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PHILIP ROTH AND THE “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” SERIES Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series. 5 March 2021. In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writingexperience.”.
STRAIGHT AND CROOKED THINKING Straight and Crooked Thinking ‖ Page 5 CHAPTER 1: EMOTIONAL MEANINGS WE can use language in more than one way. When we write or say such a sentence as "Rover is a THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
THE BEST OF H. T. WEBSTER H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? H. T. Webster. His picture made the cover of Time magazine in 1945: Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial ALL NIGHT AT MR. STANYHURST’S, BY HUGH EDWARDS (1933 A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered.What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933). COLLECTED STORIES, BY VIOLA MEYNELL (1957) Viola Meynell worked hard as a writer all her adult life, publishing short stories, novels, and nonfiction to critical acclaim, steady if not exceptional sales, and the respect of her peers, helped support D. H. Lawrence in hard times and brought Moby Dick back to recognition asa classic, and
EDA LORD, WRITING IN THE MARGINS Eda Lord (L) and Sybille Bedford (R). Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train TAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN, BY ANN OAKLEY (1984) In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life. Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare stateand
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, BY VIRGILIA PETERSON Peterson’s 1961 memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, is 334 pages of relentless mom-bashing. But this is frightfully crass of me. The daughter of one of America’s first practicing psychologists, Peterson was born into the heart of New York City society, raised in a brownstone mansion in the East Seventies and rating a notice in theNew York
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks (1972) 29 May 2021. The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase. Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure ofwhat they
PHILIP ROTH AND THE “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” SERIES Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series. 5 March 2021. In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writingexperience.”.
STRAIGHT AND CROOKED THINKING Straight and Crooked Thinking ‖ Page 5 CHAPTER 1: EMOTIONAL MEANINGS WE can use language in more than one way. When we write or say such a sentence as "Rover is a THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
THE BEST OF H. T. WEBSTER H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? H. T. Webster. His picture made the cover of Time magazine in 1945: Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial ALL NIGHT AT MR. STANYHURST’S, BY HUGH EDWARDS (1933 A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered.What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933). COLLECTED STORIES, BY VIOLA MEYNELL (1957) Viola Meynell worked hard as a writer all her adult life, publishing short stories, novels, and nonfiction to critical acclaim, steady if not exceptional sales, and the respect of her peers, helped support D. H. Lawrence in hard times and brought Moby Dick back to recognition asa classic, and
EDA LORD, WRITING IN THE MARGINS Eda Lord (L) and Sybille Bedford (R). Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train TAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN, BY ANN OAKLEY (1984) In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life. Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare stateand
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, BY VIRGILIA PETERSON Peterson’s 1961 memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, is 334 pages of relentless mom-bashing. But this is frightfully crass of me. The daughter of one of America’s first practicing psychologists, Peterson was born into the heart of New York City society, raised in a brownstone mansion in the East Seventies and rating a notice in theNew York
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. FEATURED NEGLECTED AUTHORS The Tragedies of Isabel Bolton. 18 May 2021. 30 April 2021. Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE Dorothy Richardson in 1932, about a year after Dawn’s Left Hand was published Of all the Pilgrimage series, Dawn’s Left Hand by far offers the richest lode for Richardson scholars to mine for publication material.Not because it’s the longest (it’s not) or the best (it’s not, IMHO) or the densest with references (my vote for this award would be Deadlock), but because of the sex. CITY WITHOUT A HEART, BY ANONYMOUS (1933) Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author'sidentity, but then
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE “This is not an autobiography as much as an evocation of a time that is gone,” write Jon and Rumer Godden at the start of this magical book. At the time the book was published, both women were experienced writers of novels and short stories. COMMON READER EDITIONS Common Reader Editions. Beginning in the late 1990s, Akadine Press, through its catalog company, A Common Reader reissued dozens of neglected titles in handsome paperback editions. With a few exceptions, the titles dated from the 1940s on, but they ranged from story collections to cookbooks, and “FOR A WORDFARER,” FROM GREEN ARMOR ON GREEN GROUND, BY For a Wordfarer. Speak them slowly, space them so: Say them soft, or sing them low, Words whose way we may not know any more. Still, before the days go, Sing them low, or say them soft. Such a little while is left To counterpoint the soundless drift of Time, Let rhyming fall andlift. Space them
THE MOONFLOWER VINE, BY JETTA CARLETON The Moonflower Vine is a multi-dimensional tale of the lives of Matthew Soames, his wife, Callie, and their four daughters — Jessica, Leonie, Mathy, and Mary Jo. Mary Jo is probably closest in profile to Carleton herself. The youngest of the girls, she is roughly the same age as Carleton and, like her, left rural Missouri for acareer in the
NO RIGHT TO LIVE, BY ESTHER GRENEN (PSEUDONYM OF MARIA No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar) (1934) 21 March 2021. 21 March 2021. Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks (1972) 29 May 2021. The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase. Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure ofwhat they
PHILIP ROTH AND THE “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” SERIES Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series. 5 March 2021. In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writingexperience.”.
STRAIGHT AND CROOKED THINKING Straight and Crooked Thinking ‖ Page 5 CHAPTER 1: EMOTIONAL MEANINGS WE can use language in more than one way. When we write or say such a sentence as "Rover is a THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
THE BEST OF H. T. WEBSTER H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? H. T. Webster. His picture made the cover of Time magazine in 1945: Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial ALL NIGHT AT MR. STANYHURST’S, BY HUGH EDWARDS (1933 A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered.What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933). EDA LORD, WRITING IN THE MARGINS Eda Lord (L) and Sybille Bedford (R). Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train COLLECTED STORIES, BY VIOLA MEYNELL (1957) Viola Meynell worked hard as a writer all her adult life, publishing short stories, novels, and nonfiction to critical acclaim, steady if not exceptional sales, and the respect of her peers, helped support D. H. Lawrence in hard times and brought Moby Dick back to recognition asa classic, and
FACES OF PHILIP: A MEMOIR OF PHILIP TOYNBEE, BY JESSICA Jessica Mitford describes Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee as “A record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information.” With such a qualification, one can excuse the fact that this book is likely to have been of more interest to TAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN, BY ANN OAKLEY (1984) In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life. Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare stateand
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks (1972) 29 May 2021. The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase. Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure ofwhat they
PHILIP ROTH AND THE “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” SERIES Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series. 5 March 2021. In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writingexperience.”.
STRAIGHT AND CROOKED THINKING Straight and Crooked Thinking ‖ Page 5 CHAPTER 1: EMOTIONAL MEANINGS WE can use language in more than one way. When we write or say such a sentence as "Rover is a THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
THE BEST OF H. T. WEBSTER H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? H. T. Webster. His picture made the cover of Time magazine in 1945: Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial ALL NIGHT AT MR. STANYHURST’S, BY HUGH EDWARDS (1933 A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered.What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933). EDA LORD, WRITING IN THE MARGINS Eda Lord (L) and Sybille Bedford (R). Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train COLLECTED STORIES, BY VIOLA MEYNELL (1957) Viola Meynell worked hard as a writer all her adult life, publishing short stories, novels, and nonfiction to critical acclaim, steady if not exceptional sales, and the respect of her peers, helped support D. H. Lawrence in hard times and brought Moby Dick back to recognition asa classic, and
FACES OF PHILIP: A MEMOIR OF PHILIP TOYNBEE, BY JESSICA Jessica Mitford describes Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee as “A record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information.” With such a qualification, one can excuse the fact that this book is likely to have been of more interest to TAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN, BY ANN OAKLEY (1984) In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life. Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare stateand
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE Dorothy Richardson in 1932, about a year after Dawn’s Left Hand was published Of all the Pilgrimage series, Dawn’s Left Hand by far offers the richest lode for Richardson scholars to mine for publication material.Not because it’s the longest (it’s not) or the best (it’s not, IMHO) or the densest with references (my vote for this award would be Deadlock), but because of the sex. CITY WITHOUT A HEART, BY ANONYMOUS (1933) Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author'sidentity, but then
THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE “This is not an autobiography as much as an evocation of a time that is gone,” write Jon and Rumer Godden at the start of this magical book. At the time the book was published, both women were experienced writers of novels and short stories. COMMON READER EDITIONS Common Reader Editions. Beginning in the late 1990s, Akadine Press, through its catalog company, A Common Reader reissued dozens of neglected titles in handsome paperback editions. With a few exceptions, the titles dated from the 1940s on, but they ranged from story collections to cookbooks, and THE TRAGEDIES OF ISABEL BOLTON The Tragedies of Isabel Bolton. 30 April 2021. Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather patheticfigure, who is
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE Life in the Crystal Palace may, one day, come to seem a little like one of those prehistoric bugs preserved in resin, as it captures a way of life and work that in many ways has already become a thing of the past.. Based on Harrington’s experiences over three years working in the public relations department at the headquarters of an unnamed firm–one of the largest in America at the timeSILENT VOICES
Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers edited by Brenda Ayres. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2003. from the publisher's website: Some of the greatest English novels were written during the Victorian era, and many are still widely read and taught today. But many NO RIGHT TO LIVE, BY ESTHER GRENEN (PSEUDONYM OF MARIA No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar) (1934) 21 March 2021. 21 March 2021. Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks (1972) 29 May 2021. The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase. Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure ofwhat they
PHILIP ROTH AND THE “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” SERIES Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series. 5 March 2021. In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writingexperience.”.
THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
STRAIGHT AND CROOKED THINKING Straight and Crooked Thinking ‖ Page 5 CHAPTER 1: EMOTIONAL MEANINGS WE can use language in more than one way. When we write or say such a sentence as "Rover is a THE BEST OF H. T. WEBSTER H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? H. T. Webster. His picture made the cover of Time magazine in 1945: Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial GRAHAM GREENE’S “THE CENTURY LIBRARY”: NEGLECTED ENGLISH Graham Greene’s “The Century Library”: Neglected English Fiction Classics. 20 June 2010. In scanning through W. J. West’s The Quest for Graham Greene, I came across a reference to the Century Library, one of Greene’s initiatives while he was an editor with Eyre and Spottiswoode in the late 1940s. West describes it as “a series ALL NIGHT AT MR. STANYHURST’S, BY HUGH EDWARDS (1933 A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered.What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933). A MAN TALKING TO SEAGULLS, BY KATHLEEN SULLY (1959) Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England.She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only TAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN, BY ANN OAKLEY (1984) In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life. Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare stateand
FACES OF PHILIP: A MEMOIR OF PHILIP TOYNBEE, BY JESSICA Jessica Mitford describes Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee as “A record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information.” With such a qualification, one can excuse the fact that this book is likely to have been of more interest to THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks (1972) 29 May 2021. The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase. Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure ofwhat they
PHILIP ROTH AND THE “WRITERS FROM THE OTHER EUROPE” SERIES Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series. 5 March 2021. In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writingexperience.”.
THE WORLD OF CHARMIAN CLIFT (1970) The World of Charmian Clift (1970) 24 July 2020. 28 May 2016. Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknowntoday.
STRAIGHT AND CROOKED THINKING Straight and Crooked Thinking ‖ Page 5 CHAPTER 1: EMOTIONAL MEANINGS WE can use language in more than one way. When we write or say such a sentence as "Rover is a THE BEST OF H. T. WEBSTER H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? H. T. Webster. His picture made the cover of Time magazine in 1945: Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial GRAHAM GREENE’S “THE CENTURY LIBRARY”: NEGLECTED ENGLISH Graham Greene’s “The Century Library”: Neglected English Fiction Classics. 20 June 2010. In scanning through W. J. West’s The Quest for Graham Greene, I came across a reference to the Century Library, one of Greene’s initiatives while he was an editor with Eyre and Spottiswoode in the late 1940s. West describes it as “a series ALL NIGHT AT MR. STANYHURST’S, BY HUGH EDWARDS (1933 A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered.What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933). A MAN TALKING TO SEAGULLS, BY KATHLEEN SULLY (1959) Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England.She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only TAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN, BY ANN OAKLEY (1984) In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life. Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare stateand
FACES OF PHILIP: A MEMOIR OF PHILIP TOYNBEE, BY JESSICA Jessica Mitford describes Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee as “A record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information.” With such a qualification, one can excuse the fact that this book is likely to have been of more interest to CITY WITHOUT A HEART, BY ANONYMOUS (1933) Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author'sidentity, but then
ANDREW GRAHAM, TELLER OF CLUB SECRETS I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection Mostly Nasty (1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely design, the pages filled with ornate and startling illustrations by Leonard Huskinson. Mostly Nasty reads a bit like a collection of after dinner tales told over a brandy in the THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE Light in Dark. It was the twilight made you look So kindly and so far. It was the twilight gave your eyes A shadow, and a star. For loveliness is not to keepREDISCOVERIES II
Rediscoveries II, edited by David Madden & Peggy Bach Carrol & Graf, 1988. "Among every reader's favorite books are little-known novels or volumes of stories that someone urged him or her to read. And every reader has urged others to reach for such books. Rediscoveries II is agathering of
HALLELUJAH, I’M A BUM: WHAT TO READ AFTER WAITING FOR Hallelujah, I’m a Bum: What to Read After. Waiting for Nothing. 3 March 2021. 31 October 2020. The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE “This is not an autobiography as much as an evocation of a time that is gone,” write Jon and Rumer Godden at the start of this magical book. At the time the book was published, both women were experienced writers of novels and short stories. WHO WAS TOM KROMER? ON THE AUTHOR OF WAITING FOR NOTHING Dust jacket for 1935 edition of Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer.. A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, back to print for the first time since 1986.Though it’s mostly been out of print since its first publication in 1935, Waiting ALICE KOLLER, AUTHOR OF AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, DIES AT AGE 94 Alice Koller, author of. An Unknown Woman. , dies at age 94. 30 August 2020. 29 August 2020. Most of the people I write about are no longer with us. And when I began my research for the post about Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman five years ago, I assumed she was, too. Instead, I discovered that she was not only alive but was still on her THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE The best time to write about one’s childhood is in the early thirties, when the contrast between early forced passivity and later freedom is marked; and when one’s energy is in full flood. THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE Life in the Crystal Palace may, one day, come to seem a little like one of those prehistoric bugs preserved in resin, as it captures a way of life and work that in many ways has already become a thing of the past.. Based on Harrington’s experiences over three years working in the public relations department at the headquarters of an unnamed firm–one of the largest in America at the timeSkip to content
THE NEGLECTED BOOKS PAGE www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered UNCLE REGGIE’S TRAIN, FROM _ENTER A CHILD_, BY DORMER CRESTON (1939)22 November 2020
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_Enter a Child_ by Dormer Creston.EXCERPT
There must, I suppose, have been wet days during the summer holidays at Hilldrop but actually, I cannot remember a single one. It may have been on these supposititious wet days that Uncle Reggie had out his toy engine; not for us to play with; it was far too expensive, also far too dangerous for that: Uncle Reggie’s engine was a grown-up toy, an engine of importance. All the male members of the family were pressed into the service of laying down the rails — which were heavy. In this Adam house the billiard-room, drawing-rooms, hall, library, and dining-room all opened out of each other: when all the double mahogany doors were thrown back there was revealed a charming landscape of room beyond room, the whole length suffused with streams of light from the windows at one side. But when the rails were all down, crossing every room, running through every doorway, it gave amost desolate look.
But still that was not the point; the point was to make the engine go, and for such an extremely grand and impressive toy I must say I never saw anything that demanded so much inducement, that necessitated so many people to attend to it, before it could be persuaded to perform. It appeared to require not only the encouraging presence of the entire family but that too of Randall, the carpenter (who was always sent for on engine-days as a matter of course), before it could be persuaded so much as to stir. The amount of discussions, tapping, screw-turning, adjustment, and readjustment that polished brass and green enamelled object required! Matches were lit … blown out … further matches lit … the smell of methylated spirits impregnated the air. The attendant family got tired of waiting … it seemed as if nothing would ever happen … as if there would never be any other show to look’ at than that of the two bending, arguing figures of my uncle and the carpenter hiding the engine from our view. And then suddenly there would be a cry. “She’s off!” There would be a fizzing and a puffing, and actually, yes, actually, there was the little creature moving along the rails of its own accord … beginning to go quite quickly … quicker … now really fast; and my uncle, flushed with success, and brandishing a walking stick (which he used for poking into the engine’s tender when he wanted it to stop) would run along by its side, occasionally, for some strategic purpose, vaulting over the rails. The whole family, headed by Aunt Flora crying out, “Splendid, dear Reggie, splendid!” would try to rush after him. I say try because, (being so many, there was generally a jam atthe doorways.
Uncle Reggie, meanwhile, by his leaps over the rails, invariably got left behind by the engine which, now at the height of its form, would rush from room to room, a terrifying demon that no one of us dared interfere with for fear — as was constantly impressed on us — that it would either explode, burn one’s fingers, or set the house on fire. For us it was this very diabolic quality that was the engine’s charm; the delicious feeling at the back of our mind that anything might happen at any moment. “Oh, Uncle Reggie — what’s that funny noise it’s making? Is it going to explode?” “Get off the rails, dear child! Get off the rails!” And then, seeing the engine was nearing a side line on to which she was to be shunted, “Quick, Harry, she’s coming — quick, quick — the points!” To see all the grown-ups so excited seemed very odd. It made one wonder whether at bottom they were really so very different from oneself as one had imagined. ------------------------- It’s been a long time since I opened a book and was instantly taken by the freshness of the writing. I stumbled across _Enter a Child_when it came up
among the results when I went to the Internet Archive in search of a Patricia Traxler poem. It was about a woman’s memory of an abusive relationship and the only words I could remember were “kidnappers, burglars.” Amazingly, Traxler’s 1994 collection, _Forbidden Words_was the first
title returned, but what caught my eye was the one at the end of the first line of results: _Enter a Child_, by Dormer
Creston.1 It came from the Public Library of India, which includes a
wonderful assortment of books that appear to have been left behind in the officer’s libraries of various army outposts when the British cleared out after Partition in 1947. The phrase appears in the following sentence, which was by itself enough to make me want to keepreading:
> My mind, stretching out all round me to get to know the kind of > world I had entered, discovered through stories read to me, gossip, > and teasing that, apart from the few home figures, it was peopled by > a most sinister company: kidnappers, burglars, ghosts of many kinds, > a witch who lived in the nursery bathroom, and a “little man” > who, if I did not behave myself, would leap like an acrobat out of> the chimney.
That “little man” made me remember with some shame a story we used to tell our children about the fearsome Turtle Lady. The Turtle Lady hid in the bushes around the front door of houses and jumped out and grabbed little kids who made the mistake of wandering alone outside after dark. She would snatch them with her great clawed hands and stuff them inside the empty turtle shell she carried on her back. I’m sure the Turtle Lady held a prominent place in the “most sinister company” that peopled the world of our children’snightmares.
_Enter a Child_
is structured in five sketches, but in reality, it’s just two parts, one dark and one light. The book opens in the dark, in the memories of the fears that filled the author’s early years as Dolly, the youngest daughter of an upper-class English family in the late 19th century. “As regards fear I was an expert,” she writes of thosedays.
Her one safeguard was her beloved nurse, Mary, in whose company she spent most of her days. Yet even Mary brought fears into the child’s life. Decades before, when Mary have been her mother’s nurse, she incurred the wrath of no less than Queen Victoria herself. While walking together in Hyde Park, the mother — then just seven — had broken away to run alongside the Queen’s carriage as she was out for a ride. Seeing the child, the Queen called for the driver to stop, then instructed a policeman to escort her back to her guardian. The man asked for Mary’s name and address, and ever after Mary remained convinced that at any moment, there might come an angry knock at the family’s front door. The thought of Mary being taken away in irons became one of Dolly’s nightmares. Imagine, then, the girl’s anxiety when she was sent away from a few days in the charge of another maid. Why wasn’t Mary taking her? she wondered. And then to discover, upon their return, that Mary had vanished. “Please, please tell me about Mary,” she begged her mother. “When will she be here? To-night? To-morrow?” Her mother gave evasive answers and tried to distract the child with a game of “Happy Families.” But her mother’s avoidance only increased Dolly’s panic. So, she sought out another maid, Ellen, Mary’s best friend among the servants. “Why, don’t you know, Miss Dolly?” Ellen answered, matter-of-factly. “She’s never coming back! She’s gone for good, she has!” Dolly’s parents were classic Victorian in their attitude towards children. Many days, they neither saw nor spoke to their children aside from saying good morning or good night. Her relationship with her father, in particular, had only two modes: great periods of completely ignoring her, alternating with short bursts of fearsome discipline. “My father was one of the major problems of my life,” she recalls. “A problem in the sense that I was always making little bids to enter into friendly relations with him, which little bids were invariably repulsed.” One of these bids, heart-breaking for most parents of today to read, was when Dolly heard that her father’s birthday was approaching. She felt compelled to offer him a present but having no money and no means to shop for him, decided to create one. She cut out several pictures of bowls from a newspaper advertisement and decorated them with the brightest colors in her paintbox: > My system of painting was first to ram the paint brush with all my > force down on top of the paint, and then to twist the brush this way > and that. I then pressed the brush with equal force on top of the > drawing, splurged it round, and would note with satisfaction a > spatter of paint arrive, more or less, on the object I wished to> colour.
Then, when the happy day arrived, Dolly carefully laid out her offerings in front of her father as he read his newspaper at the breakfast table. He briefly glanced over at them then resumed reading. That was the end of it. > I could not believe that nothing more than this was going to happen. > I stood there waiting. The clock ticked, the breakfast things lay > glistening in the strong morning light, my father continued to read. > It was driven in on me that the Great Moment had come, had passed. > No more notice was going to be taken of my present: my father had > not accepted it and was not going to: he did not think it even worth> a thank-you.
“If Miss Creston’s parents had possessed as much common-sense as the ordinary farm labourer’s wife,” one of the book’s reviewers wrote, “she would have been a far happier child, but might never have grown into so acute a writer.” “Their cruelty was the more intolerable,” he continued, “because it was unintended, and their daughter could not console herself with hating them.” Instead, the author sees her parents’ cool uninterest as their peculiar eccentricity, just one of the many forms of it she observed among her relations. Fortunately, charm rather than aloofness characterized the majority of her family’s eccentricities, and these — related through Dormer Creston’s vivid prose — brighten the sketches that comprise the latter two-thirds of the book. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy later wrote in his book _The Unnatural History of theNann y_, “She
manages to create, out of what must have been numerically a tiny proportion of her childhood months, the illusion that she had a perfect, radiant, sunny Edwardian girlhood.” A bit of Dorothy Julia Baynes’pedigree.
Gathorne-Hardy was mistaken, however, in placing the book in King Edward II’s reign. Its author had, in fact, come of age by the time Edward came to the throne. Dormer Creston was the chosen pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Baynes — Dolly in the book — born in 1880 and the beneficiary of not one but two baronetages. Her father Sir Christopher William Baynes was the 4th Baronet Baynes of Harefield Place, Middlesex; on her mother’s side, her uncle Charles was Charles Edward Hungerford Atholl Colston, 1st Baron Roundway and heir to Roundway Park , a large estate in Wiltshire. When she was in her mid-sixties, she applied by Deed Poll to change her name to Colston-Baynes to emphasize herpedigree.
Roundway Park — referred to in the book as Hilldrop — is the setting for four of the five sections of _Enter a Child_, and a stark
contrast to the grim atmosphere of the stern Victorian London home where the book opens. Every summer, Dolly and her parents would travel there to relax with a dozen or more uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers. The grownups would relax in the cool interior while Dolly would explore and play outside in the baking August sun. “All this warmth, this glow, is within me as well as without,” and that warmth pervades these pages. The house at Roundway Park around 1900. Part of that spirit was due to her Aunt Flora, a spinster who’d sacrificed her life in “self-immolation” to Dolly’s grandmother, but who nonetheless served as a prime specimen of the art of living: “let life offer her a handful of dust and her exuberance would so irradiate it that it was dust no more.” At times, though — particularly sunset — Aunt Flora’s enthusiasm could grow tedious: > “Yes, beautiful. Aunt Flora,” I would say because I had been > taught to be polite, taught, when a grown-up said anything was > beautiful, to acquiesce, but in my heart hating this flaming > wreckage of the day’s reassuring blue sky.>
> “You don’t sound very enthusiastic, dear,” Aunt Flora would > murmur, disappointed in her proselyte, then, catching sight of my > mother coming down the stairs, “Here, dear!” she would cry, > “such a lovely sunset … you must come and look at it … did you > ever see such colours!” And then, realizing I was about to slip > away, “No, dear, don’t go yet, it’s changing every minute — > you really oughtn’t to miss it!…Oh! Look at that long streak of > yellow by the green!” And in her excitement she would drub on the > glass with her fingers as if, could she only reach the sunset, she > would like to pat it in approbation. Eccentrics like Aunt Flora fill these pages with their well-meaning ridiculousness. As _The Observer’s_ anonymous reviewer put it, they are all “strait-jacketed from the cradle in conventionality, and carefully trained to feel, as well as to be, useless.” Yet collected together and put to such activities as loading into carriages for a picnic or organizing themselves for a photograph or giving Uncle Reggie’s trainset a go, they become completely charming. “There is a lucent airiness in the writing that is often a delight,” wrote Marjorie Grant Cook in her review for the _TLS_. “The essential merit of Miss Creston’s book,” Anthony Powell wrote in _The Spectator_ “is that, although it may be … an account of a child who suffered from misunderstanding and loneliness, it is entirely free from any sense of obsession or feeling that the words have been written for the author’s gratification rather than the reader’s; a failing from which even a great writer like Proust is not entirely free.” One reason no shadow of lingering resentment hovers over _Enter aChild_ is that
Dolly — or Doreen, as her friends came to call her as an adult — was not fundamentally out of sympathy with her parents and their values. When she was in her sixties, she would write a testy letter to the editor of _The Spectator_ complaining about a William Plomer article proclaiming the merits of Surrealism. “As the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of culture is ‘the training and refinement of mind, tastes and manners,’ she wrote, “it can scarcely be used to describe Surrealism. Its whole motive is exactly the opposite ofthis definition.”
Dorothy Julia
Colston-Baynes, from a family photo. Dorothy/Dolly/Doreen never married. She took up the penname of Dormer Creston out of discretion: like Hilldrop, few things or people in_Enter a Child_
appear under their real names. After publishing a small volume of poetry in 1919, she took up biography and earned a solid reputation as a dedicated researcher and colorful writer. Books about royals bookended her career: _The Regent and His Daughter_ (1932), about
Queen Charlotte and her domination by her father, King George IV, and _The Youthful Queen Victoria_ (1952). Other
titles included _Andromeda in Wimpole Street: The Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning _ and _Fountains of Youth_(1936), about
the artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. Her best-received work, _In Search of Two Characters_ (1946), about
Napoleon and his short-lived son François, won a Heinemann Foundation Award Royal Society of Literature award. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of this book, “A sort of lyricism and freshness comes from so much of the material having been drawn from young minds. This is in the best sense — and how good that can be! — a feminine book.” She lived most of her life in London, sharing a house on Lowndes Square with her sister Christabel. She was great friends of the writer and preservationist James Lees-Milne, who would often drop in her for tea and a bit of gossip. Doreen found a happy statis in her life. “She writes in bed every day till 1 o’clock, lunches alone, then walks at breakneck speed, she says often running; returns for tea to receive some friend or other; reads at dinner alone and retires to bed immediately” Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. “She says happiness consists in finding the right rut and never leaving it.” She suffered, however, each time her books were published. She told Lees-Milne that she went through “such agonies over reviews of her books that she often retires to bed for a week, with blinds drawn, silently weeping.” Her sister Christabel, who died not long after was published, was even less fond of publicity. Lees-Milne recalled a guest at one of Doreen’s lunch parties going to the lavatory in her house and finding Christabel sitting on the toilet, a Pekinese on her lap, reading a novel. “I attributed this to the sister’s intense shyness and reluctance to meet Doreen’s friends,” he wrote._Enter a Child_
proved Alfred A. Knopf’s adage that many a book dies on the day it’s published. It came out in October 1939, earned good reviews, and vanished. There are no used copies available online and only a dozen library copies listed in WorldCat.org.
Fortunately, it is available on the Internet Archivein electronic
formats.
------------------------- 1 Among the other titles containing the phrase is a fascinating 1935 study titled _Children’s Fears_by Arthur T.
