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Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank (1937)

17 November 2023

Lost Heritage by Bruno Frank

A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the
late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and
torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a
wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another
one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a
tiny and dirty attic room.

When he opens the man's passport to note down his details, however,
he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of
Germany's oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to
come wandering out of the woods from Germany.

In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates
the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as
his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the
German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right
of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and
duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest
and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the
feudal culture are still respected by most of the family's former
subjects.

Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university
like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a
revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of
Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in
his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for
suggesting that an etching by Durer is not a symbolic forecast of the
rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig's older brother is appointed to a
high regional post in Ernst Rohm's Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler
becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry,
zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.

Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi
acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army
officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways
to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however,
the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.

Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the
prison's hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten.
When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his
cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig
is certain he's being taken out to be shot.

Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of
Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at
resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into
Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual
transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the
1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace:
events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous
cliffhanger-type situations.

I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger's 1933 novel The
Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs
Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and
dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism
until it's overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are
gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.

But they're also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a
regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are
concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the
beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish
shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual,
commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather
than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions
are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of
characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and
frightening.

Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig
reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts
most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who
finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he
had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was
headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie
could be made from this book.

The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on
the Internet Archive: link.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks
New York: Viking, 1937
Closed Frontiers
London: Macmillan, 1937

Categories Short Reviews Tags 1930s, Bruno Frank, Germany, Nazism,
novel

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright (1969)

5 November 2023

[wright-shark-infested-rice-pudding]

Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the
recording business. We may never know what Doubleday's remit to the
Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright's A Shark-Infested
Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in
response represents in not the slightest way the book's contents. For
one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas.
And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a
fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect.

Sylvia Wright doesn't even pretend to know how to write such a book:
"How do you make fiction?" she asks in the opening line of "Fathers
and Mothers," her opening novella. After contemplating fiction's
components -- information, characters, plot -- she confesses within a
page or so, "I cannot grasp this craft." And in the subsequent
180-some pages of the book, she makes no attempt to.

Although one can detect the influence of Nouveau Roman at some
points, Virginia Woolf at others, there is no deliberate imitation
here. In fact, it would be easier to place A Shark-Infested Rice
Pudding in the context of the wave of American experimental fiction
just then making itself known in the work of Donald Barthelme,
William Gass, Robert Coover, and others. Except even that suggestion
is misleading, since Wright's career as a fiction writer (well, even
though she claimed not to grasp the craft, it's the most convenient
label we have at hand) was too brief to allow any sort of network of
influences to form. None of the three pieces in A Shark-Infested Rice
Pudding were published previously and this is her only work of
fiction.

Sylvia Wright was not a naif, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn
Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she
and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page
manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable
form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off
many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a
blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we'd call
steampunk.

Sylvia WrightSylvia Wright, 1969.

She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers
Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous
observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and
published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts.
Many have titles like, "My Kitchen Hates Me" and "How to Make Chicken
Liver Pate Once." But one piece has worked its way into our
vocabulary: "The Death of Lady Mondegreen."

In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, "The Bonnie Earl O'
Moray," as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, "They
have slain the Earl o' Moray/And Lady Mondegreen." Only, in the
balland, that last phrase is actually "And layd him on the green." "I
saw it all clearly," she wrote:

    The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course
    wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in
    his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown
    curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress
    embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.

"It made me cry," she writes. When she did finally learn the correct
wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this
led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright,
mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds:

    If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The
    world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and
    strange images. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, and
    who knows what lost and lovely things may not come streaming in
    with them? But there is always the possibility that they may
    engulf you and that you will go wandering down a horn into a
    mondegreen underworld from which you can never escape.

Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and
advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for
them, even when many of us didn't know they had a name. And Wright
was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for
example, turns Jimi Hendrix's ode to LSD, "'Cuse Me While I Kiss the
Sky," into a celebration of homosexual love: "'Cuse Me While I Kiss
This Guy."

And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what
Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. In the first
novella, "Fathers and Mothers," the reader can reconstruct a
straightforward story: a Greek mother and father are sharing an
apartment in Boston with their son, his American wife -- the narrator,
but only sometimes -- and their infant grandson. The father is
suffering from lung cancer. They have come to America to get the best
medical care. After months of treatment, the father dies. The family
returns to Athens for his funeral.

But that's what's happening in the background. In the foreground, the
thing that attracts Wright's attention is how her in-laws (in real
life she was married to a Greek man, so presumably this is somewhat
autobiographical) deal with their new world. Part of that new world
is cancer and sickness and too many hours in the hospital. Another
part is America is another part. They are Greek. At home, they can
glance out their apartment and see the Acropolis. Ancient Greece and
modern Greece are intertwined.

So naturally, one would expect similar things in America. "Have there
been preserved here some of the songs and stories of the old Indians,
so that one can get a sense of their rhythms, their sonorities?" the
mother-in-law asks. A natural question. Except that even today, most
Americans would be stumped to indicate any aspect of the culture of
our indigenous peoples that hasn't been processed through Longfellow,
the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood. All we know is the transformed
version.

The mother-in-law, in particular, is the transformative agent in this
family. When not at the hospital, the father-in-law spends most of
his time lying limp on the couch. The mother-in-law is the one
questioning norms, pushing for routines to be changed, not being
satisfied by the status quo. "Now, if this were a story," Wright
observes, "a real story instead of whatever it is, then this could be
interpreted and the story shaped to advance through the
interpretation." And those interpretations "would serve the delicious
purpose of turning the mother into the villain."

But which is the truth? The interpretations -- the mondegreens -- or
"the information," as Wright refers to one of her elements of
fiction? The tension between the two alternatives runs like a motif
through all three novellas. In the second, "Dans le Vrai" [In truth],
the "story" is about the narrator's visit to her sister and nephew in
upstate New York. It's the late 1950s or early 1960s: the great
Federal interstate highway system is in the midst of being built. The
characters go to see a section under construction nearby, a great
excavated gash through the countryside.

Then, suddenly, the narrator announces, we're in a new story, a story
within a story called "The Thruway." Or is the narrator the story?

    I am the Thruway. I live in a new world in which I must stretch
    myself to touch, to contain immeasurably unexpected combinations.
    I will link discrepancies. No, I will be discrepancies, encompass
    contradiction, and out of that compute what meanings -- what
    secrets -- out of what snail-like and dreary settled pasts will
    now freshly dart what pleasures in rooms without shapes, corners,
    of dimensions I cannot now imagine. Ah, yes, I will be reconciled
    -- No, not be reconciled, never be reconciled, that will be the
    strength -- but action -- one's life will be --

Following Sylvia Wright through her fictions is like watching someone
trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have the
same color but just ever-so-slightly different shapes. She takes a
piece of "the information," places it against reality, sees where it
fits ... but also where it doesn't. And so she sets that piece down and
tries another. Which way does the mondegreen work? Which represents
truth? The piece or the rest of the puzzle?

If this makes A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding sound maddening ... well,
it is. But only in the sense that Sylvia Wright refuses to accept the
simple solutions. She is every bit as perceptive into the gestures
and mannerisms and pretences of individual characters as Virginia
Woolf or George Eliot, and there are plenty of moments of just the
sort of pleasure one gets from reading about the interactions of
human beings in more conventional fiction.

But she also reminds me in some ways of one of the most challenging
and frustrating writers that ever lived, Dorothy Richardson, who puts
such extraordinary effort into trying to get her impressions right --
and yet always adds, "Yes, but there's still something more." Despite
its extraordinarily odd title, A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding may be
the best work of fiction I've read this year.

Sylvia Wright died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 64. She published
no other books after this, though she left an unfinished biography of
her great aunt Melusina Fay Peirce, wife of the philopher and
mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce.

Oh, and a shark-infested rice pudding is the punchline of a joke.
You'll have to read to book to get it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969

Categories Long Reviews Tags 1960s, fiction, novella, Sylvia Wright

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman ("Red Emma"), by
Ethel Mannin (1941)

29 October 202329 October 2023
Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in
the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma
Goldman Papers)Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly
implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in
1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)

This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

I can't imagine many biographical novels about anarchists begin with
the subject lying in bed as a child, hand between thighs, pleasuring
herself. But Ethel Mannin's Red Rose (1941), a fictionalised
biography of the Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
does just that. Goldman's childhood crush, a teenage boy called
Petrushka, looked after the family's 'horses, and tended the sheep
and cows in the field. Petrushka was tall and strong; quiet and
gentle,' Mannin writes. She then describes a game the young Emma
played with him in which he,

    lifted her up and suddenly flung her above his head, catching her
    as she fell and pressing her against him as she slid to the
    ground, so that she knew the body smell of his shirt and the
    animal smell of his coat, the warmth of his strong hard body, and
    the grip of his rough gentle hands. ...there was no fear in this
    excitement, it was pure ecstasy.

Then Mannin paints this scene:

    And it came again in the warm dark secrecy of the nights, so that
    childish hands pressed down between the remembering thighs in an
    attempt to recapture the sensation, and the darkness would be
    alive with Petrushka's brown smiling face, the smell of horses,
    cattle, sweat, and the fields. Petrushka became her last thought
    on falling asleep and her first on waking.

Throughout her life, Goldman had an active sex life and many lovers.
In her younger years she was in a menage a trois with her soul mate,
the anarchist and writer Alexander Berkman, and an artist who lived
with the couple. They were not lovers for long, but their deep
spiritual and political union lasted for the rest of their lives. As
she aged, Goldman felt increasingly bitter about the uneven
opportunities for men and women on what we would now call 'the dating
scene'. Berkman (the fictional Sasha in the book) had fallen in love
with 20-year-old Emmy (Elsa in the book) whom he'd met in a cafe in
Berlin when he was 52.

They were together until he died by suicide in June 1936. Mannin
describes this as a thorn in Goldman's side: 'A man could age and
lose his looks,' she writes channelling the voice and mind of
Goldman, 'and still command the passionate love of the young and
beautiful; it was not easy for a woman. Her business was not to
desire but to be desired, and when her desirability was ended her
desires were expected to die automatically--and the tragedy was that
they didn't. No one thought it wrong for a middle-aged man to desire
a young girl, but everyone was horrified if a middle-aged woman
showed other than a maternal interest in a young man.'

Mannin is sympathetic to Goldman's desire not just for a fairer world
but for a fairer playing field for women. A committed socialist and
feminist herself, Mannin was also no stranger to love affairs. Like
Goldman, she came from humble means; her father was a postal worker
and her mother was a farmer's daughter. Born in 1900, she supported
the anarchist cause and fought for sexual liberation. In between her
two failed marriages, she had affairs with W. B. Yeats and Bertrand
Russell. Part of the pleasure of reading Red Rose, is the
satisfaction of reading the life of a complex and politically driven
woman as constructed and shaped by a female author who one senses has
a strong kinship with her subject.

[mannin-red-rose-cover-page]From the cover page of Red Rose.

The first two thirds of Red Rose feel more like a straightforward
biography than a work of fiction because in these segments Mannin is
basing her novel closely on Goldman's autobiography Living My Life,
which ends in 1928 - twelve years before Goldman's death. The latter
part of Red Rose had no memoir to rely on. Those final years of
Goldman's life needed to be 'reconstructed from various
sources--including imagination', Mannin tells us in her short
introduction. 'And it is precisely that part of her life which I have
had to reconstruct which has most interested me as a novelist, and
which she urged I must "one day" write.' This explains the tonal
shift in the final third of the book which is imbued with a stronger
imaginative power and a more novelistic sweep.

The two women met in the late 1930s when they were working on behalf
of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) - the anti-fascist
faction fighting against General Franco's Spanish Nationalists. There
is no historical documentation of their meeting, but there is one
photo of them, from 1937, when Goldman came to Britain to speak at a
London meeting in support of the Spanish Confederacion Nacional del
Trabajo (CNT).

[mannin-mannin-and-goldman]Ethel Mannin chairing a meeting in support
of the Spanish anarchist CNT-FAI, with James McGovern, MP, (left) and
Emma Goldman (right). Friends' House, London, February 1937.

In the photo, we see Emma Goldman, aged 69, standing, shoulders back,
delivering one of her fiery speeches. Ethel Mannin, hair pulled back
severely would have been 38 in this photo - she looks off to the
distance, wearing a serious expression. James McGovern, an MP, is
furiously making notes. A year after this photo was taken, Emma
Goldman would die from a stroke suffered in Toronto. Her body was
allowed back into the US and she was buried in Chicago.

Goldman's many affairs and two failed marriages feature prominently
in Red Rose. Her second marriage was to the Welsh Miner James Colton
(Jim Evans in Red Rose) is mentioned only three times in Goldman's
memoir, whereas Mannin brings in her novelist's eye to this episode
turning it onto a somewhat bittersweet affair. There was never any
hint of a sexual relationship between the couple, and Mannin
describes how after the registry office wedding, 'When the marriage
was affected,' Emma 'was impatient to get away. She realised that it
meant disappointing Evans, and to "compensate" him she slipped him a
ten shilling note on the station platform, urging him to "treat"
himself and one or two of "the boys" to the pictures.' There is a
sense in Mannin's description that the fictional James Colton, was in
some ways humiliated or at the very least disappointed by Goldman's
perfunctory approach to their union. As an anarchist himself, he was
committed to the cause and felt honoured to be able to do something
for the famous Emma Goldman, but Mannin writes, 'He stood there,
troubled, confused, fingering the note she had forced upon him,
overriding his bewildered objections.' It's in moments like these,
when Mannin inhabits the interior world of her characters, that Red
Rose fully comes alive.

Goldman's life, according to Mannin, was one of passion and struggle.
She was incarcerated for inciting a riot but only served several
short prison sentences. Most of her struggles centred around money:
she never had enough of it and was often hungry and homeless. In
order to feed herself and to fund her travels and lectures to spread
the anarchist message, Goldman took on whatever work she could. As a
young woman, she worked making corsets and then in a glove factory.
She trained and practiced as a nurse, set up a massage parlour and
had two failed attempts at running an ice cream shop. She had a go at
being a street prostitute on 14th Street in New York which ended in
ignominy. The gentleman who took her for a drink noticed that she was
not cut out for the job. He took pity on her, and after buying her a
drink, gave her ten dollars for the trouble it took her to put on a
fancy frock.

