The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).
Glenway Wescott Personally by Jerry Russo (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)
Wescott, a writer I have long admired, apparently lived a charmed, productive, creative, satisfying, golden and long life. Russo’s biography, which repeats much of the information contained in Wescott’s journals (Continual Lessons, FSG, 1997) elegantly and succinctly details that life, from cradle to grave. The journals end in 1955; Wescott lived for 30 more (less creative but eventful) years, and a second volume of journals has recently been published.
Born to a farming family in Wisconsin in 1901, Wescott went to the University in Chicago, and from there to New York City, and from there to Europe, spending most of the 1920s and 30s in England and France. He met his life-long partner, Monroe Wheeler when they were both young men in Chicago, and the two remained together, devoted partners, in a sort of open — in all senses — marriage that accommodated many affairs, including a years-long menage-a-trois with George Platt Lynes. The years after the war were mostly spent in New York City, where Wheeler worked as director of publications at the Museum of Modern Art, and Wescott devoted much time and energy working with the American Academy of Arts and Letters and with the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana.
Wescott’s fiction, which was predominately autobiographical, was greeted enthusiastically by both reviewers and readers early on — both his novels The Grandmothers (1927) and Apartment in Athens (1945) were bestsellers, and his novella, The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), was heralded as a contemporary classic. But he struggled to write fiction in the second half of his life, turning instead to perceptive and appreciative literary essays about Colette, Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, W. S. Maugham, and many of the other writers he befriended and admired.
Russo’s portrait of Wescott is extremely flattering, and deservedly so: he was a brilliant writer and conversationalist, a generous and loving friend and devoted partner, civic-minded about democracy and literature, humble, hard-working, and handsome.
The Siege at Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell (Modern Library, 2012; originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973)
The Siege at Krishnapur is an odd, dark, rather brutal book about a native Indian mutiny in the 1850s that traps a small community of British citizens and their servants and hangers-on in a poorly fortified compound for several grueling months, where they all suffer (and many die) from warfare, lack of water and food, cholera and other diseases.
Farrell seems to find most of these people (justifiably) reprehensible and ridiculous, and takes much humorous delight in their ever-worsening suffering. Yet the reader can’t help feeling a little sorry for them, as the hardships and discomforts they endure are so thoroughly and vividly described. So the book has a strange, off-putting yet extremely engaging tone, and reading it is an intense and discomforting experience.
Farrell is an excellent writer — good with both characters and place, all of which are described, or actually recreated and enlivened, with complexity and brilliance.
A Shower of Summer Days by May Sarton (Rinehart & Company, 1952)
This early novel of May Sarton’s (and the only one I have read) is set in Ireland, among the Anglo-Irish gentry, sometime in the early 1950, when the Empire was crumbling, in one of the great country houses not incinerated in The Troubles.
Charles and Violet (Dene) Gordon return, after many years in Burma, to Dene’s Court, the house that Violet grew up in and has inherited, but which has been left derelict and disintegrating during their long absence. They are both beautiful charming people and love one another (despite Charles’ discreet infidelities) and go about establishing a third act for themselves in the beautiful house, which they restore to habitability, if not its former grandeur. Charles manages the estate and Violet does the flowers.
Into this idyl Violet’s niece Sally arrives, banished from America where she has grown up with her mother, Violet’s sister Barbie, and her American father, because she has made an inappropriate romantic engagement with an actor (even though he’s handsome and rich). Sally initially feels that Dene’s Court is a prison and that her aunt and uncle are her jailers, but rather (too) quickly succumbs to the charms of the house, Charles, and Violet, falling passionately in love with all three. By the time Ian, her fiancee, arrives and jilts Sally (and falls in love with the irresistible Violet), we know that Sally has become a Dene, and like her ancestors, will always return to Dene’s Court, which she will, in due time, inherit.
The graceful and beautifully descriptive writing is the finest thing about this book. Sarton gives her characters complicated and well-spelunked interior lives, but it is her poet’s attention to the house itself and the world and weather surrounding it that gives the reader the deeper and more lasting satisfaction. One sometimes wishes the annoying characters would clear out so that one could enjoy the house and the demense (a new word for me and frequently used here, meaning land attached to a manor and retained for its owner’s use) without their sometimes tedious interruption.
Told By An Idiot by Rose Macaulay (Boni & Liveright, 1924)
Told by An Idiot is a social history of England disguised (not all that successfully) as a family saga. It follows the Gardner family from the final years of Victoria (1890) through the fin de siecle, and into the Georgian and Edwardian Ages, detailing much of the politics, social mores, fashions, and culture of these periods — sometimes interestingly and sometimes (often?) not.
The Gardner patriarch is the least believable character, a caricature of a religious man who cannot settle upon a religion, and so tries them all. This allows Macaulay to satirize many sacred cows (and other religious flora and fauna), but it quickly seems like the gimmick it is and becomes tiresome. The mother, a sort of Christian martyr, supports her husband’s fecklessness with unwavering (and unbelievable) devotion and good cheer.