Jersild and Frances B. Holmes which catalogued and analyzed an impressive and unsettling list of fears that included “queer, ancient, wrinkled, deformed persons,” “being shut in a small space,” “going up or down in an elevator,” “being abandoned by parents,” and “darkness plus imaginary characters other thananimals.”
------------------------- ENTER A CHILD, BY DORMER CRESTONS (PSEUDONYM OF DOROTHY JULIACOLSTON-BAYNES)
LONDON: MACMILLAN, 1939 Categories Excerpts from Neglected BooksTags Dormer Creston
, Dorothy
Colston-Baynes
, England
, memoir
, women writers
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PETER GREAVE’S SECRETS15 November 2020
Gerald
Wilkinson and his parents, Bombay, India, 1914. I first came across Peter Greave in a battered Penguin paperback copy of his 1977 memoir, _The Seventh Gate _, that I’d found at the Montana Valley Book Store , a marvelous storehouse of books in the little town of Alberton, Montana. _The Seventh Gate _ has the grim fascination of a car crash. Born in Bombay in 1910, Greave spent his first years in the comfort of a villa surrounded by a lush garden and cared for by Indian servants. That haven was soon destroyed, however, by his father’s predilections. It wasn’t just that his father (who is unnamed in the book) was a swindler, he was also a chronic exhibitionist. He would ask his wife to play something on the piano to keep her occupied while he strolled out to their porch and exposedhimself.
Greave’s childhood was punctuated by abrupt moves as his father fled the police and creditors or pursued ever-riskier ventures. In late 1918, the family sailed from India to New York City on a ship called _The City of Lahore_ to make a fresh start. The voyage was not smooth: the ship was quarantined at Cape Town when influenza broke out among the crew; then the Hindu and Chinese seamen began fighting and one man was thrown overboard. Twice German submarines tried to torpedo her. Then, hours after the family disembarked in New York, the ship caught fire and sank at pierside. Advertisement for the 1921Dixie Flyer.
Greave’s father tried to set up an import/export business. It failed. Then he took off for South Africa hoping to sell Afrikaners a new American automobile called the Dixie Flyer. Greave’s mother and the three children were left freezing in a tenement flat in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the car had a tendency to stop running, usually far from a garage. The father returned and took the family back to India again. This time he started a sporting newspaper; it too proved a failure. Then he set up a lottery scheme that proved another scam. He was convicted of fraud and sent to jail. Greave’s mother fell ill of cancer. As he writes in _The Seventh Gate _, the family fell apart “like an old trunk eaten by white ants” — his sister sent to a convent in Calcutta, Greave and his brother to a derelict school in Darjeeling. Desperate for a home, Greave ran away from the school in the spring of 1923. Alone and almost penniless, he traveled eight hundred miles — walking, train-hopping, stowing away on a boat — to a remote town in East Bengal. There he persuaded a kindly woman he barely knew to take him in.Cover of the
Penguin edition of _The Seventh Gate_. By the time Greave was a young man, he’d become accustomed to life on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society. With his sketchy education and lack of connections, he took whatever work he could get. He sold gramophones; he sold refrigerators; he sold coloured enlargements of family photos for a firm that rarely delivered them. He spent most of his time reading, going to movies and getting drunk: “I lived like a nomad, moving from one city to another, existing in seedy hotels or in shoddy rooms.” His father reappeared. The two often shared the same rooms and pooled their meagre resources. Then one day in 1938 while shaving, Greave noticed a reddish bump on his forehead. Others appeared on his legs and buttocks. A doctor diagnosed food poisoning: “You’ve been eating some muck from the bazaar.” New symptoms joined the skin lesions — numbness in his right hand, pain and cloudiness in his eyes. Finally, he went to an Indian hospital in Calcutta, where he was diagnosed with leprosy in August 1939. Hearing this news, Greave “realised instinctively that I had crossed a frontier from which I could never return.” He spent the next seven years in squalid Calcutta flats, living off handouts, an occasional cheque from his father and the kindness of a few Indian friends. With India being torn apart in the conflicts over Partition, his existence grew more and more tenuous until he received a letter from a doctor with the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association. The doctor offered him free treatment at St Giles, England’s last operating leprosy clinic, outside Chelmsford. Greave managed to obtain a berth on the _Franconia_, a ship carrying British Army troops and their families away from the embattled former colony. _The Seventh Gate _ ends in August 1947 as Greave stands on the deck, his last view of India slipping over the horizon. The story that followed was told in Greave’s first book, _The Second Miracle _, published in 1955. His first miracle was making it to St Giles, where through slow and painful drug therapy, his leprosy was cured. The second miracle referred to in the title was his spiritual recovery. Greave wrote in the brutally honest tradition of Rousseau and Stendhal that considered hypocrisy as the greatest of all sins. While he hid away from the world in his room in Calcutta, Greave had come to see his disease as a mark of “the guilt of a thousand generations of twisted minds, and of bodies thirsting for decay.” The Homes of St. Giles, the last clinic in England for the treatment of leprosy. _The Second Miracle _ takes the reader not only through the physical ordeal of Greave’s treatment for leprosy but also his realisation that he — not his doctors and not God — was responsible for what he made of his situation. In the end, he went from slinking through his days “sunk in lethargy” to an attitude of joyful penitence — of saying in his prayers, “Thank you — give me more.” This attitude would be crucial to Greave’s acceptance that, despite being cured, his leprosy had left him with such severe damage to his eyes, nerves and muscles that he would remain at St Giles, dependent on its care, for the rest of his life. It fills the two otherwise grim books with vitality, wonder and hope. Years after I posted pieces about _The Seventh Gate _ and _The Second Miracle _, I was contacted by Josephine, a woman living in Herefordshire. Josephine had been given Peter Greave’s journals by a friend. Greave had left them to the secretary at St Giles and through various hands they made their way to her. Having been born and raised in India, both Josephine and her husband had a keen interest in materials related to Anglo-Indian society. She also informed me that Peter Greave’s real name was Gerald Carberry, though she had no idea why he’d chosen the pseudonym. In June 2019, I arranged to visit Josephine and look through the journals. When I arrived, she showed me into her dining room. There on the table sat an old fruit crate filled with what looked like two dozen or more well-used school notebooks. Josephine had marked the dates covered by each — the earliest starting in January 1937, thelast in late 1969.
The first entry in Gerald Carberry’s diary, dated 11 January1937.
Not knowing what I would find, I hadn’t planned how to use the few hours I had. At first, I skipped through entries almost randomly, photographing pages with my phone. In the earliest entry — 11 January 1937 — he was miserable. “Nothing to read, nothing to do, and no money. And a god-damned toothache.” He was rooming with his father — “H,” for Herbert Carberry — who is also broke but working on some suspicious deal: “I’m sick of his strong silent man act.” And he was frustrated with a woman he referred to as “C”: “It’s like her to start her stuff when I’m in a worse corner than usual.” I jumped forward to the 1950s, where he reported his progress in writing The Second Miracle, worried about publishers and critics, exulted when BBC Radio invited him to appear. In the journals from the 1960s, the handwriting grows larger, looser and more difficult to decipher. Fears about losing his sight came to dominatethe entries.
Pages from Gerald Carberry’sdiary.
I soon began to focus on references to “V.” The initial first appears in the entry of 5 June 1948, the first since his arrival in England nine months earlier. V appeared to a nurse at St Giles. “V was anxious this morning, and behaved with less than her usual sense,” Gerald wrote. By August, she had left the clinic and he went to see her in London. They saw Oklahoma at the Drury Lane Theatre, sat together in a bar full of visitors to the Olympics and, near midnight, went to V’s room. They “experimented with passion,” but he confessed, “I felt little real desire.” “She sensed it almost immediately and was, I fear, hurt and disappointed.” And yet she begged him, “Can’t we be married?” He quickly gave in. On 9 September 1948, he wrote, “I’ve done it! What the blazes it will lead to I don’t know.” Just a few lines later, he wondered if the marriage can be annulled but feared the resulting publicity “would immediately finish me.” He hadn’t told anyone at St Giles aside from “M,” a fellow patient and confidant. Armed with the date of the marriage, Josephine and I searched on a genealogical website and confirmed that Gerald Carberry and Violet Wood married in London in September 1948. This fact — indeed Violet’s very existence — was never mentioned in _The Second Miracle _. It seemed from the diary that Gerald and Violet rarely lived together — there are notes about sharing holiday cottages, but also entries where he fretted about not receiving letters from her. Then, in an entry dated 26 September 1964, he wrote, “10 months since Vi died.” In the following pages he wrote multiple versions of the days leading up to her death: “And so, when I returned to your room it was all over …”; “It must have been around eleven on the night of 25 October 1963 that I learnt she was going to die”; “She died on the morning of the 5th of December.” It was as if he hoped to appease grief by achieving the most precise record of her death. Yet the sense of loss remained. In one of the last notebooks, from December 1966, one line appears on the inside cover: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.” A note from 3 December 1966: “My dear Vi, I miss you sovery, very much.”
As I later read through the hundreds of pages I’d photographed, it became clear that Violet was not the only secret Gerald Carberry had kept from the readers of Peter Greave’s books. In trying to reconstruct Gerald’s story through further research, I discovered that Carberry was also a pseudonym. Gerald Carberry had been born Gerald Wilkinson and christened at St Teresa’s Church in Kolkata on the 11th of November 1910. His parents were listed as Herbert Reginald Wilkinson and Katherine Margaret Wilkinson, nee Tighe. His father had been born in Manchester and enlisted in the 1st (Kings) Dragoon Guards at the age of 16 in 1899. After service in the Boer War and Aden, he made his way to India. When he married Katherine Tighe, whose father had been a police commissioner in Bombay, in 1909, Herbert Wilkinson’s profession was listed as “merchant’s assistant.” The job must have involved some travel, because a few months before Gerald’s birth, Herbert was arrested and fined in Adelaide, Australia for indecent exposure. Herbert Wilkinson’s arrest for indecent exposure, Adelaide, Australia, 29 June 1910. Sometime after the family’s return to India in 1922, Herbert Wilkinson changed his name, because the Times of India article about his conviction for “cheating and abetment” identifies him as “Herbert Carberry, alias Wilkinson.” The rest of his family went along and Gerald began Gerald Carberry, the name by which he was known outside of his books. Greave had also taken liberties with some of his characters. In _The Seventh Gate _ Greave wrote of his sexual relationship with a woman he called Sharon. Sharon was clearly the “C” of Gerald’s diary: “C and I spent hours together yesterday;” “With C all afternoon.” He was deeply affected by her: “Another of C’s moods worked off on me;” “Struck cold by something C said.” According to the book, Sharon married, left India in 1946 and was killed in a traffic accident soon after arriving inEngland.
In the diary, however, C remained alive and part of Gerald’s life into the early 1960s—despite his marriage to Violet. He wrote of meeting her. In 1951, he quoted from one of her letters: “For God’s sake, come to me Gerald; come to me before I lose my sanity.” From some of the clues in the diary, I was able to identify “C” as Catherine Rowland-Jones. Born in Bombay in 1914, she married Owain Rowland-Jones, a ship’s captain, and left India for England not long before Gerald’s own departure. Living in Kensington after coming to England, it would have been easy for her to meet with Gerald, who appears to have come to the city often by train fromChelmsford.
An excerpt from the diary entry for the meeting with “Mac”,November 1966
After Vi’s death, yet another woman appears in the diary: Mac. In a long entry from November 1966, he wrote of meeting her at the Liverpool Street station in London, after which they spent a long afternoon in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel. “For the first hour her behaviour was relatively subdued, but as one double vodka after another disappeared her voice and her spirits rose disquietingly.” She plied Gerald with drinks, insisted he kiss her, implored, “Will you marry me?” She may have been another nurse from St Giles, as she speaks of her impending departure for “that big hospital in Barnsley” (Yorkshire). He referred to her apprehensively as “Macthe Knife.”
By this point, however, sight was his biggest concern. From the early 1940s, the effect of leprosy on his sight had been a constant worry. “I just don’t know what to do with these bloody eyes”; “Eyes killing me again”; “I feel blindness hovering over me.” At times, he couldn’t focus or bear bright lights. In the 1960s, there were repeated visits to the Royal Free Hospital for operations. Each time he wondered whether he would wake up from the anesthesia and find himself blind. In the next entry after his meeting with Mac, he writes, “The world becomes increasingly foggy and indistinct. All I see is seen darkly even at noon when the sun shines brightly.” The last entry in Gerald Carberry’s handwriting, 30 December1966
His ability to see became intertwined with his will to live. “Long ago I made up my mind that when it came to this, I’d say, OK, enough,” he wrote in late November 1966. “But already I may have lost the power to act, to conclude the final chapter.” The last entry in his hand is dated 30 December 1966: “Almost certainly my last entry. No sight left — can’t read, can’t write. At last I’m ready to say — I don’t want to live anymore.” After this, the remaining pages are blank. The next journal opens in early 1967. The handwriting is new, a precise secretarial copperplate: Gerald’s dictation, taken down by the secretary at St Giles. Occasional passages are written in Pittman shorthand: other secrets to be revealed, perhaps. ------------------------- _This is an expanded version of a piece included in Secrets & Lives: The University of East Anglia MA Non-Fiction Anthology 2020_.
Categories Featured Neglected AuthorsTags diary
, India
, leprosy
, memoirs
, Peter Greave
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WHAT TO MAKE OF ROD MCKUEN? 10 November 20207 November 2020 I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from the scene. He was no longer a regular on television variety shows — in part because television variety shows had themselves faded from the scene by the end of the Seventies. He was still performing live, but much of his audience were people who’d been going to his shows for years. After pumping out a steady stream of books of poetry and lyrics for over two decades, his output — having made him the biggest selling poet in the world for much of that time — fizzled out. After _Intervals _and _Valentines_ in 1986, there would only be two more books, published in the early2000s.
But there was a time — from 1967 to around the mid-1970s — when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or record store or turn on a TV or radio without bumping into Rod McKuen. If he wasn’t as big as the Beatles, he was as big as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or Jacqueline Susann and certainly more prolific. It make seem odd now, but there was a time when, as a profile that appeared in _The San Francisco Chronicle _ in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” “His mellow poetry was on the end table (_Listen to the Warm_), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on _The Tonight Show_ and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.” (In our house, it was _The Sea_, one of his collaborations with Anita Kerr .) In Frank Sinatra’s long career, Rod McKuen was the only songwriter he ever devoted an entire album to. Guys bought his books to show their girlfriends how sensitive they were and women bought them for their boyfriends to show them what sensitive was. “The cult of Rod McKuen grows by leaps and bounds,” proclaimed a 1967 profile in the _Fort WorthStar-Telegram_.
The same year, _The Chicago Tribune’s_ entertainment editor gushed, “Rod McKuen is great, great, absolutely great! His is a poet, and he sings and reads practically nothing but his own songs and poems. Doesn’t sound like a night club act? Well, he doesn’t just read and sing them — he lives them and makes you breathe and feel them. He drags you through the gamut of emotions, putting a lump in your throat one minute and making you chortle the next.”1 Bear in mind: this was a guy who wrote poetry and then read it in a quiet, gravelly voice (he used to joke that “It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser” and rock critic Greil Marcus once said it had “the force of a squirrel’s”) over a soft musical accompaniment. That was it. He didn’t dance and you couldn’t dance to him. He didn’t act, or at least hadn’t acted since his last B-movie in early 1960s. He didn’t tell jokes, or at least not many and not well enough. He wasn’t a sex symbol: although there were plenty of women (and undoubtedly some men) who fell in love with him, he made it clear he was a loner. And yet, he’s the only poet with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, as late as 1974, he was being billed as “the greatest entertainer in the world!”2 Ad for Rod McKuen’s 1974 appearance at the Troubadour inSanta Monica
He did, however, infuriate many people who took poetry seriously. The English poet David Harsent described McKuen’s poetry variously as “scraps of maudlin meditation masquerading as emotion deeply felt,” “ersatz anguish, carefully sifted to pablum for easy consumption,” and “lumpish impressions of places and people, flashes of cheap surrealism and clumsy gropings at the numinous.” “No one has done more to degrade language and human sensibility,” D. Keith Mano wrote at the end of a full-page skewering in the _National Review_. Josh Greenfeld, writing in _Mademoiselle_, lumped McKuen with Kahlil Gibran and the now-forgotten Walter Bentonas “the
Marshmallow Poets.” “The main thing I have against McKuen is his oversimplification of everything,” Greenfeld says. “I mean, if your pussy cat comes home, your life problems aren’t solved. And the words, the phrases McKuen uses! They all lack that precise particularization that is poetry.” Professor Robert W. Hill of Clemson University argued that McKuen “touched the anti-intellectual, the escapist, the superficial, the blindly sentimental capacities of the American public.” McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetrysection.”
This was similar to the view expressed by Margot Hentoff in _The New York Review of Books_ in its one and only review of his poetry: “McKuen is so devitalized a singer, so bad a poet, so without wit or tune—as well as so out of touch with the contemporary pop sensibility—that one can only consider his monumental nationwide popularity as a kind of counter-counter-cultural phenomenon.” Karl Shapiro said it was irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. Shapiro conflated McKuen with Bob Dylan into a creation he called Dylan MacGoon. Asked about his creative regime, Shapiro wrote, “MacGoon tried to answer as best he could (language is not his strong point).” One reviewer refused to do anything more than include the title of McKuen’s latest in a round-up of recent poetry books. Reviewing McKuen, he complained, was “a bit like using a jack-hammer to clear cobwebs.” This attitude was a dramatic contrast to the gushing admiration with which Margaret MacDonald, a reporter for the _Oakland Times_ reviewed McKuen’s first book of poetry _And Autumn Came_ in 1954. She praised the book’s “powerful impact of sincere emotions, expressed in clear language with original figures of speech and a sensitive approach.” “Like all true poetry,” she felt, it could “stand the test of re-reading” and was “one which all who really love poetry will keep in an easily accessible place for frequentperusal.”
There was a long gap between that review and the next. As Barry Alfonso writes in his fine biography of McKuen, _A Voice of the Warm _, McKuen self-published his next collection, _Stanyan Street & Other Sorrow_, and sold it at his concerts and other appearances while his long-time partner, Edward Habib, drove up and down California, placing it with bookstores. “I’d go through the telephone book and get addresses of bookstores,” Habib told Alfonso. “I’d go to the stores and say, ‘Can you handle five books? If they don’t sell by next week I’ll come and pick them up.’” In a matter of a year or so, this approach stacked up over sales of over50,000 copies.
It was McKuen’s lyrics that sold the books — first for Glenn Yarbrough, one of the most successful of the well-scrubbed school of folksingers popular in the early 1960s, and later for himself after signing with RCA. McKuen was a prolific lyricist, heavily influenced by Jacques Brel, whom he came to know during a spell in France and with whom he collaborated, performing some of Brel’s songs and writing others than Brel performed in translation. Indeed, the label _chansonnier_ was perhaps more appropriate for McKuen than _poet_. And his performances drew inspiration from Brel, as McKuen usually sat on a stool on a bare stage, dressed in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and sang/spoke his songs. In 1966, RCA released a Yarbrough album titled _The Lonely Things: The Love Songs of Rod McKuen_. The next year, having signed with RCA as well, McKuen recorded _Listen to the Warm_, which was also the title of his third book. Having heard about the grassroots success of _Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows_, Bennett Cerf of Random House had approached him to join its list and the two men agreed to an initial release of 30,000 copies of _Listen to the Warm_. Gene Shalit broke the news in the _Los Angeles Times_, commenting, “Insiders versed in publishing history can’t remember another volume of poems by a national unknown which got such a send-off.” McKuen cagily negotiated a partnership arrangement that allowed him to continue publishing the books with his own Stanyan Press imprint, which gave him the advantage of Random House’s nationwide marketing while preserving the independence to put out other titles (which ultimately included _God’s Greatest Hits_, a collection of Bible quotes illustrated by the folk artist SisterGertrude Morgan).
_Listen to the Warm_ was as much a phenomenon of 1967 as _Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band_. The book sold over one million copies in hardback within a year of its publication. Although the record’s success was less spectacular, it became the first of nine albums McKuen placed in _Billboard’s_ Top 200 charts over the nextfour years.
Both the book and the record opened with a poem that became a favorite for many McKuen fans. “A Cat Named Sloopy” remembered a cat McKuen had owned when he was living in New York City in the early 1960s.> _For a while
> the only earth that Sloopy knew > was in her sandbox. > Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street > were her domain._ In the poem, Sloopy wait while the poet goes off in search of love, or at least one-night stands, until one day when he runs away.> _Looking back
> perhaps she’s been > the only human thing > that ever gave back love to me.> prologue_
Some of its fame could be attributed to association (or confusion) with a popular tune from two years before, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys. But it was a heartstring-tugger sure-fired to bring out the hankies. I suspect more than a few of his fans wanted to take Rod home like afound car.
After years of hanging around the margins, McKuen quickly found himself in the warm embrace of the book, record, television, and stage business. He did hundreds of live shows each year, dozens of television appearances, and continued to release new books of poetry and new records at a steady rate. Ads for his books and LPs ran in mainstream magazines like the _Saturday Review of Literature_, _Playboy_, _Life_, and _Time_. In a 1980 book titled _Shrinklits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size_, Maurice Sagoff parodied _Listen to the Warm_: > _Are you sentimental? > Dote on plastic charm? > Rod’s massage is gentle, > Does no lasting harm:_>
> _No deep thoughts to rile you, > Blandness to beguile you, > Pare your toenails while you > Listen to the smarm._ McKuen’s only record to break into _Billboard’s_ Top 100, however, came years before _Listen to the Warm_. It was a novelty tune titled “Oliver Twist” that mocked the rage launched by Chubby Checker’s hit, “Let’s Do the Twist.” He later blamed his scratchy voice on too many nights of trying to sing the tune at bowling alley lounges. An ad for a 1961 McKuen appearance performing his hit, “Oliver Twist” “Oliver Twist” was only one of the many milestones along McKuen’s career path to bestselling poet (or _chansonnier_). After dropping out of high school, he started working as a disc jockey for an Oakland, California radio station. Within a year, he had attracted the attention of Bay Area entertainment columnist Dwight Newton, who included him among his “1952 Prospects”: “A young man with much promise. Writes interesting, colorful scripts for his disc jockey show. Good individual voice.” After a spell in the Army, he returned to the Bay Area, took an apartment on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, and began appearing as a singer in nightclubs such as the PurpleOnion.
He also dipped his toe in the water of Hollywood, picking up a few parts but eventually earning lobby card billing, if only as a supporting player, on such movies as _Rock, Pretty Baby _. One of McKuen’s friends later joked that, “If Rod weren’t a poet, he’d make a tremendous marketing analyst,” and the proof can be found early on. In 1956, the United Press syndicate ran a feature titled, “Rod McKuen Has Too Many Talents.” “McKuen is a young man in a very pleasant quandary,” wrote the anonymous author — most likely a press agent paid by McKuen. “He does so many things well that he has trouble sometimes deciding which talent to emphasize.” The article also reported that McKuen had “appeared in five Japanese films” while serving with the Army. This was just one of many accomplishments that McKuen would claim over the years. Others included singing with Lionel Hampton’s band, writing a column for the _San Francisco Examiner_, and performing for a state dinner at the Kennedy White House. He told one interviewer, “I write novels under other names. I wrote a medical book. I’ve had a couple of books of history that have done very well. I’m in the middle of doing a history now that will be about 12 or 13 volumes by the time it’s finished.” He also claimed that every day he ate one meal, read two books, wrote ten poems, and worked 16 hours straight. As Alfonso writes in _A Voice of the Warm _, > Three and a half years of research has led me to believe that Rod > told many white lies and some real whoppers about his life and > career. A constant need to legitimize himself and prove his worth > drove him to exaggerate his actual accomplishments, which were truly > formidable. His deceptions were mostly benign; he probably came to > believe many of them were true. In the end, they invoke more > sympathy than outrage. No amount of recognition could still the > nagging inner voice that he just wasn’t quite good enough. Even after achieving commercial success as America’s _chansonnier_, culminating in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (which was recorded and released as an album), McKuen continued to pad his resume. Perhaps his most dubious claim was of having taught himself musical composition. As early as the late 1950s, when he recorded several albums that would today be labeled “beatnik jazz,” he was taking credit for not only the lyrics but the music to his _chansons_. In 1960, he collaborated with veteran studio arranger Dick Jacobs on an instrumental album titled _Written in the Stars_, also known as _The Zodiac Suite_, with each track based on a different astrological sign. McKuen was listed as composer, but this needs to be taken with agrain of salt.
There was a lot of musical ghosting going on in the 1950s and 1960s. As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. TV comedian
Jackie Gleason claimed arranger credits on several dozen easy listening albums that were the work of trumpeter Bobby Hackett workingat union scale.
McKuen acknowledged some of his collaborators, such as Stan Freeman, another veteran faceless studio musician, but in reality Freeman probably did most of the work. As Michael Feinstein told Barry Alfonso, Freeman recalled that McKuen would say something like, “I want to write a concerto for oboe and this and that instrument” and then hum a couple of melodies that Freeman would then work into a completed piece. And Freeman was certainly not McKuen’s only “collaborator”: others included John Scott Trotter, Vince Guaraldi, and Arthur Greenslade. McKuen’s musical credits began to pile up quickly in the late 1960s. He was credited with a number of soundtracks, most notably for _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1969 and which became a #1 pop hit for the English singerOliver . His
“classical” compositions began to compete with, and eventually overtake, his _chanson_ albums. He took to listing them along with the titles of his books on the frontispiece. Rod McKuen’s credits, from _Intervals_ (1980) As Alfonso writes, McKuen’s compositions “sound like an amalgam of Aaron Copland–like Western elements, stage musical melodies, and film soundtrack excerpts” — in other words, the sort of pleasant but somehow generic stuff often sold as library music. He gave _Newsday_ reporter Leslie Hanscom a recording of his opera _The Black Eagle_ when she interviewed him in 1979. “On later sampling,” she wrote, it turned out to be a work of truly masterful monotony with a plot and theme that might have made _Jonathan Livingston Eagle_ a more appropriate title.” Hanscom found that McKuen “projects a sense of self that could dwarf Wagner.” That might have been an understatement: in 1983, he told Bill Thomas of the _Baltimore Sun_ that he’d rewritten Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and reduced it down to 5½ minutes. Though McKuen often award-dropped the fact that one of his pieces was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music for 1974,3 for his composition _The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra_, the other fact that composers such as Patric Standfordopenly admitted to
ghostwriting for him tends to diminish just how impressive that accomplishment sounds. The more one looks into the details of McKuen’s life and work, the more McKuen comes off as a Jack of all trades and master of none. His poetry and lyrics, in particular, were written at a furious rate. He published nearly 30 collections of poems, the vast majority new, in the space of 20 years. By the end of 1968, three of the alone had sold over one million copies. By 1972, it was 12 books and over 4 million copies; by 1974, 15 and 9 million; by 1979, 24 and 16 million. McKuen’s modesty about the success of his poetry tended to ring false. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” he told one interviewer, “but who’s counting?” Or, on another occasion, “I didn’t even know I was a millionaire until I read about it in the newspapers.”4 The enormous popularity of McKuen’s poetry could be one of the reasons so many critics attacked it. As critic Gary Morrishas written,
“There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth.” _The National Lampoon_ made an obvious joke of it in their McKuen parody: “_The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/i$ warm like drippy treacle/on the wind$wept beach._” Even the _New York Times_ felt free to publish their own parody: “_I met your press kit first/Box of mimeographed attributes and achievements_.” A few tried to look beyond the sales figures. Robert Kirsch, the LA Times book editor, declared in late 1968, “I don’t believe that Rod McKuen can be ignored as a poet simply because he is the best-selling troubadour in America today.” But even Kirsch found it hard to be unqualified in his praise. Although he found that McKuen “more than occasionally … is capable of rendering awareness into perceptions of small but haunting truths,” he also acknowledged that “He is less effective on the printed page than on his records, where, assisted by music and the nuance of the spoken voice, he evokes recognition and fantasy.” Too many of McKuen’s poems — such as “Manhattan Beach,” from _Lonesome Cities_ — read less like poetry and more like, well, notes: > _I’ve taken a house at Manhattan Beach > working the summer into a book._>
> _Eddie came last weekend > and brought two girls and some books. > The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer > and now they menace me stacked up on the floor > staring back in unread smugness._>
> _Otherwise I’ve had no visitors._ In a survey of American poetry of the 1960s written a few years later, Louis Simpson quoted from _Listen to the Warm_: > _But yesterday you touched me > and we drove to the toll beach > and ran in the sand. > Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were._ “Well, what’s wrong with it?” Simpson asked. “It’s simple, it makes lots of people happy. Only an effete intellectual snob would find fault with it…. The world is like a sand-pile with lots of nice gooey wet blobs to play with. It’s a soda pop, a weenie-roast, a sticky, marshmallow kiss.” McKuen’s world, he wrote, “is the province of Youth.” But Simpson warned that, “Youth sooner or later will want to have poetry. Not this slop.” McKuen claimed he started writing poetry because he couldn’t find ones he liked. “I wanted to say something different or write about what everyone else was saying but say it in a different way.” But in truth, what tends to distinguish McKuen’s language from that of other poets is its lack of individuality. His poetry, like his music, is not so much different as generic. “_Forever is not far enough/to throw a smile/that never was_” McKuen writes in one of his later collections, _The Sound of Solitude_. Which seems at first glance like a koan, something a guru or Yoda might say. Except … look closer, read it over a few times, and you realize it’s nothing. We know what each word means, but put together it’s nonsense. _Everywhere is close enough/to lose a memory/you never had_. Would you buy a book filled of 80 pages withthat?