Much of Goldman's energy is taken up with fund raising, which Mannin,
as a self-made woman describes with a profound understanding. Reading
Red Rose is a glimpse into the life of Goldman and into the mind of
Mannin. The novel doesn't completely work as a piece of fiction, and
yet, it does re-imagine how a life can be documented and how pushing
the boundaries of imagination are crucial to creating a successful
work of fiction - even one that sticks so close to biography. In
feminist politics there is always a sense of a trajectory, of history
moving with the times, but what we see here is not history as a
passive inevitability progressing from one idea to the next but a
sense that history can be shaped and created by women with the aim of
a fairer world. It is the fact that Ethel Mannin took on such a vital
and important subject and had the courage to fill in the gaps of
Goldman's life with her own imaginings that makes Red Rose such an
important work in the library of women's - and the world's -
struggles.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman ("Red Emma"), by
Ethel Mannin
London: Jarrolds, 1941

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Joanna PocockJoanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently
living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The
Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize
in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and
House of Anansi Press (US).

Categories Guest Posts Tags biography, Emma Goldman, Ethel Mannin,
novel, women writers

The Colours of the Night, by Catherine Ross (1962)

19 October 2023

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

The colours of the night in Catherine Ross's title aren't romantic in
the least. They're the colors of the signal flares fired from the
control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming
back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is
just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The
Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life
on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman's
point of view .

Virginia Bennett, the novel's narrator, is a member of the Women's
Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near
Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its
broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast,
was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF -- and
later, U.S. 8th Air Force -- airfields from which the Allies launched
the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that
represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.

It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, "During
the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were
killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became
prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed." An
aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions
before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.

71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each
manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and
the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most
typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying
members of the current would be gone. "There'd be a 71 Squadron, of
course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the
week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact."

A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself
falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by
accident -- literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene
after Craig's Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy
verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive.
But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his
attention as well.

Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and
other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of
flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to
various subterfuges to spend time together -- the most important being
to ensure they're never seen together. To further complicate matters,
Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section
chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.

But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she
senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him,
she asks the inevitable question:

    "But what shall we do about us?"
    "What about us?"
    "Us," I said slowly and painfully. "In the future."
    He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.

And suddenly it hits her: "I knew that in his own mind he had no
future."

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross - paperback edition

From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to
thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more
than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment
dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from
his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia's cigarette
lighter that it's just a matter of time before flirting becomes
romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively
happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another
operational tour).

But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about
the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical
inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted
diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue
issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all
the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what
was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone
switchboard operators.

Betty Beaty, AKA Catherine Ross and Karen CampbellBetty Beaty, alias
Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell.

Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia
Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real
name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a
bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his
hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented
novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction
books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross,
then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she
published nine Harlequin romance novels.

The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it's a thoroughly
enjoyable tale that's rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would
recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War
Two.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn's edition of the
semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen
Langley.[1962club]

Categories Short Reviews Tags RAF, romance, women writers, World War
Two

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl's Escape, by Barbara Starke
(1931)

15 October 2023

starke - born into captivity

I wouldn't recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs
of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke's Born in Captivity
lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke's aunt gave her a copy
of David Grayson's The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour
made by an adult man in 1912's America. "It was the image of Grayson
walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the
delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly
filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act."

Reading Grayson's book suggests to Starke that "Perhaps, after all,
it was not absolutely necessary" to come home every night -"even if
he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm." A pretty
risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of
eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the
house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems
certain to end badly.

But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She
traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City,
rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side
of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a
ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically
clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy
about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow,
in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she
have to fight her way out of the car.

More than that, the men who offered her rides -- and it was always
men, even though she wore mens' clothes and was usually scruffy
enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in -- would
buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand
her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who
said they believed that "if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she
must be prepared to 'come across.'" She usually managed to change
their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to
intimidate: "I could look straight at them, could say unexpected
things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I
should be unafraid."

On the other hand -- and reading this must have made her mother's hair
stand up, if she ever did read her daughter's book -- if Starke liked
a man's company, she wasn't above sleeping with him. On an early leg,
she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared
his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret:
"If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be
a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and
clean for having stayed with you."

Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke's
motivation was to reject her parent's choices. "The net had caught my
father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and
sending one's children to college, had kept him there." The only
result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family
was to be "cheated of any joy," to be "shackled by them."

The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but
to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked
and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn't
want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys
with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing
worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls
alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or
so together. "I began to divine that one could get fond enough of
another person to want him about a great deal." Yet she walks on
without regrets. "That priceless feeling of affection as we said
good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely
because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not
even pretending to try to make it last longer."

Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but
neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled
weren't always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms
of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she
recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not
pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike
with Joe, however, a regret remains. "How am I going to reach the
ground and the sky again?" she wonders at the end as she sits in an
office typing pool.

The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T.
E. Lawrence. "Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did
it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead
younger generation -- passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the
concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation."

A. T. Simon III and Helen Card, with Frederic Remington painting,
around 1960A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington
painting, around 1960.

Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card
published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only
remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although
she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer's conference in
1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of
Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the
Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl's Escape, by Barbara Starke
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931
London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Categories Short Reviews Tags 1930s, memoir, travel, USA, women
writers

Star Turn, by Rene Clair (1926/1936)

22 September 2023
[clair-paris-qui-dort]Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the
Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.

There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than Rene Clair's
short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into
English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays
of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants
of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris
will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to
time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and
the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which
Clair belonged.

Right around the time that Rene Clair was finishing work on his first
film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its
setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he'd been
with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little
classic every bit as elegant and amusing.

Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn by Rene Clair
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.

The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world's
greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of
moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic,
debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just
finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of
gold who's, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of
its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the
atmosphere is, predictably, intense:

    Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout,
    repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like
    an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car,
    lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and
    sinks. He'll be drowned in admiration.... A police-charge stems the
    tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers
    to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared
    through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human
    debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.

As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist's
booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from
Buster Keaton's 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: "His three-dimensional body
is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in
the dancing shadow of Jack."

This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot
of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it's the audience
that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and
the character. In Adams' case, he's the one who finds it increasingly
difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his
best-known roles.

There are seven of these alter-egos in all -- from William the cowboy
to Dorian the poet. ("My golden head troubles the beauty of the
clouds," Dorian declares. "One breath wafts me to heaven." Dorian is
a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters
worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on
an independent existence. Adams' attempts to maintain some semblance
of order are no match for their wills:

    To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William
    on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore
    William's outfit; on Tuesday Harold's morning-coat. But the
    characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William's
    leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles.
    They refused to fall into line.

He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then
place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of
the characters manage to keep up -- indeed, are often already there
when he arrives.

If all this wasn't bad enough, Adams' studio chief has come up with
the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect
for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his
multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made -- and is then
premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention
that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.

What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all
deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at
once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of
becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog
in an industrial entertainment machine.

[clair-director-photo]Rene Clair on the set of an early sound film.

When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the
translator is uncredited), they asked Rene Clair to contribute a
preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better
recognized how the power of writer and director differed:

    How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation
    calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on
    the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic
    machine. What complications are involved in bringing the
    slightest of his ideas to fruition!

Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of
control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he
would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, "You might as
well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down
Piccadilly."

What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair's
fictional movie business: the bottom line.

    If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater
    number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the
    pictures at present shown, producers would set about training
    frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the
    brightest specimens of batrachian talent.

Clair wonders "how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of
Cezanne could have developed" if their work had depended on the
collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not
with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time
Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe
independence he imagines.

The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in
"a flippant and fantastic light." And yet, if we are to believe his
own preface, the film world created by Rene Clair the novelist
doesn't really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise
described by Rene Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I
mentioned at the start: Rene Clair the director would have had the
assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches
that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism
and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame
can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors
to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit
too much like playing God.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Star Turn, by Rene Clair
London: Chatto & Windus, 1936

Categories Short Reviews Tags 1920s, France, movies, novel, Rene
Clair, surrealism

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge (1934)

7 September 2023
Advertisement for Fortune Grass by Mabel LethbridgeAdvertisement for 
Fortune Grass from the Daily Telegraph.

"Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?" Mabel
Lethbridge's first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns
his father has cut him off without a penny.

"Nothing is too much for me," she replies. Which could well serve as
this remarkable woman's motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next
to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass
covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed
into those years!

Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two
brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire
following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly
(mirroring her parents' marriage), her mother took the children to
Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother
then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school -- a
stay that was short-lived.

With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her
sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other
into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to
wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was
nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see,
cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good
cause.

Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she
lies again -- to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is
sewing uniforms -- and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling
shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude
safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the
women working there were never more than a stray spark away from
death. "That's the last shell, by the time you've done that the milk
will be here," one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when
Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. "The last shell! The
last shell!" she thinks. And then:

    ... a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being
    'hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness.
    Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother!
    Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn't someone come? Wouldn't
    someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding
    flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that
    terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers
    pierced my consciousness.

When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg
below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered
with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other
women in her hut are dead.

Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A
familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her
side. But Mabel's greatest fear is for her mother: "Oh, Tattie,
Tattie," I sobbed, "I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won't
tell Mother, will you?"

[lethbridge-Daily_Mirror_Sat__May_18__1918_]From the Daily Mirror, 18
May 1918.

For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire --
at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her
injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on
his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change
how her family viewed her condition. "Don't you realise you are a
cripple?" her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out
and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of
hand-me-downs -- a skirt with a large burn in the back: "That'll do
for Mabel, she never goes anywhere."

But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first
with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse,
climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out
for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable
women's hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay
away.

The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants -- widows and
spinsters who "exuded an air of tragedy" -- combined with the tedium
of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain
a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that
is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs,
relationships, and living arrangements.

Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations,
cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in
Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a
crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps
in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion.
She co-habits with "Daddy," the demobbed Army officer with whom she'd
started a correspondence during the war -- despite the fact that he'd
married another woman in a mad moment -- then falls in love with his
cousin Noel, who moves in with them.

[lethbridge-Sunday_Pictorial_Sun__Dec_3__1922_]"Peggy the chair
girl," from the Sunday Pictorial, December 3, 1922.

In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And
in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes
her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues
outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside
the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel,
"Peggy the Chair-Girl" expands her business in the space of a year to
one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even
finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs
attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular
revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.

[lethbridge-shooting]Article about Noel Kalenberg's failed suicide
attempt, 1922.

Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to
be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of
Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first
month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out
to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the
sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from
the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has
attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly
suspected of murder.

Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another
failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is
carrying his child, but that doesn't prevent him from knocking her
around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse
when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his
allowance.

[lethbridge-estate-agent]Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent
(1934).

Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she's vending
chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work,
carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other.
And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As
we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just
established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And
she's just 28!

Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack
up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a
wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she
died, she'd been the subject of a "This is Your Life" television show
and included in the historic BBC "Great War Interviews" series.

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as "Granny Mabel" in the 1960s,
just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to
Milan:

    I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in
    Cornwall at Granny Mabel's when a leg sprang out and hit me, and
    it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I
    screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been
    seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had
    only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn't like you to
    miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a
    munitions factory during the First World War when she was
    sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the
    nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone
    had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She
    had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel,
    who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could
    swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.

So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing
aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your
shoes -- one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934

Categories Long Reviews Tags England, Mabel Lethbridge, memoir, women
writers, World War One

Neglected Books Publisher Spotlights for September to December 2023

1 September 2023

[sep-spotlight-header]

This year, I've been hosting a monthly online discussion focusing on
books from publishers specializing in reissues and new translations
of long-forgotten books. I wanted to share the plans for the rest of
this year so that those interested in participating have a chance to
order and read the books in advance and get the most out of the
discussions.

So far, we've featured the following books and publishers:

  * The Flutter of an Eyelid by Myron Brinig, from Tough Poets Press
  * Stamboul Sketches by John Freely, from Eland Books
  * Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan, from Boiler
    House Press
  * Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene, from Daunt Books
  * Biographical Recreations from the Cranium of a Giantess by Jean
    Paul, translated by Genese Grill, from Sublunary Editions
  * Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs, from the British Library
    Women Writers

For the rest of the year, we've lined up the following books:

[deutsch-mask-of-silenus]

* 28 September: Register on Eventbrite
   * Mask of Silenus by Babette Deutsch, from Modern Times Publishing
    Mask of Silenus tells the story of Socrates's last days. An
    episode familiar from Plato is transformed into a vivid and
    immediate story through Babette Deutsch's intuitive understanding
    and poet's gift for expression. As one reviewer put it, she
    "makes us feel the presence of the man, the power of soul and
    personality by which this ugly, shabby old stone-cutter won the
    attention and loyalty of ancient Athens."
    When the book first came out, the Los Angeles Times reviewer
    wrote: "With the freshness of a poet's imagination, Miss Deutsch
    has written this short novel of Socrates. Her portrayal of the
    Athenian scene is so sincere and simple that it has the warm
    semblance of present-day life. The reader cannot fail to respond
    to the homely charm of the philosopher and feels himself one of
    the group of loyal friends following him in the market place,
    listening to his witty discourse in the banquet room and at last,
    with profound emotion, hearing his dignified defense at his
    trial."

    [levy-kzradock]

* 31 October: Register on Eventbrite
   * Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah by Louis
    Levy, from Wakefield Press
    Originally published in Danish in 1910, Kzradock the Onion Man
    and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah is, in the words of Wakefield
    Press, "a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its
    time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and
    one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day.
    Combining elements of the serial film, detective story, and
    gothic horror novel, Kzradock is a surreal foray into
    psychoanalytic mysticism."
    Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de
    Montpensier is conducting hypnotic seances with the titular Onion
    Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of
    battling detectives, violent murders, and a puma in a
    hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs
    of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost
    child, a scalped detective, a schizophrenic skeleton, a deaf-mute
    dog, and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront
    his own sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion.
    When Gershon Scholem first read the book in 1918, he wrote in his
    diary, "This evening I read with the greatest suspense The
    Onion-Man Named Kzradock and the Spring Chicken Called Methusalem
    . This immensely great book speaks with a powerful language. 'You
    must doubt. You have to doubt in your soul.' The book unfurls the
    metaphysics of doubt. The terrifying law behind the soul's
    germination -- if one trusts the soul -- is developed explicitly in
    this detective story. Its beginning and end both rest in man's
    inexpressibly demonic regions, which only doubt can overcome."

    [carny-matheson]

* 28 November: Register on Eventbrite
   * Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts by Michael
    Carney and Kate Murphy, from Handheld Press
    As Handheld Press puts in, "Vita Sackville-West was infatuated
    with her. Virginia Woolf hated her. Sir John Reith resented her
    but couldn't do without her skills: she transformed the BBC into
    a broadcaster for the people. Lady Astor was her close friend,
    making a way for her into the heart of Britain's political,
    cultural and intellectual aristocracy. Hilda Matheson was one of
    the most important women behind the scenes in Britain's public
    life between the wars and an influential networker between
    feminist, media and political powers." When she died in 1940 at
    the age of 52, Vita Sackville-West wrote, "She was not only the
    best of friends, but in the noblest sense a servant of the
    State."
    Michael Carny and Kate Murphy's book was first self-published in
    1999 by Carny and gained almost no notice aside from an
    appreciative review in the Sunday Telegraph by Nigel Nicolson.
    Kate Macdonald of Handheld discovered it in a second-hand
    bookshop in the far north of Scotland. She had to track down
    Michael Carny via his former parish council secretary and is
    bringing the book back to print as part of Handheld's Biography
    series.

