1930s

No More Orchids, by Grace Perkins (1932)

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Advertisement for No More Orchids, from Publishers Weekly, June 4, 1932.

At a time when writers could make small fortunes by selling the film rights to their novels, plays, and magazine stories to studios hungry for scripts for talkies, the biggest fortune by far was that made by Fulton Oursler and his wife Grace. Neither of those names are likely to be familiar to many people today, but they represented a power couple that could take a place beside legendary studio executive Irving Thalberg and his Oscar-winning actress wife, Norma Shearer. In 1932 alone, they sold eight properties to Fox and Columbia — five for Fulton and three for Grace — while continuing to produce a steady flow of best-selling novels and magazine short stories. And, in Grace’s case, giving birth to her second child.

It may help to explain that Fulton Oursler was more than a writer. Back in 1921, Oursler had been hired by Bernarr Macfadden, the physical fitness guru who had stumbled into a gold mine by founding True Story magazine and tapping into two burgeoning trends: America’s fascination with gossip and its consumption of magazines. Although True Story purported to be filled with authentic if lurid tales submitted by general public, Macfadden soon found that while the public might have some great stories, they needed the help of experienced writers to tell them. He hired Oursler, a former newspaper reporter who could produce thousands of publishable words in just a few hours at the typewriter.

Macfadden learned that Oursler had an even greater gift as an editor than as a writer and he turned over most of the day-to-day responsibilities for True Story to Oursler. True Story quickly grew into one of the most popular magazines in America and with Oursler’s help, Macfadden established over a dozen magazines in the next few years, capitalizing on everything from the growth of radio (Radio Stories), the beauty industry (Beautiful Womanhood), and even the brief wave of artistic dance enthusiasm inspired by Isadora Duncan (Dance Magazine). To feed his media machine, Macfadden tasked Oursler to hire what in today’s world we’d call content creators: prolific writers like Oursler. Into the Macfadden Building at 1926 Broadway filed an ensemble that included Vera Caspary (future author of Laura), Nat Pendleton (Olympic wrestler and future Hollywood character actor), and a tenacious young reporter and occasional Broadway actress named Grace Perkins.

Perkins became Oursler’s girl Friday, taking on every job from chasing down gangsters’ molls to posing for the cheesecake photos that were a staple of Macfadden periodicals. And not long after, she became Oursler’s mistress. By 1925, Oursler had decided to end his first marriage, and he and Perkins sailed for France, when Oursler obtained a French divorce and the two married. Oursler continued to run Macfadden’s magazines remotely while in France and managed to finish his third novel, Sandalwood.

Oursler encouraged Perkins to try her hand at creative writing and she began selling stories, starting with “Borrowed Clothes,” which appeared in McClure’s in 1926. Two years later, her first novel, Angel Child, appeared within weeks of Oursler’s fourth, Poor Little Fool. As if life wasn’t busy enough at the Oursler/Perkins apartment (referred to as Sandalwood), publisher and bookstore owner Lowell Brentano, who’d co-authored a thriller play, The Spider, approached Grace about writing a book to capitalize on the success of Ursula Parrott’s scandalous best-selling novel, Ex-Wife. Brentano’s idea was to publish anonymously — as Ex-Wife had been at first — a novel claiming to be the confessions of a long-time “kept woman”: Ex-Mistress.

Although uncomfortable with the subject matter — as her stepson Will Oursler relates in his memoir, Family Story, Perkins’s private morals were considerably more Puritanical than her professional career and affair with Oursler would suggest — she agreed on the condition that Brentano assure her anonymity. Considering that Perkins had spent the last six years working for a tell-all magazine and lived in a city with a gossip columnist on every corner, she should have known that Brentano’s commitment would be short-lived. Although Ex-Mistress first appeared anonymously, subsequent printings were credited to Dora Macy, the book’s narrator, and within a month or two later, Variety and other papers were telling the world that the credit properly belonged to Mrs. Fulton Oursler/Grace Perkins.

Perkins suffered from multiple health problems, and not long after Ex-Mistress was published, she was hospitalized and spent several months in recouperation. Her talks with the nurses who cared for her inspired her to follow the formula of Ex-Mistress — a first-person of a woman who struggles against a series of injustices and obstacles. This time, however, she added a more compelling action. Lora, the nurse, is assigned by her nursing service to care for two young sisters who are, as the medical profession put it at the time, failing to thrive. In reality, they’re being starved to death in a complicated conspiracy involving their wealthy but dissolute mother, her chauffeur, and a corrupt doctor. The obstacles she faces in trying to rescue reveal something of the power structures of the time in that Lora, despite the medical facts on her side, is disparaged by virtually everyone, including her nursing service supervisor and a reputable doctor she seeks out. The doctor, for example, resists becoming involved purely out of collegial discretion.

The film rights to Ex-Wife and Night Nurse were quickly picked up by Warner Brothers, each selling for over $10,000, and Perkins’s next novel, Personal Maid, was sold to Paramount before it was even published. Hungry for strong stories on shocking subjects, the studios found Perkins’s work ideal — and her prominent connection with Macfadden’s magazine empire, which now included Liberty, provided an easy way to broaden the reach of their publicity. Of the three film versions, Night Nurse is, by far, the most faithful to Perkins’s original. My Past, on the other hand, jettisoned almost everything except the heroine’s name — and even that was mutated to Doree Macy.

By the summer of 1932, the lure of movie money had become too strong to resist, and the Ourslers moved to Hollywood, renting a large house from actor Jack Holt. Oursler continued to manage the editorial affairs of Macfadden Publications and work on Thatcher Colt mystery novels he published as Anthony Abbott, several of which were made into movies, as was The Spider. Ironically, living in America’s capital of illusions sparked Perkins’s interest in writing a story that dealt more directly with the nation’s economic problems: the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the resulting depression.

No More Orchids opens in November 1929, just a few weeks after the crash. Anne Holt, daughter of a banker and granddaughter of one of the richest men in America, arrives in Cherbourg by seaplane to catch the steamship that’s delayed its departure while she partied in Paris. She offers no apology to the captain, knowing his concern for schedule takes a back seat to his fear of provoking the grandfather’s wrath, and immediately dives into a bridge game with a band of friends. “Card playing was the hardest work any of us did,” Ann reflects. Short on hard cash when she loses, she pays her debt by handing over a $10,000 diamond bracelet. Money means as little to Ann as air.

Her attitude especially repels one of the ship’s passengers. Tony Gage, the manager of a coffee plantation in Brazil (owned, it turns out, by Ann’s grandfather), finds her carelessness about money abhorrent. Unfortunately, the two of them also feel a powerful physical attraction, and by the time they land in New York, a fierce love-hate relationship is underway, with love steadily gaining the upper hand.

Anne’s holiday comes to an abrupt end. Her sister, in an unhappy marriage, has had an affair, followed by an abortion, and has taken to smoking cocaine-laced cigarettes. Anne’s grandfather is holding her inheritance hostage to her agreeing to marry a European nobleman. And his leverage has increased thanks to the impending failure of her father Bill’s bank. “The whole world will hear of it — for there isn’t a chance, not a chance, that he could pull out clean,” he informs her, delighting in the prospect of seeing the son-in-law he despises ruined. Marry the prince, however, and the grandfather will not just release Anne’s inheritance but bail out her father. Thus, Anne’s dilemma is set: will she choose love or money and her father’s rescue?

Opening pages of "No More Orchids" in Liberty magazine, July 2, 1932
Opening pages of No More Orchids in Liberty magazine, July 2, 1932.

We reach this cliffhanging moment roughly one-third of the way into the book. Between here and the eventual happy ending, Perkins seeds a half-dozen more plot twists and quandaries, betraying a factor that influenced the book every bit as much as artistic intention: its serialization. No More Orchids appeared in ten installments in Liberty magazine between mid-June and mid-August 1932. In keeping with the traditions of magazine serials, it was incumbent upon Perkins to close each installment with enough dramatic tension to bring the readers back the next week. At the end of the ninth installment, in the August 13, 1932 issue, for example, readers were informed, “In next week’s concluding installment you’ll witness the great climax that decides whether life is to hold frustration or happiness for Anne.” In this way, the narrative arc of a serialized novel more closely resembles the trajectory of an artillery shell than Aristotle’s three-act story structure. Nine-tenths of the way into the novel, we still don’t know “whether life is to hold frustration or happiness for Anne.” Everything will come together in the final installment.

Photoplay edition of No More Orchids
Photoplay edition of No More Orchids.

The film rights to No More Orchids were sold to Columbia in early June 1932, before the serial even began running in Liberty, and the book edition of the novel was released by Covici-Friede in late July, when seven out of ten installments had appeared. The film version, starring Carole Lombard, was released in late November, concurrent with a second book edition, this time with photos from the film, in the “Photoplay” movie tie-in series that Grosset and Dunlap had been publishing since Harold MacGrath’s The Adventures of Kathlyn in 1913.

No More Orchids offers an illuminating example of how each medium — book, magazine, and movie — adapted the same underlying story to its purposes. From a plot standpoint, there is little difference between the book and magazine serial versions, but Perkins had to trim her structure and prose for Liberty. The book’s sixteen chapters are condensed into ten installments, with color being the chief victim of the cut. Here, for example, Anne, recuperating from an emergency appendectomy (another cliffhanger), observes her Maine farm-wife grandmother:

And as I got better I’d pretend that I was asleep, and then fall to studying her with endless inspection…. She wasn’t ugly! [Anne’s mother had called her mother-in-law ugly.] Nobody could call her a beauty, but she certainly wasn’t as repulsively decayed as my memory pictured her. There were moments when she was almost lovely. I searched her for signs of resemblance to Bill, and often there were phrases she used, and tonalities, that brought him back to me so sharply that I could feel my lips forming his name.

The Liberty version drops that last sentence, and similar elisions can be found in almost every paragraph of more than three or four sentences. It’s much the same editorial approach one finds in Reader’s Digest condensed books: triage. Keep the plot, patch up the dialogue, sacrifice the long descriptions. The extent of the damage this triage does to a text is perhaps evidence of its artistic integrity: one shudders to think how it would ruin Remembrance of Things Past; No More Orchids, on the other hand, might actually have benefited from it. Grace Perkins mostly writes in terse, telegraphic sentences, her dialogue ping-pongs among her characters. I’m not sure Gran’s “tonalities” are worth preserving.

Lobby card for film version of No More Orchids
Lobby card for film version of No More Orchids.

If the magazine version of No More Orchids required Perkins to trim her prose a bit, the film version called for some serious machete work. Keene Thompson was first assigned as screenwriter, but in September, with the serial complete and the book version published, Columbia called in Gertrude Purcell to tailor the story to the strengths of its three leads: Carole Lombard (Anne), Lyle Talbot (Tony), and Walter Connolly (Bill). Between them, Thompson and Purcell jettisoned at least 70% of Perkins’s material.

Much of the second half of the novel takes place in the aftermath of Bill’s suicide. Anne having refused her grandfather’s deal, Bill heads to Washington, D.C. in hopes of raising money to keep his bank afloat. Failing, he shoots himself, and Anne finds herself destitute, struggling to find work and survive. Her romance with Tony runs into its share of obstacles. She flees to the safety of her grandmother’s farm, only to see it consumed in a forest fire. In the last chapter, a letter from Bill materializes with evidence that will send her evil grandfather to jail for fraud, restoring Bill’s posthumous reputation, and Anne and Tony reunite, marry, and head off to South America to live happily ever after.

All of this gets ditched in the film. Anne never has to go hungry or fight a forest fire or have an emergency appendectomy in a Maine train station because the scriptwriters manufacture a deus ex machina that allows all that dramatic clutter to be bypassed. Bill takes out an enormous life insurance policy and then flies his plane into a mountain, thereby resolving the bank crisis and enabling the lovers to reunite, etc..

Many studies have been written about the art or craft of adapting fiction to film. Most take books that most of us would consider classic, or at least respectably solid — say, the novels of Jane Austen — and note the various ways in which the complexities, nuances, and riches are lost in translation to the screen. But one could just as easily take a lesser book — and No More Orchids is certainly far inferior to Pride and Prejudice — and ask, what’s gained?

Just comparing the book and film versions of No More Orchids and their near-contemporaries in Big Business Girl, which I wrote about recently, I would argue that little that’s lost between page and screen in No More Orchids is worth mourning. There is a lot of narrative thrashing, particularly in the second half, that is intricate choreography but not fundamentally revealing of character or context. With the film version of Big Business Girl, on the other hand, the entire subplot of dry-cleaning rackets, hijacking, murders, and bombings is lost, and the story is reduced to a familiar formula: will Priscilla marry Miles Standish or John Alden? Either way, Priscilla’s going to have to quit her job and become a happy homemaker.

Grace Perkins and Fulton Oursler stayed in Hollywood for a year or so after No More Orchids, both contributing dialogue and picking up a few more film rights sales. Perkins’s story “Mike,” which appeared in Liberty in May 1933, came out as Torch Singer, starring Claudette Colbert, a few months later. They returned to New York and carried on their successful magazine careers, Oursler moving from Liberty to Reader’s Digest in the early 1940s. Oursler and Perkins both embraced religion around the same time and Oursler had an enormous bestseller in The Greatest Story Ever Told, which took a serial magazine story approach to the life of Jesus Christ (and which was filmed in 1965). Perkins wrote three more novels after No More Orchids, but none were picked up by the studios. Oursler died in 1952; Perkins died three years later after sustaining injuries in a fall.

No More Orchids, by Grace Perkins
New York: Covici-Friede, 1932

Pick Up by Eunice Chapin (1931)

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Advertisement for Pick Up in the Washington Herald.

In late 1931, the budding literary journal Prairie Schooner informed its readers that “Miss Eunice Chapin, formerly of Lincoln” (and formerly of the University of Nebraska, where Prairie Schooner was based) had published her first novel, Pick Up. “It is trash, and not worth the hour it takes to read it.” It was, according to the reviewer, “the worst first-novel we have ever read,” the sort of thing only of interest to “servant girls and overworked stenographers.” Having done a fair amount of research into the history and society of Lincoln, Nebraska around this time for my biography of Virginia Faulkner (due from the University of Nebraska Press in January 2026), the bitterness of this review intrigued me. Was there more than just literary criticism at work here?

Lincoln and its major university should have been proud of its native daughter. Having done graduate work at Bryn Mawr, Eunice Chapin rose steadily through the literary world of New York City, first as a freelancer, then as an assistant editor at Forum, then managing editor of McCall’s, one of the most popular women’s magazines in America, in 1928, and finally acquisition editor with G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1930. She wrote Pick Up after George Putnam himself challenged her to put her apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the city, or at least Manhattan, on paper.

Chapin’s father was a banker, director of First National, one of the largest banks in the city and on the boards of several companies and charities in Lincoln, so there was an understandable tendency among the local newspapers to make a big deal of Pick Up. The Star gave the book a half-page spread in its Sunday magazine section, announcing that it “Reveals Real Quality in Modern Youth.” Chapin herself tried to downplay the hype, saying that “her conservative friends are going to be surprised” and that her family “will wish I’d produced a Hamlet” instead of something “frisky.”

“Frisky” was putting it mildly for most Lincoln readers. In the book’s opening chapter, Cherry Towne, a secretary, meets a handsome young man on an uptown bus. Losing her hat in a gust of wind, she catches a chill and he generously invites her up to his luxurious apartment to warm up, introducing himself as Niels Atherton. After chit-chat about his stint with a circus in Barcelona, a tiger hunt in Malaya, and an expedition up the Amazon, he drops that he happens to own the Humming Bird motor company in Detroit.

Though Cherry demurs that she has little experience with alcohol, he plies her with multiple cocktails and then suggests she take a bath to relax. Unable to steer a straight course into the bathroom, she allows him to disrobe and set her into the tub, where he proceeds to soap her all over. This is as intimate as the evening gets, but allowing a strange man she’s known for just a few hours to assist with her ablutions was already a prairie mile past the point where any good Midwest girl should have drawn the line.

Advertisement for the serialization of Pick Up in the Lincoln Star.

Not content with publicizing the book, the Star decided to publish Pick Up as a serial. Unfortunately, so many complaints were received when the first two installments were published that the paper put its censors to work and excised all the potentially scandalous bits from the remaining text. The Omaha World-Herald called the resulting work “pretty much emaciated,” with “little reason for publishing it.” Several other papers around the country ran the book as a serial as well, but Pick Up failed to gain traction either critically or commercially. (Perhaps this is why George Putnam, who encouraged Chapin to write the book, passed on publishing it — and even Brewer & Warren, who accepted it, chose not to take Chapin’s second novel, City Girl, a year later.)

If there was an agenda behind the Prairie Schooner review, the journal wasn’t alone in its judgment. The New York Time dismissed the book as “a flimsy bit of fluff.” Saturday Review called it a “slightly idiotic, pseudo-sophisticated tale,” and “a novel peopled exclusively by imbeciles, morons, pinheads, and worse….” The Brooklyn Daily Times compared Chapin’s subject and style to that of Viña Delmar’s best-seller Bad Girl: “reportorial, with great attention to detail.” Its rival, the Brooklyn Eagle, on the other hand, thought Chapin capable of much better work: “talent devoted to such a girl as Cherry is too much like squirrel hunting with a bear trap.”