_Saturday Night Live_ used to run a cartoon feature about two superheroes known as the Ambiguously Gay Duo. McKuen might
be crowned the Ambiguously Poetic Poet. “I’m not a poet, I’m a stringer of words,” he sometimes demurred. Yet when the _Los Angeles Times_ invited McKuen to submit a short reflection “On What Poets Are … and Aren’t,” he wrote with patent self-importance, “A poet is a keeper of the language.” The job of the poet was to “shed light on the darkness.” A poet “must repair but never rape the words that form his native tongue,” adding rather disingenuously, “nor should he be an advertisement for himself.” The _LA Times_ piece sparked some sharp reactions. One reader wrote in to say that “Having McKuen comment on the nature of poetry is somewhat akin to having a kindergarten fingerpainter comment on theart of Picasso.”
McKuen often resorted to a rhetorical trick when asked to defend hispoetry:
> Actually, I really don’t think it’s fair to criticize poetry. A > novel, sure. But not poetry. See a poet _is_ his poem. He _lives_ > his poem. So if you just give a poem a quick reading and call it > something like sappy, then you’re really calling the poet sappy. > It just isn’t fair. Not really. Attack my poems and you attack me, McKuen was saying — a cheap way of warding off any interviewer with good manners. “I lived that poem. I defy you to catch me and say that I wrote about the experience badly. How do you know what the experience was? You didn’t live it!” Some who profiled McKuen pointed out, however, the martyr-like pose he assumed. Like the old joke, he seemed to say, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now, you can suffer, too!”Rod McKuen signing
books at a Phoenix mall, 1977. Another tactic was to compare his fame to that of his critics. “Name one critic who’s downed me,” he challenged Bill Thomas, “and ask five total strangers if they know who he is. I bet none do. Then ask them if they’ve heard of me. They may have a good opinion or a bad opinion — but they sure as hell know who I am.” On other occasions, McKuen would defend his poetry by trotting out its achievements. “I mean — if I wasn’t a damn good poet,” he told Rick Soll from _The Chicago Tribune_ in 1975, “why would I be in the _Oxford Book of Verse_, why would I be in all the famous quotation books, why would my poems be used in hundreds of college courses?” The trouble is: none of that was true. There is no _Oxford Book of Verse_. There are Oxford books of _English Verse_ and _American Verse_ and _Comic Verse_, and McKuen is in none of them. I also checked more than a dozen different quotation books published between 1968 and 1978, and the only one I found McKuen’s name in was _What They Said in 1971: the Yearbook of Spoken Opinion_. McKuen’s quote is worth repeating in the context of this discussion, however: > Critics attack my poetry because it’s understandable. I always > think everything should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A > while ago it was announced that I would come out with a paperback of > new poetry. I got bad reviews from _Publisher’s Weekly_ and _Book > World_ and a rave from _Coronet_, and I still have not written one > word of the book. Which, of course, was also untrue. As for his poetry being used in hundreds of college courses, this was also improbable. A few, such as Brian Curtis in a 1972 article in _The English Journal_, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English titled, “The Necessity of the ‘Rod McKuens'”, argued for McKuen as, if you will, a gateway drug for serious poetry. However, this argument tended to produce the response reported by Ross Talarico in his book _Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America_: “As a matter of fact, I brought sneers to the faces of poets and critics when, during a couple of panel discussions over the past few years, I’ve made the observation that if poetry survives at all in America, perhaps more credit will go to Rod McKuen than to any of a few high-powered poetry critics.” And both Curtis and Talarico were careful to point out that while McKuen’s poetry had utility, it lacked quality: > Do I say these things because I am a fan of Rod McKuen’s? No, not > really. I’d be the first to say his poetry is filled with > overused, often trite phrases, sentimentalism, predictability, and a > naive, terribly romantic view of the world.>
> I do not suggest that “trash” compose the curriculum, although > it fits the nation’s bias and fills drugstore shelves. We all > leave our McKuens behind, and, if lucky, we suffer “growth.”>
Part of the problem was McKuen’s own understanding of poetry. “The problem is that a lot of people who write poetry think the more obscure they can be, the more intelligent their poetry is,” he once told an interviewer. “To me, intelligence and obscurity never went together.” He sometimes compared his poetry to that of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, but mostly in self-defense: “Their poetry was very uncomplicated, very straightforward.” “I write in the language of my day and try to make it effortless for the reader,” he said on another occasion, which only supports Dick Cavett’s quip that McKuen was “the most understood poet inAmerica.”
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with poems written in simple, uncomplicated language that reads effortlessly. Millions of American schoolchildren have had their first exposure to modernist poetry through Williams’s red wheelbarrow: > _so much depends> upon_
>
> _a red wheel
> barrow_
>
> _glazed with rain> water_
>
> _beside the white> chickens_
But I think it’s illuminating to compare McKuen’s simplicity with that of another poet known for creating poetry from simple, clear words: Mary Oliver. For the same of illustration, let’s look at how they each treat the subject of dogs. Here are two selections fromMcKuen:
> From _Caught in the Quiet_ (1970): > _My dog likes oranges > but he’ll eat apples too.> Like me,
> he goes where the smiles go > and I’d as soon lie down > with sleeping bears > as track the does by moonlight_>
> _Don’t trouble me > with your conventions, > mine would bore you too._>
> _Straight lines are sometimes > difficult to walk > and good for little more > than proving we’re sober > on the highway._>
> _I’ve never heard > the singing of the loon > but I’m told he sings > as pretty as the nightingale._>
> _My dog likes oranges > but he’ll eat apples too._>
> And from _Listen to the Warm_:> _See the dog
> he doesn’t move—a voyeur.> Never mind.
> What we’ve done is beautiful. > For gods and animals to see, > for us to stand aside in awe > and look ourselves up and down._And Mary Oliver:
> From _Devotions_ > _Now through the white orchard my little dog > romps, breaking the new snow > with wild feet._>
> _Running here running there, excited, > hardly able to stop, he leaps, > he spins until the white snow is written upon > in large, exuberant letters, > a long sentence, expressing > the pleasures of the body in this world._>
> _Oh, I could not have said it better> myself._
Neither poet tells us much about the dog they’re writing about. In both McKuen poems, however, the dog is merely an object. It, like the “gods and animals,” is there merely to be a silent witness. In Oliver’s poem, on the other hand, the dog’s the star. We’re sure that McKuen has seen dogs; but we know that Oliver has owned dogs and has watched them delight in hopping about in drifts of new snow. And while McKuen’s dogs are there to gaze upon his sensitive pensiveness in wonder, Oliver is the one observing and taking joy from her dog’sexuberance.
In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written. One suspects, therefore, that part of what was missing from McKuen’s poetry was himself. For all the supposed confessional honesty of his poetry, McKuen concealed and distorted much about himself, including his sexuality. Ambiguity was not a trick he used to avoid being pinned down: it was at the heart of his being. He was careful, for example, not to openly declare himself as gay. Though he lived with Edward Habib for decades, he always referred to Habib as “my brother.” After the success of _Listen to the Warm_, McKuen would refer to having a son and daughter he’d fathered during a stay in France in the early 1960s, but as Alfonso writes: > There is no information that confirms Rod McKuen ever had children. > To the author’s knowledge, no one else has ever mentioned meeting > or communicating with them. At least four of his closest friends > either doubt or flat-out deny that Jean-Marc and Marie-France ever > existed. After Rod’s death, no son or daughter came forward to > claim anything from his estate. Yet clues slip out here and there in his poetry, if only unconsciously. In “A Cat Named Sloopy,” for example, he writes: > _I never told her > but in my mind > I was a midnight cowboy even then. > Riding my imaginary horse down > Forty-second Street, > going off with strangers > to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, > but always coming home to Sloopy, > who loved me best…_ While “midnight cowboy” might have been an obscure reference when _Listen to the Warm_ was published, it became impossible to miss after the release of the Oscar-winning film two years later. And some of the lines in the title poem are positively creepy: “_Follow women after dark/they can only yell for help or whisper _yes”; “_I’m grateful then for your upbringing/it led you like an arrow here uncomplicated and mine_.” Though many of McKuen’s poems are about love, they are almost never a celebration of love or the loved. Instead, McKuen most often looks at love in the rearview mirror. Even when he’s in a relationship, he’s thinking about its end, as in the lyric of one of his most popular songs, “If you go away”: “_If you go away/as I know you will…_.” One woman who posted about _Listen to the Warm_ on Goodreads wrote tellingly, “My husband gave me three small poetry books, early in our marriage. I think I probably related some of his feelings in poems. Now I just see a man having affairs with various women, and then breaking up with them.” In fact, the one constant in McKuen’s views on love is himself: “_If I’m still alone by now it’s by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine._” His political views were as ambiguous as his sexuality. Though hundreds of thousands of young people bought his books, he was never comfortable being associated with hippies, Flower Power, or other aspects of the youth movement. “Flower power is fine but what they really need is shower power,” he used to joke, and he had little patience for hippies: “I got _my_ success on _my_ own terms, worked for it, suffered for it. Hippies are fine, but I like to be clean myself,” he told the _New York Times_ in 1969. In one of McKuen’s earliest profiles, Joyce Haber of the _Los Angeles Times_ wrote that his careful choice of material and his own presentation made him “a hip square or a square hip, depending on which way you look at it.” Flower children may have bought his books, but they didn’t go to his concerts. One account of a McKuen performance described his audience as “white, female, middle class, scrubbed and respectable.” “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be. People don’t want to keep getting hit in the head with social commentary all the time.” When the _Saturday Review_ invited McKuen to review a collection of Mao Tse-tung’s poems, he made sure to stipulate that “Being neither far right, left, nor extreme middle (though having antagonized in my brief span each faction in turn), I am more concerned with poetry than with politics.” Even McKuen’s religious views were elusive. He told one interviewer that he’d been “a Roman Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Mormon, and a Quaker” and that he was planning to give Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy a try. In some ways, it was as if McKuen was trying to be both the most famous poet in the world and invisible. When his book _The Power Bright and Shining: Images of My Country_ was published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, he claimed that he had started out wanting to write “a kind of Studs Terkel book” featuring the words of working men and women.5 “Unfortunately — or fortunately, I suppose — it’s not easy for me to be invisible….” It’s the ambiguity of McKuen’s identity that ultimately undermines his poetry. One reviewer on Goodreads wrote, “These poems are like the antithesis of Bukowski.” Well, exactly. Like him or not, Charles Bukowski was unapologetically _himself_. Rod McKuen, on the other hand, seems never to have been entirely satisfied with whatever self he devised. And that lack of a strong sense of self may have been the secret to both his commercial success and his artistic failure. There was just enough content in McKuen’s poems to give his readers the sensation of reading poetry without any of the individuality or obscurity that make good poems both challenging and memorable. McKuen dedicated _Come to Me in Silence_ by saying, “This book is for nobody/everybody.” “I think he should make up his mind,” quipped the _Daily Mail’s_ book editor, Peter Lewis. “If there’s a message in my work,” McKuen would often tell interviewers, “it’s about man’s inability to communicate.” Which cannot but remind one of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.” Even McKuen occasionally allowed readers to see the emptiness at the center of his poetry. As he wrote in “October 3,” from _In Someone’s Shadow_: > _If you had listened hard enough > you might have heard > what I meant to say._> Nothing.
I was going to end this piece here, dagger neatly inserted into the poet’s corpse. But I realized this would leave an incomplete picture of McKuen’s work. One of my favorite adages is that if a pile of horseshit is big enough, there might be a pony in there. I went through more than a dozen of McKuen’s books across his career as part of my research. And yes, there are a LOT of poems about beaches and sunsets and loneliness, but there are also oddities. Fans of pop music have long known that some of the most interesting tunes in an artist’s repertoire are the stray tracks thrown in to pad out one side of an LP, songs where the constraints of what should or shouldn’t go into a hit were tossed aside and caution shelved in favor of unfiltered creation. Sometimes, the result is awful; and sometimes the result is — well, if not genius, at least intriguing. And the same is true of McKuen’s _oeuvre_. It may be that McKuen sheltered a big hole of hurt at the center of his being. And while a big hole of hurt may be a handicap as a poet, it can often be a source of great energy for a satirist. _Listen to the Warm_, for example, which is easy to dismiss entirely from its drippy dedication alone — “For E.: _If you cry when we leave Paris/I’ll buy you a teddy bear all soft and gold_” — includes a poem with the title “First and Last Visit to an Annex in Burbank.” “_Time was you couldn’t see the Forest Lawn for the trees_.” Forest Lawn, just to fill in possible gaps in cultural history, is a huge cemetery in Glendale, California where hundreds of celebrities from L. Frank Baum to Elizabeth Taylor are buried. It’s also one of the inspirations for Whispering Glades in Evelyn Waugh’s _The Loved One _ And because it’s the cemetery that set the standard for the grandiose American style, it’s also largely swathes of headstone-dotted grass. The fact that I had to explain McKuen’s joke drained what meager comic value it may retain, but it serves to illustrate the vein of ironic observation that runs quietly underneath much of the teddy bear dreck of his poetry. One of the best examples is his 1959 album _Beatsville_. It was marketed to tap into the Beatnik craze, the fascination with beret-wearing, goatee-bearded, finger-poppin’, jazz-loving coffee house-haunting poets and musicians who ranged from serious (Allen Ginsburg) to silly (Maynard G. Krebs ). Its cover shows an angst-ridden McKuen brooding over a glass of cheap wine as he sits next to a wild abstract painting with a mysterious and beautiful woman and would lead the buyer to believe this is a sincere sample of Beatart.
Instead, it’s a pastiche. Though he’d spent plenty of nights strumming his guitar and singing folk songs and published his own book of poetry, McKuen wasn’t buying the shtick. On _Beatsville_, he mocked the beats as _poseurs_ — such as “Raffia the poet, who is not only an angry young man but a dirty old man as well” — and riffed on their lingo (“I was mixed up with this Gemini cat who, well, she didn’t like to be liked, like”). As Alfonso puts it, McKuen “came across more as an observer (or infiltrator)” than a card-carrying Beat. He went on to demonstrate his disdain for the Beats even more obviously in the single “The Beat Generation” he released with Bob McFadden soon after: “_Some people say I’m lazy/They say that I’m a wreck/But that stuff doesn’t faze me/I get unemployment checks_.” He went through years, or volumes, rather, without indulging his appetite for caustic commentary, but sometimes it came out despite himself. One of the tracks on his first album with Anita Kerr, _The Sea_, included a short number titled “Body Surfing with the Jet Set” that was full of parodies of surfer talk along the lines of _Beatsville_: “_Madame Marie Ouspenskaya went through her whole life never learning to surf/But she sure had some bitchin’ garlic leis_.” Years later, in his collection _Beyond the Boardwalk_, he reused that title for something whose humor is almost too black tobear:
> _My father’s uncle’s brother > married his cousin. > Twice he beat her up > and twice the police came > and twice they carried her away. > Does that make her his cousin> twice removed?_
> Surf’s up.
>
> _I keep a loaded pistol > just beneath my bed, > it’s nice to have a gun that works > in case I lose my head._> Hang ten.
Edward
Habib and Rod McKuen at McKuen’s Hollywood mansion. In his later books, the sunshine fades and more often gives way to unvarnished sarcasm. _The Beautiful Strangers_ (1980) includes a multi-part poem titled “A Field Guide to Cruising” that is nothing less than a summation of decades of cruising experience — by both McKuen and his “brother” Edward: > _Do not dress up or down > but as you would for an occasion. > With some luck and some premeditation > it will be one._>
> _Avoid church socials or the Bake-off. > Those who gather at such gatherings > have paired off long ago. > They are in the middle > of what they perceive > as the act of living life, > who are we to interrupt them?_ In its way, this is every bit as uncomfortable as anything in Bukowski. If nothing else, McKuen here ventures into territory few other American poets (well, perhaps aside from William Dickeyin _The Rainbow
Grocery_). In the same book, “Designer Genes” veers into Ogden Nash territory with its perhaps too-ephemeral satire on a 1980s fad: > _With laissez-faire each derriere > with nom or nom de plume > is held in place with little space > to wiggle or sha-boom.> _
In one of his last books, _Intervals_ (1986), McKuen not only displays a more good-natured sort of humor but also includes his most extensive use of social observation in a long poem titled, “Is There Life After Tower Records?” The poem, dedicated to Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, will tug at the nostalgia strings of anyone who spent a long night browsing through the aisles of this legendary West Coast record store. (And for those under 40, I won’t try to explain what a record store was except to say that it was the social and cultural heart of many towns in America.)_See them move
between the aisles,
pathways so narrow
that passing past anotheris bold adventure,
thrilling drawing-in of breath and stomach. And in between the aisles, the islands back to back that hide the million dreamsinside
bright jackets,
well-turned sleeves
plastic fused so fast it must be cut apart to reach the shiny metal hopes, the deep dark vinyl of delight whose inner grooves can only be decoded by the diamond needle, narrow beam of laser light._ This is just the kind of ecstasy you would experience flipping through the shrink-wrapped albums that filled Tower Records’ trays. Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard inL.A.
Occasionally, just occasionally, McKuen shared moments too candid to be faked. Nothing like the trinkets about sun and sand and cats that cluttered many of his pages, with details that quickly burrow themselves uncomfortably into the reader’s mind: _One day coming homeI saw a farmer
pissing by the road.His balls hung down
below his hand
and looked so heavy
that I began to run
for no apparent reason.I didn’t stop
until I reached
the safety of my room.__Home again,
I pulled the shade
and got down from the bureau my Sunday School coloring book. Having chewed my brown Crayola just the day before,I had no choice
but to color Jesus Christ’s hairyellow._
Ten pages before this in _And to Each Season …_, McKuen tells a ridiculous and unbelievable story about a friendship he made with a mountain lion he spotted in the woods behind his family’s house when they lived in rural Washington state. A few pages on, we’re back in the land of sun and lovers left behind. Had McKuen held himself to the same standard of intimacy displayed in poems like this, he might truly have earned a place in one of the Oxford books of verse. And his poems might still be taught today. But perhaps poet is not really the right label for Rod McKuen. Remember what he often said: “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be.” Perhaps we should heed Maya Angelou’s advice and believe him. Reviewing that 1974 performance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, Dennis Hunt of the _L.A. Times_ wrote, “His performance was awash with flagrant melodrama. He used a lot of old, obvious tricks to put his songs across. On his closing number, ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ he was even gesticulating in the flamboyant manner of Al Jolson.” There was a time when Al Jolson was considered the greatest entertainer in America. Today, it’s hard for anyone to see Jolson’s blackfaced rendition of “Mammy” in the original _The Jazz Singer_ and cringe. As it might be hard for anyone to listen to one of Rod McKuen’s albums or read one of his books now and wonder how they managed to sell in astronomical numbers. Perhaps entertainment is not quite so timeless as poetry. _My thanks to Barry Alfonso for suggesting I take a look at Rod McKuen’s increasingly — if somewhat justly — neglected poetry._ ------------------------- 1 The _Tribune_ article also mentioned that the same bill featured a ventriloquist, Aaron Williams, “and his dusky friend, Freddy.” 2 The ad for McKuen’s appearance at the Troubadour credits the “greatest entertainer in the world” quote to _The Times_, London. I searched through the archives of _The Times_ and failed to find any such statement. Indeed, the only time _The Times_ saw fit to give McKuen more than advertising space, it was a brief entry in the “Times Diary” for 20 February 1969 about an appearance he made at the Odeon cinema on Leicester Square reading the lyrics to his title song for _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_. Perhaps this, like many other things, was just something he made up. 3 One of McKuen’s favorite claims was that of having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1974. This intrigued me so much that I contacted both the Pulitzer committee and the Pulitzer archives at Columbia to confirm it. What they both stated was that prior to 1980, when the Pulitzer Prize adopted its current nomenclature of winners, finalists, and entrants, the submission process for the Music prize was essentially open. All entrants were considered “nominees” and all nominees (there were 40 in 1974) received a certificate. It is quite possible that McKuen or someone working for him submitted the nomination. That didn’t keep him from frequently mentioning the nomination for years thereafter. 4 After reading dozens of McKuen’s newspaper interviews, I strongly suspect the piece he was referring to was … an interview with RodMcKuen.
5 McKuen said he’d spent months traveling around the country as research. “I took a lot of odd jobs” taxi driver, hot dog seller, ice cream seller, mine worker, garbage man. “I was found out in Florida and it got on the front page of the _Miami Herald_ that I was a Miami garbage collector for a week.” In fact, no such story appeared. Instead, on December 18, 1974, a story appeared on page 2 of the _Herald_ that reported that “Millionaire poet Rod McKuen worked in Miami as a garbageman sometime in the last three months as research for a new book.” He said it was the toughest job he’d ever done. “I was aching everywhere. I don’t know what they put in those cans. It must be cement bricks.” The story also added bartender and soda jerk to the list of his odd jobs. The source for the story? RodMcKuen.
6 I’m told that people shopped at Tower Records during daylight hours, but I have no personal experience of this and have to discountit as myth.
Categories Featured Neglected Authors, Justly Neglected?
Tags America
, poetry
, Rod McKuen
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HALLELUJAH, I’M A BUM: WHAT TO READ AFTER _WAITING FOR NOTHING_31 October 2020
The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s _Waiting for Nothing_, and the initial
response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for. The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s _Vagabond Adventures_ (1870),
which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. _VagabondAdventures
_ is so old
that it predates the word _hobo_, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman , has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” _Tramp_, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’s _The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp_
(1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’s _Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative _ (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum. * • _Beggars of Life: a Hobo Autobiography_, by Jim Tully
(1924)
Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-_cum_-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration fromTully.
Kent State University Press has reissued a number of Tully’s books, including _Beggars of Life_,
_Circus Parade
_,
_Shanty Irish
_, and
_The Bruiser
_, as well
as the biography _Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, HollywoodBrawler_ by
Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak. * • _You Can’t Win_, by Jack Black
(1926)
Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word _hobo_ in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now). There are several different reissues of _You Can’t Win_available now,
including a Kindle edition and an audiobook. * • _Bottom Dogs _, by Edward Dahlberg(1929)
_Bottom Dogs _, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion: > … e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; > he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to > wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to > lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. > He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards > outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went > down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the > railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged > along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his > shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no > one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up. Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, _Bottom Dogs _ got a less than stellar reception. For _Saturday Review_, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed. _Bottom Dogs _ is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazonand elsewhere.
* • _The Hobo’s Hornbook_,
by George Milburn
(1930)
More cultural artifact than story, _The Hobo’s Hornbook_
reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….” The text of _The Hobo’s Hornbook_
is available online at https://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1930s/1930_the_hobos_hornbook__george_milburn_(HC)/index.htm.
* • You Can’t Sleep Here_,
by Edward Newhouse
(1934)
In _You Can’t Sleep Here_,
Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.” _You Can’t Sleep Here_
is extremely rare now, but you can find it online if your library has access to HathiTrust.org: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006498559. * • _Boy and Girl Tramps of America_,
by Thomas Minehan (1934) Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. _The New York Times’_ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.” _Boy and Girl Tramps of America_is available on
the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/boygirltrampsofa0000unse * • _Somebody in Boots_, by Nelson Algren
(1935)
Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to _A Walk on the Wild Side_, the 1956
novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of _Someboy_, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times. Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection: > _The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night > With loafers and bummers of most every plight ; > On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills. > Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills._ He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville,Mississippi:
> He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll > never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his > hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both > the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t > get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got > and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line > just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it > comes down — _sww-ish_. God help you if you run and God help you > if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if> you’re black.
_Somebody in Boots _ has been reissued a number of times, most recently in 2017 by IG Publishing , with an introduction by Colin Asher, author of _Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren_ .* • _Hungry Men
_,
by Edward Anderson (1935) In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.” This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when hereviewed Hungry Men
for _The New Masses_. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s _Hungry Men_,
no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.” According to Anderson’s biography, Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson (Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities (Hardcover)) by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'” The University of Oklahoma Press reissued _Hungry Men_
in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon . Anderson’s second novel _Thieves Like Us_, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume _Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and1940s_ .
* • _Horse in Arizona_,
by Louis Paul (1936) This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness. As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”_Horse in Arizona
_
was published in England as _Hallelujah, I’m a Bum_.
I’ve got to track this one down. Categories Reader Recommendations Tags America , autobiography, hobo
, novel
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THE HIDING PLACE, BY ROBERT SHAW (1959)23 October 2020
_The Hiding Place_
opens with Hans Frick putting on his Nazi party uniform, preparing his breakfast, and taking a tray with meals down to the two RAF airmen imprisoned in his cellar. While they eat, he tells them a story about a British bomber shot down outside Karlsruhe. The crew, having been rescued after parachuting into the Rhine, were summarily shot by the local Gauleiter. He then heads upstairs, changes out of his uniform and into a suit, and bicycles in to work. “The date was June the twelfth, nineteen fifty-two.” Well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was returning its last surviving German prisoners from World War Two. For several decades after 1945, stories would appear from time to time of Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Pacific islands after hiding out for years, unaware the war had ended. But in _The Hiding Place_,
Robert Shaw imagines the plight of two British airmen held in isolation, ignorant of the outside world aside from the stories of victories on the Russian front, amazing new German weapons, and the continuing futile attempts by Allied bombers to attack Germany. This is not, however, an alternate history like Philip K. Dick’s _The Man in the High Castle_. Instead,
it’s a tightly-focused study of the psychology of prisoners and their jailer that anticipates by over a decade the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome . Connolly and Wilson, having bailed out when their Lancaster bomber was hit on a raid over Bonn, are taken prisoner by Frick, a civil defense auxiliary. To keep them from being lynched by an angry mob, he ushers them to his nearby house and locks them in the bomb shelter that’s been built in his basement. Thanks to his late mother’s fears about being buried alive, the shelter is extremely strong and completelysoundproofed.
As the first hours pass, however, he realizes the quandary he’s in: he cannot take the men to the Gestapo without questions about the delay; neither can he set them free. He soon decides the only solution is to keep them prisoner in his house. And so he enters upon a fiction that, once started, he can’t figure out how to end. Shaw manages with remarkable success in convincing the reader that Frick could continue to convince his prisoners that his fiction is their reality. In part he does this by careful attention to the necessary practical details, but more is the result of his understanding of how prolonged captivity, particularly in relative comfort compared to what the typical Allied POW in Germany could expect, erodes the will to resist. The monotony of their existence also saps their initiative. After an argument over Connolly’s latest idea for overtaking Frick and escaping, the two men stop suddenly: > After a moment, Connolly and Wilson felt the whole of the previous > conversation had been incomprehensible: neither of them could > remember what had been said; surely they had said it before; it > seemed to bear no relation to anything whatsoever; and in what order > had the sentences fallen? They didn’t know if it was exactly > similar to hundreds of other conversations, or significant in some > tiny detail, some fresh twist. Connolly swayed again. He felt so > weak this morning. Wilson felt as if he had been improvising the > same tune at a piano for years, and now, asked to play the original, > had forgotten what it was. What had they been talking about? Wilson endures their confinement better than Connolly. A lawyer in civilian life, he early on convinced Frick to supply pencil and paper so he could practice translating remembered English texts into German. When his memory ran out, his imagination took over. Gradually, Connolly becomes “aware how much Wilson was changing — how much he was beginning to enjoy writing — how much there seemed for him todo.”
