novel

Big Business Girl, by Patricia Reilly (1930)

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Cover of first US edition of Big Business Girl

When Farrar and Rinehart published Big Business Girl in 1930, they credited the book to the anonymous “One of Them” — meaning one of the women in big business. “She knows whereof she writes. She remains anonymous because she has revelations to make and emotional secrets to tell.”

They were being disingenuous. They knew perfectly well that the author was Patricia Reilly, then managing editor of College Humor. For one thing, the novel had just been serialized in the magazine and when Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, Reilly had been named in Variety and other industry journals. For another, they’d known Reilly for years: when she was a journalism graduate fresh out of Columbia, Stanley Rinehart had hired her as a staff writer when he and John Farrar were both working for The Bookman magazine.

Though College Humor was hardly in the same league as America’s biggest weeklies, Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Colliers, all with readerships in millions and famous for paying extraordinary rates for fiction by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its editorial reputation belied its name. Many of the same names that appeared in the big magazines competed to publish in College Humor, even though its circulation was just 150,000 in 1930, half of what it had been before the Wall Street crash of the year before. Zelda Fitzgerald, for example, published “The Original Follies Girl” (credited to “F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald”) in the July 1929 issue, just a few months before Big Business Girl began running. Patricia Reilly would take over as editor of the magazine in 1932, moving on to run Motion Picture magazine in 1934.

Patricia Reilly with her dog, from a feature in the St. Louis Dispatch from 1932.

When she was named College Humor editor, Reilly recalled that she felt she had to give up her own chances of being a writer when she started working at the magazine. “I wanted to write myself but I very quickly realized, and with few pangs of disillusionment, that I would never write the Great American Novel.” But sometime in 1928, she began developing an idea for a book that would blend her observations from her time in the working world with events that were shaking up Chicago, where College Humor was based. She approached Margaret Culkin Banning, already a prolific novelist and a regular contributor to College Humor, but Banning declined, saying she knew little about the situation in Chicago. She then asked H. N. Swanson, the magazine’s editor, for suggestions, and he advised Reilly to set aside doubts about her own abilities and write it herself.

Big Business Girl is the story of Claire MacIntyre:

A girl who has just graduated from a great state university, with a diploma , which is almost standard equipment for the young darling of today; a girl who faces the cold fact that nine out of ten of her number are doomed to failure, yet surveys the business world with level eyes and decides she can succeed as fast as any college trained man of her age.

Reilly’s was not the first generation of working women, but it was the first for whom going to college and continuing on to work in business was a reality for tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of women. There had been plenty of books written about the experience of young men leaving college and going into the world, she wrote in her foreword, but “almost never
are the problems of the girl graduate dignified between the covers of a book.”

The book opens as Claire — Mac to her friends — is celebrating her impending graduation with her boyfriend, Johnny. Johnny is a star of the campus, a singer with his own jazz band, in demand at all the local dances. He was proud of Claire for her “brains and personality” — but not her ambition. He plans to try his luck in show business and wants her to trail along as the dutiful spouse. She has other ideas. She wants to make her own money, in part because she’s racked up a debt of $5,000 getting through college.

And so, she bids farewell to Johnny and heads to Chicago, where her only relative, a comfortable but crotchety bachelor, lives. Her uncle thinks little of her plans for a career: “I think you are a crazy young kid. You have no business in business,” he tells her. After several rejections, she applies to an industrial dry-cleaning company looking to fill a new position: adjuster. The job involves settling claims from angry customers whose clothes have been damaged in the cleaning process. Today’s reader will wonder how such a job could qualify as “Big Business.” But here’s where the other half of Reilly’s concept for the book comes in.

Long forgotten in the legends of Chicago mobsters like Al Capone is the dry-cleaning racket. While best remembered for bootlegging and rum-running to supply the public with illegal booze during Prohibition, Capone and his ilk had a dozen or more other shady ways of making money. Among them was the dry-cleaning racket, which was a complicated web of collusion between mobsters and unions to shake down dry-cleaning shops and companies for protection money.