    [farrell-mistletoe-malice]

* 19 December: Register on Eventbrite
   * Mistletoe Malice by Kathleen Farrell, from Faber
    A perfect Christmas book for people who hate Christmas. C. P.
    Snow called it "savagely witty and abnormally penetrating." A
    more recent reader, Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal, wrote
    that it's "A horribly delicious snapshot of post-war family life,
    in which tensions ensnare the reader in tinsel-covered barbed
    wire."
    From the 1951 review in Punch: "Most of the aspects of English
    middle-class life that have perpetually puzzled foreigners -- its
    frustrations, what could be called its masochism, certainly its
    sexual prudery -- are freely displayed in Mistletoe Malice as
    though on the cold white slabs of a scientific exhibition. The
    "old maid," for instance, is a native of England; and Miss
    Kathleen Farrell has etched her sterility in bold outlines. Bess
    is recognizably one of those badly dressed women of forty one
    sees in trains going down to Bournemouth or shopping and taking
    tea and scones at a well-known Knightsbridge store. Herimpotent
    and platonic love affair at a Christmas house-party -- which forms
    the "story" of this novel -- is likewise wholly characteristic. So
    too is the formidable Rachel who dominates the unhappy household
    and its festivities by reason of a marriage nearly half a century
    before which produced a child and a whiff of romance. Then there
    is the inevitable cook below-stairs, the ubiquitous Mrs. Page
    with her nose for Goings On, and Rachel's penniless son who
    sponges."
    You can pre-order Mistletoe Malice from Faber now: Pre-order link
    .

To learn about and register for these sessions, please follow me at
Eventbrite: [email protected]. Not only will there be these
discussions, but in 2024, we'll be running a special group, the Wafer
Thin Book Club, with Caustic Cover Critic. And in 2025, I will be
running another year-long #ReadingPilgrimage group.

Categories News Tags Babette Deutsch, Faber, Handheld Press, Kate
Murphy, Kathleen Farrell, Louis Levy, Michael Carny, Modern Times
Publishing, Wakefield Press

Margaret Fishback, Poetess: A 1932 Sketch by Joseph Mitchell (plus
notes)

23 August 2023
[fishback-mitchell-article]Sketch of Margaret Fishback, from the
Pittsburgh Press Sun, 14 February 1932.

Margaret Fishback was among the most commercially successful poets of
the 1930s, a prolific writer of comic verse who probably sold more
books and had more poems published in more magazines than the
better-known Ogden Nash. I doing some research on Fishback recently,
I was startled to see the byline on a short portrait that appeared in
several newspapers in February 1932: Joseph Mitchell. Yes, Joseph
Mitchell, the author of Joe Gould's Secret and legendary New Yorker
writer who came to work daily for decades after publishing his last
article for the magazine.

This piece was written in 1932, six years before Mitchell joined The
New Yorker. At the time, Mitchell was just 24, a few weeks short of
getting married, and working for the New York Herald Tribune. He'd
begun to get a name for his color pieces, usually sketches of odd
characters in the city -- from bartenders to circus owners. A portrait
of an author with a new book out would have been a pretty mundane
assignment compared to what would become his signature, a soft piece
to help sell Fishback's first collection, I Feel Better Now.

[fishback-1932-ad]Ad for I Feel Better Now, Margaret Fishback's first
collection of poems.

Not that the book needed much help. Published the same week that
Mitchell's article appeared, by the end of March, I Feel Better Now
had gone through six printings.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK. Feb. 13--Margaret Fishback. a young woman who likes to sit
on summer nights in the somber beer houses which line the Hoboken
waterfront and talk to the reminiscent sailors, said she wrote the
casual verses in her book, I Feel Better Now, while riding to work on
a Fifth Avenue bus and while eating lunch in a restaurant in
Pennsylvania Station.

"And I wrote them on the backs of speakeasy cards," she said, "and I
wrote them while dressing to go out to dinner with some gent or
other. And I wrote them while walking over the Brooklyn Bridge to see
our absurd skyline. And on the Staten Island ferry. And on the bench.
You know, everywhere."

Miss Fishback has had long hair since she was a child. It is the
color of corn shucks. She always has a good time. She likes elevator
operators and bartenders. She gave the first autographed copy of her
book to a conductor on a Fifth Avenue bus.

She lives in an old-fashioned house at 222 E. Sixty-first Street with
Elizabeth Osgood, who is head of the proofroom at Appleton's. There
are 19 poplar trees on the block. There are also two churches but she
does not known much about them.

"No, I don't know what kind of poplars they are," she said. "Lombardy
poplars, maybe. I don't know anything about nature. Do you like beer?
I don't care for it. The foam chokes me. All the people I know like
beer. Over in Hoboken they live on it. You know. I have a lot of fun
washing my hair. I like shower baths.

"The reason I started running around is because there are a lot of
cats in the back yard of my home. And there's a lady who always turns
the radio on when they play 'When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.'
I never went around to speakeasies until they began playing that. One
night last summer I heard that song over and over. I got out of the
house and went to the Palace, and the first thing I knew a woman
named Kate Smith was singing it all over the place. Then I went to a
speakeasy."

Miss Fishback is an advertising copy writer for Macy's. She is called
"the highest paid advertising woman in the world," but she laughs
heartily whenever she hears that she is. She came to New York eight
years ago, found a job in a ballet, danced in various opera companies
at $1 a night and $1 for each rehearsal, wrote poems for F. P. A.'s
[Franklin P. Adams] column in the World under the name of Marne and
always had a good time. She is a graduate of Goucher College. There
she was a friend of Sara Haardt, who is the wife of H. L. Mencken.

"Mencken is the most attractive man I ever met," she said. "I like
men. I never was married, but I have had my troubles. You can be sure
I have had my moments. Hell, I'm not a lady poet. I'm not literary. I
like to get around. The reason I'm not a married woman is because I
don't have time. I work from 9:15 to 6:30. I'm always in a hurry. It
wouldn't be fair to marry. I'm too interested in my work."

Miss Fishback is a very lovely young woman. She does not like to play
tennis, cook, sew, or play bridge. She does not like parrots. She is
entranced by the commonplace. She buys chestnuts on a windy corner,
finds a worm and writes "a triolet on an enviable existence." Walking
around New York she reaches the Garlic Belt and decides that "on
Bleeker Street the babies' noses aren't pampered by the scent of
roses." and under the "L" she decides that "on Second Avenue the
babies howl as if they had the rabies."

The titles of her poems are indicative of her personality -- "A tomato
is all right in its place," or "Capitulation within the city limits,
preferably the East Fifties." or "No duels, drama, or bloodshed to
speak of," or "Lines on watching a mother at her crooning," or
"Orange juice and a quick swallow." She wears bracelets made from the
hoofs of elephants. She likes to wear sweaters. She writes triolets
in Maine bathtubs, and she swims with a great deal of pleasure, and
she has two favorite drinks.

"I like an old fashioned," she said, "if it's made with a great deal
of care. But I can care violently for sidecars."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, Margaret Fishback attended Goucher
College outside Baltimore, where she became friends with Sara Haardt,
who later married H. L. Mencken. She then headed to New York City.
She took whatever work she could, including dancing in the chorus at
the Metropolitan opera, until, on the strength of a few poems she'd
sold to F. P. A., she walked into Macy's department store and
proposed to go to work in their advertising office.

[fishback-ad-age-1932]

They accepted, and she would remain with the store over ten years.
Many newspaper stories suggested she was at one time the highest-paid
woman in advertising, though she always dismissed this as
unsubstantiated nonsense. (Though, given the pay inequality that
prevailed at the time, it probably wouldn't have takem much to claim
the title.)

Her copy for Macy's was, in some ways, more absurd and edgy than her
poetry. An early item claimed that cows were positively thrilled to
be giving up their lives for Macy's latest line of purses. Fishback
used to roam the store in search of odd items to boost, once
proclaiming that a two-foot long cake tester she found in the kitchen
department was just the thing when it came time to bake a two-foot
tall cake. (The store ended up selling thousands.) And she was
unapologetically on the side of women as the wiser of the two sexes,
as demonstrated by this ad cartoon from 1938:

Cartoon: "We could be just as crowded at Macy's and not get wet!"

Fishback once said she started writing poetry as a reaction to seeing
other people hold up writers as demigods. "I'm not literary," she
would demur. "I do things by ear." And she never got too
sophisticated in her poesy: indeed, as it sticks to simple meters and
always rhymes, it might be more accurately called verse than poetry.
But her early poems could be subtle and flirt with complex effects:

    View From a Fifth-Floor Fire Escape

    An underfed ailanthus tree
    Contributes animatedly
    One bright, intrepid splotch of green.
    And here and there through the ravine

    An enterprising ray of sun
    Contrives to have a little fun
    By wriggling through a window just
    To call attention to the dust.

    And though it's messy in the street,
    The sky above is large and neat.
    And from this fire escape of mine
    The cloud effects are very fine.

    Along about this time of day
    Despite the roof across the way
    That harbors shirts hung out to dry
    Against the valiant Gotham sky.

The poems in I Feel Better Now draw directly from Fishback's own
experiences: working, commuting, living in a fifth-floor walkup with
no view except from the fire escape:

    It may be just as well that I
    Can't have a penthouse in the sky.
    Perchance it's just as well to be
    Whete it's impossible to see
    The rivers and the boats unless
    I wash my face and change my dress
    And hop a crosstown trolley car.

This was something new in 1932 and working women responded with
enthusiasm. "Reading Miss Fishback is contagious business," wrote a
woman reviewer. "You stop strangers in the trolley car or in the
subway and begin to read to them aloud." Fishback's poems could be
found almost every week in one or another magazine: from The New
Yorker and Vanity Fair to Ladie's Home Journal and the women's
sections of newspapers all over. Enough to collect for a second book,
Out of My Head (1933).

[fishback-trio-cartoon]

With few points of reference, Margaret Fishback was often compared to
Dorothy Parker, though Parker's poetry was far more acidic and her
fiction far more serious than the lightly comic stories she began to
write. On the other hand, her work was positively biting compared to
the warmer verse of Phyllis McGinley.

Her life and her voice took on a new tone in 1935 when she married
Alberto Antolini, a buyer at Macy's. She was undoubtedly the only
poet whose engagement was announced in the pages of Sales Management
magazine.

Her third book, published the same year, I Take It Back, was a little
sunnier. The title was chosen by her husband and reviewers noted that
it had "far more of sentiment and less of wit than I Feel Better Now.
"The mighty Amazon has washed the poison off her darts and her winged
shafts of poesy no longer sting." Antolini convinced Fishback to move
to the suburbs (Camden, New Jersey) -- even though she had early
written a poem about her own "Suburbaphobia":

    What meagre charm I had before
    Expires the moment that the door
    Of any suburb-going train
    Clangs shut. And I do not regain
    My normal joie de vivre until
    I leave each flagrant daffodil
    And buttercup behind, hell-bent
    On getting back to God's cement.

Her life and writing changed again in 1941, when she gave birth to
their son, Anthony. She left Macy's days before the delivery, and
became a stay-at-home mom. She continued to write and publish poems --
dozens and dozens about Tony -- and slowly took on freelance
copywriting work.

She remained at home, taking an active part in Tony's life (one
interviewer found her assembling five hundred gift bags for a school
fest) until he went away to college in 1958. Then she returned to
advertising, but moved from Herald Square up to Madison Avenue,
joining Young & Rubicam and then Doyle Dane Bernbach a year later.
Fishback was there to witness the change in culture depicted in the
TV series Mad Men, as print and radio ads began to take a distant
backseat to television and "branding." And she continued to publish:
as late as 1966, her poems and comic anecdotes could be found in Look
magazine's "Look on the Light Side" section. One of her last
contributions to Look was a declaration of her failure to be that
thing an advertising professional most wanted to encourage: a
competitive consumer.

    Underprivileged
    Our living standard is so low,
    We've but a single radio.

    No wonder that our children fret
    With just one television set.

    No doubt our solitary phone
    Feels unendurably alone.

    But most traumatic of all scars --
    We haven't ever got two cars!

Margaret Fishback died in 1985. Kathleen Rooney made Fishback the
protagonist of her 2018 novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (though I
wonder what Fishback would think of her fictional transformation into
Boxfish). Fishback's poetry books are long out of print and somewhat
scarce, though One to a Customer (1938), which collects her first
four collections, can be found on the Internet Archive (link).

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: Margaret Fishback the comic versifier should not be confused
with Margaret Fishback Powers the Christian poet.

Categories Neglected Authors Tags 1930s, Joseph Mitchell, Margaret
Fishback, poetry

Articles of Association for Adventuresses, from Written with Lipstick
by Maurice Dekobra

16 August 202316 August 2023
Title page from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra (1938).Title
page from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra (1938).

One of my Neglected Books guilty pleasures is the work of the
prolific French novelist Maurice Dekobra. There was a time when
Dekobra was among the best-known and most successful authors in the
world. His books are said to have been translated into over seventy
languages, and there was a time when no novelist came close to him as
a precursor to Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann for American
readers: our titan of titillation, if you will.

Dekobra's books are like fresh garlicky potato chips: heavily
seasoned and hard to resist, but not good to overconsume. From
everything I've read, he was a man of monstrous ego. A man who, had
the great Victor Hugo himself been around at the time, wouldn't have
hesitated to tell le maitre des Les miserables to step aside as he
paraded down the Champs-Elysees.

Dekobra's egotism enabled him to blithely ignore his own ignorance.
Reality and research were for the timid and unimaginative. The fact
that he knew nothing about a subject never prevented him from making
up his own facts. And if their foundations and construction seemed a
bit jury-rigged and unstable, no matter: speed was what mattered
most. As long as the reader kept turning the page, credibility took a
back seat to pure forward narrative momentum.

[dekobra-prince-or-clown]Cover of Reader's Library (UK) edition of
Prince or Clown by Maurice Dekobra.

In his 1929 novel Prince ou Pitre, published in English as Prince or
Clown, for example, he invents an entire Balkan country, Phrygia, its
language and culture. The Phrygians, for example, consume massive
amounts of yarka, their national drink. Yarka, Dekobra informs us
"made from distilled tomatoes and geranium leaves." Geranium leaves
are, in fact, edible and have been used to season dishes, supposedly;
but distilled tomatoes? (The answer turns out to be yes, according to
drinks website SevenFiftyDaily ("The Arrival of Tomato-based Spirits:
European distillers are betting on Americans' fondness for the
nightshade with a new crop of liquors") -- so get your yarka franchise
going today!)