Eventually — and quite by accident — Wilson and Connolly do escape, and in some ways what happens next forms the most interesting part of the book. Interesting because the reader wonders where Shaw will take the story. After all, the men think the war is still going on, that they are in the midst of enemy territory. So, even after getting away from Frick, Frick’s fiction remains with them: they are, indeed, actively resisting being set straight. Frick also struggles to adapt to his new reality after the escape, for he has become as emotionally dependent upon them as they have been physically dependent upon him. Despite the inhumanity of Frick’s actions, Shaw makes him seem sympathetic in the end. _The HidingPlace_
manages to be both thrilling and tender and — despite the very specific conditions upon which the story is premised — also somewhat timeless. It could almost as easily have been set during the American Civil War or on another planet as science fiction._The Hiding Place_
was twiced staged as a television play: once in the U.K. with Shaw himself, along with Sean Connery, as the airmen, and once in the U.S. with James Mason as Frick and Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard as Wilson and Connolly. Unfortunately, neither one of the productions received positive reviews. Then in 1965, Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt, decided to turn it into a comedy, _Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious_ with Alec Guinness as the jailer and Mike Connors and Robert Redford as the airmen, now Americans. One IMDB reviewer wrote that the movie “was sheer torture to watch”; another, that it was “the strangest Alec Guinness film out there.”_The Hiding Place_
was Robert Shaw’s
first novel. And
though he’s now primarily remembered as an actor, he wrote a total of five novels between 1958 and 1969. His second, _The Sun Doctor_ (1961), won the Hawthornden Prize and is becoming rather rare and expensive. _The Flag_,
is something of a realistic parable, perhaps along the lines of William Golding’s _The Spire_. _The Man in the Glass Booth_ (1967), inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, was adapted with considerably more critical successful both for the stage and film. _ACard from Morocco_
(1969), about two British expats on the prowl in Spain, bears traces of Anthony Burgess in its corrupted sense of humor. All, sadly, arelong out of print.
------------------------- THE HIDING PLACE, BY ROBERT SHAW LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, 1959 Categories Short Notices: Short ReviewsTags England
, Germany
, novel
, Robert Shaw
, World War Two
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NEW VIDEO FEATURE ON G. E. TREVELYAN21 October 2020
In honor of the upcoming reissue of her first novel, _Appius and Virginia _, from the Abandoned Bookshop Press next month, I put together a 20-minute video feature about the life and works of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan and what I hope will be the end of her long period of neglect. You can see it now on YouTube: The Eclipe of G. E. Trevelyan . Categories News Tags G. E. Trevelyan 1 Comment THE GRANDMOTHERS, BY GLENWAY WESCOTT (1927)18 October 2020
THIS IS A GUEST POST BY BARRY ALFONSO, AUTHOR OF _A VOICE OF THE WARM: THE LIFE OF ROD MCKUEN _ To someone who grew up in California, a place like Wisconsin seems both drab and exotic, the sort of bland nowhere you would never want to visit deliberately. This may be the prevailing view, but that’s not how I thought of the Badger State when I lived in San Diego. I remember discovering Michael Lesy’s classic book _Wisconsin DeathTrip _ in the
early ‘70s. Its grim prose and even grimmer photos from the 1890s captured a world as darkly fascinating as H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham for me. The Wisconsin countryside seemed like a vast empty plain where human affairs — quiet tragedies punctuated with loud explosions of insanity — could play out. Living in a supposed paradise at the far end of the continent, Californians tend to think of the Midwest as irredeemably dull, filled with the sort of stunted people who don’t have the gumption to move West. To me, though, books like Lesy’s made the case that places like Wisconsin were filled with mystery, shadowy secrets, old houses harboring old people possessed by twisted dreams. A lingering association of the Badger State with things stark and spooky led me to pick up a paperback copy of _Good-Bye Wisconsin _ (Signet edition, 1964) at a San Diego used books store in the 1990s. The author of this short story collection was Glenway Wescott , a writer completely unknown to me. Reading it, I was struck by his lyrical prose and the empathetic treatment he gave to his damaged and morally confused characters. Years later, I ran across Wescott’s novel _The Grandmothers _ at a library sale in the Pittsburgh area. This 1927 novel — apparently a best-seller that went through at least 24 printings — was a much deeper dive into the moody Midwestern landscapes and tormented characters that _Good-Bye Wisconsin _ dealt with. I recently re-read it and found it an even richer experience the second timearound.
Glenway Wescott, 1933. On the surface, _The Grandmothers _ treads the same ground covered by Sherwood Anderson: commonplace scenes rendered with a poetic touch, filled with repressed, thwarted men and women who turn into grotesque exaggerations of themselves when their hurts and grievances remain buried too long. Anderson generally dealt with Midwestern small town life rather than more isolated rural folk, but the same sense of rigid Protestant proprieties draped over chronic regret and moldering obligation is present in Wescott’s novel as well. Both Anderson’s _Winesburg, Ohio _ and _The Grandmothers _ feature an adolescent boy with artistic inclinations who strongly resembles the author at a similar age. That said, Wescott seems to accept and embrace the failings and cruelties of the society he grew up in with a greater sense of forgiveness than Anderson does. And while Westcott is more literal and less parable-like in his accounts of his characters’ lives, his poetic language is even more mystically evocative than Anderson’s. _The Grandmothers _ doesn’t mythologize its gruff, semi-articulate men and wounded yet indominable women so much as surround them with a visionary glow. Its prose heightens the normal world and makes you see it with renewed color and vibrancy: > “They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were > whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it > advanced through regular ripples that were like a wedding veil…”>
> “The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper > which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the > sky like such a newcomer.”>
> “As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one > kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, > even her good health.” The arc of _The Grandmothers _ is simple and reminiscent of similar narratives. A group of families move to frontier Wisconsin before the Civil War and intermarry, establishing lines of descendants who prosper or succumb to ill fortune (mostly the latter) as the world enters the 20th Century. Wescott treats nearly everyone with respect and at least a modicum of sympathy — there are no real villains in the book. He doesn’t shy away from bringing out the more unpleasant and downright bizarre qualities of his characters, though. One of the grandmothers of Alwyn (the stand-in for a young Glenway Wescott) suffers from excessive prudery and takes to hiding small household objects to torment her husband. The couple’s poisoned but enduring marriage is summed up in a bitter vision: “During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.” (I read this and thought of certain photographs in _Wisconsin Death Trip_ and shuddered a
little.)
At times, the slow-seeping toxicity within these family relationships gets a tad claustrophobic. Those who wander away from the ancestral homesteads generally come to no good, though their travels do add some excitement. Black sheep Evan Tower runs off to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, deserts the army and hops a freighter for London, marries an Italian woman and ends up living with his wife and children under an assumed name in New Mexico. These adventures provide contrast to the severe monotony of rural Wisconsin life, throwing its grinding routines and unyielding moral codes into starker relief. Wescott parses the subtle shadings within old-fashioned Protestantism without displaying disdain or boredom. (Unlike Sherwood Anderson, he doesn’t flaunt his pagan instincts.) The lives of the most publicly religious are portrayed in the least flattering terms — the “stringless harp wrapped up like a mummy in the music room” found in a minister’s home suggests his overall stuffiness. It is the women in the book — most of them thwarted or broken by love — who seem to possess the most life-affirming faith. Believe in a forgiving God and the promise of heaven makes the sorrows of the everyday world easier to accept. Yet that isn’t the whole story – as the book nears its conclusion, Wescott makes clear that hard-shell Methodism, habitual labor and flattened expectations still allow for nobility and satisfaction if not joy. The “dignity of citizenship” and “the perfect and tender monotony of an uneventful married life” deserve celebration, something Anderson (let alone fellow Midwestern chronicler Sinclair Lewis) might not concede. The final chapters of the novel lay the older generation to rest as Alwyn’s growing awareness of his family heritage comes into focus. Wescott notes that Alwyn spied upon his family, “studied to convict them,” even as he watched his grandmothers slowly die. He compares his desire to write to the art of taxidermy, an attempt to simulate life out of selected pieces of the dead past. As she wastes away, his maternal grandmother mistakes Alwyn for her son and tells him, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” Whether this parting benediction is given to the wrong person is irrelevant. Wescott finds an all-embracing love in the resolute endurance and collective heartbreakof his ancestors.
In its sometimes bleak, sometimes tender depiction of a vanished world, _The Grandmothers _ anticipates Marilynne Robinson’sGilead novels.
There’s a quietly compelling drama to the stories that both writers tell about the Midwest, as well as an attempt to describe ordinary men and women with as much perceptiveness and nuance as possible. They share a deep empathy for the overlooked and undervalued. I haven’t seen Wescott’s name invoked in reviews of Robinson’s fiction. Those who admire her work would find _The Grandmothers _ worthy of discovery. I have visited Wisconsin many times over the past two decades. I’ve seen the sorts of places Wescott described in _The Grandmothers _ and maybe even met the descendants of the people he wrote about. The mysteries of the Badger State still haven’t been dispelled for me. I hope they never are. If I need to revisit them, I will return to _The Grandmothers_ one more time.
------------------------- THE GRANDMOTHERS, BY GLENWAY WESCOTT NEW YORK: GROSSET & DUNLAP, 1927 Categories Featured Books: Long ReviewsTags America
, Glenway Wescott
, novel
, Wisconsin
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FIVE A. M., BY JEAN DUTOURD (1956)9 October 2020
_A contribution to the 1956 Club._
This ought to be one of the rediscovered classics of this pandemic. Like Fernand Gérard Doucin, the narrator of Jean Dutourd’snovel _Five A. M._
,
many of us have found ourselves wide awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at the ceiling, our mind wandering along the edge of an abyss of despair: > Catastrophe: not the least little bit of sleep between my eyelids! > My mind is as clear as at noonday. The room has grown considerably > lighter, too. I can hear the muted ticking of the alarm clock hidden > in the closet. Panic! I am filled with panic. Like Doucin, we find our thoughts “revolving in lucid brain like those acrobats known as riders of death, spinning on their motorcycles round and round the inside of a huge drum.” And like Doucin, we drag ourselves into the waking world “haunted by the thought of not having had enough sleep.” In 1956 (or 1955, when _Five A. M._ first appeared in French as _Doucin_, the
global spectre was not disease but the atomic bomb. Comparing his trivial accomplishments with those of Homer and Shakespeare, Doucin reflects, “Besides, the atom bomb may destroy everything in fifty years’ (or fifty minutes’) time. In which case, farewell Homer, good-by Shakespeare, good night Balzac, adieu Doucin (Fernand and Gerard).” Born a few years after Doucin was having these thoughts, I can still remember how, as a child, upon awakening to the flash of lightning outside my bedroom window as a kid, my first thought was that a nuclear war had begun. But in Doucin’s case, it is less global destruction than the minutiae of his own life that fill his thoughts. A thirty-year-old bank clerk, bachelor and largely lapsed Catholic, he worries about money, his weight, about his smoking, about his baldness. While the last of these could be seen as mere vanity, Dutourd recognizes something I’ve been saying ever since I went bald myself — namely, that being bald requires one to stare death in the face each morning. Perhaps as a symptom of his profession, Doucin is a calculator. “How many people in the world care about me, alive or dead? How long will they talk about me after my death?” he wonders. Not many of them will be women. As a lover, Doucin is more hunter than collector. Even as he feels his attraction to a new mistress, his thoughts race ahead to the moment when he will grow bored and have to break with her. Smoking is easier to quantify. “How many cigarettes have I smoked in sixteen years?” he wonders. “Possibly 150,000.” Of these, nothing remains — except, of course, the collective damage they’ve done — are still doing — to his body. Unlike the narrator in Italo Svevo’s _Zeno’sConscience _,
however, his last cigarette is nowhere in sight: “I can’t stop,” he despairs. “As night closes in, as the lights come on, my frantic need to smoke grows more intense.” As a realistic description of insomnia, _Five A. M._ is a success. But it fails, in the end, as a piece of literature. Doucin is too much of an empty shell — or rather, the emotion at the core of his being is one unlikely to compel much sympathy from the reader: boredom. “I am convinced that I know the world inside out. Everything bores me. I know everything in advance. Love, war, the passions, money, all disgust me like a sauce gone bad.” Even though the word _love_ appears three times more often in the text than _boredom_ and its variations, the spirit that fills the pages of_Five A. M._
is paralysis. “A man who loves boredom,” Doucin reflects, prefers it “to diversions, pleasures, happiness, everything.” He will refuse to go to a cafe, refuse to call his friends, refuse to move: “He will stay at home for weeks on end, sprawling on a sofa, all alone with boredom.” As _Time_ magazine’s critic responded callously, “Author Dutourd writes as dry ice feels, but his chilling message is only half true. A man’s lifetime is invariably more than the sum of what he thinks and feels in the small, black hour of thehoo-ha’s.”
Jean Dutourd, 1956
Perhaps _Five A. M._ was only a therapeutic exercise. “I used to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning filled with morbid thoughts,” he later claimed, “and said to myself that the best way to fix that was to write a book. I wrote it with the utmost pleasure, in just a couple of months, and have slept soundly since.” Even so, French critics thought well enough of _Doucin_ to nominate Dutourd for the Prix Goncourt (he lost to the now-forgotten novelist Roger Ikor’s novel _Les eaux mêlées_, later published in English as _The Sons of Avrom_).
At the time he wrote _Five A. M._,
Dutourd was undergoing an ideological sea change. Having been an active member of the Resistance — narrowly escaping execution after being captured by the Gestapo in 1944 — by the mid-1950s, he had forcefully declared himself as a Gaullist, writing an enthusiastic review of de Gaulle’s memoirs and writing _The Taxis of the Marne_,
which was partly a memoir of his wartime experiences and mostly a brooding reflection on the state of France as he saw it. It’s not a pretty read in light of today’s world. “In 1935, with her institutions, her cabinet ministers, her soldiers, her severe court of justice, her sparkling navy, her strict prefects, her Pacific empire, her cruel colonists, and her State patriotism, France was a lion,” he declares. To protest against this state, even at the smallest scale, he argued, “was noble and courageous.” “But the France of 1956 is a weak and divided country,” he continued. “The anticonformists are donkeys kicking a dying lion.” His preference to the campaigns of the left, was patriotism. And “By patriotism,” he wrote, “I mean active, intolerant, cruel and effective patriotism.” Orville Prescott, _The New York
Times’_ usually conservative book editor found _The Taxis of theMarne_
“crammed with fine, mouth-filling denunciation, drenched with eloquent cries of lamentation and despair.” And the equally conservative Paul Johnsonnoted
ironically, “Dutourd remarks, correctly, that too many Frenchmen regard their memories as rights; but his whole book is a convincing demonstration that he himself shares the fallacy.” Dutourd’s shift continued over the course of the next decade until, by the late 1960s, he showed himself sympathetic to royalism in his novel _Pluche, or the Love of Art_
(1967). Eventually, he grew so identified with the establishment in France that he became a target of radical leftists. In the early hours of Bastille Day in 1978, Dutourd’s apartment on Avenue Kleber in Paris was wrecked by a bomb planted by a so-called “Franco-Arab refusal section” that wanted “to destroy the lair of the provocateur Jean Dutourd, a man of the pen at the service of theJewish press.”
Dutourd was by then writing a column for the evening newspaper _France Soir_ in which he often mocked the pretensions of the left. His cynicism, particularly of leftists still taking favorable positions toward the Soviet Union, would prove prescient. As he wrote just a few days before the bombing, “In a few years’ time, the proletarians and intellectuals will perceive that the fatherland of socialism is nothing other than a military empire.” ------------------------- FIVE A. M., BY JEAN DUTOURD NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER, 1956 Categories Short Notices: Short ReviewsTags France
, Jean Dutourd
, novel
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WHO WAS TOM KROMER? ON THE AUTHOR OF _WAITING FOR NOTHING_ 5 October 20205 October 2020 Dust jacket for 1935 edition of _Waiting for Nothing_ by TomKromer.
A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s _Waiting for Nothing_, back to print
for the first time since 1986. Though it’s mostly been out of print since its first publication in 1935, _Waiting for Nothing_ was been quietly
influencing generations of writers from Hubert Selby to Breece D’JPancake to James
Kelman with its
hard-nosed prose, impressionistic narrative, and grim, survivalistoutlook.
But who was Tom Kromer? Facts about him are scarce to start with and he didn’t help much when he was asked to contribute an autobiographical note for the British edition of _Waiting for Nothing_:
> I am twenty-eight years old, and was born and attended school in > Huntington, W. Va. My people were working people. My father started > to work in a coal-mine when he was eight years old. Later, he became > a glass blower, and unable to afford medical treatment, died of > cancer at the age of forty-four. There were five children and I was > the oldest. My mother took my father’s place in the factory. My > father’s father was crushed to death in a coal-mine. My father > never hoped for anything better in this life than a job, and never > worried about anything else but losing it. My mother never wanted > anything else than that the kids get an education so that they > wouldn’t have to worry about the factory closing down.Owens Glass
Factory #2, Huntington, West Virginia. Kromer glosses over the specific. He was born in Huntington in October 1906, the son of Michael Albert Kromer, who’d emigrated from Russia in 1891 to join his father at a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and Grace Thornburg, a West Virginia native. Bert Kromer spent most of his working life in one of the big glass and bottle factories in northern West Virginia. The Kromers lived in several different towns while Tom was growing up, but settled in Huntington, where his father went to work at the Owens Glass Factory. In the 1920 census, Bert Kromer’s occupation was listed as glass-blower. Coming after years of working in coal mines as a boy, it was a job that likely contributed to his early death from lung cancer. Kromer mentioned having three years of college but didn’t identify the school as Marshall Universitythere in
Huntington (later portrayed in the movie _We Are Marshall_). He wrote, “I
taught for two years in mountain schools in West Virginia,” but didn’t say that he’d left when two of his favorite professors were fired after they protested the school’s banning of Mencken’s _American Mercury_ magazine for its printing an article about a Missouri prostitute nicknamed “Hatrack.” Nor that he took the schoolteaching job to support his family after his father’s death in 1926. Kromer returned to Marshall in the fall of 1928 and got his first taste of life “on the fritz,” as he put it, on an assignment for the _Huntington Herald-Dispatch_ soon after. As an experiment, the paper sent him out, dressed in shabby clothes, onto the streets of Huntington to beg for change. “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 An Hour is All He Gets,” read the resulting article. It may have given Kromer a false sense of the ease with which one could live life on the bum: in hindsight, $2 an hour would seem a a fortune in the eyes of the narrator of _Waiting for Nothing_.
A month or so later, Kromer ran out of money to keep attending Marshall and decided to head to Kansas in search of farm work. He would spent most of the next five years on the road. As he wrote in his autobiographical note, > My intentions were to hitch-hike, and after hiking all day without a > lift, a freight train pulled to a stop Beside the road. I crawled > into a hox car. i never again voluntarily took up the > responsibilities of hitch-hiking, but I always aligned my interests > with the interests of the railroad companies. They generally got me > where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than “east”> or “west.”
The big Kansas farmers had already mechanized their operations, so there was no work to be had. “I got my first taste of men trying to buck a machine,” he later wrote. Kromer headed home after five months with little money and many hungry days. But things were just as bad in Huntington and he soon headed out again. _Waiting for Nothing_ is a
lightly-fictionalized distillation of Kromer’s years as a hobo. He claimed that, “Parts of the book were scrawled on Bull Durham papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jails, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a few memorable occasions actually pecked out with my two index fingers on an honest-to-God typewriter.” In fact, most of it was probably written in a notebook in the relative comfort of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in California between mid-1933 and mid-1934. _The Oro Plata, Murphy’s Camp_, California (1934), by MarcyWoods.
At one of these camps near Murphy’s Camp in the Sierra Nevadas, he met the painter Marcy Woods. Kromer complained to Woods that he’d sent his manuscript, then titled “Three Hots and a Flop”, to several publishers with no luck. Woods’ wife Hazel was acquainted with the muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens , who’d retired near the Woods’ home in Carmel, California, and offered to send the book to Steffens. Steffens returned the book after a few days with an enthusiastic note: “This story, this portrait of a ‘stiff’ is important. I sat up late nights reading it and I knew I was getting something I had never ‘got’ before: realism to the nth degree.” Encouraged by this response, Kromer sent the book to John Steinbeck’s first publisher, Covici-Friede. They rejected it. Kromer wrote to Steffens again, asking for advice on hiring a literary agent. Steffens recommended Maxim Lieber , then the champion of many of the most promising radical writers in America: Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Albert Halper, James T. Farrell, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes. Lieber submitted the book to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d begun to publish such writers in the hard-boiled style as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Knopf quickly bought the book and included it on their Spring 1935 list as “Title not announced.” Knopf did not care for “Three Hots and a Flop.” By then, Kromer had left the CCC and taken a job at the Harvard Book Store in Stockton. One of the biggest risks of life on the road — along with getting beaten up by railroad bulls and falling off a train — was tuberculosis, and Kromer’s health could no longer stand up to the physical demands of the CCC work. The book store hosted a signing for Kromer when _Waiting for Nothing_ came out in
early 1935.
Harvard Book Store ad for _Waiting for Nothing_. _Waiting for Nothing_ came out at a
busy time for the book reviewing business. It was competing with the likes of Thomas Wolfe’s _Of Time and the River_, Faulkner’s _Pylon_, Steinbeck’s _Tortilla Flat_, Willa Cather’s_ Lucy Gayheart_, and Enid Bagnold’s _National Velvet_. And it wasn’t the first novel about life “on the fritz.” Edward Newhouse’s _You Can’t Sleep Here_, which was based on Newhouse’s experience of unemployment and homelessness in New York City, came out the year before and a few months later, Edward Anderson’s_ Hungry Men_
was instantly compared with _Waiting for Nothing_.
Yet _Waiting for Nothing_ still stood out
from its competition. It’s easy to imagine Kromer’s fingers flying on a typewriter’s keys: his prose has the same striking staccatopace:
> It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits > a stick. I reach down and pick it up. I finger it. It is a good > stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out. It > wouldn’t kill him, but it would lay him out. I plan. Hit him where > the crease is in his hat, hard, I tell myself, but not too hard. I > do not want his head to hit the concrete. It might kill him. I do > not want to kill him. I will catch him as he falls. I can frisk him > in a minute. I will pull him over in the shadows and walk off. I > will not run. I will walk. Many, including Kromer, spotted the influence of Hemingway, especially his first short story collection _In Our Time_. But it’s also very close to this sample from a young hobo’s diary, quoted in a 1934 book titled _Boy and Girl Tramps of America_, a factual
account by Thomas Minehan published in 1934: > Sept. 11. Villa Grove. Rode with truck. Good town. Raining when I > hit first house. Woman gave me three eggs, two big pieces of meat. > Cream and corn flakes, cookies, jell and all the coffee I want. Ask > lots of questions. Man in house, too. He gives me a dime when I go. > Made thirty cents hitting stem. A junction. Took train. Friendly. > Good for supper and that’s all.>
> Sept. 12. Shelbyville. Cop picked me up. Sent to jail, had to work > two hours for dinner and supper. Stayed in jail all night. Six guys > of us. N. G. Got out before breakfast. Walked with Shorty to Baxter. > Small burg. N. G. Rode with farmer to Clarksburg. N. G. Got handout > from farm girl, bacon and bread. Me and Shorty came back to ask for > drink of water and she says, “Sic ’em,” to big gray dog. Dog > jumped at Shorty, but Shorty socks it. I gets a club. Dog chases us > a mile until we get to gravel and a lot of bricks. Boy did we give > it to him then. One critic later groused that “the ‘Tom Kromer’ of the book is a craftily simple version of the Tom Kromer who wrote it: the former doesn’t know where is next meal is coming from, but the latter knew to tell it like _A Farewell to Arms_.” And while it’s true that Kromer was better educated than the average hobo, his experience and hardened attitudes rang true to the life Minehan encountered when he accompanied one of his subjects through a week on the skids: > Large sewer rats scurry across the floor, rustling the newspapers, > foraging in the filth. Drunks stagger in, miss the top step in the > darkness, and stumble to the bottom. They call and curse at each > other, fight, vomit, urinate in the darkness. Some groan. Many > hiccup. One sings a ribald ballad, tuneless and wheezy. And by my > side a sixteen-year-old boy coughs, continually, without waking. > Deep and chesty is the cough. Between coughs, I can hear his labored > breathing. A rattle comes from his throat. The rattle becomes > deeper, more difficult. Breath wheezes, a pause. And cough, cough, > cough, until the tubes are clear, and the boy can breathe again. For Kromer, rats carried a special terror: > I listen to these rats that rustle across the floor. I pull this > sack off my face and strain my eyes through the blackness. I am > afraid of rats. Once in a jungle I awoke with two on my face. Since > then I dream of rats that are as big as cats, who sit on my face and > gnaw at my nose and eyes. I cannot see them. It is too dark. I > cannot lie here and wait with my heart thumping against my ribs like > this. I cannot lie here and listen to them patter across the floor, > and me not able to see them. It’s hard to believe that Orwell hadn’t taken some of his inspiration for Winston Smith’s fear of rats in _1984_ from _Waitingfor Nothing _.
A few months after the US publication, Constable published _Waitingfor Nothing _ in
England. Theodore Dreiser was enlisted to write an introduction, which was enthusiastic, if in Dreiser’s uniquely ham-fisted and occasionally incoherent way. In the 1986 University of Georgia edition of _Waiting for Nothing_, which also
includes most of Kromer’s other writings, Arthur D. Casciato wrote, “In the entire introduction, only Dreiser’s first two sentences really make sense: ‘This book needs no introduction or foreword,’ he writes. ‘It is its own introduction or foreword.’ Dreiser probably should have left it at that.” The English edition was, however, missing an entire chapter. In Chapter 4 in the original, the narrator meets and goes home with a homosexual known as “Mrs. Carter” simply to get a warm meal. Once at Mrs. Carter’s, he faces the facts of his situation: > I will have to go to bed some time. This queer will stay awake until > I do go to bed. What the hell? A guy has got to eat, and what is > more, he has got to flop.>
> “Sure,” I say, “I am ready for the hay.”>
> You can always depend on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I > pull off my clothes and crawl into bed. Given the laws in England at the time, however, Constable was in a quandary. “An experienced member of the book trade had sent us a warning,” they wrote in an insert that took the place of Chapter 4, “and we must decide whether, under existing conditions in this country, a true incident which could be publicly described in America was one which might not be publicly described in England.” It might not, Constable decided. > We have cut out Chapter IV entirely — cut it out with reluctance > and with shame, merely consoling ourselves with the thought that > fortunately the continuity of the book is in no way affected. Were > we wrong to cut it out? No one can possibly say. Would we have been > guilty of corrupting youth had we left it in? Once again, no one — > in advance — has the smallest idea. That is how things are in > England these days; and that is why _Waiting for Nothing> _ appears in
> England in an emasculated form. On the strength of his five years on the road and the reviews of _Waiting for Nothing_, Kromer felt
he’d earned the right to sit in judgment of those who would write about the hobo life. His contempt for Edward Anderson’s _Hungry Men_
when he reviewed the book for _The New Masses_ is unmuted: > You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward > Anderson’s _Hungry Men> _,
> no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no > derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker > bunks while the mission sign outside flashes “Jesus Saves” on > and of? in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men. When one of > Mr. Anderson’s puppets gets a gnawing in the pit of his guts, he > takes him up to a back door or a restaurant and feeds him. When his > hero is mooning on the waterfront over a respectable two-bit whore > that he is in love with, you will never guess what happens — the > Communist in the book hands him fifty bucks and says here take this > dough, I’ll not be needing it and make a home for the gal. “Perhaps Mr. Anderson has never seen a bunch of desperately hungry men,” Kromer speculated. Soon after _Waiting for Nothing_, however, Kromer
found that even the book store work was too much for him. He headed again back to West Virginia, where one of his classmates from Marshall, Thomas Donnelly, convinced him to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Donnelly was taking a teaching post at the University of New Mexico starting that fall, working for their former Marshall professor Arthur S. White. His two Marshall acquaintances arranged a scholarship for Kromer to study journalism. In the report of literary conference in July 1936, Kromer was identified as “a health seeker and student living in Albuquerque.” Not long after he started classes, he began coughing up blood and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital fortreatment.
