the litter and they took the wounded man to medical aid. He then rejoined his outfit and started forward through the bursting shells.

Headline from <em>Missoulian</em> article about Al Schak's death, November 15, 1945.
Headline from Missoulian article about Al Schak’s death, November 15, 1945.

He had little time to enjoy his belated recognition, however. During the night of November 14, 1945, a lit pipe he had forgotten in a living room chair caused a fire that destroyed his house. Firemen found his body in the kitchen. Luckily, his mother, who lived with him, was visiting a daughter in California. Al Schak was buried with military honors in Missoula, though his gravestone states a unit he never served with. He was 46.

Al Schak’s gravestone.

Soul Wounds, by Al Schak
Missoula, Montana: Missoulian Publishing Co., 1934