There are six children, whose different characters allow Macaulay to conveniently explore different topics: Victoria, Marcus, Sydney, Rome, ?, and Una. Because there are so many of them and so much of the book concerns itself not with the family but with general socio-political lectures, none of these second-generation characters are very much developed, except for Rome, a free-thinking and passionate woman who decides not to mary and leads a sensuously indulgent and independent life (a self-portrait of the author?).
This book retains Macaluay’s witty and irreverent style of narration, but is encumbered, and finally undone, by its ambitious yet misguided premise.
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2021
This trilogy of memoirs (individually titled Childhood, Youth and Dependency) was originally published in Denmark in the 1960s and 70s and only now translated and published in English.
They are unique and fascinating books, mostly because Tove Ditlevsen is a unique and fascinating person, and an original and captivating writer. As a small child in an impoverished and emotionally repressed household, she takes a sudden interest in language and poetry, and vows to become a poet, a goal she quickly achieves by augmenting her talent with fierce ambition. This drive to publish plays havoc with her personal life, and she ends up addicted to painkillers, a debilitating habit she seems unable to break.
All the attention paid to her drug dependency in the last volume causes her to lose all her agency and much of the reader’s sympathy, and the world of the books, which heretofore was complex and engaging, loses dimension and becomes much less interesting. As the sequence of titles suggests, this the rather sad story of fiercely autonomous child who loses her independence as she matures.
Faster! Faster! by E. M. Delafield, Harper & Brothers, 1936
I bought this book because it was by E. M. Delafield, the author of The Provincial Lady series of books, which I, like so many, enjoyed. This novel, while interesting, was less accomplished and enjoyable than the PL books, perhaps because its rather ordinary third-person narrator lacks the sparkle and wit of the PL’s first-person voice.
The (tragic) heroine* of Faster! Faster! (I love titles with punctuation marks, especially exclamation points) is a bright, attractive, accomplished, 40-ish English woman of good breeding (there’s a family house) but small means (no money to upkeep the mortgaged house). . Her husband is a sometimes charming but mostly irritable and annoying fellow who is unemployed (it’s the Depression and jobs are scarce). They have three pleasant and intelligent children who they are raising in a modern way, allowing their two daughters and one son to make their own choices (and subsequent mistakes).
What makes this book interesting is that it very directly explores a social dilemma that is common today, but was less prevalent a century ago: Can a woman be equally devoted to and invested in her career and her family? That challenge is the undoing of our heroine, who, partly because her husband isn’t winning any bread but mostly because she’s good at it and enjoys it, runs a successful agency in London called Universal Services. This small agency, which is staffed exclusively with competent and hard-working women, does all the things no one wants to do themselves (the ultimate women’s work): schlepping children to schools and doctors, paying bills and filling out forms, dealing with bureaucracy, translating documents, cleaning up literal and figurative messes, nursing the ill, and burying the dead.
Our heroine runs Universal Services with tireless energy and microscopic attention to detail, and tries to devote equal time and care to her husband and children. But of course that can’t be done, and everyone realizes she is exhausted and must take a rest. And the reader begins to wonder if her hands-off approach to child-rearing is not a philosophical choice but a desperate coping technique, as her hands are full of work. And so we observe, along with her family and friends, as she drives herself (quite literally — a traffic accident) to death.
This strange and tragic conclusion to a book that is often sunny and delightful might seem jarring, bit it is appropriate, for we all know that it is impossible to be a perfect wife and mother and have a successful career, unless one has made a bargain with the devil or is Amy Coney Barrett (or both).
The Old Ladies by Hugh Walpole, George H. Doran Co., 1924
An interesting and disturbing novel about three old ladies, all poor and alone, who live in three rented rooms on the third floor of an abandoned house in a provincial English city. Our hero is Mrs. X (already forgotten her name), a genteel widow who has fallen on hard times, and whose son Brand (remember his name!) has disappeared in America. Our villain is Mrs. Y (forgot her name, too), a fat, lazy, slovenly woman who is both a power-hungry sadist and a lover of brightly-colored and beautiful objects. Mrs. Z (name forgotten), the third old lady, moves into the cold, drafty house when she loses all her money to a silver-haired scam artist who tricks her into investing her small fortune with him. Goodbye small fortune! Her most precious remaining possession is a piece of golden-red amber given to her by her only friend, which Mrs. Y decides she must have, even if it means scaring poor Mrs. Z to death, which in fact it does.
It’s interesting to read a book set entirely in the world of these disenfranchised and desperate elderly women, a type of character not often encountered in fiction, and even more rarely exclusively and in triplicate, even if their characters are broadly drawn and the action is melodramatic. Brand, Mrs X’s long-lost son, returns to his mother in the nick of time, for at least one happy ending, but the strange and bitter taste of this macabre book lingers.