Most reviewers found it implausible that Cherry would manage to cross paths with so many celebrities. Strolling into the restaurant of the Algonquin Hotel, Ricky, another of her suitors, remarks, “There’s Fannie Hurst — back from Florence. And [Lucius] Beebe, home from Bermuda. And Admiral [Richard] Byrd…” Among the glitterati he spots is Niels, lunching with June, a Broadway star known as one of his main squeezes. There’s plenty of jealousy, mixed motives, and white lies to propel Chapin’s story along for its three hundred-some pages, but what there isn’t is substance, either behind its characters’ masks or underneath Chapin’s descriptions of New York. Chapin told one Lincoln reporter that she hoped “those at home who know me will see that fragile, sensitive story of the girl beneath the noisy, wisecracking surface of New York, and they’ll understand, and like it.” I hoped so, too. But I’m afraid the reviewers were right.

RKO bought the film rights to Pick Up and announced its version would star Helen Twelvetrees, but the project died in development, as did “Coast to Coast,” an original story Chapin sold to Fox. Still, the studios were gathering in writers like firewood ahead of a rough winter and Chapin ended 1931 on the staff at Columbia. Within a year of that, she married John Larkin, a playwright and former New York acquaintance. She published three more novels — City Girl (1932), Love Without Breakfast (1934), and Million-Dollar Story (1938) — all of which quickly disappeared without much critical notice. If she contributed to any films, her credits have been lost, likely all in early stages of development. Eunice Chapin died in Los Angeles in 1978.

Pick Up, by Eunice Chapin
New York: Brewer & Warren, Inc., 1931

The Ex- Files: Ex-Wife, Ex-Husband, Ex-Mistress, Ex-Racketeer, etc.

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Lobby card for The Divorcee, the 1930 film adaptation of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife
Lobby card for The Divorcee, the 1930 film adaptation of Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife (1930).

As part of my current project of digging into the source texts of Hollywood Pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, I spent much of February exploring the rabbit-hole of the brief-lived phenomenon of books inspired by (or simply exploiting) the success and notoriety of Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel, Ex-Wife. Recently reissued by Faber (UK) and McNally (US) and featured in the title of Marsha Gordon’s biography of Parrott, Becoming the Ex-Wife, Ex-Wife is no longer a neglected book. But what most readers don’t know — even Gordon mentions it only in passing — is the extent to which Ex-Wife led to a whole series of Ex-titled books, most of them drawing upon or taking off from Parrott’s book.

To set this overview in context, I have to take say a little bit about Parrott and her bestseller.

Cover of the first US edition of Ex-Wife.
Cover of the first US edition of Ex-Wife.

• Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott
New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1929
When Ex-Wife first appeared, it was considered such a volatile mixture of sex, drink, and changing morals that its publishers kept its author’s name off the first five printings and initially marketed it as nonfiction. Even after Ursula Parrott, then a prolific writer of magazine short stories, was credited on the dust jacket, it was claimed to be her autobiography. By then, it had been declared unfit for circulation by the venerable Watch and Ward Society of Parrott’s hometown of Boston — which only speeded up the rate at which copies flew out of bookstores.

“My husband left me four years ago,” declares Pat, the narrator. “Why — I don’t precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect, does he.” Though divorce was still considered something of a social embarrassment (I had a distant cousin who never told her husband of 60 years that her parents had divorced in 1915), what was most shocking to readers was this blasé attitude of the two parties involved. Decades before the term “open marriage” was coined, the practice of flexible fidelity had become so prevalent, or perceived to be, that publishers and Hollywood studios felt obliged to both cover and condemn it. (See Party Husband (book and movie) or Illicit (movie).)

Ex-Wife shows that flexible fidelity required a far more flexibility than many Americans were capable of. Pat and Peter marry, spend time in Europe, maintain busy work and social lives, and everything seems grand for a time. Well, aside from Pat’s pregnancy: “No baby, at least no baby for years and years,” Peter cautions her. “You are too young and nice-looking, and I don’t want you to be hurt.” Meaning he doesn’t want to have a wife who’s less than ideal arm candy. Or the financial and emotional responsibility for two other lives. When Peter has a casual affair, he expects Pats to take it, well, casually. When Pat responds in kind, though, Peter recoils: “I always thought you were the cleanest person in the world.” Open marriage quickly turns into open conflict. “I’ll teach you to go through my pockets for money or anything, you bitch,” says Peter, and strikes Pat across the mouth. Yet neither admits to feelings of jealousy because jealousy “was too outrageously old-fashioned.”

Although not strictly autobiographical, Ex-Wife has numerous parallels with Ursula Parrott’s own story and her first marriage to reporter Lindesay Parrott. Both Parrott and Pat cheated and were cheated on, lubricated their lives with too much Prohibition alcohol, enjoyed the financial independence of working, and resented the uneven distribution of practical and emotional responsibilities between wife and man. Pat echoes a sentiment frequently voiced by Parrott: “Freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.”

Though Pat soon adapts to life after marriage (her diary fills with entries like, “Dinner — Richard”; “C. L. C. — the Ritz — 7:15”; “Dominic — to dine at the Cecelia”), she never quite settles into the role of the gay divorcée. Indeed, Ex-Wife is as much an artifact of 17th century Boston Puritanism as of the Roaring Twenties. Adultery was then still the most common basis for divorce and though Pat doesn’t have to wear a red “A”, she still carries around a label of ostracism: “You’re an ex-wife,” her friend Lucia tells her, “because it is the most important thing to know about you … explains everything else, that you once were married to a man who left you.”

As Parrott portrays it, life as an ex-wife is less carefree than nihilistic. “While I was married,” Pat writes, “I saved money and made plans for the next fifty years and so on. Afterward, I did not make plans for the month after next. It seemed such a waste of time.” After years of socializing, brief affairs, and a cast of a thousand escorts, Pat surrenders her freedom for the security of marriage to Nathaniel, a dullish but reliable man who celebrates her “obvious wholesomeness.” It’s not a case so much of living happily ever after as living comfortably ever after. Pat has had her flings and Nathaniel is clearly too unimaginative to even contemplate one.

It’s hard to imagine anyone getting much of an illicit thrill from reading Ex-Wife, but it was, if briefly, considered the hottest book one could buy over the counter. Ex-Wife was scooped up by MGM and filmed with MGM executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, in the lead. Though it won Shearer a Best Actress Oscar, The Divorcee resembles Ex-Wife only in the sense that the shards on the floor resemble a vase before it was knocked off a table. We’re 57 minutes into an 84-minute film before Jerry (Pat) tells Ted (Peter) about her infidelity. And unlike Ex-Wife, the two remarry and live happily ever after.

The success of book and film led to a predictable response from publishers: “Can we have another one like it?” Parrott herself quickly spun off Strangers May Kiss (1930), another story about years of a sophisticated and loose relationship that culminates in traditional marriage. It, too, was instantly transformed into a vehicle for Norma Shearer (under the same title and with slightly more fidelity to the original). But in New York, the call for “More!” rang out and was soon answered.

Cover of Ex-Husband
Cover of first (and only) US edition of Ex-Husband (1929).
• Ex-Husband, by Anonymous
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929
The first to follow was Ex-Husband, published anonymously but attributed in rumors to various authors, including Parrott’s real ex-husband and the poet and critic Joseph Auslander. Of all the Ex-titled books, it was not only the most clearly imitative of Parrott’s book but also by far the best. Although certainly written in haste, it operates at a level of originality far above that of mere parody.

“My wife left me four years ago, maybe five,” relates the narrator, Wilfred Mallard. Time is not the only thing Wilfred is a little vague on. Indeed, Wilfred often reminded me of another great comic autobiographer, Augustus Carp. Like Carp, he thinks so highly of himself that everyone else in his world is merely a passing shadow. Wilfred feels he has made not only the supreme but also the most logical sacrifice in allowing his able wife Roberta, to go out and work while he remains at home. He’s happy to be the weaker sex in their relationship:

I wanted to subordinate my life to hers, to devote myself utterly to her service, to be the one who would cry, “Upidee, Upida,” as she struggled up the hilly path, and “Excelsior!” as she reached the top.

Not that this means he takes on any domestic duties, unless these include showering frequently. Wilfred takes a lot of showers in this book, each followed by long sessions of admiring his “smooth bronzed skin, like a Greek god, long eyelashes, supple shapely calves, and silky hair” in front of a mirror. So consumed with himself is Wilfred that he struggles to comprehend when Roberta stands at the door, suitcases packed, ready to leave for the last time:

“Good-by and good luck!”
She could not possibly mean it. She must be joking.
“Don’t joke about that, Roberta dear,” I said. “It hurts me too much even to think about it. Will you be home early?”

Like Parrott’s Pat, Wilfred finds refuge with a sympathetic friend. Ivan, however, wants to extend him more than just sympathy. Ivan comes in while Wilfred is bathing: “O, but I haven’t scrubbed your back yet.” Wilfred declines his offer (“I hate having my body touched unless by a woman, who touches it in holy passion,” he confides to the reader). Ivan is crushed. “He looked hurt, as though I had struck him with a whip.”

Having a narcissist as narrator gives the author of Ex-Husband the opportunity to play on some of Parrott’s worst tendencies. Pat in Ex-Wife is constantly giving the reader a fashion show:

The dress slipped on. Black marocain with a deep white collar and exaggerated cuffs, cut petalwise. Black satin opera pumps… I did not like satin shoes much, but these made my feet look so narrow. An almost brimless black milan hat, with a gold arrow embroidered athwart the front. Pearls — no, the flat gold necklace.

Wilfred is a peacock of the highest order:

I had dressed with especial care that morning. Suede shoes were topped with soft velvety mouse-colored spats covering pin striped silk socks in black and white like the shimmer of cobwebs against a dark sky. At the last minute I had decided against my soft, light gray suit vest, and had worn a silk brocade instead. Soft gray shirt, tie to match. Gray Borsolino hat. Gray gloves. I love grays. I looked in the long cheval glass and decided that I was not offensive, not offensive at all.

Like Parrott, Ex-Husband’s author plays “artfully” with music. Parrott has a chapter in which Pat’s thoughts are interwoven with lines from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Wilfred and a friend debate the meaning of life while listening to the strains of “Andante Strenuosa” by that Viennese master, Meiselmenig. Where Parrott very occasionally drops a name, Wilfred spews them out:

We mingled with them informally. William Seabrook, red-faced and thumb-ringed; Theodore Dreiser, the American tragedy; George Jean Nathan, a choir boy at a prize fight; Joseph Auslander, Adolphe Menjou talking with Edgar Allan Poe on Fifth Avenue; … Rebecca West, looking Spanish, spoiled, and spent; Horace Liveright, a cut-steel shoe buckle; Edna Millay, looking as though she had lost a buck in the snow ; Ursula Parrott, the little girl reporter of the dementia Peacox case1…

1 Parrott reported on the June 1929 murder trial of Earl Peacox for the New York Evening Journal.

This goes on for another page and a half, and it’s just one of several name-dropping orgies.

As entertainment, Ex-Husband edges out Ex-Wife in my book. While Parrott’s book is undoubtedly an accurate representation of the quandary of women trying to balance the pulls of career, marriage, societal expectations, and (let’s face it) enjoying themselves, Pat (and Parrott herself) always seems haunted by the specter of Puritanical judgments. Wilfred, on the other hand, is too blissfully oblivious to worry about anything but finding another woman to take care of him. Which he does, in Harriet, who has the decided advantage over Roberta of being independently wealth and hence capable of supporting him without the distraction of a career. It certainly seems a happier match than that of Pat and Nathaniel, which Parrott never quite portrays as anything more than a compromise.

Cover of Ex-Mistress.
• Ex-Mistress, by Anonymous (Dora Macy)
New York: Brentano’s, 1930
With Ex-Mistress, the direct influence of Parrott’s book begins quickly to fade. The shadow of The Scarlet Letter, on the other hand, falls starkly across this novel’s opening chapter. “I am not a bad woman. I am not a prostitute,” she announces at the start. Dora Macy (one of the mysteries of this book is the author’s decision to name her narrator after one of her pseudonyms) is a virginal sixteen-year-old in a small Southern town seduced by the handsome son of the town’s banker. Things go too far on a Sunday picnic. Dora finds herself with child; the banker’s son and her family reject her, so she hops a train to New York.

Dora proves a proficient survivor. She gets a job, finds a trustworthy friend and guide to the ways of the big city, and even manages to gain admission to a benign home for unwed mothers when her time comes. Giving up the child for adoption, she emerges with a single overriding goal: security. Security, that is, within the constraint that her history makes her unfit for marriage in the eyes of “decent people.” So she has to rely on the one commodity of value on the market: “My body belonged to myself…. It was mine — the only thing I had. The only thing in the world that belonged to me.”

Dora pursues two paths to security. While slowly ascending the career ladder through retail jobs from shopgirl to manager to shop owner and eventually, a chain of cosmetics salons, she acquires a sequence of sugar daddies. Restaurant dinners, clothes, and occasional items of jewelry at first, then an apartment, and finally, a penthouse complete with grand piano and gym. A Chinese businessman is followed by an author, a doctor, and a banker. Abortion as birth control is dealt with casually. Dora’s friend Marion, a Broadway star, has one done after a show on Saturday night and is back and dancing in the spotlight on Monday.

As an author, Dora Macy is more craftswoman than artist. Her prose carries the story along in coach class and most of her characters are equally functional. Occasionally, though, an observation slips out that suggests far closer study of people. A sister who counsels her after she gives up her child has a mind “like a room that never had the windows opened.” A landlady is “The kind of a woman who put on her glasses to answer the phone.”

And she understands well the skills required to attract and keep a man interested in maintaining a long-term mistress. On a first evening out, Dora wears:

White satin (which is always good for a first impression), and a huge white ostrich fan. But not a single piece of jewelry. Never wear jewelry when you first consider a new love; it leaves him nothing to adorn. Later, of course, you wear his jewelry, and nothing else but.

A mistress has to manage a delicate and ever-evolving balance between tantalizing and satisfying the man keeping her. He has no legal constraint preventing him from abandoning his mistress and at most the risk of of blackmail if he does. Men, Dora decides, need three women: a mother, a wife, and a mistress, and the successful mistress must juggle all three roles over the course of a relationship. When her sugariest daddy, a banker, dies and she considers her situation at the age of 37, however, Dora opts for marriage to Earl, a middle-aged bachelor with deep pockets and a shallow mind: “He took an enormously long time to say anything, and when it was said it really didn’t amount to much.”

Dora Macy was the pen name of Grace Perkins, a one-time Broadway actress who married the writer and editor Fulton Oursler in 1925 and became a successful writer herself. Ex-Mistress was her second novel, and like Parrott’s, it was picked up by by Hollywood (Warner Brothers) and made into My Past (1931), starring Bebe Daniels. Both the novel and the movie were followed in short order: Macy’s Night Nurse, which drew upon dozens of interviews with registered nurses in New York, was also filmed by Warner Brothers, retaining the book’s title. Night Nurse is considered a classic Pre-Code film, with a stellar performance by Barbara Stanwyck and unveiled references to adultery, child abuse, bootlegging, kidnapping, and drug addiction.

Cover of Ex-“It”.
• Ex-“It”, by Anonymous (Edward Dean Sullivan)
New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1930
One assumes that Grosset and Dunlap approached Edward Dean Sullivan (or vice-versa) about whipping out a quick parody of Ex-Wife. Instead of going the route of Ex-Husband, though, he reached way back to 1927 and another then-hot commodity, It, which made both author Elinor Glyn and star of the film adaptation, “It” (with quotation marks), Clara Bow, household names.

Ex-“It” is the somewhat amusing autobiography of Fanny Hill, a girl who “works” (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) her way up to wealth and fame. At the time Ex-“It” was published, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was very much considered obscene and unsaleable over the counter any place in America, so it’s doubtful that many readers saw the parallels between Cleland’s character and Sullivan’s.

Somewhat amusing in part because, like most published jokes, it goes on too long, but mostly because of the howling sexism: “At four years of age I could say ‘Pees dimmy dat,’ which is all any gal with good teeth and a shape need say up to thirty.” On the other hand, there are a few apt observations. I’m sure we’ve all encountered a little dog that’s “just a nervous breakdown with a leg at each corner.” Overall, though, file this one under “Forgettable.”

Cover of Ex-Judge.
• Ex-Judge, by Anonymous
New York: Brentano’s, 1930
Ex-Judge has no relationship with Ex-Wife aside from its title. Unlike the rest of Ex-Wife’s ilk, it’s a third-person narrative and clearly a novel submitted to Brentano’s with a different title. In the context of the Seabury investigations of New York City police and judicial corruption, Ex-Judge is an overlooked artifact, a fictionalized account (Tammany Hall becomes Tammanela) of a mediocre political machine functionary elevated to the bench with the task of acquitting friends and convicting enemies. It does give an convincing insider’s view of how the gears of Tammany’s machine fit together, but as a novel, it’s a bit too much like a building that’s never had its scaffolding removed.