The scheme was explained a decade later in a report to the U.S. Senate:

Terrorism has been among the devices employed in the enforcement of a succession of market-sharing and price-fixing plans adopted by members of the cleaning and dyeing trade in Chicago at various times during the past 30 years. Beatings have been inflicted, trucks damaged, plants bombed, windows smashed, and clothing ruined; at least two persons connected with the trade have been murdered and the talents of such notorious gangsters as Al Capone and George (“Bugs”) Moran have been brought into play. The Chicago Master Cleaners and Dyers Association controlled the trade from 1910 to 1930, its power derived-largely from the economic strength of three friendly unions — the Laundry and Dye House Drivers and Chauffeurs Union, Local 712 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters known as the truck drivers’ union; the Cleaners, Dyers, and Pressers Union, Federal Local No. 17742 of the A. F. of L., known as the inside workers’ union; and the Retail Cleaners and Dyers Union, Federal Local No. 17792 of the A. F. of L., known as the tailors’ union.

When he learns where Mac will be working, her uncle tells her she’s landed in the worst place in Chicago for corruption: “There are even racketeers who prey on other racketeers.”

Hired on a trial basis, Mac quickly impresses her company’s owner by running an appeal that brings in hundreds of women customers. She proves a wizard at everything from calming irate customers to convincing them to accept low claim settlements — and with the racket in full swing, fire-bombing stores and hijacking delivery trucks, there are plenty of claims to settle. The owner begins grooming her for advancement. “You don’t handle your work like a girl, somehow,” he observes. “You seem more like a man.” “That is the sweetest thing you ever could have said,” she replies. And in true chauvinist fashion, he also takes a special interest in cultivating a social relationship — purely in a fatherly way, mind, and only because his wife dislikes going out. Their home is up in Evanston, after all, and it’s so much easier for him to keep a spare tuxedo at the office.

Farrar and Rinehart ad for Big Business Girl emphasizing the author’s anonymity.

Mac’s career is rolling along smoothly — despite having to parry her boss’s advances — when Johnny arrives on the scene. Soon, the two suitors are butting heads like a couple of buck deer in heat. And suddenly Reilly betrays her inexperience in plotting by throwing in a completely implausible twist. Johnny is upset because he and Mac are husband and wife. They were married in college. But “student marriages weren’t popular at State,” so they decided to let anyone know. Including themselves, given the way Mac and Johnny talk of parting ways at the beginning of the book.

Many of the novels about modern women and modern marriage written around this time, like Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife and Sarah Salt’s Sense and Sensuality, struggled to reconcile traditional notions about a wife’s role and the desire to earn money and pursue a career. The choice is often presented in either/or terms, and neither option particularly appealing.

Big Business Girl rejects the either/or choice. For Mac, abandoning her career for a domestic life is out of the question. “She wondered how women just stayed at home and shopped and played bridge in the afternoon and had tea together, with nothing to talk about except their parties and husbands and menus and clothes. She couldn’t picture herself in such a role — ever.” Johnny eventually comes to acceptance, if unmistakably grudging. Long before the acronym was invented, he sees the economic benefits of being in a DINK marriage.

In part, this was due to Reilly’s own experience. Around the time that Big Business Girl was being serialized, she married Robert Foster, a stockbroker she’d known while working for The Bookman in New York. As she told an interviewer in 1932, “My husband is all for my working. He thinks I’d simply die on the vine if I didn’t have something to keep me busy constantly.”

Advertisement for the Warner Brothers/First National film Big Business Girl (1931).