At St. Joseph’s Hospital, Kromer met Jeannette (Janet) Smith, a Vassar graduate who was being treated for rheumatic heart disease. Janet had been working in New Mexico for the Federal Writers Project and teaching at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school near Santa Fe. The two decided to get married, but postponed the wedding until Kromer was discharged from the Sunnyside Sanitorium where he’d been transferred. Janet got a job writing for the _Albuquerque Tribune_ and Kromer sent off reviews for _The New Masses_ and articles for _The Pacific Weekly_, a liberal magazine recently started by Steffens and his wife, Ella Winters. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was turned down. He also began work on a new novel titled _Michael Kohler_ based on his grandfather’s life as a coal miner. And that was essentially the end of Tom Kromer’s career as a writer. Janet and Tom Kromer married in December 1936. His last article, “A Glass Worker Dies,” based on his father’s death, appeared in _The Pacific Weekly_ the same month. Tom never finished _Michael Kohler_.The Kromer House,
1968. Photo by Harvey Hoshour. In 1937, the Kromers bought a lot in Alameda, on the north side of Albuquerque, where they constructed an adobe house still known as “the Kromer House.” Janet became the editor of the _Tribune’s_ Women’s Page and supported the couple until her death from lung cancer in 1960. According to at least one account, by the late 1940s, tuberculosis and alcohol abuse had turned Tom into a recluse. After the war, Janet established a chatty weekly advertising paper known as _Janet Kromer’s Shopping Notes_
and there is a chance that Tom contributed some of its material. He was, in any case, the named party when an upset local Albuquerque TV personality sued _Janet’s Shopping Notes_ for libel over a suggestion that she was pregnant and taking a beauty course when shewas neither.
By the time the suit was dismissed by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1964, Tom Kromer had left the state. He sold the Kromer House to Harvey Hoshour, an architect, who later reported that the place had fallen into serious disrepair. Hoshour and his wife restored the house and it’s now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Kromer moved back to Huntington and took a room in the same house on 4th Street he’d left in 1929. He lived there, cared for by his sisters Emogene and Katherine, until he died in 1969. He was buried in a family plot alongside his parents. Categories Featured Neglected AuthorsTags America
, novels
, Tom Kromer
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A CONVERSATION WITH ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA, AUTHOR OF _ASCENT TOGLORY_
1 October 2020
I learned about Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s
new book, __ _Ascent to Glory_ : How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic, from Michael Orthofer’s reviewon
his Complete Review
site, and immediately purchased a copy. What attracted me was that Santana-Acuña doesn’t just describe the uncertain process by which García Márquez’s1967
novel became a classic recognized around the world: he also explores why five other Latin American novels—powerful novels, novels of substantial literary merit—failed to achieve the same status. He refers to these examples as “literary counterfactuals”—the classics that might have been, if you will. His point is that looking at both the success (_One Hundred Years of Solitude_) and
the “might have beens”, demonstrates that it’s often factors beyond the text’s quality, sometimes factors beyond the author’s control, that make or break a book’s longevity. This resonated with what I’ve seen in my years of studying neglected books and writers and especially in this last year, when I’ve dug deep into the stories of forgotten writers as part of my graduate program at the University of East Anglia. So much, indeed, that I contacted Álvaro, who teaches sociology at Whitman College and asked if he’d be willing to participate in a discussion about what leads to one book becoming a classic and another little-known, little-read relic. I was delighted when he agreed, and what follows is a distillation of what was, as we both later agreed, the fastest 90 minutes we’ve spent since lockdown. BRAD: Congratulations on the book! For the sake of readers who are learning about it here, can you give a quick overview of what youcover?
Dr. Álvaro Santana-Acuña ÁLVARO: Thank you. What I wanted to show in _Ascent to Glory_ was that the road to the success of _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ was
actually very bumpy and that there were other books that for different reasons were expected to be more successful—or were already successful and then disappeared from view. And the same thing happens to authors. Critics and readers were expecting, for example, JoséDonoso , to be the
real major Latin American Boom writer and his _The Obscene Bird ofNight _ the
best Latin American Boom novel. What happened was that García Márquez and _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ took
that place and instead, Donoso’s novel is now becoming a neglected literary work. No one could have predicted how things would turn out. Of course, the quality of the work matters, but as much or more that what happens afterwards. I wanted to show that the making of a classic is a social process, and that we need to look into the social, economic, and cultural context as well as the literary content, that is, the text, to understand why—and in the case of others likeDonoso, why not.
BRAD: Yes! I’ve seen that with so many writers I’ve looked at. The difference between the writer who continues to be read and the one who loses his or her readers in the space of a few years so often just seems to be a matter of dumb luck. I particularly see that now that I’m back in the university and I can see that the conventions of academic study tend to lead scholars to write about the writers that other people write about. It creates the effect that a few writers — Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, for example — get intensely studied. That every year, their library sections get bigger and bigger and bigger, while a few feet away you find some old copies of JamesHanley’s
books, say, that haven’t been read, let alone studied or written about. And the reactions of most academics when I approach them about someone like G. E. Trevelyan — an amazing writer whose books are almost impossible to find, who’s been completely forgotten in literary history—is complete disinterest. It’s like they can’t afford to become pigeonholed as a champion of theoddballs.
ÁLVARO: I must say that unfortunately, I had the same experience. One of the authors I study in _Ascent to Glory_ ,José de la Cuadra
, was first
mentioned to me by a colleague with a tremendous thirst for literature. He was always recommending books to me. I remember vividly the day he said, “Oh, you like _One Hundred Years of Solitude_? Read
_Los Sangurimas _ by de la Cuadra, and you tell me whether you think García Márquez actually found inspiration for his novel in that little book.” And the fact is that there are so many similarities between them that it’s very hard not to claim that García Márquez built on _Los Sangurimas_ to write his own
novel.
The truth is that _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ was so
successful because it built on themes that were already prevalent in other regional literatures of Latin America, as in Ecuador, where de la Cuadra wrote his works. That’s the reason why, when people had _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ in
their hands, they could immediately see connections with other books that they’d read. And that’s one of García Márquez’s merits: he was really interested in other peoples’ experiences, in other people’s works, in other literary traditions. That’s something that literary critics often don’t take into account. When they look at influences on famous writers, they tend to focus on other celebrated writers—to the point that nowadays, the prevailing narrative is that García Márquez wrote in the tradition of high modernism: especially, Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, and Faulkner. But the reality is that García Márquez was omnivorous in his reading. He read those classic authors, but there were others like Curzio Malaparte from Italy. His style and themes had a big impact on García Márquez’s early writing. In Colombia, there were local writers such as HéctorRojas Herazo ,
Eduardo Caballero Calderón, and
Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, all of
whom García Márquez knew personally. And if you read what these Colombians were writing at the time, you see that they were all on the same page. The case of Cepeda Samudio is even more interesting because, as I show in _Ascent _, García Márquez and other friends regarded him as an extraordinarily talented writer—and indeed, his masterpiece _La casa grande_
is praised by scholars today even if it’s neglected by most readers. So, there are legitimately major classic writers like Faulkner and Woolf that influenced García Márquez, but there are also less well-known writers who arguably had as much or more of an impact onhim.
BRAD: A point that I found particularly interesting in your book was the distinction between a classic and a canonical book. What is that difference, and how can it help with looking at a text? ÁLVARO: One of the reasons I wrote _Ascent to Glory_ was to offer my colleagues in literary studies a different perspective on the question of what’s a classic. What struck me in looking at the examples of the counterfactuals I discuss is that a classic is a work that can survive on its own. _Hamlet _will survive whether or not the Royal Shakespeare Company continues to exist, for example. If anything, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s reputation can be damaged if there is popular and critical backlash against one of their productions of _Hamlet_. _Hamlet _is also a canonical book: you have the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the plays edited by Shakespeare scholars, you have the Folger Library, you have academics constantly working on new studies and interpretations. Similarly, _Madame Bovary_ is a classic that thousands read every year in cheap paperback editions at the same time that you have the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition and annotated critical editions, plus dozens of film and TV adaptations. There are other works that are canonical but not classics. They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments. I give a couple of examples in the book. One of them is Georges Bernanos’s _Diary of a Country Priest_, which depends on French publisher Gallimard to maintain its canonical status. And there are books that are classics but not canonical. Kahlil Gibran’s_The Prophet_, for
example. People all over the world still buy it and read it, but the academy in general refuses to recognize it as a literary text worth studying and teaching. Of course, a canonical book can be become recognized as a classic. BRAD: Like Zora Neale Hurston’s_Their Eyes Were
Watching God
_, for
example? It was out of print for years, but once it was reissued and started to be written about, it got put onto course reading lists and started to take off through word of mouth until now we could say it’s able to survive in the wild. ÁLVARO: Right, there are classics like _The Prophet_ that can never become canonical unless some institution decides it’s going to stake its reputation on supporting it. The point is that when we talk about a text as canonical, we’re talking about a relationship based on dependencies. The canonical work that’s not a classic depends on the support of an institution—Ben Jonson’s _Epicoene_, for example, would probably not stay in print if there wasn’t an academic press to support it. But the press that publishes _Epicoene _also stakes something of its reputation when it chooses to publish that text. This kind of dependency extends beyond literature. Let’s think about art museums. We know the Louvre, for example, has classics like the _Mona Lisa_ but it also owns many other lesser known works displayed on its walls and stored in facilities underground. BRAD: Yes! The vast majority of the works on display in the Louvre are not classics: there is only one _Mona Lisa_, there is only one _Raft of the Medusa_. And most art museums can’t aspire to only have classics because then most of them would be empty. That’s what I love about art museums, in fact: you can almost always count on seeing something you’re not familiar with. Here in Norwich, in the museum at the Castle, for example, there’s a wing devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum. ÁLVARO: That’s a good example, because it helps us understand why Turner became the pinnacle of this form of artistic expression: he was building upon a whole school, a whole aesthetic movement. Going back to _One Hundred Years of Solitude_, when
we talk about the style known as magical realism, the perception is that García Márquez invented it. But the reality is that, when he wrote the novel, the term magical realism itself had been around for at least twenty years, and there were already people like AlejoCarpentier , Juan
Rulfo , who were also writing in this style. So, when _One Hundred Years of Solitude’s_ came
out, it was building on that magical realist tradition. But something happened: a dislocation of the tradition. When a book becomes an exceptional success, like _One Hundred Years ofSolitude’s
_, it
tends to overshadow what came before. If you think about it, Shakespeare managed to kill his predecessors—and for decades after also managed to kill his successors. And that’s what classic books and classic authors do. García Márquez’s and _One Hundred Years ofSolitude’s
_ success
makes it seem like there’s nothing in Colombian literature before or after this writer and his novel. In reality, Latin American literature was far more diverse than just magical realism. I point to the example of the Peruvian writer JoséMaría Arguedas
, who had
a different conception of what being Latin American meant. He was a supporter of indigenism. He wrote the superb but neglected novel _The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below_.
Arguedas was proud to say, “I am a provincial writer!” And he wasn’t alone. But all these alternatives disappeared, and we only have that pinnacle—García Márquez and a few others—representing Latin American literature. Now, if you do some digging, you find all these other writers and ideas that were active at the same time. Unfortunately, a lot of my academic colleagues say, “Yeah, but I’m not really interested in those minor writers,” while for me, it’s a passion. It really gives you a better and deeper understanding of what goes into making a Turner or a García Márquez. BRAD: Absolutely. It’s all part of what makes literature. Literature is not just the classics. I like to use the analogy of a landscape. Today, the fastest route between two places usually involves driving on some freeway—which in the American West is often practically a straight line. But there’s so much to be seen if you get off the freeway, if you follow the two-lane roads that wind around a little more, that take you through the smaller towns, that show you features of the landscape that nobody taking the freeway ever knows about. The landscape is not just that strip you see as you rush along the freeway—in fact, most of the landscape is what you can’t see fromthe freeway.
And literature is like that. The works and the writers that people were reading at the same time that García Márquez was becoming known worldwide are part of Latin American literature even if now most people have forgotten them. One reason your distinction between a classic and a canonical book intrigued me is that it opens up ways to rebalance the situation, to bring the forgotten parts of literature into the discussion. I have to confess that until I read _Ascent to Glory_ , I always associated the idea of a canonical book with things like Harold Bloom’s _The Western Canon_: that the canon was limited to 50 or 100 books—the pinnacles, as you put it—and that anything that wasn’t in the canon was, in effect, second class, not worth bothering about. Your interpretation, on the other hand, says that we can bring forgotten books back into the discussion—but they will need some support: a publisher willing to keep them in print, academics willing to study and write about them. ÁLVARO: You’re right. _Ascent to Glory_ is an anti-reductionist book. That’s in part because I’m a social scientist, and one of the things I like about the social sciences is that they give you the tools to offer multi-layered understandings of how society works. Something as simple and concrete as a book requires the collaboration of so many people, not just the labor of the writer. Whether it’s a classic or a canonical book, that collaboration continues and can become highly complex. And this multi-layered perspective makes it impossible to take a reductionist view and claim that the fame of a classic rests only on the quality of the text. Because this is not true. And I’m sure people reading our conversation now can remember reading a book written in absolutely amazing prose and asking themselves, “How is it possible that this book is not better known?” That’s what happened to me when I read _Los Sangurimas_. I said to myself, “This is a gem and nobody knowsabout it.”
That’s why I talk about it in _Ascent to Glory_ : I wanted to make the story about _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ a
little more complex. I wanted to show all the obstacles that the book faced—in order to show that it wasn’t just magic. García Márquez took 15 years to write the book. At the same time, Latin American literature was emerging after decades of facing its own obstacles. And the book wasn’t expected to be a bestseller. In fact, as I show, the novel met all the conditions to be a complete failure. That’s why I quote publisher Alfred Knopf in the Introduction: “Many a novel is dead the day it is published.” Because that’s the truth. _Ascent to Glory_ aims to show that the road to any artwork’s attaining the status of a classic is not straight, that it depends on a lot of factors, and any one of them can easily go wrong. Actually, when an artwork becomes a classic, it’s more like an alignment of planets, where each planet is a different factor. The skills of the creator matter, of course, but also his or her professional connections of the creator, the support of peers, the quality of the artwork, the precise historical moment, the gatekeepers, the distribution channels, and the market—and when you put all these factors together, you understand how one book—_One Hundred Years of Solitude_—became
a classic where another—say, José Lezama Lima’s _Paradiso_—didn’t.
This doesn’t mean that the planets can’t align in future for a neglected book. As a matter of fact, we often see rediscoveries in art, works that have been forgotten, come back to life, and evenbecome classics.
BRAD: Like _Their Eyes Were Watching God_… ÁLVARO: Right. Another one is _The Master and Margarita_ by Bulgakov. Due to the political conditions in the Soviet Union when it was written, this novel couldn’t even be published during Bulgakov’s lifetime. But when it was published outside the Soviet Union in the 1960s, you had an audience ready to praise it as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature. BRAD: And, according to something I read recently, the most popular book in Russian prisons today. ÁLVARO: It’s incredible. I didn’t know that. This would have been impossible fifty years ago. And that confirms the idea that there are factors that can be obstacles—the political environment in the Soviet Union, for example—but not forever. One factor I talk about in _Ascent to Glory_ is gatekeepers like literary agents. Carmen Balcells was a Spanish agent who got to know Vargas Llosa and García Márquez when they were living in Barcelona and played a major role in their careers. Another of her clients, José Donoso, on the other hand, came to resent and even attack her, and she was not supportive in return. But gatekeepers like agents and agencies come and go, and when they do, things can suddenly become possible. It would have been hard to envision a TV or film adaptation of _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ just a
few years ago because of the influence of García Márquez’s agent. Netflix is now working on the first adaptation. Let’s not forget that books are social objects. Their production follows social patterns. And what I’m trying to show in _Ascent_ is that the transformation of the social object we call a book into the social institution that we call the classic needs a social explanation. We cannot limit the explanation to talking about the quality of the text. And there are social patterns we can see when we look at numerous classics—the _Mona Lisa_, _War and Peace_, Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s _Ninth Symphony_, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn—that are like the freeways, to use yourexample.
BRAD: Right. It’s not just that the freeway is the fastest, most direct route. It’s also that the freeway has rest stops, has places where you can refuel, get food, spend the night. In the same way that the classics have reproductions and adaptations and Cliff’s Notes and other things that make them more accessible. ÁLVARO: Exactly. And I’m offering some ways in which we can understand these patterns. One is the imagination of the author—how the work is envisioned by its creator. Another is the production process—the way the work gets produced and marketed. And the third is the distribution process—how a book, for example, gets circulated, translated, reprinted, and adapted into other formats. Even imagination is a social activity. García Márquez had colleagues he talked with as he was imagining the book, even before he started writing it. He had the works of other writers to inspire and guide him. And even as he was writing the novel, which after all took him over a decade in the end, he was talking about it, he was reading new things. Even though it was his hand putting the words on the page, in some ways it was more like a mural—the work of many hands. In my book, I try to disassemble this collective process, which I call “networked creativity,” to identify the elements that fed into García Márquez’s imagining _One Hundred Years of Solitude_. And
what I try to show in Chapter 7—“Indexing a Classic”—is that this social collaboration in the imagination stage continues in the circulation stage. Over the decades, as different people approach the book, at different times, languages, and social and political contexts, they find units of significance—indexicals, I call them—that become reinforced. Like the opening line of the novel… BRAD: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” ÁLVARO: See! You know it by heart, too. You also run into people comparing their own experiences to that discovery of ice, people pointing to the impact of the words, different critics coming up with different interpretations—Freudian, semiotic, religious, etc.—of those words, until that line becomes something that even people who’ve never read the book can recognize and even memorize parts ofit.
BRAD: I found your model of the process—imagination, production, circulation—striking for a number of reasons. One is that it seems as if only the first stage ever gets discussed in traditional literature courses. I mean, I took an undergraduate degree in English literature and we never talked about two thirds of this process. And yet now that I’ve been studying and writing about neglected books for years, I’ve come to appreciate how much of an impact things like the design of the cover or the prestige of the publisher or whether it was easy to translate and appealed to readers in other languages can have on whether a book succeeds or fails in the long run. In _Ascent to Glory_ you show, for example, how publishers in Spain dominated the development of Latin American literature for years because especially publishers in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina operated on a more limited local or nationalbasis.
ÁLVARO: Yes. The control of the production and circulation of books on a wider basis throughout Latin America was in the hands of a small number of Spanish publishers. And because they had such control, they exercised a homogenizing, standardizing influence over the kind of books that Latin American readers—including writers—read. Things have now changed. With the rise of the Internet, readers all over the world can learn about books, can buy and download books, and can start up their own discussions through everything from Goodreads to Twitter to blogs like yours. And that means that no single agent or critic or broker can have the impact that someone like Harold Bloom had just 20-30 years ago. The age of literary criticism as this sort of global religion is over. BRAD: I spoke with a number of publishers earlier this year and it was striking how many of them reported that attracting social media influencers were as or more important than getting reviews in major trade journals in how they marketed books. So, some publishers will routinely push free copies to Amazon “Top One Hundred” reviewers because those early five-star reviews can be as critical as a good review in the _New York Times _. ÁLVARO: It doesn’t surprise me. Compare this to how readers would communicate about a book before the Internet. What would they do? They’d only know a handful of other readers and they’d have to write letters to them, or they’d write letters to newspapers or magazines. And the editors of those newspapers or magazines would choose what letters did or didn’t get published and then control the conversation about newly published books. Whereas now, with Goodreads and other social media platforms and even the comments section at the end of many online newspaper articles, we see a plurality of voices, even about neglected books. And those voices are reinforcing the idea that there are thousands of good books and thousands of good writers—and not just living writers andin-print books.
To go back to your landscape analogy, these social media discussion platforms are acting as avenues that open up the landscape, that encourage us to discover the diversity of writers and perspectives that exists beyond the narrow and straight lines of the “Western Canon.” For example, new platforms are helping to make more visible the literary works of female Latin American writers from the 1960s, some of which, such as Elena Garro’s _Recollections of Things to Come_, are said to have influenced the works of their more famous male peers, including García Márquez’s _One Hundred Years of Solitude_. But
there are still obstacles, and some are in academia. BRAD: Publish or perish. ÁLVARO: Correct. There is a risk-averse atmosphere in academia and especially in some disciplines at present, which I think explains some of the responses you got when you approached academics about several neglected works and authors. This atmosphere makes it difficult to undertake long-term writing projects like _Ascent to Glory_ . It took me eleven years to write this book. When I started it, I knew that it was a risky move from an early career standpoint, which demands from raising scholars shorter writing projects and a fast publishing turnaround. I’m happy to say that this is the book that I wanted to write. And it makes me even happier that _Ascent_ is finding its way to readers with a passion for neglected authors and works, because, let’s not forget it, the prestige of classics stands not only on the shoulders of giants but also on the shoulders of neglected creators and neglected works of art. THE FIVE “LITERARY COUNTERFACTUALS OF _ASCENT TO GLORY_:
* _The Obscene Bird of Night_ by José
Donoso
* _Los Sangurimas _ byJosé de la Cuadra
* _La casa grande
_
by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio * _The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below_
by José María Arguedas* _Paradiso _ by
José Lezama Lima
Categories Reflections Tags Arguedas , Cepeda Samudio, de la Cuadra
, Donoso
, García Márquez
, Latin America
, Lezama Lima
, novels
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FIVE NEGLECTED HOLLYWOOD NOVELS: AN INTERVIEW WITH KARI SUND24 September 2020
Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn Seepublished her own
dissertation, _The Hollywood Novels: An Historical and Critical Study_ way back in 1963. I contacted Kari recently to ask if she’d share some recommendations from her wide reading in this genre, and shegenerously agreed.
* What got you interested in novels set in Hollywood? Were you a film buff who got interested in literature or a literature buff who gotinterested in film?
Definitely the latter. I first became interested in the Hollywood novel when I was doing my Postgrad in American Literature, though the course didn’t focus on the genre. One of the texts on the core course was John Steinbeck’s _Grapes of Wrath_, and when I had finished reading this my Kindle recommended that I read Nathanael West’s _Day of the Locust_, which I had never heard of, but absolutely loved. As both the works were published in 1939 and both were set in California during the depression era, I wanted to write about their differing depictions of the Western Dream in American Literature, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis _The Significance of the Frontier in American History_ (1893). Around about the same time, I was writing my dissertation on the portrayal of alcohol, waste and occupation in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this led to me reading his unfinished Hollywood novel _The Last Tycoon_ (1941). That set the ball rolling: the more Hollywood novels I read, the more I wanted to read. What most surprised me was the fact that until reading Nathanael West’s _The Day of the Locust_, I hadn’t come across discussion of the Hollywood novel as a genre. I had taken undergraduate modules on twentieth-century American literature, and a postgrad in American literature, but the genre hadn’t been covered and it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the American lit anthologies on my shelves. That added a layer of intrigue to the topic for me, which I find always helps when you are going down a rabbit-hole. * 1. Merton of the Movies (1922) by Harry Leon Wilson. * This is perhaps the first Hollywood novel to become a best-seller. It’s interesting to compare what contemporary reviewers said to how the book’s remembered now. The_ New Republic’s _reviewer, for example, said “for the thousands who will laugh with Mr. Wilson there are millions who might read his story and see nothing in it to laugh at at all.” Harry Leon Wilson has a reputation as a comic novelist (e.g., _Ruggles of Red Gap_): is this a comic novel or atragi-comic novel?
For me _Merton of the Movies_
is a tragi-comic novel, and it really surprises me how many scholars, critics and reviewers refer to Wilson’swork as simply
comic. There is no doubt that it is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Merton is a small-town shop assistant who wants more from life and dreams of finding success as a serious actor. He moves to Hollywood, struggles at first, but eventually finds fame in slapstick Keystone Kops-style comedy westerns due to his remarkable likeness to an existing Western star. The only problem is that Merton has a deep disdain for these comedies, seeing them as the lowest form of acting. But when a director recognises the humorous scenarios created by Merton’s tendency to take himself far too seriously, he exploits this, putting Merton in a comedy role without telling him. Merton thinks he has finally got the serious Western role of his dreams. This is hilarious, of course, but because all Merton’s colleagues and bosses on set are part of the ruse it’s also humiliating to witness. Merton finally reaches the level of fame and success he has long dreamed of, but by a means which he has always scorned – slapstick comedy – and so there’s a bittersweet element to this. It’s definitely difficult to feel sympathy for Merton at times because he is pompous and judgemental, but Wilson’s novel speaks about the culture of the Hollywood film-factory utilising human beings for its own means, a culture which countless Hollywood novels would continue to explore into the 20s, 30s, and still do today. _Merton _ can bring you tears of laughter and of pity, definitely a tragi-comic novel, and a wonderful read. * Some years ago in _The New York Times_, Nora Johnson called _Merton of the Movies _“>Merton of the Movies one of the Hollywood novels that had become “dated as old valentines in their innocence and their view of the movie capitol as exciting, amusing, certainly loony, but harmless on the whole.” Is this a fair accusation? I don’t think this is entirely fair, no, mainly because I don’t feel that the novel depicts Hollywood as harmless. Wilson captures the excitement, or rather obsession, that people felt about potential fame and success in the field of acting, and that’s a dream that I don’t think has ever fully left Western culture. But with this obsession comes a resulting difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy – another theme which Hollywood novels have continuously explored – and this is one of the main concerns of _Merton of the Movies _. Merton experiences delusions in his humdrum life back home, like getting into fights with mannequins at work as he envisions himself in a Western saloon scene, and becoming the laughing stock of the town when he tries to steal a local horse ashis trusty steed.
After he has made the pilgrimage to Hollywood he ends up so destitute that he finds himself secretly living on film sets and nearly starving, and it is because his hold on reality is so loose that he is able to normalise this situation. He constantly filters the events of his own life as they might be depicted through a Hollywood memoir, or fan-magazine interview, with a famous star. Wilson’s narrative depicts these scenes in a comedic style, but Wilson himself was not a fan of Hollywood and there is an undeniably serious message in this novel about how harmful an extreme obsession with Hollywood, film, and the cult of celebrity can be. The exploration of this theme has endured not only in fiction, but also in films about Hollywood and the West. _Sunset Boulevard_ (1950), _Mulholland Drive_ (2001), and more recently _Ingrid Goes West_ (2017), all explore the distortion of reality through their character’s proximity to, or obsession with, Hollywood and celebrity. _Ingrid Goes West_ links this to the use of social media in modern culture, exploring how we distort our own portrayals of reality via platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and how these portrayals in turn impact our perceptions of our own lives. So, I don’t feel that _Merton of the Movies _“>Merton depicts Hollywood as harmless, nor do I think that the work is dated given that one of its main themes is still so relevant today. Johnson’s words do resonate in respect of one aspect of the novel though, and that is the fact that Merton still finds success in Hollywood, even if it isn’t hispreferred role.
Scholars like John Parris Springer have observed that Wilson gives in to the fairy-tale perception that dreams really do come true, and I have to admit that I also find it disappointing that he somewhat endorses the idea that anyone could make it in Hollywood.1 This truly was a harmful message, one that was bringing thousands of starry-eyed young people to the film-capital in search of fame, only to be met with disappointment and sometimes destitution. Yet without this ending—Merton’s success—it would have been a completelydifferent novel.
* 2. Minnie Flynn (1925) by Frances Marion * Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter (of either sex) in the 1920s. What does _Minnie Flynn_
tell us about Marion’s view of the industry she was so successfulin?