Cover of Ex-Racketeer.
• Ex-Racketeer, by Anonymous
New York: Rudolph Field, 1930
Ex-Racketeer is a gangster’s soliloquy of just 83 pages, an express journey through American organized crime from 1918 to 1930. Eugene Caxton is a mob soldier hiding out from Turk, a boss he’s ripped off. While counting time, he picks up the pen and courtesy paper in his hotel room’s desk and begins to write a memoir.

Like James Cagney’s character, Tom Powers, in The Public Enemy, Eugene gets started doing petty jobs as a teenager and works his way up through the ranks. With the start of Prohibition, his mob adds bootlegging to its existing menu of “Narcotics, White Slavery, Robbery, and Strike-Breaking,” and Eugene offers his opinion of the risks and benefits of each. He regrets, though, that Hollywood has “spoiled” most mobsters: “Made them too self-conscious… They all try to live like the subject of a Ben Hecht scenario.” And he offers a prediction we sadly can see being realized in America today: “What this nation needs is not a good five cent cigar, but a definite, exclusive, authoritative, and formally acknowledged aristocracy … we’ll come to it yet.”

Not to spoil the plot, such as it is, but it should be no surprise that things do not end well for Eugene.

Ex-Baby (no dust jacket survives).
• Ex-Baby, by Anonymous (Aben Kandel)
New York: Covici-Friede, 1930
Anyone who paid good money for a copy of Ex-Baby (as I did) got robbed. Just 55 pages long with 18-plus point type, it’s an average humor column packaged like a novella. And the joke is paper-thin. This is the narrative of a four-year-old boy (an ex-baby, get it?) with the voice and sensibility of a twenty-something wiseguy: “On a good night, I’d have pa, ma, grandma, Uncle Timiny, the neighbor, the maid, and maybe a cousin or two all doing little tricks to get me to eat my spinach. Gee, it was great.” Ha-ha, hee-hee.
Cover of Ex-Book.
• Ex-Book, by William Henry Hanemann
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930
Ex-Book is the slightest of the lot, just 14 pages, really just a brochure included with copies of Hanemann’s The Facts of Life, a collection of comic pieces also published by Farrar & Rinehart. On the other hand, its one joke is carried off far better than Ex-Baby’s. “I am lying, face down, in a strange wire basket,” the narrator relates. It’s a manuscript, dropped off with an editor by its author. “I’m sick and tired of you,” declares the author. “I know every comma, every paragraph, every turn and twist and clever phase … and God, Cookie, how you bore me.” An amusing slalom though the publication process.

Though Ursula Parrott cranked out 18 more books before her life and career crashed and burned in the mid-1940s, none of them inspired a wave of imitators like Ex-Wife’s. I highly recommend anyone interested in Parrott’s rackety life read Marsha Gordon’s biography.

The Goldfish Bowl by Mary C. McCall, Jr. (1932)

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Cover of first edition of The Goldfish Bowl by Mary C. McCall

Mary C. McCall, Jr. (given the Junior by her mother, Mary C. McCall, as a flex against the patriarchy (her father specifically)) was a busy and well-paid writer of magazine fiction when she decided to take on a longer piece, a novel. Looking around for material, she thought of her girlhood friend, Elisabeth Morrow, whose sister Anne had recently married the most famous man in America: Charles Lindbergh. Like any newspaper reader or radio listener of the day, McCall knew that Lindbergh and his wife were subject to relentless scrutiny, but unlike most of them, she also heard from Elisabeth what it was like to be the objects of this attention.

It was, she said, like living in a goldfish bowl, exposed on all side — an analogy that got credited to Irvin S. Cobb but originally came from a story by Saki. McCall thought a good story could be built around the situation as told from the goldfishes’ perspective. To avoid simply fictionalizing Lindbergh’s tale, she took her inspiration from the loss of the US Navy submarine SS-4 in 1927. Struck accidentally by a US Coast Guard ship, the SS-4 sank off Provincetown, Massachusetts. Forty men were trapped aboard and though divers were able to locate and communicate with crewmen through tapping on the hull, all hands died before the sub could be raised.

McCall turned this tragedy into a story of heroism. After his sub is struck and sunk by a yacht, Lieutenant Scotty McClenahan comes up with the idea of ejecting the crewmen through the torpedo tubes, allowing them to make it to the surface. The catch, though, is that the last man aboard would be unable to trigger the firing of the tube. Scotty volunteers to be the one to stay behind and accepts his certain death, only to be rescued at the last moment by Navy divers.

All of this happens before the book opens. We meet Scotty as he comes to aboard the Navy destroyer after the rescue. Still groggy from oxygen deprivation and time in the bariatric chamber, he’s startled to learn that he’s become an overnight hero:

“They want romance: that’s you. Football hero, laying down his life for his brothers. Two days, trapped in a watery tomb. Raised from the dead. You’re Lazarus and Buddy Rogers all in one. You’re every mother’s dearm-kiddie. Every school teacher has fallen asleep thinking of running her fingers through your hair.”

He’s promoted to Commander, which is particularly disconcerting because Scotty had resigned his commission and was due to leave the Navy in a few weeks. His fleet’s admiral is waiting to present him with a medal. As the destroyer pulls into New York harbor, dozens of reporters and a newsreel camera crew come aboard to get his story. Tugboats shoot up waterworks. Landing at the Battery, he’s hustled into a limousine for a ticker tape parade along Broadway. The mayor presents the key to the city. He’s bundled into a tuxedo and feted as guest of honor at a banquet that night. Telegrams stream in with offers — the movies, magazines, vaudeville — but a wily publisher named Chapin talks him into signing an exclusive contract while Scotty’s head is still spinning.

Little of this would have been unfamiliar to McCall’s readers, and to be honest, little of it is told with particular originality. Where the book improves significantly is when McCall takes Scotty home to Connecticut and his longtime girlfriend, Janet. Or, to be more accurate, his longtime girl friend. For, as ardent as Scotty’s feelings may have been even before his brush with death, Janet is a young woman not ready to abandon her independence for a wedding ring. When Scotty leaves Janet’s home in the wee hours of the morning after a long and inconclusive talk, however, a reporter accosts him and asks if the two are now engaged. Still untrained at handling the press, Scotty stutters “Yes” and hurries away.

In the morning, the news is on the front page of every paper. Returning to Janet’s home to apologize for the surprise, Scotty is confronted by a woman with a stronger backbone than his:

“Can’t you see what’s the matter?… You honestly can’t see what you’ve done to me?”

“No,” said Scotty. “Here it was so late — and your mother and father –”

“Well, all I have to say to you is this,” said Janet, “if you’re afraid of anything a filthy little tabloid can say, I’m not. The newspapers own you. You’re afair of them. Well, thank God, I’m not.”

“But, Janet, you can’t — ”

“I can telephone them and tell them the truth. Tell them what you should have told that man last night, — that we’re not engaged. Let them say what they please. Let them print whatever dirty story they like. Suppose it was three o’clock when you left here. Or six o’clock. Do you suppose I care? We know what happened. You went to sleep.”

Janet sees far better than Scotty the that price of fame is a loss of control, and she is far less willing than he to surrender it: “I’m crazy about you,” she acknowledges. “But being crazy isn’t a very enviable state. My reason’s got to play some part in my marriage. I won’t be yanked around by my body.”

When Scotty returns to New York City to meet with Chapin about his plans, he finds himself attracting a fans from the moment he arrives at Grand Central Station. The moment he stops to look at the display of the book “by Commander Scott McClenahan” his ghostwriters have slapped together overnight, the press of the people begins to feel more suffocating than the oxygen-deprived atmosphere in the submarine:

They were all staring at him. Passers-by stopped. The crowd multiplied itself, as figures multiply in a dream. Scotty made for the doorway to the offices, but they were there before him. Hands on his coat — people pawing him. Some one was tearing at a button on his sleeve. He lowered his head and butted his way through. He didn’t know whether his shoving shoulders or his doubled fists hurt them. He had to get away. He dragged a few of them into the hallway.
He made a last flailing movement with his arms and heard some one fall on the marble floor. “Good!” He was grunting out the words as he ran to the elevator. “I hope he broke his God damn neck!”

Scotty does not wear the mantle of fame well. And the wealth and comforts that come from his display-case job with a gyroscope company don’t compensate for the constraints of being under the constant scrutiny and pressure to play the hero. But it’s Janet — they eventually marry — who draws the line. She wants to be able to work: “I don’t think I want to be taken care of. I don’t like asking you for clothes money and taxis — things like that. I’d like to have something of my own.” And she fears that they could never have children: “I couldn’t stand the prying and peering…. ‘Yes my dear, I saw here on the street the other day and she’s enormous. She must be seven months along.'”

McCall manufacturers an escape for Scotty and Janet that one has to say operates a little too much like the torpedo tubes on the sub: they flee in the night for a place where their names are unknown and they can start afresh as nobodies. Canada.

The artificiality of the book’s ending didn’t prevent McCall’s agent from selling the book to Little, Brown & Co. ($5,000), the serial rights to Pictorial Review ($7,500), and the film rights to Warner Brothers ($8,750), or slightly under $500,000 in today’s dollars. It was a different time indeed.

Lobby card for It's Tough to be Famous, showing Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. pulling up up crewman played by David Landau.
Lobby card for It’s Tough to be Famous

McCall had Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in mind when she created Scotty, and Darryl Zanuck at Warner Brothers agreed he was right for the part. The script was finished in late 1931 and the production was filmed in January 1932. McCall wanted to work on the script, but Zanuck told her that the studio “never employed writers on their own work.” He also rejected the title as “too arty” and said the film would be called (spoiler alert!) It’s Tough to be Famous. The script was written by a studio veteran, Robert Lord (who, coincidentally, also wrote the screenplay of Five Star Final, featured here last year. McCall soon afterward joined Warner Brothers as a screenwriter, though, and would eventually become a three-time head of the Screenwriter’s Guild and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood until her career was derailed by the blacklist.

McCall and Fairbanks clicked when they met and had a brief affair after she arrived in Hollywood ahead of her husband. They remained good friends until McCall’s death in 1986. Sadly for all involved, It’s Tough to be Famous was released a month after Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped; a few weeks later, his body was found and the manhunt for the killer launched with a magnitude of publicity vastly exceeding anything McCall had imagined. An above-average if not great film by the standards of its day, with a winning performance by Fairbanks, It’s Tough to Be Famous was quickly forgotten.

You can read more about Mary C. McCall, Jr. in J. E. Smyth’s recent biography, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter, published by Columbia University Press.

The Goldfish Bowl, by Mary C. McCall, Jr.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company (1932)

The Woman Accused, by Rupert Hughes et novem alii (1933)

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Liberty magazine ad for its serial of The Woman Accused (and the associated Paramount movie)
Liberty magazine ad for its serial of The Woman Accused (and the associated Paramount movie)

I should start with an apology — two of them, actually. First, I apologize for not posting here for the last two months. I recently submitted the manuscript of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, to the University of Nebraska Press, and that left me little time and energy for Neglected Books. And second, I’ll apology in advance for the fact that there will be a fair number of posts about books from the early 1930s that will probably, on average, deserve their neglect if not for their function as sources for movies from what’s known as the Pre-Code era, which has become something of a fascination for me.

I wrote about Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five-Star Final back in September and have since accumulated several shelves full of novels and plays from this period. A fair number of source texts have become quite rare, so I’ve taken liberal advantage of Inter Library Loan to obtain others — including this monstrosity.

There may be no better evidence of the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the literary world of the early 1930s than The Woman Accused. The genesis of the project is lost in the files of Paramount Studios, but apparently Polan Banks, one of Paramount’s screenwriters with a few novels to his credit, concocted the idea of having a team of popular novelists of the time collaborating on a novel that would both be serialized in Liberty magazine and filmed by Paramount. Tag-team novel writing wasn’t new: no lesser worthies than Henry James and William Dean Howells had banded with ten scribes in 1907 to produce The Whole Family, whose excellence is demonstrated by the fact that this may be the first and only time you’ll ever hear about it.

The novelty of Banks’s proposal was not the collaboration of the authors but the collaboration of studio, magazine, and book publisher in the synergistic marketing of the story. Liberty would publish the individual chapters concurrent with the appearance of Paramount’s movie in cinemas around the country, and Ray Long & Richard R. Smith would collect the chapters in a book that would hit shops at the same time. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Consumer would have to make concerted efforts not to stumble into one or another of its packages.

Poster for The Woman Accused starring Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant (1933)
Poster for the Paramount film of The Woman Accused, starring Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant (1933).

As the most popular magazine of the time, it was easy for Liberty to round up nine willing writers (Polan Banks graciously offered his services). Most of them were regular contributors already, and the few who weren’t would be happy to join the Liberty team. At the time, a single feature story in Liberty could earn a writer more than the average American made in a year. By late 1932, the recruitment process was over and the writing well underway. The cast of contributors is testimony to the fickleness of literary success:

  • Rupert Hughes. Hughes was a prolific novelist, playwright, and author of magazine fiction whose strongest tie to Hollywood was through his nephew, the millionaire and budding film producer Howard Hughes. Hughes was also then in the midst of writing a well-regarded multi-volume biography of George Washington.
  • Vicki Baum. The Austrian-born Baum was riding a wave of success from her novel, Menschen im Hotel, which became a best-seller in the U.S. as Grand Hotel and, in turn, the 1932 movie of the same name that won the Oscar for best picture of the year.
  • Zane Grey. Grey had, by this time, spent decades as America’s best-selling author of Westerns (and even today his novel Riders of the Purple Sage has never been out of print).
  • Viña Delmar. Delmar was then at the height of her success, her hit novel Bad Girl having been both a popular success and the basis of a 1931 movie of the same name, which earned three Oscar nominations, including for best picture, and with several other films made from her magazine stories.
  • Irvin S. Cobb. Unless you frequent musty old bookstores, you’ve probably never seen his name before, but Cobb was then producing humorous and folksy books with titles like Speaking of Operations and Old Judge Priest (which John Ford would film the following year with Will Rogers in the title role).
  • Gertrude Atherton. California’s answer to Edith Wharton, Atherton was perhaps too prolific to help her critical reputation, but her social and historical novels had been steady sellers since the turn of the century.
  • J. P. McEvoy. McEvoy was then best-known for his Dixie Dugan novels, lightly satirical looks at show business as seen by a chorus girl and would-be starlet (modeled on Louise Brooks). (Long out of print and exceptionally rare, the Dixie Dugan trilogy was reissued earlier this year by Tough Poets Press.)
  • Ursula Parrott. Ursula Parrott already had two movie adaptations under her belt, with her 1929 best-seller, Ex-Wife, made into The Divorcee and Strangers May Kiss filmed under the same name in 1931, both starring Norma Shearer.
  • Polan Banks. Banks’s first novel, Black Ivory, was a turgid potboiler set in 18th century Louisiana, but it sold well enough to earn an invitation to come to Hollywood, where his next book, Street of Women, became a starring vehicle for Kay Francis under the same name in 1932.
  • Sophie Kerr. Although, as her Wikipedia page puts it, Kerr “is largely unknown to contemporary readers and her books are long out of print,” she had ten novels to her name by the time she was enlisted to work on this project and was a frequent contributor of magazine fiction.

In theory, The Woman Accused would have taken months to write, with each author receiving the previous chapters and adding their own, in a version of the game Consequences. In practice, it appears that Banks and Hughes came up with the outline of the story and the transition points for each chapter to ensure continuity, and all the writers churned out their chapters in a few weeks. The exercise was not much of a stretch from that of writing a typical magazine short story, which all of them were doing as many as a dozen times each year.

Churned is the operative word here. As the New York Times’s reviewer put it when the book version came out, “If a machine existed for the production of novels without the hindrance of an artist’s imagination, its work would resemble this collaboration of ten successful writers …” It’s a bit like a gourmet meal run through a blender for consumption through a straw.

Much magazine fiction of the time relied on a formula perfected decades before by the likes of O. Henry: characters recognizably based on stereotypes, a dramatic quandary, and a twist. And The Woman Accused is simply a concatenation of ten different versions of this stereotype hung upon a skeletal plot. Glenda Cromwell is a bright, beautiful, popular young woman who’s madly in love with bright, handsome, successful lawyer Jeffrey Baxter. Happiness awaits them. Unfortunately, there’s an obstacle: Glenda is a kept woman, the mistress of a powerful tycoon named Leo Young.

She decides to take the course of radical honesty and tells Jeffrey all, expecting his rejection. But Jeffrey demonstrates exception tolerance — or a uniformly low opinion of women:

She told him everything, put the worst interpretation on all her misdeeds, made crimes of her mistakes, tried to make him loathe her old self, as she herself did. This proved to him only that she was honest. He believed all women capable of sin, and most of them eager to yield to temptation.