Then there is the Phrygian language, which is capable of expressing
things hitherto unthought and unfelt:

    "Afafna!"
    "Afafna?"
    "That means in Phrygian, 'By the body of my mother, I am overcome
    with zodiacal emotion.'"

Dekobra presents us with other bits of Phrygian: Tchik zaga houm-houm
crakoi ("I'm feeling better" -- I think); Zurbe Barigoul! (um ..
sorry, not a clue); Djouk! (you can probably figure this one out
yourself). (I must omit Kayout Kagda, as that would be a spoiler.) He
also offers us a remedy for accidental poisoning: "Give her a
spoonful of milk every two hours, a cup of cod liver oil, boric acid
and gum-arabic." (OK, admittedly this is probably what the finest GP
in Paris would have prescribed ... in 1729.)

Not surprisingly, Dekobra also had a high opinion of his high
opinions. American and English newspapers loved to offer their
readers his grand pronouncements on everything from love and marriage
to food. And especially, women. He was, after all, "The Man Who KNOWS
Women."

From the London <em>Sunday Dispatch</em>, 11 December 1938.From the
London Sunday Dispatch, 11 December 1938.

Dekobra would argue that his ideas were grounded in careful and
objective observation. When he visited in New York in January 1930,
for example, he told reporters that he had come to conduct a study of
American women:

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930.From the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930.

Nevermind that upon debarking the week before, he felt confident in
announcing that what American women needed was a good shaking:

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 11 January 1930.From the Pittsburgh
Post Gazette, 11 January 1930.

By the time he'd ended his American tour, he was ready to set down
his conclusiong about American women and American romance in
algebraic precision:

From the Long Beach Sun, 30 August 1931.From the Long Beach Sun, 30
August 1931.

Ten years later, as a refugee from occupied France, he predicted with
striking inaccuracy the economic landscape of the postwar world:

From the Montreal Gazette, 2 April 1941From the Montreal Gazette, 2
April 1941

When Dekobra turned fifty, he thought it was time to offer the world
a larger piece of his mind. His autobiography, published in English
as Written with Lipstick, is part memoir, part stories polished to
perfection at countless dinner parties and rounds of drinks with
friends -- always showing Dekobra to his best advantage -- and part
pontifications as solemn and authoritative as any declared from a
balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square in Rome. These last are easy
to spot in the book: they're always in numbered lists. There are, for
example, four key failings of English women:

 1. They do not understand how to choose their dresses -- above all,
    to choose colours -- too much apple green and red geranium.
 2. They marry without careful consideration -- before they know
    whether the man is suitable.
 3. They talk too much about their household affairs.
 4. They are too fond of bridge.

At the end of his chapter on "The Adventuress" ("chief character in
tens of thousands of novels in every language under the sun"), he
provides us with his "Articles of Association for Adventuresses" --
or, "Ten Commandments for Love's Highwaywomen":

 1. Choose an original name -- Thea, Belkis, or Mareva.
 2. Confide to men under strict secrecy that you are the niece of a
    revolutionary executed in prison, or the natural daughter of a
    Balkan king [from Phrygia, for example].
 3. Although you may have taken you M.A. at Oxford, speak English
    with a Russian accent, slightly flavoured with Bulgarian and just
    a suspicion of Hungarian.
 4. Have a favourite flower -- a red lily or a Brazilian cowslip --
    that you won the first time you were kissed on the lips by a
    Cossack general at the age of sixteen.
 5. Introduce anecdotes into your conversation. Remark casually, for
    example: "'In summer it is warmer than in winter,' as the great
    Lao-Tze has said."
 6. Always live at a hotel. An adventuress has no use for a
    kitchenette.
 7. Wear an antique ring on your little finger -- one that used to
    contain deadly poison and was used by the Florentines in the days
    of Lucretia Borgia.
 8. If you happen to be spending a few days at Margate [surely
    Dekobra didn't write Margate in his French original], say to the
    man who is paying you attention, "My dear, I have just arrived
    from Stamboul."
 9. Procure a number of leading Continental hotel labels and stick
    them on your new luggage. An adventuress who does not travel is
    like a panther without teeth.
10. An adventuress does not eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. She
    takes snails on toast, six olives, half a pound of caviare, and
    an aspirin tablet in a glass of absinthe.

When he returned to France after the war, Maurice Dekobra continued
to publish several novels a year into the 1960s, but hardly any of
these were translated and published in English. To readers now
accustomed to fug, Lolita, and Playboy, Dekobra's brand of
footsies-as-sex seemed as outdated as Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.
Which is a bit of a shame, as Dekobra's postwar novels were,
according to Claude Duneton, precursors to Frederic Dard's fast,
furieux, and funny San Antonio novels.

Cover of Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes by Philippe
Collas (2002)Cover of Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes by
Philippe Collas (2002).

However, by the time Philippe Collas' biography, Maurice Dekobra:
Gentleman entre deux mondes, was published in 2002, most of Dekobra's
work had falled out of print and, even for French readers, he was an
unknown. Melville House reissued his single biggest bestseller, The
Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, as part of its Neversink Library in
2012, but that appears to be the only one of his books currently
available in English.

Categories Excerpts from Neglected Books Tags France, Maurice Dekobra

The Weepings and the Laughters

9 August 2023
The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976)The Weeping and the
Laughter by Viva King (1976).

I bought Viva King's autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on
the strength of a single review: "How pleasant to know Viva King even
if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book."
It also said that "There were few of that period [Bloomsbury, 1920s]
whom Viva King did not come to know." Ezra Pound greeted her naked
once (he, not she). She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in
Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner
Margaret Jourdain to tea. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer,
"If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. King's parties you would risk
peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and
Anthony Powell." Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the
people who flash through King's pages was like trying to read the
names of stations on a fast-moving train.

But reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity;
Richardson called her "a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother
Courage" and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with
a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 -- despite his
tendency to make off with her jewelry. (She offers a fastidious way
of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: "I needed
revving up -- and though the men may have had the right tools, they
were bad mechanics.")

When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva
King's book, I quickly discovered that "The Weeping and the Laughter"
is a popular title. The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual,
but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, "Vitae Summa Brevis Spem
Nos Vetat Incohare Longam," is taken, in turn, from a poem by the
Roman poet Horace (translation: "The brief sum of life forbids us the
hope of enduring long"). Dowson's poem is appropriate for an
autobiography written in one's eighties after a long and busy life:

    They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
    Love and desire and hate:
    I think they have no portion in us after
    We pass the gate.

    They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
    Out of a misty dream
    Our path emerges for a while, then closes
    Within a dream.

That hasn't prevented other authors from using it for their own
purposes. So, let's take a look at some of the other books with this
title.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947)The Weeping and
the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947).

The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the
English translation of this German novel about the murky details
surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. Married to a dancer
whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never
understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three
children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for
his sheer obtuseness. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime
and Punishment -- and then quickly added that Maass lacked
Dostoevsky's obsessive intensity. This may be one of those books
whose cover outrates its contents.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950)The Weeping and
the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950).

Vera Caspary's publisher boasted that The Weeping and the Laughter
was her "debut in serious fiction" -- which, of course, is a slight
against Laura and previous novels that were marked as suspense or
murder mysteries and consequently, not "serious." The mystery here is
Beverly Hills widow Emily Arkwright's own psyche and motivations. Why
did she attempt suicide when she was, on the surface, popular, happy,
and successful? Dorothy B. Hughes -- no slouch at writing "serious
fiction" mislabelled as suspense herself -- called it a fine portrait
of "the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will
bend." This was reissued some years ago by the Murder Room Press, but
for some reason, Amazon reports the Kindle edition is "out of stock"
(is this even a thing?).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953).

Julian Maclaren-Ross, who might have caught some buckshot had a
shotgun been fired at one of Viva King's parties (he was X. Trapnel
in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time), took the phrase as the
title for his first memoir. This volume covers his childhood up to
the age of ten. Born in Ramsgate, he wrote that his first memory was
of seeing an attack by German Zeppelins (an astonishing feat if it
was the first raid on Ramsgate in late 1914). Arthur Marshall wrote
in the New Statesman that some of Maclaren-Ross's recollections were
"probably tosh," but overall the book gave a "charmed pleasure" and
was "immensely engaging."

When it was publised, The Weeping and the Laughter was intended to be
the first of a total of four books of autobiography. They even had
titles: Threnody on a Gramophone, The Sea Coast of Bohemia, and Khaki
and Cockayne. Drink, poverty, and chaotic habits undermined his
plans, and it was up to London Magazine editor Alan Ross to assemble
posthumously his fragments into Memoirs of the Forties (1965), which
achieved a success that eluded Maclaren-Ross during his lifetime.
These were subsequently combined with The Weeping and the Laughter
and other pieces into Collected Memoirs, which was published by Black
Spring Press in 2005. I'm shocked to see that this edition been out
of print for over a decade now. Unacceptable!

The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975)The Weeping and the
Laughter by Judy Chard (1975).

I include this only for the sake of completeness. This is the sort of
book that no one bothers to review. The publisher's own jacket blurb
suffices to explain why:

    Kate Fielding - a widow, but still comparatively young - seems to
    have everything a woman could wish for in life - except someone
    with whom to share it. Then she meets and falls passionately in
    love with a young artist -- Larry Stafford. Can their love survive
    the difference of a decade in their ages, the criticism of
    friends and of Kate's daughter, Roz, herself deeply involved with
    a married man? Can they overcome the terrifying illness which
    attacks Kate?

Folks, Lloyd Douglas wrote this story back in 1929. It's called
Magnificent Obsession. Save your time and watch the Douglas Sirk -
Rock Hudson - Jane Wyman movie version, which put the O in
overwrought (and we're all the better for it).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988)The Weeping and the
Laughter by Noel Barber (1988).

This was Barber's 32nd novel, published posthumously. A bestseller,
probably because he'd amassed an army of fans with the previous 31.
Twins of noble birth are separated in the turmoil of the Russian
Revolution. The lucky one makes it to Paris and finds success in love
and business. The other is lost and written off as dead. But is he?
And what about that teddy bear: is it just an object of childhood
obsession like Charles Foster Kane's Rosebud? Or is there more to the
story? I'm pretty sure I will never know. Or care.

Where are the The Weeping and the Laughters of this century? Has
Ernest Dowson lost his capacity to inspire?

Categories Covers Tags Joachim Maas, Julian Maclaren-Ross, memoirs,
Vera Caspary, Viva King

"Only nasty readers will be disappointed": Constance Tomkinson's
comic memoirs

3 August 2023
[tomkinson-german-1930s]Constance Tomkinson in Germany in 1937, while
touring with the Basil Beauties.

"My goal was to become the Toast of Broadway," Constance Tomkinson
writes in her 1962 memoir, What a Performance. So is that of a
thousand other bright-eyed young women and men who come to New York
each year. While she failed to make a name for herself on Broadway,
or in the nightclubs of Europe, or in the theatres of London,
Tomkinson succeeded in writing some of the most entertaining books of
her time.

Indeed, she may still hold the record for most money earned per word
by an author. MGM bought the film rights to her first book, Les Girls
(1956) for PS20,000 even before the book hit the stores, but after
much script doctoring and studio diktats, the resulting musical bore
almost no resemblance to Tomkinson's story -- which led some wits to
quip that she was paid PS10,000 each for "Les" and "Girls."

Tomkinson was born in Canso, Nova Scotia in 1915. Her father was a
Non-conformist Protestant minister; her mother, Grace Tomkinson, was
a writer who published a number of well-regarded novels of Canadian
life. Her parents must have had tremendous faith in their daughter,
for they allowed her to board a boat in Halifax bound for the sinful
city of New York when she was just 18.

Cover of What a Performance by Constance TomkinsonCover of What a
Performance! by Constance Tomkinson.

She'd been accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the
Theatre, where she studied drama, speech, and dance under such
teachers as Tamara Borzoi and Martha Graham. During her first summer
break, she auditioned for a summer stock company that producer Izzy
Gordon was organizing. Having spent a year studying the dramatic arts
with a capital Ah, Tomkinson wasn't prepared for the hard-nosed
practicality of a working theater company:

    "How many plays are we doing ?" I put both elbows on the table
    and gazed at him earnestly.
    "Ten. We open with Tobacco Road. You'll be playing the daughter
    with the hare-lip."
    "A play well worth doing." I nodded. "It has the feeling of
    truth."
    "It has everything. One set. Small cast. No costumes, much. About
    costumes, you provide your own."

After graduating, she soon learned that the lot of a working actress
was less passion and high ideals than cold-water flats and meals at
the Automat. She rushed to auditions, slunk home dejected time after
time. Quickly, she began to expand her definition of "theater," which
allowed her to land a well-paid, steady, but perhaps less than
prestigious gig:

    It was with pride I announced that I was to play the female lead
    in the Mario and Maria dance team and that we were to open at
    Atlantic City's most exclusive night club, from where we hoped to
    go on to the Plaza.... I told my family I was to dance in a club,
    without disclosing its name, which was not reassuring, or its
    location. I hoped my father would think it was a country club
    with the more wholesome overtones of golf. My mother and sister
    would guess the truth and classify their suspicions as Top
    Secret.

Next, she went from suggestive tangos to solemn pageants. She and a
friend decided to set up, under the auspices of a company that
franchised Biblical dramas to small troupes that toured churches
around the U.S. The work might have been more respectable but it came
with many logistical headaches, many of them involving the great
trunks of heavy costumes. It only took a few months before
Tomkinson's friend bowed out: "You may go on with the Biblical Boys
from success to success but I'm retiring," she said. "I've had enough
of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other."

So, Tomkinson decided to try her luck in England. Despite its
legendary theatre scene, London proved even tougher than New York
when it came to making it past a first audition. Growing hungry and
desperate, she answered an add for chorus girls, part of a touring
revue known at the Millerettes, that was scheduled to depart on a
tour of nightclubs in Scandanavia. Blonde, pretty, and roughly
capable of dancing in synchronization with the other 15 Millerettes,
she got the job, the start of a string of chorus line jobs she
chronicles in Les Girls.

[tomkinson-les-girls-full]Dust jacket of the Michael Joseph first
edition of Les Girls.

This experience emboldened her to apply for the most famous chorus
line in the world at that time: Les Girls at the Folies Bergere in
Paris. She got this job, too, and was soon up on stage with the great
Josephine Baker. The show, she found, was not the precision machine
she'd anticipated:

    The first night I was in the show I was led to believe, by the
    babble of voices, the running feet and the feeling of excitement
    and urgency, that there must be some crisis; but I learned that
    every night there seemed to be a crisis at the Folies. There were
    great dash and elan backstage, but little apparent co-ordination.
    Many orders were given, but few taken. I expected the
    organization to fall apart at any moment, but miraculously it
    held together. I decided it must be the French way.