Siam, Or The Woman Who Shot A Man by Lily Tuck, The Overlook Press, 1999
Lily Tuck is one of the few contemporary writers I am always excited to read, and Siam is yet another cool, elegant, and intelligent novel about women coping with personal dramas in foreign countries, where the personal and the political artfully merge (or collide).
This is the story of Claire, a young American woman who travels with James, her government/military contractor husband, to Thailand in 1966, where he is overseeing the construction of runways in the northern jungles to facilitate the bombing of Viet Nam. His frequent trips to the north leave Claire alone in Bangkok, in a house with a pool and several not-entirely cooperative servants. She becomes obsessed with the mysterious disappearance of Jim Thompson, the (real) American man who reinvigorated the Thai silk industry.
The United States’ corroding involvement in Southeast Asia is slowly and slyly revealed as Claire’s activities and liaisons make her more aware of her own and her country’s nefarious presence in the larger world. As always Tuck writes with stylish aplomb — her view of the world, even seen through (or slyly around) Claire’s rather deluded eyes, is always crystal clear and bracingly complex. Her writing is assured, sensual, and compelling. I’d read anything by her.
Albert Spears by Millen Brand (Simon and Schuster, 1947)
Another interesting and unusual novel by Millen Brand, written with his customary clarity and empathy. I discovered Brand’s first novel, The Outward Room (1937), in a second-hand bookstore and convinced New York Review Books to republish it, with an afterword written by me, in 2010. (I also admire his second novel, The Heroes, published in 1939.)
The eponymous Albert Spears is 66 in 1915, and lives with his invalid and house-bond wife in Jersey City. (I wonder why Brand gave his hero the same name as the Nazi war criminal.) Albert has a son with his long-time mistress, a younger woman in the neighborhood, who he would like to adopt (the son not the mistress). He runs a carpentry mill and speculates in residential real estate and becomes involved in a local conflagration when a Black family moves into the all-white neighborhood. Albert befriends the family and attempts to make them feel welcome and safe, but his neighbors are united in their hateful prejudice and do everything they can to force the family to leave (break all their windows, sabotage their heat and water, send the father to jail). Albert’s son also befriends the family, and fights along with the other Black boys when their gangs clash.
Brand writes from the point of view of both families, from the perspective of the young and elderly of both races, and his creation of many complex and very different characters is admirable. An interesting and engaging look at race relations, and the power of individuals, in early 20th-century America.
Maybe Tomorrow by Jay Little (Pageant Press, 1952)
Gaylord LeClaire (“Gay” for short) grows up in Cotton, a small town in Texas. By the time he’s in High School, he realizes he is different from all other boys: he wishes he were a girl and is attracted to boys, particularly Bob Blake, the handsome, friendly, and charming captain of the football team. Fortunately, Gaylord is very attractive (albeit “pretty”) and has a big dick, and although he is bullied and teased — he’s nearly raped in the locker room by a group of boys who call him a “Venus with a Penis” — he is also befriended, rather suddenly, by Bob Blake (and his girlfriend Joy). It turns out that Bob is secretly gay and loves Gaylord, even if he calls him “my beautiful faggot.”
Gaylord’s parents (unwisely) take him to New Orleans for a weekend, where Gaylord is promptly taken underwing (and into bed) by a handsome and pleasant but unhappy homosexual named Paul. Paul takes Gaylord to a dive gay bay and then to a private party hosted by Gene, a mincing and shrieking queen, attended by an assortment of faggots, including Gus, a butch number who does a balletic striptease and tries to pry (literally) Gaylord from Paul’s arms.
Although many gay men may have spoken and acted exactly like the “faggots” Gaylord encounters in the Big Easy, reading these scenes now is disturbing: one realizes this exaggerated, self-loathing behavior is a result of ceaseless ridicule, mental and physical harassment, and debilitating repression, and that the “inversion” of homosexuality is something that is forced upon homosexuals, not something that is innate. A tree grows thwarted and crooked only when it is prevented from growing as it naturally would.
Characters in pre-Stonewall gay novels are usually doomed to death and (self) destruction, but Jay Little gives all the gay characters in this book unusually happy endings: Bob and Gay decide to pack up and move to New Orleans as soon as they graduate from High School — be careful, boys! –and Paul picks up a nice masculine married man who decides to never leave once he gets to Paul’s tastefully decorated bachelor pad (complete with a goatskin on the bed). And Gaylord is an admirable character — he is kind, honest, and loving. So in many ways, this book, while disturbing in its unnuanced and objectifying portraits of many of its gay characters, is a delightful anomaly in pre-Stonewall queer literature: a feminine boy is an admirable hero. He gets the football player, befriends the dimpled, hunky farmboy (a subplot), and lives happily ever after — maybe tomorrow.
Jay Little in (above) and out of (below) drag. More photographs, and an interesting and well-researched examination of Jay Little and Maybe — Tomorrow are featured on Brooks Peters’ blog An Open Book.