And so, he proposes and she accepts and this book could easily have been ended by page 9. But Rupert Hughes, author of the first chapter, injects a couple of doses of plot complications and twists to keep his fiction machine cranking. They should go on a “six-day cruise to nowhere,” during which the captain — an old client — will marry them in secret (Because? O, reader, toss away your crutches of plausibility and walk!).

But then, the night before departure, Leo Young returns. He refuses to let Glenda go. Threatens to spread horrible rumors. She was once arrested (For? This is left to our imagination, or rather, to Chapter 10) and he can arrange for her records, including fingerprints, to be destroyed. He twirls the end of his moustache around his finger in malevolent glee. (Sorry, that’s Simon Legree. Hard to keep these stereotype bad guys straight.) There’s an argument, a struggle, and a shot.

Somehow, Glenda and Jeffrey make their way to the ship before the police discover the body. But wait! There’s a radiogram: Glenda is wanted for murder. Those fingerprints match the ones on the gun! The captain is told to hold Glenda until the return to port. But then someone comes up with the idea of holding a mock trial, with Glenda as defendant and Jeffery as her attorney. Several more plot twists follow, each accompanied by much creaking of machinery. Finally, a completely implausible explanation for Leo’s death is produced and Glenda and Jeffrey live happily ever after.

The ten authors should be credited with managing to achieve a consistent level of mediocrity across all ten chapters. These were writers known for their ability to produce fast-moving plots, not finely-honed prose styles or memorable characters. Viña Delmar shows slightly more flair for dialogue, Zane Grey slightly less clunkiness in his narrative. Sophie Kerr has the misfortune to be left with the chore of explaining those fingerprints, which she does in ten pages of near shaggy-dog tale telling by Glenda that serve more to achieve her word count goal than to facilitate a neat happy ending to the book.

In sum, The Woman Accused is neither a good novel or a good novelty. Nor was it entirely satisfactory as film material. Paramount gave the stories to playwright Bayard Veiller, then on contract, and he cut out a few twists and introduced some of his own. Now, the mock trial is instigated by a crony of the late Leo Young who commandeers a police boat that races out to intercept the cruise ship at sea. Which was, of course, just another day’s work for the men of the New York City Police Department Navy. Veiller tacks on a talky examination in a judge’s office on land — with Baxter once again as defense attorney — and invents a fairly shocking scene in which Baxter, played by Cary Grant, horsewhips a low-life crook, played by Jack LaRue, into confessing…well, something useful to exonerate Glenda.

Cary Grant demonstrates his ability to wield something other than his charm.

The book’s primary interest is as an artifact of the intimate links between Hollywood and the literary world of its time. Liberty proclaimed that 5,000,000 of its readers would want to see Paramount’s movie version. Paramount opened its movie not with cast or production credit but with portraits of the “Ten of the World’s Greatest Authors.” Ads for the Long & Smith book touted both film and magazine serial.


Opening credits of the Paramount film, The Woman Accused (1933).

For the authors involved, The Woman Accused, once the royalty checks were deposited, the book was probably forgotten. All continued to write. Atherton, the oldest, published eleven books before her death in 1948. Grey, the first to die, in 1939, managed to publish sixteen more as well as an equal number posthumously. Viña Delmar had the the longest career, publishing her 16th novel, McKeever, in 1976 and passing at the age of 86 in 1990. Of the several hundred books (and even more magazine stories) produced by this tentet, Zane Grey’s books have survived the best, although Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife has had a recent revival thanks to reissues from Faber (UK) and McNally Editions (US) and a 2023 biography by Marsha Gordon.

The Woman Accused, by Rupert Hughes, Vicki Baum, Zane Grey, Viña Delmar, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, J. P. McEvoy, Ursula Parrott, Polan Banks, and Sophie Kerr
New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933.

Five Star Final, by Louis Weitzenkorn (1931)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight Doorstoppers for #1937Club

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

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

• Low Company by Daniel Fuchs

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

• The Chute by Albert Halper

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

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

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

• Pie in the Sky by Arthur Calder-Marshall

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

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

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

• The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner

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

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

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

• Spanish Prelude by Jenny Ballou

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

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

The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

• The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

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

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

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

• Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts

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

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

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

• Imperial City by Elmer Rice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman’s face flushed dark with anger.

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

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

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

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

Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi (1935)

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via Bodenbach by Ference Körmendi

If you ever want to experience what it was like to take a train in Europe in the mid-1930s, read Via Bodenbach. Ferenc Körmendi wrote it as an experiment in the use of interior monologue, taking the reader, through the thoughts of George Kovacs, a Hungarian engineer, moment by moment, as he travels from Budapest to Berlin. We walk along the platform to the compartment he’s tipped the porter to hold. It’s an early train, going via Prague and Bodenbach, allowing him to reach Berlin in time for a good night’s sleep at a hotel. He wants to be fresh for his visit to the factory where the electrical device he’s invented will be manufactured. With any luck, this device will make his fortune.

He’s early, so early he regrets tipping the porter. Few passengers have boarded, there are plenty of compartments. He decides to get a paper, a German film magazine — something to read. When he returns to the compartment, there is a woman just settling in. “A girl, no Hungarian, quite pretty.” She apologizes in German for shutting the window (it’s cold). Not German, either, probably Czech. A boy enters, followed by an older gentleman. There is the settling of bags and overcoats, apologies in Hungarian, then in German. Everyone understands German? Yes, then they’ll stick with German.

The train begins to pull out of the station. “It’s moving. Daddy, the train’s moving,” the boy says excitedly. So, they’re father and son. “Dear little boy,” the woman says, “How well he behaves.” Oh, he’s not little: almost thirteen. Father prods the son to introduce himself. There are introductions all around. The Szabos. The woman is Alice Morek: yes, definitely Czech. “May we ask where you are going to?” says the father. “Podmokly,” she replies. He’s puzzled. “Bodenbach, you probably know it by that name.”

Bodenbach, Czechosolvakia, before World War Two.

On the one hand, this is all mundane, just minutiae. The chit-chat continues, gracious but not overly friendly. How many more pages of this? you may wonder. But Kovacs is suspicious, petty, insecure. Not pathologically, just … well, human. And so a low-keyed, superficially polite battle of the stags begins. The elder Szabo is bound to lose, of course. He and his son are changing trains in Prague. Kovacs will still be in the compartment with Alice Morek after they leave.

In the course of the next few hours, Kovacs subtly edges out Mr. Szabo. Alice agrees to dine with him in the restaurant car. They head down the corridor, edging past the first diners. A couple of aristocratic men who pass “at their distance of five hundred years’ exclusivity, aloof and distant.” Cross from one coach to the next:

Second-class coach corridor empty a compartment door half open smoke tall blonde woman in red slippers lying not sleeping alone sleeping all the way to Berlin I might have come along here too lazy it doesn’t matter now I’m not so badly off where I am empty compartment here they’ve already gone to the restaurant car two suit-cases in the rack another empty compartment lots of luggage the door opposite’s open cold wind it’s going to rain these have gone as well or there wasn’t anybody here oh yes there was luggage and newspapers on the seat a half compartment one man alone eating sandwiches on the table in front of him no need of railway food for poisoning another coach if it crumpled up the end of the train’s empty another empty compartment one suit-case on the rack he was eating from a plate his wife must have packed it another. .. .

They lunch, have coffee. She is friendly now, but not yet warm. But Kovacs slowly grows obsessed. Each bit of information she offers he places like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, trying to construct her story. On the way back from lunch, he forces her into an empty compartment, forces a kiss on her. He begins to think: maybe I will get off in Bodenbach, take her to a hotel, seduce her, run off with her.

What he’s considering is mad, of course, reckless, but now it’s like each thought follows the next faster and faster, like we’re descending a spiral staircase, picking up speed, until we’re running, taking terrible risks. Will Kovacs abandon his carefully planned journey, go flying out of his neat and comfortable life in pursuit of Alice Morek? She has given him no encouragement, even protests that his conduct was abusive. When he tells her he’s going to get off in Bodenbach, too, that he intends to run off with her, she protests: he’s mad, she wants nothing to do with him. But will he persist? We cringe as Kovacs keeps stepping closer and closer to disaster.

Via Bodenbach is something of a tour de force. On the surface, it’s an extraordinarily detailed and precise account of one man’s journey by train through three countries, from early morning to after midnight. Underneath, though, it’s a walk along a tightrope strung between a complacent life in Budapest and the prospect of a successful partnership in Berlin suddenly complicated by the presence of this woman, a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman. Kovacs is not a sympathetic character, but that’s one of the reasons the narrative develops such compelling momentum: we know we wouldn’t be heartbroken if he goes tumbling off the rope and ends up a broken, bloody heap. A fascinating experiment — and a journey I’d be willing to take again.

(And yes, if you’re keeping score, this is the second Hungarian novel I’ve written about in which a man in a train meets a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman (see Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar. Coincidence? Plagiaristic inspiration? A common trait among Ferencs? Who knows?)

Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1935

January 6, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain (1936)

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Unemployed Crowd Benches of New York Parks as New Year Begins

Charlie huddled in the doorway, protected somewhat from the tugging wind; but when he saw the old lady approaching with her dog, he squared his shoulders and walked towards her with something of his old carelessness. He whispered: “It’ll be easier, the first time, to ask an old dame. It won’t be so shameful.” The old woman stopped and peered over her nose glasses at Charlie, surveying his wrecked shoes, his dirty reddened hands, his unshaven face. The terrier bitch stepped forward, dancing in the cold, and sniffed his trousers, making a whining sound.

All at once Charlie’s jauntiness vanished. The set speech which he had rehearsed in the doorway went out of his mind. He spoke rapidly in his terror: This was the first time he had ever begged. She must believe that, for God’s sake. He wasn’t a bum. He’d had a good job until just a few months ago. This was the first time, and he hadn’t eaten for almost two days. He was a man with self-respect and she must believe that. It was important. She must believe that, for God’s sake.

The old woman opened her bag. She dropped a dime into his palm.

Charlie sat on a bench in Washington Square, clutching the coin tightly, crushing with his heels clods of soiled and brittle snow. In a little while he would get up and buy something hot for his gnawing belly; but first he must sit here a little longer and adjust himself to shame. He rested his face against the iciness of the iron bench, hoping that nobody could guess his degradation by looking at him. He thought: “I sold out pretty cheap, didn’t I?”

William March only contributed two sketches to the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, but they are among the very best in the book. This one in particular is like a haiku of the Great Depression: brief, deft, perfect. It’s exactly reflective of the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day.

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

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank (1937)

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Lost Heritage by Bruno Frank

A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a tiny and dirty attic room.

When he opens the man’s passport to note down his details, however, he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of Germany’s oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to come wandering out of the woods from Germany.

In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the feudal culture are still respected by most of the family’s former subjects.

Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for suggesting that an etching by Dürer is not a symbolic forecast of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig’s older brother is appointed to a high regional post in Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry, zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.

Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however, the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.

Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the prison’s hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten. When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig is certain he’s being taken out to be shot.

Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the 1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace: events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous cliffhanger-type situations.

I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism until it’s overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.

But they’re also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual, commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and frightening.

Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie could be made from this book.

The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on the Internet Archive: link.

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks
New York: Viking, 1937
Closed Frontiers

London: Macmillan, 1937

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke (1931)

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starke - born into captivity

I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’s The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”

Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.

But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.

More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”

On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”

Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”

The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”

Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.

The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”

A. T. Simon III and Helen Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960
A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960.

Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931
London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Margaret Fishback, Poetess: A 1932 Sketch by Joseph Mitchell (plus notes)

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Sketch of Margaret Fishback, from the Pittsburgh Press Sun, 14 February 1932.

Margaret Fishback was among the most commercially successful poets of the 1930s, a prolific writer of comic verse who probably sold more books and had more poems published in more magazines than the better-known Ogden Nash. I doing some research on Fishback recently, I was startled to see the byline on a short portrait that appeared in several newspapers in February 1932: Joseph Mitchell. Yes, Joseph Mitchell, the author of Joe Gould’s Secret and legendary New Yorker writer who came to work daily for decades after publishing his last article for the magazine.

This piece was written in 1932, six years before Mitchell joined The New Yorker. At the time, Mitchell was just 24, a few weeks short of getting married, and working for the New York Herald Tribune. He’d begun to get a name for his color pieces, usually sketches of odd characters in the city — from bartenders to circus owners. A portrait of an author with a new book out, a soft piece to help sell Fishback’s first collection, I Feel Better Now, would have been a pretty mundane assignment compared to what would become his signature.

Ad for I Feel Better Now, Margaret Fishback’s first collection of poems.

Not that the book needed much help. Published the same week that Mitchell’s article appeared, by the end of March, I Feel Better Now had gone through six printings.

NEW YORK. Feb. 13—Margaret Fishback. a young woman who likes to sit on summer nights in the somber beer houses which line the Hoboken waterfront and talk to the reminiscent sailors, said she wrote the casual verses in her book, I Feel Better Now, while riding to work on a Fifth Avenue bus and while eating lunch in a restaurant in Pennsylvania Station.

“And I wrote them on the backs of speakeasy cards,” she said, “and I wrote them while dressing to go out to dinner with some gent or other. And I wrote them while walking over the Brooklyn Bridge to see our absurd skyline. And on the Staten Island ferry. And on the bench. You know, everywhere.”

Miss Fishback has had long hair since she was a child. It is the color of corn shucks. She always has a good time. She likes elevator operators and bartenders. She gave the first autographed copy of her book to a conductor on a Fifth Avenue bus.

She lives in an old-fashioned house at 222 E. Sixty-first Street with Elizabeth Osgood, who is head of the proofroom at Appleton’s. There are 19 poplar trees on the block. There are also two churches but she does not known much about them.

“No, I don’t know what kind of poplars they are,” she said. “Lombardy poplars, maybe. I don’t know anything about nature. Do you like beer? I don’t care for it. The foam chokes me. All the people I know like beer. Over in Hoboken they live on it. You know. I have a lot of fun washing my hair. I like shower baths.

“The reason I started running around is because there are a lot of cats in the back yard of my home. And there’s a lady who always turns the radio on when they play ‘When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.’ I never went around to speakeasies until they began playing that. One night last summer I heard that song over and over. I got out of the house and went to the Palace, and the first thing I knew a woman named Kate Smith was singing it all over the place. Then I went to a speakeasy.”

Miss Fishback is an advertising copy writer for Macy’s. She is called “the highest paid advertising woman in the world,” but she laughs heartily whenever she hears that she is. She came to New York eight years ago, found a job in a ballet, danced in various opera companies at $1 a night and $1 for each rehearsal, wrote poems for F. P. A.’s [Franklin P. Adams] column in the World under the name of Marne and always had a good time. She is a graduate of Goucher College. There she was a friend of Sara Haardt, who is the wife of H. L. Mencken.

“Mencken is the most attractive man I ever met,” she said. “I like men. I never was married, but I have had my troubles. You can be sure I have had my moments. Hell, I’m not a lady poet. I’m not literary. I like to get around. The reason I’m not a married woman is because I don’t have time. I work from 9:15 to 6:30. I’m always in a hurry. It wouldn’t be fair to marry. I’m too interested in my work.”

Miss Fishback is a very lovely young woman. She does not like to play tennis, cook, sew, or play bridge. She does not like parrots. She is entranced by the commonplace. She buys chestnuts on a windy corner, finds a worm and writes “a triolet on an enviable existence.” Walking around New York she reaches the Garlic Belt and decides that “on Bleeker Street the babies’ noses aren’t pampered by the scent of roses.” and under the “L” she decides that “on Second Avenue the babies howl as if they had the rabies.”

The titles of her poems are indicative of her personality — “A tomato is all right in its place,” or “Capitulation within the city limits, preferably the East Fifties.” or “No duels, drama, or bloodshed to speak of,” or “Lines on watching a mother at her crooning,” or “Orange juice and a quick swallow.” She wears bracelets made from the hoofs of elephants. She likes to wear sweaters. She writes triolets in Maine bathtubs, and she swims with a great deal of pleasure, and she has two favorite drinks.

“I like an old fashioned,” she said, “if it’s made with a great deal of care. But I can care violently for sidecars.”

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, Margaret Fishback attended Goucher College outside Baltimore, where she became friends with Sara Haardt, who later married H. L. Mencken. She then headed to New York City. She took whatever work she could, including dancing in the chorus at the Metropolitan opera, until, on the strength of a few poems she’d sold to F. P. A., she walked into Macy’s department store and proposed to go to work in their advertising office.

They accepted, and she would remain with the store over ten years. Many newspaper stories suggested she was at one time the highest-paid woman in advertising, though she always dismissed this as unsubstantiated nonsense. (Though, given the pay inequality that prevailed at the time, it probably wouldn’t have takem much to claim the title.)