One of Tomkinson's goals in joining the Folies girls was to "do"
Paris. Feeling after six months that "I was now scraping the bottom
of the Baedeker barrel," she started looking for other opportunities.
History and luck laid one in her lap soon after. The Basil Beauties,
managed by Reginald Basil, considered the glamour girls of the chorus
line business, came to the Folies for a short run before heading to a
long turn of Germany. Concerned that the Nazis might make trouble for
a Jewish woman in the group, Basil was looking for a replacement.
Though not as drop-dead gorgeous as the rest of the Beauties,
Tomkinson figured that "in Paris, where the supply of English girls
was limited," she might do.

Basil was stand-offish at first. His was no ordinary ensemble.
"They're not a troupe," he warned her. "None of that one, two, three,
kick, kick, heads, heads sort of thing." But Tomkinson conspired with
a friend to change his mind. The friend brought her name up, then
assured Basil there was little chance she would deign to joint them.
This bit of reverse psychology did the trick and she soon bundled
aboard the train to Berlin with the rest of the Beauties.

It was something of a bizarre tour. While nightclubs and parties were
still lively places, there was an ominous spectre hovering over even
the most sophisticated venues. Even the relatively naive Tomkinson
began to notice it:

    Once my eyes were sharpened, I registered things that at first
    had gone unobserved: laughter in the streets or in a Bierkeller
    suddenly being checked when the shadow of a uniformed,
    truncheon-swinging thug passed by; the notice in small lettering
    outside restaurants and hotels -- "Juden unerwunscht" [Jews not
    wanted].

By the time the Beauties made it to Rome, it was clear that Fascism
was making it too hard to carry on as if nothing had changed from the
Roaring Twenties. "We knew that the Basil Beauties were
deteriorating," Tomkinson writes. "The stick make-up was worn down to
little stumps and there was not an unbroken eyebrow liner."

Les Girls follows the Beauties on to Amsterdam, where "Tommie" toyed
with a Dutch diamond merchant, then back to Italy as part of a
touring Carnevale, then finally back to London for a run at the veddy
upper crust Dorchester Hotel. It's at the Dorchester where she parts
ways, but for reasons she only explains in her second book, African
Follies (1959).

One night at the Dorchester, she was introduced to an older gentleman
she refers to only as Mr. Doe who kept ordering lemon squashes
instead of champagne cocktails. He explained that he had made a
fortune in toffees and thought alcoholic beverages interfered with
the taste of sweets.

Cover of African Follies by Constance TomkinsonCover of African
Follies by Constance Tomkinson.

He was preparing to leave for Africa, he told Tomkinson, and was in
the market for a secretary to accompany him. She heard Africa and
ignored the rest. He ignored her utter lack of secretarial skills and
offered her the job. "Availability was my chief qualification for the
post," she writes. She did, however, take the precaution of going to
see Mrs. Doe just to make sure everything was above board.

His plan was to trek from Timbuktu to Khartoum by truck, a journey he
estimated would take ten days. It ended up taking two months. He
intended to travel as a proper English gentleman should. "Essential
bring cummerbund," Mr. Doe telegraphed her in setting out
requirements for provisions.

The pair ended up being complementary companions. Though Mr. Doe
insisted that the pot be heated up when making tea, even in the
middle of the sweltering desert, he also proved handy when it came to
coaxing a malfunctioning truck back to life. And though Tomkinson
struggled to keep up with the long memos Mr. Doe would dictate (even
when there was no way to send them to anyone), she proved better
suited than he when it came to coaxing French border guards to let
their group past.

The Africa they saw was that of empires beginning to fray at the
edges. As Michael Hogg put it in his Daily Telegraph review of
African Follies, "It was not the Dark Continent that they saw but the
seedy hinterland, with its decayed expats and hotels magnificent in
name only; not adventure that they got but discomfort, as they
trekked dustily from barely-existing towns to uninhabitable
resthouses living on sardines and brandy."

Hogg also noted the particular gift Tomkinson has for telling her
stories. "Even at her funniest she rings true -- or very nearly so."
Was it true that one of the more remote outposts they stopped at in
British Sudan, with a white population of three had a country club
with just two members? "No matter; it undoubtedly ought to be so." In
her review of Les Girls for The Tatler, Elizabeth Bowen echoed this
sentiment: "The story is simple first because it is true, also
because it bubble and trills from the writer's pen." "Only nasty
readers will be disappointed," she promised.

The disappointment is that no matter how publishers try to suggest
otherwise, there is little or nothing risque in Tomkinson's memoirs.
"Miss Tomkinson is a lady," Bowen wrote. "I don't mean she stresses
it, but it shows." Most of her fellow dancers in the various groups
were too smart to give in to their stage door Johnnies. "A girl's
best friend is her virtue" was Tomkinson's motto. As Helen Beal
Woodward wrote in Saturday Review, though she "masqueraded as a
champagne cocktail, at heart she was as wholesome as a bottle of
Seven-Up."

Partly this was because by the time Constance Tomkinson started
writing her memoirs, she was, as she told one interviewer, "anchored
to a well-ordered life as the wife of a one-time economic planner."
She took up writing after finding that her only daughter, Jane, was a
good nap-taker and gave her time each afternoon to get a few hundred
words in.

This was around 1952, after marrying her second husband, Sir Hugh
Weeks, one of the leading economic advisors to the Conservative
Party, and becoming Lady Weeks. But "Tommie" Tomkinson still had
plenty of adventures in her when she got back from Africa with Mr.
Doe.

In the summer of 1939, she returned to New York with her mother,
planning to get Broadway a try again. But there they met Albert
Batchelor, a cousin of Grace Tomkinson's, who had set himself on
taking a trip around the world by the most modern transportation
means available. He invited Constance to come along and she happily
accepted.

They headed west across the U.S. by train, then flew to Hawaii and on
to Hong Kong by clipper plane, then by British Airways to Singapore.
They arrived on the day the Second World War broke out. Albert was
unfazed, though. An experienced pilot, he knew how to talk his way
around an airfield and through a combination of persuasion, good
fellowship, and (probably) bribery, he managed to get hops all the
way to Egypt. Though the British and Italians were observing their
own version of the Phony War in North Africa at the time, direct
access across the Mediterranean was cut off and they had to hop their
way inland through British and French colonies.

It was early November by the time Albert and Constance, along with a
band of American expats fleeing Europe, managed to return to New York
by way of Lisbon. They hadn't managed to beat Phileas Fogg's 80 days,
but undaunted, Albert booked a clipper ship to the Caribbean and
continued on his journey.

Constance remained in New York and went to work for the British
mission coordinating the purchase and delivery of supplies and
weapons from America. While there, she met and married Lt Peter
Twiss, a Royal Navy fighter pilot (and later world air speed record
holder) who was touring American building support for the Allied
cause.

Cover of Dancing Attendance by Constance TomkinsonCover of Dancing
Attendance by Constance Tomkinson.

She traveled to England to rejoin Twiss after the war ended, but
their marriage fell apart and Constance was once again on her own.
She turned again to entertainment, but this time in a supporting
role. She spent two years working for the Sadler's Wells ballet
company, where she dealt with prima personalities like Margot Fonteyn
and Ninette de Valois. Then, after divorcing Peter Twiss and marrying
Sir Hugh, she moved over to the theatre, working as secretary to
Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic until she quit in 1952 to have her
daughter. She wrote about this time in Dancing Attendance (1965).

Though motherhood gave her time to write, it didn't give her
inspiration. When she finished Dancing Attendance, she capped her pen
and devoted her energies to the duties of Lady Weeks.

All of Constance Tomkinson's book had an effortless charm that wins
over even the hardest-boiled reader. But though she had no training
in writing, she took great care to achieve that effortlessness. She
once told an interviewer, "I feel I must polish a book within an inch
of its life, because if you haven't anything important to say, as is
the case with comedy, you must say it well." A quote that belongs on
the wall of anyone who aspires to write comedy.

Constance Tomkinson Twiss, Lady Weeks, died in Sussex in 1995 at the
age of 80. Her memoirs are all, sadly, long out of print.

Categories Neglected Authors Tags Constance Tomkinson, England,
entertainment, memoirs

Knopf's Borzoi Puppies - An Experiment in Experimental Fiction

27 July 202327 July 2023

[knopf-1971]
The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions
faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were
launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many
institutions grabbed desperately at innovations they gambled would
turn into lifelines. One such experiment was Alfred A. Knopf's brief
series of dust jacketless, shiny-covered hardbacks that championed
the work of young American writers playing around with fictional
forms and styles -- a series referred to as "Borzoi puppies" after
Knopf's legendary Borzoi Books. Knopf launched the series by
promising to break new ground between traditional hardbacks and cheap
mass market paperbacks, offering "new novels at plausible prices."
The plausible price in 1971 was $3.50. (According to
USInflationCalculator.com, this is equivalent to $26.37 today. By
comparison, another Knopf title from the same year, Thomas Bernhard's
Gargoyles, sold for $5.95 or $44.82 in 2023. Which goes to show that
despite what some folks think, the price of new books today has not
remotely kept pace with inflation.)

If you're a veteran of American used book stores, you may have come
across one or more of these. Fifty years later, they still standout
on any shelf: such slick spines are more often confined to textbooks
and high-end vanity publications. That look was the first thing to
attract the interest of people covering the publishing industry.
Reporting on the initiative in the New York Times, Joan Baum wrote,
"At the risk of emphasizing the container at the expense of the
contained, it should be noted at once that these slim volumes are
bound in strikingly handsome overboards with back photos of the
authors and cover designs that evoke the mood and subject matter
within."

Bill Katz (who later compiled Writer's Choice, a cornucopia of
neglected book recommendations, with his wife Linda Sternberg Katz),
introduced the series to his fellow librarians in a piece in Library
Journal:

    With In the Animal Kingdom and Burnt Toast, Knopf initiates a
    program of publishing new fiction by young novelists at a
    reasonable price. The books are just slightly smaller than the
    ordinary novel, bound in paper over boards, and nicely produced,
    with attractive covers and good, wide margins. Each of the
    present works has as its hero a youth engaged in a version of the
    ancestor quest, familiar through anthropology, by which manhood
    is achieved. And, though the two books are very different in
    style and tone, each has a large component of ritual. These
    initial selections evidently were made with an eye to capturing
    two segments of the youth market: the English-major set, who may
    be impressed with Warren Fine's impacted manipulations of time
    sequence and narrative voice; and the flower-child communards, to
    whom Peter Gould's unremitting ingenuousness may appeal.

The series was short-lived: Knopf published four titles in 1971 and
four more in 1972. By 1973, it was dead and forgotten. Dead probably
because Knopf lost money on them -- or at least (such is the logic of
the market), didn't make enough money. But unjustly forgotten, in my
view. So, here is my attempt commemorate this experiment.

Cover of Burnt Toast by Peter Gould

* Burnt Toast, by Peter Gould
    Peter Gould's amiable autobiographical novel about life on a
    Vermont farm with a sort-of commune of friends was a perfect
    introduction for the series. "We consulted the oracle when this
    book was first begun," read Gould's dedication. "This is what
    came up: 'Innocence (The Unexpected)'." The optimism of
    innocence, or maybe the innocence of optimism, was behind both
    Knopf's investment and the creative spirit of these writers. Each
    of these books was an attempt to change the world, or at least
    evidence that the belief that fiction could change the world was
    still alive and kicking.
    The farm in question had already been celebrated in Raymond
    Mungo's nonfiction book of the year before, Total Loss Farm: A
    Year in the Life. As often happens, Gould's version was more
    earnest and less commercially successful. His hero, Silent, and a
    character named V.D.C. (for "Very Decent Citizen") enter
    forthrightly and energetically into the task of farming and
    community building and take each setback with a mixture of wonder
    and resilience. Joan Baum wrote that rather than trying to turn
    his work into a book, Gould should have "tacked it up instead on
    the hardwoods in Vermont and read it aloud to the community for
    free."
    You can purchase Peter Gould's more recent nonfictional account
    of his experiences at Total Loss Farm, Horse-Drawn Yogurt, on his
    website, PeterGouldVermont.com.

    Covers of Their Family and In the Animal Kingdom by Warren Fine,
    illustrations by James Grashow

* In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family, by Warren Fine
    Warren Fine had more ambition that all his series-mates combined,
    and it shows in these two books, which have accumulated a tiny
    but loyal following over the years. In the Animal Kingdom and
    Their Family tell related stories that revolve around Orcus
    Berrigan and Gerhard Blau, who desert the revolutionary American
    army and head into the wilderness that is now the Midwest. They
    become trappers and Berrigan settles with an Indian woman known
    as Marie or Sawpootway. Their Family is Blau's fantasy of what
    happens to Berrigan and Sawpootway in the years after the two men
    parted. Where In the Animal Kingdom is rhapsodical and profane,
    Their Family blends realism and visions, particularly as
    experienced by Sawpootway:

        In the dream, her hands covered her ears; if she put her
        hands upon the sewing in her lap, she'd have to listen to
        words about Legget. She reached for the sewing, needing its
        confirmation: a voice spoke of her existence in an old life.
        The voice said nothing of Legget; her sewing disappeared
        beneath her fingers, and she didn't miss it. Dutchess rose
        out of the water, lake water still and deep. The man, from
        her first dream, perhaps Legget, perhaps Thurlow, perhaps...
        The man from her first dream, a shape shifting, threw
        Dutchess into an oven, where, cooked, she became Sawpootway.
        In the oven, she bled forever from her womb, and no man would
        touch her. The man departed, betraying her as if he were one,
        now laughing at his joke, who'd already died, long before.

    Something in Fine's work set reviewers' teeth on edge:

        Warren Fine is a devotee of the "Faulknerian" school of
        writing: using endless, snake-like sentences and relying on
        purple prose to tell poetic rather than objective truth. If
        you believe that reality is mysteriously subjective and that
        a tale can never be told simply, then Their Family is your
        literary cup of commas, diluted with pitchers full of colons
        and sweetened by tablespoons full of semi-colons.

    It's hard to see what the fuss was about. "Faulknerian" is
    actually off the mark, in my view. The real tip-off to Fine's
    creative inspiration is in his dedication in In the Animal
    Kingdom: "For John Hawkes." Fine was probably the closest any
    writer came to following in "the school of Hawkes" (or is it
    "Hawkesian"?), with its mixture of mystical eroticism and
    precise, at times painful, concrete details.
    And, it must be said, a clear invocation of the spirit of Walt
    Whitman in the opening to In the Animal Kingdom:

        In America, I throw my single voice about like a
        ventriloquist; like an evangelist--ox, eagle, ass, or winged
        man, play my various tongues, both intimate and distant
        voices cast from my mouth, as if fishlines spread to
        flickering sheets, become so much like fish themselves, like
        blades and flames, to catch my experience in the animal
        kingdom, to come into my story, feeling as if with my tongue,
        to know again, and know mostly now, the process of my
        adventure in the flesh, as all tongues, like castaways
        returning through my mouth, reenter and descend into my
        present body.