Warner Brothers bought the movie rights to Big Business Girl soon after its run in College Humor, and the movie version starring Loretta Young as Mac and Frank Albertson as Johnny was released in mid-1931. The adaptation was written by Robert Lord, then Warners’ most prolific screenwriter. Lord recognized that Warners could make a love story or a gangster story but not both, so Chicago was swapped in favor of New York City and dry-cleaning in favor of advertising. Young carries off her role — stunningly beautiful and full of entrepreneurial gumption. Frank Albertson is a convincing college boy and an utterly unconvincing romantic lead who makes the often-slimy Ricardo Cortez as the lecherous boss look like a good prospect. Lord takes advantage of the divorce the couple consider to write a terrific scene in which Albertson and Joan Blondell play cards in a hotel room while waiting for a private detective to catch them in flagrante.

As in the novel, the couple reunite — but with the understanding that Mac gives up business for the hope of living happily ever after with Johnny. In this way, as seems to be the case with many of the books behind supposedly outrageous Pre-Code movies, Big Business Girl is more complex, realistic, and sophisticated than its better-known film version. Even before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Association’s Production Code, Hollywood was forced, through a combination of the constraints of short running times, set limitations, and the need to appeal to a much broader audience than that of a magazine like College Humor, to eliminate much of what makes the book interesting.

Big Business Girl, by “One of Them” (Patricia Reilly)
New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930

Which Grain Will Grow, by H. H. Lynde (1952)

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Cover of Which Grain Will Grow by H. H. Lynde

Looking about for a good book to offer as my contribution to the 1952 Club, I was a bit daunted by the gulf between the extremely un-neglected candidates (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood) and the many neglected but unexceptional ones (e.g., Carl Jonas’s Jefferson Selleck, an attempt to update Babbitt for the 1950s without ruffling any feathers). Skimming through reviews in the New York Times, I was intrigued to see that Orville Prescott, the Times’s book editor, singled out a book I’d never heard of in his end-of-year round-up. Which Grain Will Grow by H. H. Lynde, he wrote, “has not received the attention it deserves, which is a pity because it is a wise and expertly written novel about that rare thing, a cross section of American life which includes neither plutocrats nor sharecroppers.”

My interest increased in reading a few synopses in various newspaper reviews. Which Grain Will Grow follows a collection of about a half-dozen major characters and several dozen others, all of them residents of Columbia City — from Lynde’s descriptions a fictional stand-in for Pasco, Washington — over a period of roughly twenty-five years, from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s. This is an era I find particularly fascinating, given the number of social upheavals that took place: Prohibition, the Wall Street crash, the Great Depression and New Deal, World War Two and the reintegration of millions of veterans, the start of the Cold War and blacklisting. In addition, south-central Washington state is an area unnoticed, to my knowledge, by any fictional observer.

Yet in Prescott’s review earlier in the year, when Which Grain Will Grow first came out, there were signs for caution, had I been paying attention:

Miss Lynde has chosen to write of normal people and to avoid extremes of tragedy and degradation. She is intensely interested in the varieties of individual character and in the strange ways of destiny. She has no pat answers to life’s eternal questions, but she asks them again with fresh insistence and brood about them in a thoughtful fashion which stimulates further thought.

He may have been attempting to contrast Lynde’s novel with those (e.g., Wise Blood) peopled with grotesques or (e.g., Invisible Man) simmering with anger, but in hindsight, his words seem as much to be placating potential readers. “No extremes here,” he signaled: this is a book about “normal people,” and 1952 was a time when being “normal” (i.e., white, middle-class, patriarchal, and socially conservative) was a matter of near-paranoiac levels of concern.

Which Grains Will Grow takes its title from Macbeth:

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grains will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me…

The epigraph alerts us to the prospect that some characters we are about to meet will achieve success and others failure. This, and the span of time the story encompasses, would lead you to think that this will prove a saga of social, economic, and political forces at work, a tale of winners and losers.

The book opens as Chris Barlow, a World War One veteran and Princeton drop-out, is crossing the great blank space of wheat farms and nothingness between Ritzville, an hour west of Spokane, and the cluster of towns around the bend where the Columbia River turns west for its long run to the Pacific. Thinking only to stop for the night before continuing on to Seattle, he decides instead to play an old trick and talk his way into the home of a wealthy family based on an asserted acquaintance with their son, a Princeton alum conveniently settled far away on the East coast. There, he meets two young women — Ann Saxon and Phyllis Hollister — to whom he finds himself strongly attracted.