Her copy for Macy’s was, in some ways, more absurd and edgy than her poetry. An early item claimed that cows were positively thrilled to be giving up their lives for Macy’s latest line of purses. Fishback used to roam the store in search of odd items to boost, once proclaiming that a two-foot long cake tester she found in the kitchen department was just the thing when it came time to bake a two-foot tall cake. (The store ended up selling thousands.) And she was unapologetically on the side of women as the wiser of the two sexes, as demonstrated by this ad cartoon from 1938:

Cartoon: "We could be just as crowded at Macy's and not get wet!"

Fishback once said she started writing poetry as a reaction to seeing other people hold up writers as demigods. “I’m not literary,” she would demur. “I do things by ear.” And she never got too sophisticated in her poesy: indeed, as it sticks to simple meters and always rhymes, it might be more accurately called verse than poetry. But her early poems could be subtle and flirt with complex effects:

View From a Fifth-Floor Fire Escape

An underfed ailanthus tree
Contributes animatedly
One bright, intrepid splotch of green.
And here and there through the ravine

An enterprising ray of sun
Contrives to have a little fun
By wriggling through a window just
To call attention to the dust.

And though it’s messy in the street,
The sky above is large and neat.
And from this fire escape of mine
The cloud effects are very fine.

Along about this time of day
Despite the roof across the way
That harbors shirts hung out to dry
Against the valiant Gotham sky.

The poems in I Feel Better Now draw directly from Fishback’s own experiences: working, commuting, living in a fifth-floor walkup with no view except from the fire escape:

It may be just as well that I
Can’t have a penthouse in the sky.
Perchance it’s just as well to be
Whete it’s impossible to see
The rivers and the boats unless
I wash my face and change my dress
And hop a crosstown trolley car.

This was something new in 1932 and working women responded with enthusiasm. “Reading Miss Fishback is contagious business,” wrote a woman reviewer. “You stop strangers in the trolley car or in the subway and begin to read to them aloud.” Fishback’s poems could be found almost every week in one or another magazine: from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to Ladie’s Home Journal and the women’s sections of newspapers all over. Enough to collect for a second book, Out of My Head (1933).

With few points of reference, Margaret Fishback was often compared to Dorothy Parker, though Parker’s poetry was far more acidic and her fiction far more serious than the lightly comic stories she began to write. On the other hand, her work was positively biting compared to the warmer verse of Phyllis McGinley.

Her life and her voice took on a new tone in 1935 when she married Alberto Antolini, a buyer at Macy’s. She was undoubtedly the only poet whose engagement was announced in the pages of Sales Management magazine.

Her third book, published the same year, I Take It Back, was a little sunnier. The title was chosen by her husband and reviewers noted that it had “far more of sentiment and less of wit than I Feel Better Now. “The mighty Amazon has washed the poison off her darts and her winged shafts of poesy no longer sting.” Antolini convinced Fishback to move to the suburbs (Camden, New Jersey) — even though she had early written a poem about her own “Suburbaphobia”:

What meagre charm I had before
Expires the moment that the door
Of any suburb-going train
Clangs shut. And I do not regain
My normal joie de vivre until
I leave each flagrant daffodil
And buttercup behind, hell-bent
On getting back to God’s cement.

Her life and writing changed again in 1941, when she gave birth to their son, Anthony. She left Macy’s days before the delivery, and became a stay-at-home mom. She continued to write and publish poems — dozens and dozens about Tony — and slowly took on freelance copywriting work.

She remained at home, taking an active part in Tony’s life (one interviewer found her assembling five hundred gift bags for a school fest) until he went away to college in 1958. Then she returned to advertising, but moved from Herald Square up to Madison Avenue, joining Young & Rubicam and then Doyle Dane Bernbach a year later. Fishback was there to witness the change in culture depicted in the TV series Mad Men, as print and radio ads began to take a distant backseat to television and “branding.” And she continued to publish: as late as 1966, her poems and comic anecdotes could be found in Look magazine’s “Look on the Light Side” section. One of her last contributions to Look was a declaration of her failure to be that thing an advertising professional most wanted to encourage: a competitive consumer.

Underprivileged
Our living standard is so low,
We’ve but a single radio.

No wonder that our children fret
With just one television set.

No doubt our solitary phone
Feels unendurably alone.

But most traumatic of all scars —
We haven’t ever got two cars!

Margaret Fishback died in 1985. Kathleen Rooney made Fishback the protagonist of her 2018 novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk. Fishback’s poetry books are long out of print and somewhat scarce, though One to a Customer (1938), which collects her first four collections, can be found on the Internet Archive (link).

Note: Margaret Fishback the comic versifier should not be confused with Margaret Fishback Powers the Christian poet.

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle (1938)

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“Do you mean to say I didn’t give you anything to eat yet?” one character asks another several hours into their wanderings around Paris in Monday Night. At this point, the pair has visited three or four bars and had at least a few drinks in each one of them. And the night is just beginning.

If you’re not one for drinking on an empty stomach, Monday Night may remind you of that time when you made the mistake of going out on the town with someone who considers bar nuts an entree. Bernie Lord, a medical student, arrives in Paris fresh off the train from Le Havre and meets up with a slight acquaintance from Chicago named Wilt Tobin who’s been living in France since before the First World War. His mission is to meet a man named Jean Sylvestre who has become world famous as a forensic toxicologist (though this was before the job had a name). Bernie is in awe of Sylvestre’s technical wizardry and hopes to learn a bit of the master’s craft.

Wilt is the only person Bernie knows in Paris. Literally anyone else would have been a better choice. Wilt is a writer, but somewhere along the way the pleasure of enjoying an aperitif at a sidewalk table outside a charming café has become a compulsion. Writing is now only a means to get money to drink with — that and cadging a glass or five off anyone who will listen to him. Stepping off the train in a crisp new blue serge suit, Bernie is shocked at his first sight of Wilt: “The cracked brown shoes, the grey trousers with no shape left in back or front, the paunch buttoned into the waistcoat, the shirt, the twisted tie, the soft, bristled jowls, the dark small almost fervently set eyes….” Wilt not only has “no sign of youth to recommend him, but no look left in eye or teeth to recall that he ever had been young.”

Still, Wilt feels some obligation to his friend. Luckily for him, though, their first stop, the pharmacy where Sylvestre got his start, is close to the Gare St. Lazare. When they fail to produce any further information about the man than the fact that Monsieur Sylvestre never comes there anymore, Wilt steers Bernie into the nearest bar to discuss next steps. This sets the pattern for much of the plot of Monday Night. The only difference between Bernie and Wilt and Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that they’re looking instead of waiting. Oh, and drinking. In fact, each stage of looking tends to be preceded by around a half dozen drinks.

By around ten P.M., Wilt advises Bernie that it’s now either too late or too early to eat:

“The time we should have started in eating, if we were going to eat at all, was right after the first drinks, the first two or three drinks, right after the gin fizzes we had at the brasserie.” The darkness stretched before him as he walked, facsimile of that obliteration unpunctuated by mood or time that life itself and action had become…. “So now we’ll just have to hold off awhile until the red wine is out of the system,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick the first night we’re out together. I want to take care of you, Bernie.”

Wilt not only seems to run solely on the promise of another drink but as the night wears on, he begins to take over Bernie’s quest as well. Early on, Bernie explodes at Wilt’s complete ignorance of the feats of Monsieur Sylvestre and the murderers condemned through his testimony. “My God, Wilt, don’t you know? Don’t you know about it? I thought everybody — anybody who read the papers, anyway — I thought there wasn’t anybody who–” But Wilt becomes convinced that Sylvestre is hiding a dark secret, that he is motivated less by objective truth than by revenge.

The two men head for Malmaison, on the outskirts of Paris, where Sylvestre now resides in a villa surrounded by large estate. Wilt begins to construct a psychological portrait of the chemist, examining his motivations, wondering at what it must be like to know your words will send a man to the guillotine. When they reach the villa, they learn that Sylvestre is in Lyons on a case, but his servants invite them into the kitchen, where a game of Monopoly is underway. More drinks are had as Bernie finds his will to live fading and Wilt cagily pries out information about Sylvestre.

Wilt and Bernie’s journey takes them out and back into Paris and through Monday night to early Tuesday morning. As with a bad hangover, the world they return to seems both fuzzy and jarring. Bernie no longer knows why he wanted to meet Sylvestre in the first place, and Wilt finds the solution to Sylvestre’s mystery in a newspaper headline spotted as they wait in the Gare St. Lazare for Bernie’s train back to Le Havre.

Monday Night has been described as an unusual detective story. If you accept this, then Boyle’s ending will seem abrupt and ill-prepared. But that’s the wrong way to look at the book. Boyle tells us what Monday Night is really about in its dedication, which comes from one of her unpublished stories called “The Man Without a Nation.” In that story, she writes of the “secret code” of the expats she had come to know in the course of — by that time — fifteen years in Europe:

Those who speak it follow no political leader and take no part in any persecution or conquest; nor have they to do either with a vocabulary of the rich or the poor or any country or race; it being simply one way of communication between the lost and the lost.

Wilt is one of these lost souls, one who has realized that he has stayed too long to be considered a tourist and can never stay long enough to become French. “It didn’t take me very long to find out I was in the wrong country,” he jokes to Bernie. “Only about eighteen years.” Boyle signals this awareness of being a displaced person (before that became an official term at the end of the next world war) in the book’s very first line: “You might have recognized it as a drugstore except for its situation in what might generally be called the wrong country.”

Kay Boyle based the character of Wilt on Harold Stearns, a man she and her second husband, Laurence Vail, came to know in Paris. Legend has it that after reviewing the proofs of a collection of essays by American intellectuals and artists that he edited titled Civilization in the United States, Stearns immediately booked passage to England, convinced that the United States had no civilization. In reality, it’s likely that a favorable exchange rate and the advent of Prohibition played a larger role in his decision.

As it was, he was only able to make it to Paris on the strength of a loan from Sinclair Lewis, who was in awe of Stearn’s potential. It was a loan that Stearns never repaid. Lewis later got something back, however, by referring to Stearns (indirectly, mind) as “an important habitue of the Cafe de Dome in Paris living these many years as a grafter on borrowed money.” Asked to respond by an American reporter, Stearns said he’d like to come back to the U.S. for the privilege of punching Lewis in the face.

Peter Pickem story
A “Peter Pickem” story from the Chicago Tribune, 1923.

For a while after arriving in Paris, Stearns was able to get by working as “Peter Pickem,” the Paris track correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. But then his drinking got so bad that he started to go blind and he lost that job and survived on a combination of betting on the horses and the generosity of his drinking partners. As he later wrote in his memoir, The Street I Know (1935), Stearns learned that few friends will buy you a meal, but plenty will buy you a few rounds at the bar. In his book Americans in Paris (1977), Tony Allan wrote that Stearns’s “shabby, unshaven figure was pointed out to newcomers as a warning of the dangers of the Latin Quarter.”

Hemingway was the first to commemorate Harold Stearns in fiction. In The Sun Only Rise, Jake Barnes encounters a friend named Harvey Stone in Stearns’s favorite café:

I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Sélect. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.

“Sit down,” said Harvey. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just looking for you.”

“Been out to the races?”

“No. Not since Sunday.”

“What do you hear from the States?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”

He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

“Do you want to know something, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”

Stearns wrote in his memoir, “I would stay up at the Sélect until dawn crept through the windows, drinking champagne and watching the boys and girls do their vaudeville stunts.”

Stearns himself described the Sélect as “a seething mad-house of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter drunks, and sober maniacs (most of whom were on the wagon only temporarily, of course, because of unkind medical favors of the fickle goddess, Venus).” It was, he wrote with bittersweet reflection, “a useless, silly life — and I have missed it every day since.”

But by 1932 — not Wilt’s 18 years, but a little more than ten — Stearns, like Wilt, knew he had stayed too long. “I was just an uprooted, aimless wanderer on the face of the earth. And a lonely one, too. I didn’t like that; I hated it. And, since there was nothing else to do, I would go into the bar and take another drink and try to forget.” With the arrival of the Depression and exodus of easy American money, however, even drinking to forget was becoming harder and harder. “With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money,” Stearns wrote, “I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country — and to try to start all over. Everything about Paris had suddenly become distasteful to me; I suppose because I felt so alien and alone.”

If you’re a fan of 1930s detective fiction, you will certainly find Monday Night unsatisfactory. Sylvestre’s is not that much of a mystery. It’s really just the excuse for Boyle to send her lost soul, Wilt, and his naive companion Bernie, on their hallucinatory odyssey through the Paris night, an odyssey that will ultimately lead them both, like Stearns, back to America.

Monday Night represented both a structural and stylistic departure for Boyle. Although the plot takes place in the space of less than 24 hours, her night will seem endless to many readers. Though she sketches the people they meet in quick, precise strokes, it is Wilt and Bernie — and really just Wilt — who remains on camera, in focus, throughout the book. And in describing their wandering, Boyle switches back and forth between Wilt’s streetwise newspaperman’s chatter and rich, impressionistic descriptions of the Paris streets, scenes, and shadows. Reviewing the book in The Nation, Louis Kronenberger felt the latter “achieves strong and even beautiful effects, but shows too little restraint and has some of Faulkner’s and Wolfe’s tendency to overwrite.”

Most critics noted admirable qualities in Monday Night but felt it too much of an oddity to take as seriously as her previous novels. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic called Wilt “a sort of lost-generation Don Quixote.” Time’s reviewer found Boyle’s cast “a bunch of puzzling neurotics” and Alfred Kazin dismissed them as “manikins who walk through the book as on hot beds of coal.” Kronenberger, on the other hand, felt that part of the problem for reviewers was that their easy labels were ill-suited for Boyle:

Call her decadent and you will find an imagery that is vital and under almost perfect control. Call her lush and you’ll find prose with the delicacy, discipline, smoothness to the touch and good hard grain of carving in ivory. Call her a necromancer and then see by what homely undeniable things she sets up her rhythms and the overtone of their effect.

Monday Night has always had a small but loyal set of fans. Dylan Thomas called it “the best novel of the year” in a review for the New English Weekly and wrote Boyle a gushing fan letter that was reprinted on the cover of a 1970 reissue of the book. Doris Grumbach and James Laughlin of New Directions Press both named it one of their candidates for rediscovery in their submissions to Bill and Linda Katz’s 1983 guide to neglected books, Writer’s Choice. The editor Virginia Faulkner confided to Boyle that “Monday Night remains for me a landmark” in a letter written 25 years after the book first came out. And in the late 1940s, the actor Franchot Tone attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a film version of the book, saying that its “way of story-telling makes me tingle.”

Boyle herself felt the book represented something of a breakthrough and said that she “liked it the best of my novels.” Perhaps this is, in part, because it is so overwhelmingly a book about men, about their actions and thoughts and desires. Her next few novels — Primer for Combat (1942), Avalanche (1944), and A Frenchman Must Die (1946) — would also take the world men as their focus — in combat, in mountain climbing, in wartime espionage and resistance. But most critics would agree that these attempts to create, if you will, lyrical action stories, are substantially weaker books when compared with Monday Night. Not much happens in Monday Night — if you set aside the drinking and walking — but within its small frame a moving and unsettling portrait of a lost soul can be seen.

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing (1939)

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Cover of the first US edition of The Hospital by Kenneth Fearing

Though it takes place within the space of just an hour or two, a lot happens in Kenneth Fearing’s first novel, The Hospital. A suicide, a disfigurement, an act of vandalism and a power outage, an old man’s death and a young woman’s reprieve from tuberculosis. But even more happens off-camera, so to speak.

Although Fearing’s Hudson General Hospital is an enormous Manhattan hospital with hundreds of patients and thousands of staff members, in his hands it’s just a microcosm in a world churning with events. A dramatic rescue at sea. A contest between rival gangs over who controls the dockworkers’ union. The collapse of a a giant company. An illicit affair. An attempt to unionize the hospital workers.

But these things are only mentioned in passing, a sentence or two, and with little in the way of context or explanation. Over the course of the book, for example, we learn that Steve Sullivan, a first mate, was responsible for a rescue at sea that was later resented by his ship’s owner, leaving him without a birth. We only get bits of this story — from Sullivan, from his mother, from his wife as she waits to be operated on for breast cancer, from the woman he’s in love with — and never all the details.

In part this is because Fearing is an impressionist, not realist. He works in quick strokes, not painstaking reproduction. But also because The Hospital is a mosaic composed of what dozens of characters think, feel, and see. This was the technique Fearing used in all his novels.

The table of contents of a Fearing novel is a list of names: each chapter a moment or two as seen by that character within the book’s overall short duration. Some are major characters, such as Doctor Cavanagh, the surgeon who removes the tumor from the breast of Freya, Steve Sullivan’s wife — a surgeon who’s racking up more than his share of operating room deaths. Some, like Tom Pharney, an electrician, walk on, utter a few lines, and exit, never to be seen again. In The Hospital, Fearing even includes a few faceless extras in his cast: the crew of a city tugboat, the attendant at a police switchboard:

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

Every fire alarm in the city sounds up here, and it’s always going.

“Give me a description of the men. Yeah, describe them. Did they have a car? What kind of a car? Were they tall or short? Which way they went after they held you up?”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

“Police Headquarters.”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong. On the box in front of me, Precinct 19 shows a green light Take it.