    Warren Fine never managed to publish another book after these two
    novels. He taught at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, often
    holding class in the Zoo Bar off campus, then moved to the
    University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he was found dead in his
    apartment in 1987 at the age of 44. His passing was marked by his
    favorite bartender in the Lincoln Star: "He drank, he gambled, he
    was lax about his health and his taxes. He hurt some wonderful
    women and they left him. They had no choice. He was desperately
    self-destructive... I know he believed the first rule of being a
    writer: write an awful lot." Fine's papers at the UNL archives
    include the manuscripts of dozens of stories and at least one
    unpublished novel.
    The two striking cover illustrations are by James Grashow.

    cover of Arkansas Adios by Earl Mac Rauch

* Arkansas Adios, by Earl Mac Rauch
    I've got to be honest about this one. There was a period, maybe
    from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, when Playboy magazine
    used to publish serious fiction in between the ads and nudes.
    Serious, often innovative, but also tending to fall into a
    certain rut that was even narrower and more identifiable than the
    supposed New Yorker school of spare short stories in which
    nothing happens (I'm citing the stereotype here). That rut was
    usually comic, often ribald, and pretty much always confined to
    male authors.,/dd>

    I don't know if Earl Mac Rauch ever published in Playboy, but if
    you wanted to get a good sense of what the Playboy school (or
    perhaps, playground) of fiction was like, give Arkansas Adios a
    read. It's about a precocious eleven-year-old boy growing up in
    Red Mound, Arkansas and his picaresque adventures -- at least, as
    picaresque as you can get on a fat-tired bicycle. One of his
    adventures involves playing a trick on the town's prostitute. If
    that sounds like comic gold to you, you'll probably love this
    book. Bearing in mind that Rauch published his first novel, Dirty
    Pictures from the Prom, while an undergraduate at Darmouth, I can
    be excused for describing the humor as sophmoric.
    Reviewing the book for the Boston Globe, Richard Pearce wrote,
    "More than anything else, Rauch leads us from one episode to the
    next in anticipation of some mind-blowing joke that lies just
    beyond the novel's reach." Pearce rated the book "a minor by
    singular accomplishment like that of a Pogo or Snoopy cartoon,"
    which in my opinion is an insult to Walt Kelly and Charles
    Schultz.
    Rauch does play around with fictional conventions, giving his
    characters dialogue balloons at one point, but I'm stretching to
    class this with the other books on the list as experimental
    fiction. His main claim to fame is his screenplay and
    novelization of the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

    Cover of Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense by Kathy
    Black

* Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense, by Kathy Black
    Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense is about a Barnard
    graduate named Betty who's trying to get a book called Riches and
    Fame and the Pleasures of Sense published -- that is, once she's
    written in. In search of material, she interviews friends and old
    classmates and spends time in Paris with her boyfriend Arnold.
    The book is filled with snippets. Snippets of the interviews, of
    Betty's notebooks, of a play she wrote in elementary school, of
    letters to editors, of thoughts on such topics as "Modern Youth
    Searches for an Identity." Even a snippet of an author's apology
    to the reader:

        "I started writing this book because I wanted to write
        something and because I needed something to write about so K
        said "Why not ask girls about their future plans" said K. In
        college you never think about the distant future said Arnold.
        So here it is, the distant future.

    All this would quickly grow insufferable were it not for Kathy
    Black's winning acknowledgement that since we're following along
    with her wanderings, she owes the reader a chuckle or accurate
    insight every page or so. As the New York Times reviewer, Thomas
    Lask, wrote, Black manages to capture the spirit of a certain
    segment of American youth on the cusp of a new decade: "The
    goodwill of these young people, their desire to redress
    injustice, to make the world better, to do something about the
    deep stores of guilt that lie in their hearts all shine through
    their immaturity, their quixotic and sometimes dangerous
    behavior."
    As far as I can tell, this was Kathy Black's only book.

    Cover of Saw by Steve Katz

* Saw, by Steve Katz
    Of all the authors represented in the Borzoi puppies, Steve Katz
    was the most committed to experimental fiction as both cause and
    form. He founded the Fiction Collective (still going strong,
    yay!) with fellow experimentalists Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick,
    et al., and never lost his love of play in every aspect of
    writing and publishing. His first novel, The Exagggerations of
    Peter Prince includes photos, illustrations, one-, two-, and
    four-column texts, and even a full-page set of exit doors in case
    the reader feels like quitting. His short story collection Creamy
    and Delicious (recently republished by Tough Poets Press) has
    been called the best embodiment of Pop Art in fictional form
    (and, I'm happy to note, is currently ranked as the 2506th
    greatest fiction book of all time according to
    TheGreatestBooks.org).
    Saw could be seen as Steve Katz's riff on J. G. Ballard, at least
    J. G. Ballard's disaster novels of an Earth subject to relentless
    heat, rising sea levels, crystalization, and blistering winds. In
    this case, the disaster is garbage. It's set in a New York City
    swimming in garbage: "Garbage heaps. Garbagy air, people wander
    around in the garbage, kicking it up underfoot, sucking it into
    their lungs, kissing it into each other's mouth. The Garbage Age,
    not the Space Age or the Computer Age." And when a couple manage
    begin enjoying a gourmet meal of asparus and veal Milanese, their
    apartment is invaded by "the fetid grimy rabble of the streets
    nobody loves. They drag with them some garbage cans full of
    steamy putrid stuff, and plastic bages full of sodden trash."
    So ... how does this relate to the astronaut on the cover? Well,
    the Astronaut is Steve Katz, who is watching the garbage-piled
    world and us the reader and reserving his right to remain the
    impassive observer -- or to descend and reorganize the world as a
    new Creator. If you have any familiarity with fragmentary
    fiction, you will be able to enjoy Saw. If not, you may feel like
    the New York Times reviewer, who claimed his ARC fell apart and
    left him with scattered pages and Chapter 7 following Chapter 17.
    Which I suspect Steve Katz would have told him was a darned good
    novel, too. Kirkus Reviews took a more tolerant view, saying it
    was "simply a charming book that amuses the reader as it gently
    deposits him from one place to another, with a minimum of fuss
    and a maximum of pleasure if you're so minded."
    Saw is in print, at least according to the website of the
    University of Alabama Press.

    Cover of The Log of the S. S. Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

* Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford
    Stanley Crawford's first novel, Gascoyne was a broad-brush satire
    of the American way of enterprise, something not too dissimilar
    from Stanley Elkin's early novels or Max Apple's wonderful
    collection The Oranging of America. His second -- let's call it
    The Log for short -- represents the fabulist strain of 1970s
    American experimentalism. Mrs. Unguentine spends forty years as
    the partner and shipmate of Unguentine, the captain of barge full
    of plants, odd machines, and miscellaneous junk. They wander the
    sea aimlessly -- literally: Unguentine "had been steering all
    those years with no idea of what he was steering towards."
    Eventually the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine becomes something of an
    ecosystem onto itself -- a state both cozy and comforting and
    profoundly isolating. Until one day when Unguentine falls
    overboard. Though this comes to seem to Mrs. Unguentine as less
    an event then a condition, a state that may or may not persist: "
    [T]here seems to be no longer any precise moment when old
    Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost
    gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a
    great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his
    disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that
    he would come back, so on, so forth."
    The Log was the beloved secret book of a handful of readers for
    years, but now it's back in print and available from the Dalkey
    Archive.

    Cover of Motorman by David Ohle

* Motorman, by David Ohle
    People who wax about how weird and unsettling Djuna Barnes's
    Nightwood is need to read Motorman. The short novel has enough
    strangeness to fill a 400-page novel. The Motorman is Moldenke,
    who is kept alive by the transplanted hearts of several sheep and
    spends much of his days feeling guilt for having killed some
    jellyheads (who are people ... maybe ... sort of) and resisting the
    competing influence of Bunce, the "Bust'em or Burn'em Big
    Brother," and Burnheart, the Organ Transplant King.
    In his introduction to the Calamari Archives reissue of Motorman,
    Ben Marcus writes of the awe with which the few people he knew
    who were aware of the book -- let alone had read it -- spoke of it:
    "For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come
    recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded
    disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of
    this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be
    posthumously imprisoned for reading the book--a jar of cinder
    resting in a jail cell."
    One of the striking aspects about Knopf's backing this series is
    that they were able to get a book like Motorman reviewed in
    dozens of newspaper book sections around the country -- even
    papers like the Fresno Bee. The downside, however, was that they
    couldn't prevent reactions like this: "This particular book, a
    first novel, is a bummer. It is not good writing by any standard.
    There is no real creativity and certainly no redeeming social
    value. Is Ohle's purpose to put a copy of Motorman into every
    spaced-out acid-head's hands?" Well, Motorman did get into the
    hands of some spaced-out acid-heads as well as into the hands of
    a few lovers of envelope- and mind-expanding fiction who carried
    a torch for David Ohle's odd book until, within the last decade
    or so, it's begun to be recognized as a significant and complex
    work.

Having read half of them, I must say upfront that I don't think any
of them, with the possible exception of David Ohle's Motorman, can be
considered a classic. But neither are these complacent books. For
literature to remain vital, it has to keep changing, and part of that
change depends on writers who are willing to take risks and try
things without the guarantee of success. While Knopf's venture was
probably a commercial failure, it would be a mistake to consider any
of these books a critical failure. Not everything works. But there is
something good in each of them and something for other writers to
learn from. And for that alone, these puppies deserve to be
remembered.

Categories Short Reviews Tags 1970s, David Ohle, Eral Mac Rauch,
Experimental fiction, Kathy Black, Peter Gould, Steve Katz, Warren
Fine

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1968)

19 July 2023
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for <em>A Jingle-Jangle Song</em> by
Mariana Villa-Gilbert.Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A
Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most
of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A
Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one
short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of
print and have never been reissued.

Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted
verdict of "interesting." Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith's Air
(1963), about -- well, not so much an affair as an attraction --
between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman
was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its
author's reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I
found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I
gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to
lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up
again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my
tired brain.

Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from
Bob Dylan's early hit "Mr. Tambourine Man," for it takes place in a
brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance
that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and
Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar
success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert's heroine, is undoubtedly modeled
on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark
eyes, and otherworldly voice.

Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France,
Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art
gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she
drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the
ladies' room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the
exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and
escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.

The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is
waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter
the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet
later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah
with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of
how she spoke of her:

    "Twenty-two." Carefully. And putting aside the earring now,
    placing it exactly -- so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest,
    that she'd bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was
    ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why
    on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her
    own sex?)

Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both
apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane's background
is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very
occasional affair (her husband's far more frequently). Sarah,
however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for
whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests,
she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who
abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept
up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as
a property -- abuse of another form.

Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television
appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in
London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane,
is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her
part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah's beauty and the intensity of her
passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.

A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover
romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach
of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two
ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal
life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to
rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to
their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is
the logic of this particular cliche.

In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step
short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was
reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her
readers' expectations.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.Mariana Villa-Gilbert,
from the late 1950s.

In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams
wrote of the novel, "Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content,
it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as
an important contribution to the genre." Attacked is too harsh a
word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening
Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as "yet another
[unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without
talent -- but not wholly with conviction either" and exhorted the
author: "Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at
convent school." Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the
New Statesman, admitted that "For non-lesbians like myself, the love
scenes have a certain didactic interest," unconsciously revealing
just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex
between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely
past the "brush of a fingertip" level.) The worst take by far was
that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded
that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar "can never quite
reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste."

The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene
Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine,
The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and
worst-written porn, wrote that, "For me, the reward for searching
through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title
tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by
many of them, worth it." A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, "is one
of the special books." Damon felt that "the nature of love is
discussed and examined without clinical detractions" and the sex was
described in realistic yet tender terms.

A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, "the closest thing to a
romantic novel one could expect in this time." Still, she did note
that Villa-Gilbert's decision to switch back and forth between
character's perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person
narrative, "which is awkward and unsatisfactory" -- as indeed it is.
In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the
two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which
she is which.

Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but
with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered
Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a
middle ground between "justly neglected" and "reissue worthy." It
links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Alvaro Santana-Acuna
, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude
Was Written and Became a Global Classic. "There are other works that
are canonical but not classics," he argued. "They have literary
merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need
support from institutions--academics, publishers, national
governments." When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary
consideration is whether it's likely to be of enough interest to
current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as
Santana-Acuna puts it, a curatorial project.

Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher
Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships
in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a
series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time,
I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is
hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing
label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that
statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some
lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary
importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in
literature.

What should be clear, regardless of one's view of where it best fits
in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn't
deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies
for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly)
university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why
I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative
continue to scan and make such books available online. What we
understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books
like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana
Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968

Categories Long Reviews Tags 1960s, England, Mariana Villa-Gilbert,
novel, romance, women writers

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane (1935)

12 July 2023

Dust jacket of first edition of Faith, Hope, No Charity by Margaret
Lane

This is a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale.

The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936,
beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia
Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you've probably never heard of
it.

Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges'
deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary
fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or
indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane's novel Faith, Hope, No
Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by
Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You've probably
never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless
you're a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography
of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist).
Competing against Lane's debut novel for the prize that year were
Graham Greene's A Gun For Sale, George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra
Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that
year, Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished
authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside
that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E.
Bates.

The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about PS4,000 in today's
money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a
competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural
relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee
short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the
French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until
1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert
Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French
Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee's criteria
were that the winning novel should be a 'strong and imaginative'
work, that the author should show promise for the future and that
there should be something in the novel that should reveal the 'true
character and spirit' of Englishness to French readers.

What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many
literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the
novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique
of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main
characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a
Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the
dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the
horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and
growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows
that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was
not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as
if they were separated by vast oceans.

[lane-photo]Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the
presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for Faith, Hope, No
Charity in July 1937.

Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily
Express and then Daily Mail, writing 'descriptive' pieces about
events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial
of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels
in 1933). Lane's reporter's eye describes in great detail a divided
world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each
other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy
inhabitants of the West End:

    Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and
    stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning
    whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be
    there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to
    shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance.
    They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with
    their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to
    another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more
    hands... The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were
    stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy
    goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the
    Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.

It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams,
married to Ada, one of the book's female protagonists. Lane implies
this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and
economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic
hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a
different class: Ada, an ostler's daughter, the lower classes;
Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd,
the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped
out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social
strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient
and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from
the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny.
Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three,
boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a
damp country house.

