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Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (1957)

Three Serbian peasant women from the 1920s
Three Serbian village women, circa 1920.

It would be natural for Women in a Village to be compared with Rebecca West’s masterpiece about her travels in the former Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both West and Louisa Rayner were Englishwomen writing about a land and people relatively unknown to most of their readers. But West was never anything but a visitor to Yugoslavia.

Rayner, on the other hand, was a resident. Fascinated by the country on her first visit in 1936, she returned the next year, when she met and married a Belgrade fuel dealer named Stojan Božic. She would no longer be able to see the country “as a picture; I should not be able to stand back and disparage or admire. I was going to become a Yugoslav woman; I was stepping into the picture.”

That step may have ensured her survival after the Germans invaded in 1941. By then, she had become fluent in Serbian and fully assimilated into the culture, serving slatko and coffee to her husband and his friends as they sat and talked in their living room, working in the kitchen in the early fall as they canned great quantities of tomato sauce.

In 1944, she and her husband decided to flee Belgrade with their six-year-old daughter, joining a great exodus of civilians leaving the city as it became a target for regular Allied bombing raids. He chose Rušanj, then an isolated village along a hillside roughly ten miles south of Belgrade. Life in the village was so rustic that there was no notion of rent: the villagers simply took them in and made them part of the household.

Having reconnoitered the situation beforehand, Stojan chose to approach Savka, a grandmother, who was already sharing a two-room hut with two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Savka’s hut had only an earthen floor and everyone slept together in a single bed. The hut had no chimney; there was simply an opening at the peak of the tiled roof through which the smoke escaped. Instead of a stove, Savka cooked on an iron dome suspended over the fire.

Rayner, who’d taken a degree in classics at Cambridge, recognized the central room of Savka’s hut as what the Greeks called a melathron — a black room. “… [M]ore than a kitchen, but hardly a living-room and not quite a hall in the medieval sense. The walls and beams of this room of Savka’s were black with soot, for the smoke from the hearth visited every cranny before drifting out through the room.” She later wrote of her comparison between Savka’s hut and those of Homer’s time in an article titled “Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece,” published in The South African Archaeological Bulletin in December 1956.

“I did not stay with Savka in her melathron in order to study Homer,” Rayner wrote. But “in that precarious and primitive way of living I found Homer a most cheering companion. Homer had gone through all this. Homer knew. And in all this smoke and dirt and toil Homer had kept his poise and his refinement.”

Rayner’s classical sensibilities are evident throughout Women in a Village. The way of life in Rušanj was closer in many ways to that of ancient Greece. Even before the war, the village operated more on a barter basis, and as the war made currencies fleeting phenomena with fluctuating values this became all the more so. As a refugee with little more to offer than labor and occasional contributions of food or cloth, Rayner focused on doing all she could to assimilate.

Thus, unlike Rebecca West, who could afford to be subjective, picking and choosing among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, Rayner is at all times an empathetic observer. Reference to Homer was one of the ways in which she could deal with the radical changes forced by her situation. So she doesn’t recoil at what occurred after each meal:

A sketch of Savka's house
A sketch of Savka’s house, from Louisa Rayner’s article in The South African Archaeological Bulletin.

… there was a black dog and his chocolate-covered mother. They served no purpose at all except to bark and lick the table clean after meals. The table (sofra) was about a metre in diameter and perhaps a foot in height. When the dogs had cleaned it, it was leant up against the wall out of the way. I suspect that the “table dogs” of the Odyssey also licked the tables and were not simply fed at table.

Rayner soon learns the merit of rustic ways, switching to wearing a wooden yoke after her first experience of hauling two bucketfuls of water from the well nearly a kilometer away from Savka’s hut. And when she finds the corpse of one of the neighbor’s chickens floating in a bucket, she simply extracts it and carries on. She comes to understand the importance of cattle in plowing even the smallest field and the tragedy of losing one of a matched pair. “She is a left-hand cow!” Savka chastises Rayner when she suggests borrowing one of another farmer’s spares. With many of the men having been conscripted into the Army or the partisans or forced labor in Germany, it is the women who do most of the work.

Rušanj is so far removed from its century that the villagers do not even observe St. Vitus’s Day, the day still held sacred by most Serbs, marking the death of the last Christian king in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. “It’s only a national holiday,” one of them remarks. The significance of that comment stunned Rayner:

Try to grasp the idea of the distance of stars. If you are not a scientist your mind faints in horror at the attempt. So in horror did my mind faint when I tried to comprehend the awful slowness of change. How long does it take for a new idea to be adopted — six hundred years? A thousand? Well, there is some hope. But how much more time is needed for that new idea to oust a new one? That is like the distance of stars. How long had it taken for the people of Rušanj, wherever they may have been living, to learn to worship oak trees — or the sun, or their ancestors? And how many millenia had they needed to forget whatever ideas they had before that? The mind faints.

Yet when it became clear that the Russians and Tito’s partisans were going to succeed in forcing out the Germans, the villagers adapted quickly to the emerging balance of powers — placing Rayner’s situation at risk. “It followed that a newly-converted partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other Communists by denouncing someone who had spoken a word in favour of the British.” And even more so if the denounced were a British citizen.

Rayner and her husband returned to Belgrade soon after the Germans evacuated, but their stay would be short. By late 1945, they realized they would not be allowed to resume their former bourgeois ways and one or both could face imprisonment. Stojan arranged for visas through a friend in the French embassy and they left in January 1946, never to return.

Women in a Village was published in England in 1957. The book received enthusiastic reviews. V. S. Pritchett considered it “a most remarkable book…. Something quite new and original: war as it is seen by a distinguished, level-headed and sensitive woman. It is most interesting and well-written.” Most reviewers cited the author’s compassion and understanding. “Here is the drama of life and personality told with intelling perception in fascinating human detail and all on a level of taste and values calculated to excite the mind and heart at once,” wrote Monni Adams in the The Montreal Gazette.

Isabel Božic in 1986, photo by Dragoslav Simic, from http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html
Isabel Božic in 1986, photo by Dragoslav Simic.

By then, Stojan and Rayner had parted ways, she settling back in Cambridge. The book soon fell out of print and was forgotten. In 1986, however, it was translated into Serbian and serialized in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. This led to a journalist, Dragoslav Simic, tracking down Rayner, who was by then retired in a small village near Diss in Norfolk. Born Isabel Foster, she had kept her married name and had been known as Isabel Božic in England. Simic traveled to Diss and interviewed Isabel Božic, who explained that she had taken her mother’s maiden name of Louisa Rayner as a pseudonym. Simic then visited Rušanj, where he found one of Savka’s surviving daughter-in-laws, Vuka. A translation of Simic’s story can be found online at http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html. Isabel Mary Foster Božic died in 2004 at the age of 90.


Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (Isabel Mary Foster Božic)
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1957

The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1974)

Cover of the Harvill Press edition of <em>The Restless Years</em>.
Cover of the Harvill Press edition of The Restless Years.

In the final pages of Southern Adventure, the previous volume in his memoir The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky boards a train from Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia to return to Russia having been struck by “the realization that nobody needed me here.” Anyone who’s read the first three volumes will know that Paustovsky must have been haunted by the memory of the two people who did need him: his mother and his sister Galya.

Paustovsky’s mother and sister were the last remnants of his family, a family blown to pieces by war, revolution, and misfortune. Volume One of The Story of a Life opens, in fact, as the author, then a young schoolboy, travels through a Ukranian winter to his father’s burial. The last sight we (and Paustovsky) have of them is in Volume 3, In That Dawn, when he’s forced to abandon them in Kiev as control of the city is wrestled for by the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, and the Ukranians. At the time, Galya had already begun to lose her sight, leaving the two women in a desperate state, with few friends and almost no resources to support themselves aside from the few funds that Paustovsky can send them from time to time.

By the time Paustovsky is reunited with them at the beginning of The Restless Years, Galya is blind and they are reduced to living in a single room in a tenement in Kiev: “two spindly iron bedsteads, an old cupboard, a kitchen table, three wobbly chairs and a mirror on the wall.” Everything in the room is grey — as if covered in dust, but in reality simply worn out of color through years of constant wiping and polishing.

Yet their faith in Paustovsky is undiminished by their years of waiting and need. All that matters to them is that, as a writer, he can change the world. “Tell me please, about the things you write,” his mother asks: “Can they help people, so that they will suffer less?”

It’s hard for any writer to change the world, especially when writing in a time of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. But as The Restless Years demonstrates, in Paustovsky’s case, it was not for lack of trying. He arrives back in Moscow in August 1923, almost five years after his last departure. The city is in the midst of one of the early experiments of the Soviet regime, the first cycle of the New Economic Policy and the closest the Communists came to embracing capitalism. Moscow is full of “NEPmen.” These supposed entreneurs were, for the most part, schemers, grifters, and swindlers with little to contribute to actual economic improvement. To Paustovsky, they are like characters in a cheap imitation of a Chekhov play, living “in shabby and spasmodic grandeur, with ramshackle motor-cars, faded beauties and restaurant-gypsy music.”

The city is also overrun by thousands of children orphaned through almost a decade of devastation. These bespriorniki wear bits of old army uniforms, beg for handouts or rummage for scraps in gutters and wastebins, carry their meager belonging in their pockets — “bits of broken combs, knives, cigarettes, crusts of bread, matches, greasy cards, and bits of dirty bandages.” As poor as he and his fellow writers may be, often going a day or two without a meal, Paustovsky finds some comfort in knowing that the bespriorniki are even worse off.

1923 was no more than thirteen or fourteen years later than the schoolboy days that open The Story of a Life, but to Paustovsky it seemed as if he had already lived “so enormously long that the thought of it filled me with terror.” At 30, he feels himself an old man among many of his fellow writers, even though most were no more than five years younger.

That feeling only intensifies when he learns of Lenin’s death. “Men were waiting to be saved from thousands of years of helpless sufferings,” he reflected, and now, “The man who knew what had to be done was gone.” He goes to the train station to travel to Red Square for the funeral but arrives too late. He then tries to walk along the tracks into town but soon collapses out of hunger and exhaustion.

Lenin’s death took from Paustovsky and millions of Russians the spark that fired their spiritual commitment to the revolution. In its place came a grey blanket of bureaucracy and mechanical repression overseen by Stalin. Paustovsky found himself increasingly consumed in self-protection — and most of all, in protecting his intimacy with the Russian language:

I tried to put up a resistance against everything capable of soiling the inner world I carried within me and tried to communicate to others. Most of all I was afraid of becoming contaminated by that exhausted and impotent language which at that time was spreading relentlessly and swiftly.

“The Russian language exists like a collection of great poetry, as unexpectedly rich and pure as the blaze of a starry sky over a forest waste,” he writes. Had it been otherwise, “I should have taken up bookkeeping or something of that sort.”

It was a struggle in which he was, by his own admission, largely unsuccessful in the next few years. “There is nothing worse than a nail driven into the wall and bending,” Paustovsky tells us. “One has no confidence in it.” His poor attempts at fiction in the mid-1920s “resembled in some inexplicable way a mass of nails more or less bent.”

What breaks this impasse is an assignment to travel deep into central Asia. Paustovsky’s imagination had been inspired by reading of an attempt by a Frenchman, Bernardin St. Pierre, to interest the Empress Catherine in his founding a utopian republic on the shore of a vast and desolate inlet off the Caspian Sea known as Kara Bugaz (now Garabogazköl). Catherine had better sense than the Soviets, who launched a grand venture to establish a salt production industry in the regime.

Cover of Kara Bugaz
Cover of Kara Bugaz (The Black Gulf).

If you want an unbiased version of the Kara Bugaz salt factories and Paustovsky’s role in propagandizing it, I highly recommend reading Frank Westerman’s excellent book Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. For as much as Paustovsky earned a reputation as one of the few Soviet writers to maintain a relatively high level of personal integrity through decades of pressure to conform to the changing tides of editorial policies, his novel Kara Bugaz (1932) (translated as The Black Gulf) veers too close to socialist realism (i.e., propaganda) for comfort. Even in retrospect, his willful misreading of the reality of the situation is clear:

As I have already said, the work in Berezniki was carried out by deportees. But deportation is one thing and work another. Their condition as deportees in no way affected the selflessness of their work. They were the first, according to the chemical experts, to set up machines and installations which they had never seen before. In the past they had only dreamed about them or else read about them in foreign scientific and technical journals. Indeed, there was much to amaze the layman and strike him as being nothing less than a miracle.

The one good result from Paustovsky’s Kara Bugaz experience was that he quit the writers’ collective he’d joined after returning from Moscow and committed to making it on his own as an independent: not an easy task for any writer and particularly challenging through twenty years of Stalin’s rule.

But it also makes The Restless Years the most problematic book in The Story of a Life. It’s easy to read the first five books as the story of a series of violent storms as seen by a bit of flotsam caught up and tossed about by their winds and waves. Paustovsky was too close to the center of Soviet cultural life not to know the true nature of Stalin’s regime. And he cannot console himself, like his friend Mikahil Prishvin, by losing himself in the wonders of Russian nature and wildlife.

The fact that he kept himself aloof from much machinations of the Soviet system doesn’t mean that he remained pristine. Glimpses slip through now and again in The Restless Years. In describing an incident in which he collapsed from typhus while traveling on assignment in the Caucasus, he mentions in passing:

Famine had started in the Ukraine at the time and thousands of refugees rushed off to the south, to Transcaucasus, to the warm regions where there was enough to eat. They flooded out all the railway stations between Zugdidy and Samtredi. Typhus broke out among them.

There may have been a million or more corpses left in the wake of “Famine had started in the Ukraine.”

Sergei Budantsev
Sergei Budantsev

As with the two volumes before it, The Restless Years is full of wonderful sketches of the many writers Paustovsky encountered in the course of his long career. Perhaps the best are his recollections of Isaac Babel in volumes 4 (Years of Hope) and 5 (Southern Adventure). In one profile in this volume, however, he drops his artifice of blindness to Stalinist repression for a moment. He writes of Sergei Budantsev, who was loved as a conversationalist for his habit of sharing his thoughts for future books, “telling people willingly and in detail” their plan, subject, characters, and plots. “He would thus create a whole cycle of oral chapters and novels, worked out and completed to the last detail” — which then, all too often, he failed to translate onto the written page. Paustovsky ends his sketch with one chilling sentence: “Budantsev was one of the first to die in a Chukota concentration camp.”

The Russian edition of The Restless Years was published in 1964 — after the end of the Khruschev Thaw, but perhaps early enough in Brezhnev’s regime that such a blunt disclosure could still be tolerated. Nonetheless, when he wrote his memoir of Soviet literary politics, The Oak and the Calf, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was critical of what he saw as Paustovsky’s reluctance to call out Stalin’s repression directly, lumping him in with Ilya Ehrenburg, whose record of collaboration with the regime was certainly worse. The two men, he felt, were “writers who had seen the great dark epoch, and yet were forever trying to sidle round it, ignoring the things that mattered most, telling us nothing but trivialities, sealing out eyes with emollients till we no longer saw the truth.”

But Paustovsky may have had a different objective in writing his memoirs than of providing a historical record. He was an impressionist at heart, and if he can be criticized for not speaking out against the arrests, camps, exiles, and execution he knew were going on, he must also be credited for leaving behind one of the most vivid autobiographies ever written, a book of life every bit as much as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. And The Restless Years shows how Paustovsky came to understand how he needed to write.

Ironically, he claims that he came to this realization came to him on his journey to Kara Bugaz:

… I realized very soon that one must never make a special point of looking for material and behaving like an outside observer; instead, one must simply live while travelling or staying anywhere one happens to be, without trying to remember everything. Only then does one remain oneself and impressions are absorbed directly, freely, and without any previous “screening,” without the constant thought of what can and what cannot be utilized for a book, what is important and what is not.

“Memory,” he concludes, “will eventually make the necessary selection.” In saying this, Paustovsky is treating memory as inspiration rather than source. Throughout The Story of a Life, he recreates experiences, conversations, and sensations that no one could be expected to have remembered accurately or objectively. He doesn’t pretend to be authoritative on any point aside from his own memories, and even in recording those memories, he is saying, in effect, not “This is happened to me” but “This is what my life was like.” It may have made him a lesser witness in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, but it certainly made The Story of a Life a book that seems at times as vivid and immediate as one’s own experiences.


Note: As I mentioned in my post on Volume 5, Southern Adventure, Vintage Classics has announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith in June 2022. As wonderful as I’m sure it will be, this edition will not, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6. All six volumes can be found on the Internet Archive.


The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1974

Quarry, by Jane White (1967)

Cover of UK paperback of Quarry by Jane White

Brooks Peters, who had a wonderful website devoted to neglected gay writers before he lost it to Russian hackers, wrote me back in 2008 to recommend Jane White’s 1967 novel Quarry:

It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society

Photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry
Photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry.

The post I wrote building on Brooks’ recommendation produced far more comments than usual. Some were about the book, but most were about White herself — including one from her son Martin Brady, a specialist in German literature and film at King’s College London. White was her maiden name and she was known in real life as Jane Brady, who taught at St. Catherine’s School in Surrey. She wrote seven novels between 1967 and 1979, as well as a memoir, Norfolk Child, published in 1973. She contracted multiple sclerosis in her forties, however, and was forced to stop teaching and writing. At a time when treatments for MS were few and ineffective, and, in her son’s words, “made what I believe was a brave decision to get out before things got (more) unbearable,” dying in 1985 at the age of 51.

I’ve long felt that Jane White greatly redeserved rediscovery, but must confess that while I collected all her books, I read none of them until last year, when I took Norfolk Child along when we spent a long and quiet Christmas break at a house located about ten miles from the isolated Norfolk farm where White grew up. I then tucked into Quarry, which is also set in the Norfolk countryside.

There is nothing bucolic about this novel, however. In fact, it simmers with sense of the danger that’s fostered by apathy. Early in the book, three teenagers — Todd, Randy, and Carter — persuade a younger boy to come with them to a cave in the side of an abandoned quarry near their town. The boy, who’s never given a name and who seems to lack any parent or guardian to notice his absence, is nothing but an abstract victim for them to toy with. “Who do you think he is?” Randy asks Todd.

The question never gets answered. Nor does the boy help. He seems, in fact, to be happy to leave his identity ambiguous. “But who are you,” Todd asks him after a few days. “You know who I am,” he replies. When asked for his name, he answers, “Fred. Or Bert. Or Jim. Anything will do — I really don’t mind.”

The friends aren’t even quite sure what they intend to do with the boy. All three are products of the 1960s, when parents let children — or at least boys — spend most summer and weekend days running around outside with little sense of how they spent the time. “Well? Where’ve you been?” Cater’s mother asks him. “Up at the quarry.” “Oh, the quarry again,” she concludes, moving on to another subject. And so, it’s easy for them to smuggle small amounts of food that they take to the boy.

Cover of first US edition of Quarry
Cover of first US edition of Quarry.

White deliberately leaves the boy’s situation abiguous. He’s not quite free to leave but neither is he restrained like a prisoner intent on escape. They soon decide, though, to build a cover for the cave that’s both shelter and jail. This being the 1960s, Carter is able to get the materials by simply sneaking into a nearby construction site one evening and taking what he needs. They see the building of the wall as a “Boy’s Own” project: “You’re making a good job of that, Randy,” says Carter. “I like doing it,” Randy tells him. “I like making things.”

The first casualty, however, isn’t the boy but a girl who wanders into the quarry and begins exploring. They chase her away, through a woods, and onto a road where she’s knocked down and killed by a passing motorcycle. Carter’s mother reads the news of the accident with as little interest as if looking at yesterday’s temperature.

The apathy of the adult world toward the teenage boys creates a vacuum which they are allowed to fill with their own fantasies, some sinister, some as childish as playing at being pirates. Randy and Todd, however, are near the end of secondary school, soon to be pushed out to join the adults. They look upon that prospect with complete uninterest. Far better to remain in the limbo of teenage life, able to take a parent’s car for joy-riding but never expected to pay for the fuel.

Cover of US paperback edition of Quarry.
Cover of US paperback edition of Quarry.

Their toying with the boy, however, must come to an end, and when it does, the result is brutal but almost anticlimactic. The boy’s death seems almost as unreal as has his weeks of uncomplaining imprisonment.

Brooks Peters wrote, “I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.” I think he was half-right. I think that Quarry isn’t about the breakdown of society but about a society that has already broken down without realizing it. Most of the adults in the book seem to be sleepwalking through their lives. If there is a voice at the back of their heads to urge them to look a little more closely into what their children are up to, it’s tiny and faint, almost inaudible.