“Headquarters.”

“Narcotics Bureau.”

Put the call through. There is the yellow light of an outside wire. Take it.

“Police Headquarters.”

The approach is remarkably effective at conveying a sense of the swirling currents of activity that go on in a complex institution such as a major hospital. It’s an approach that many a film director has followed when trying to tell the story of a big event, such as the Normandy invasion in The Longest Day. It also reinforces the sense that the institution is large and the people small. At the scale of a whole novel, it’s a bit like looking down on a busy city street from a window on the 25th floor.

It also may have enabled Fearing to play to his strengths. No character’s chapter runs more than a few pages, some just a few paragraphs. This saves him the task of any real character development. His people are more cogs in his narrative machine than the actual engine of the narrative. Though Fearing gives us a salad full of bits of their stories, his story isn’t really about any of them. It’s about Hudson General Hospital as a artefact of modern society. Again, to use a film analogy, we could consider The Hospital for the Best Editing award, but none of its cast would get nominated for an acting award.

Of Fearing’s fiction, The Big Clock consistently gets the lion’s share of the attention and critical praise, but having read most of them now, I think there is much of a muchness about all of them. For what it is, it’s a very well done muchness, and I full expect to go on and read his remaining novels. They race with the manic energy of Fearing’s best known poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” with its shoot-out between the police and gunman Louie Glatz:

And rat-a-tat-tat
Rat-a-tat-tat
Muttered the gat
Of Louie the rat,
While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam!

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Random House, 1939

French Polish, by P. Y. Betts (1933)

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French Polish by P. Y. Betts
Christopher Hawtree’s copy of French Polish.

This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.

SWISS MOUNTAINS AND WELSH HILLS

“I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there’s nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm.”

No, this is not Bridget Jones or one of her ilk but Virginia Odell, a young American at a Swiss finishing school which occupies much of P.Y. Betts’s novel French Polish, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933. To read it again is to be as startled as I was when first doing so, early in 1985, in the Round Reading Room, as it then was, at the British Library. I could not help but give whoops which startled sedulous thesis-writers either side of me.

Diligent curiosity had brought me to this seemingly frivolous perusal of a long-vanished novel — and would take me far from that sedentary perch in Great Russell Street. That winter I was at work compiling and introducing an anthology from the weekly magazine Night and Day, which lasted for only the second half of 1937 in a bid to be a London equivalent — with equally wonderful cartoons — of The New Yorker. Its demise is often attributed to a lawsuit brought against it by Twentieth-Century Fox after co-editor Graham Greene had written in no uncertain terms about the sexual stance displayed by nine-year-old Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie. In fact, funding had been low from the beginning, with modest fees paid to an array of authors who would, around the world, become better known down the years.

There were also some who faded from sight after appearing in such glittering company where they, too, made an equal showing. Among these was P. Y. Betts who wrote entertainingly about French life and food, as well as supplying “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”, which anticipated Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U controversy by two decades. What could have become of such a talent? Try as I might, I could not discover anything much about her — and lamented this en passant in the long introduction to the volume which appeared later in the year.

Naturally, this anthology, with the first republication in five decades of Greene’s film review, brought interest from the hills around Los Angeles -– and, with the publication a few years later of Shirley Temple’s splendid memoir Child Star, her saying that Greene had in fact been accurate in his description of her sultry parading in that film and two others. That made a pleasing symmetry to the work on the anthology (if I say so myself, I am thanked in Child Star). Meanwhile, and perhaps all the more exciting, Michael Davie in an Observer column had picked up my reference to the seemingly fugitive P.Y. Betts. This led to the biographer of publisher Edward Garnett (the friend of Lawrence) getting in touch with an unpublished letter in which Garnett, as a reader for Jonathan Cape, had taken against Samuel Beckett’s early Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women (“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole!”) but urged that the publisher take P. Y. Betts’s novel.

No sooner had I read about this unexpected literary confluence than Lady Eirene White got in touch from the House of Lords to say that she had been at St. Paul’s Girls’ School with Betts (as she was known) and that after growing up near Wandsworth Commons before the Great War, Betts had travelled around the world in the Thirties before joining the wartime Land Army which she quit around 1944 to live, alone, in a remote Welsh smallholding which she had never left.

And she was still there.

By this time, not only had electricity been installed there (in 1970), but also a telephone. Never had I thought that I should be talking upon it with somebody whom I had – dare I say it — thought might easily be dead.

Her conversation across those hundred of miles was as vivid as her writing.

Hearteningly, a little later, Veronica Wadley of the Daily Telegraph (and herself now in the Lords) readily agreed that I should travel there for an interview. This was quite a journey, without signposts through narrow lanes with high hedges in a motor-car at low gear (top gear was always a novelty for a window-flapping Citroen); when I did see anybody and asked directions, there was astonishment that I was going to visit P. Y. Betts (“we’ve heard of her but never seen her!”). Eventually I got there, at one end of a long track where I was greeted by a goat of an uncertain disposition and, after a struggle between tyres and mud, parked beside a low, thick-walled cottage from which, followed by a cat and dog, Betts emerged with pails in hand to feed others of the various animals which lived upon her tranche of hillside.

A far cry from the afternoon when Shirley Temple’s husband telephoned me about her imminent memoir (which she wrote herself). This was quite a place. We soon ate, while her talk roved across a Great War childhood near Wandsworth Gaol (an early memory was of watching people walk along the pavement to be in time to stand at its gates when a hanging was due) and looped around life in the Welsh hills, many tales of which reached her in that seclusion (the area was a redoubt of those who had returned from a flower-power trail along the road to Katmandu). As she went out again, the sky darkening, to feed the animals, I scribbled notes of all this, and her words echoed through my mind during the long journey back. There was something marvellously heartening about her conversation borne of long experience (and visits by the mobile library where she put in for so many new books); she was savvier about the world than those who are eternally, wirelessly connected. All of this I wrote up, and it appeared complete with a photograph of her beside one of those animals: a seemingly stray peacock.

And that was not that.

One morning I received a telephone call. A woman said, “Mr. Hecht would like to speak with you.” All right, I replied, puzzled, curious. This turned out to be the owner of independent publisher Souvenir Press, whose outwardly elegant office, chaotic within, was opposite the British Library on Great Russell Street. He had chanced to see the Telegraph piece – and wondered whether Betts would like to write a second book, one about the upbringing she had described to me.

This was an inspired notion, to which she readily agreed, and she wrote it – People Who Say Goodbye — through a Welsh winter. And, as chance also had it, this was published around the same time as Shirley Temple’s book. I asked Greene if he would give a quote for the cover, which he happily did, and, one way and another, the book got about: it was read in eight instalments on national radio, which, one Saturday, also sent an interviewer to her, while Dirk Bogarde (a man whose film career had begun a few years after she took up that life in the hills), who had found it in a Chelsea bookshop, made it one of his books of the year. It went into several paperback incarnations and is still in print.

She died in her nineties, after a stroke, which meant that — after living alone for so long — she had, ever pragmatic, to agree to a carer in that cottage where, as I found on another visit, there were now fewer animals but her spirit was still vivid — as it remains, so wise, so funny, and this sequence of events always makes me thankful that I had made the initial foray to the Reading Room.

P. Y. Betts’s inscription.

You never know what might happen. And so it is that I have now gone back to that novel French Polish which she wrote in her early twenties, and can again hear that voice from decades later. She gave me a copy of it and signed it – a novel now exceedingly hard to find (many have tried to do so after relishing People Who Say Goodbye).

For its first half or so, events take place in that Swiss finishing school before an excursion takes some of the girls with one of the mistresses to life in a pensione – and that amatory imbroglio which had been so much a source of discussion and speculation by the girls during days and evenings when they were meant to be pursuing regular studies. As Betts herself must have done, for the narrative finds room for quotations in several languages as well as extracts from one of the girl’s anthology-in-progress (“anything remotely lunar will do”) about references to the Moon, whose varying appearances in the night sky make it very much a character in a novel where due emphasis is also given to such matters as “those privy to the esoteric abracadabra of contraception” and a page of improvised stream of consciousness.

Time and again, one finds such descriptions as “when she laughed she opened her mouth so wide and displayed teeth so long and white and powerful that it was almost with a sense of incongruity that one glimpsed behind them a squat human tongue and not the darting scarlet tatter of a flop-eared puppy”. That very word “tatter” has one reaching for a dictionary of slang, and, to say the least, the novel is a repository of words and phrases which would make Anthony Burgess redouble his efforts to impress.

To pick out some, here are a “bourden of voices”, “dispharetic travelling”, and in a nightmare towards the end one of the teachers had seen a woman “apparelled in scarlet and monstrously mounted upon that heptacephalous progeny of hell”. And of course, in the opening pages, it is said of one of the girls that “a rufous challenge sparkled in her eyes, and her hair flamed like a November sun in the shadowy room”. There should be a revival of this expression for removing one’s dress: “she skinned it over her head”. And one could discuss until humans beings cease to exist the subsequent observation “have you ever noticed that people who are quite disintegratingly beautiful in the nude are often dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?”

And what can one say of Penelope “who had discovered that morning at prayers that j’ai sucri did not mean ‘I have sugared,’ but was French for Jesus Christ”? With all the precocity of youth, one is informed that ballet and ballade share a root. Amidst the current British crises, can it any longer be given credence that “they had such beautiful pink skins that Penelope thought they must be Etonians”? One such character, when asked if he is growing a moustache, replies, “at present it is only visible in certain lights, like the sheen on velvet”.

One reads on avidly, while pausing to ponder “coprolitic spirals” – and with passing time and “scrannel spirit”, one must marvel at the protracted metaphor made from the speed of life being akin to the long outer grooves of a 78-rpm disc shortening as the needle reaches the label: “on the record the last two inches really are covered in less time, though the tempo remains the same”. Once again, two pages in, here is that paragraph which, in the Round Reading Room, had me reading on. “Here, from a central parting of impeccable rectitude, uniform waves of iron-grey hair flowed towards the orderly roll at the back of the head with the beautiful inevitability of creation moving to one far-off divine event.”

Now, when Katherine Mansfield is rightly lauded, it is an interesting point of view that, a decade after her death, one of the precocious adolescents could say of her that she “bores me frightfully. She’s so conceited and vapourish, taking it for granted that everybody will be interested to read that on such-and-such a night she woke up and felt passionate. She was a beast to the Gaudier-Brczeskas, anyway.”

No apology for quoting so much from the novel. Otherwise how could readers gain a taste of something which led me to traverse all those miles, making it across the Severn Bridge, in a vehicle whose windows flapped open at the slightest breeze? The novel is sought after, and yet there are those who might cavil at its reappearance. The opening section lays some emphasis upon a Black woman’s arrival among the School’s pupils for a while. “On her ears were gold earrings of about the bigness of half-crowns and a coruscation of bracelets of strikingly extra-European workmanship gauntleted her bare forearm almost to the elbow.”

Some will decry this, and an element of debate would be that many others are regarded askance, such as a teacher who “had only once put her foot down, when a young man from Milwaukee had raped from her chalet a lavatory seat elegantly intagliated with edelweiss entwined with bells of gentian, with Alpenrose and the modest camomile. Since this incident, unique of its kind, Americans had not been encouraged”.

What place would such a lavatory seat find in “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”?

Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).

French Polish, by P. Y. Betts
London: Victor Gollancz, 1933

The Biff and Netta trilogy, by N. Warner Hooke (1934 -1938)

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Close of Play by Nina Warner Hooke
Cover of U.S. edition of Close of Play, the second book in the Biff and Netta trilogy.

I wish I had more time to write this piece, for this trilogy not only amounts to nearly 900 pages but represents one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever come across. When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. “A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!” declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month.

I can’t imagine anyone comparing the trilogy to Wodehouse, Rabelais, or anything remotely funny if they knew how its story ends. Though I am not usually one to take care to avoid spoilers, in this case I won’t go into details, except to say that the final pages of Own Wilderness (1938) are the most heart-breaking I’ve read in many years.

In her foreword to Close of Play, the second volume, Nina Warner Hooke wrote that she felt compelled to continue the story of Biff and Netta after being asked to so many times by readers of Striplings. “I do not yet know what is going to happen to my striplings…. Perhaps there will be more to come. Perhaps not,” she concluded. Yet to me, the narrative arc — hell, the narrative momentum — seems inevitable and irresistable, as certain as the fact that two leaves that fall into stream will be pulled downstream by its current.

So, who are Biff and Netta? Biff, eleven, is the son of Hugh Tamlin and his wife Georgina. Hugh, who “used to have something to do with the Rubber World,” now spends his days cloistered in a workshop in his estate — The Place — in Sussex, supposedly working on inventions but in reality simply hiding from the truth that his world is crumbling around him. The fine house in London he has inherited is now rented to a family of Greek Jews whose monthly checks are almost the only income he has left. He can no longer afford repairs on the buildings or grounds of the once-grand Place, is in arrears with his property tax, and has had to reduce the staff to almost nothing.

His marriage is in even worse shape. His wife Georgina has taken a lover, Henry Arthur Pybus-Glanville, known as Uncle Pi, who lives at the estate on weekends and is the only functional adult in this highly dysfunctional family. And even his affair with Georgina is largely a thing of the past, as her only interest is in riding around the country on Warrior, her prize horse, likely the only asset of real value remaining. The only part of the affair not left in the past is Netta.

Netta, eight, is the spit and image of Uncle Pi. “She had his blunt features. His nondescript hair. His throaty laugh. So there he was.” Rounding out the cast is John Johns, the sour chauffeur/gardener/handyman, and Miss Mudford, the governess. Muddy had once been a good governess, but now she is prisoner of her demons: bad teeth, “muddy skin, muddy voice, and muddy mind,” and “given to secret masturbation and pornographic literature.”

In their decay, the Tamlins have become isolated from much of the world around them. Hugh continues to receive copies of trade magazines but no longer bothers to read them. “Not many people ‘knew’ the Tamlins these days. Things were said about them. None too savoury things. The servants were a queer lot. And then there was Uncle Pi.”

The only vitality left at The Place resides in Biff and Netta, who spent their days foraging around its two hundred acres. They swim in its ponds, climb its trees, trap its rabbits and ferrets — they are almost feral in their freedom. Biff spends the summer in a single pair of shorts, literally unable to wash them unless he spends a day naked in bed. They are “extravagant children.” “They did everything with an extravagant largeness and a total disregard for consequences. They were extravagantly fond of one another.”

Too fond. Their mutual attraction is both a thing born of genuine innocence and love and one of the worms at the core of this apple, an apple destined to rot and disintegrate in a manner that is both horrifying and gripping to witness over the course of the trilogy.

If Biff and Netta are Warner Hooke’s Adam and Eve, their problem is not that they haven’t tasted the fruit of knowledge. It’s that Netta, at least, doesn’t care:

“You know I shan’t ever marry anyone but you!”
“We can’t be married, you fathead!”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because we’re related. We’re not allowed to. There’s a law about it.”
“Not allowed to? Why ever not?”
“Because we should have queer sorts of things for children.”
“Oh, Biff, what sort of things?”
“Well, things with two heads. Or six toes, or something. It’s called inbreeding. It happened to the chickens last year.”

Netta is not deterred. “We might have something with eyes all over its stomach. We might make a lot of money out of it. We could show it at Church Fêtes and charge tuppence to have a look.”

As Biff and Netta near puberty, the adults at the Place rally one last time. Uncle Pi agrees to pay for Biff and Netta to be sent off to boarding schools. Their experiences are very different. Biff grows leaner, harder, stronger — but is an outcast, treated as an oddity by his schoolmates, nursing his hatred of them, and longing to be reunited with Netta. Netta, on the other hand, no longer malnourished, puts on weight, fits in, makes friends, develops schoolgirl crushes.

When they meet again during the first school holiday, civilization in the form of conventions and moraes have intruded. Netta confides that her breasts are being to grow. “Let me feel,” Biff demands. “He thought he had never felt anything so soft.” Yet when he reaches out again, Netta draws back: “‘Don’t,’ she said.” “For the first time in their lives, they felt that a veil had descended between them.” The extravagance of their affection may have diminished, but the strength of their attraction never does. Biff abandons school, gets work as a farmhand, then runs away when he learns that Netta plans to spend her summer holiday with a classmate.

This is where Striplings ends. It’s hard for me to take Warner Hooke’s claim that she didn’t plan to carry on with the story seriously. In one of the rooms of The Place, there is a mural of a scene from a Greek myth slowly falling apart. Early in the book, Netta and Biff take guesses as to when the next piece will tumble to the ground. There are too many pieces in Warner Hooke’s narrative left dangling, about to fall, to treat it as a completed work. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she closes the book on the crash before we’ve had the chance to count the victims.

The pieces begin to fall in Close of Play:

Fifteen months later, early in the summer holidays, the horse Warrior put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, breaking his neck and Georgina’s back. Careless of Warrior. One would not have expected him to do a thing like that.