None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final
scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her
entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help
each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative
effort:

    The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a
    quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and
    fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The
    coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in
    its white globe purred hoarsely.

They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a
symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The
image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that
rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these
women may lead fulfilling and free lives.

The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the
edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers,
surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in
London's East End, it is also 'otherland,' an extraordinary island of
Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the
industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the
novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead:
Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and
Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion,
disappointment and its examination of the 'new public woman' gives
Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix
Femina committee.

The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the
novelists Kate O'Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year
included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd,
Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their
comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.

One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old
late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger
women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie
Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished
submission from a literary point of view as 'a journal kept by a
lunatic.' Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene's A Gun for Sale as: 'a
bogus book. Intensely insincere.' Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell,
saying: 'As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant
personality.' And so it seems that Margaret Lane's 'promising' novel
was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious
about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.

It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some
of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of
their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make
are forced upon them and thus their 'freedom' lacks agency; their
experiences are not transformative. The dropped 'aitches' of the
working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several
other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the
journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in
biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility
in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter
particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional
characters.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr Sarah 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.

Categories Guest Posts, Long Reviews Tags England 1930s, Margaret
Lane, novel, women writers

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques (1955)

4 August 20237 July 2023

Cover of Love from a Convict by Veronica Henriques

Joan Reid would have sympathized with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin
Hoffman's character in The Graduate). "How shall I fill up my years?"
she asks as she stands on the threshold of adulthood:

    "Paint," said my mother. "I will have you taught."

    "Medicine," said an aunt.

    "Secretary," said a friend.

    "Photography," said someone else.

"Plastics," I wanted to add.

"But surely I should feel something?" she replies. "Some purpose
which I must fulfil?"

Because this is fiction, or the Fifties, or both, Joan manages to
land a job as a reporter with a regional newspaper in a small city on
the Channel coast based on little more than the ability to type and
spell. She sets out for life with a capital L with an exchange that's
one of the best leavetakings in literature:

    "Goodbye," I said to my parents, as they handed me over to
    myself.

    "Goodbye," I said, taking possession.

Everyone at the paper is very nice and very helpful and there is not
a whiff of sexism or misogyny, which suggests that either Joan is
oblivious to it or Henriques never actually worked for a newspaper,
for both were certainly as pervasive as the clouds of cigarette smoke
in such places back then.

Indeed, these two paragraphs encapsulate the brightest and dimmest
facets of Love from a Convict (its U.S. title was Love for a Convict,
though why just the preposition was changed is anyone's guess). At
its best, Henrique's narratorial voice is snappy, clever, unexpected,
and funny. Joan, however, is often too dense or too earnest to merit
Henrique's brio.

How earnest? Earnest enough to fall in love in the space of five
sentences and even fewer minutes. Stranded out on the moors by a
bitter storm, she and a colleague seek shelter at the only structure
that seems inhabited: a prison. A warder lets them into the visitors'
waiting room and fetches a convict, who comes into to light the
stove. And the lightning strikes:

    His nose was fairly straight; it had a slight twist as it neared
    his nostrils, which sloped back gently, sensitively. His mouth
    was straight, the upper lip very slightly overlapping the lower.
    His chin was square. He was a very attractive looking man I he
    sort of man I would want to love.

And that is pretty much all there is to it. By the time they make it
back to the office, Joan is certain that she is in love with Richard,
the inmate. Several visits in the following weeks only set her mind
more firmly, though Richard seems an unpromising candidate.
Soft-spoken, well-mannered, and attracted in kind to Joan, he is also
prone to sudden bursts of rage. And on the day when his sentence is
up, he attacks the guard bringing him the civilian clothes he's about
to be released in.

Joan's parents are, understandably, concerned, despite her open
optimism in sharing her news:

    "I am in love," I wrote my parents.

    "Who? Do bring him home," they wrote.

    "I can't," I answered. "He's still in prison."

Her fellow reporters also try to dissuade her, but Joan is convinced.
"If I didn't love him, would I know so surely?" she challenges them.
A cousin of Richard's she meets tells her that he is a vicious man,
"constantly exploding with belligerence." Richard's parents, who she
visits in search of answers, have written him off: "We have our own
lives to live, and we have accepted the fact that Richard is better
in prison than out."

None of them manages to change her mind. Even when the prison's
governor advises her that Richard is likely to keep adding years to
his sentence through his outbursts, Joan remains steadfast. And here
we leave the story, with Joan and Richard stuck in their respective
limbos.

For me, this stuckness was what kept Love from a Convict from rising
to the level of Veronica Henriques' frequently-sparkling prose.
Reading it was like listening a light and swinging jazz tune on a
scratched record, where tune returns again and again and again to a
particular two-bar passage. [Some youngsters make have to Google
"record skipping" to understand that analogy.] Stuckness is a
problematic state to end a novel in -- indeed, Love from a Convict
seems almost unfinished.

Ironically, the structural aspects were what Kingsley Amis thought
most successful in the book. His problem was with Joan, whose willful
naivete he could barely tolerate:

    I had barely caught sight of Love from a Convict before starting
    to object to it, and certainly there can be few books more
    energetically not my cup of tea.

    I can just about stomach the idea of a sensitive girl reporter on
    a provincial newspaper falling in love with a noble-savage
    convict, but her only identifiable motive for what she does about
    it turns out to be, not love, but a half-hidden desire to be
    though shocking by some people and 'interesting' by others, and
    at this point the last of my sympathy expired. It is with all the
    more emphasis, then, that I must praise the book, firstly for the
    unusual vigour with which it puts of its (to me antipathetic)
    state of feeling, and secondly for its grasp of technique, flair
    for exposition, adroitness in scene-shifting and the rest of the
    how=d'ye-do -- whatever it is that makes the reader detect some
    kind of sense of vocation in a novelist. So when the next one
    from this stable appears I shall, reluctantly, have to get hold
    of it. (The Spectator, 18 February 1955)

Other reviewers were generally as positive as Amis, most of them
singling out the freshness of Joan's voice and perspective. "A little
tour de force in the sense of honesty," wrote Newsweek's critic.

Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of <em>Love from a Convict</
em>.Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of Love from a Convict.

Veronica Henriques was 24 when Love from a Convict was published. The
daughter of the novelist and founding member of the British
Commandos, Robert Henriques, she went on to write four more novels in
the next dozen years. By the 1970s, however, she had become more
interested in painting and printmaking and began showing her work
under her married name of Veronica Gosling. She continues to create
and foster a space for art and community in her Studio 36 in Exeter.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques
London: Secker & Warburg, 1955

Categories Short Reviews Tags 1950s, England, love, novel, prison,
Veronica Henriques

June 30, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina
Conarain (1936)

30 June 2023

[boyle-365-days]

Editor's Note: This entry for June 30, 1934, written by the Swedish
novelist Gustav Sandgren, offers a timely reminder of the precarious
nature of freedom.

Headline: "Wanderers on the Face of the Earth" [Sweden]

The train moved out from the small station. He sat on the bench
opposite me, his little dark-clothed body nervously twitching, his
long white hands moving like disturbed birds. His eyes blinked behind
silver-bowed eyeglasses. And I listened to him, while the landscape
glided by as in a dream, silent and contourless.

"I tell you I am afraid," he said. "You know I am an emigrant, and
that I have saved my life by running away from Germany. Still it is
not those facts that upset me. I am not afraid of anything happening
to my body, it is not death I talk of. It is something other.
Something dreadful beyond words. Something that happens not only to
me, but to the whole world. You understand?"

"Yes," I said.

"Yes, yes," he said. "Pardon me I -- I mean I have seen and felt ten
millions of respectable citizens, of kind, labouring folks suddenly
turn bandits, bloodhungry animals, craving for men to put to death by
kicks and blows. I say to you, I have felt it, seen it, seen my best
friend and neighbour, a peaceful clerk with ink-spots on his
fingertops turn wild, heard him hammer at my door with an axe to get
in and kill me. Yet it is not the facts I shrink from -- it is the
thing behind it, the evil power, the nothingness of all that we
called human thoughts and feelings. We have been cheated, we are
cheated, the whole of mankind. We have lived on illusions and now
they are withdrawn from under our feet... "

"But in this country you are safe," I tried to soothe him.

"Nobody is safe, I am afraid. I say I am afraid. It is nameless ugly
things that begin to darken over us, that are to come. I seek to calm
myself, but I can't, I can't...."

His poor little figure hooked in the corner, his clammy hands
fastening to the window strap. The train moved very fast, it was as
if we were thrown forward through a mist of green, through a green
dead dream.

And I felt his fear.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

This piece appears in 365 Days, an anthology of what we would today
call flash fictions, inspired by a newspaper headline and story for
each day in 1934, that was edited by the American writer Kay Boyle
and her then-husband Laurence Vail, along with their Irish friend
Nina Conarain.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
London: Jonathan Cape, 1936

Categories Excerpts from Neglected Books Tags Gustav Sandgren, Kay
Boyle, Laurence Vail, Nina Conarain, Sweden

A Dozen Views of the Fall of France, June 1940

28 June 202328 June 2023

[Juin-1940-une-famille-quitte-Paris-avec-des-moyens-de-fortune-]

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the
audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry
into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer's massive follow-up
to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000
pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader's
appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940.
And if there is one resounding criticism I'd make, it's that Shirer's
is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top
down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the
politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and
military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events
of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in
a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of
the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the
national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell
apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time
without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted?
Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged
the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to
learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12
different ways in which people responded.

[tessier-divided-loyalties]

* Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du
    Tessier Cros
    Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married Francois Teissier du
    Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural
    Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military
    service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the
    war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:


        A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and
        came on board. They told us that their leave had been
        cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were
        pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus.
        i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately
        hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My
        sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The
        Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves?
        What about Francois? It was the end, the terrible end I had
        sensed from the beginning....

    [polnay-paris]

* Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)
    (1942), by Peter de Polnay
    Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English,
    was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie boheme when
    war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and
    even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little
    import:


        I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and
        at that bridge party only English and Americans were present.
        They all said that the French were running; I heard the word
        running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside
        France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was
        that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible.
        But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French
        army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though
        nobody quite believed that those tanks were really
        invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the
        talk would exorcise him.

    Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of
    the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de
    Polnay seemed to cross paths -- and be trusted -- by everyone:
    Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance
    members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the
    attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his
    way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of
    his book.

    [simenon-train]

* The Train, by Georges Simenon
    Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges
    Simenon wrote one of his best novels -- Brigid Brophy called it
    his masterpiece -- about the choices people make when their lives
    are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are
    fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the
    experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their
    fellow townspeople have decided to stay:


        Other people, like us, were walking towards the station,
        burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if
        she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it
        along with me....

        There was a rather wild look in most people's eyes, but that
        was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be
        off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was
        convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind
        and sacrificed.

        Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind
        the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it
        seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a
        sort of icy calm.

    The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband
    meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to
    go with his life. It's a classic Simenon story, in which one
    unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a
    series of events that overturns everything an individual has
    taken for granted -- rather as the fall of France did on a much
    larger scale.

    [lodwick-running-and-bid]

* Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by
    John Lodwick
    Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John
    Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in
    numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way
    before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as
    a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again,
    15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a
    prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent
    for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.
    Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial
    nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to
    Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being
    attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

        Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by
        it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as
        material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles
        as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as
        nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few
        moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in
        the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated
        in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity.
        He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear,
        and since the enemy realize this and know the control which
        his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens
        to their aeroplane engines -- sirens, whose mournful wail,
        like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and
        curdle his quaking tripes.

    [gwynn-browne-fsp]

* F.S.P.: An N.C.O.'s Description of His and Others' First Six Months
    of War, January 1st-June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)
    Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a
    military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force
    deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He
    witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like "Phony War" but the
    panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through
    Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne's might be considered the first
    modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the
    clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
    In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the
    masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from
    the Germans:


        There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all
        looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the
        next one coming after. On the top there were always the
        mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets
        pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and
        then usually a bicycle and a child's scooter and sometimes a
        pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and
        it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it
        was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything
        the family had and all the women inside all wore little round
        hats with little veils on them. The children usually there
        were two or three children they were asleep. There were never
        any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was
        hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they
        all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump
        scented and stuffy.

    [boothe-europe-in-the-spring]

* Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)
    Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding
    husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce's name to hers) traveled
    to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness
    the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and
    Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up
    in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day
    in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into
    Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes
    her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian
    sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:


        Paris got its information about what France had been doing
        all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her
        husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split
        second her husband walks in the door with a carefully
        arranged smile on his face: "So things have been going badly
        at the office?" And he says: "My God, how did you know?" And
        she replies: "Because I know you so well, darling." That is
        how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the
        husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians' faces
        when they left their offices, the way military moustaches
        drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of
        well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on
        the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked
        in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the
        significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a
        thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures
        and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from
        the top of Paris to the bottom--from clerk to doorman, to
        domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the
        people--so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how
        the fate of France fared.

    [spears-assignment]

* Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)
    Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a
    fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust
    of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill's personal
    representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after
    Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to
    Catastrophe, Spears' two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war
    and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the
    personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth
    Republic.
    Knowing Marshal Petain from his work as a liaison officer between
    the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a
    call soon after Petain's return from his post as ambassador to
    Franco's Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being
    lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and
    completely unsuited to the task:


        Very sadly I said: "What France needs today, Monsieur le
        Marshal, is another Joan of Arc." His reaction was startling.
        Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. "Joan of
        Arc! Joan of Arc!" he exclaimed, "Have you read my speech on
        Joan of Arc?" "No, Monsieur le Marechal "Now that is too bad,
        it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when
        was it, in 1937, '38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may
        say. I shall read it to you."

        To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some
        bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound
        volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent
        right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was
        considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: "I shall
        have it found, it is certainly here," and, moving back to his
        desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General
        Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was
        a major quality in the Marshal's eyes) and, I think, very
        lame.

        The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic
        haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

        It was presently found. " Je vous remercie ," said the
        Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled
        himself in a stiff arm! chair with his back to the window.

        All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very
        long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a
        single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the
        terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based
        on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently,
        felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely
        pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

    [bartlett-my-first-war]

* My First War: An Army Officer's Journal for May 1940, through
    Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)
    Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with
    the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First
    War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in
    collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as "British
    nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting," but what comes
    across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take
    in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.
    As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the
    name of a good hotel there, "as we're all tired and feel we'd
    like a wash and a sleep." The man looks at him in amazement. He
    soon discovers why:


        Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I
        hadn't realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town
        there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw
        about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on
        their underwings flying very low above me. There were no
        airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street
        and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs
        began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming
        bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little
        delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped
        being hit.
        I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

    [bloch-strange-defeat]

* Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch
    Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a
    veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined
    personal memoir with searching political and social criticism
    that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for
    his work in the French resistance.
    Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the
    German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by
    disguising himself as ... himself:


        What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep
        in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to
        choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long
        run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the
        house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My
        rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about
        them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this
        occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without
        difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then,
        after first making contact with an old friend who was a
        professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels.
        Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to
        retain one's identity, I put my real name and occupation on
        the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were
        sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence
        of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so
        obviously academic a figure?