It was perhaps unsurprising that Quarry was compared to Lord of the Flies by numerous reviewers. Golding’s stranded schoolboys, though, had far richer imaginations than White’s teenagers. The violence of Randy, Todd, and Carter is not savage but mundane. Their captive boy is a welcome diversion from their otherwise tedious lives, but when he becomes an impediment, they have no choice but to make him go away, like disposing of the sheet of newspaper after finishing a packet of chips.

At the time it was published, Quarry seemed shocking to readers and reviewers, but after Columbine and countless other school shootings in America, after the murder of James Bulger in England, I suspect it will seem either prescient or all too numbingly familiar. What it will not seem like is the work of a private school English teacher in her offtime.


Quarry, by Jane White
London: Michael Joseph, 1967
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967

Stanton Forbes

Photo of Stanton Forbes from 1970 and a selection of her books

I’m not a great reader of mystery novels. I have nothing against the genre, but even its most loyal fans will have to admit that it has a healthy share of workmanlike prose, two-dimensional characters, and predictable plots. And let me be clear from the start that Stanton Forbes (one of several pennames used by Deloris Stanton in the course of her 40-year career) wrote plenty of the first two. Having read a half-dozen of her novels and sampled a dozen more, however, I can say with some authority that her books almost never come out the way you’d expect.

What overcame my usual resistance to reading mysteries when it came to Stanton Forbes, though, was the one aspect in which I’d argue she has no equal in the field: her titles. Here is a sample of just a few:

and my favorite, If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End (1970).

If the contents of these books doesn’t always live up to the quirky charm of their titles, they’re usually not half bad. Forbes published over 20 novels as Forbes in the space of about 25 years while also producing nearly as many under the pseudonym of Tobias Wells in the same period, so it would be a bit much to expect brilliance and originality throughout. But I got the sense that Forbes never took what she was doing too seriously.

Forbes usually starts with one of the most frequently-used situations in all fiction: collect a half-dozen or more mismatched characters in some artificial situation (yes, a grand country house is a favorite setting), toss in a corpse or two, shake vigorously, and let human nature do the rest. She also draws upon some of the signature motifs of Alexandre Dumas père: switched infants, the high-born in low places, and the low-born in high places. But she never seems to have gotten too hung up about plausibility.

Cover of Welcome, My Dear, to Belfry House
Cover of Welcome, My Dear, to Belfry House

In Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House (1973), for example, there is no good reason why the grand actress Deirdre Dunn would be holed up in a grand Gothic mansion on an isolated, windswept beach with a house full of former vaudevillians and circus performers. She is, after all, THE Deirdre Dunn:

Deirdre Dunn as Catherine the Great, Deirdre Dunn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Deirdre Dunn in plays by O’Neill, Ibsen, Shake¬ speare, Moliere, in adaptations of novels by Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara. “Deirdre Dunn dances . . . Deirdre Dunn sings . . . Deirdre Dunn laughs.” Deirdre Dunn as Sarah Bernhardt, Deirdre Dunn in a new Hitchcock thriller, Deirdre Dunn in everything!

Nor are we really expected to believe that a handsome young chiropterologist would just happen to arrive at the house at the same time as the sweet young orphan who has just learned that Deirdre Dunn is her grandmother. Or that he would be coming to study a rare species of bats that nest in the … you guessed it … belfry.

In All for One and One for Death, the cast is a set of female quintuplets and five matching male celebrities: a baseball player, an artist, a movie actor, a pop singer, and a nuclear scientist. Forbes has the girls tell their side of the story, followed by the boys, with her small town sheriff taking center stage in Act III to solve the puzzle.

The whole point, after all, is see how Forbes can pull off another feat of legerdemain. Will the rightful heir be the chauffeur or will the plain, self-effacing housekeeper turn out to be a vicious she-wolf from Hell? In fact, after the first few of her books, I learned to keep an eye out for her MacGuffins. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Forbes was fond of throwing her readers off the scent.

She often sets her reader up to be tricked by starting out with a suspicious death or two already having occurred. “Did one Alvaro Rojas, gardener by profession, and one Cecilia Jenks, housemaid, die by accidental drowning off Belfry House within eighteen months of each other?” she asks early in Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House. Did the millionaire Harrington Hartford Lake really die of a heart attack, causing all his potential heirs to gather at the start of Bury Me in Gold Lamé? Or was he poisoned by his twenty-something fourth wife and former stripper — sorry, artistic dancer — Kohinoor Diamond Lake? Or is he even dead in the first place?

In Go to Thy Death Bed, which takes place among the members of a vaudeville troupe in 1890s Philadelphia, the preceding murders are the unsolved hatchetings of Marguerite’s mother and grandmother — naturally begging the question, is she our fictional Lizzie Borden? If she is, and I can’t honestly say, having only skimmed this one, it certainly won’t be for any of the reasons we’ll have been led to believe for at least the first 150 pages.

Cover of Some Poisoned by Their Wives
Cover of Some Poisoned by Their Wives

When Forbes executes her trick well, she manages to squeeze more than one turn of the table into her last twenty-some pages. Some Poisoned by Their Wives appears for most of the book to be a hunt for an elusive black widow who’s bumped off several innocent G.I.s stationed around El Paso, Texas during World War Two to gain access to their death benefits. Except that whole plot turns out to have itself been a grand MacGuffin orchestrated to kill off a character barely even visible on the radar. And then, just because she can, Forbes flips the table again and tosses in a final Verbal Klnt/Keyzer Söze twist to make us wonder just what was going on all along.

Sometimes, however, Forbes has to resort to the same sort of drawn-out mechanical explanations of the crime that make the last chapters of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels so tiresome. It defeats the point of a superb feat of magic to have someone come on stage afterward and explain in detail how it was done.

Cover of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End
Cover of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End

And there are times when the ridiculousness of the situation overwhelms Forbes’s ability to pull of the trick. As much as I love the title of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End, it’s not a particularly good murder mystery. We are expected to believe that once a year, the drama students at a local college all dress up and run around town playing pranks. OK, that’s not so bad. But this year in particular, there are thirteen pairs dressed up as Laurel and Hardy running about, and one of them managed to race into the office of the CEO of the town’s biggest company and murder him. Or are there more than thirteen pairs? Or was that just a coincidence? Or was it someone completely different, someone wanting to steal his company or his prototype computer (BABY)? I finished the thing and can tell you the correct answer is none of the above. But save yourself the trouble and skip the book in the first place.

Cover of Grieve for the Past
Cover of Grieve for the Past.

Not all of Forbes’s novels involve such far-fetched premises. In fact, her first book as Stanton Forbes, Grieve for the Past (1963) is closely rooted to her own upbringing and probably her best book overall. Born in Kansas City in 1923, Forbes was raised in Wichita, Kansas during the Great Depression, and this is the book’s setting. In it, Ramona Shaw, a bookish fifteen-year-old girl likely not that different in interests and personality from Forbes herself, begins to question why a devout elderly couple in her neighborhood were murdered. Her parents, neighbors, and the police are all convinced it’s the work of one of the many jobless, homeless drifters who pass through the town.

You can tell that Forbes was at home not just in her setting but in Ramona’s voice. She has yet to experience much beyond her own neighborhood, let alone town: “Next to the Farmers was the Bragdon house and then the Webster grocery store. That was my world — except from school, of course. That was my world — in that time.” She already understands the subtleties of Midwest values: “Caroline was prettier. Not pretty. Just prettier.” She fantasizes that some wealthy benefactor will learn of her detective work and decide, “Now there is a girl I should send to college.” But she also knows that her aspirations are seen as futile:

This was the way everybody treated me. As if they were saying inside, Isn’t that nice? The child has ambition. She’ll learn, of course. She’ll find out. She’ll find out that wanting is not getting.

Ramona turns out to be shrewd but not ingenious. She does figure out the likely murderer, but she’s unable to do anything about it in the end. Which she finds maddening. “I mean — crime doesn’t pay. You can’t let someone kill and get away with it,” she complains to her grandfather, a former lawman. “That’s a fine theory,” he replies, “only it doesn’t always work out. I wish it did. I wish we could mark a neat little SP after every crime, S for solved, P for punished.” “There’s many a murderer loose in this world, Ramona,” he cautions her. “And that’s the truth.”

Cover of She Was Only the Sheriff's Daughter
Cover of She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter.

A similar sense of groundedness pervades other novels set in small towns. Although She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter takes place in Texas, Forbes’s Yarrowville is as believable a small Texas town as the Thalia of The Last Picture Show. Anthony Boucher, the New York Times’s long-standing crime fiction critic, distinguished between Forbes’s naturalistic novels and those he called “tailored-to-order.” The characters in the latter, he argued, never came close to the credibility of the ones in the realistic novels, and Grieve for the Past certainly supports his case. But I wonder whether she ever intended for the two to be compared.

Perhaps the answer can be found in the novels she published as Tobias Wells. These all feature Knute Seversen, first as a Boston homicide detective and later as chief of the Wellesley, Massachusetts police. While not quite so unflappable as Inspector Maigret, Seversen can usually be relied upon to keep his head when all around are losing theirs. And he seemed to allow Forbes/Wells to work in a middle ground between grounded realism and near-farcical flights of fantasy. So, the victims, the circumstances of their deaths, and the cast of suspects tended to be unusual, they still had to retain some amount of plausibility. No quintuplet/celebrity matchups allowed anywhere near Plymouth Rock.

Stanton Forbes in 2003. Photo by Dennis Wall, Orlando Sentinel
Stanton Forbes in 2003. Photo by Dennis Wall, Orlando Sentinel.

Counting her first four novels, which she co-wrote with Helen Rydell as Forbes Rydell, Stanton Forbes published over 45 mysteries by the time she died at the age of ninety in 2013. And if the unpublished manuscripts listed in the finding aid for her papers at Boston University are any clue, she came nowhere near running out of terrific titles: Mother Goose Was Stuffed, Mother Goose Was Cooked; The Hippie-Yippie Murder; Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed; When the Hearse Goes By, Jack and Jill Hill Kill, Fall of the House of Snodgrass, Mary a Pickle Makes a Mickle….

A fine selection of books by Stanton Forbes and Tobias Wells can be borrowed online from the Internet Archive.

Give Me Your Answer Do, by Peter Marchant (1960)

Cover of first UK edition of Give Me Your Answer Do by Peter Marchant

“At the office Miss Finlay was something of a dark horse.” That opening line hooked me.

A while ago, someone on Twitter posted a picture of Give Me Your Answer Do in answer to a request for books that changed readers lives. I’m always intrigued when I come across a book that’s completely new to me, and this one was a blank slate. The poster provided no further information, but the sheer scarcity of the book (fewer than five copies for sale) was enough for me to take the plunge.

There’s something comfortably nonconformist about Give Me Your Answer Do. This might have been what made the book a life changer for its fan on Twitter.

Miss Finlay, Marchant’s heroine, is both dark horse and ugle duckling. She’s “tall and ungainly, with large feet and hands which made sudden, gawky movements. Her hair was flat, her upper teeth protruded, and she wore spectacles with plain, tortoise-shell rims.” Her fellow typists at Boothby, Gold & Co. think she looks “as if she scrubbed herself very regularly with carbolic soap.”

Miss Finlay engages with the other women at Boothby, Gold as little as possible without seeming rude, offers nothing about her private life. Which is probably wise. To them, her practical diversions when off work — mostly taking long bicycle rides into the countryside beyond London — would merely confirm she is as dull as they think. And her imaginative diversions would have been too wild and grand for their sedate little office.

For Miss Finlay — Margaret, not that anyone seems interested in her first name — has for many years carried on a passionate friendship with a large white horse named Ponikwer Peter Aylestone Bradshaw, or Bradshaw for short. Through dreary years at a bleak girls’ boarding school and further years of workday routine at Boothy, Gold followed by solitary nights in her little coldwater flat, Bradshaw has comforted and amused Margaret.

Margaret’s mother was happy to be rid of the girl. Beautiful and easily bored, she’d only had the child because an abortion was too hard to obtain and she’d only married Margaret’s father to put a wrapper of propriety around her pregnancy. Once Margaret could be put in the care of someone else, her mother could resume amusing herself with handsome and vapid men like her husband’s former commanding officer, Margaret’s real father. And to keep up with Margaret’s school fees and her mother’s expensive tastes in clothes and men, her father dutifully returns to labor at the coalface in India.

Socially awkward, physically inept, and deeply introverted, Margaret finds the experience of boarding school near unbearable. It’s only the odd moments when she can escape to the WC, lock herself into a stall that she has any privacy, and carry on a conversation with Bradshaw that can find any respite. He is the perfect companion: understanding, a good listener, always ready with a hug. She lulls herself to sleep each night imagining herself in the strong, protective arms (legs?) of Bradshaw.

When school comes to an end, Margaret’s mother deems her too ugly to be marriagable material and so packs her off to London to find secretarial work. Margaret soon manages to find herself a room of her own: a coldwater flat with a WC down the hall, perhaps, but a haven nonetheless. Within its four walls, she is free to paint the ceiling yellow, to fix the food she likes, and to carry on long conversations with Bradshaw.

Then, one day, Mr. Bacon, a divorced Yorkshireman as uncomfortable in his own skin as Margaret, invites her on a Saturday outing. One outing leads to another and soon companionship blends into friendship and begins to blend into … well, neither one of them feels quite comfortable putting a name on it. These are two extremely introverted people.

We know, of course, that a collision between Margaret’s fantasy world and her real world is inevitable, but the tension derives from our uncertainty over just how disastrous that crash will be. I’ll just say that Peter Marchant would have had Hollywood rom-com producers knocking on his door if he’d published this book in the 1990s instead of 1960. His ending is suspenseful, sappy, and satisfying in equal measure.

Marchant dedicated the book to Marguerite Young. Yes, the Miss Macintosh, My Darling Marguerite Young. Marchant had followed an unusual path to arrive at Young’s seminar at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1950s. He’d taken an MA in the classics at Cambridge and taught a variety of subjects while serving in the British Army Training Service, then emigrated to Iowa, where he both taught in the School of Education and attended the Writer’s Workshop.

“I’ve heard you have a story about a girl with an imaginary pony,” Young said to Marchant soon after meeting him. Marchant told her it was a flop, having been rejected by magazines and even his agent. “T’d like to read it,” she insisted.

Marchant had few hopes for the story. If it was going to survive and get published, it would have to be cut back severely.

No, Young told him: “You must let it grow. It’s a treatment — it needs expansion.”

When he next brought her a draft, it had grown to over eighty pages. Young’s criticism was harsh but supportive: “With unerring ruthlessness,” she said, “you’ve crossed out the best parts of your writing…. You’ve massacred all your flowers, leaving only the bare branches. She pointed out a passage where Margaret is sitting alone on a hillside. Mr. Bacon, in a fit of passion, has tried to kiss her — an act that she receives like a full-fledged sexual assault.

“She saw the sun glittering on hothouse roofs and wondered why it didn’t crack from the heat,” Young read. “Why did you cut it?” she asked.

“It seemed to me nonsense. Hothouse roofs don’t crack from sunlight.”

“Her fear of sex has nothing to do with her fantasy about glass shattering? Come, now,” Young scolded him.

“Oh,” said Marchant. The lightbulbs were beginning to come on. Over the next weeks, Marchant wrote furiously, soon producing a 300-page manuscript he turned in as his MA thesis for the workshop. He sold the book to the British publisher Michael Joseph, which released the book in 1960. It garnered a few reviews, but its combination of an unconventional heroine and a theme of escape through fantasy was perhaps a little too far ahead of its time. The most frequently-used adjective in its review was “odd” — which probably turned folks off in that conformist day but ought to pique the interest of today’s readers. I think the book would do very well if reissued now.

Marchant put fiction behind him after publishing Give Me Your Answer Do. According to his obituary, he stayed in academia, becoming a specialist in the 19th century British novel and teaching for decades at Penn State and the State University of New York – Brockport. Instead, it was his wife, Mary Elsie Robertson, who focused on fiction, writing a half dozen novels starting with After Freud in 1981. A Quaker, holder of a black belt in judo, and a historian of the Holocaust, Marchant must have been a remarkable man, and Give Me Your Answer Do deserves a high place in any list of his accomplishments.


Give Me Your Answer Do, by Peter Marchant
London: Michael Joseph, 1960

Parachute, by Ramon Guthrie (1928)

Cover of UK edition of Parachute by Ramon Guthrie
Cover of UK edition of Parachute by Ramon Guthrie.

Ramon Guthrie’s 1928 novel Parachute is a story about PTSD. The term post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented then, and the fact that the novel is full of pilots, airplanes, and people jumping out of them led its publishers to sell it as a story about aviation. Coming out a year after Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking solo flight across the Atlantic, Parachute seemed guaranteed to hit a bullseye with the reading public.

The fact that its author was credited with downing four German aircraft (as an observer/gunner, mind, not a pilot) and awarded the Silver Star for his exploits didn’t hurt. But the actual fact was that Ramon Guthrie was by then, almost ten years after the war, anything but a stereotype of the heroic military aviator. He wrote the book, his second novel, while living in France, having returned in late 1921 to rejoin Marguerite Maurey, the woman with whom he’d fallen in love just before being repatriated to the United States as a casualty in early 1919. He’d taken a degree at the university in Tours and become interested in poetry, publishing several collections with expat publishers and writing a first novel, Marcabrun, about a 12th century troubadour.

The wounds for which Guthrie was brought home weren’t physical. He’d survived several crashes while serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s Aviation Section on the Western front. Worst that those, however, was the ill-conceived raid in which a flight of 10 DH-4 “Liberty” bombers took off on 18 September 1918 to attack Mars-la-Tour, a town just seven miles inside the German lines. Three planes dropped out due to mechanical problems. The Liberties were plagued with mechanical problems. A fourth turned back when the formation encountered clouds. The pilots, mostly inexperienced, had little experience flying and trying to navigating in clouds.

Ramon Guthrie and members of the 11th Aero Squadron.
Ramon Guthrie (arrow) and members of the 11th Aero Squadron.

About half an hour into their mission, the remaining six planes were attacked by German fighters. Three were quickly shot down, killing all six pilots and observers. Two others were damaged and force into crash landings. Only Guthrie and his pilot, Vincent Oatis, made it back safely, Guthrie managing to shoot down one of the German Fokkers. Guthrie later recalled the experience in the poem “Death with Pants On” in his last book Maximum Security War (1970):

I think of others
Chapin, Sayre, Comygies, Nick Carter
whom I last saw spinning down in flames
toward La Chaussee. Their first fight —
if you can call it that. Unmatched for unreality:
as we straggled out of clouds into a well
of open sky, the red-nosed hornets swooped.
Most of us
never found a chance to fire a shot.
There were others. I forget their names.

A few days after that raid, Guthrie’s helmet and goggles came off while they were flying at a relatively high altitude and he suffered burns to his face and eyes from the freezing air until Oatis got the plane down. Guthrie continued to fly, usually with Oatis, until less than a week before the Armistice.

Guthrie had been in France since the end of 1916, when he arrived in a contingent of the American Field Service ambulance corps, a now legendary unit that included such future writers as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings. Guthrie’s section of the service operated with the French Army in both France and the Balkans. When American entered the war in 1917, Guthrie enlisted as an aviation observer, thinking it would take too long for him to qualify as a pilot.

Even before the war ended, however, Guthrie already began to suffer psychological effects from his combat experiences. He had bouts of amnesia and his behavior off duty began to concern his fellow flyers. As in World War Two, air combat in the First quickly gained a romantic mystique that covered up the ugly reality that war was even more of a meat grinder in the air than it was on the ground. Doughboys in the trenches had better chances of survival than the airmen they envied for their “luxurious” billets behind the lines. Life at a typical aerodrome was certainly more comfortable than it was in a front line trench, but you had to avoid being killed, wounded, or captured to enjoy it.

Newspaper article about establishment of a "Nervous" hospital for aviators in Cooperstown, NY.
Newspaper article about establishment of a “Nervous” hospital for aviators in Cooperstown, NY.