This picks up where I’ve just left off with _Merton of the Movies_. In Cari Beauchamp’s compelling work _Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood_ (1997), she writes that Marion wanted the novel to be “a warning to the thousands of women she saw pouring into Hollywood full of optimism and without the slightest idea of what lay ahead”.2 So Marion was open that this was a cautionary tale for young girls coming to Hollywood to try and make it as actresses. At the time when _Minnie Flynn_
was published, people were travelling to Hollywood in the thousands to find fame and success only to find that even extra roles were impossible to get because there was such a vast pool of hopefuls to select from. Hollywood had more budding actors than it needed. Marion’s message was that even for those young girls who did find work, it would not necessarily be the experience that they envisioned. The novel follows a young girl, Minnie, who starts out as an extra in the East coast film industry. She is given an introduction by a minor actor she meets at a ball and who is interested in her romantically. Minnie doesn’t find massive stardom, but she does find moderate success and moves to Hollywood to continue her career. Marion really emphasises the serious pitfalls, and one of the main ones is the loss of trust in friends and family members. Most of Minnie’s loved ones use her for what they can get when she is at the peak of her fame, and are nowhere to be found when she is down-and-out, it’s quite tragic. Then there is the added fact that, for most, fame rarely lasts. Marion also makes it explicitly clear that women trying to make it as actresses were objectified sexually, often from a young age, as part-and-parcel of the casting process. This is one of the most significant aspects of the novel for me, as it reflects that a culture which still exists today – as we have seen in the last couple of years with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement – has been deeply ingrained from the early years of silent film. Marion confessed later that she spent four months writing the first four chapters and then finished the rest of the book in just six weeks. The “tough guy” novelist Jim Tully said she “was guilty of the artistic murder of a beautiful character.” Did you notice any significant shifts in style or quality in the course of the book? I wasn’t aware of this when I was originally reading it, and I think it would lead to a different reading experience, so it makes me want to read the novel again! There are some aspects of the work which instantly come to mind. For example, Minnie moves from the East coast film industry to the West coast film industry, and her time in Hollywood is short in the grand scheme of the novel. I was surprised by just how much of the novel is set in the East and how little is set in the West, though this was also an aspect I enjoyed as I felt it highlighted the relevance of the East coast film industry to Hollywood, another topic which my thesis gives focus to. As for Tully’s accusation, I guess the answer depends on how we consider Minnie as beautiful. From the start she’s described as physically beautiful but Marion also emphasises the many flaws of Minnie’s character: she is selfish, fickle, shallow, and pretty mean! If Tully means that the character was beautifully crafted, then I would agree, but I also felt the ending was effective, not rushed. Minnie ends up being used by partners, lovers, family members, and so-called friends. By the close of the book she is destitute, having lost her fame and her looks, and she’s punishing herself for herfate.
Note: Kari got this beautiful copy of _Minnie Flynn_
a few years ago from Ben Smith, who ran a Kickstarter to get the work back into publication (and who may have a spare copy or two for sale): Frances Marion’s Lost Novel _Minnie Flynn_ – A New Edition * 3. Twinkle, Little Movie Star (1927) by Lorraine Maynard. * This is a children’s book — what might be considered YA (Young Adult) fiction today. What interests you about this book in the context of your research? Hollywood-related fiction for children plays a huge role in my research. The first film-related novels to be published about Hollywood were in the form of series-works for children, so they really hold a formative position in the genre, yet these and all works for children are consistently dismissed from scholarship. Because of this, I assumed that they would be irrelevant to the larger genre, yet when I started reading these works I was struck by the similarities in the themes they explore, but also by the fresh perspectives that they bring to the genre, and so I felt they warranted more attention. The most interesting aspect of _Twinkle_for
me is the depiction of a child star – Vivi Corelli – and that stars experience of working in the film-industry of the 1920s. The story is almost wholly set in Hollywood, bar a few visits for location shooting, yet the universe we encounter in the novel really exists in a vacuum of film sets through the eyes of a child. Through this novel,Lorraine Maynard
depicts and
condemns the working conditions for child actors by detailing the dangers which Vivi is at the mercy of because of those conditions. It also touches on the use of animals in the industry, as Vivi’s co-star is a beloved dog, Scamp.Illustration from
_Twinkle Little Movie Star_ * Would you consider Maynard’s child star, Vivi Corelli, a precursor to Shirley Temple? Absolutely. Lorraine Maynard herself had worked as an actress for a short period of time when she was a teenager, so she would have had experience on film sets and in studios, and would have been familiar with the phenomenon of child stars in America. _Variety _also claimed that this work was allegedly based on “Baby Peggy” (Diana Serra Cary) who was one of the first child stars of the silent movie era, a real-life precursor to Shirley Temple. * 4. Remember Valerie March (1939) by Katherine Albert Like Frances Marion, Katherine Albert wrote from insider knowledge of working in Hollywood. Yet _The New York Times_ reviewer wrote, “It would be shocking to think that her people represent a cross-section of Hollywood, and this reviewer is left unconvinced by the jacket’s assurance that such is true.” Having read a fair share of Hollywood books by now, how realistic did the book seem to you? For me, this is a good example of a Hollywood novel being unfairly dismissed based on its authorship and the subcategory to which it belongs. The work is female-penned, focuses almost entirely on the career of an actress and has elements of romance and sensation in it. Having dissected bibliographies on the genre and having now read a fair amount of scholarship on it, works with these characteristics have often been dismissed since—and they were not even given serious attention at the time of publication either. There is nothing in this work which strikes me as more or less realistic than the nextHollywood novel.
_Remember Valerie March_
takes the form of a mock star exposé narrated by Conrad Powers, who’d directed most of March’s films. It focuses on Valerie’s personality, her rise to fame, her acting roles and methods, and the events of her personal life. The writing is sometimes deliberately sensationalised due to it being a mock-exposé, yet the story remains believable. The New York Times review wasn’t the only one to disparage the work: Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg dismissed _Valerie March_, along with _Minnie Flynn_ and a number of other works about women’s experience in Hollywood as “Glamour Books, glorified fan magazine stuff”.3 This was the common view of these works in the 1950s and there hasn’t been much to contradict this stance in Hollywood scholarship since. This is one of the reasons I feel these works warrant further exploration. Given the prevalence within the genre of surrealist novels like _The Day of the Locust_ (1939), satires like Carroll and Garrett Graham’s _Queer People_ (1930), and tongue-in-cheek works like Evelyn Waugh’s _The Loved One_ (1948), it does become difficult to distinguish this genre as “realistic”. * One thing that sets _Remember Valerie March_
apart is the fact that Albert related the story through the voice and perspective of a male narrator–Conrad Powers, the director who discovered Valerie March. Why do you think Albert made this choice? I’m not sure why, but it makes for a complex portrait of a Hollywood actress. In part, it’s a necessary measure to fit with the mock star-exposé form the narrative takes. At the time, the relationship between an actress and their director was something which film fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columns would often focus on as part of their preoccupation with revealing “insider” stories (and something we still read about in gossip magazines today!), so on more obvious level it would encourage an existing readership who were interested in Hollywood to buy the novel. I don’t know if this was Albert’s conscious intention, but I also felt the narrative perspective highlighted the way in which women in Hollywood were—and often still are—filtered through male perspectives, and this is another reason why I selected this work for focus in my thesis. Conrad Powers has a close relationship with Valerie, and at times quite a strong ability to influence her decisions. I don’t think that Albert intended for the reader to always take Powers’ view of events at face value, but for them to question if there was a different perspective. * 5. In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes. * You’ve written that “For me, this is neglected in the sense that it’s not traditionally considered to be a Hollywood novel, but I think there’s a really strong argument for it being one!” How would you make that argument? This ties in with a larger existing scholarly debate over how much of a link to Hollywood a Hollywood novel should have. Some critics think that a Hollywood novel should have a specific and significant geographical setting in Hollywood, while others feel that Hollywood doesn’t need to be a specific or central setting, but can be more of a “symbol rather than setting”, in the words of Jonas Spatz.4 To play devil’s advocate, I don’t really agree or disagree with either, or not yet anyway! The genre has such an enormous and diverse collection of novels, all of which have varying degrees and forms of involvement with Hollywood as either a place or an industry. Norman Mailer’s _The Deer Park_ (1951) isn’t even set in Hollywood, but with an overarching concern with the film industry and the people in that industry, no one can deny its status as a Hollywood novel. Then you have works like _Remember Valerie March_
(1939), which are very distinctly set in Hollywood, painting a clear picture of living and working in Hollywood even down to what interior design is popular with the stars. Yet, as we have seen with the review you cited, it is still critically dismissed for being unrealistic orinaccurate.
_In A Lonely Place
_
(1949) hasn’t been discussed within the genre – to the best of my knowledge – and it isn’t recorded in any bibliographies of the genre, and I believe this is because of the book’s delicate involvement with Hollywood. Hughes goes to great lengths to utilise the geographical area, as the protagonist Dix Steele drives round specific streets at night, haunting hotspots where he *spoiler* looks for murder victims. The geographical element is very much there, but many would argue that there is no actual concern with Hollywood as none of the characters or plots are prominently involved in the filmindustry.
Much of Dix’s urge to kill, though, comes from a feeling of resentment which is clearly linked to class, money, and lifestyle. He pretends to be a novelist and tries to exude the casual superiority of a man of leisure. But, of course, this only betrays an inferiority. He is financially dependent on an uncle he hates, and the perpetual land of sunshine and beautiful film-people represents, for Dix, a fantasy which he has been shut out from after serving in the war. His experience is such a truly stark contrast to the leisurely life which was consistently promoted in Hollywood through consumerism. This lifestyle was promoted through the films being produced, by the publicity machines of film studios, by the fan magazines, even in the shop windows you would pass as you walked down the street. The message was that this life of leisure was attainable if you only looked thepart.
Dix is trying desperately to look the part but only feels an increasing sense of unbelonging that adds to his resentment. I would argue that there could be no better setting to fuel this type of resentment than Hollywood itself. So, though it might seem almost like an incidental setting – just the backdrop to a serial killer’s hunt – I think Hollywood is the essential setting for _In A LonelyPlace
_.
I don’t think this novel could be set anywhere else and still have the same associations. * One last question: some people say that Hollywood and the movie business is an artificial environment, so fictions set there are inherently stilted or simplistic. Others say it’s an environment that distills, drawing out and intensifying aspects of the world at large. Where do you side? From the Hollywood novels which I have read I think the genre tends to draw out and intensify aspects of the world at large. An idea which you come across frequently in scholarship on Hollywood and the Hollywood novel pre-1950s is that Hollywood was being perceived and portrayed in these novels as a “microcosm” of America. This idea doesn’t always resonate with me when I’m reading Hollywood novels, but I think in a great many of these works Hollywood is definitely being used to explore some of the larger social, cultural, and artistic concerns which people were experiencing at this time. The early works I examine from the 1910s and 1920s reflect the changing perceptions of social class in America, women’s role in the workplace, concerns and excitement over industrialisation, invention, and technological advancements being made. I really haven’t read one Hollywood novel that I’ve found stilted or simplistic. Instead, even the least complex works still provide insight into significant aspects of the film industry and reflect larger concerns over cultural or societal issues, and if we are examining Hollywood and the film industry from a historical perspective these are extremely valuableinsights.
* Footnotes
1John Parris Springer. _Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature_. Norman. University of Oklahoma, 2000. 2Cari Beauchamp, _Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood_. California, University of California Press,1997.
3Budd Schulberg. “The Hollywood Novel.” _American Film_ (Archive:1975-1992), vol. 1, no. 7, May 01, 1976, pp. 28-32. 4Jonas Spatz. _Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth_. Mouton, The Hague, 1969. Kari provided the following profile: _I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is k.sund.1@research.gla.ac.uk, would love to hear from anyone with similar research interests, or fellow part-time PhD students as it’s always nice to connect with those who have a shared experience ofthis!_
Categories Reader Recommendations Tags America , Hollywood, novels
, women writers
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CANDIDATES FOR THE #1956CLUB 26 September 202019 September 2020 For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s BookishRambles ) and Simon
Thomas (of Stuck in a Book ) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at booksfrom the year 1956.
1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s _The Towersof Trebizond _,
which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prizefor
fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel _Time for a Tiger_,
the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.
To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.* • _Solo
_,
by Stanford Whitmore A first and only novel about a jazz pianist working in Chicago. In the _Sphere_, Vernon Fane wrote, “Mr. Whitmore’s hero is an eccentric young man who describes himself as the last individual in the world, is a brilliant jazz pianist and, by his almost total independence, makes himself as many enemies as fans.” In the _Guardian_, Anna Bostock found Whitmore’s knowledge of Chicago and jazz “fascinating … with its own values, manners, and language, and the author’s sure command of these gives the novel something of the quality of a good travel book.” In the _Observer’s _year-end wrap-up, John Wain wrote that he’d under-praised _Solo_, “which has stayed in my mind very firmly since January, and show no sign ofdissolving.”
* • _For All We Know_,
by G. B. Stern
A novel about the theater and all the personalities around it. In the New Statesman, Michael Crampton wrote that it “throbs with the passionate, false life of the stage. Everybody strikes poses, and there’s a good deal of sharp elbowing up right and down left in the crowd scences. But I find that green-room novels, like salted almonds, are insidiously to my taste.” Isabel Quigly praised Stern’s ability to manage a vast cast with sublime nonchalance. “_For All WeKnow
_
(a suitably airy title) is about one of those brilliant, fictional families with ramifications so complex that even with a family tree at the beginning you can hardly tell by the end exactly who is whose great-aunt or grandmother or second cousin. But it doesn’t really matter; what does is the frightful, fascinating buoyancy of plot, characters, conversations and, of course, plain narrative.” * • _The Brazen Head_,
by John Cowper Powys One of Powys’s last books, described as a phantasmagoria and set in Wessex at the time of Roger Bacon. “A profusion of odd characters — barons, sorcerers, giants, enchantresses — appear and disappear, argue, tangle and disentangle, evacuate, copulate or die,” wrote Tom Hopkinson in the _Observer_. Hopkinson found the book a molten, formless mass — but didn’t think that mattered much. “The book’s chief quality,” he wrote, “lies in the author’s immense erudition and expansive kindliness of heart, which gleam, whenever they are allow to, through the boisterous confusion of action and the ceaseless babel of talk.” Both Stevie Smith and Angus Wilson named_The Brazen Head
_
one of their books of the year. “It is beautifully, _deeply_ weird and also happy,” wrote Smith, while Wilson called Powys “still the most original living English writer.” * • _Remember the House_,
by Santha Rama Rau
A novel about an English-educated Indian young woman in Bombay (Mumbai). Isabel Quigly found it seems—and maybe is—the first novel I remember reading which takes you right away from, right beyond, the confines of western thought. And so delicately that you barely notice, till afterwards, you have spent time in another world. The surface is perfectly familiar—a light, glittering, conversational style, dialogue that often recalls Mr. Waugh in his bright young days, action at just the right pace to keep you interested but not breathless, characters beautifully disposed and organised. ” “The worn old adjective ‘brilliant’ does really apply to this extraordinary eyocation of a way of life at once familiar and remote: and so deftly, so—in a brash, lighthearted way—femininely” Quigly concluded, “that you are half lulled into thinking it just another novel about social habits: which it is, but so very much more. And, I almost forgot to say, highly entertaining, at the idlest level of appreciation, as well.” * • _Image of a Society_,
by Roy Fuller
Mary Scrutton spoke for many potential readers when she wrote in _the New Statesman_, “I never met a more misleading title than _Image ofa Society
_.
It sounds like yet another sociological survey. In fact it is rather like a good Arnold Bennett, only it is well written . It is about the people who work in a large Building Society in a provincial town, and more particularly about two of them—the ambitious, cocky, extrovert executive who is fancied as the next General Manager, and the sad, intellectual parent-ridden young solicitor who falls in love with that executive’s wife. Both men are most shrewdly studied, but not at the expense of the background; the whole movement of the office is tersely and wittily conveyed.” Scrutton had exceptional praise for Fuller’s skill: “It is a beautifully organised novel, all the more moving for being closely pruned. It gave me the feeling that I had when I first read _Afternoon Men_—namely, that most novelists never succeed in extracting the statue from the stone at all. No wonder it is often such hard work trying to enjoy them.” * • _A Single Pebble_,
by John Hersey
This short novel drew upon Hersey’s years of living in China as the son of American missionaries. An American engineer travels by upon a junk up the Yangtze River in search of a location for a dam. But the story is more in the journey and the interactions between the young Westerner and the members of the crew, lead by a man known as Old Pebble. Howard Mumford Jones wrote that the book’s narrative “is merely the occasion of the novel, not the substance of Mr. Hersey’s art. He wonderfully succeeds in purveying the slow, dreamlike journey up this ancient river. We move with the junk as if under enchantment and are as helpless as the teller of the story to alter the drift of event or comprehend the Chinese enigma.” Santha Rama Rau found that Hersey “captured all the magic, the terror and the drama of that extraordinary stretch of water.” John Wain called it “the most distinguished book I read in the year — the one I would have least hope of ever being able to emulate.” * • _A Dance in the Sun_,
by Dan Jacobson
A short novel about the encounter between two drifters and a farm family they meet on a road in South Africa. John Wain gushed about the book in his _Observer _review: “_A Dance in the Sun_
is a beautiful performance, a model of how to treat a vastly complicated subject without over-simplifying, and yet without ever becoming confused. As a novel of suspense, it could be enjoyed in the simplest way, but I doubt if anyone will be able to keep his reaction dewn to this level; the real subject of the book, race relations in South Africa, is so insistently present that it will touch and move the stupidest and most calious reader.” “Altogether,” Wain concluded, “one might, without absurdity, put this novel on the same shelf with_ A Passage to India_ — and that is a very small shelf.” * • _The Seven Islands_,
by Jon Godden
A short, simple, almost artless story about a holy guru living as a hermit on an island in the Ganges and the quite unholy measures he takes when he encounters competition in the form of Dr. Mishra, who wants to set up his own commune on a neighboring island. It’s a bit parable, a bit human comedy, and a bit distillation of Godden’s many years of observing Indian manners and thought. “This gravely mischievous fairy tale has a moral too good to give away,” wrote John Davenport. “A singularly charming book.” * • _Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire_,
by Alfred Chester
_Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire_
left many reviewers flummoxed but impressed. In the _Listener_, Sean O’Faolain wrote that it was “impossible to summarise … all a matter of mood, atmosphere, place, temperament: New York in a strangely, Parisian dress, more Baudelaire than Bonwit Teller.” The hero lives above a funeral parlor, hangs out with a deadbeat novelist, a one-eyed priest, and a warm-hearted social worker. The trappings and atmosphere of the mortuary seeps into everything in the book — “Only the vampires are missing,” O’Faolain joked. He was not entirely off the mark in writing that “Mr. Chester is a real writer; corrupted, somehow, astray somewhere, probably in French Lit., and exile — I hazard the guess.” “Would Mr. Alfred Chester, present whereabouts unknown, please return home immediately where his talent lies seriously ill?” O’Faolain pleaded. * • _The Marble Orchard_,
by Margaret Boylen
The second of only three novels that Boylen wrote before dying at the age of 46, _The Marble Orchard_
takes the Southern Gothic sensibilities of Flannery O’Connor and sets them down in the middle of Iowa, where Boylen grew up. Lovey Claypoole, a girl blinded as a result of one of her tinkerer-inventor father’s failed experiments, spends many hours roaming the graveyard — the marble orchard of the title — and talking with her town’s outcasts. Orville Prescott, the _New York Times’s_ oracle of the time, only read the book because his daughter forced it on him. “I had to find’ out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily,” he later wrote. “Sometimes its crackling rainbow prose seems so artificial that all sense of reality is lost. But far more often Lovey’s extraordinary talent for the imaginatively right word, for the concrete detail that will bring a whole episode into life, for a fantastic but wonderful figure of speech, makes reading _The MarbleOrchard
_
an exhilarating experience. In the end, Prescott found the book “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” It did not, of course. But as Prescott acknowledged, “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.” If you’re running out of time to locate one of these ten neglected titles, however, here are some others worth at look. These well- or somewhat well-known and in print titles from 1956 are almost enough to tempt me to divert from my path through the land of the neglected:* • _My Dog Tulip
_, by
J. R. Ackerley
Ackerley’s loving memoir of his Alsatian dog Queenie (whose name was changed to Tulip out of concerns over inferences about Ackerley’s homosexuality) was turned into an animated feature with Christopher Plummer in the lead in _My Dog Tulip _ in 2009. Both the film and the book are well worth looking for. * • _O Beulah Land _, by MayLee Settle
Settle’s third novel and the second volume in what would ultimately become known as the _Beulah Quintet_, _O Beulah Land_ is about the early settlement of the Ohio Territory. Like all of Settle’s books, it combines deep tenderness towards nature and emotion with absolutely unflinching depiction of the violence that runs through so much American history. * • _The Lost Steps_, by
Alejo Carpentier
This was really the first novel that made English language readers sit up and realize that Latin American novelists were coming up with something new — the sizzle before the Latin American boom, if youwill.
* • _Andersonville_, by McKinlay
Kantor
A huge book (~800 pages) and a huge bestseller, this account of the grim conditions in the notorious Confederate Andersonville prison camp — particularly coming after World War Two and the grim images of Nazi concentration camps — helped offset (somewhat) the nostalgia for the antebellum South embodied in that other doorstopping bestseller, _Gone with the Wind_. * • _The Tree of Man_, by Patrick White
Technically, this only qualifies for the #1956Club for readers in the UK, where it was published about nine months later than its appearance in the US and Australia. Like _The Lost Steps_, _The Tree of Man_ was a book that made readers in the Northern Hemisphere sit up and realize that great fiction that wasn’t just English stories transplanted were being written in Australia. * • _The Emigrants_, by
Vilhelm Moberg
Moberg published the first of his four volume _Emigrants _series in 1949, but it first reached English readers in 1956. In a fair world, we’d recognize it as one of the better candidates for the Great American Novel: taken together, the four books are the closest thing we have to an epic of the American Dream in all its complexities. * • _Tunes of Glory_, by James
Kennaway
Kennaway’s first novel, later made into a terrific film starring Alec Guinness, _Tunes of Glory_ is a favorite
with many a soldier for its knowing depiction of the turnover of traditions and generations that’s inherent in the history any military unit that wants to remain effective. * • _Anglo-Saxon Attitudes_, by Angus Wilson
Angus Wilson was just nine years older than Kingsley Amis but he unjustly got labeled as an old man (in contrast to the Angry Young Men), despite the fact that his satirical blade cut far deeper and sharper than Amis’s. I’m not sure he had the best judgment in his choice of titles, either, which is a shame. I’d take _Anglo-SaxonAttitudes_ over
_Lucky Jim_ any day of the week. * • _A Charmed Life_, by Mary McCarthy
Although I prefer McCarthy as a critic than as a novelist, I had to include this book — which Edward Albee _had_ to have read before writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — because it is _so_ much better than the book she’s best known for (which need not benamed).
* • _Pincher Martin _, by William Golding Another example where the novelist’s best known book pales in comparison to a somewhat lesser known work. I remember the impact when I realized, late in the book, was Golding was doing, what really was the fate of Pincher Martin. It was like that moment in Richard Yates’ _Revolutionary Road_ when we learn that April Wheeler is dead: a punch in the chest that takes your breath away in shock. * • _A Train to Pakistan _, by Khushwant Singh So much life, so much suffering, so much death is packed into the under-200 pages of this novel about the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. An antidote for anyone who gave up without finishing _Midnight’s Children_ Categories Reader Recommendations Tags #1956Club , America, England
, India
, jazz
, novels
, South Africa
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ANDREW GRAHAM, TELLER OF CLUB SECRETS14 September 2020
I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection _MostlyNasty_
(1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely design, the pages filled with ornate and startling illustrations byLeonard Huskinson
.
_Mostly Nasty_
reads a bit like a collection of after dinner tales told over a brandy in the comfortable leather chairs of a fine old London club — if the club included men like Roald Dahl or John Collieramong
its members. For there are streaks of Dahl’s delight in the absurdity of death and Collier’s spirit of jolly misanthropy. There are many deaths in its pages and most are fraught with ridiculousness. On the other hand, Graham’s stories are told from the perspective of a man poised a rung or two above Dahl or Collier on the social ladder. He is not just familiar with fine country houses but able to spot the details that set a better one apart: “A particularly good set of busts of emperors looked down at us from the tops of the bookcases; firelight from a wood fire twinkled in the silver of the tea-tray; there was hot toast and farm butter and home-made black cherry jam; and a slight smell of vellum, Turkish tobacco and late roses.” This is from “Dear George,” the story of a painfully well-mannered bachelor uncle who becomes the target of a thoroughly unpleasant nephew’s domestic terrorism. As George and the narrator settle down in the lounge for a bit of tea after their dusty journey, little Cedric launches his first raid: “He wore a Red Indian head-dress, he left the door open, he caught his foot in the wire of a standard lamp and brought it crashing to the ground, and, catching George (ever a slow-mover) unawares, seized hold of both ends of his moustache.” Too kind to heed the narrator’s advice “to give the child a sharp biff on the behind,” he suffers silently as Cedric attempts to extract every hair of George’s moustache by its root. “He must have suffered agony,” the narrator reflects. Little Cedric gets his comeuppance in the end, though, in a shocking if satisfyinglypermanent way.
Cedric attacks George. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson from _Mostly Nasty_ by Andrew Graham Graham’s elevated position has its disadvantages, though. His sense of fitness restrains him from taking quite the same evil relish in awful outcomes as a Dahl or Collier. This is not black humor but rather an elegantly muted shade of grey. Writing after two world wars — the latter in which Graham fought as a tank commander — where Britain took more than its fair share of losses, he is fully aware that social changes are afoot, but not yet decided whether he agreeswith them:
> Nowadays one is so accustomed to old ladies of eighty who do their > own housework, bumble about the neighbourhood in Morris 10s, and > spend the evening of life baby-sitting, that it was a rare pleasure, > like sampling a wine of ancient vintage, to shake the be-ringed hand > of this splendid old number, complete with curly fringe of false > hair (weren’t they called “transformations”?), lace, > altar-frontal held up round the neck by whalebone, locket on black > watered-silk ribbon, and lace cuffs: complete, in fact, with all > those trimmings which come in so handy if you happen to have a > lady’s maid, but which only confuse the issue if you’re doing> the washing-up
In structure, Graham’s stories betray a strong grounding in the kind of set-up/punchline structure first mastered by Edgar Allan Poe and then used for the next 100 years by writers like O. Henry and Frank Stockton. If you’re looking for that twist designed to provoke a burst of laughter or gasp of disbelief, read the first paragraph or two then skip to the last. But what really matters here is the teller, not the tale. Graham is a man of the world, but not a man full of himself. Stick with him for the details, not the drama. If Graham’s mostly nasty tales seem to have had their cutting edges dulled a bit, it’s all in the interest of good taste. “Assuming one’s critical faculties were just a teeny-weeny bit numbed by a glass or two of really good wine,” one reviewer wrote, “these stories would be quite enjoyable.” Graham would have been your man if really good wine was what you were looking for. He’d not only savored his fair share of the stuff in post-war military liaison posts, he spent much of the 1960s as the _Times_ own wine correspondent — back in the days when the only wines considered worth drinking came from France bearing an _appellation d’origine contrôlée_. He got his start as a scribbler with a short memoir of his tour as the British Military Attaché in Saigon from 1952 to 1954 titled _Interval in Indo-China_ (1956). The _Telegraph’s_ reviewer praised Graham for his “light, conversational style that is often very amusing,” but I suspect his urbane and ironic account of his experiences now seems a bit ill-timed given what came after. His skills as a raconteur, however, made him an exemplary clubman. I haven’t been able to track down a list of his memberships, but according to knowledgeable sources, it was the Conservative Clubat 74 Saint
James’s Street that inspired his next book, _The Club_ (1957). Although written as a novel with a thin plot centered on the attempt of a _nouveau riche_ manufacturer to gain access to the True Blue Club’s auspices ranks, _The Club_ was closer to an anthropological study than a work of fiction. That is, if the anthropologist took a wicked delight in reporting the worst of his subject’s manners and customs. Reviewers with some experience of club life took particular pleasure in reading the book. John Betjeman wrote that, “What makes this book so very well worth reading is its author’s accurate knowledge of elderly men and how much more maliciously they gossip about one another than women.” Alan Ross in the _TLS_ found it “full of the most delicately observed character studies, of bores, complainers, retired soldiers, country gentlemen, business magnates, upstart peers, and the hereditary rich.” One reviewer called it “a plum-cake of a book,” but praised Graham for his restraint: “Yet the joke is not overdone.” And indeed, some thought Graham’s instinct not too cut too deeply laudable. “There have been other books about the malice of men but few which so well describe their pathos,” Betjeman wrote, and Maurice Richardson considered that Graham had hit “the correct note of poignancy, so integral a part of club atmosphere which can turn the most divergent types of human frailty into desirable members ofsociety.”