This first section of Which Grain Will Grow is titled “A Long Introduction.” It consumes 265 of the book’s 433 pages, and that fact offers the first clue to what’s wrong with the book. This very long introduction takes us through roughly six or seven months, culminating in a scene in which Chris, encountering Ann on the veranda of the home where she lives with her sister and her brother-in-law, Columbia City’s most powerful banker, realizes in a flash that he loves Ann and not Phyllis. In those many pages, Lynde patiently draws her cast on stage, giving each a chance to share with us — through her omniscient narrator — their thoughts, emotions, aspirations, and dreads. Each is given plenty of time to speak their piece. No one is rushed off.

Here, for example, we follow Pete Malleck, an honest if unexceptional young man whose family lives in one of the cheap frame houses in the Flats down by the river. He’s just learned that his brother-in-law has left town with the hard-saved cash Pete had given his sister to pay off a medical debt. I quote at length to offer a taste of H. H. Lynde’s voice:

Pete walked the three blocks over the High Street steadily and stolidly; not fast, because he was sweating with the heat — though it might just as well have been deep snow he was plodding through, picking up one foot and putting it down ahead of the other. But he wasn’t walking blindly either, or unseeingly, as the saying goes. It was, in fact, more as if he’d been in an accident, hit by a truck, maybe, and got up and walked away from it, knowing just where he was going — which was home to supper and he’d be late and Mom would be waiting if he didn’t get a move on and at the same time congratulating himself in a dim way because his legs and arms worked all right. So apparently he hadn’t been killed or maimed in the crash. But the pain was there, just the same, and he was full of it.

It takes another three paragraphs and about five hundred words to get poor Pete through those three blocks to High Street. Lynde is in no rush, regardless of whether Pete’s mom has supper waiting. When she takes us inside a character’s head, we’re going to be there for a good five to ten pages.

Lynde’s approach is nothing if not earnest. If Pete is going to work through his feelings about being ripped off or about his sister — not particularly bright or ambition — slipping further into poverty and hopelessness, Lynde is going to stick with him every step of the way. This scene reminded me of a mindfulness teacher who related how she once tried to run mindfully, focusing on the movement of each foot as it set down and pushed off, and came close to breaking an ankle in the process.

Combined with what one reviewer called Lynde’s “honest, thoughtful, unspectacular, malleable prose,” the result is convincing, almost unsettlingly realistic. We know that Pete is a good man because along with Lynde, we watch him consider the different ways in which he could lash out — at his deadbeat brother-in-law, at his shiftless sister, at his poor-paying, unrespected job as a hardware store clerk — and sets each aside as brutish and unproductive. Whether that understanding was worth slogging through page after page of undistinguished prose is another matter.

William Esty, writing about a year later in Commonweal, had no patience with Lynde’s style, which he called “insufferable serious-woman’s-magazine prose, so considerately clear about everything small, so comfortably vague about everything large, withal so suffocatingly cozy.” Her work — as indeed Carl Jonas’s Jefferson Selleck — was, he argued, an example of “the forsaking of politics and, indeed, life, for an intellectual bomb shelter.”

It’s a fair criticism. If politics affect life in Columbia City, it escapes Lynde’s notice. If the Depression causes anyone to lose a job or experience hardships, it amounts to more than a vague awareness. A son is lost in World War Two and Chris Barlow somehow becomes a wealthy and influential businessman as a result of his part in America’s war machine, but we’re never clear just how. And if you give up on Which Grains Will Grow as little as ten pages before the end, you will never know how the dramatic situation Lynde painstakingly develops over four hundred pages reaches its climax. Fittingly, which it finally comes, it’s related in flashback.

Which Grain Will Grow was no bestseller, but it did rate selection as an alternate title by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Even given the Club’s inclination to highlight only the best attributes of a book, however, its catalog writer acknowledged that “Had the economy required of the playwright been forced upon her, I suspect we’d have here even a more engrossing book.”