Even though psychiatry was still in its early days and looked on with some suspicion by other medical practitioners, the U.S. Army had begun to recognize that not all wounds were physical, and it sought to provide suitable rehabilitation for at least some of its returning veterans. For flyers like Guthrie, however, it was sheer luck that Stephen Carlton Clark, a wealthy philanthropist who later founded the Baseball Hall of Fame, had decided to offer the services of a brand-new hospital he was building on part of his estate in Cooperstown, New York. Clark had some snobbish stipulations, though. He preferred to limit the patients to aviators and even then only to those not requiring surgery or physical therapy. The hospital would specialize in “nervous shock” cases.

The hospital opened just in time to receive the first airmen arriving back in the U.S. in early 1919. In Parachute, the fictional town of Berkenmeer takes the place of Cooperstown and an only-partly-philanthropist named Alfred Banning takes the place of Clark. Among the hundred or so flyers assigned to the hospital are Tony Rickey, an ace and crack fighter pilot, and Harvey Sayles, who served entirely behind the lines as a ferry pilot.

Of the two, it’s Harvey who is the more damaged, however. He’s had three planes crack up on him, and after the third crash, he went AWOL for weeks before being caught by the military police. Unwilling to go through the trouble of organizing a court-martial, though, his commanding officer persuades the medical officer to diagnose Harvey with dementia praecox — or schizophrenia as it’s usually termed today.

Tony and Harvey find themselves outsiders at the hospital. From an Italian family in Peoria, Tony is considered lowbrow by the other pilots, most of them Ivy Leaguers from “better” families. Harvey, on the other hand, is seen as the only patient in the place truly in need of its care. “I’m plagued the by insanity label,” he complains. The rest of the men are just enjoying a few months of rest and recreation at the Army’s expense.

Tony isn’t bothered by the insanity label — or rather, it helps him accept Harvey’s idiosyncracies:

Tony didn’t mind listening to Sayles, because he knew that Sayles was crazy and couldn’t help talking that way; and occasionally as he listened he would become aware of a deep current of sense running through the babble. Once his ear had distinguished it, it was like singling out the notes of one instrument in an orchestra until it dominated everything else. Sometimes Tony would even wonder why more people didn’t talk that way, and if it wouldn’t be a good idea for more people to be insane.

Tony soon meets and begins an affair with Natalie, Alfred Banning’s beautiful young Russian wife. Managing to deceive the older man, he also persuades Banning to support a hare-brained scheme he concocts of establishing an airline based in Berkenmeer. Boston – Berkenmeer – Chicago, he fantasizes. Tony revs up the Chamber of Commerce and soon raises enough money to buy an old Curtiss Jenny and turn a local field into a runway.

His entrerpeneurial dreams get mixed up with his passion for Natalie, and soon the two have run off as Tony scrapes by with barnstorming jobs and joy-rides at county fairs. Meanwhile, Harvey decides it’s time to return to civilian life and travels to New York City in search of work. Instead, he encounters scenes more hellish than anything he’d seen during the war:

Miles of sidewalks and people flickering by, young men, old men, women, girls, and all with dead, distorted faces, horribly obscene, like gargoyles worn by the rain, the same faces that make the ghastly fresco of the Subway, blotchy, bloated, idiot faces with evil squints and apathetic leers. Subway Faces. Subway Faces crawling out into the air. He forced his pace to pass them more quickly and, as he met them, turned his eyes away with sickened dread.

While in New York, however, he witnesses a demonstration of parachuting and gets the idea to buy one and join Tony on his barnstorming travels. In addition to the stunts and rides, Harvey will do parachute jumps, giving most of the people on the ground their first sight of a falling from a plane in flight and surviving.

Guthrie understands that both Tony and Harvey are avoiding their inevitable return to the routines and small dramas of peacetime life. Flying, adultery, and skydiving are attempts to recreate the intensity of wartime experiences without recognizing their psychological costs. Harvey begins to worry that his trip to New York was proof that he was, indeed, insane — incapable of fitting back into normal life. As winter approaches, bringing an end to the barnstorming season, Harvey thinks that winter will also “terminate his life with Tony.” Harvey’s response is suicidal; Tony’s is merely rash and reckless. In the end, neither manages to put the war behind him.

Ramon Guthrie in 1928, a portrait by Stella Bowen.
Ramon Guthrie in 1928, a portrait by Stella Bowen (from the Hood Museum at Dartmouth).

Guthrie’s choice of title is ironic: neither Tony nor Harvey finds a way to break their fall from the heightened experience of war. Guthrie himself fared better, perhaps with the help of his wife, perhaps because of his return to France, or perhaps because of a simple resilience of spirit. He and Marguerite left France in 1929, driven out by the failing economy, and Guthrie landed a job at Dartmouth. He stayed there for over thirty years, writing little and concentrating on teaching and translation. He served briefly with the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA, to help coordinate between Allied forces and the French Resistance, earning the Legion d’Honneur, then returned to Dartmouth.

He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in the mid-1960s and had to curtail his teaching activities. His fight with the disease seemed to reinvigorate his creative energies, however, and he began writing poetry again. He was unwilling to condone further military operations, though, and he mailed his Silver Star to President Johnson in 1965 to protest the American involvement in Vietnam. He also began work on his best-known book Maximum Security Ward, which was published in 1970. By the time the book was published, however, the disease had seriously debilitated him and he spent his last years in pain, much of the time hospitalized. He managed to arrange his release in late November 1973 and took his life with an overdose of phenobarbital soon after returning home.


Parachute, by Ramon Guthrie
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company
London: Gerald Howe

A conversation about G. E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia with the Lost Ladies of Lit

Kim Askew and Amy Helmes of the wonderful Lost Ladies of Lit podcast recently invited me to talk with them about G. E. Trevelyan’s remarkable first novel Appius and Virginia. Back in print now thanks to Eye Books and the Abandoned Bookshop Press, Appius and Virginia started me down my journey of discovering Trevelyan’s work a little over three years ago.

You can listen to the full conversation at the Lost Ladies of Lit episode 59: G. E. Trevelyan — Appius and Virginia.

Simenon’s romans Américains

Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the United States for almost ten years but also set over a dozen novels here. But what’s even more surprising is these novels have appeared in English so haphazardly.

Simenon achieved his tremendous output through tremendous discipline. Despite the fact that he moved from place to place almost constantly, he kept to a strict routine of sitting down to his typewriter each morning, and once there, he wrote at a furious rate. A typical novel might take him two to three weeks. There was at least one Maigret a year, plus two to four of the psychological thrillers he called romans durs, plus countless stories. And if these weren’t enough, he also wrote further works under a variety of pseudonyms throughout the first half of his career.

Simenon claimed that living in the United States was a goal he had set himself as a young man, and soon after the war in Europe ended, he applied for visas for himself, his wife Tigy, and their son Marc. They landed in New York City in October 1945. Knowing almost no English, Simenon quickly hired an American agent and put out a request for a bilingual secretary to help him with his correspondence. He met the first application, a French Canadian woman named Denyse Ouimet, for an interview at a restaurant named Brussels near Central Park. As Denyse later told Simenon biographer Pierre Assouline, “I met him at the Brussels at 1:45. I saw him again at the Drake at 4:45. At 7:00 we were making love.”

Now a party of four, the Simenons headed for Quebec, where at least they avoided the language problem. There, he wrote his first two American novels, both set in New York City.

Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946); first published in English as Three Beds in Manhattan (1964), translated by Lawrence G. Blochman.

Simenon transposed his first meeting and the early days of his affair with Denyse into this story, with his role played by François Combe, a French actor, and hers by Kay Miller, the estranged wife of a Hungarian count. In her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, Joyce Carol Oates called it “the most existential of love stories,” and it represented something of turning point for Simenon in that it was his first novel in which sexual passion — which soon became one of his favorite narrative accelerants — was the driving motivation.

But it’s also about Simenon’s romance with Manhattan. The book is filled with scenes that show that even having spent just some weeks in the city, Simenon soaked in countless details. When not in bed with each other, François and Kay spend hours walking:

They were on the street again. No doubt about it, they felt most at home in the street. Their mood changed immediately. The magic, lighthearted comradeship they had found by accident returned the moment they were again caught up in the noise and confusion of traffic.
People were lining up in front of the move theaters. Gaudily uniformed doormen guarded the padded portals of night clubs. They passed them all by. They zigzagged aimlessly through the sidewalk crowds until she turned to him with a smile he recognized instantly. It was the smile that had started everything.

Later, while waiting for Kay to return after a separation, François walks endlessly, the city now devoid of the energy they experienced together:

… the little dark men swarming like ants under the lights, the stores, the movie houses with their garlands of light, the hot-dog stands, the bakeries with their displays of nauseating pastries; the coin machines that played music for you or allowed you to play at rolling balls into little holes that rang bells and lit lights; everything a great city could invent to deceive man’s loneliness…

Simenon may have written Three Beds in Manhattan having scarcely set foot in America, but he managed to produce not only his best romantic novel but also one of his best American ones.

The was filmed in France as Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965, starring Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot.

Maigret à New-York (1946); first published in English as Maigret in New York (1980)

If you’ve read any of Simenon’s Maigret novels, you can guess that the Inspector was far less impressed with New York City than were the lovers of Three Beds in Manhattan. The beer is poor, the streets too noisy, he can’t smoke his pipe in a movie theater, and no one seems to understand why he wants his “little lunch” in the morning. The practice of numbering streets he finds particularly frustrating: “I’ve never had a memory for figures and you people are really tiresome with your numbered streets. Why couldn’t you say Victor Hugo Street, or Pigalle Street, or President-What’s-His-Name Street….?”

The story starts at convoluted and gets messier. There is a missing young man, perhaps the heir to a fortune or perhaps an imposter, a jukebox millionaire who started as a vaudeville musician, elements of the mob (some English editions are called Maigret and New York’s Underground), retired carnival performers and FBI men who aren’t always as helpful as they could be. Despite this, the book remains among the most popular of the many Maigret novels.

La jument perdue (1947); not yet translated into English.

Simenon wrote this novel (the title could be translated as The Lost Mare Ranch) within weeks of arriving in Tucson, Arizona in September 1947, and he drew upon places and people he discovered there. Jane Eblen Keller, who wrote an extended study of Simenon’s time in Arizona and the books he wrote there for the Journal of the Southwest in 2002, describes it as “one of the few sunny books Simenon wrote,” a tale involving a pair of aging cowboys and a couple of elderly sisters in a town resembling Tucson — although Keller does add that the plot “deals in treachery and sorrow, skullduggery and betrayal, crooked business dealings and corrupt politics.”

Le Fond de la bouteille (1948); first published in English as The Bottom of the Bottle (1954), translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.

This was the first of the romans Américains I read and I enjoyed it even more when rereading it recently. Simenon wrote the book while renting a house called the Stud Barn in the Santa Cruz Valley near Tumacacori, Arizona, about a fifty miles south of Tucson and just across the border from Nogales, Mexico. There, the eastern bank of the Santa Cruz River was broad and productive, and the area was mostly populated by a few dozen wealthy ranchers. The Simenons — Georges, his wife Tigy, mistress Denyse and son Marc, now joined by their French cook Boule (coincidentally another of Georges’ mistresses — quickly fit into the little community.

The ranchers and their wives enjoyed a relaxed and highly social lifestyle, often gathering at one or another’s large houses for parties that could go on for days — earning the area the nickname of Santa Booze Valley. At times when the river flooded, the eastern bank became completely inaccessible and the ranchers’ parties could then run on for weeks.

This is the situation into which Donald Ashbridge, a convicted murderer and escapee from a prison in Illinois, arrives. He wants money and help from his older brother P.M., a lawyer who’s married a woman with one of the largest ranches in the valley. Donald needs to get across the river and into Mexico, where his wife and children are waiting. But P.M., having built up a reputation of integrity, needs to distance himself from Donald and his own less than respectable upbringing. Meanwhile, the storm rages, the river rises, and the booze spins the party at ever-faster speeds.

The Bottom of the Bottle introduced a theme that appears in most of Simenon’s romans Américains — that of the supposedly upstanding citizen who’s ultimately undone by some fatal flaw rooted in a secret past or association. As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, that secret can remain hidden and inert. But when some catalyst upsets the formula — a brother on the run or a young woman found murdered or being black-balled from the country club — that stability quickly devolves into chaos.

In his Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recalled one concept that struck him while living in America: “In any American town, ‘you have to belong.’ To the community.” He himself admitted that when he was living in Connecticut, he had the illusion that he really belonged. But he also realized, as do his protagonists such as P.M. Ashbridge and Eddie Rico, that the flipside of belonging was ostracism and the ostracized person had not place in the American of the 1950s.

The novel was filmed — partly on location in the Santa Cruz Valley — as The Bottom of the Bottle, starring Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Ruth Roman, in 1956.

Maigret chez le coroner (1949); first published in English as Maigret at the Coroner’s (1980), translated by Frances Keene.

In Maigret at the Coroner’s, Maigret is less inspector and more witness. He’s essentially dumped in a Tucson coroner’s inquest by an FBI agent he’s visiting on his way across the U.S., and most of the book is devoted to his following the courtroom proceedings, all the while trying both to figure out the case and decipher the odd habits of Americans. The case itself seems straightfoward: a young woman goes out partying on a Saturday night with five airmen from a nearby base and is found dead the next morning. Is it murder, accident, or suicide? We’ll never know, because Simenon ushers Maigret along to his next stop before the inquest closes.

It’s Maigret/Simenon’s observations about American manners and customs that are far more interesting than the crime (if there was one). Such as how they managed to avoid the hangovers that plagued him every time he indulged in American whiskey rather than his beloved beer:

From his first days in New York he had been amazed to see men whom he had left the night before in a state of advanced drunkenness all fresh-faced and, as they said, rarin’ to go the next morning. Then someone had told him their secret. After that, he noted in all the drugstores, in cafés, in bars, the special blue bottle mounted on a wall bracket, its spout down, out of which the proper dose of effervescent powder could be measured. Dropped into a glass to which the barman added water, the compound fizzed and tingled. This was served you as promptly as a morning coffee or a Coca- Cola, and a few minutes after ingesting it the fumes of the alcohol had been dispersed.

Yet why not? Machines for getting drunk, machines for getting over being drunk. They were logical people, after all.

Logical, yes, but this would not be Simenon if he didn’t also hint at the worm at the core. The clean-cut, Power of Positive Thinking-minded American men got that clean-cut look by taking their shirts to the dry cleaners instead of wearing them again and again like any sensible Frenchman. This emphasis on appearances is, to Maigret, just a façade. “He suspected that, at bottom, they suffered the same anxieties as the rest of humanity but that they assumed this happy-go-lucky appearance out of embarrassment.”

The book closes as Maigret’s plane is about to land in Los Angeles, the next stop on his tour. “Whatever would he see now?” he wonders as the book closes.

Un nouveau dans la ville (1950); not yet translated into English.

Un nouveau dans la ville or A stranger in town is alone among les romans Américains in being set in a seaside town in Maine. As Jane Eblen Keller summarizes the book, the stranger acts a catalyst, unleashing the town’s many dysfunctions. He sets Charlie, the owner of the only bar in town, to wondering about the one foreigner in town, a quiet man called Yougo (he’s thought to be from Yugoslavia), and Charlie’s doubts infect the rest of the town. At the same time, the stranger suggests to Yougo that his situation is at risk, that the town’s latent xenophobia is about to make him its target. Simenon sets up a conflict that ends … well, for that we’ll have to wait for an English translation.

New York Daily News article on Simenon's second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.
New York Daily News article on Simenon’s second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.

La Mort de Belle (1952); first published in English as Belle (1954), translated by Louise Varèse.

Belle is the first of three novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse. At the time he wrote the books, Connecticut was within commuting distance of New York City by train but still full of small, quiet towns whose inhabitants could often point out generations of ancestors in the local cemetery. But in some ways, these books are more specific to a time than a place: specific, that is, to the time of blacklisting, McCarthyism, and whisper campaigns. And of course, these were all symptoms of that question Simenon saw Americans asking each other: “Do you belong?”

In the case of Spencer Ashby, the answer to that question is already a little unclear. A teacher at a local exclusive boarding school, he’s become a local artificially, by marrying the daughter of the school’s late headmaster. But when Belle, the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends, staying with the Ashbys temporarily, is found strangled in her bedroom, that artificial link becomes brittle. See, the problem is that Ashby was working in the basement, turning a piece of furniture on his lathe, at the time that Belle must have been murdered.

There’s no evidence of his being involved, no obvious motive. Yet it seems oddly suspicious to everyone. He’s questioned repeatedly by the police … and let go. Is it just a matter of time before they find the evidence? The doubt is enough to make the townspeople keep their distance: “The newspaper dealer was gaping at him as if he came from another planet; and two customers, who only came in for their papers and out again, cast a curious glance in his direction.”

And more than that — and this is really where Simenon excels in his dissections of his protagonists’ psyches — Ashby begins to doubt himself. “Why, not being guilty of anything, did he have a feeling of guilt?” The fragile props of his comfortable life begin to weaken, to give way. Whether Ashby has already committed some sin or only committed the sin of inaction, his self-doubt ultimately becomes a propelling force and drives him forever out of his comfortable inertia. Simenon plays out his drama quietly, subtly, simplying adding one straw after another until something catastrophic happens.

Les Frères Rico (1952); first published in English as The Brothers Rico (1954), translated by Ernst Pawel.

The Brothers Rico demonstrates that Simenon had learned quite a bit about the workings of organized crime during his time in the U.S.. Eddie Rico is, to all appearances, a prosperous fruit and vegetable broker somewhere in central Florida. In reality, he’s a local boss, running the gambling and prostitution operations in his area while keeping the local sheriff on his payroll. It’s a nice, quiet affair, one that keeps him in good with the big bosses in New York without forcing him to get his hands dirty.

Eddie doesn’t really have the appetite for the rough side of the business: “He was never armed. The only gun he owned was in the drawer of his night table. As for fighting, he had too much of a horror of blows and of blood for that. He had fought but once in his his, when he was sixteen, and the blood running from his nose had made him sick.”

His brothers Gino and Tony, on the other hand, are suspected of being involved in a hit on a mob boss in Brooklyn. Which becomes a problem for Eddie when Gino shows up in Florida (note the parallel with The Bottom of the Bottle). He soon disappears again after realizing that Eddie is too afraid of his higher-ups to take a risk. Unfortunately, those higher-ups then enlist Eddie in tracking down his brothers.

Eddie knows that he’s playing the Judas goat. All he has to do is locate at least one of his brothers and then step out of the way and let the professionals do the rest: “It was routine. Long ago this kind of operation had been perfected like the rest, and by now they were performed according to an almost inalterable ritual. It was best to have executioners who, coming from elsewhere, were unknown in this area.” So, he does as he’s told, knowing he’ll be able to return to his quiet, comfortable life in Florida. Only without his soul: no one gets away with murder in a Simenon, even if by proxy.

The Brothers Rico was filmed in 1957, directed by Phil Karlson and starring Richard Conte as Eddie Rico.

Feux rouges (1953); first published in English as The Hitchhiker (1957) and Red Lights (1967), translated by Norman Denny.

Red Lights is Simenon’s version of The Lost Weekend. Steve Hogan meets his wife for a couple of drinks before they hit the road one Friday evening, intending to pick up their kids from summer camp in New England. But it’s hot and rainy and the traffic is terrible and Steve just needs a drink or two more to get him through hours of sitting in traffic. And so he stops at a roadside bar.

The problem is, Steve is a blackout drunk. Or, as he puts it, “he goes into a tunnel”: “an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.” His wife refuses to go along and heads to take a Greyhound bus to the camp. Steve ignores her, walks into the bar, and the next morning, wakes up on the roadside in his car with a flat tire, his trunk rifled through, and a vague memory of having given a ride to an ex-con named Sid.

What’s worse, he has no idea where his wife is. And that’s where the nightmare really begins. Once again, Simenon looks behind the façade of the happy, normal American life:

For thirty-two years, nearly thirty-three, he had been an honest man; he had followed the tracks, as he had proclaimed last night with so much vehemence, being a good son, good student, employee, husband, father, and the owner of a house on Long Island; he had never broken any law, never been summoned before any court and every Sunday morning he had gone to church with his family. He was a happy man. He lacked nothing.

Then where did they come from, all those things he said when he’d had a drink too many and started by attacking Nancy before assailing society as a whole? They had to spring from somewhere. The same phenomenon occurred each time, and each time his rebellion followed exactly the same course.

For Simenon, a momentary lapse of judgment is never an isolated incident. There is always an underlying flaw, some fundamental character defect that just needs the right — or the wrong — set of circumstances to reveal its full capacity for destruction.