Graham returned to Southeast Asia for his second novel, _A ForeignAffair_
(1958). Set on a fictional island split between two states in uneasy and impermanent truce — the revolutionary Cheo Republic in the north and Westward-leaning but charmingly corrupt kingdom of Parasang in the south (reminder you of any place?) — _A Foreign Affair_ is a comedy soaked in a genial sort of Foreign Office snobbery. Coups, crises, and conflicts may come and go, but the first priority of the British Ambassador is not to allow matters to upset the peace of a predictable daily routine. When a crisis does arise, however, the Westerners are prepared to respond: “The Englishwomen of Alassar, with their unrivalled knowledge of auxiliary services in time of war, set about imparting their skills in First Aid, Fire Watching, Ambulance-driving and the making of hot sweet tea, to their Eastern sisters.” The wife of the French ambassador offers her own form of aid: instruction “in that essential weapon in the armoury of modern French healing, the hypodermic syringe.” For the most part, however, life in Parasang is one of late mornings, sleepy afternoons, and long evening cocktail hours. The primary duties of the Parasang Army are ceremonial: > For this they had left their humble homes in the ricefields; for > this they had learnt to bear without blubbing the acute pain of > wearing army boots and the relatively minor discomfort and > airlessness of battledress; for this they had endured long hot > afternoons on the barrack square, being screamed at by bull-chested > sergeant majors, while their less patriotic brothers dozed till the > evening shadows fell; for this they had sloped, ordered, presented, > shouldered and trailed their arms, hitting the great unwieldy rifles > till, if necessary, their hands bled. This, they felt — one glance > of royal recognition — this was _It_.>
> And, considering that the Army was not normally called upon to do > much else throughout the year, they were not far wrong in their> belief.
Graham clearly drew upon his time as a military attaché in Vietnam for the material in _A Foreign Affair_,
but he showed himself more than willing to make a joke at his own expense. Reporting the responses around the world to one of Parasang’s occasional coups, he notes that, “One enterprising London bookseller arranged a window display of an ill-informed and now out-of-date little book called _Interval in Parasang_, written some years before by a junior officer with literary ambitions who had served at Alassar under the Mandate. Graham’s next book, _Love for a King_ (1959), is a lightweight bit of royalist nostalgia set in the early 20th century somewhere along the Adriatic in the kingdom of Quarankol. The love referred to in the title is not romantic but patriotic. Though the King of Quarankol is aging, ill, and somewhat fuzzy-minded, the people know he has only the best intentions. Unlike the Parasangians in _A Foreign Affair_,
the people of Quarankol long for a peaceful transition of power, even if the choice of successors offers slim pickings. Graham tells a good-hearted but forgettable little fairy tale, and the most noteworthy aspect of the book may be the chapter heading illustrationsby William McLaren.
Illustration by William McLaren, from _Love for a King_ byAndrew Graham
Graham took a break from fiction in the early 1960s, probably due to elbow strain incurred through his work on the wine circuit for the _Times_. He knew he had a sweet deal, however, and seems not to have indulged in unnecessary flourishes of wine snobbery. Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman’s authorized biographer and an expert on English ceramics, for example, recalled sitting next to Graham at a fancy lunch and asking his opinion of the host’s choices in wines: > “You’re meant to know something about pottery and porcelain, > aren’t you?” Graham replied. “How would you like it, if every > lunch you went to, you were asked to turn the soup-plate upside down > and pronounce on the quality of the ware? Well, that’s the sort of > thing that happens to me with wine. So I’m having beer instead.” Having poked fun at the ways of London clubs and the Foreign Office, it was only natural that Graham would turn in his next books to a subject he knew best: the Army. He made an exception, however, and took time to write a straightforward history of the regiment he served with through most of the War. _Sharpshooters at War_ (1965) was an account of the wartime exploits of the 3rd, the 4th and the 3rd/4th County of London Yeomanry (the 3rd and the 4th were combined into the 3rd/4th after D-Day — who says the military can’t be efficient?). He then spun the table and in _The Regiment_ (1967), Graham told the story of an earnest young historian’s struggle to extract a serious history from the records of a thoroughly dishonorable unit, Queen Adelaide’s Imperial Heavy Infantry. Vernon Scannell, who’d served as an enlisted man at El Alamein and spent much of his war years as a prisoner in military jails for desertion, didn’t think much of the book: “Most of the members of the regiment have comic names, long and difficult if they are officers, but Meagre and Lumber if they are Other Ranks. There are some jokes about bed-wetting, boils on the bottom, and homosexuality.” Simon Raven, on the other hand, who’d resigned his commission for “conduct unbecoming”, however, enjoyed the richness of Graham’s insider knowledge, offering as an illustration his translation of one particularly dusty dispatch:> _The Original_
> Z Coy , till recently out of luck, has made a successful > foray on a hide-out in its area and captured several suspected > terrorists. Well done, Z Coy; keep it up. But all work and no play > makes Jack a dull soldier, so we are happy to say that they are > showing their usual resource in finding off-duty recreations. A > party from the Coy recently came down to the Battalion HQ on a short > visit for administrative purposes, and impressed all by their> cheeriness.
>
> _Translated into plain English_ > Z Coy, after months of incompetence, accidentally picked up two > drunk natives in a ditch. Both were subsequently released, as being > entirely harmless, by a contemptuous Inspector of Police. Meanwhile, > native women were enticed into the Coy camp on numerous occasions > and gave 37 soldiers clap. There were sent down to be treated by the > MO at Battalion HQ and were delighted to get shot of their tedious> duties.
Graham had such a good time with the book that he persuaded Leo Cooper , whose imprint published a long series of histories known as the Famous Regiments, to allow him to write a pastiche of the genre, _The Queen’s Malabars_ (1970), subtitled “A Not-So-Famous Regiment.” The Queen’s Malabars were, if possible, even more disreputable than Queen Adelaide’s Heavy Infantry, having spent much of their time being shuttled off to places where they could be kept at a safe distance from anything remotely resembling armed conflict. Graham’s books are all out of print now, but _The Club_,
_The Regiment_
,
and _The Queen’s Malabars_ get passed around among small circles of admiring readers. None of his books will go down in literary history, but he can always be relied upon for a good yarn and a good laugh — especially if accompanied by a good stiff drink within easy reach. And I have to admire the good nature of any author who would allow his illustrator to place his head on a plate as in this Leonard Huskinson illustration from _MostlyNasty_
.
Andrew Graham’s head on a plate. Endispiece illustration by Leonard Huskinson, from _Mostly Nasty_. Categories Featured Neglected AuthorsTags Andrew Graham
, England
, humor
, novels
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BEOWULF, BY BRYHER (1956)6 September 2020
When Pantheon published Bryher’s_Beowulf_
in 1956, one of its reviewers, R. T. Horchler, wrote, “Those who know Bryher’s historical romances will be surprised that Beowulf is a contemporary war novel, about the bombing of London in World WarII.”
I have to confess that over the decades I’ve known about Bryher and her work, I always assumed that _Beowulf_ was a historical novel — something from English history along the lines of _The Player’s Boy_ (Shakespeare) or _This January Tale_ (the Norman Conquest). It was only when I was browsing through a bibliography of World War Two fiction recently that I discovered my mistake — and quickly located a copy. What’s more surprising, however, is that _Beowulf_ has never been published in England. Bryher had, in fact, written the book in late 1943 and early 1944 while living in London as a refugee with her partner, the American poet H. D. . As Bryher later wrote in her war memoir, _The Days of Mars_ , “The English refused to publish _Beowulf_.
They do not want to remember. It was a documentary, not a novel, but an almost literal description of what I saw and heard during my first six months in London.” Instead, after she returned to France following Liberation, Bryher was encouraged by her friends Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to translate the book into French. Tt was published by Mercure de France as _Beowulf: roman d’une maison de thé dans Londres bombardé_ in 1948. Bryher later repaid the favor by dedicating the American edition of the book to Beach and the memory of Monnier. Monnier in particular loved the book, declaring in a French review, “As for myself, I should like better to have written it than most of the books that are spoken about.” Beach, who met Bryher in the 1920 when her then-husband Robert McAlmon brought the writer into Shakespeare & Co., saw a connection between Bryher’s behavior on that first visit and her approach to her subject in _Beowulf_:
> Bryher, as far as I can remember, never said a word. She was > practically soundless, a not uncommon thing in England; no small > talk whatsoever — the French call it ‘letting the others pay the > expenses of the conversation.’ …. She was quietly observing > everything in her Bryhery way, just as she observed everything when > she visited ‘The Warming Pan’ teashop in the London blitz days > — and, as _Beowulf_>
> proves, nothing escaped her._Beowulf_
takes place over a few weeks in the course of the Blitz. It centers on a modest tea shop, the Warming Pan, run by Misses Selina Tippett and Angelina Hawkins. Bought with a legacy left Selina from her years in service, the tea shop runs on a mixture of hospitality and the altruism of its owners, who are willing to look past rationing restrictions to slip an extra cake to a hungry young soldier or to allow a lonely old man to spend hours nursing a cup in the corner. There is no plot per se. Bryher simply introduces us to the Warming Pan, its owners, help, and a selection of its customers. She begins with Horatio Rashleigh. Old, lonely after the death of his wife, and no longer producing paintings that anyone wants, he survives on a tiny allowance given begrudgingly by a cousin. As if old age and widowerhood weren’t bad enough for him, war has left him thoroughly bewildered: “Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.” Horatio would have been happier living before the Industrial Age. “The artist abhors engines,” he observes to one of the few people who will stilllisten to him.
To the Warming Pan come an array of noncombatants. Colonel Ferguson, an expat returned after years in Switzerland, in hope of offering some service to some part of the government — with no clear notion of what, where, or how. Adelaide Spenser, a suburban wife in for a day of shopping, to whom the war is inevitable if undesirable: “If people make guns, it is human nature to want to use them.” Ruby, the waitress, worried each night that her family’s East End tenement will be destroyed by one of the German’s “century” (incendiary) bombs. The only soldier to appear in the whole book is Joe, a childhood friend of Eve, one of Selina and Angelina’s lodgers. Joe is also the only person who appears to thrive on the war — leading Eve to think, “It was a comment on civilization that it had taken a war to settle him into his right place.” The Warming Pan is the culmination of a dream Selina has fostered through the decades she spent caring for an invalid, Mrs. Humphries. “Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom.” Freedom might seem an odd thing to associated with a tearoom, but in Selina’s mind, “Only those people who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was.” The Warming Pan fulfils a need — serving as something like “a cross between a village shop and the family doctor.” Selina has cultivated the art of the standard. “With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone.” “Nowhere in all the district,” she reflects with pride, “had good standard things”: good farmhouse tea, nice crumpets and gingerbread, rock cakes and buns” — “the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch.” Adrienne Monnier understood the value of these staples in wartime: “It is surely as a distributor of manna that Selina Tippett considers herself and fulfills her task. Complete manna, since tea with her is accompanied by perfect toast and excellent pastry,” Monnier wrote in an essay collected in _Les Dernières Gazettes_.
In offering these bedrocks of the English diet and a warm, hospitality place in which to enjoy them, she is not just running a business but improving morale. “For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” “It was inspiring really,’ she thinks, “how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.” Her partner, Angelina Hawkins, is one of those tweed-cloaked Englishwomen whose energy could power a thousand homes. While Selina minds the shop and caters to its customers — never chatting too long or allowing too much familiarity, mind — Angelina is off doing battle with the war’s many attempts to interfere with and disrupt normality. “It added such richness to life, making so many contacts,” she thinks “hearing and learning so many things even if occasionally something went wrong.” It’s no surprise to learn, for example, that Angelina had roped Selina into taking classes in Esperanto before the war, or that Bryher characterizes her as “what the French called ‘an amateur of meetings.'” A woman drinking tea atop rubble from the Blitz. War’s inevitable disruption of norms and the earnest attempts by the English to defend them is the overarching theme of _Beowulf_.
To Adelaide Spenser, war is “a queue and a yellow form with blank lines that had to be filled up with the stub of a broken pencil.” To Selina, it’s “an endless succession of rainy days in a small country place on a brief summer holiday.” There is something satisfying in how many characters find solace in the thought that they can always write a sharply worded letter to the _Times_. And no one is as ardent a defender as Mr. Burlap, the veteran civil servant Colonel Ferguson visits in the vain hope of finding a position. Arriving at his office one morning to find his secretary’s desk has been requisitioned, Burlap’s reaction is a gem of stiff-upper-lip-ness: “I am worried, I have been worried, but am I to understand that … unauthorized persons have entered this room where I am engaged, oh, in a very humble and insignificant manner, in guiding the destinies of a war-racked country and have removed the tool with which you aid me in such labours?” The Beowulf of the book’s title refers not to the monster of the Old English saga but a plaster bulldog that Angelina Hawkins brings in one day to serve as the Warming Pan’s mascot: “In a salvage sale, opposite the Food Office. I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first that you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, sodetermined….”
“And so stubborn,” Adelaide Spenser interjects. And despite the fact that Selina, Horatio, and almost everyone else in the shop finds Beowulf the bulldog ugly and in bad taste, he does, in the end, serve his symbolic purpose, perched atop a bomb crater outside the shop, a Union Jack tied around his neck.If _Beowulf_
has a documentary quality, it’s no coincidence. As Bryher wrote in _The Days of Mars_ , it had a real-lifeequivalent:
> Hilda had discovered the Warming Pan some years earlier and usually > went there for lunch. Up to 1941, its owners, Selina and Angelina, > supplied their clients with soup, meat, two veg and dessert for two > shillings and ninepence. They were country people, they bought all > the ingredients they could directly from farms and the cooking was > plain but excellent. Such places are now extinct. I liked it > because, as I said, I could go there without fear. And it was the sight of a plaster bulldog that inspired Bryher towrite the novel:
> I saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched > a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were > then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of > rubble. At that moment _Beowulf_> ,
> my war novel, was conceived. Even the sad old painter Rashleigh came from her experience: “We had corresponded for years,” she wrote, “and as he earned his living painting miniatures on ivory of the _Victory_, what else could I callhim but Horatio?”
At just 201 pages in the American edition with generous margins, widely-spaced lines and each chapter set out by separately-numberedpages, _Beowulf_
is more novella than novel, but Bryher packs a lot into her carefully chosen words. Monnier considered it a “little classic” and one American reviewer called it a novel “in which all the excess baggage has been thrown out.” Reviewing the book for the _New York Times_, Orville Prescott wrote that Bryher “has succeeded so well in her modest project that _Beowulf_ could serve as a loving memorial to the millions of Londoners who carried on, as one of Bryher’s characters said, ‘after all the nervous people must have left.'”Cover of
Schaffner Press edition of _Beowulf_ Marianne Moore, writing in the _Saturday Review of Literature_, compared Bryher’s tribute to the spirit of “Keep Calm and Carry On” to Colonel Ferguson’s small but honest attempt to come to theaid of his country:
> Like the Colonel’s return, Bryher’s work is always an offer of > services. Beowulf is not only a close-up of war but a documentary of > insights, of national temperament, of primness and patriotism, > sarcasm and compassion, of hospitality and heroism, a miniaturama of > all the folk who stood firm. It’s wonderful, therefore, that British readers will finally have a chance to enjoy _Beowulf_ for themselves. In October 2020, Schaffner Press , a small U.S. independent publisher based in Arizona, will be releasing it for the first time to in the U.K.. It can be pre-ordered now from Hive,
Blackwell’s
,
Foyle’s
,
and Waterstones
,
among other outlets, and U.S. readers can find links to a variety of sources on the _Beowulf_ page on Schaffner’s website.
-------------------------BEOWULF, BY BRYHER
NEW YORK: PANTHEON BOOKS, 1956 TUCSON, ARIZONA: SCHAFFNER PRESS, 2020 Categories Featured Books: Long ReviewsTags Bryher
, England
, novel
, women writers
, World War Two
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DIANA TRILLING’S NEGLECTED FAVORITES31 August 2020
Lionel and Diana Trilling in the 1940s Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for _The Nation_ magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, _Reviewing the Forties_ , her reviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the state of English-language fictionat mid-century.
She came to the job in part through the reputation of her husband Lionel Trilling , but she came well-prepared, having been Lionel’s copy writer for over a decade. As Paul Fussell wrote in his preface to this collection, “as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that “literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness ofsociety.”
She also had strong opinions. Reviewing Natalie Robins’s 2017 biography _The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling_ for _The Nation_, Vivian Gornick wrote:
> Books, for Diana, were either decent or indecent, vulgar or > civilized, responsible or irresponsible. Forget the hundreds of > skewered writers who have gone down into oblivion; routinely, she > also took apart the likes of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Evelyn > Waugh, Arthur Koestler. Reviewing Truman Capote’s debut novel, > _Other Voices, Other Rooms_> ,
> in 1948, she wrote: “I find myself deeply antipathetic to the > whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel…. I would > freely trade 80 percent of his technical virtuosity for 20 percent > more value in the uses to which it is put.” As Tobi Haslett wrote in _The New Yorker_,
also reviewing Robins’ book, Diana Trilling’s “gimlet-eyed assurance that has not always aged well.” Trilling was already developing a reputation for being, as Marjorie Perloff put it, “a difficult,
at times unpleasant woman — self-absorbed, arrogant, catty and competitive — who managed, sooner or later, to alienate just about everyone she knew.” Not that she couldn’t be entertaining when she had her knives out. I love this assessment of that domesticated English favorite, Angela Thirkell: > Advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thirkell is in fact > quite a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of > the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, > the movies, and the lower classes, except an occasional half-wit > mechanic. The cousin of Rudyard Kipling, she hates “natives” and > foreigners; she hates servants, except the governess who can > frighten the grown son of a peer by asking him if his hands are> clean.
Trilling’s standing as a critic has fallen considerably since her death. She is dismissed for having slammed the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Isherwood, while praising a few number of now-forgotten novelists. It’s this point, however, that interested me in _Reviewing the Forties_ . While many seem to think that Trilling’s criticism of books now considered classics such as _1984_ imply that she was also dead wrong about the writers she liked, I’ve read enough to know that forgotten-ness is never a reliable indication of whether a book is worth reading. Here, then, is a sample of some of the now-neglected books that Trilling gave her thumbs-up to: * • DAPHNE ATHAS’ S _THE WEATHER OF THE HEART_ … written when Miss Athas was only twenty-two, her first published work, is strikingly talented. It is also an admirable attempt to put sensibility at the service of growth rather than of self-pityingretreat.
There is much fantasy in our literature of sensibility but it is predominantly narcissistic, unable to move beyond the range of the writer’s self-love. The fantasy in Miss Athas’s novel is almost frighteningly unhampered. On the one hand, Miss Athas can generate large dramatic conflict out of something as seemingly trivial as the murder of a pet canary. On the other hand, she can match Faulkner in the imagination of aberrant behavior. Her story is set in Maine and even her descriptions of landscape and weather are free and bold. It is only in her statement of the source of Eliza Wall’s sexual fears that Miss Athas works by rote, looking to the textbook. * • CAROLINE SLADE’S _LILLY CRACKELL_ A social-work novel, despite the fact that it is unsparing in its criticism of that profession, Lilly Crackell is the most estimable novel I have read this week. A story of America’s lower depths, Lilly Crackell traces the career of a young girl raised in the squalor that is so apt to fringe American prosperity. When we first meet Lilly it is 1918; Lilly is a lovable child of fourteen, about to become the mother of an illegitimate baby. Twenty-four years later Lilly is the mother of six children and still the victim of almost unbelievable misery and privation. Mrs. Slade … writes barely and factually with none of the “literary” overtones that make poverty good reading: it is unlikely that Lilly Crackell will have a fraction of the popular appeal of _The Grapes of Wrath_. But the book is
no less courageous: it takes courage to make explicit the meaning of the war for people who have never had a chance to be anything but adrain on society.
* • EDITA MORRIS’S _MY DARLING FROM THE LIONS_ Mrs. Morris has published a volume of short stories but I am unacquainted with the earlier work. Her novel is set in Sweden where she was bom, and has two heroines, the sisters Anna and Jezza, who tell their firstperson stories in alternating chapters. Both girls are excruciatingly precious, and precious to themselves; self-love seems to be a concomitant of sensibility in women writers, and Mrs. Morris is one of those oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all literary women for whom a snowflake or a sausage is equally an occasion for ecstasy. Yet whatever my dislike of so much quiver, I have to admit Mrs. Morris’s talent. Cumulatively, her sensibility loses some of its exacerbation and even begins to take effect; after the first hundred pages I found myself acutely aware of the charm of her village in northern Sweden, almost as nostalgic for it as if I had myself known it. And it is certainly no denigration of Mrs. Morris’s gifts to say that she frequently invites comparison with better writers than herself: for example, her gallery of decayed gentlewomen — Anna and Jezza’s aunts — is suggestive of Chekhov, and the spiritual stature which she can give to the life of privacy suggests Isak Dinesen. * • EDWARD NEWHOUSE’S _THE HOLLOW OF THE WAVE_ wears no air of importance, is entirely understandable and even lively, it must be singled out from the run of current fiction: these are rare, if relative, virtues. It is some time since I have read a novel whose author comes through his book so attractively. Even where Mr. Newhouse’s manner is less than striking and his characters less dimensional than is their human privilege, we see the former fault as a defect of modesty, the latter as a defect of kindliness. * • ENRIQUE AMORIM’S _THE HORSE AND HIS SHADOW_ Like most good South American fiction, _The Horse and His Shadow_ is a revolutionary novel but unlike the revolutionary fiction of our own country, it is subtle, fluid, deeply concerned with the drama of human relationships. The action moves between the estancia of Nico Azara, outside Montevideo, and the community of Polish refugees and poor natives who live on the fringes of Nico’s lands. On the estancia itself there is every shade of political opinion. In addition to the peons at the one extreme, and the arrogant Nico at the other, there is Adelita, Nico’s wife, an aristocrat of decent liberal opinions; there is Bica, her servant and illegitimate half-sister, who lives in lonely severity among the men ranchers; there is Marcelo, Nico’s brother, sought by the government for his part in smuggling refugees into Uruguay. Mr. Amorim doesn’t measure either the decency and courage or the weakness of these people by the famihar yardstick of their social-political views…. Even the poor people in Mr. Amorim’s novel, the gauchos and the struggling refugees, are shown naked of grandeur in an amazing scene in which two of their number steal the services of Don Juan for a broken-down mare. What Mr. Amorim is saying is what is too seldom said in fiction these days, that it is by both the new and the old, by the mixture of good and evil, by the progressive and the retarding, that society must advance, and he says it in the only way fruitful for the novelist, through drama and even melodrama. * • IRA WOLFERT’S _TUCKER’S PEOPLE_ he surprise literary package of the season, the most thoughtful and talented novel I have read this year. Mr. Wolfert is correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a Pulitzer prize-winner in reporting, and author of _The Battle of the Solomons_ but he turns out to be that rare creature, a newspaperman with a notable gift for creative writing. _Tucker’s People_ is an outstanding novel, the simple statement of whose theme—the numbers racket in Harlem—gives no hint of its emotional and intellectual scope. _Tucker’s People_ is a study in gangsterism; its characters are racketeers, politicians, hangers-on, police, and their families. But this is no Damon Runyonesque novel of the underworld; Mr. Wolfert talks out of his head, not out of the corner of his mouth. He views gangsterism as an aspect of our whole predatory economic structure and at least by implication his novel is as much a novel of legitimate American business as it is of racketeering. In the sense that Mr. Wolfert is attacking the entire system of capitalism, he has of course written a “radical” novel, but it is in the sense that his method is the method neither of pamphleteering nor of rabble-rousing but the method of anatomizing society by anatomizing people that his novel is truly radical. * • GONTRAN DE PONCINS’S _HOME IS THE HUNTER_ …although not so direct in its romantic appeal as _Kabloona_ , the same writer’s account of his stay among the Esquimos, is still one of the notable books of recent years, shining out of the mist of most current writing with the full light of M. de Poncins’s remarkable personality. To read the books of M. de Poncins is to be unusually aware of their author: he seems at once very worldly and very internalized, monastically intense in spirit. One has the impression of an intelligence peculiarly of the French aristocratic tradition, and indeed _Home Is the Hunter_ is a reconstruction — or a commemoration — of the almost feudal background against which, we can guess, M. de Poncins was himself bred. It is published as fiction but it is not strictly a novel. Rather, it is both elegiac poetry and penetrating sociological research into a culture which was already vanishing glory when the author was a small child before the first war. The writer Trilling singled out for her greatest praise was a favorite of neglected book fans: Isabel Bolton . Of Bolton’s debut novel, Do I Wake or Sleep,
she wrote:
> Isabel Bolton’s Do I Wake or Sleep>
> is quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I > have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine. Small, anonymous > in the welter of current books, it might very well have escaped my > notice had Edmund Wilson not called attention to it in the _New > Yorker_: the possibility of such an oversight will now become my > reviewer’s nightmare. Mr. Wilson’s high praise prepared me, > however, only for a work of exceptional talent. It did not prepare > me — nothing but reading the book could — for the extraordinary > process of revelation that Miss Bolton’s novel turned out to be.>
> Opening as a minor work of poetic sensibility, the kind of writing > which Miss Bolton herself goes on to describe as achieved with the > nerves rather than with the deeper centers, Do I Wake or Sleep>
> gradually deepens to become a work of compelling insight; then the > story progresses a bit farther, and the intelligence that one has > hitherto noted simply as a restraining force upon poetic excess > slowly proclaims its dominion over the novel’s whole conception; > finally one confronts the real shape and intellectual strength of > the book, and recognizes the source of and response to a major > fictional experience.>
> I have no idea who Miss Bolton is: the jacket of the novel is > provocatively uninformative. Whoever she is, she is the most > important new novelist in the English language to appear in years. > Whatever her literary apprenticeship, her book—it is a long > novelette, really, rather than a novel—is the achievement of a > fully matured artist. When Bolton’s second novel, The Christmas Tree,
came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in thiscountry today”:
> Miss Bolton works like a mosaic-maker, piecing together bits of > scenes and persons—but it is a full panorama and a full cast, > though given us in such tiny fragments—until finally, in > unbelievably small compass, the whole pattern and intention are laid > out before us. By what miracle of selection and organization she > catches in 212 pages all we need to know of four generations of her > Danforths, a story which in the hands of any other writer would have > been a giant tome, is a not-to-be-fathomed secret of her craft. She > could not have done it, one is sure, had she used a different > narrative manner. The reader may be too conscious of, even irritated > by, her long Proustian sentences but they admirably connect past and > present, and permit Miss Bolton to recollect, create, and comment > upon, all at the same time and with greatest economy. Having been reissued several times with Bolton’s third novel _Many Mansions_ as _New York Mosaic_ , Do I Wake or Sleep and The Christmas Tree have, sadly, been out of print so far this century. Categories Short Notices: Short ReviewsTags America
, criticism
, Diana Trilling
, novels
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ALICE KOLLER, AUTHOR OF _AN UNKNOWN WOMAN_, DIES AT AGE 94 30 August 202029 August 2020 Most of the people I write about are no longer with us. And when I began my research for the post about Alice Koller’s _An Unknown Woman_ five years ago, I assumedshe was, too.
Instead, I discovered that she was not only alive but was still on her quest to carve out a place for herself in the world as a solitary woman, a woman not tied to marriage, family, job, or place but only to her own need to find meaning in our world. She was a Diogenes of our time — except her search was not for an honest man but for the purest level of self-honesty. Unfortunately, this is not a kind time for a Diogenes. Rent, food, taxes, cards of identity, and the fact that our world today requires one thing foremost of a person — a fixed address — all worked against her. Nor was her quest free of other complicating factors. These were hinted at in _An Unknown Woman_ but more obvious in its sequel, _The Stations of Solitude_ (1990). She cut ties with her family in Ohio over wrongs that may have been more perceived than real. She got jobs with her exceptional intelligence — she had a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard — and lost them over her unwillingness to comply with institutional norms. When she grew uneasy with her connections to a place, she would load up whatever junky car she had and head for another place. Even the website she set up some years ago required the help of a friend in Colorado and once set up, she tended not to respond to people who wrote her through the contact form it provided. Berkeley librarian Francisca Goldsmith noted the problem in her _Library Journal_ review of _The Stations of Solitude_.
Koller, she wrote, seems to “take pride in her independence but complains when others have not come to her assistance as thoroughly as she believes they might.” As a result, Goldsmith wrote, _Stations_ “is a disappointing book, primarily because Koller seems to be writing for herself, failing to invite readers into her exclusive domain of solitude.” In _An Unknown Woman_,
Koller acknowledged the paradox she embodied. She was engaged, she wrote, in a battle: “I’m defending, and laying siege, all at once.” “I’m even the prize,” she joked — “But I’m also the only one who’d want it.” Koller understood — and accepted the consequences of her honesty. Honesty may indeed be the best policy, as the saying goes, but as another saying goes, the truth hurts. Alice Koller’s life in some ways is testimony to the cost of honesty when taken to its extreme. I first heard from one of Alice Koller’s death in Trenton, New Jersey last month from one of her relatives, Akiva Fox. I was hoping someone would publish her obituary but was about to give up hope when I was contacted by Penelope Green, who was looking for details on Alice’s life in preparation of her _New York Times_ obituary. Thatobituary
is
now online and well worth reading. I also recommend that anyone interested in Alice’s life read the profile that Judy Flander first published in the _Washington Star_ in 1977 — five years before the publication of _AnUnknown Woman_
.