    [feuchtwanger-devil-in-france]

* The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940,
    by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)
    Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after
    Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal
    intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution.
    Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940,
    however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les
    Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape
    from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to
    Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry,
    the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger
    wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.
    Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands
    of other prisoners in Les Mille:

        What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that
        one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night,
        every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping,
        voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men,
        men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing,
        feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating,
        smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public
        view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

    [ehrenburg-fall-of-paris]

* The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg
    Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in
    Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical
    risks of Stalin's purges). In response to the fall of France, he
    quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre's Roads to
    Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society
    and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the
    despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:


        All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They
        could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In
        the morning Agnes went shopping. The long queue was silent.
        The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a
        pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract
        their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who
        had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

        Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: "What about France?"

        Nobody answered, but everybody thought: "France is also
        lost."

    [sartre-troubled-sleep]

* Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre
    In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French
    society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France
    and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre
    follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and
    are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He
    describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape
    rolls away from them:


        Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of
        vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two
        pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop,
        stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France,
        an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was
        watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and
        thought of Petain; the train swept across her gaze, across
        her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and
        trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories
        and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of
        men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all
        the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child
        made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.

Categories Short Reviews Tags Arthur Gwynn-Browne, Clare Boothe Luce,
Edward L. Spears, Georges Simenon, Ilya Ehrenburg, Janet Teissier du
Cros, Jean Paul Sartre, John Lodwick, Lion Feuchtwanger, Marc Bloch,
Peter de Polnay

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros (1956)

14 June 2023

Cover of first US edition of The Mermaids by Eva Boros

"He met her on the Danube Corso, on the 29th of August, 1936." The
scene is Budapest before the horrors. He is Aladar, a 30-something
businessman, divorced, seeking an escape from the oppressive heat.
She is an attractive peroxide blonde ("a Jean Harlow type," he
thinks). Their cafe tables abut and their glances lead to a
conversation. Her Hungarian is accented, sketchy. She is Lalla, an
Italian, a nightclub singer and dancer, or so she claims. He doubts
her words. There is a certain frailty about her and sense of
unworldliness.

He invites her to dinner but she declines, saying she needs to get
home. As he helps her onto the tram, he slips his business card into
her hand.

And for weeks thereafter, he returns to the same cafe in hopes of
seeing her again. "Like most solitary people," Boros tells us, "he is
a creature of habit." His persistence doesn't pay off.

Then one day, a letter arrives in his office. It's from Lalla, who
invites Aladar to visit. "I am laid up with a cold" at the Pannonia
sanitorium on the outskirts of town. She is a tuberculosis patient,
he realizes.

Cover of The Doll's Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids
Cover of The Doll's Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids.

Boros, who grew up in Budapest and who was herself a patient in such
a clinic, captures the safe but fraught atmosphere in which some stay
for years and some hemorrhage and die overnight.

    Hospitals, like prisons, create their own time. Weeks pass
    unnoticed, while minutes seem to last for hours and days. You are
    aware of this change in the rhythm of time as soon as you enter
    the place. It affects you unpleasantly, like the smell of
    disinfectants and drugs. It feels like anxiety. You glance at
    your watch, for instinctively you know that there is something
    wrong with the time; that you have to come too early or too late.
    And you begin to wonder how long your visit is supposed to last.
    You are already counting in minutes and in seconds; the afternoon
    is never going to end. . . .

Like us, Aladar is, at first, uncomfortable seeing Lalla in her bed,
walking her along the ward, sitting her on the terrace. But the ease
of her talk and the friendliness of the other patients she introduces
him to -- bright young Franciska, charming Kati, the unassuming Count,
who has been in and out of the clinic (mostly in) for decades -- soon
overcomes his awkwardness.

He returns the next weekend, and the next, and the next after that
(creature of habit, remember?). He takes Lalla out for rides in his
car, proud to be seen with a young, beautiful woman. Aladar comes
during the week to meet with Lalla's doctor (days before healthcare
privacy regulations), looking for assurance that she will eventually
be cured. He wants to take her away, marry her, add her to his
treasures. "Yes, she is improved," the doctor responds, careful not
to confuse improved with cured -- though Aladar instantly does.

Gradually, we realize the meaning of Boros's title. Aladar has no
more chance of taking Lalla away from the sanatorium for good than
the prince has of taking the mermaid from sea. She understands this.
On a trip into Budapest, he urges her to spend the night in town.
"But remember that no hotel would accept me," she reminds him, "What
with my sputum-mug and all that."

When Aladar does finally come to some acceptance of the situation, it
is almost wholly selfish. "She couldn't exist without her illness...
She was made by her illness, she was her illness."

The Mermaids is, as one can predict from the moment Aladar reads
Lalla's letter in his office, a tragic romance. But not a melodrama,
thank God. Eva Boros is far too skillful and subtle an artist for
that.

In fact, the pleasure of The Mermaids is that of putting ourselves in
the hands of a masterful minimalist. Reading this book is like taking
a glass of wine in the sun-dappled shade of a continental cafe. The
experience is one to be savored, not indulged in. We take one glass
and sit for an hour or so. Not two, and never three.

The U.S. edition of The Mermaids came with a long -- and rare --
tribute from Eudora Welty. "Thank you for letting me read this
beautiful novel," she wrote, likely in response to an advance copy.
The book, she wrote, was a "sensitive, haunting work of a quality
distinctly its own. While it probes deeply for unsparing truth, it is
delicate as a flower to the senses."

Most critics shared this view. Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing the book in
The Tatler and Bystander, remarked that Boros, although Hungarian,
wrote "far better English than many of us command!" She applauded the
descriptions of the sanatorium's atmosphere and residents and found
that the novel "has a beauty hard to pin down. This book, I can only
say, haunts me: I must re-read it." Her fellow novelist Antonia White
was equally impressed: "It is exciting, if a little disconcerting,
that a Hungarian, writing her first novel in a language not her own,
should produce a small gem of English literature."

In the U.S., Granville Hicks, always an insightful and supportive
reviewer, found The Mermaids "is completely unified by the mood that
the author creates, and the writing has a kind of purity that takes
the breath away." On the matter of the inevitable comparisons with
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hicks argued that "Miss Boros, of
course, is trying to do something very different from Mann, something
much smaller than he attempted, but on her own scale she has been
quite as successful, and that is a great deal to say."

Eva Boros in Vienna, 1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.Eva Boros in Vienna,
1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.

Though she set The Mermaids in 1936, Eva Boros had left Hungary years
before. In 1928, she moved to Vienna, where she met the young
German-born British photographer Bill Brandt. Like Boros, Brandt had
spent time in a T.B. clinic -- in his case, in Davos, the setting of
Mann's novel. Brandt fell for Boros -- 21, blonde (natural), beautiful
-- and the two married ... eventually. Brandt's love life was never less
than complicated and Boros eventually lost her taste for competition.

Her life remained intertwined with Brandt's, though. In the 1950s, he
entered psychoanalysis with a therapist named Barbara Lantos and
suggested that Boros, now divorced from him but living in London as
well, become her patient as well. Later, when Lantos was dying of
cancer, she told her husband, a Hungarian emigre named Sandor Rakos,
that he should marry Boros after her death -- which he did.

Paul Delany, Brandt's biographer, speculates that psychoanalysis may
have cured Boros of the compulsion to write. The Mermaids was her
first and only novel. It has never been republished.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros
New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956

Categories Long Reviews Tags Eva Boros, Hungary, novel, tuberculosis

Seven Days Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr. (1928)

7 June 2023

Cover of Seven Days Whipping by John Biggs Jr.

This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned
today, it's inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much
more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if either of
his novels enters the discussion, it's probably in a footnote. This
is not entirely unjust.

Biggs (Princeton '18), Fitzgerald ('17), and Edmund Wilson ('16)
became friends through their passion for writing and editing
Princeton's two literary magazines, The Tiger and The Nassau Literary
Magazine. Biggs would serve as managing editor for both, though he
quickly realized that Fitzgerald was the better (and more prolific)
writer. He and Fitzgerald shared a room during FSF's last term at
Princeton before entering the Army in late 1917.

[biggs-princeton-tiger-1918]The 1917-1918 staff of the Princeton
Tiger. John Biggs, Jr. center front and F. Scott Fitzgerald behind
him.

Biggs later admitted that while he was "a literary snob, Fitz was a
snob's snob." Despite the fact that Biggs came from a far wealthier
family, Fitzgerald somehow managed to dress in the best clothing
available from Brooks Brothers and Jacob Reed. When Fitzgerald needed
someone to get him out of jail after a bender, though, it was Biggs
who inevitably provided the bail.

Both men enlisted in the Army after American entered the First World
War. Neither made it overseas. While Fitzgerald married and moved to
New York after his discharge, Biggs returned to Princeton to graduate
and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard. Biggs and his wife
traveled to Paris for their honeymoon but then headed back to
Delaware, where Biggs followed in his father's footsteps and
established a successful law practice.

Although he was not even a year older than Fitzgerald, Biggs became
something of an older brother figure for the writer. Biggs arranged
for a house in Delaware when Fitzgerald needed to dry out and he took
an increasingly active role in handling Fitzgerald's legal matters.
In return, Fitzgerald introduced Biggs to Max Perkins, his editor at
Scribner's.

Biggs wrote a long untitled novel while at Harvard that Fitzgerald
shopped to Scribner's, Putnam, and eventually, H. L. Mencken. "To my
mind it has the most beautiful writing -- and I don't mean "fine"
writing -- that I've seen in a 'coon's age," he told Mencken. "I don't
believe anyone in America can write like this -- and the novel is also
remarkable in the objectivity of its realism...." Mencken did not
agree. Not only did the book never get published but Mencken, who
crossed paths with Biggs socially from time to time, considered him
dull and officious.

Scribner's accepted Biggs' next novel, Demi-Gods (1926), which
reviewers found an awkward mix of American eccentric religious
mysticism (there are two attempts to found a cult in the book) and
Gilded Age tycoonism. Perkins accepted the book for Scribner's but
was measured in his feedback to Fitzgerald.

Perkins' opinion of Biggs' third novel, Seven Days Whipping, was much
higher. Scribner's publicized the book in all the major reviews. A
shorter version was serialized in Scribner's Magazine and prefaced
with this potpourri-like teaser:

    In describing the book, one is at a loss for comparatives. One
    thinks of James Joyce, of Edgar Allen Poe, even of that fantastic
    play, "Beggar on Horseback." None of them fits, although all of
    them suggest something of the truth. Seven Days Whipping has
    certain qualities of Joycean introspection, the fascination of
    Poe's stories, an atmosphere of fantastic mystery, a revelation
    of forces hidden deep in the primitive in all of us.

Fitzgerald was delighted at its apparent success. "I loved John's
book," he wrote Perkins after receiving a copy. "It's his best thing
and the most likely to go. It's really thought out -- oddly enough its
least effective moments are the traces of his old manner." He did
acknowledge, though, that "From the first draft, which was the one I
saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere
Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don't know."

The book did not sell well, however, despite generally favorable
reviews and Scribner's support. And almost two years after his
initial enthusiasm for the book, Fitzgerald -- who was likely off on
Biggs and all stable people in general, given his own troubles at the
time -- confided, "Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless.
Demigods was simply oratorical twirp."

I have to agree with Fitzgerald on Seven Days Whipping. That odd
title, by the way, is the name of a Delaware tribesman whose sudden
and dramatic appearance -- with the aid of a tremendous hurricane-like
storm -- provides the climax of the book. In contrast, Bigg's
protagonist, Stawell -- a Puritan throwback, perhaps (Stay Well)? --
Ball La Place, is the opposite of dramatic. He is sober as a judge,
which is fitting, since he is a judge (as Biggs himself would later
become).

As dark clouds mass to the east, Judge La Place travels from his
court in Wilmington to his family estate on the banks of the Red clay
River. There, his wife awaits, expecting to deliver their first child
at any moment. She is a late mother and La Place frets about her
health and the birth. As they sit down for supper, the storm breaks
with a violent fury. The telephone goes out and he decides to drive
to fetch the doctor.

With sheets of rain and earth-shaking bursts of thunder battering
him, La Place is startled to meet with a tall Indian, half-naked and
carrying the body of a dead deer. What happens next is neither
respectable nor colorless, but it is largely unbelievable unless
you're willing to accept that the mixture of an expectant wife and a
melodramatic encounter in the rain would be enough to send a
middle-aged judge into a murderous hysteria. A hysteria which
evaporates as soon as the sun rises, the baby howls, and Seven Days
Whipping manages to come back to life.

John Biggs, Jr. was not unfamiliar with hysteria and other forms of
mental illness. He dealt with numerous cases involving commitment to
mental asylums at a time when the power in such cases lay heavy
against the individual and in the 1940s, he became the chair of the
American Bar Association's committee on the rights of the mentally
ill.

He may not, however, have had the temperament to put himself fully
into the mind of a man who goes mad, even if just briefly. Reading
Seven Days Whipping, I was reminded of something James Baldwin once
said in an interview: "When you're writing, you're trying to find out
something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me
is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to
find out. But something forces you to anyway." Whatever that
something is, John Biggs, Jr. resisted it. If he wanted his readers
to believe that Judge La Place becomes mad, he only succeeds in
convincing us that he becomes histrionic.

Fortunately for Fitzgerald, Biggs was a far better lawyer and friend
than he was a novelist. As Fitzgerald's alcoholism and money problems
grew worse, Biggs staunchly defended his interests and protected the
writer against bankruptcy. Before his death, with Zelda in and out of
institutions, Fitzgerald named Biggs executor and guardian of their
daughter Scottie, and proximity to Biggs was one of the reasons that
she settled in Washington, D.C. after leaving college.

I have to admit that I knew nothing about Seven Day's Whipping when I
started it. I was merely intrigued by the title and happy to give it
a try when I spotted a cheap copy. In the end, it was more
interesting as an entree to the story of John Biggs, Jr. -- a good
man, a good lawyer, a good judge, but a merely adequate novelist --
than on its own merits. But such is the nature of reading forgotten
old books: they're not all masterpieces.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Seven Day's Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928

Categories Justly Neglected? Tags 1920s, Delaware, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, John Biggs Jr., novel
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