The dispassion in those lines hints at one of the peculiar qualities of Warner Hooke’s writing. She has a knack for eliciting our sympathies for Biff and Netta in all their rough tenderness — and yet can, a few sentences later, poke at her characters with the disinterest of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope. Most of Warner Hooke’s later work were stories about animals written for children, and her instincts seem to be those of a naturalist rather than a novelist.

Nina Warner Hooke, from the New York Times, 1934.

One of Stripling’s American reviewers, Herschel Brickell, wrote that “Very few of the considerable number of contemporary novels that have attempted to explore the strange world of the young of the human species have been so honest, so forthright and so understanding….” And the American edition of Close of Play included a letter from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to its publisher in which she called it “one of the most real books I have ever read and the truest study of children and adolescence I’ve had the pleasure of reading in fiction form.”

The realism of Warner Hooke’s treatment of Biff and Netta’s story is all the more striking for the utterly bizarre reality of their situation. Working as a navvy on a construction site in Brighton, Biff hears of Georgina’s death and returns to The Place. Now taller, stronger, and callous of hands and manners, he is bound to act as an accelerant in what is already a highly combustible situation. Though Netta is in the midst of a teenage romance with a neighbor, Rodney Fletcher, she finds herself drawn again to Biff. And though Biff has been living in the roughest of workman’s lodgings, he can see that The Place is on the brink of collapse. Much of its forest has had to be sold off for lumber, and Hugh, referred to the children as D.M. (Deaf Mute, for his near-total lack of interaction with anyone), is almost catatonic in his isolation.

A child-man, Biff exudes a certain confidence and power that attracts followers, and both Rodney and Netta go with him when he decides to leave The Place again. He returns to his room in Brighton and the three settle in together. They have almost nothing, yet he ensures their basic needs are met through intimidation:

Biff they feared. He subdued them from the outset. They surrendered to him because they had no alternative. If he required an extra blanket or another cup, there was little use in stating that it was not available. He went downstairs to fetch it. And if the excuse proved to have been founded on fact, he went out and bought what he wanted and charged it to Ma [the landlady].

Of course, three into two won’t go, as they say, and after a few months of pretending to be a simple working man and attempting to understand the complexities of Netta’s relationship with him and Biff, Rodney returns to his familiar middle-class life. Rodney is hands-down the most normal character we will come across. No wonder he’s destined to be among the wounded.

At this point, Close of Play ends. The last book, Own Wilderness, opens in London, where Biff and Netta are boarding with a greengrocer and his family. Netta helps out in the shop, while Biff cycles through a variety of jobs, not all of them legal, until he settles in as a delivery truck driver. Warner Hooke’s cast grows to take in the whole family and the power of the narrative is weakened somewhat as she loses the tight focus on Biff and Netta.

That is, until Hugh dies and leaves The Place to them. Saddled with debts, its buildings now so decrepit as to be barely habitable, it still has the attraction of Eden to Warner Hooke’s strange Adam and Eve. Foraging, once their pasttime, now becomes their means of existence. And now that they are both of age, Biff and Netta begin to become aware of what their neighbors are saying about their relationship.

It’s enough at this point to say that we’ve left Wodehouse and Rabelais behind long ago. We are now deep in Thomas Hardy’s territory. How we got here isn’t entirely clear, and I’m not sure it was to Warner Hooke, either. She probably didn’t work according to a plan, probably didn’t know from one chapter to the next when Biff and Netta were going to lead her. But we should be grateful that she stuck with them.

In some ways, taken together, Striplings, Close of Play, and Own Wilderness resemble a 19th Century English novel more than a modernist one. Biff and Netta’s path meanders from time to time and Warner Hooke occasionally suffers from the naturalist’s tendency to note all phenomena, even the unimportant, when some details ought to be omitted. But taken together — and as hard as these books are to locate, I cannot overstress how important it is to read the three as a single work — this trilogy is a work of stunning power, and I just regret that I am giving it less than its due with such a relatively brief assessment. Absolutely unjustly neglected; absolutely worth tapping into your local Inter Library Loan service to get your hands on. (Note: Own Wilderness is available through HathiTrust.org, if you have access.)

The Biff and Netta Trilogy, by Nina Warner Hooke (credited as N. Warner Hooke)
Striplings
London: Faber and Faber, 1934
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934
Close of Play
London: Putnam, 1936
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936
Own Wilderness
London: Putnam, 1938
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938

The Case is Altered, by William Plomer (1932)

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Dust jacket from the first US edition of The Case is Altered.

This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.

The Figures in the Boarding-House Carpet

Many a novel has sprung from a paragraph in a newspaper. Notable among them was that New York Times snippet about a houseful of murder victims in the Midwest which Truman Capote chanced to see — and so began the trail that led to In Cold Blood. Three decades earlier, William Plomer returned to London after a weekend away when his eye was caught at the railway station by something larger than a paragraph: posters announced SHOCKING BAYSWATER TRAGEDY.

The newspaper revealed to him — in late-November 1929 — that this tragedy had taken place in the very house where he lodged. It was a narrow escape, for it is likely that he would have joined his landlady in the mortuary had he not been out of town. She was the common-law wife of a man given to the obsession that she would succumb to any man who paid her court. Mania turned into murder as he set upon her with an open razor while their child looked on; with her dead, the man looked for Plomer, but the police were soon on the scene, samples taken — and, in due course, the returning novelist cleaned up the remaining mess.

Hardly surprisingly, that friendship with his landlady and the encounter with the blood which had spurted from her veins were to haunt him. Two years later, in the summer of 1932, he published his third novel The Case is Altered. After the South Africa of Turbott Wolfe and the Japan of Sado, this was a raw but deeply felt account of those clinging onto life by dint of a rented room in somebody else’s house.

Since his childhood, split between South Africa and terms at Rugby School, Plomer’s life had since been varied, and he knew such humble lodgings as well as Patrick Hamilton, who was to make a career from boarding houses, with such works as Hangover Square. Another boarding house novel, Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s The Lodger, inspired not only Plomer but also Norman Collins, whose London Belongs to Me has recently won new attention. One might also think of works by Muriel Spark, Emeric Pressburger, Tennessee Williams and Sarah Waters as examples of the continuing fascination of such settings, which provides dramatic unity while characters move in and out the shadows of rooms whose carpet is no longer as fresh as the time when it had been obtained on an instalment plan.

Cover of the Hogarth Press edition of The Case is Altered.

The Case is Altered proved to be Plomer’s most popular novel, one of the bestsellers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as had been Orlando, Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Saturday Night at the Greyhound. The last, by Plomer’s friend John Hampson has something in common with The Case is Altered: set in a pub, its timescale is limited and to the fore is a cruel husband.

According to Plomer, the houses in his fictional Cambodia Crescent “have the self-righteous air of a selfish and uncultivated person who thinks that he is a good and wise, and the ornamentation around the doors, windows and chimneys forms a lasting insult to the beauties of natural stone and careful craftsmanship”. As this is in hailing distance of Kensington Gardens, one can be sure that Plomer’s house would now command cool millions.

Almost a century ago, it had simply been spotted by Mrs. Beryl Fernandez (with her impoverished and ailing common-law husband Paul), who thought that with care, it could become a profitable enterprise. She planned to run with the help of her friend Mrs. Gambits, “who belonged to that numerous and depressing class of women who are not exactly of the kind known as decayed gentlewomen, but whose chief aim in life is to be taken for decayed gentlewomen”. This was an era when even Mrs. Fernandez’s modest funds could stretch to the hiring of a manservant, Mr. Empringham “with grey hair and rather a puzzled expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite make out why life had treated him quite the way it had, or what it was likely to do to him next”.

Among the lodgers are a couple, the Rudds, forever in hope of winning crossword competitions and siring a child. They are joined by Constantia Brixworth who is down on her luck after losing her money in an American railroad scheme. She is friendly with Frances Haymer, a former explorer, to whem she regularly entertains with tales of her fellow residents, whom the writer regards with all the curious avidity that she had showed in chronicling foreign tribes.

This is a finely-observed novel. Plomer describes Miss Haymer when she ventured out, as she “used a stick with a rubber end, and tottered along on heels that were rather too high, supporting, like some caryatid, a large, oldfashioned hat, decorated with a bird or two and some fruit, as in her heyday.” Of particular interest to both Miss Brixworth and Miss Haymer is young Eric Alston, who works in a greengrocer’s “and had a very fresh complexion, as if his cheeks were reflecting a rosy glow from the apples and peaches which it was his work to sell”. Eric is walking out with a girl who works in the kitchen of a clothes shop which, called Pélagie, proclaims itself as trading in “Robes and Modes”.

And so the scene is set for lives of aspiration running into frustration and worse — none blessed with “that assurance which the possession of money brings with it”. The novel’s title has a double meaning. A Miss Brixworth says to Alston (to whom she offers tea and omelettes), “When I had more money, I used to have an ordinary afternoon tea and late dinner, but now the case is rather altered…”. And nearby the house is a pub with that very name: a plaque relates that “it was originally called The Three Cranes but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!”‘

William Plomer in 1932.

Briskly told in nineteen chapters across some three hundred pages, the novel has something of the “tea-tabling” manner for which Christopher Isherwood praised his and Plomer’s mentor, E.M. Forster. Despite a cinema fire, dramatic incident is rare; everything turns around the simmering of domestic matters, one small table-side event knocking into another much as a billiard ball sets up a chain reaction across the green baize. Worthy of Forster, or Proust, is the observation of Paul Fernandez who chain-smokes in the dead of night, the night-lamp’s shadows an emblem of his maniacal anxiety. “The idea of cruelty (which is only a diseased form of sympathy) was beginning to exercise a fascination over his thoughts. Not content with love, and love fully requited at that, he wanted power as well, he wanted to command more love, a stronger, more intense kind of intimacy than is humanly possible, and so he began to seek how he might obtain such power.”

And so begins a descent which will take down many with it against a background which forms an indelible view of the Thirties, whether in spiritualist gatherings, a mediation upon the nature of conscience, a suggestion of the homosexuality which had been to the fore in Sado, or advertisement hoardings “covered with huge posters. Each of them showed a gigantic human figure, and each figure seemed to live in a strange world of the imagination. A giantess in evening dress was in raptures at having discovered a new tooth paste to apply to a set of teeth that looked like the keys of a piano”. Whether observing people’s tendency to walk towards a window when contemplating the future or a man who “indulged in none of those humorous sallies which are so important a part of an auctioneer’s technique”, Plomer shows those powers of description which made people relish his letters’ arrival (would there were a collection of them).

Rather than dwell on the murder which was its inspiration, one relishes The Case is Altered for its life:

an immense murmur made up of the traffic of human beings going about their business and pleasure, a rich and subtle and continuous sound which it takes more than motor-cars to make, for it must contain as well the cries of infants, the ranting of demagogues, the tapping of the blind man’s stick, the happy laughter of young girls, the vomiting of drunkards, the stirring of squirrels in their sleep, the fall of leaves, the growth of trees, the threats of blackmailers, the solicitations of whores, the shuffling steps of lecherous old men, the banter of soldiers, the coy shrieks of housemaids, the shy kisses of young lovers, the worm in the bud, and the millionaire’s last words.

The novel put Plomer’s quiet life in good stead, although he was not to know such success again until its very end, in 1973, when his sequence The Butterfly Ball was illustrated by Alan Aidridge, who brought a similar style to his work in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. FThough his satirical and lyrical poems are a particular delightr, Plomer may now be best known as the publisher’s reader who, in the face of opposition, persuaded Cape to take on the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bonds novels, Casino Royale, and worked closely on the rest of them.

How has the equally if differently thrilling The Case is Altered fallen from print? It last appeared half a century ago in a hardback series called the Landmark Library. Perhaps some have balked at another aspect of the Thirties. As early as page twenty-six, one learns that “even if Miss Brixworth had not been able to see at once that Mrs. Fernandez was a Jewess, it would be soon have been able to tell that she was one, by the way she began over-emphasising her partiality to bacon for breakfast”. Two pages later, she “launched out into a sea of Jewish visions of luxury and comfort far beyond her means” and further in, there is “that Jewish impulse towards grandeur so noticeable in Mrs. Fernandez”.

Plomer was a humane man. These are the tropes of an era, similar to the first edition of Brighton Rock, which featured a Jewish Mr. Big in a seafront hotel (later editions turned him into an Italian, as if that made it all right). The narrator of The Case is Altered notes that “you can never make out whether the Jews want to be aristocrats or socialists. Half-way between East and West, they maybe somewhere near the truth, if the truth really lies in paradox. Jesus Christ was the greatest and most paradoxical of the Jews. He had the most aristocratic nature imaginable, and yet he lived with the lowest of the low. He was unique, and yet expressed himself in terms of what is ordinary and universal”.

For all that “Jews kiss and kill at the same time, just as a sportsman may feel a real affection for the game he slaughters”, The Case is Altered has a power which impressed its first publisher, Leonard Woolf, a Jew. As felicitous as it is raw, here is a novel which remains as provoking as when it appeared in 1932.

Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).

The Case is Altered, by William Plomer
London: Hogarth Press, 1932
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932

A Check List of Good Books from 1931

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“A Check List of Good Books” from Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931

I’ve long wondered about one of the longest modernist novels ever written, Evelyn Scott’s A Calendar of Sin (1931), an epic of the Reconstruction and after that took two volumes to encompass its over 1300 pages. When I stumbled across a copy with the original dust jackets at a reasonable price recently, I grabbed it. But I have yet to read it, so this is not about A Calendar of Sin.

On the back of the book, however, as was often the practice of publishers in those days, there appears “A Check List of Good Books,” which lists thirty titles then available from Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Cape & Smith was a brief and unsuccessful joint venture between the veteran British publisher Herbert Jonathan Cape and the American Harrison Smith. Established in 1928, the partnership lasted just three years. Smith left to form his own house and Robert Ballou, the former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, who’d been the treasurer, took over and the firm reformed as Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou. This incarnation was even briefer, closing its books in 1933.

The Cape & Smith check list, however, is an interesting mix of classics and the now-forgotten. The books by William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh have remained in print and are well-established as 20th century classics. Several others (Maurice Hindus’s two books, Louis Fischer’s study of Soviet foreign policy, Charles Yale Harrison’s biography of Clarence Darrow) are too contemporary not to have been superseded by other studies. But let’s take a quick look at a few of the less well-known titles. A number of these have been reissued from time to time — Plagued by the Nightingale, for example, was a Virago Modern Classic. But these are the sort of almost-classics that never quite manage to stay in print without the support a champion or two.

• A World Can End, by Irina Skariatina
A candid, if at times disingenuous, account of the Russian revolution as seen by a member of the aristocracy. In his review for The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote:

“Here is death as we might ourselves experience it, not death in the desert or the jungle, but death in the drawing-room, the bullet that smashes the familiar picture…. The sufferings of her family, of her deaf old father, the General, who could not be stopped from criticizing the Revolution at the top of his voice until at last he was struck down in a street brawl, of the old Princess, her mother, married to an Estonian gardener that she might be allowed a passport to leave Russia, then dying when she crossed the frontier, are described with a freedom from prejudice, even with some sympathy for the Revolution, which makes her story the more terrible. If this is the best that can be said, one wonders at the worst.

Skariatina was able to leave the Soviet Union and come to New York, where she married an American, Victor Blakeslee, an experience she wrote about in a sequel, A World Begins. Shortly afterward, she and Blakeslee visited Russia and she published an account of their trip with the somewhat boasting title of First to Go Back.
Skariatina’s memoir was based on her diary, which gives the book an immediacy — but also a certain amount of undiguised naïveté, as in this entry from early 1917:

On my way home this afternoon, just as I left the hospital, I saw a wretched little dog perishing of cold and hunger. Its bones were sticking out in the most ghastly way and as for its eyes — the anguish in them cannot be described! Right next to where the little thing lay was a grocery store — so I dashed into it, bought an enormous sausage and was just about to feed the beastie, when all of a sudden passers-by, of the kind one sees in the hospital district, began to stop and stare and grumble out loud: “Look at her feeding a dog, when Christians are hungry nowadays. Ugh, those idle rich!” … Nothing like it ever happened to me before. It proves that there is a feeling of hostility among the poor that is ready to crop up at the slightest pretext.