Helen Huntington (H. H. Lynde) at the time of the publication of her first novel in 1944.

This is not to suggest that Which Grain Will Grow is not worth reading. Lynde, born the daughter of one of the richest men in Spokane, Washington (the H. H. stood for Helen Huntington, the Lynde coming from her paternal grandmother), came late to fiction. She was 47 when her first novel, Remember Matt Boyer (1944), about an isolationist politician, was published. She married at the age of 51, two years after her parents died and perhaps because she felt freed by their deaths. She wrote four novels in all, her last, The Adversary, appearing in 1957. I have to wonder if Lynde had read Esty’s article, as The Adversary portrays two contrasting groups in a fictional Orange County town: a group of society fixtures gathering at a cocktail party and an extremist cult busy burning their belongings and preparing their ritual costumes for what they believe is the end of the world, just hours away.

Which Grains Will Grow is, in its way, an archetypal novel of the American 1950s. It could sit alongside James Gould Cozzens’s 1957 novel, By Love Possessed, an even bigger commercial success and critical failure, both books suffering from an excess of care paid to subjects not worth the effort. Cozzens was guilty of overestimating his talent, which led him to write prose of torturous complexity. H. H. Lynde was guilty of underestimating her ability to stage manage her characters. She treats every character’s every thought with an excess of respect, subordinating her control of plot to yet another paragraph of reflections. It makes for a cast filled with convincing and nuanced personalities. What it doesn’t make for is powerful fiction. It’s a novel now of historical rather than literary interest.

Which Grain Will Grow, by H. H. Lynde (pseudonym of Helen Huntington Morgan)
New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1952

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander (1912)

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This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

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

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

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

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

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

Advertisement for Mightier than the Sword.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.

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

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

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

Verity Bargate and the Revenge for Lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith (1992)

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An Honourable Death by Iain Crichton Smith

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

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

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

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

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

Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald in 1901.

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

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

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

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

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry (1990)

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Another Present Era by Elaine Perry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fire Sermon and A Life by Wright Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Roundabout by Michael Allwright (1968)

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

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

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of Neighbors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Allwright, 1968.

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

The Roundabout is available on the Internet Archive: Link.

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

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

Soul Wounds, by Al Schak (1934)

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Soul Wounds by Al Schak (1934)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEAR NO MAN’S LAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Al Schak’s gravestone.

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

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

Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar (1945)

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I found a copy of Ferenc Molnar’s little novel Farewell My Heart in Ravenswood Used Books while visiting Chicago recently. It was the sort of book that’s easy to miss on a shelf: no dust jacket, the spine broken and its lettering faded. For me, though, sitting between familiar titles by Vilhelm Moberg and Toni Morrison, it was an orphan crying out for a closer look. I recognized Molnar’s name but only knew him as a dramatist (Liliom, later made into the musical Carousel, among others). I soon found more than enough reasons to buy it: its size (8″x5″, just about the ideal for a book that’s pleasant to hold AND read; the nostalgic disclaimer “ABOUT THE APPEARANCE OF BOOKS IN WARTIME” on the colophon page; and a couple of opening lines that guaranteed I’d want to go on:

“Religion?” The Italian officer in the Fascist uniform asked, holding my passport in his hand.

The train had been standing at the border station between Switzerland and Italy for a long time.

Wherever this story was going to go, I was willing to follow.

And did. However, let me disclose up front that though I thoroughly enjoyed Farewell My Heart, it cannot be held up as anything more than an entertaining minor novel. In fact, it reminded me of those times when I’ve been in the mood to see a movie and taken whatever happened to be showing without being too discriminating — and been rewarded by something unexpected and memorable if not quite a masterpiece. Many years ago, I had to quickly shepherd some younger cousins out of my grandparents’ house to get them away from a family meltdown. I took them to the nearest multiplex and into the next available showing — Breaking Away. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was not only far better than sitting through a screaming match but a movie I’ve been fond of ever since.