Crime impuni (1954); first published in English as The Fugitive (1955), translated by Louise Varèse.

The Fugitive, which has also been published as Account Unsettled is only part romans Américains. The first half is set in Simenon’s native city of Liege in Belgium. Elie, a student rooming with Madame Lange and her daughter, becomes obsessed with revenge when a Romanian student named Michel Zograffi moves in and becomes the pampered pet of the household — and the daughter’s lover. Elie plots to murder the man and flees the city when he thinks he has. After years on the run, he makes his way to Bisbee, Arizona, where he runs the town’s best hotel as Mr. Craig. The plot hinges on the highly improbable coincidence that Michel (now Michael) Zograffi one day wanders in, bearing the scars of the murder attempt but now a wealthy investor come to bail out Bisbee.

The most plausible element of the story draws upon Simenon’s observations of the copper mining business in Bisbee, which then centered on the Copper Queen Mine. By the late 1940s, conventional tunnel mining was proving unproductive and open pit mining had not yet begun. Simenon postulated the collapse of the mine and the town:

It was as though the city were dying, the tip-trucks that at certain places ran along cables over the streets were now stationary near the pylons and the four tall oven chimneys at the far end of the valley no longer wore their crowns of greenish smoke.

It happened from one day to the next when the machines, which for twenty years had been boring into the red earth of the mountain, scooping out a gigantic crater, and uncovered a subterranean lake, the existence of which no one had suspected.

Bisbee was able to postpone its decline for a few decades by switching to open pit mining, but the city now relies more on tourism than industry to survive. As far as the book itself, however, I’d rate it the weakest of the lot, a story that might have fared better had Simenon left his characters on the other side of the Atlantic.

L’Horloger d’Everton (1954); first published in English as The Watchmaker of Everton (1957) and The Clockmaker (1977), translated by Norman Denny.

In The Watchmaker of Everton, Simenon’s favored theme of guilt through inaction is played out in the form of a good father and a bad son. Dave Galloway, the quiet watch repairman of the title, a single father, learns that his son Ben and his girlfriend have stolen a car, and killed its driver, and run off into the night. When Ben is eventually caught and arrested several states away, he shows no remorse and no interest in talking to his father. Which, of course, leads the police — and Galloway’s neighbors — to wonder: how could a father not know he was raising a monster? “Do you know your son well, Mr. Galloway?” the police ask. Was he perhaps not quite the dutiful father everyone thought he was? And if so, what else might he be guilty of?

Galloway asks himself the same questions. Was this due, in part, to the fact that his own father had died when he was young, that he’d hated the stepfather his mother married? Did his flaws drive off Ben’s mother when the boy was just a toddler? The Watchmaker of Everton is an almost agonizing example of Simenon’s gift for pulling on one well-chosen loose thread.

Bertrand Tavernier filmed the novel as L’Horloger de Saint-Paul starring Philippe Noiret in 1974.

La Boule noire (1955); first published in English as The Rules of the Game (1988), translated by Howard Curtis.

Walter Higgins, manager of the local supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds his application to the local country club has been rejected — for the second time. Higgins understands the real message behind this decision: “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community.” He begins to question everything around him, begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back.

And, of course, this being Simenon, there are reasons why Higgins might be insecure about his place in the community. Or rather, one reason: he was born poor. He grew up in a tenement, often having to fend for himself while his mother went out drinking. His real fear is that the country club men can smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

Unlike P.M. Ashbridge or Eddie Rico, Walter Higgins doesn’t fall apart through this crisis. His resolution is more French than American: he falls into cynicism:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game — like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game.

La main (1968); first published in English as The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1970), translated by Moura Budberg. Also published as The Hand (2016), translated by Linda Coverdale.

Written over a decade after Simenon left the U.S., The Man on the Bench in the Barn takes the theme of guilt by inertia of Belle and refines it down to a cold existential minimalism. Two couples get stuck in a blizzard near one of their houses. One of the men gets separated from the other three and doesn’t make it to the house. After some wait, the other husband — Donald Dodd (another lawyer (viz. P. M. Ashbridge), another artificial local (viz. Spencer Ashby)) — is sent to look for him. Already exhausted, he quickly gives up. But rather than simply return and admit his failure, he enters the barn near his house, where he sits for an hour or so, smoking.

“All the time I had been in the barn, on the red bench, I had chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette after another, dropping the butts
on the ground and stamping them out with my foot. I had smoked at least ten.” That’s it. That’s the sum of his crime. Except that when the storm abates and the authorities are notified, Dodd goes back to the barn and see that the cigarette butts are gone. Which can only mean one thing: his wife knows.

And that is all Simenon needs to let the unraveling begin. For Dodd has built around him the same façade that Maigret had detected in Arizona: “It made him think of too tidy a garment, too well washed and pressed.” In Dodd’s case — and he is only first-person narrator I’ve encountered in a Simenon — “The truth is that I wanted to have everything run smoothly and orderly around me.”

David Hare adapted The Man on the Bench in the Barn for the stage as The Red Barn in 2016.


The sum of Simenon’s Romans Américains, one could argue, is enough to earn him a place among the best American novelists of his generation. He could certainly claim to be — to steal something A. J. Liebling once said of himself — faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. And we have to look back to Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to find such bitter criticism of American mores and concepts of sin. It’s a shame that it’s a body of work still so incompletely represented in English.

Note: Simenon’s English language publishers have long been fond of bundling his books together. As a result, there are a number of compilations worth looking for if you’re interested in reading any of these novels:

  • Violent Ends, comprising Belle and The Brothers Rico. Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
  • Tidal Wave, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Doubleday, 1954.
  • Danger Ahead, comprising Red Lights and The Watchmaker of Everton. Hamish Hamilton, 1955.
  • An American Omnibus, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, The Hitchhiker, and The Watchmaker of Everton. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

Apalache, by Paul Metcalf (1976)

Cover of Apalache by Paul Metcalf

I’m going against my principle of only writing about books that have been out of print for some time in offering this piece on Paul Metcalf’s Apalache as my contribution to the #1976Club. Although Apalache has been out of print as an individual volume since its publication in 1976, it’s available today as part of Volume I of the Collected Works of Paul Metcalf. On the other hand, that book and its two companion volumes — one of the worthiest products of American independent publishing — came out 25 years ago, so it’s at least no longer new.

I wanted to write about Apalache because, though his work may be in print, he’s perhaps the most neglected major American writer of the late 20th Century. And he’s certainly the first writer I started to follow devotedly. In looking through my collection of Metcalf’s works — books that have been in storage since 2001, when my wife and I thought we were moving to Europe for just three years — I came across a letter from 1981 in which Metcalf graciously thanked me for what was probably a gushing fan’s note.

My collection of books by Paul Metcalf
My collection of books by Paul Metcalf.

Looking at this stack, I also realize that it was assembled at some effort over the course of a decade or more. These books all predate Amazon and online bookshopping. I think I would open my local library’s latest copy of Books in Print, flip to the Ms, and scan to see if there was anything new from Metcalf. Although I found a receipt from Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue back in 1982 in Apalache, I’m pretty sure I bought the rest by writing to the publishers and enclosing checks to cover purchase and postage.

Most of Metcalf’s major works — Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), The Middle Passage Both (1982) — were published by the Jargon Society, the eclectic independent press run by his friend and Black Mountain College classmate, the poet Jonathan Williams. Williams was not a prolific publisher, but he was a master book designer and meticulous printer and all of the above are beautiful books in their own ways. Apalache was published by the Turtle Island Foundation in Berkeley (certainly why I was able to find it at Moe’s), and though a good-looking piece of work, not quite on the level of the Jargon Society books.

Metcalf put a book designer to the test. His style, at least from Genoa on — constantly draws upon the range of possibilities of then-current typesetting. Metcalf himself always wrote on a manual typewriting, but he never wanted to stay within conventions of font, paragraph, and line. He may have overtaxed the capabilities of Turtle Island’s designer, Clifford Burke. After receiving the manuscript, he called the writer and asked Metcalf to record a reading of the book so that he had a clearer idea of what the writer had in mind.

Apalache weaves together hundreds of excerpts from numerous sources ranging from Native American myths to the journals of early European explorers to scientific texts and newspaper articles. Metcalf’s first book Will West (1956) followed, for the most part, the pattern of a traditional prose narrative. By Genoa, however, his own words began to recede, changing from the substance of the text to the binding agent, the lead in a stained-glass window or the mortar in a mosaic. In his introduction to the 2015 edition of Genoa, novelist Rick Moody described Metcalf’s style as a “helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and its open-ended grammatical structures, sentences that are sometimes picked up later and sometimes not.”

Metcalf later said that he decided to take a different direction in his writing as he began to work on Genoa in the early 1960s. He was responding, he said, to the sense “that the old-fashioned novel — pure fiction — had played itself out, that it must be refreshed, revivified, by the incontrovertible force of facts.” Those facts, for Metcalf, were the most precious ingredients. He spent months, sometimes years, mining them from countless volumes he found in libraries all over the Northeast. As his friend Guy Davenport once wrote, “Paul Metcalf is a great reader…. Metcalf’s reading is to find things which he puts together in patterns. Such was the working method of Plutarch, Montaigne, Burton, all of whose books are new contexts for other voices.”

An excerpt from "Shick Shock" published as a broadsheet
An excerpt from "Shick Shock" published as a broadsheet.

Metcalf then pieced these together, sometimes jamming texts into a seamless amalgam, sometimes leaving the original intact, occasionally linking pieces with his own words. From these sections he constructed the overall work based on a design — and an underlying message — that he saw on almost an architectural level. One critic has called Metcalf’s style architectonic, and the link to the geological term tectonic has particular significance in Metcalf’s case. His vision of history in Apalache reaches all the way back to the formation of the features of the North American landscape. The final passages in “Bash-Bish,” the first section of the book, invokes a litany of geologic terms: moraines, drumlins, podzols, eskers, monadnocks. He calls Appalachia the “resistant relic of metamorphosis” (his own words), that metamorphosis being the emergence of the continent from the time when “the earth an ocean. the earth ocean.”

Davenport argued that “Metcalf represents our most radical shift in the form of narrative.” Michael Davidson invented a new term, palimtextual, to describe the kind of work that Metcalf created, in which original source texts formed such an integral part of the overall work’s substance. George Butterick described it as “an eco-system of texts.” And yet there is a familiar literary pattern underlying Apalache: the tragedy.

Apalache is an epic tragedy of the loss of the Eden that North America represented when Europeans began to explore and colonize. In “Bash-Bish,” the first of the eight major sections that comprise Apalache, Metcalf starts with English explorers recounting the fact that they smelled the land before they even saw it. Then, as they land and explore, he moves along with them as they note the lushness and variety of trees, plants, features. And their first encounters with Native Americans and the odd names they give to places: “chaubuqueduck, messatsoosec … twada-alahala … machaquamagansett … the kenogamishish … connoharriegoharriee….”

Then, in “The Feare in Ye Buttocks,” we shift forward to explorations of the interior — the Saint Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi — the hardships (starvation, disease, attacks by natives), and the first clashes. He takes the section’s title from the journals of Peter Esprit Radisson, recalling the desperation that set in on long excursions by canoe into what are now parts of Quebec and Ontario:

A strange thing when victualls are wanting, worke whole nights and dayes, lye down on the bare ground and not allwayes that hap, the breech in the water, the feare in ye buttocks, to have the belly empty, the weariness in the bones and drowsiness of ye body by the bad weather that you are to suffer, having nothing to keep you from such calamity.

The dramatic mid-point of the narrative comes in section three, “South →.” Metcalf assembles an abbreviated account of Roger Williams, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and forced to head south to what is now Rhode Island, where he founds the Providence Plantations. Williams encouraged a spirit of cooperation and co-habitation with the native Narragansett people that contrasts with the attitudes of the Massachusetts Puritans — and represented, for Metcalf, the one chance America had of a common stewardship of the land.

Unfortunately, as today’s American historians are demonstrating with increasing effectiveness (and controversy), much of this land’s history is colored by discrimination, hatred, exploitation, and violence. The next few sections offer depressing examples. In “Telemaque,” Metcalf runs parallel narratives — literally — of Denmark Vesey, a freed slave who attempted to organize an armed takeover of Charleston, South Carolina in 1822; and of Robert Williams, a North Carolina organizer who argued for the right of blacks to defend themselves against white violence with weapons, if necessary. Betrayed by one of his fellow conspirators, Vesey was hanged along with five other men. Railroaded in his hometown of Monroe, Williams eventually fled to Cuba, and later China, before returning to the US in 1970. The charges against him were dropped soon after he appeared at the Monroe courthouse.

The parallel texts in "Telemaque" from Apalache
The parallel texts of “Telemaque” in Apalache

The most damning passage, however, is in the section titled “Okefenokee.” Metcalf gives us a snatch of the genealogy of the Thrifts, a family that settled near the Georgia swamp, then howls across the following pages in large print, one word per page:

Hard Thrift logged the trembling earth.

Section six, “Shick Shock,” reconstructs America’s Genesis. “Where the sun sleeps, our fathers came thence.” Metcalf traces, using a combination of scientific/archaeological accounts, excerpts from Creek, Delaware, Iroquois, and other Native American myths, and passages from the Vinland Saga and the journal of Arthur Barlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh’s co-captain on the first Roanoke expedition, how the two peoples came into the land. How they came into contact he saves for the final two sections, “Cocoanut Indians” and “Beothuk.”

The last takes its name from the natives encountered by Sebastian Cabot and the first white settlers of Newfoundland. The Beothuk are probably responsible for the stereotype of the “red Indian,” as they had the habit of coloring their faces with red ochre pigment. Small in number, the Beothuk were considered “ghost people” by other tribes for their ability to disappear into the woods. This skill was not enough, however, to protect them from the white hunters and fishermen, who not only tended to shoot them on sight but then to brag of such acts as if of great accomplishments.

Despite the fact that consecutive colony governors banned such killings as “inhuman barbarity,” the practice continued. By 1770, Captain George Cartwright, whose report Metcalf quotes, wrote grimly,

It will be expected by the British reader that a work on Newfoundland should afford some insight into the destiny of the Beothuk Indian; but I am sorry to say, I cannot satisfy this expectation; none have been seen of late even by the trappers and hunters, by the Micmaics, or by the Esquimaux of Labrador; and, unless they are in the fastnesses of the centre of the island, the race has emigrated, or become extinct.

Metcalf closes with a phrase from one of the origin myths he used in “Shick Shock”: “… they feared a powerful monster, who was to appear from the sea.”

Paul Metcalf outside his writing cabin in the early 1970s.
Paul Metcalf outside his writing cabin in the early 1970s.

Metcalf never used a computer. Reading Apalache, I took generous advantage of the capabilities of search engines to track down passages in the book to their source texts. The text contents search feature of the Internet Archive was a particularly useful tool. One benefit of these searches was to see the quoted passages in context. In many cases, reading the longer text from which Metcalf took a few sentences, or even just a phrase, amplified the power of Metcalf’s mosaic. It gave me a chance to see the work, if you will, though Metcalf’s eyes, to understand what he chose to include and what to leave out. If ever Apalache gets the serious annotation it deserves, I think more readers will be able to see this book for the American classic I think it is.

In a eulogy he published in Rain Taxi, Allan Kornblum wrote that Paul Metcalf had “a scope of historical vision and a depth of compassion that I found breathtaking.” I find that last phrase key to appreciating Metcalf’s work. Yes, it is densely historical, and as he said himself, full of “the incontrovertible force of facts.”

But those who knew the man are uniform in their praise of his generosity, curiosity, and gentleness. Metcalf and his wife Nancy spent most of their lives in a secluded piece of land outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts, living in a rough wooden house with few conveniences. Day after day, when he wasn’t in a library, Metcalf retired to a small cabin on the property where he worked on his books. He was, in some ways, a more authentic Thoreau than Henry David himself, who relied on his mother to bring him supplies during his year of seclusion at Walden Pond.

With all my searching for the sources in Apalache, what I ultimately took away from the book was a deep sense of sadness. It is, in its unique way, the Great American Novel — if you accept that the Great American story is that of the destruction of Eden and its inhabitants and their replacement by a spirit of exploitation enforced through violence. I defy anyone to read “Beothuk” and not feel that you’re leaving part of your heart behind.

Metcalf once told Dalkey Archives founder John O’Brien that his daughter — who rarely read her father’s work — came to him after finishing Apalache and said, “I’ve learned something: you’re a closet romantic.” “Do you know what this book is?” she teased him. “No, what is it?” he replied. “It’s a love poem,” she answered. “You’re in love with North America.” Yet it’s love poem free of all illusions about the beloved. Metcalf looks upon the continent with wonder at its beauty and power — and horror at the crimes to be witnessed wherever one looks in its history.

Forty years ago, I was a noisy and enthusiastic young fan of Paul Metcalf’s work. Now, I am simply in quiet awe.


Apalache, by Paul Metcalf
Berkeley, California: The Turtle Island Foundation, 1976

Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya (1972)

Cover of the first edition of Going Under by Lydia Chukovskaya

Going Under is a story of physical comfort and emotional and psychological suffering. Nina Sergeyevna, a translator, arrives at Litvinovka, a writer’s retreat somewhere outside Leningrad, for a few weeks’ state-approved rest in the middle of winter. She’s provided with three meals a day, the freedom to walk through the neighboring countryside and forest, and, most importantly, time to think and write in her room. This last is most precious of all because, like many Soviet city dwellers, she has to share a communal apartment in which privacy is essential unknown.

Yet she will find nothing to shelter her from the pain of her memories. She’s decided to take advantage of this time to “go under.” Going under means to immerse herself in the past — specifically, into the time of Stalin’s purges and show trials of the late 1930s, when her husband Alyosha was arrested and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.

Since Alyosha’s arrest, Nina has no contact with him. Like other women whose husbands and sons were sucked into the vortex of the Soviet penal system, she’s stood in line for months outside the prison where he’s supposed to have been taken, to ask of his whereabouts. The answers she was given were vague and always shifting. “There are no foundations for a review of the case.” “When he serves out his sentence, he will write to you himself.” “Maybe he’s alive, maybe dead. How would I know?” Finally, she’s told that he’s been sentenced to a special camp for “ten years without right of correspondence.”

It’s now been over twelve years. There’s been nothing. Many nights, Nina finds herself dreaming of Alyosha in prison, in a labor camp, being interrogated, sometimes even being executed. The uncertainty eats away at her psyche.

She wants to put down her thoughts to restore the sense of closeness with her husband that’s grown weak and thin over the years: “The book was me, the sinking of my heart, my memories, which nobody could see…. In creating it, Alyosha’s voice … would permeate” its reader’s soul. Nina is haunted in particular by the thought of his death. “What was his last moment like? How had they turned a living man into a dead man? … And where was his grave? What was the last thing he had seen as life abandoned him?”

Arriving at the retreat with Nina is Bilibin, a writer of comic stories who’s been rehabilitated as a member of the Writers’ Union after serving a term in the gulag. She is desperate to speak with him: “Until now I had never met anyone who had come from there — from a concentration camp.” Bilibin is flattered by Nina’s attention but wary of her questions. He suffers from angina; his heart is weak from the strain of his years in camp.

Finally, however, he reveals the truth:

He was never taken anywhere, he had never suffered from cattle-trucks or dogs. Everything was over long before that. According to Nikolai Aleksandrovich, “ten years without right of correspondence” simply meant execution by firing squad. To avoid repeating at the windows “executed”, “executed”, and so on that there should be no howling and crying in the queue.

Bilibin also confides that he is working on his own account, a book about the things he has seen in the camps. Nina is thrilled to have an ally, and solicitous of Bilibin’s fragile health, especially after he suffers a mild heart attack. As their time nears its end, Bilibin modestly offers his manuscript to Nina.

At first, she read with great excitement. “Yes, his writing was more powerful than his conversation.” Though Bilibin’s story is set in a mine, Nina recognizes some of the men from the camps he’s told her about. Perhaps it’s an allegory to avoid the censors. As she reads on, however, she realizes that Bilibin has written nothing more than a conventional piece of socialist realism: earnest workers, conscientious supervisors, a happy collective. “You’re a coward. No, you’re worse, you’re a false witness.” “Why did you not have the decency to remain silent,” she asks.

For Lydia Chukovskaya, there were only two legitimate choices for Soviet writers: tell the truth or remain silent. Her greatest scorn was for those who tried to follow a compliant middle way and appease the authorities. Going Under is really Chukovskaya’s own story, one she wrote in 1949 after learning of the fate of her own husband.

Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.
Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.

The daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a children’s writer who was perhaps the best-known and most beloved literary figure inside the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya had married a Jewish physicist and mathematician, Matvei Bronstein, in the mid-1930s. Bronstein and Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova’s son, were arrested. Gumilyov was set to a labor camp. Bronstein in all likelihood never made it out of basement of the NKVD’s building in Leningrad.

Chukovskaya and Akhmatova stood in the same lines described by Nina Sergeyevna in Going Under, the lines in the introduction to Akhmatova’s great poem “Requiem”:

In the black years of ezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the prison lines. One day someone recognized me. Then, a woman with blue lips who stood behind me woke up from the trance into which we all fell and whispered in my ear: “And this, can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.” And then something like a smile glimmered on what once had been her face.

The two women became close friends and over the subsequent years Chukovskaya took notes of their almost daily conversations, note that were later published as The Akhmatova Journals, only one of whose three volumes has been translated into English.

In the decades after her husband’s arrest, Chukovskaya became one of the most vocal critics within the Soviet system. She supported Pasternak when he fell out of Stalin’s favor. She wrote in support of Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuri Daniel when they were arrested and tried in the 1960s and in support of Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Sakharov when they were persecuted. She was a friend of Solzhenitsyn and let him hide in her flat for a time before he was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. She was herself expelled from the Writers’ Union soon after.

Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.
Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.

She even had the courage to sue her publishers after they balked at publishing Sofia Petrovna, her short novel about a mother whose son is arrested during the purge. Although the book was accepted for publication in 1962, when it came time to be released in 1963 after Khruschev’s fall from power, the Soviet authorities banned it. Chukovskaya argued that her publishers were in breach of contract. Her publishers alleged that the book was not in the public interest, to which she responded,

Literature must illuminate what happened in 1937 in a profound way and from every angle. But this is beyond the powers of a single work. Only our literature as a whole can do that. And that is why we must not stop printing Solzhenitsyn. On the contrary, many more books about that time need to be printed, including my novel.

Amazingly, the court found in Chukovskaya’s favor and ruled the publisher had to pay her the outstanding share of the royalties. A samizdat copy of Sofia Petrovna was smuggled out and published in Paris as The Deserted House. It was not until 1988 that the book was published in the Soviet Union.

She once told an American reporter that she felt compelled to speak out against injustice in the Soviet system: “If I don’t do it, I can’t write about the things that matter. Until I pull this arrow out of my breast, I can think of nothing else!” Chukovskaya had great faith in the future. When she was expelled from the Writers’ Union, she responded in a public letter,

Always, when performing acts like this, you have forgotten — and you are now forgetting — that you control only the present and to some extent the past. There is still another court with jurisdiction over the past and the future: the history of literature.

What do they do — those you have expelled? Write books. After all, even prisoners have written books, and are writing them. And what will you do? Write resolutions.

Like Sofia Petrovna, Going Under was published in the West decades before it came out in Russia. The Chekhov Publishing Corporation released the book in Russian in the US in 1972 and an English translation by Peter M. Weston came out from Barrie &Jenkins the same year.

Reviewing the book for The New Statesman, Germaine Greer wrote, “Chukovskaya’s calm prose shakes the heart with grief and outrage for one of the greater man-made calamities of our time.” It was, she concluded, “a very important book indeed.” Valentin Terra argued that Going Under was “artistically neater, tighter, and more subtle” than Sofia Petrovna.

Anatole Broyard, the New York Times’ reviewer, however, savaged the book. He snarked that Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiastic blurb for the cover of the US edition “evades literary evaluation, either by accident or design.” Going Under, he wrote, was “dull, stodgy, amateurish and almost wholly bereft of ideas.” He was so sure of himself that he even ventured to say, “while I have not read The Deserted House I am convinced, in my heart, that it cannot have been a good book.”

Fortunately, the “history of literature” that Chukovskaya believed in has proved a better judge than Broyard. Although the book has never been reissued in English, it’s been translated into numerous languages. The book’s page on GoodReads includes positive reviews from readers in Germany, Spain, Finland, Latvia, and Armenia.

Lydia Chukovskaya died in February 1996. She was 89 and had lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union. Her body was buried in the cemetery at the writer’s colony of Peredelkino, not far from the grave of Boris Pasternak.


Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Peter M. Weston
London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972

It’s a Great War! by Mary Lee (1929)

Cover for US edition of It's a Great War!

I’ve been collecting neglected books for decades and writing about them here for over 15 years and I still get surprised by books I’ve never heard of. I first came across a mention of It’s a Great War! in a 1935 newspaper article reporting on a talk about novels of World War One. The speaker, a professor at an Illinois university, singled it out as one of the “truest, most powerful” books written about the war and noteworthy for having been written by a woman: Mary Lee.

I quickly Googled it and was stunned to learn that Robert Lovett, one of the three judges for the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, considered it that year’s best book: “It is the biggest piece of fiction I have read, and comes nearest to satisfying the last conditions of which I was notified, i.e., ‘preferably a novel presenting the whole atmosphere of American life.’” Lovett ended up supporting the decision to award the prize to Oliver La Farge’s novel of Navaho life, Laughing Boy. It was not the only award Lee was short-changed on.

Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.
Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.

Daughter of an old Boston Brahmin family (she once informed a Boston College student that the Lees arrived in Boston two hundred years before the College), Lee was caught up in the fervor that accompanied America’s decision to enter the war in 1917. A recent graduate from Radcliffe College, she responded to an Army call for women to serve in administrative positions and sailed for France in the fall of that year as part of the staff of a field hospital. The hospital deployed near Bordeaux and Lee worked there for some months before being enticed to take a secretarial job with an Army Air Corps office in Paris. Then, growing uncomfortable with the relatively luxurious conditions in Paris, she joined the YMCA and took a post running a field canteen for an aviation unit near the front. She decided to stay on after the Armistice and set up and ran several canteens serving American Army units in occupied Germany, returning home to Massachusetts in late 1919.

Lee later said she wrote the book to tell women the truth about the war. “They think that war is a pure, wonderful crusade,” she told reporter Eleanor Early. “Fine young men and women, fighting for Justice…. If people really knew what it was like — if women knew –.” Following her own experiences with few fictional variations, her story took 200,00 words to tell. And when she finished it, she found no one interested in publishing it. So she put the manuscript on the shelf.

Then, in 1928, to mark the tenth anniversary of Armistice Day, Houghton Mifflin and the American Legion sponsored a contest offering $25,000 for the best novel about the war. Lee retyped the manuscript, leaving off her name as the rules required, and submitted it.

Most of the contest judges — all of the civilian judges, that is — considered Lee’s novel by far the best of the candidates. Retired Major General James Harbord, Pershing’s head of supply at the war’s end, however, thought the book “unseemly” in its content and inappropriate for an award sponsored by the Legion. Unwilling to go against the general, the other four judges agreed to a compromise and split the award between Lee and William T. Scanlon, who’d submitted a more conventional novel about combat during the battle of Belleau Wood, God Have Mercy on Us!. Scanlon and Lee each took home $12,500.

Rank and file Legionnaires objected to this compromise. Or rather, they objected to Lee’s selection. Ten years after the fact, veterans appeared, like General Harbord, to chafe at Lee’s mention of such unheroic aspects of the doughboys’ time overseas as prophylactic stations, drunkenness, and the abandonment of children they fathered with French women. Several Legionnaire posts, including one near her hometown of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts wrote letters demanding she forfeit the award, criticizing the book for its “frivolity”.

Ad for syndicated version of It's a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.
Ad for syndicated version of It’s a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.

Ironically, this was exactly the sort of thing Lee intended to document. “War is not a romance,” she protested. “As long as romances are fabricated about war, it will remain a noble, worthy, beautiful adventure for youth. As long as war is made romantic, it will go on.”

Nevertheless, there is a certain air of romance in the early chapters of It’s a Great War!. Anne Wentworth, Lee’s fictional counterpart, departs for France, she is full of idealism: “Wasn’t it a noble gesture…? They were starting out to make the world safe again…. This was a War to End War, –”

That idealism begins to fade as soon as her ship docks in Le Havre. There, all along the quai, lie stretchers with the British casualties being loaded onto a transport headed for England. “There was nowhere you couldn’t hear them…. See them…. Logs of wood, going slowly, one after another.”

And the reality of the women’s quarters at the hospital in Bordeaux are not the sort of thing mentioned in the recruitment literature: “Black fleas hopped…. Women taking clothes off. Hideous underwear. Fat legs and thin ones. Hairs…. How could anyone ever choose to look at women’s bare limbs…?” The expression “It’s a great war!” quickly turns from enthusiasm into sarcasm. It becomes a running joke. Anytime conditions are lousy, supplies are short, or Army bureaucracy infuriatingly pig-headed, someone will quip, “It’s a great war!”

Even more disheartening is Anne’s realization that she, a bright, intelligent young woman, is just as much a faceless number expected to keep quiet and follow orders as any soldier. “They thought you couldn’t be trusted, did they…. Sent you out here, fed you on horse meat, and then refused to trust you.” Though she enjoys a brief reunion with her brother, a lieutenant serving with an infantry unit, the hospital proves too dreary and too dull, being too far from the front. When Anne is offered a position with an Air Corps staff office in Paris, she jumps at the opportunity.

Paris seems a different world after the rural isolation of the field hospital. “Dresses, in shop windows, — soft and colored…. Through the glass, handkerchiefs, diaphanous, frail things with colored borders….” In the staff office, officers in smartly tailored uniforms and shining Sam Browne belts and boots rush in and out of meetings, trying to obtain airplanes from the French, supplies from America, and most importantly, attention from Pershing’s staff. Anne stays at the home of a French noblewoman, is invited out to restaurants and the Opéra Comique, goes for rides into the country in a general’s staff car.

There are occasional German air raids to dispel the illusion, of course. “Men, up there, in the darkness, trying to kill you…. Others trying to kill them….” Lee reminds us that air warfare was a grim novelty back then: “The sky, no longer an empty place you didn’t have to think of…. Human beings, skimming through the great dome….” She stoops to pick up a piece of shrapnel that falls at her feet. Her friend quickly ushers her under the arch of a bridge for safety.

Ad for It's a Great War! from the Guardian.
Ad for It’s a Great War! from the Guardian.

The samples I’ve offered so far demonstrate an aspect of Lee’s prose that many found hard to take. One British reviewer compared the experience of reading It’s a Great War! to “riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” “A book about war cannot move smoothly, swiftly,” Lee later countered. “War moves in jerks.”

Now that we have seen many more writers work in such fragmented, impressionistic prose (Céline most obviously comes to mind), however, we should not be put off by Lee’s style. Instead, we should recognize the mastery with which she uses it to capture the fragmentary nature of intense experiences. This excerpt, describing Anne’s first flight in an airplane, seems a perfect example of what makes this book as palpable, as immediate, as some of the finest scenes in Tolstoy:

She held her breath, mouth open. The bumping earth, falling away below you…. Falling, falling…. Wind, filling your mouth, blowing furiously against you…. But you weren’t moving…. Moving means things that rush past…. Here there was nothing…. Nothing but that furious, high wind…. And the old earth, a purple map below there, sinking, sinking…. The great wing tipping, tipping…. You’d fall out. A great, swirling dip, — the earth going from one wing to the other, — God, you were upside down…. Breathless…. The world whirling…. Down, down….

As the fall of 1918 approaches, Anne grows concerned about her brother, whose unit fought in the battle of Château-Thierry. She scans casualty reports and asks anyone she meets who’s been to the front, but it is only a month later that she receives a letter from a nurse she knows: “The regiment was frightfully shot to pieces, but no one will be a greater loss than Geoffrey.”

Her brother’s death causes Anne to question the value of her work in comfortable Paris, and she decides to take a post with the YMCA where she can serve close to the front. The work seems trivial — every evening, she cooks up great batches of cocoa and bread and butter that she serves up to the soldiers and airmen who come into her canteen. It seems “like throwing things into a bottomless pit.” Yet she soon learns of its importance for morale — and health. Her little YMCA cafe provides the men with an alternative to getting drunk, sleeping with prostitutes, or simply lying in their bunk going mad with boredom.

And she gives the men an illusion of home. “Men will tell you that you remind them of their wife,” her first supervisor cautions her. In most cases, this is just a harmless flirtation. But Anne learns not to take her safety for granted. Lee recounts a scene in which Anne walks to her quarters late one night after closing the canteen. She spots a drunk American soldier staggering out of an estaminet. The man begins to follow her down the dark street. Though Lee doesn’t use the word, the possibility of being raped takes over Anne’s thoughts and she rushes in fear to the safety of her doorway.

Feature story by Eleanor Early on It's a Great War
Feature story by Eleanor Early on It’s a Great War!.

Among the many aspects of this book that impressed me was Lee’s candor in dealing with the realities of sex and violence in war. She not only mentions the presence of brothels near the front and the prophylactic stations run by the Army to deal with the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the number of children fathered by soldiers who seduced local women. “I’d like to see people start saying, ‘Johnny, this is a photography of the French girl your father had an affair with,'” she later told Evelyn Early.

She also writes of the threat of sexual assault that always hovered around any woman serving around large numbers of men. At one of her posts in occupied Germany, several junior officers conspire to ensure that Anne is never left alone with their unit commander, a colonel they recognize as a violent sexual predator. “This town’s no place for a decent woman,” one warns her, encouraging her to seek a different posting.

A book of over 600 pages can pack in a lot of detail, and I must pass over many for the sake of brevity, but the range of material Lee covers in this book is extraordinary. In some ways, the variety of her postings during and after the war exposed her to more than any typical soldier would have seen. It’s a Great War! may be the first novel to have captured one of the realities of 20th Century warfare: namely, that much of the activity in war has little to do with actual combat: “For every day at the front, three or four were spent at the rear,” she later remarked. “For every man at the front, seven or eight were at the rear.” She writes of the impact of the influenza pandemic, of seeing more soldiers buried from the flu than from wounds. And she devotes over a hundred pages to Anne’s time during the US occupation of the Rhineland following the Armistice, an operation few Americans today are aware of.

And she records the difficulties faced by those who return home after months or years away. When the train pulls into her hometown’s station, Anne is startled to realize that it was “entirely unchanged.” “Stations,” she thinks, recalling all those she saw in her journeys around wartime France (and post-war Germany), “were places with great holes blown in plaster, and roofs half fallen off.” Serving “Mr. Wilson’s cause” in the war, she also lost contact with the fundamental motivators of peacetime life: “Money. We forgot in France how life revolves round money.”

Her many months living in tents, working with make-shift cafes, walking miles from villages to encampments, made her wary of spending her days sitting in some office. “God, Life must have fresh air, and movement in it, — you mustn’t get tied to jobs that kept you indoors,” she thinks as she flees an interview at an insurance firm.

In her first months home, Anne struggles to adapt to these forces. Without the relentless pressure of her daily tasks serving the troops, she begins to suffer anxiety attacks — what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. She considers seeking medical advice — a Boston doctor she knew from the hospital in Bordeaux. But as she approaches his door, the grim prospect of what that age could offer in the way of psychological treatment chills her. “This thing might mean two years of sagging…. Limping…. Sanitariums…. Two years of being pitied…. Spilling your soul….” Anne turns around. “Soul, still her own, — thank God. Unspilled.”

The book ends with the election of Harding — and the mass rejection of those Wilsonian ideals she so believed in. If her future remains unclear, she has at least come to understand that there was no more chain of command to decide it for her.

Mary Lee in 1930.
Mary Lee in 1930.

Like Anne, Mary Lee rejected office work and the possibility of marriage to return to Radcliffe and take her master’s degree. She spent several years as a reporter for the New York Evening Post, one of the few women then on its staff, then went out at a freelancer for the New York Times and others, covering everything from society balls to sports events to a stint in Italy and Greece. Sometime during this period, she also wrote — and failed to interest publishers in — this novel.

By the time Lee won the American Legion contest and managed to get the book published, she appears to have settled back in her hometown of Chestnut Hill, living in her parents’ home. Though she did write another book, a history of Chestnut Hill, in the mid-1930s, she seems have devoted herself mostly to charitable causes, such as a fund to help Greek refugees during World War Two. Over forty years after It’s a Great War! was published, a reporter from the Boston College campus paper found her busy supervising a handyman working on her family home, which was now a rooming house for graduate students. She was reluctant to talk much about herself and refused to have her picture taken. “It seemed she had spent many of her productive years caring for her aging mother,” the reporter wrote. “Her life had grown quiet.” She died at the age of 90 in 1982, having left her home in Chestnut Hill only in her final months due to ill health.

Though Lee had to share the American Legion-Houghton Mifflin award, It’s a Great War! received considerable publicity. Most major US papers and all the national English papers mentioned and/or reviewed the book. As the sample below shows, most reviews were enthusiastic and a few agreed with the Illinois professor that it was one of the best, if not THE best, American novel about the war published until then. Of the reviewers who disliked the book, most were put off by the then-novelty of Lee’s prose style. After that, the most common criticism was that the book was too long and particularly that the final section, about Anne’s adjustments to peacetime life, were extraneous. Personally, I think the final section is one of the book’s best parts in that it’s one of the earliest examples of the kind of challenges we’re now accustomed to associate with the experiences of returning veterans.

It’s a Great War! sold well enough that both Houghton Mifflin and the English publisher George Allen & Unwin ran second impressions and the book was syndicated in abbreviated form in a number of US newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner. The American Legion’s backlash against Lee only proved once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Legionnaires’ distaste for the book piqued book buyers’ interest and improved its sales.

The book’s hold on the attention of both readers and critics was brief, however. It’s never been reissued and is rarely mentioned in discussions of First World War literary. I suspect that Paul Fussell, whose The Great War and Modern Memory remains the best-known survey of literature from the war, wasn’t even aware of it. In the dozen-plus studies of literature and women’s role in the war published in the last twenty years that even mention the book, most give it no more than a sentence or two.

The one exception is Stephen Trout’s 2010 book On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941. Trout focuses on the American Legion’s attempts to dismiss It’s a Great War! and positions this response in a cultural context. “The novel’s avalanche of details and modernist fragmentation,” he argues “suggests disconcertingly that the war had no center of meaning — the last thing that an organization built around collective memory wished to hear.” His literary judgment, though, is qualified: “For a World War I scholar, her text offers a treasure trove of details that few other writers bothered to recovered. However, as a novel, it is rough going.”

Yet It’s a Great War! is no longer and no more detail-filled than Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth. (Brittain, coincidentally, was perhaps Lee’s most vocal defender against English critics.) And its style is certainly far more accessible to today’s readers, accustomed to sound-bite driven media. I was also reminded many times of another modernist, immersive masterpiece that was being published around the same time: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which I covered at length back in 2016.

While Pilgrimage has held its place in literary history, it’s suffered in terms of readership from its length and relative obscurity. Although I personally consider Pilgrimage far more interesting and accessible than Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one in a hundred people who know Proust’s work are even aware that Richardson’s exists. To compare Testament of Youth and It’s a Great War! in the same way is laughable: hundreds of thousands or millions have seen the recent film version of Brittain’s book; for Mary Lee’s book, there are … well, me, a few First World War specialists — and now you.

American literature has its share of one-book wonders. John Leggett’s fine book Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies deal with two post-World War Two examples, Ross Lockridge of Raintree County and Thomas Heggen of Mister Roberts. In many cases, these authors’ lives and careers flame out early and destructively. Mary Lee, on the other hand, seems to have this one book burning to be written and by the time it finally came out, had already decided — or been forced by family circumstances — to focus on other things. Whether those things represented a compromise or a cause, only she could have said. But It’s a Great War! deserves as much as Raintree County and Mister Roberts to be remembered as a work of substance and importance. It may, arguably, be the best American novel to come out of the First World War.