• Juan in America, by Eric Linklater
Juan in America tells the story of Scotsman Juan — the name is meant to evoke Byron’s Don Juan, though it’s a loose connection at best — and his adventures in 1920s America. As the summarized it, Juan encounters “gangsters bootleggers, wenches, bean-wagon proprietors, Carolina negroes and Hollywood deities. He runs rum from Windsor to Detroit, rides a mule for twenty-four hours down a flood-swollen river, invades a beer baron’s Everglade retreat and seduces his daughter, and accompanies these adventures with a running fire of commend and ribald laughter.”
Linklater wrote the book after spending two years in America, so it’s filled with dry British satire of American customs and manners. The book is often cited as an example of a modern picaresque novel, and it stands (or falls) on the strength of its episodes rather than its narrative arc. Juan in America has been a perennial favorite of reissuers, coming out several times as a Penguin Modern Classic and within the last twenty years as a Capuchin Classic. At the moment, it’s available as an eBook from Bloomsbury in the U.S., but not in England.
Illustration from Mad Man's Drum by Lynd Ward
Illustration from Mad Man’s Drum by Lynd Ward.
• Mad Man’s Drum and Gods’ Man, by Lynd Ward
Two wordless novels, in which the story is told through a series of full-page woodcuts. The form was pioneered by the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, and these, Ward’s first two attempts, are far more interesting as art than literature. Both suffer from excessive abstraction, with every character treated as symbol rather than individual. Susan Sontag considered God’s Man so awkward that she listed in her Camp canon in her milestone essay, “Notes on Camp.”
By far Ward’s best graphic novel was his last, Vertigo (1937). In his introduction to the two-volume Library of America edition collecting all seven of Ward’s novels, Art Spiegelman writes of it,

“Genuinely novelistic in scope, it is a difficult work that grapples with perilously difficult times. As emblematic as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as ambitiously experimental as Dos Passos’s U. S. A/ trilogy, as apocalyptic as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, it is a key work of Depression-era literature, and useful in understanding what is being down to us right now.”

If you are interested in sampling Ward’s novels but reluctant to go for the magnum opus, budget versions of God’s Man, Mad Man’s Drum, and Vertigo are available from Dover Books.

• The Wave, by Evelyn Scott
When The Wave was published in 1929, Carl Van Doren called it “the greatest novel on the American Civil War.” At the time, with five novels to her credit, Scott was considered one of the premier American modernists. In fact, publishers Cape & Smith touted a novel by another of their Southern-born writers by saying, “The Sound and the Fury should put William Faulkner in the company of Evelyn Scott.”

In his 1950 study The American Historical Novel, Ernest Leisy wrote that The Wave “marked a new advance in the technique of historical fiction, and in an article from 1964, Robert Welker asserted that the book should be seen as “the standard measure against which novels dealing with the war were tested, and perhaps more than any one book, it is responsible for opening up the materials of the Civil War to fiction. It is unique in American fiction.”
Peggy Bach, whose advocacy of the novel, along with that of her frequent collaborator David Madden, wrote of The Wave in a 1985 article in Southern Literary Journal,

Scott’s style is elaborate; her sentence structure is complex and often convoluted. Her characters, even when they are the great men about whom much Civil War fiction is written, exhibit particular human behavior in a particular situation. Upon the firm foundation of her intellect, her interests in various groups of people — Negroes, Jews, poor whites, politicians, military leaders — her strong compassion for the plight of women in the South, and her knowledge of history, Scott formed a novel unusual in content, character, tone, and structure.

Bach and Madden were responsible for the Louisiana State University Press reissuing the book in 1996 as part of the “Voices of the South” series. Since then, however, the book has, like much of Evelyn Scott’s work, fallen out of print again.

• Gallows’ Orchard, by Claire Spencer
Claire Spencer, the author of Gallows’ Orchard was, conveniently, Harrison Smith’s wife. Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the hyperbolic reception her debut novel received. As Harvard Crimson’s reviewer gushed, it “has everything and is everything necessary to make it an extraordinary good novel.” Amy Loveman, the Saturday Review’scritic, tried to chalk it up to that old stereotype, the natural born writer:

Every now and again there appears an author who is a novelist not by power of will, but as naturally as the bird is master of flight. Miss Spencer is of that happy company who write with so direct a vision as to seem to be improvising as they proceed. Her book has that appearance f unpremeditation which is the triumph of art. It has an urgency and immediacy of emotion that are the very accent of life, a sequence of happening as seemingly inevitable as the inescapable encounters of actual existence. Her narrative is electric with feel-ings -— quick with a passionate responsiveness to the beauty of nature, the pathos of dumb beasts, the calamities and complexities of the human heart.

Gallows’ Orchard tells the story of a Scottish girl who becomes pregnant by one man and marries another to save her name. When the truth finally comes out, her village takes its revenge in a manner, well, befitting Thomas Hardy … or Shirley Jackson.
Spencer later divorced Smith and married Mabel Dodge Luhan’s son John Evans. The poet Robinson Jeffers, with whom they stayed after Spencer obtained her divorce in Reno, wrote a friend, “You never saw a pair of such handsome creatures — in a strange unusual way & so different.” they lived in Luhan’s compound in Taos until they sold it in the late 1960s and moved to Maine. Claire Spencer Evans died in 1987 at the age of 91.
Gallows’ Orchard is available on HathiTrust (to those who have access).

• Brother and Sister, by Leonhard Frank
Leonhard Frank gained international acclaim for his first novel Carl and Anna, and American reviewers seemed inclined on the strength of that to give this account of a brother and sister who accidentally fall in love and marry (the old trick of long separation and a broken family). The New York Times thought that “so great is Frank’s art in portraying the love that is theirs [Constantine and Lydia, the two sibling/spouses], that one understand and sympathizes. One can no more censure them for what has happened than one can upbraid a mountain torrent for going out of its course and inundating ground that had hitherto slumbered in peaceful repose.”
But British critics were less enthusiastic. The historian E. H. Carr wrote in The Spectator, “If his intention was to write a modern realistic novel on these themes, he has stopped half-way in the attempt. He ostentatiously flouts realism by a Shakespearean use of the long arm of coincidence; and he adopts, both for narrative and for dialogue, a purely poetical style which sometimes achieves beauty and occasionally, at any rate in translation, descends from the sublime to the ridiculous…. The result is a powerful and striking book which will be widely read and discussed; but Herr Frank has not solved, has not even really faced, the problems which he raises.

• Bystander and The Magnet, by Maxim Gorki [Gorky]
I must confess that these two titles were unfamiliar to me. But they’re also just the tip of the iceberg, or, more accurately, the first half of The Life of Klim Samgin, a tetralogy that Wikipedia describes as “Gorky’s most ambitious work, intended to depict ‘all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century.'” Bystander and The Magnet were followed, in English translations, by Other Fires in 1933 and Specter in 1938. The first two volumes in English were published by Cape & Smith; the second two by Appleton-Century. None of them has ever been reissued in English.
Among English-language readers, Maxim Gorki’s reputation has fallen dramatically since these books were published. Once considered the moral pillar of Russian literature after Tolstoy, Gorki had a problematic relationship with Lenin and even more so with Stalin, and his collaboration in the white-washing of the disastrous Belomor Canal, a pointless project to which thousands of Gulag prisoners were sacrificed has tended to outweigh his literary accomplishments since his death.
This is a work of massive scale. The four books add up to over 2,700 pages. If you really wanted to read them, you’d have to be prepared to shell out over $500. While there are plenty of copies of Bystander available for under $20, there is just one copy of Other Fires currently listed for sale, and it goes for over $400.
Whether it would be worth the effort in terms of reading satisfaction is another question. There was no difference of opinion among reviewers on one point: these are wordy novels. Gerald Gould, who reviewed Bystander for the Observer, was not a fan:

At first sight, one might merely wonder why this enormous book is not more enormous. Since the conversations seem endless, why not make them literally endless, especially as they all agree in finding nothing to agree about? But an artist of Gorki’s stature is entitled to his method, even when it involves tedium: and his book must be read for the impression of muddle it conveys. This, after all, is but the first volume of a trilogy: between the dissolution of this, and the Revolution that is coming, there may be an intention of violent contrast. Certainly the theory, so far, appears to be: “Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.” The subject is the Russian Intelligentsia as it lived and talked — O how it talked! — between the assassination of Alexander II and the coronation of Nicholas II. The intelligentsia is unintelligent. Vagueness, vanity, morbidity, self-consciousness, lack of Ideals, a soft snow-drift of purposeless arguments and feckless delays, a sniffing at revolution — such is the picture: the few people who do anything quickly pass out of it: the hero goes on wondering about himself.

E. H. Carr put it more succinctly in reviewing The Magnet for the Spectator: “Gorki wields an amazingly fluent pen, but ‘the art to blot’ is one which he forgot at an early age.”

On the other hand, those who loved 19th Century Russian novels found much to love in this one. In the Saturday Review, Alexander Kaun wrote that Bystander was not a historical novel but an immediate novel:

…we watch the bewildering Russian panorama, not in its cosy remoteness, but as a disconcerting immediacy. We miss the comfort of a historical novel, in which everything has been made clear and definite by the obliging author. Rather do we share the discomfort of contemporary Russians who lived in the chaos of an unduly protracted period of storm and stress. We speed headlong from the spectacular ‘Seventies, reverberating with terroristic explosions and culminating in the assassination of Alexander II, through the arid ‘Eighties, drabbish with pseudo-Tolstoyan passivitv and Chekhovian whimpering, and into the mad ‘Nineties, when a hothouse industrialization was foisted upon a rustic, famished country in which erstwhile peasants, stolid and pious, turned overight into militant proletarians, when the intelligentsia tried to digest a chop-suey of Marx-Nietzsche-Ibsen-Wilde-Verlaine-PIekhanov-Lenin-Mikhailovsky-Chernov.

Kaun was willing to excuse much in consideration of the energy in Gorki’s narrative: “A tremendous canvas of Russian life unfolds before our eyes, dizzying in its colorfulness and multiplicitv of action and movement…. Perhaps he uses his faculty a bit extravagantly; the abundance of faces and objects may tax our receptivity. But then, we recall the dimensions of the canvas, its Homeric proportions.”

One wonders whether anyone will want to take on a new English translation (no one had good things to say about the first one). Is the work worth it? Or is The Life of Klim Samgin as justly forgotten now as the thick historical novels of Gorki’s contemporary Dmitry Merezhkovsky (who?).

• Plagued by the Nightingale, by Kay Boyle
This was Boyle’s first novel, written in part in anguish at her treatment by the Breton parents of her first husband, Richard Brault. Though mostly written between 1923 and 1927, it was not published until 1931, at which point she confessed to a friend, “I wrote [it] so many years ago that I feel it has nothing to do with me now.” In her review of the book, along with Wedding Day, Boyle’s first collection of stories, Katherine Anne Porter wrote,

The whole manner of the telling is superb: there are long passages of prose which crackle and snap with electric energy, episodes in which inner drama and outward events occur against scenes bright with the vividness of things seen by the immediate eye: the bathing party on the beach, the fire in the village, the delicious all-day excursion to Castle Island, the scene in the market when Bridget and Nicholas quarrel, the death of Charlotte, the funeral. Nothing is misplaced or exaggerated, and the masterful use of symbol and allegory clarify and motivate the mam great theme beneath the apparent one: the losing battle of youth and strength against the resistless army of age and death. This concept is implicit in the story itself, and it runs like music between the lines. The book is a magnificent performance; and as the short stories left the impression of reservoirs of power hardly tapped, so this novel, complete as it is, seems only a beginning.

After being out of print for decades, it was reissued in 1966 to launch the Crosscurrents/Modern Fiction series of neglected books from the Southern Illinois Press. In his introduction to that edition, Harry T. Moore wrote,

The novel that emerged is a variant on the Henry James theme of the clash between Americans and Europeans— and it may be asked, Who since James has handled this theme more skilfully? Indeed it can safely be said that Kay Boyle in her first novel portrayed a French provincial family far more convincingly than any other American writer, in her story of the American girl Bridget who has married a Breton and at- tempts to live with his fiercely clannisH family that dominates a village.

I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson (1978)

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I don’t remember how many years ago I bought this book, but it sat on the shelf long enough to have escaped my notice until I took it down to kill a few minutes while waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. One of the downsides to reading and writing about books all the time is that one loses touch of that magical experience of opening a book and commencing to read without any prior knowledge to cloud one’s judgment.

If I ever knew much about I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, I’d forgotten it long ago. I suspect it was nothing more than the loveliness of the title that made me buy it in the first place. So I was naively putting myself in Madeleine Masson’s hands, knowing that I would be setting it down in a few minutes, perhaps not to pick it up again for a matter of years, if ever.

“It was a beautiful day in June 1940” opens the first chapter, “Paris — June 1940.” Of course, we know enough history to realize that a beautiful day in Paris in June 1940 is not going to end beautifully. Masson’s lover arrives to persuade her to leave for Switzerland with him. As a Jew, she understands the risks she faces. “They say that the Germans will be entering Paris at any moment,” her anti-Semitic landlady announces with undisguised delight. Masson chooses not to go to Switzerland but carries on packing up, prepared to join the flood of refugees leaving the city for … well, any place else.

We understand by the end of Chapter One that Masson’s title is a lie, which gives everything that follows a certain poignancy, rather like that one feels in watching the silly bourgeosie in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu. And Masson herself could easily have been one of the characters in Renoir’s film. Raised in South Africa by a French father and Austrian mother, she came to Paris in 1934 with her mother, who was hoping to establish her own salon and effectively separate from her dull diamond broker husband (if not from his money).

For Masson, however, Paris is a different kind of escape — from her mother, in fact. She quickly finds herself a job as secretary to a wealthy American dowager and a room of her own in a pension, and begins to assimilate into a peculiar cross-section of Parisian society. At the high end, she meets the idle rich and idle not-so-rich (the latter often of noble descent) through her enployer and mother. At the low end, she meets people like Madame Tricon, the patronne of her pension:

She told me that she was one of the first women in Paris to have eyelashes made from the hairs of her current lover’s legs. “Imagine, ma petite,” she said, batting two black centipedes at me, “Imagine to yourself the voluptuousness of giving him Japanese kisses with his own hairs.

At one of employer’s soirees, Masson meets Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière, who plies her with food and drink and by the end of the evening declares himself desperately in love. She takes quick stock of his character: “lazy, amoral, deeply religious, sentimental, and selfish.” Nonetheless, when he proposes, she accepts.

Then she discovers that she is the third player in a duet. The Baron is in thrall with the Marquise de Rastignac, a fifty-ish noblewoman his mother enlisted to introduce her son into the mysteries of sex. Some twenty years later, the two are still carrying on their affair, aided in part by the fact that the Marquise is footing much of the bill for the Baron’s playboy lifestyle. Masson’s account of the Baron and the Marquise is just one of the nuggets of la vie Parisienne pluperfect that are studded throughout this book:

The Marquise’s finest hour, L’heure bleue, was her hour of triumph. From 5 to 7 p.m. was visiting time for French lovers; and in love nests all over the country, and in Paris particularly, men were taking down their trousers and heading for the Louis XVI style bed where lay la petite amie in a frilly négligée. Tearing off this garment was part of the ploy. I could never visualise the Baron’s Laure frivolling naked on what the Baron called with some respect the battlefield. For this lady, who to me resembled a Roman matron, had amisleading air of impenetrable virtue. Her clothes appeard welded to her massive frame, and her large handbags and tiny feet were as much a legend in Paris as was her vanished beauty.

Not long after Masson and the Baron are married, the Marquise pays a visit and informs the new bride that “Renaud is my life and I don’t propose giving him up.” Masson’s job is to produce an heir and interfere as little as possible in the status quo ante matrimonium.

This is also the view of the Baron’s family, who don’t bother to hide the contempt they feel towards a pretender with three strikes against her: a Jewess, a foreigner, and a commoner. They refuse to even acknowledge her existence. The shock of her rejection on all fronts causes Masson, now pregnant with the Baron’s child, to miscarry. And this, ironically, then enables Masson to get the marriage annulled through some intricate maneuvers through the Byzantine processes of the French bureaucracy and the Catholic Church.

Madeleine Masson, 1942
Madeleine Masson in 1942.

For proper Parisians, there is no difference between an annulée and a divorcée. Official recognition as a wanton woman, however, frees Masson to explore less-sanctioned aspects of Parisian society. She takes a series of lovers, some who fall for her, others whom she falls for, none of them remotely suitable. Early on, she is aided and abetted by Lucy de Polnay (sister of the author Peter de Polnay, whom Neglected Books fans may recall). Lucy instructs her in the fine art of judging a lover, dismissing one for having what she called “the postman’s knock method”: “three sharp rat-a-tats, put it in the letter box, and away.”

Masson also comes to know — intimately or briefly — many of the celebrities of Paris of the 1930s: Colette, Nathalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, Suzy Solidor, Marie Laurencin. So, if you’re not satisfied with savoring Masson’s delicious tales, you can also feast upon pages rich with vintage Parisian gossip, including their “curious sexual appetites and habits.” (Masson could never share Count Serge Cheremeteff’s “passion for the whip and the rod,” for example.)

And, as we know from the start, there is the tragic goodbye to all that, as Masson tries to find a way out of France with thousands of other refugees. The streets of cities like Tours and Bourdeaux “black with people, like flies on a wound.” Just what happens to her in the end, however, is unclear. In the book, she writes that she managed to book a passage to South Africa from Marseilles. Her Wikipedia page, on the other hand, suggests that she stayed and became involved with the Resistance. After the war, however, it’s clear that she married again (a Royal Navy captain), had a son, to whom the book is dedicated, settled in England, and became a biographer and playwright. She died in 2007 at the age of 95.

I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye is as insubstantial as an éclair — and every bit as irresistible.

I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978