Farewell My Heart is about the unexpected, too. Its unnamed narrator is a fifty-something Hungarian journalist, a Jew who’s managed to shift some money to America without losing it in the Crash — enough to qualify for that rare and coveted object, an American visa. As he travels from Budapest, “At every border the poor, underpaid passport officials had started with that same strange expression at the American visa. As if it were some foreign coin which, though it had no value in their own country, they felt was very valuable.”

His train stops at Lausanne and a young red-haired woman boards and takes the seat next to him. She is also Hungarian, he learns, a twenty-year-old named Edith, and has a ticket on the same ship leaving Genoa for New York. She is pretty — but, he is quick to tell us, “let’s be absolutely frank, she was conventionally pretty — and let’s be even franker, there was something in her character, in her appearance, in her look, in her voice, that was reminiscent of the typical Budapest streetwalker.”

Edith soon abandons him for a Finnish diplomat — younger, more confident, better dressed than the narrator — until their itineraries diverge and she takes up again with the journalist. This pattern will be repeated on board the ship to America, in the cheap hotel they take rooms in upon arrival in New York, and over their first months in the new country.

The narrator is a cautious man, careful with his money and his health, having already been diagnosed as having a weak heart. He avoids leading Edith to think he has any interest in her other than as a companion, and when she decides to latch onto a young Hungarian dancer and go with him to try their luck in Hollywood, he offers her only a little money and encouragement. Not long after, he suffers a heart attack and while rehabilitating, meets and marries a gentle American woman closer to his age.

Married, eligible for citizenship, financially secure, he is in a perfect position to live out a life of quiet and moderation. And then Edith returns. And Molnar reminds us of one of the reasons we read fiction: to follow as people make terrible, foolhardy, self-destructive choices. Choices most of us wouldn’t be dumb or daring enough to take. And in this case, for no reason at all, for nothing more than the feeling the narrator had when Edith first sat beside him in that Swiss train compartment:

And still, when she sat down beside me and said softly, “It’s cold,” and pushed closer to me, and her shoulder and hip touched me, I felt unerringly that we two belonged to each other for all that remained of life. This was a fearful new element in my experience, this suddenly born thought which had taken possession of me with such overwhelming force, for no reason at all.

Farewell My Heart will take you just an evening or two to read. If you happen across it on a shelf someday, do pick it up. But if not, there are other good books a few inches further along.

Farewell My Heart, by Ference Molnar, translated by Elinor Rice
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945

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

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin (1941)

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Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)
Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)

This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.

I can’t imagine many biographical novels about anarchists begin with the subject lying in bed as a child, hand between thighs, pleasuring herself. But Ethel Mannin’s Red Rose (1941), a fictionalised biography of the Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) does just that. Goldman’s childhood crush, a teenage boy called Petrushka, looked after the family’s ‘horses, and tended the sheep and cows in the field. Petrushka was tall and strong; quiet and gentle,’ Mannin writes. She then describes a game the young Emma played with him in which he,

lifted her up and suddenly flung her above his head, catching her as she fell and pressing her against him as she slid to the ground, so that she knew the body smell of his shirt and the animal smell of his coat, the warmth of his strong hard body, and the grip of his rough gentle hands. …there was no fear in this excitement, it was pure ecstasy.

Then Mannin paints this scene:

And it came again in the warm dark secrecy of the nights, so that childish hands pressed down between the remembering thighs in an attempt to recapture the sensation, and the darkness would be alive with Petrushka’s brown smiling face, the smell of horses, cattle, sweat, and the fields. Petrushka became her last thought on falling asleep and her first on waking.

Throughout her life, Goldman had an active sex life and many lovers. In her younger years she was in a ménage a trois with her soul mate, the anarchist and writer Alexander Berkman, and an artist who lived with the couple. They were not lovers for long, but their deep spiritual and political union lasted for the rest of their lives. As she aged, Goldman felt increasingly bitter about the uneven opportunities for men and women on what we would now call ‘the dating scene’. Berkman (the fictional Sasha in the book) had fallen in love with 20-year-old Emmy (Elsa in the book) whom he’d met in a café in Berlin when he was 52.