Contemporary Reviews

  • “… the book conveys the sense of war’s horrible waste, its aimless, blundering stupidity, as powerfully as any novel I can recall, with the single exception of Remarque’s great book [All Quiet on the Western Front]. As an indictment of everything that war means it stands in the front rank.”
    — Bruce Catton, syndicated reviewer

  • “Those who can accustom themselves to the staccato style of the authoress, with her herky phrases, will realise that the novel is a sincere attempt to present the uncensored truth. Necessarily this is not all, or mostly, attractice. It treats of the obscenities of billet life, the contrasts between gay life in Paris and the misery and despair in the fighting lines, the disillusionments leading to an embittering cynicism.”
    The Age, Melbourne, Australia

  • “It would be unbecoming in us to defend American soldiers against the humble opinion which Miss Lee formed of much of their conduct. But when it comes about that she or her heroine pretends that the British Army lacked the services and the solace of genteel womanhood, that the young women of France sat with idle fingers, we dare to say that she talks through her hat. As Count Schuksen might put it, in the politest manner in the world, the damned impudence of such pretenses, based on so trivial an experience, takes our breath away.”
    The Morning Post, London

  • “Staccato in style, these impressions make reading somewhat of a nervous strain. At the end, however, they piece into a kaleidoscopic design which service men and women will recognize at once as war in its infinite detail.”
    — Maxwell Benson, syndicated reviewer

  • “It seems to me one of the really good books that have come out of the war. It makes absorbing reading, and what a glorious lot of bunk-exploding goes on in its half a thousand pages.”
    — Herschel Brickell, New York Herald Tribune

  • “It gives a wider view of the work back of the front than any book so far written. The style is so unique that it literally carries the reader through a moving picture of the war behind the lines…. The reader is made to realize what the service man had to undergo. He is conscious of the reason why so many men do not and will not talk of their experiences ‘over there’.”
    — Barend Beek, Miami News

  • “Frankly speaking, It’s a Great War! proved a vast disappointment. After reading the first few chapters the story, as a whole, becomes dull and monotonous. It was recommended to us with great gusto, and perhaps that is why we didn’t like it.”
    The Burlington (Vermont) Daily News

  • “We recommend this book to you as the greatest and frankest panoramic view of the war that has yet been published, not even excepting All Quiet on the Western Front. If you were in the war, you will sigh with relief at reading the truth. If you were not an active part of the army in France and at the front, you will probably be very much hurt at the picture Miss Lee paints — hurt and rebellious and incredulous, because you won’t believe what your read…. Get your courage up and procure the book from somewhere. You will be sorry all your life if you miss it.”
    — Eleanor Evans Wing, Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent

  • It’s a Great War! is a long book — over 500 pages [the UK edition was 690] — but it is easy reading. Miss Lee has hit upon a style that perfectly fits her material — disjointed, staccato sentences for facts that presented themselves more of less disjointedly, in flashes…. It is a fine book that leaves one much enlightened and with much food for reflection.”
    Philadelphia Inquirer

  • “In a staccato and rather confused style Miss Lee has managed to convey something of the gigantic bewilderment of those days in France, the seamy and sordid and disillusioning side of war, the bitterness and waste of life. She relies for her effect upon the diligent piling up of instantaneous and detached impressions.’ It is almost as if she had attempted a literal rendition of those vivid and disordered days. It’s a Great War is a powerful book, but it is too amorphous to be accounted a literary masterpiece.”
    The Bookman (US)

  • “By far the majority of these six hundred and ninety pages are written in that manner, giving the reader the impression of riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.”
    The Bookman (UK)

  • “[Lee] writes in the historic present participle … she, writing … a style, very irritating … using jerks and dots…. Mr. Wyndham Lewis says somewhere that this is done by feminine types who wish to appear virile.”
    Nation and Athenaeum

  • “I may as well say at the outset that it is one of the most irritating books I have ever read through to a tedious end. The author is a journalist, but she appears to have the vaguest grasp of the ordinary rules of rhythm in words, as well as of punctuation. Four dots appear to be the quota for each ejaculation. There must be ten million dots in this book….
    Every step of this long narrative of events is recorded in a series of ejaculations. Most carefully of all are are set down the coarsest of details the heroine observes during her enforced contact with soldiers….
    The whole book is an impertinence. To call it a novel is an impertinence. It is no more a novel than the columns of a sensational newspaper, slapped together, could be called a novel. As for the war — a little WAAC, swabbing canteen floors at Dover during an air raid, is as qualified to write about it.”
    — “Tobias Trott,” The Graphic (UK)
    [This and similar comments led Vera Brittain to write the following to the editors of Time and Tide: “Mary Lee’s gigantic novel, It’s a Great War!, seems to me to have been more unfairly treated by reviewers than any important book for a long time… I suggest, therefore, that women are not … bored with war-books, but that their, real interest has not yet been aroused. And it will not be aroused until a war-book is published which removes the impression that one sex only played an active part in war, and one sex only experienced its deepest emotions.”]

  • “In my judgment she has accomplished a masterpiece.
    In the last analysis the least part of war is the actual fighting.
    The great part of it is the effect it produces on the souls of those engaged in it.
    The former can be ably written by any little war correspondent sitting on a safe hilltop. The latter can only be written by one who has lived it and nearly died of it — whether that death be physical or spiritual.
    It is this latter and more important aspect of war with which Miss Lee deals; and in all the literature of the war which I have read — English, French, German — no one has succeeded better in recreating the gradual descent into hell which is the inevitable fate of the man who goes to war…. Miss Lee has been to hell. Because of it, every page of her book is the truth — terrible, heart-breaking, discouraging, if you like, but, so help me God, the truth!”
    — Hamilton Gibbs, letter to the New York Times


It’s a Great War!, by Mary Lee
New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1929
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1969)

Cover of Harvill Press edition of Southern Adventure by Konstantin Paustovsky

“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in the introduction to this, the fifth volume of his autobiography. “But I do not regret it,” he continues, and neither will the reader. Southern Adventure is easily the most exotic, the most magical chapter in Paustovsky’s life.

After a trip along the Russian coast of the Black Sea aboard the freighter Pestel (which concludes the previous volume, Years of Hope, Paustovsky awakened one morning “feeling on my face the warm palms of somebody’s hands. They smelt of mimosa.” The Pestel is anchored off Sukhum (now Sukhumi), the main port in what was then the Abkhazian Soviet Republic. The scents from the lush tropical vegetation on shore carried out to the ship …

A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.
A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.

… until they formed a tight ball and the air was compressed into a thick syrup; then they would untwine again into distinct and separate fibres and I would detect the breath of azalias, bay-trees, eucalyptus trees, oleanders, wisterias and many other flowers wonderful in appearance and colour.

The sensation stirs a childhood fantasy based in stories of the Arabian nights and jungle explorers and Paustovsky resolves to go ashore — not just to go, but to stay. As he quickly learns — in an experience repeated throughout this book — the nascent bureaucracy of this young Soviet republic is ruthless and absolute: there is no official way for him to leave the ship except under close supervision and for a matter of just an hour or two. On the other hand, the harshness of Soviet rules are also softened by the indolence and lackadaisical attitude of most officials in the Caucasus: “The old and the new were jumbled up together in the way things get jumbled up in a basket after a sharp jolt.” Soon, he is walking along the boulevards of Sukhum.

In Sukhum, as with the other ports along the now-Georgian Black Sea coast that Paustovsky visits in the course of the book, “It was difficult to grasp what century we were living in.” While Soviet-organized collectives, workers councils, and goverment functions attempted to institute a new regime, blood feuds still broke out between families and tribes, disputes were more often settled by elders than by courts, and bamboo shoots still sprung up overnight in even the busiest streets in town.

Despite having no money and no job, Paustovsky lucks into a conversation with an official of the Cooperative Union of Abkhazia in Sukhum — the Absouyz — who hires him as a secretary. “I was hellishly lucky in Sukhum,” he writes, and indeed his luck throughout his two years in the Caucasus is one of the magical elements of this volume.

Lake Amtkheli inthe Abkhazia region of Georgia.
Lake Amtkheli in the Abkhazian region of Georgia.

But the most magical element by far is Paustovsky’s evocation of the other worldly beauty of the Caucasian landscape, where coastal strips of palm trees and tropical flowers suddenly transformed into steep Alpine mountains. Early in the book, he and an odd assortment of temporary residents of Sukhum make an expedition to Lake Amkeli, formed by an earthquake just a couple of decades before. The lake seems to Paustovsky something out of a fairy tale book:

The crystal clarity of reflections in the water was so perfect that it was impossible to distinguish the reflection of the shores and mountains from the real shores and mountains.

It was as if there were two Caucasuses around us. One of them rose up to the sky above, and the other went down into the shining abyss beneath our feet. Identical feathery clouds slowly moved in the sky and along the bottom of the abyss.

Every time I threw my line and sinker into the lake I shattered the ideal fusion of this world.

Soon, however, he grows restless and talks his way onto a ship heading further south, to the port of Batum. Here, to the fragrances of Sukhum are added the cacophony of a city closer in spirit to the Middle East than to Russia:

Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.
Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.

… in Batum, particularly in the Turkish bazaar, known as Nuri, you were deafened with a whole kaleidoscope of sounds — from the bleating of sheep to the desperate cries of maize sellers: ‘Hot maize!’; from the plaintive moans of a muezzin on the top of a near-by mosque to the squeaking of pipes out of the windows of dukhans and the tearful singing of their tipsy patrons.

As in Odessa, Paustovsky manages to convince the local seamen’s union to underwrite a newspaper and appoint him as its editor. The pay is low, but then so is the cost of living in Batum, particularly when he takes a room in the town’s “coastal shelter,” a refuge for sailors stranded in the port from getting drunk or spending a night in jail for fighting. The coastal shelter, he writes, was “a cross between a doss house, a pub, a police cell for drunks and a brothel.”

One of the men he encounters there is Batum’s lighthouse keeper, Stavraki. Something about the man sets Paustovsky’s senses on edge, and eventually he discovers that this is the notorious former Imperial Russian Naval officer responsible for shooting Lt. Pyotr Schmidt, the leader of the Black Sea fleet uprising of 1905 later made famous in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin. Normally one to accept his fellow man with understanding, Paustovsky finds it impossible not to revile Stavraki:

That life of his was just a series ofacts of blackest treachery. And these acts of treachery developed out of petty bits of nonsense: out of a desire to wear just one more pip on his shoulder straps and cut a dash in women’s eyes, out of servile fear of all authority

A few months later, Stavraki was arrested by the Cheka, taken to Sevastopol, tried for his anti-revolutionary crimes, and sentenced to the same fate to which he’d sent Lt. Schmidt: death by firing squad.

Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.
Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.

After two years enjoying the warmth of the southern Black Sea coast, Paustovsky begins to long to see ice and snow again. He heads into the interior, to the Georgian capital of Tblisi. There, he meets again with Frayerman, a “martyr to the pen,” an inveterate journalist who’d managed to work his way around the rim of the Black Sea, writing for or, when necessary, founding newspapers. In Tbilisi, they start a paper for the railway workers, The Little Train Whistle, and enjoy riding the narrow lines that wind up into the mountains of Georgia.

It’s not a bad life for the time and place, but soon Paustovsky begins to brood about his mother and sister, abandoned long ago in Kiev. Why is he idling away his time in a foreign place when he could be helping them? “I wanted to groan at the painfully obvious, perfectly clear thought which had never before entered my head, groan at the realization of my absolute, unfeigned, genuine and, therefore, hideous loneliness, the realization that nobody needed me here.”

And with this, Paustovsky climbs aboard a train to start the long and tortuous journey back to his native Kiev, bringing his Southern Adventure to a close. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life’s drama, one could not ask for a better way to stir one’s imagination and make one long for a similar time in some exotic locale. It’s a beautiful and memorable excusion.

Note: Vintage Classics recently announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, due for publication in June 2022. This edition will not, however, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6.


The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1969

The Red House, by Else Jerusalem (1932)

Ad for <em>The Red House</em> from <em>The New York Times</em>, 1932.
Ad for The Red House from The New York Times, 1932.

Catching up with my friend the Dutch translator and publisher (Van Maaskant Haun) Meta Gemert, I learned about a neglected Austrian best-seller from over 100 years ago that’s beginning to experience a comeback: Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus, which was published in English in 1932 as The Red House. The English version, published in the U. S. by The Macaulay Company and in the U.K. by T. Werner Laurie, sold poorly and quickly disappeared, which is why the only way to get your hands on a copy is via Inter-Library Loan.

Jerusalem, born Else Kotányi to Hungarian Jewish parents in Vienna in 1876, was a pioneer in her interest in the sociology and economics of the sex trade, and The Red House was the result of her study of the operations of Vienna’s brothels. The book centers on Milada, who comes to the Red House, an apartment house in Vienna’s red-light district, when her mother Katherine, comes to the city from a small town in Bohemia after being cast out as an undesirable. Though she has a chance to send Milada away to a convent school, Katherine sees no point in trying to better her daughter’s lot: “Why should she be any better than her mother?” she asks.

Katherine dies when Milada is still young, but the girl becomes a fixture as the house changes hands and becomes more of an upscale brothel in the hands of Else Goldscheider. Mrs. Goldscheider introduces Milada into the business in her teens, first serving wine in the house’s lounge and later turning her into a working girl at the age of sixteen. Unable to remember life before the Red House, Milada is naive in her acceptance of the familiar atmosphere of depravity. “Poliska,” she asks the brothel’s housemaid, “Tell me … what’s a decent girl?” “Girl … what idea you got,” responds the maid. “But I want to know,” continues Milada, “Have we any here? Or doesn’t any ‘decent girl’ … ever come to a bordel?”

One of the house’s regulars, Horner, takes a liking to Milada and tries to educate her in the realities of how prostitution operates as an integral element of “decent” society. “Did you ever see a dunghill beetle … eruditely Scarabæus coprophagus?” he asks Milada.

It’s a pretty little thing, gleaming in green and gold. But if you take it in your hand it discharges a dark brown fluid and your prying nose is rewarded for its curiosity by a most malevolent stench.

The world needs its dunghills, he argues. They allow society to pretend that everything else is clean and proper.

Milada acts as Jerusalem’s eyes and ears inside the world of prostitution in Vienna, noting the range of clients, from middle-class merchants to dashing young noblemen to self-righteous city fathers. She also learns how Mrs. Goldscheider stays on the right side of the police and the sanitary inspectors through a mixture of obeisance, flattery, bribery, and deceit.

After a few good years, during which the Red House rises to the reputation of one of the better houses in Vienna, Mrs. Goldscheider sells the business to Miss Miller, a former housekeeper for a country parson and a woman ill-suited to the task emotionally and practically. She tries to pitch pennies at every turn, driving away the better class of clientele and turning her girls into workhorses.

The house’s decline continues when Miss Miller is replaced by Nelly Spizzari. Jerusalem saw the sex trade not only as a feminist but also as one familiar with Marxism, and Nelly Spizzari — with “more energy and less conscience than all previous owners” — represents capitalism at its most brutally efficient and exploitative:

Under the Spizzari System The Red House speedily lost its unique position among establishments of its kind. Rapidly it sank to the lowest grade. Mrs. Spizzari had no understanding of, nor indeed any use for, the atmosphere of middle class respectability which had been the main attraction in The Red House. She had no use for girls who would have fitted in such surroundings, for she demanded of them services that the former Red House inmates, down to the most reckless of them, would have refused with shudders.

Spizzari takes advantage of the desperate poverty of some Viennese families to procure new girls cheaply and in their early teens:

One pet enterprise of the energetic Spizzari was to buy very young girls from inhuman parents who gloated over the purchase price, whether as straight cash or a monthly rent. With these innocent unfortunates in her power, Mrs. Spizzari would perform all sorts of manipulations, operating on them herself, cutting and stitching. She had a special technique of virgin-exploitation, which she managed to keep hidden from the medical inspector….

Into this toxic environment comes a young doctor, Gus Brenner, a well-intentioned crusader from a good family. Though he avoids the attempts of some of the girls to seduce him, he and Milada fall in love. In the hands of a typical romantic novelist of the time, Brenner might have become the knight in shining white armor who rescues Milada. In the hands of the scientifically-minded Jerusalem, however, such matches are only the stuff of fantasies. If Milada does manage to escape from the Red House, it is not without carrying her share of emotional and psychological scars.

Early edition of De heilige Skarabäus
Early German edition of De heilige Skarabäus.

Der heilige Skarabäus became a best-seller in continental Europe, being translated into Hungarian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. It took over two decades, however, for the book to reach English readers, and then in an apparently abridged version. The Macaulay Company edition of The Red House runs to just over 300 pages, while catalogue records show that the original Austrian edition came to well over 600.

Ad for The Red House from Publisher's Weekly
Ad for The Red House from Publisher’s Weekly.

Though coming after the Jazz Age, the English version, titled The Red House, still seemed too controversial for Anglophones. “Readers who can stomach the subject of this novel will find it exceedingly well done,” wrote one brief review in The Spectator. “Those who cannot (the theme is prostitution) are advised to leave it alone.” The New York Times’ review acknowledged that, “The moral tone of the book is unquestionably sincere and lofty, its revelation of conditions convincing in every detail, and its aunguished protest driven home with terrible and arresting truth.” Still, the reviewer cautioned, “There seems small likelihood of a book so exclusively indigenous and alien to the American reader’s ken meeting with a kindred acclaim in its English version.”

Soon after, the book fell into disfavor in Austria and Germany, but for political rather than critical reasons. In questioning the moral integrity of good bürger society, Der heilige Skarabäus was quickly banned by the Nazis and Jerusalem’s work joined that of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig on their bonfires.

By that time, however, she was no longer Else Jerusalem, having divorced her first husband and married an academic named Viktor Widakowich. She and Widakowich emigrated to Buenos Aires. Though she found Argentina largely lacking in cultural life, it soon become too difficult to consider returning to Europe and she died there in 1943.

Only recently has the book been resurrected for German-language readers. Austrian publisher Albert Eibl released a new edition, with an afterword by Professor Brigitte Spreitzer of the University of Graz, from his Das Vergessene Buch (the Forgotten Book) press. You may recall my mention of Eibl’s rescue of Maria Lazar’s novel Leben verboten!, which was published in English (also in an abridged version) in 1934 as No Right to Live.

Daniel Elkind published an article about The Red House in Lapham’s Quarterly earlier this year: House Warning: Revisiting Else Jerusalem’s critique of bourgeois hypocrisy and exploitation. As Elkind writes, “The double standard Jerusalem exposed in her novel persists: it is still more acceptable to hire a sex worker than it is to be one.” Blogger Edith LaGraziana (Edith of Graz, a pseudonym) also wrote about the book back in 2016: The Red House by Else Jerusalem


The Red House, by Else Jerusalem, translated by R. L. Marchant
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1932

Suggestions for the 1976 Club

1976 Club Logo

For the last few years, I’ve tried to offer some lesser-known suggestions for those interested in taking part in one of the ‘net’s best and biggest collective reading events, Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (stuckinabook) semi-annual clubs. This coming October 11-17, they’re inviting you to read and write about books published in 1976.

Looking back, the one book published in 1976 most likely to hold a permanent place in literary history is William Gaddis’s massive wordfest and satire on American capitalism, JR*. However, coming in at nearly 800 pages, it may be a bit more than most readers will want to take on in a week. Even if you choose to listen to Nick Sullivan’s landmark audiobook version, you’re still looking at clocking in over 37 hours or roughly many people’s entire work week.

For 1976 Club suggestions, I decided to look at a couple of the “Books of the Year” features that used to be an annual fixture in newspaper book sections. In these, well-known writers and occasional celebrities were asked to name their favorite books of the year. Although those who participated often showed the professional courtesy of honoring good works by their peers (JR and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime earned the most mentions), there are always a few unexpected or obscure titles that get mentioned. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, offered his own uncompleted novel The Original of Laura, which didn’t get published until long after his death the next year. John Cheever told The New York Times that he ended the year with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, though he confessed that he couldn’t read it in the laundromat.

So, here, without further ado, are recommendations from year-end round-ups in The Observer and The New York Times from 1976. (Note that the Agate and Bardin are 1976 reissues of earlier books, but I’ve kept them because they’re both darned good books.):

“Books of the Year” from The Observer, 12 December 1976:

The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

“A first novel doing one particular, narrow thing (impersonating a furious, silly woman) superbly.” — Lorna Sage

A Literary Affair by Marie-Claire Blais

A Literary Affair by Marie-Claire Blais

“A short, very fresh, mischievous novel about the adventures of an ingenuous French-Canadian writer in French literary circles. The poor lad, who came to conquer, is picked dry. A Balzacian story that custom hasn’t staled: compressed here and ‘pris sur le vif,’ it has the charm of a classic cautionary tale.” — Mary McCarthy

Klynt's Law by Elliott Baker

Klynt’s Law by Elliott Baker

“A hilarious satire on parapsychology which starts on a ghastly unversity campus and ends with a bang in ghostly Las Vegas.” — Arthur Koestler

Brogan and Sons by David Batchelor

Brogan and Sons by David Batchelor

“In fiction, I most enjoyed meeting a new novelist in David Batchelor, whose Brogan and Sons shows a skilled had, a sense of social comedy, and the gift of being serious without portentousness.”