Ave atque vale.
Categories News Tags AliceKoller , memoirs
, women writers
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O WESTERN WIND (1943) AND YOU’VE GONE ASTRAY (1944), BY HONOR CROOME 2 September 202025 August 2020 Most writers will be forgotten. While there are plenty of examples where a writer’s work has been neglected through deliberate acts of suppression, there are far more where the neglect is due to the lack of any deliberate act of remembrance. Fortunately, when it comes to the work of British women writers of the 1920s to 1950s, there have never been so many people committing deliberate acts of remembrance on a daily basis. Beginning with the ground-breaking Virago ModernClassics
series, publishers such as Persephone Books, Dean Street Press
, Handheld Books
, Turnpike Books
, NYRB Classics
, and the recently-launched British Library Women Writersare
busy bringing the work of dozens of writers back to print. Dozens of book bloggers are helping promote and celebrate these reissues. Academics are collaborating through such initiatives as the MiddlebrowNetwork and
Transatlantic Literary Women . And through his Furrowed Middlebrow blog, Scott Thompson continues to reveal just how rich and vast the ranks of thesewomen writers were.
Yet even with all these hands to the task, some remain overlooked. Take Honor Croome for example. She published five novels between 1943 and 1957, all of them received with enthusiastic reviews that praised her precise prose style and her sensitivity to the qualities of even her most unlikeable characters. Two — the ones discussed here — deal with the relatively popular subject of the experience of women during the Second World War. And yet not only have her books all fallen out of print but her name doesn’t even appear in what is likely the most comprehensive catalog of the writers, Scott Thompson’s Master List on Furrowed Middlebrow . It’s not through lack of trying. But when being lost and forgotten is the default end state for writers, there can never be enough deliberate acts of remembrance. And so I want to take a few minutes to recognize Honor Croome’s work by looking at her first two novels: _O Western Wind_ (1943) and _You’ve Gone Astray_ (1944). _O Western Wind_ focuses on the lives of four women and their children while _You’veGone Astray_
deals with just two — yet it’s the latter which ultimately has abroader scope.
_O Western Wind_
opens on a crowded passenger ship crossing the rough waters of the Irish Sea, on its way to take hundreds of British women and their children to safety in Canada. Most of them are in the Third class compartments: “One can get away from the smell of ship in the first class lounges and even, occasionaly, in Tourist; never in Third. There is oil in it, and brass, and sea salt, and, particularly in Third, disinfectant, and bad sailors find it conducive to seasickness.” Sitting in the Third class bar are two cousins, Margaret and Cora, happy to have their children settled for the night. Margaret is older, longer married; Cora is younger, wed to an RAF bomber pilot, and stunningly attractive. “I wish I could feel like Cora looks, at the end of a day like this,” Margaret muses. In the lounge, they meet Mary Hallam, a nervous mother, with a two-year-old daughter and just months from delivering a second child. To these three women, Croome adds Daphne Torrance — divorced with two teenage sons and an eye for available men — and then takes us through their first year of life as evacuees. The women are settled outside Boston with the help of a local refugee committee. The contrast with wartime England strikes them as soon as they leave the train station: “No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky. No one carrying gas-masks. No steel helmets on the policemen. A carefree, lovely land. And tonight there would be lights again.” Margaret and Cora and their children end up in a remote country house. The peace and quiet of their surroundings seem unworldly after life in crowded, busy, noisy London: > Margaret and Cora, like dwellers on another planet, went marketing > and swept and scrubbed and cooked, tended their children, drank > their tea, and sat by the fire, evening after lonely evening. They > had the children; they had housework. There — as mothers and > drudges — they stopped short. It was a great deal, but a great > deal was missing. Friendship meant an envelope with a printed slip > “Opened by Examiner 3697” gummed over one end. “Whole tracts of faculties lay idle,” Croome writes, and in both novels she examines the uneven and often unbalanced mix of domestic, economic, and intellectual demands that women who take on the responsibilities of child-rearing have to meet. Margaret thinks, only half-jokingly, “We should have been Victorian wives…. Then we should have found this a lovely, lovely rest.” Except, as she quickly adds, that probably would have meant she would have had eight children to care for and Cora four. Eventually, the Greater Boston Hospitality Committee brings the four women and their kids together to live at Southwood, a large mansion left empty after the death of its dowager owner. In some ways, it comes to seem even more artificial than the isolation of their farmhouse in the country. Everything around them speaks of wealth, luxury, comfort — but it’s all given by the grace of the Hospitality Committee. “It seemed as though several new layers of unreality had interposed themselves between them and the great tragedy from which they had cut themselves off; and in their varying ways they fretted against their physical good fortune.” I was often remind of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s _Time Stood Still_ , his account of four years spent as an internee in a British camp during the First World War. Like him, these women are not abused in any physical way; and yet, the very artificiality and limitations of their situation become, in the end, a sort of torture. And like Cohen-Portheim, Croome’s women find that “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence.” Margaret thinksat one point:
> For the duration, Clive Torrance would infest the dinner table. For > the duration, they would have to check their conversation to keep it > within Mary Hallis’s scope. For the duration, they would chit-chat > with Mrs. Torrance about nothing in particular. Margaret found > herself wanting, frantically, to hear the sound of a masculine > voice, preferably several of them. I’m not turning into a > man-hunter, I’m resigned to celibacy, but I am tired of being a > full-time hen…. It is only after several crises that Margaret, whose voice seems to speak Croome’s own thoughts most often, finds a way to look beyond the walls of their comfortable but indefinite existence. “There would be moments of black depression,” she thinks, but she can at least “distinguish between the superficial and the real, now.”_O Western Wind_
draws in part on Honor Croome’s own experiences. She left Liverpool bound for Canada in July 1940 with two children (and, like Mary Hallam, within weeks of delivering another). Although the family would eventually settle in Ottawa after John Croome was appointed head of the British Food Mission to Canada, Honor and the children spent over a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. While there, she wrote a letter to the editor of the _Boston Globe_ taking exception to another British refugee’s suggestion that Americans were not showing sufficient gratitude for Britain’s sacrifices: “You owe us much, we owe you much,” she wrote. “Among other things each owes the other for their share in our joint victory over Hohenzollern Germany. Of what those shares were, let our dead as well as our dollars speak.” When the Croomes returned to England in 1946, they needed a much bigger cabin. They were now a family of seven, bringing along three sons born in Canada. In other words, Honor Croome managed to produce two novels and three children during her own indefinite existence in the US and Canada. Her capacity for work seems astonishing. Both before and after the war she was a frequent reviewer for _The Economist_, and one of her editors, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, once said of her speed in reading, “A thousand pages in her sight are but an evening gone.” The same may have been true for her speed in writing. She must have been one of those rare writers who can work in short snatches, for she dedicated her second novel to “John, Ursula, Gilbert and David, because they occasionally kept quiet.” Yet in neither book does Croome suggest that the solution to a woman’s challenges in juggling both family and a career is simply to work harder. _You’ve Gone Astray_ (1944), in fact, is a demonstration that this is a recipe for failure. In some ways, the book is a prequel to _O Western Wind_:
taking place between the early 1930s and the first year or so of the war, it follows two women — Linda and Kitty — from a short spell of sharing a flat in London through marriage, children, and successes and failures at work. _You’ve Gone Astray_ is far more about Linda than Kitty. Kitty — slight, beautiful, flirtatious and starting out as a writer of romance novels — is more of a _leitmotif_ than major character. Though we enter the story through Kitty’s eyes, it’s Linda — tall, Amazon-like, with a fearsome intellect (if less formidable practical knowledge) — with whom we spend most of our time. The daughter and niece of vigorous Edwardian activists, Linda feels somewhat guilty for taking a job with a reform-minded organization called the Housing Plan rather than heading off to India to run a hospital as her aunt did or crusading for women’s right as her mother did. Her work brings her in contact with Hugh, a journalist with a strong interest in social reform, and soon the two are married — and Linda is pregnant. As she tries to raise her daughter while continuing to work for the Housing Plan, she realizes she’s missing out. On burning the midnight oil with colleagues, on a pint after work, on the Budapest Conference. She struggles with the cognitive dissonance of being both mother and manager: “She had to turn dislocating psychological somersaults, morning and evening, Saturday and Monday, switching from the role of expert and organizer to that of suburban housewife and back again.” And the simply physical toll: “She was almost alwaystired.”
Kitty encounters the same issues when she becomes pregnant several years later than Linda. She expresses a feeling my wife often recounted during her pregnancies: “It’s so _inevitable_. As though something had you by the scruff of the neck and were whispering in your ear, ‘You can’t get out of this. You can’t get away. You can’t talk your way out, no one can help you out, it’ll happen, I’m not sorry for you, my name is Nature.'” Unlike Linda, however, Kitty can afford to park her son with a kindly couple in the country while she types and socializes away and her husband — present in the book for little more than the essential biological moment — is off on archaeological expeditions. Croome captures the blur of considerations and commitments that must swirl through the head of any working mother: > … waking with an eye on that clock, working, still with an eye on > that clock, frantically, among perversely uncooperative kitchen > utensils and crockery, listening desperately for Mrs. Pratt’s > click at the gate, picturing the London train remorselessly pulling > out of the station a mile away; crawling home in a rush-hour train, > supper menus and unfinished business dancing an unholy saraband in > her brain; listening to Mrs. Pratt’s chronicle of leaking taps, > spoiled potatoes, mistakes in the grocery bill, and misdeeds by > Diana (more a problem child than ever these days); flinging off her > town clothes, flinging on an apron, plunging through the preparation > for supper, with scarcely time to give Diana a good-night kiss; > spending her evenings on endless letters to agencies and to the > malevolent half-wits or mere phantoms whom those agencies> recommended.
In a sentiment many women might share, she adds, “Linda yearned for a good servant as a prisoner for freedom, as a miser for money, as a sick man for health.” The strain of it all takes its toll in numerous ways, leading to arguments, separation, even death. There are some grim chapters in this book. And though Linda and Hugh find some happiness on the other side — and Kitty finds an escape from her worries — Croome doesn’t offer us happy endings, just sustainable compromises. She was nothing if not a realist. Croome’s own background bore some resemblance with Linda’s. Her mother, Mildred Minturn, was an American socialite who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand . In fact, Fincke turned down Hand’s first proposal to marry because she and Mildred had planned to live together and pursue careers as scholars and social reformers. Bertrand Russell met Mildred while she was at Bryn Mawr and the two maintained a flirtatious relationship even after she married Arthur Hugh Scott, an Englishman, in 1906. Mildred took graduate classes at Barnard and traveled widely after leaving Bryn Mawr, visiting Japan and Europe and taking a desert caravan in Egypt with a fellow classmate. She was outspoken in her views, writing frequent letters to magazines in England and the U.S., and translated French Socialist Jean Jaures’s _Studies in Socialism_shortly before
her wedding to Scott. She struggled, however, with health problems and died in 1922, when Honor was just a teenager. Honor had a most cosmopolitan upbringing. She spent her early years in France, where her father taught at l’École de l’ Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school. She attended a girl’s school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her 1955 novel, _The Mountain and the Molehill_),
the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College in the US (for a year — “I did not flunk out,” she was careful to note), then the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics. After the LSE, she wrote her first book, _The Approach to Economics_,
then landed a job at the New Fabian Research Bureau, a left-leaning organization involved in statistics and planning — most probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan in _You’ve Gone Astray_.
Soon after, she married John Lewis Croome, who’d been a year aheadof her at the LSE.
Honor Croome, from a 1944 newspaper article In 1935, as she informed the _Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin_, she took a job as political secretary to Lady Astor. She wrote that “It’s tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was her weightiest economic text, _The Economy of Britain:A History_
,
published in 1938, which she co-wrote with R. J. Hammond. After nearly six years in the US and Canada, Croomes returned to their home in Claygate outside London in 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She published her third novel, _The Faithless Mirror_in
1946 and began publishing articles for the general public in magazines such as _Home & Garden_. Included in _Who’s Who’s_ starting in 1950, she answered the book’s pro-forma questionnaire by listing her primary form of recreation as “domesticity.” She published two more novels in the 1950s: _The Mountain and the Molehill_ and _The Forgotten Place_ (1957). She also published a further economics text, _Introduction toMoney_
in 1956.
When she died in 1960, _The Economist_ made an exception of its practice of being “anonymous by conviction as well as by tradition” and printed a black-boxed notice of her passing. “To those who knew her,” the editors wrote, “every piece she wrote could only be hers; to those who did not, her reviews were no less identifiable, running like a strong shining thread through these pages. The style was the woman.” They paid tribute to the high quality of her prose: “The cutting-edge and quality of what she wrote was that she knew, respected and was mistress of the English language. It was almost impossible to alter or cut her contributions.” As a reviewer, she was “lively and learned in the right sense of both words; sensitive but never soft; humane and good-humoured but never sentimental or trivial; critical, sometimes in a biting and indignant fashion, but never censorious; a civilised human being with a zest for life and people as well as understanding of great ideas and arguments.” “It is hard to believe that there can ever be another like her,” _The Economist_ piece concluded. “This is understatement,” responded Sir Geoffrey Crowther in the next issue. “Such beauty, such wite, such capacity to understand other people’s minds, sometimes even better than they do themselves, such capacity to move with grace in so many different fields from housewifery and writing about it to the most abstruse theoretical economics — all these in combination made her unique.” Perhaps this post will now motivate other readers to discover Honor Croome’s unique qualities as a novelist. -------------------------O WESTERN WIND
LONDON: CHRISTOPHERS, 1943 YOU’VE GONE ASTRAY LONDON: CHRISTOPHERS, 1944 BOTH BY HONOR CROOME Categories Featured Books: Long ReviewsTags England
, Honor Croome
, novel
, women writers
, World War Two
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THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE, BY EDWIN GILBERT (1966)14 August 2020
The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against theglass.
There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like _Life_, _Time_, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s _Playboys_. From _LIFE_ magazine, 1965: Debutante Anne Morris on a date at The Embers in Manhattan. The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s _The Beautiful Life_ (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons. As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400(_Silver
Spoon_ , 1957); silver salver diplomacy (_The New Ambassadors_ , 1961); Detroit auto executives (_American Chrome_ , 1965); old money (_Newport_ , 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius. This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest _pied-a-terre_. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society. It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy _The Beautiful Life_ is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the foodchain.
But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises _The Beautiful Life_ above its mid-60s airplane reading peers. Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt. Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.” Smirnoff ad from _LIFE_ magazine, 1965, with Killer Joe Piro and Skitch Henderson. Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro ) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night: > Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second > record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third > is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly > drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other > and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that > the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it > down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number> three.
>
> But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies > in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods: > Is the Frug blasting too long? > Is the age group changing? > Is fatigue or boredom seeping in? > Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be> escalated?
Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few JustPlain Money.”
Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand: > His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, > particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might > violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are _interdit_; > cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be > understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes > the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, > cocktails; but not a _soupçon_ more. As for the so-called health > diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or > salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here. In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, _maître d’_ “_haute coiffure _ who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.” From _LIFE_ magazine 1966: “At Arthur, in New York, the country’s most famous discotheque, the patrons lend a bizarre air to the club, arrayed before a Mondianesque background in their Op art mad rags. In foreground is director, Sybil Burton Christopher.” We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the _atelier_ of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure: > There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a > bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; > she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, > and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. > The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as > she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and > prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, > desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating > with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a > brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the > glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking > his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working > away with total masculine preoccupation.>
> In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their > alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard > for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes > as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief > coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to > twitch the insect away. As we swirl along through the haunts of the _hoi-polloi_, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect. You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give meManhattan in ’65.
------------------------- THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE, BY EDWIN GILBERT NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, 1966 Categories Featured Books: Long ReviewsTags America
, Edwin Gilbert
, New York City
, novel
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THE WRECK OUT ON THE HIGHWAY: NOVELS AND AUTO ACCIDENTS3 August 2020
The wreckage
of James Dean’s Porsche, near Cholame, California, September 30,1955
It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents. It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of _potential_ in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for histaste.
One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s _The Descent_ (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff , arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his _Boyhood with Gurdjieff_ (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident: > Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed > upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. > The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and > purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were > stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The > veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a > time — ceased to exist. Peters takes a _Ship of Fools_/_Grand Hotel_ approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.” Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s _The Accomplices_ (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact: > It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor > resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a > flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the > catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault. As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make _The Accomplices_ one of Simenon’s all-timebest _romans dur_.
In _Juice_ (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents _Juice_ from being quite as juicy as it could havebeen.
Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in _Be Silent Love_ (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title _The Girl in the Death Seat_ ). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies. Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from _Revolutionary Road_. On the one hand,
he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear: > Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he > wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to > pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom > dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from > climbing a ladder they could never, never climb. Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by. In Elizabeth Janeway’s _The Accident_ (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. _The New York Times_ gave the book to Frederick C.Crews , hot off his
moralistic bestseller, _The Pooh Perplex_, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called _The Accident_ a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose _Powers of the Weak_ cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from. Though published just four years after _The Accident_ , Thomas Rogers’ _The Pursuit of Happiness_ (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive,supportive.
But _The Pursuit of Happiness_ is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the _NichomacheanEthics_ : “There
is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words,happiness.”
This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s _Peanuts_ character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engelfound it “a novel
remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.” And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with _The New Statesman’s_ reviewer, Vernon Scannell : “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one. Categories Short Notices: Short Reviews Tags automobile accidents, Elizabeth
Janeway , Fan
Nichols , Fritz Peters, Georges Simenon
, novels
, Thomas Rogers
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JOHN TIMBS, SCISSORS-AND-PASTE MAN27 July 2020
John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs , perhaps the greatest of all compilers. We’ve all heard of Dickens and the many lesser ranks of Victorian writers who industriously cranked out three-volume novels at rates that competed with the fearsome cotton mills of the North, but poor John Timbs was forgotten not long after his body was placed in a pauper’s grave. John Timbs was not really a writer. He was more of an assembler. He took things he found and assembled them into books with titles like _Anecdote Lives Of Wits And Humourists_, _Curiosities
of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young_ , _Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity: Illustrated from the Best and Latest Authorities_, and _Things
Not Generally Known: Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated_. These were all
published cheaply, in low-priced editions with weak bindings and poor, thin paper, for the purpose of informing as many people as possible. Timbs worked to improve people like himself. His father was a warehouseman who managed to pull together enough money to send his son to New Marlows, a school run by Rev. Joseph Hamilton and his brother Jeremiah Hamilton. There, he discovered his talent and put it to quick use, writing by hand a school newspaper that was passed among his classmates. He was then apprenticed to a chemist and printer in Dorking, where he met Sir Richard Phillips. Phillips
had just published his little travel guide _Morning’s Walk fromLondon to Kew_ .
In the preface to that book, Phillips apologized for writing a guide to such a mundane journey, “which thousands can daily examine after him,” and for relying solely on the evidence of his own senses and deductions of reason.” Because of this, he wrote, “He therefore entertains very serious doubts whether his work will be acceptable to those LEARNED PROFESSORS in Universities” or “STATESMEN who consider the will of princes as standards of wisdom” or “ECONOMISTS who do not consider individual happiness to be the primary object of their calculations” or a dozen other types such as TOPOGRAPHERS, BIBLIOMANIACS, and LEARNED PHILOLOGISTS. Instead, he wrote for “AMATEURS of general Literature,” those “free and honest searchers after MORAL, POLITICAL, and NATURAL TRUTH.” This was a man after Timbs’s heart and mind. Phillips encouraged the young man to contribute to his _Monthly Magazine_ . Perhaps inspired by Phillips’ book, Timbs soon wrote his first book, _A Picturesque Promenade round Dorking, in Surrey_ in 1823. Timbs then moved to London to work for Phillips and started reading voraciously. He quickly produced _Laconics_, the first of what would become a lifetime’s production of books in which he compiled, accumulated, integrated, and occasionally distilled what he’d read. Front page of _The Mirror_ from1824
He moved on to become editor of _The Mirror_ in 1827, then on to John Limbird’s _The Mirror of Literature_. There, he mastered his technique. Henry Vizetelly , who later worked with Timbs at the _Illustrated London News_, described
it in his crotchety memoir, _Glances Back Through Seventy Years_:
> Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making > ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in _The > Mirror_ were carefully stores, and when later on he became > sub-editor of the _Illustrated London News_ and editor of the > _Year-Book of Facts_, he profited by his opportunities to add > largely to his collection. By-and-bay he classified his materials, > and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of > the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting _Things not > generally known_> ,
> explain Popular Errors, and provide _Something for Everybody_> , and that he
> had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of _Curiosities of science_ > , history, and other > subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets > might positively revel. There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that _The Mirror_ editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?” One wonders where Timbs found the time to indulge in gossip. He never married, socialized little, and seems to have spent most of his hours bent over his desk with stacks of books at his elbows. In a study of early Victorian editors that F. David Roberts published in the _Victorian Periodicals Newsletter_ in 1971, he wrote that these men were marked by certain common characteristics: “One obvious one was that they could write. Most not only could write but had a passion to publish.” Of the 165 men covered in Roberts’s study, they averaged 9 books each (“considerably about the going average for academics today). Yet for Roberts, these men “were pikers compared to Mr. John Timbs,” whom he credited with 150 volumes.Advertisement
for John Timbs’s _Knowledge for the People_ His Oxford Dictionary of National Biographyentry
(originally written by future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald) gives a flavor of the range of Timbs’s production: > They include, on subjects of domestic interest, _Family Manual_ > (1831), _Domestic Life in England_ (1835), and _Pleasant Half-Hours > for the Family Circle_ (1872), and, on scientific subjects, _Popular > Zoology_ (1834), _Stories of Inventors and Discoverers_ (1859), > _Curiosities of Science_ (1860), and _Wonderful Inventions: from the > Mariner’s Compass to the Electric Telegraph Cable_ (1867). He also > wrote on artistic and cultural matters works such as _Painting > Popularly Explained_ (jointly with Thomas John Gulick) (1859) and_ > Manual for Art Students and Visitors to the Exhibitions_ (1862). > Through his connection with _The Harlequin_ he has been identified > as the likely compiler (under the pseudonym Horace Foote) of the > _Companion to the Theatre and Manual of British Drama_ (1829), which > contains much valuable information on London theatres of the period. > On contemporary city life his works included _Curiosities of London_ > (1855), _Club Life of London with Anecdotes_ (1865), _Romance of > London: Strange Stories, Scenes, and Persons_ (1865), and _London > and Westminster, City and Suburb_ (1867). He also published on > subjects of biographical and historical interest, including > _Schooldays of Eminent Men_ (1858), _Columbus _(1863), _Curiosities > of History_ (1859), _Anecdote Biography_ (1859–60), _Anecdote > Lives of Wits and Humourists_ (1862), _Ancestral Stories and > Traditions of Great Families_ (1869), and _Abbeys, Castles and > Ancient Halls of England and Wales_ (1869). He also edited _Manuals > of Utility_ (1847), the _Percy Anecdotes_ (1869–70), and Pepys’s > _Memoirs _(1871). Not surprisingly, with such an output, quality often suffered. “Mr. Timbs has an inexhaustible supply of quaint stories,” one reviewer wrote, “but his critical judgment is not quite as good as his industry is formidable.” _John Bull’s_ reviewer was critical of Timbs’ multi-volume _Anecdote Biography_,
observing that “Biography is something more than a collection of anecdotes.” Timbs’s portraits, he found were “lifeless; they are models, not men”: “He has dressed up a variety of figures which would make the fortune of Madame Tussaud in a week.” A _Spectator_ reviewer, a little more charitably, acknowledged that “His books are of a kind to which it is easier for a reader than a reviewer to do justice.” Many of his books were reprinted in America, where reviewers focused on the positives. A _North American Review_assessment of
_School Days of Eminent Men_is typical,
saying the book could be “commended as a handy manual, containing a great deal of curious information, told in a playful, conversationalstyle.”
Indiscriminate accumulations of anecdotes and trivia can often contain gems among all the junk, and the chief reason to remember the work of John Timbs today are the nuggets you can usually find within a dozen or so pages of any of his books. Long before anyone came up with the idea of bathroom books, a _Spectator_ reviewer identified the peculiar merit of Timbs’s books: “His readers, if they do not gain instruction, will be amused, provided that they are satisfied with a few pages at a time. Such a collection of wit and humour can only be digested at intervals.” Here is a tiny sample of the things you can learn from a few minutes spent — wherever you happen to choose —with John Timbs:
The Fitzwalters had, however, a stranger privilege than even this: they had the privilege of drowning traitors in the Thames. The “patient” was made fast to a pillar at Wood Wharf, and left there for the tide to flow twice over, and ebb twice from him, while the crowd looked on, and enjoyed the barbarous spectacle. * From _Abbeys, castles, and ancient halls of England and Wales_ Peter the Great was a gourmand of the first magnitude. While in England, on his return from a visit to Portsmouth, the Czar and his party, twenty-one in number, stopped at Godalming, where they ate: at breakfast, half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, seven dozen of eggs, and salad in proportion, and drank three quarts of brandy, and six quarts of mulled wine; at dinner, live ribs of beef, weight three stone; one sheep, fifty-six pounds; three quarters of lamb, a shoulder and loin of veal boiled, eight pullets, eight rabbits, two dozen and a half of sack, and one dozen of claret. This bill of fare is preserved in Ballard’s Collection, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford. * From _Hints for the table: or, The economy of good living. With afew words on wines_
The bone of the Lion’s fore-leg is of remarkable hardness, from its containing a greater quantity of phosphate of lime that is found in ordinary bones, so that it may resist the powerful contraction of the muscles. The texture of this bone is so compact that the substance will strike fire with steel. He has little sense of taste, his lingual or tongue-nerve not being larger than that of a middle-sized dog. * From _Eccentricities of the animal creation_ In the winter of 1835, Mr. W. H. White ascertained the temperature in the City to be 3 degrees higher than three miles south of London Bridge; and _after the gas had been lighted in the City four or five hours_ the temperature increased full 3 degrees, thus making 6 degrees difference in the three miles. * From _Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Oldand Young_
When the Archduke of Spain was obliged to land at Weymouth, he was brought to the Sheriff of Dorset, and lived at Woolverton House. The Sheriff, not being able to speak in any language but “Dorset,” found it difficult to converse with the Archduke, and bethought him of a young kinsman, named Russell, who had been a factor in Spain, and sent for him. The young man made himself so agreeable to the Archduke that ho brought him to London, where the King took a fancy to him, and in time he became Duke of Bedford, and was the founder of the House ofRussell.
* From _Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present_ In 1865, there died in Paris the dwarf Richebourg, who was an historical personage. Richebourg, who was only 60 centimètres high, was in his sixteenth year placed in the household of the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of King Louis-Philippe). He was often made useful for the transmission of dispatches. He was dressed up as a baby, and important State papers placed in his clothes, and thus he was able to effect a communication between Paris and the émigrés, which could hardly have taken place by any other means. The most suspicious of _sans culottes_ never took it into his head to stop a nurse with ababy in her arms.
* From _English Eccentrics and Eccentricities_ Timbs was given a pension as one of the “Poor Brethren” of the Charterhouse in 1871, but for some reason he resigned his place and died in poverty at 28 Canonbury Place, London, on 4 March 1875. “He died in harness,” reported _The Times_, “almost with his pen in his hand, after a life of more than 70 years, and a literary career extended over more than half a century.” _The Times_ faintly praised his special talent: “Though not gifted with any great original powers he was one of the most industrious of men, and there was scarcely a magazine of the last quarter of a centure to which he was not at least an occasional contributor.” In reviewing Timbs’s _English Eccentrics_ not long after his death, the _Spectator_ noted somewhat wistfully, “This is, we suppose, the last work of an indefatigable compiler, who had a talent for finding odd things hidden away in odd corners, and presenting them for the amusement ofreaders.”
Categories Featured Neglected Authors , Gems from the Internet Archive Tags commonplace book, England
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