They were together until he died by suicide in June 1936. Mannin describes this as a thorn in Goldman’s side: ‘A man could age and lose his looks,’ she writes channelling the voice and mind of Goldman, ‘and still command the passionate love of the young and beautiful; it was not easy for a woman. Her business was not to desire but to be desired, and when her desirability was ended her desires were expected to die automatically—and the tragedy was that they didn’t. No one thought it wrong for a middle-aged man to desire a young girl, but everyone was horrified if a middle-aged woman showed other than a maternal interest in a young man.’

Mannin is sympathetic to Goldman’s desire not just for a fairer world but for a fairer playing field for women. A committed socialist and feminist herself, Mannin was also no stranger to love affairs. Like Goldman, she came from humble means; her father was a postal worker and her mother was a farmer’s daughter. Born in 1900, she supported the anarchist cause and fought for sexual liberation. In between her two failed marriages, she had affairs with W. B. Yeats and Bertrand Russell. Part of the pleasure of reading Red Rose, is the satisfaction of reading the life of a complex and politically driven woman as constructed and shaped by a female author who one senses has a strong kinship with her subject.

From the cover page of Red Rose.

The first two thirds of Red Rose feel more like a straightforward biography than a work of fiction because in these segments Mannin is basing her novel closely on Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life, which ends in 1928 – twelve years before Goldman’s death. The latter part of Red Rose had no memoir to rely on. Those final years of Goldman’s life needed to be ‘reconstructed from various sources—including imagination’, Mannin tells us in her short introduction. ‘And it is precisely that part of her life which I have had to reconstruct which has most interested me as a novelist, and which she urged I must “one day” write.’ This explains the tonal shift in the final third of the book which is imbued with a stronger imaginative power and a more novelistic sweep.

The two women met in the late 1930s when they were working on behalf of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) – the anti-fascist faction fighting against General Franco’s Spanish Nationalists. There is no historical documentation of their meeting, but there is one photo of them, from 1937, when Goldman came to Britain to speak at a London meeting in support of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).

Ethel Mannin chairing a meeting in support of the Spanish anarchist CNT-FAI, with James McGovern, MP, (left) and Emma Goldman (right). Friends’ House, London, February 1937.

In the photo, we see Emma Goldman, aged 69, standing, shoulders back, delivering one of her fiery speeches. Ethel Mannin, hair pulled back severely would have been 38 in this photo – she looks off to the distance, wearing a serious expression. James McGovern, an MP, is furiously making notes. A year after this photo was taken, Emma Goldman would die from a stroke suffered in Toronto. Her body was allowed back into the US and she was buried in Chicago.

Goldman’s many affairs and two failed marriages feature prominently in Red Rose. Her second marriage was to the Welsh Miner James Colton (Jim Evans in Red Rose) is mentioned only three times in Goldman’s memoir, whereas Mannin brings in her novelist’s eye to this episode turning it onto a somewhat bittersweet affair. There was never any hint of a sexual relationship between the couple, and Mannin describes how after the registry office wedding, ‘When the marriage was affected,’ Emma ‘was impatient to get away. She realised that it meant disappointing Evans, and to “compensate” him she slipped him a ten shilling note on the station platform, urging him to “treat” himself and one or two of “the boys” to the pictures.’ There is a sense in Mannin’s description that the fictional James Colton, was in some ways humiliated or at the very least disappointed by Goldman’s perfunctory approach to their union. As an anarchist himself, he was committed to the cause and felt honoured to be able to do something for the famous Emma Goldman, but Mannin writes, ‘He stood there, troubled, confused, fingering the note she had forced upon him, overriding his bewildered objections.’ It’s in moments like these, when Mannin inhabits the interior world of her characters, that Red Rose fully comes alive.