Hard Feelings and Other Stories by Francis King

Hard Feelings and Other Stories by Francis King

“I didn’t read much new fiction this year, but although as a rule I don’t much like short stories, I particularly enjoyed Francis King’s new collection, Hard Feelings and Other Stories. His combination of wit and unforgiving observation is always a pleasure.”

The Selective Ego by James Agate

The Selective Ego: the Diaries of James Agate, edited by Tim Beaumont

“Consoles me somewhat for not possessing the nine-volume original, that unique Ptolemaic universe of theatre, ponies, literature, golf, music and wisecracks, autobiography and social history combined (“Today for the first time in history I put on yesterday’s shirt”). — Philip Larkin

The Viking Process by Norman Hartley

The Viking Process by Norman Hartley

“The unputdownable thriller, the one for your last night in the condemned cell … about a sociologist in the clutches of a fiendish whiz-kid conducting a death-grapple between multinationals.” — Maurice Richardson

John Franklin Bardin Omnibus

The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus

“A crime weirdissimo, three novels dashed off in the Forties by a man who had been a bouncer in a roller-skating rink, is much the best 95p’s worth on the market.” — Russell Davies

Hotel de Dream and An Unreasonable Man

Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant and An Unreasonable Man by Henrie Mayne

“Two excellent novels about life’s losers: Emma Tennant’s Hotel de Dream experiments with the stange Hitlerian fringe of menaces that hangs around the dreams of those who have failed; Henrie Mayne’s An Unreasonable Man is a more traditional but moving and funny account of the disorder that a typical English eccentric creates in the lives of others.” — Angus Wilson

The 79th Survivor by Bronislaw Mlynarski

The 79th Survivor by Bronislaw Mlynarski

“… has not received the notice it deserves. The author, from a distinguished Polish musical family, was an officer of the reserve captured when the Russians took the Poles in the rear after Hitler’s frontal assault. He should have finished up among the 4,000 of his fellow officers shot by the NKVD in Katyn forest. But he survived. His story of life in Soviet captivity is the more moving for its unassumingness.” — Edward Crankshaw

“Authors’s Authors” from The New York Times, 5 December 1976:

Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk

Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk

“The best contemporary novel I’ve read this year…. It deals with a half-crazed survivor of the Holocaust who is periodically incarcerated in a rehabilitation center in the Negev desert. The book is laced with surreal black humor and frilliant digressions on the destiny of the Jews. It’s the Israeli counterpart of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” — Francine de Plessix Gray

The Geek by Craig Nova

The Geek by Craig Nova

“A hard, brilliantly visual novel which is equal in quality to early Hawkes. Few American writers have such a sensuous yet masterfully controlled style.” — William Gass

Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer

Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer

“A stunning book about a bright, sad, witty woman in a state of emotional disarray. Must be read carefully in order to appreciate its nuances, and even then you’ll never be sure you’ve caught them all.” — Richard Yates

Waiting in Line by David Walton

Waiting in Line by David Walton

“Strange stories set mostly in Southern California and therefore surrealist and socially realist at the same time.” — E. L. Doctorow


* As Robert Nedelkoff has correctly pointed out, JR was actually published in October 1975.

Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling (1958)

Cover of first US edition of Sigh for a Strange Land

“I always thought refugees were other people” are words none of us would ever want to say.

But no one ever chooses to become a refugee on a whim. Instead, as we witnessed just this week in Afghanistan, refugees usually have to grab what they can carry and leave in a rush. Their motivation is less to run towards than to run away, usually from violence, persecution, or simply chaos.

Resi, the teenage girl who narrates Monica Stirling’s 1958 novel Sigh for a Strange Land, awakes one morning to find a policeman at her apartment door. He informs her that her Aunt Natasha has been injured and is lying in the city hospital. Hurrying to see her aunt, Resi notices that the streets are oddly quiet. There are no queues outside the shops and the few people who pass look at her with shocked expressions.

Aunt Natasha’s only injury is a hangover from celebrating too hard the night before and she and Resi are soon headed back to their apartment. Now, however, the streets are full of noise, with groups of men running down sidewalks and the sounds of gunfire in the distance. Turning into their street, they see their apartment block going up in flames. The revolution has begun.

Seeking out the only friend they have, a horse trainer named Boris, Resi and Natasha soon find themselves on an overloaded truck headed for the frontier. After a long journey through the night, they climb out to face a table of Red Cross workers. Each of them is handed a piece of cardboard with a word on it: “REFUGEE.”

Some of their companions react in shock and disgust. “Refugees! My family’s an honorable one,” says one. “I’ll have you know, my grandfather founded our shop, built it up from nothing, and it’s been in the family ever since — wars, risings, strikes, upsets, nothing’s been able to dislodge us. And now . . . ”

If Resi, Natasha, and Boris are somewhat less surprised, it’s because their lives have been punctuated by displacements. Natasha and Boris grew up as members of the Russian imperial elite before the revolution of 1917. Natasha followed the White Russian diaspora to Paris and Italy. Boris joined a circus and found himself a citizen of an itinerant nation. Resi, left to Natasha’s care after the death of her parents, carries the blood of four nations in her veins: Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France. And none of them has any papers, of course. “Could we ever prove I’m me if we wanted to?” Resi asks at one point.

Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution being processed at an Austrian reception center.
Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution being processed at an Austrian reception center.

Although Stirling never names the country from which the trio is fleeing — which adds to the sense of displacement that pervades the book — one cannot help but assume it’s Hungary, whose abortive revolution against a Soviet-backed regime in 1956 led to over 150,000 Hungarians seeking asylum in the West.

Resi, Natasha, and Boris sneak out of their temporary refugee center and enjoy a brief holiday taking in the opulence of what is clearly Vienna:

Halfway down the next street—which was full of traffic, I’d never before seen so many motor vehicles in one place — we were attracted by a prodigious delicatessen store. The vast window’s centerpiece was a glass-fronted silver machine in which a chicken roasted on a revolving spit. Either side stood massive hams, their outsides neatly breadcrumbed, their insides the color of dark pink roses. Spread around these in tiers were shallow white china dishes containing black and green olives, soft-fleshed tan mushrooms, smooth-skinned coppery sausages, the harlequin colors of vegetable salad, artichokes with gray-green mauve-topped leaves firm as if sculpted, beets with their darkly crimson juice turned cherry-color where it dissolved into a moat of sour cream, pies with richly glazed and crusted tops.

They pool their few coins and manage to buy coffees, cocoa, and pastries at a café. “Cafés are apt to outlast governments,” observes Boris.

Soon, though, they are back sleeping with hundreds of other refugees on a gymnasium floor, and Natasha, who is probably closer to 70 than the 50 she looks like, takes ill. The odd little family unit that has sheltered Resi through her childhood falls apart, and she is forced to decide for herself what place she will adopt as home.

Stirling quotes from a 1958 essay by V. S. Pritchett in which he wrote, “In the last hundred years half the world’s population has become uprooted, expatriated from class, race or nation. We live on frontiers.” Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, short story about people accustomed to that frontier existence. For this trio, nation and home have become concepts as slippery as a bubble of mercury.

Portrait of Monica Stirling by Stanley Parker, from <em>Tatler and Bystander</em> 1958.
Portrait of Monica Stirling by Stanley Parker, from Tatler and Bystander 1958.

And Stirling, who saw a great deal of displacement as a correspondent during World War Two and its aftermath in Europe, is fundamentally distrustful of these concepts. “I’ve never understood why anyone finds it difficult to believe chairs and tables are made of constantly moving atoms. Nothing is reliable in this moving world but love,” Resi comments early on. “All I’m interested in writing about is love,” Stirling once told her friend The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner — another veteran expatriate. “Private life,” Boris tells Resi, is “the greatest resistance movement of them all.”

Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, moving tale that manages to weave two disparate themes together: the unstable, transitory nature of home and nationality, and the strong, unwavering bonds of love. It’s a tale that resonates in this moment every bit as it did over fifty years ago. It’s available on the Internet Archive (link) and I’ve had it in my Calibre library for years, but it was only when Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow recently posted about Monica Stirling that I thought to take a serious look at it. I was hooked by the opening line: “The day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk,” and had to keep going.

The whole time I read the book, I kept thinking that it could quite plausibly have been written within the last ten years: it has that sort of timelessness, aided no doubt by Stirling’s choice to minimize her specific geographical and temporal references. I do have to agree with David Williams of the TLS, who wrote when the book was first published, “The first part is so god that one’s disappointment over the other two is keener perhaps than it ought to be”: there is a faint scent of sentimentality that lingers over the middle section and lasts until near the very end, when Resi has to confront her situation without the support of Natasha and Boris.

But overall, it’s a superb and taut novel. As John Davenport in The Observer, “Miss Stirling knows how to be exquisitely brief.” It’s a welcome skill in an age not lacking in loose baggy monsters.


Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling
London: Victor Gollancz, 1958
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958

Julia Rank on Lady Eleanor Smith’s Red Wagon (1930)

Lady Eleanor Smith with circus folk, from the Sphere (1933)
Lady Eleanor Smith with circus folk, from The Sphere (1933).

This is a guest post by theatre critic and researcher Julia Rank. In this article, the term ‘gypsy’ is only used when quoting directly from Lady Eleanor Smith’s work.

‘I was born dead’ is the ominous first sentence of Lady Eleanor Smith’s 1939 memoir Life’s a Circus. The doctors at the scene of her birth pronounced her dead without checking for any signs of life and threw themselves into attempting to save her mother. The midwife, with nothing to lose, had the bright idea of massaging the newborn with gin and slapping her repeatedly until she elicited a wail. Mother and daughter both survived and Lady Eleanor grew up to become a Bright Young Thing, journalist, publicist and novelist, with a particular devotion to the circus and scenes from Romani life.

Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945) was the daughter of Conservative MP Frederick Edward Smith, ennobled as Earl of Birkenhead when appointed Lord Chancellor in 1919, and Margaret Eleanor Furneux (a granddaughter of Joseph Severn, painter and friend of John Keats). The young Eleanor enjoyed a privileged upbringing with ponies, dancing classes and Christmases spent at Blenheim Palace (her father was one of Winston Churchill’s closest friends). Despite growing up in the heart of the establishment, she was drawn to Romani culture from an early age, teaching herself the language and making the serendipitous discovery that her paternal great-grandmother was a Romani woman named Bathsheba (apparently the Lord Chancellor was proud of his ‘romantic’ origins rather than trying to conceal them, while at the same time exaggerating the humbleness of his middle-class Birkenhead upbringing).

Like her contemporary Nancy Mitford, Smith’s formal education was centred around learning to speak French. A happy experience at Queen’s Gate School, South Kensington, alongside lifelong friends and fellow Bright Young Things Allanah Harper and Zita Jungmann, was not to last. She was sent to boarding school but ran away, after which she completed her education with an extended stay with an aristocratic Belgian family who lived at the Museum of the Congo outside Brussels. On her return to England, she refused to ‘come out’ as a debutante as was expected for a young lady of her background and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.

Through her social connections, Smith landed a role writing a twice-weekly ‘Women’s Gossip’ column for an evening paper but disliked “publicising a loathsome clique of nitwits”. She then worked as cinema critic, which she found more convivial. Highlights included introducing Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner to British audiences(and being introduced to Hitler’s policies by the Austrian-Jewish Bergner).

Cover of first US edition of Red Wagon
Cover of first US edition of Red Wagon.

A stint travelling with a circus as a publicist provided ample research opportunities for Smith’s first novel Red Wagon (1930). Red Wagon is far from culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, it stands up as a gripping yarn even today.

Inspired by Victorian showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, “one of the finest types of English circus man”, the novel tells the life story of self-made and (mostly) benevolent circus dictator Joe Prince in flashback form. In the novel’s present day, the circus is no longer the national institution it was in previous decades nor is Joe Prince quite the “roistering king of the road, a plutocrat among nomads” he once was. One of his daughters has settled in suburbia and the other, to her father’s disapproval, wants to showcase her equestrian skills for cinema.

The action then flashes back to the 1860s when Joe is five years old and his acrobat mother is killed in a fire during an American tour. After a period of fostering by a Thénardier-esque clown, he’s sent to a Dickensian orphanage. He escapes in his teens, joins a circus, works his way up through the ranks and eventually sets up his own circus, always living by the mantra ‘Circus first’.

Ad for the US edition of Red Wagon
Ad for the US edition of Red Wagon.

According to the Scotsman, ‘The book stands as a challenge to all those who doubt woman’s ability to write a ‘straight’ tale unmarked with the stamp of ‘feminine’ psychology’”. The novel features a male protagonist who isn’t prone to self-reflection and who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Joe Prince is defined by his relationship with the circus and its nomadic life rather than by his romantic relationships. The novel is ‘romantic’ in terms of its setting rather than its love story.

A life-changing romance does occur, but it’s near the end and is one-sided. It’s hard not to be creeped out the way in which Joe, in middle age, marries the much younger Romani princess Sheba (surely named for Smith’s ancestor Bathsheba), the daughter of Starlina, his first crush. Sheba, who is “bought from her people for the sum of fifteen pounds”, can’t settle into the role of circus chatelaine and eventually abandons her husband and daughters to return to her community.

The depiction of Romani characters is the most troubling aspect of the novel. ‘Gajo’ (non-Romani) circus folk and Romanis are not allies. “Joe, in common with most circus children,” Smith writes, “had been brought up to despise and hate this dark race […] sometimes they attached themselves to circuses and brought disgrace to any show”. Despite Smith’s personal identification with Romani people and Joe’s coming to admire them, her Romani characters are strongly ‘othered.’ Sheba and the other Romani in the book are described as ‘wild’, witch-like,’ ‘savage’, ‘brazen’, ‘tawny’ etc. The circus itself is also described in disruptive terms, as something that allows ‘the English to take their pleasure not sadly, but almost savagely, with a boisterous brutality that would endure long into the night.” Smith feared that “It will be a dreadful day when the circus decides to become social” (but noted that she had never personally seen a mistreated circus animal).

Vita Sackville-West, writing for Common Cause, hailed Red Wagon as “a brilliantly successful first novel” and Oliver Wray of The Graphic commented, ”‘I have not read so satisfying a novel since Mr Priestley’s The Good Companions.” The Yorkshire Post found Joe Prince “a most human and likable creature… a real relief after the fantastic figures of most novelists who have touched his kind.” Of course, Smith’s title and her father’s fame may have had some influence on the praise it received. Lord Birkenhead was appalled to learn that his daughter was writing a novel and assumed it would only be published because of who he was – but he eventually changed his tune and gave her a ruby and diamond brooch representing the red wagon shortly before his death later the same year.

Article on banning of Red Wagon, from the Oakland Tribune 8 July 1930
Article on banning of Red Wagon, from the Oakland Tribune, 8 July 1930.

Alongside the positive literary reviews, Red Wagon was the subject of a minor cause celebre. The book was banned by Glasgow public libraries when an elderly councillor proclaimed that the 28-year-old Smith “knows too much for her age” and should have “shown more reticence” in her handling of the “love incidents”. I would hazard a guess that this complaint refers to the scene in a seedy Montmatre hotel room in which Joe loses his virginity to Rose, a worldly American equestrienne: ‘He wanted her and would apparently take her without wasting any time on preliminary dalliance. He pulled her on to his knee, burying his face in the daffodil shower of her hair, kissing her wildly, roughly, madly, holding her so tight that he hurt her and she cried for mercy’. Publisher Victor Gollancz responded, “I have had many funny experiences during seven years of publishing, but this is much the funniest.” He quipped that the real reason for controversy was the title, with ‘Red’ suggesting political sympathies at odds with those of Glasgow council. Which seems unlikely: Gollancz was himself a socialist but Smith was her father’s daughter politically. The novel went into its fourth printing despite the Glaswegian objections.

Poster for the film version of Red Wagon
Poster for the film version of Red Wagon.

Joe Prince may have disliked the cinema, but the epic scope and flamboyant setting of Red Wagon made it ideal for filmic treatment. In 1933, it was adapted by Elstree’s British International Studios, directed by the Austrian-born Paul L. Stein and starring the American actor Charles Bickford (who went on to be a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor) as Joe. It was an ambitious production by British standards of the time, running 50% longer than average — 107 minutes long as opposed to the usual70 minutes.

As the author of the source material, Smith felt that she was regarded ‘the lowest form of animal life” on the film set. But she also acknowledged that novelists were not suited to adapting their own work for screen and that specialist scenario writers were required. Feeding an appetite for melodrama with exotic settings, several of her subsequent novels were turned into film, including Ballerina (The Men in Her Life), Tzigane (Gypsy) and Caravan, starring actors such as Loretta Young, Chili Bouchier and Stewart Granger.

Lady Eleanor Smith, from The Sketch (1932)
Lady Eleanor Smith, from The Sketch (1932).

Smith cultivated a fey, uncanny image of herself in the press and in her memoir. Life’s a Circus related childhood encounters with a ghost dog called Gyp and grisly tales told by a nanny who attended the last public hanging in Britain. In the 1930s, she lived in a flat off the King’s Road with a black cat named Satan (despite the fact she was a Roman Catholic – probably a reference to her 1932 short story collection Satan’s Circus). She conjures up images of an aristocratic, urban version of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s heroine Lolly Willowes. She died at the age of 42 after a long illness and her most enduring work is probably her Regency-era novel The Man in Grey, albeit mostly by virtue of the Gainsborough Studios’ film adaptation starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.

Despite its entertainment value, it’s difficult to imagine Red Wagon being reissued. Unsurprisingly, Smith’s oeuvre wasn’t included in Elizabeth Macneal’s recent list of favourite circus novels for the Guardian. However, her short story ‘Candlelight’ is included in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird anthology Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird. As a glimpse inside the imagination of an unusual aristocratic bohemian, it’s left me sufficiently intrigued to try Eleanor Smith’s Gothic short fiction.


Julia RankJulia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, julia-writes.com.

Interview with Michael Walmer, Publisher and Rescuer of Forgotten Books

Michael Walmer Imprint

Michael Walmer is both one of the most modest and one of the most ambitious of the growing number of small independent publishers specializing in reissuing the work of forgotten and under-appreciated authors. A one-man firm operating from a cottage in the Shetland Islands, Michael Walmer has not only built up an impressive catalog over the course of the last nine years but is branching out with a new series, Northus Shetland Classics, later this year.

He took some time recently to answer a few questions about his imprint and where it’s headed.

• What inspired you to start up your own publishing firm?

My inspirations are twofold: first, obviously, an enduring love of writing and of writers – the capacity of some individual humans to craft language in such a way that illumination and beauty comes. And also the fact that many writers have not been celebrated with the same relish that the acknowledged classic writer might garner, despite their having equal or greater skill, to my mind – that’s the ‘neglected’ part.
My second inspiration was the feeling that I could do it in a practical sense. I had served my time in publishing with a well-known literary publisher and, because of the small size of that house, had learnt much of the trade at first hand, from contracts to editing to design to sales. Also, the advent of print-on-demand technology meant that I didn’t have to be wealthy to publish.

 

Covers of recent Michael Walmer Titles

 

• Where did your initial list of titles come from? Were these favorites you’ve wanted to see back in print?

The initial list established the idea of the republication of oeuvres, rather than solo titles. The tone of the list came from the desire to underline what brilliance there was in comic writing – six of the first ten were wits: Max Beerbohm, Ada Leverson, Ronald Firbank, Kylie Tennant, Stella Benson and Saki. And comedy was a tonic in a world that I found depressing – there was added value on that score. Anger at the state of the world and the release from that which comedy (specifically satire) gives, is the personal background.

Then there were four others who were ‘serious’ but interesting for a variety of reasons: George Sand because she was remembered now more as a romanticized celebrity than a writer; Mary Webb because she is consistently misunderstood; W. Clark Russell because sometimes a straightforward novel of events can be a huge pleasure; and the tenth ‘spot’ was given over to single works which I think deserve more attention – the first was M.R. James’ only novel, the weird The Five Jars.

These are ‘favourites’, but not the only ones – the list of potential inclusions is lengthy!