Goldman’s life, according to Mannin, was one of passion and struggle. She was incarcerated for inciting a riot but only served several short prison sentences. Most of her struggles centred around money: she never had enough of it and was often hungry and homeless. In order to feed herself and to fund her travels and lectures to spread the anarchist message, Goldman took on whatever work she could. As a young woman, she worked making corsets and then in a glove factory. She trained and practiced as a nurse, set up a massage parlour and had two failed attempts at running an ice cream shop. She had a go at being a street prostitute on 14th Street in New York which ended in ignominy. The gentleman who took her for a drink noticed that she was not cut out for the job. He took pity on her, and after buying her a drink, gave her ten dollars for the trouble it took her to put on a fancy frock.

Much of Goldman’s energy is taken up with fund raising, which Mannin, as a self-made woman describes with a profound understanding. Reading Red Rose is a glimpse into the life of Goldman and into the mind of Mannin. The novel doesn’t completely work as a piece of fiction, and yet, it does re-imagine how a life can be documented and how pushing the boundaries of imagination are crucial to creating a successful work of fiction – even one that sticks so close to biography. In feminist politics there is always a sense of a trajectory, of history moving with the times, but what we see here is not history as a passive inevitability progressing from one idea to the next but a sense that history can be shaped and created by women with the aim of a fairer world. It is the fact that Ethel Mannin took on such a vital and important subject and had the courage to fill in the gaps of Goldman’s life with her own imaginings that makes Red Rose such an important work in the library of women’s – and the world’s – struggles.

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin
London: Jarrolds, 1941

Joanna PocockJoanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).

Star Turn, by René Clair (1926/1936)

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Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.

There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.

Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.

Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn by René Clair
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.

The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:

Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.

As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”

This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.

There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:

To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.

He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.

What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.

René Clair on the set of an early sound film.

When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:

How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!

Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”

What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.

If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.

Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.

The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.

Star Turn, by René Clair
London: Chatto & Windus, 1936

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1968)

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Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for <em>A Jingle-Jangle Song</em> by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.

Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.

Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.

Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.

The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:

“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)

Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.

Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.

A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.

In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.

In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”

The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.

A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.

Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.

Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.

What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane (1935)

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Dust jacket of first edition of Faith, Hope, No Charity by Margaret Lane

This is a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale.

The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936, beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you’ve probably never heard of it.

Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges’ deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane’s novel Faith, Hope, No Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You’ve probably never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless you’re a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist). Competing against Lane’s debut novel for the prize that year were Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that year, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E. Bates.

The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about £4,000 in today’s money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until 1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee’s criteria were that the winning novel should be a ‘strong and imaginative’ work, that the author should show promise for the future and that there should be something in the novel that should reveal the ‘true character and spirit’ of Englishness to French readers.

What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as if they were separated by vast oceans.

Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for Faith, Hope, No Charity in July 1937.

Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily Express and then Daily Mail, writing ‘descriptive’ pieces about events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels in 1933). Lane’s reporter’s eye describes in great detail a divided world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy inhabitants of the West End:

Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance. They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more hands… The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.

It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams, married to Ada, one of the book’s female protagonists. Lane implies this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a different class: Ada, an ostler’s daughter, the lower classes; Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd, the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny. Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three, boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a damp country house.

None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative effort:

The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in its white globe purred hoarsely.

They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these women may lead fulfilling and free lives.

The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers, surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in London’s East End, it is also ‘otherland,’ an extraordinary island of Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead: Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion, disappointment and its examination of the ‘new public woman’ gives Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix Femina committee.

The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the novelists Kate O’Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd, Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.

One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished submission from a literary point of view as ‘a journal kept by a lunatic.’ Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene’s A Gun for Sale as: ‘a bogus book. Intensely insincere.’ Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell, saying: ‘As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant personality.’ And so it seems that Margaret Lane’s ‘promising’ novel was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.

It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make are forced upon them and thus their ‘freedom’ lacks agency; their experiences are not transformative. The dropped ‘aitches’ of the working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional characters.

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935

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