Now this remit has expanded into several additional series: a belles-lettres series of non-fiction, a poetry series, a series of classic translated fiction, a series of pre-Victorian classics, a series of great short works, and a series of modern classics. Most recently, I’ve teamed up with Robert Alan Jamieson on Northus Shetland Classics to reissue a series of key works from the literature of my new home, Shetland. The series is divided into four ‘streams’ using identifiers from the Shetland dialect: Yarns (fiction), Poyims (poetry), Myndins (memoir) and Alting (a forum for general non-fiction)

• What readers are you hoping to interest in your books? What’s been their responses so far?

Anyone with a hunger for the less traversed regions of literature, like myself, and yourself. That feeling that you will do best if you play to your passions enlivens that. It’s the same reasoning that keeps me from publishing something that I don’t respect just for the money.

Lots of great individual responses, in terms of readers and bloggers getting on board, taking up review copies and spreading the word. But I’m just about to start a new phase where I look to the trade more – the current experiment is going from being firm sale to being ‘sale or return’, so as to be an attractive proposition for more prospective buying by bookshops, and then developing a mailing list to let them know of new titles as they come. We’ll see how that goes – early days!

 

Covers of Michael Walmer titles

 

• What unexpected challenges have you run into?

All sorts of challenges, all the time. Challenges from within, where I don’t feel I’ve nailed it with a particular design or blurb. Also from without, where I thought I’d get good takeup on a particular effort and didn’t. And, of course, those things that always happen in the background of publishing, that I can’t comment on specifically – difficult estates, or irritating agents, or whatever! But then again, those times are always balanced by their opposites – brilliant responses, designs that really sing, and such.

• What books would you love to reissue but, for whatever reason, have been unable to?

Two thus far, and for the reasons above. I’d better not say too much more!

• What lessons have you learned in the process of getting your initial titles out?

That responses can always surprise, which is wonderful. Also, for some strange reason that I don’t quite understand, that the picture in my mind’s eye of any book I do always looks a lot worse than the real thing – somehow I imagine it less svelte, less balanced, less OK than it really is. Hmmmm, that seems like a problem for a psychoanalyst! Not to rely on / assume too much – just keep flexible and patient.

 

Titles of recent Michael Walmer releases

 

• Why do you think there’s an increased appetite now for rediscovering little-known books from the past?

Culturally, I think that’s been born of the digital revolution. Prior, access to these titles was extraordinarily restricted – literally visiting libraries of preservation like the British Library, the Bodleian or the Library of Congress was the only way of seeing them, copies were so rare. Or finding them through old ‘analogue’ second-hand book-search methods, like those little slips of paper from dealers with offers, sent all around the world in response to requests in trade journals! Now digitisation has meant that these titles which are out of copyright can be made available (admittedly often pretty poor quality photo-reproductions) to anyone who has online capacity. The further reaches of literature then become open to examination, rather than an effectively closed territory.

This has been the baseplate for interest to grow into other realms: material which is still in copyright is not usually available this way, but interest is peaking, exemplified by your blog, among some notable others, like Furrowed Middlebrow, Bear Alley and the like. Then it takes dedicated people to start making them available in pleasant editions to give them a happier new life – there are a growing group of us doing that, which I think is splendid. When I started, in 2012, there were only House of Stratus and Valancourt really, in the ‘curated’ (non-generic) print-on-demand field, anyway. Now there are loads of us.


Michael WalmerYou can browse the complete Michael Walmer catalogue and order online at www.michaelwalmer.com.

Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson (1938)

Dust Jacket of first edition of Music in the Listening Place by Gloria Rawlinson

I often go trawling through old book reviews in search of lost treasure. It’s usually not the reviews that feature words like “best”, “greatest”, “finest” that hint at something remarkable worth discovering. More often, there’s a certainly hesitancy in the reviewer’s tone, a suggestion that a book is, well, not bad exactly, but a little askew. A little hard to fit into a particular mold, a little awkwardness in the constraints of prevailing notions of what fiction or nonfiction should be. These are the clues I look for.

In the case of Music in the Listening Place, Gloria Rawlinson’s one and only novel, it was Majorie Grant Cook’s caution in her TLS review that “Readers who dislike the introduction of tiny supernatural beings among average-sized human creatures … will impatiently give up this novel and thereby lose a pleasure that is like biting into a strange new fruit.” Now, I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels, but Cook’s brief description of Rawlinson’s characters — a young woman who’d “lost her wits,” a beloved brother lost in an accident, an earnest young man named Edgar Pullsides — intrigued me and I hunted down one of the few used copies to be found for sale (all in Australia and New Zealand).

“I first heard of the strange little people called Turehu from my mother,” Rawlinson wrote in an introductory note. The Turehu were half-sized, pale human-like creatures — “little white faces with russet-coloured hair.” Although she was writing less than three hundred years after the first white settlement in New Zealand, even among the Maori, the Turehu had already become mythical, something that only the very old and very superstitious still believed in.

Although Rawlinson herself refers to the Turehu as fairies, as we learn in the course of the story, their powers are less magical than psychological. In ways that even they seem mystified by, they are, on occasion — but oh, how these occasions do matter — capable of grasping insights and memories that have eluded the people they help.

Rawlinson was just twenty when Music in the Listening Place was published, and even if the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had been given that label at the time it’s unlikely she would have used it. And yet, she understood it well, for the real story in Music in the Listening Place is not about the wondrous powers of the Turehu but about how deeply wounded people begin to heal.

The Parks are a family in shock. Mr. Park, a solicitor, forgets his keys, sets out for town on foot instead of by car, has to check his collar before leaving home to make sure there’s a tie underneath it. Mrs. Park hides inside in fear of visitors, conscious that any old friend or neighbor who stops by will observe how large she’s become from years of overeating. And their daughter Aroha storms in and out of the house, sniping belligerently at meals and claiming domain over their back yard as a haven for weeds, bugs, and birds. Throughout the day, she peers at the window of her brother Rollo’s bedroom, anxious to be ready with something to please him: a slice of ripe watermelon, or a sandwich.

Only gradually do we learn that Rollo isn’t an elusive hermit. He’s never coming out of his bedroom because he’s been dead for years, killed in an accident after Aroha insisted he take her joyriding on a neighbor’s motorcycle. Aroha has blanked out all memory of the accident and Rollo’s death save a lingering sense of guilt. She’s stuck, still acting fourteen, still pretending that Rollo is alive, if unseen. And as long as Aroha is stuck, her parents are stuck, too. Even their neighbor, Edgar Pullsides, is himself something of a basket case. Although he makes a little money selling a patent cleanser of his own invention, he spends most of his time hiding in his workshop, building puppets and toys.

On one of his infrequent sales trips around the North Island, Edgar meets a group of Turehu led by the distinguished and nattily-dressed Academic Gentleman. Although the Turehu look upon the mundane interests of the white men with some distain, the Academic Gentleman insists that Edgar must take his wife Peg, a queer leathery-skinned Turehu, back to his home. “Now, Peg, my dear Peg, my lamb, you must try and remember,” he instructs her:

Surely you can remember! It comes to this that there will be no peace in the village if you do not remember. You were the one to catch the thoughts, and are, therefore the one on whom all the responsibility rests. I wash my hands of it all. Anakthe!”

Anakthe, we come to see, is Turehu for, variously, Strewth!, Inshallah!, and “I wash my hands of it all.”

Back home, Edgar hides Peg among the puppets in his workshop, but soon Aroha — his one confidant and fellow daydreamer — learns of Peg’s existence. For some pages, neither Rawlinson’s characters nor we quite know why she’s placed this unusual catalyst in the midst of her unstable cast, but her purpose eventually reveals itself.

Had Rawlinson been exposed to Freudian psychology, we would have good reason to say that Peg’s role is to trigger a cathartic memory, the trigger that Freud and Breuer thought had the effect of “reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed.” But it seems implausible that even a precocious New Zealand woman of twenty with a book of poetry already to her credit would have been familiar with their work.

Instead, we have to trust that Rawlinson knew that even the deepest hurts can only be borne so long. And when Peg does finally remember, reminding Aroha of Rollo’s last words as he sped toward his certain death, she releases the Parks (and Edgar) from the limbo in which they’ve been trapped for years.

Gloria Rawlinson, 1935
Gloria Rawlinson, 1935 (age 17).

As a young writer, Rawlinson shows a certain respect for the conventions of fiction that now seem to place unnecessary restraints on her imagination. But as a young white woman writing at a time when respect for the ways and wisdom of New Zealand’s indigenous people may have been at its lowest, she demonstrates striking empathy. The Maori characters in her book see much farther and more clearly than their colonizers. They know that the North Island is the remnant of a giant fish that surfaced in prehistoric time, that they owned and cared for the island before Captain Cook arrived, and that the Government still owes them the return of the lands stolen by law and gunpowder.

Perhaps Rawlinson understood the Maori’s perspective better than most New Zealanders of her time because she spent her first years living on the island of Tonga, where there was less of a divide between the handful of white settlers and the Tongans and she learned their language alongside her own English. Perhaps she also felt empathy because she was a victim herself, having contracted polio at the age of six, which left her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Music in the Listening Place came and went with no more than a few reviews, some perplexed, others appreciative, and has never been reissued. By the time the book was published, Rawlinson had fallen under the aura of the intense, talented but erratic Iris Wilkinson, who published under the name of Robin Hyde. After Hyde committed suicide in London in 1939, Rawlinson took on the role of curator of Hyde’s literary legacy, spending decades writing a biography that was finally published by Hyde’s son Derek Challis several years after Rawlinson died in 1995 at the age of 77.

I suspect that today’s readers, benefitting from the wealth and increased appreciation of fantastic fiction in the decades since the book’s first appearance, will find Music in the Listening Place, as I did, a powerful work that blends myth, psychology, and respect for indigenous cultures in ways that are quite remarkable given the time and age at which Gloria Rawlinson was writing. If it were published today, critics would not hesitate to call it a tour de force.


Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson
London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1938

Jonathan Walker on Charles Williams’ Supernatural Thrillers

This is a guest post by Jonathan Walker, whose latest novel, The Angels of L19, is published this month by Weatherglass Books

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Charles Williams, 1935.
Charles Williams, 1935.

Charles Williams was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and, like them, a member of the legendary Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. Gervel Lindop’s recent biography of Williams therefore refers to him as the ‘Third Inking’, while Sørina Higgins’s blog, dedicated to his life and work, calls him ‘The Oddest Inkling’. Exactly how odd is something revealed in detail by Lindop’s biography, which I strongly recommend. Williams had a reputation for saintliness in his own lifetime, but much of his private life was more complicated than that reputation suggests, and modern fundamentalists attracted by his association with the Inklings might find his interest in magic and hermeticism disconcerting.

Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Williams was not an academic, and attended the Inklings’ meetings for the most part only as a visitor to Oxford. His background was also quite different to theirs: he was from a lower middle-class family whose financial difficulties meant he had to drop out of the University of London after a year and take a menial job in the printing industry, though he managed to rise and become an editor at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He was also a teacher – but he lectured in what would now be called FE: night-school classes for adult learners. (Only towards the end of his life, when the OUP had moved its offices back to Oxford during the war, did he give a series of lectures on Milton at the university, arranged by Lewis and Tolkien).

Williams wrote works of popular history for OUP, as well as poetry often inspired by Arthurian myth. But his novels, ‘supernatural thrillers’ published by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were his greatest success. The Eliot connection suggests the range of Williams’s interests: unlike Lewis and Tolkien, he was not hostile to literary modernism per se.

Though Williams is now relatively obscure – at least compared to his more famous friends – his novels pioneered a third model for fantasy writers to complement those of alternate, secondary worlds (Tolkien) or portal fantasies (Lewis). Lewis himself explains how this third model worked in a short talk he gave on Williams’s novels. These books, he said, mix:

what some people call the realistic, and the fantastic. I’d rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs. On the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. … [T]his is not a mixture of two literary kinds. … Williams is really writing a third kind of book, … in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were … invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’

In a portal fantasy like Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, characters from our world enter another through a magical gateway such as Professor Kirke’s wardrobe. In Williams’s stories, by contrast, representatives from other realities enters ours. In some respects his stories therefore resemble weird fiction, which is also preoccupied with the terrifying consequences of a ‘violation of frontier’. Except that for Williams these intrusions were not really violations at all. As Eliot wrote in his introduction to Williams’s final novel, All Hallows’ Eve, ‘For [him] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. …. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural’.

Cover of first UK edition of Descent Into Hell
Cover of first UK edition of Descent Into Hell (1937).

I confess that my interest in Williams is really only in his last two (and best) novels, Descent into Hell (1937), and the posthumously published All Hallows’ Eve (1945): I haven’t read any of the others, and the poetry does not appeal to me at all. But these two books are quite remarkable – not least for what they do with the idea of hell and the afterlife.

Williams is undoubtedly an odd stylist: his sentences are often crabbed and convoluted, not helped by his habit of inventing neologisms for religious or theological concepts in an attempt to avoid triggering preconceptions or taking sides in pre-existing doctrinal controversies. But he can also be a writer of great power, peculiarly alive to the far-reaching consequences of seemingly small moral choices.

In Descent into Hell, the titular journey is embarked upon by a historian, Lawrence Wentworth, who runs a discussion group for young people in his village. His downfall begins with his inability to accept that Adela, a woman from that group, has no romantic interest in him. Wentworth therefore welcomes the attentions of a succubus, a spirit form of Adela, who promises to submit to his every whim. For a fantasy writer, Williams here is peculiarly hostile to fantasy, at least when it takes the form of a denial of reality – worse, a denial of Kant’s moral imperative, the recognition that others have their own autonomy and desires independent of our own.

At the same time, Wentworth is also unable to admit to a professional error – the wound to his amour propre is too great for him to bear – and both these choices seal his fate. The hell that he enters, while still alive, is one where, having refused to accept his real relations to others and his obligations to the professional community to which he belongs, he is left alone. But not merely alone. Language is necessarily social: to speak implies an interlocutor. Without the willingness to fully imagine such an interlocutor, language itself collapses, and beyond that, even the possibility of associating things in meaningful patterns.

It is a hell of solipsism. The following passage comes from the extraordinary final paragraphs of the novel:

Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. … There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.

Wentworth is a living character who enters hell prematurely. Descent into Hell also features a dead character – a ghost, in effect – a wretched suicide who lingers around the site of his death in a kind of grey limbo. Near but not in the living world, he is as alone as he felt in life. But not as alone as Wentworth, since he is still able to perceive – to receive – the attention of a sympathetic woman, herself close to death, who reaches out to him.

Cover of first UK edition of All Hallows Eve
Cover of first UK edition of All Hallows Eve (1945).

This kind of provisional limbo state also appears in All Hallows’ Eve, and it suggests Williams’s willingness to depart from Christian orthodoxy. In traditional Christian thought, death offers a kind of terminal end point beyond which moral choice is not possible. One’s eternal fate is fixed at the moment before death. (Even if one believes in purgatory, this does not change one’s ultimate fate: everyone in purgatory will ultimately attain heaven; no one in hell will).

In these two novels, by contrast, not only is hell a place to which you condemn yourself and can enter before you die, but – for those who retain some attachment to life even after their death – moral choice is still possible. Ghosts are, in effect, invited to reconsider the meaning of their life: now that it is over, with what in their earthy existence do they wish to identify themselves? And what do they wish to transcend? Do they wish to relive and reaffirm their most selfish impulses? Or do they want to search within their histories for flickers of generosity and love, however small and faltering these might be? And they can be very small indeed: the redemption of one of Williams’ ghostly characters begins with her remembering her husband getting up in the night to fetch her a glass of water.

Williams’s novels are full of more obvious and dramatic supernatural elements: the succubus, a doppelganger, a sinister cult leader bent on world domination, the Holy Grail, a magical Tarot deck – but for me the most powerful aspect of his fantasy is the way it magnifies the consequences of seemingly small and ordinary choices we make in our earthly lives and assigns to them a cosmic and eternal significance.


Jonathan Walker
Jonathan Walker grew up in Liverpool, but has lived in Glasgow, Cambridge, Swansea, Canterbury, Venice, Sydney and Melbourne. He is the author of a biography of a seventeenth-century Venetian spy, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and a fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Venice, Five Wounds. His latest novel is a work of weird fiction set in 1980s Liverpool: The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Books. He has doctorates in history and creative writing.

David’s Day, by Denis Mackail (1932)

Houghton Mifflin edition of <em>David's Day</em> (1932).
Houghton Mifflin edition of David’s Day (1932).

“For the want of a nail….” Or, in the case of Denis Mackail’s 1932 novel, David’s Day, for the want of a Mrs. Bowker. Mrs. Bowker is the day woman whose duties, among other things, is to fix breakfast for Mr. Albert Coffin of number 67 Pocklington Road, one of the tens of thousands of row houses thrown up in the suburbs of London just after the First World War.

There is nothing special about number 67, like its neighbors “built like blazes with everything that would more or less hold together”: “mass-produced metal casements and unseasoned joists and unimaginably flimsy doors’; “cheap, crumbling bricks with a kind of grey wash which, temporarily at any rate, hid most of the flaws.” Neither is there anything special about Mr. Coffin, a clerk at Hamhurst’s department store.

But he is a creature of habit, so when Mrs. Bowker fails to turn up one morning, Mr. Coffin’s day is set ever so slightly askew. He snaps at his wife, refuses to rush his breakfast, and arrives at the train station just a moment too late to catch his train. Never in five years had he missed his train. He hesitates, then decides to take the next one, even though it ran the other way round the London loop.

This decision puts him in the crowd rushing for buses and the Tube just in time to bump into a young woman hurrying in the same direction. Their fleeting encounter catches the eye of a smooth operator named Harry Jackson, who steps forward to introduce himself as a long-forgotten acquaintance. Harry charms Gladys — upset at running late for work — into a cab wherein she quickly discovers that Harry has a much different destination in mind.

Within less than an hour, Harry Jackson (real name Jack Harrison) is arrested for an outstanding theft warrant, Gladys quits her job, a City schemer is tipped into financial ruin, and one Lord Midhurst, “the stupidest of a dull lot” but a man of innate loyalty, assures himself of continued employment as a figurehead on various corporate boards.

With each chapter, Mackail sets character caroming off character, producing effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some fall in love, some fall in ruin, some take a step up the social ladder, some take a tumble down. An ardent suitor arrives to woo an actress just moments before the start of her West End show’s dress rehearsal, triggering an on-stage disaster that’s a two-page masterpiece of comic writing, the sort of thing that Michael Frayn later constructed his play “Noises Off” from: spontaneous concatenated catastrophes only work when assembled with the precision of Swiss clockworks.

Denis Mackail, 1939, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Denis Mackail, 1939, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

From time to time, Mackail doubts his own ability to keep his clock ticking. “Would the chain break off here, just because a manager did or didn’t boast, or because he did or didn’t so something with his fingers?” And indeed, there are moments when the links grow tenuous, when the pace of this day of orchestrated chaos slows and the shadow of entropy creeps over the scene.

Fortunately, if Mackail’s stage direction is occasionally less than flawless, these flaws are offset by his wonderfully shrewd commentary. His is an omniscient narrator wise but not cynical about mankind’s fallibility. Throughout the book, as he moves his characters around at a usually frenzied speed, he still has time to insert his editorial asides: “The true Bright Young Person always practices with an eye, if not an eye and a half, on the crowd, and commits none of her ingenious or ingenuous excesses without making pretty certain that the Daily Dash or the Evening Branch shall here of it….”

He speculates on the nature of fame and success, asking questions we’re still grappling with today. “Is it more successful to have an immense reputation built on sand, or a minute reputation founded on rock?” Mackail makes no attempt to answer them, however. He understood that the joke is entirely about our eternally fruitless efforts to do so.

And as he continues to conduct his particles through their dance of chance encounters, he somehow manages to bring us back to Mr. Coffin, who makes it back to number 67 Pocklington Road at his usual time and by his usual train, contrite for his morning’s angry words to his wife and his angry thoughts about the missing Mrs. Bowker.

But where in all this is David, whose day this is? Well, let’s just say that Mackail has arranged things in such a way that the book ends on a note that is nothing less than sublime.

When David’s Day was first published, reviewers somehow missed the book’s essence. The Times called the book just “another of those amplified personal columns in which Mr. Denis Mackail specializes.” The New York Times judged it “a series of episodes rather than a novel.” They were both wrong: this is pure entertainment, nothing less. Don’t try to take it apart and figure out how the mechanism works: just enjoy how delightfully it marks the passing time.


David’s Day, by Denis Mackail
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932