An Appreciation of John Crowley's Engine Summer

I prepared this for an April 1 book group presentation at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. For those coming to this from Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, I'm not really suggesting it's forgotten (if perhaps a bit eclipsed by Little, Big and by Aegypt). And it certainly isn't old, nor, alas, a bestseller.

Engine Summer, by John Crowley

Doubleday, 1979

 an appreciation by Rich Horton

"Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes." So ends John Crowley's Engine Summer, one of my favorite SF novels of all time. I think that's one of the most affecting last lines I've ever read, but I have to admit, on its own, its impact is pretty minimal. Probably that's a feature of great last lines ... they are great because of what came before. So, what came before?

Well, first, two previous novels: The Deep (1975), and Beasts (1976). I found The Deep not long after its publication, and, expecting nothing much, was really impressed. Beasts probably got more notice, but though I thought it just fine, it wasn't as mysterious and original (to my mind) as its predecessor. Then came Engine Summer, which just detonated in my soul. Apparently it was Crowley's fourth novel, Little, Big (1981), which detonated in everyone else's soul, however. I don't want to denigrate that lovely book, but it is still Engine Summer which is first among his books in my heart. (Crowley followed up Little, Big with the four volume Aegypt sequence (which had a difficult path to print) and two unrelated novels, The Translator and Four Freedoms. Neither should his short fiction be forgotten: the novellas "Great Work of Time" and "The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines", as well as the short stories "Snow" and "Gone", are thoroughly magnificent, and almost everything else he has published is nearly as good.)

But I digress. (Snakes' hands, maybe. Which is an Engine Summer reference.) What is Engine Summer, then? In a way it is a bildungsroman set in a society which has abandoned even the possibility of a bildungsroman. In another way it is a post-apocalyptic elegy, resembling at a distance perhaps Edgar Pangborn's Davy. It is impossibly bittersweet, and at some level I can't say why, except everytime I finish it I am in tears. Perhaps the question is, tears for what, or who? For the main character, Rush that Speaks, who has lost his love? For the main character, who is doomed to endless repetition of his story, never knowing how it ends? For the person the tale is told to (either in the story, or, I suppose, me), who lives in a world separate from Rush That Speaks' world, a fragile and isolated world, a world, it would seem, doomed by its reliance on high technology. For humankind?

The story hinges importantly on its frame ... it opens with the narrator, in conversation with another person, denying that he was asleep – he has only closed his eyes. He opens them, above the clouds, below the sky, talking to an angel, who asks him for his story. "Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning?". How those lines resonate when the story is over!

The narrator is a young man named Rush That Speaks, who grew up in a commune of sorts called Little Belaire. The first section tells of his young life in Little Belaire, of his Mbaba (his mother's mother), who raised him, and of his cord (Palm cord) and his mother and father ... The customs of Little Belaire, which seem long established and little-changing, are introduced. He meets a girl named Once a Day (the names of characters in this story are one of its many wonders), and falls in love with her (over years) and she leaves to join the wandering Dr. Boots' List. I have of course elided a great deal.

We slowly gather a bit about this future ... it is centuries (probably) after an apocalypse called the Storm. (This is never clearly described, but it seems more an infrastructure collapse than the result of a war or of an overt catastrophe.) Most people died, but the Long League of Women had been planning how to cope for a long time, and they, it seems, enforced some sort of return to living lightly on the Earth for the survivors. It's never clear how many people survived, but quite few. Little Belaire seems to be the descendant of a group, Big Belaire, that came together towards the close of industrial civilization, before eventually leaving their home (in a city?) to wander (a time they call "When We Wandered") until somehow founding Little Belaire. They call people in their history with important stories to tell "Saints". And along the way, Rush That Speaks decides he wants to become a Saint. The people of Little Belaire have one critical characteristic: they are Truthful Speakers (a Heinlein allusion?): "they say what they mean, and they mean what they say".

This being a bildungsroman of sorts, Rush must leave his home. And so he does, first spending a year or so with an hermit who Rush thinks might be a Saint, a man called Blink. Then he wanders further, trying to find Dr. Boots' List, the group Once a Day joined. There are other wonders: the Planters, source of the unearthly psychotropic fungus that Little Belaire harvests and sells; the mystery of the silver glove and the ball; the mystery of the letter from Dr. Boots; the avvengers; and the Four Dead Men. And, of course, the question of where (and who?) Rush That Speaks is as he tells his story.

The story is magnificently written, not in any ostentatious way, but supremely gracefully. The choices of names, as I've said, are lovely. The simple descriptions of things – some familiar to us, some new – are beautiful; and we see things like "Road" newly as Rush That Speaks describes them. And the mysteries are made – if not clear, at least perceptible – in good time, and in a very satisfying way.

Engine Summer is one of my favorite SF novels of all time, and this reread reinforced my view. (Not a new view – my votes in the Locus Poll of a few years ago for Best SF Novels of the 20^th Century are public record, and Engine Summer was on my Top Ten list.) It is heartbreaking in one sense but arguably nothing terribly bad happens to Rush That Speaks (except the girl he loves goes away – but to how many teenagers does that happen, anyway?) It is suffused with a sense of loss, but its world could possibly be called utopian (from some angles, anyway).

An Old Ace Double: Clash of Star-Kings, by Avram Davidson/Danger From Vega, by John Rackham

An Old Ace Double: Clash of Star-Kings, by Avram Davidson/Danger From Vega, by John Rackham

a review by Rich Horton

I've discussed Ace Doubles here before, and as I've spent much of the last two weeks out of town, I'm posting one of my old Ace Double reviews here, a pretty decent example of them.

Both halves of this Ace Double, interestingly, made the first ballot for the 1966 Nebula Award, Danger From Vega as a Novel, and Clash of Star-Kings as a Novella. The latter made the final ballot, which that year had only three entries -- along with Charles L. Harness's "The Alchemist" it lost to another Ace Double half, "The Last Castle" by Jack Vance. (The Vance story actually originally appeared in Galaxy, April 1966.) Clash of Star-Kings is about 38,000 words long, just barely short of novel length. As far as I know this was its first publication in any form. According to the Avram Davidson Website, Davidson said, referring to Ace's habit of changing titles in the direction of greater garishness: "I call it Tlaloc but I bet you they will call it something like Aztec Goddesses from Outer Space with Big Boobs" Well, Clash of Star-Kings is better than that, at any rate! Danger From Vega is about 54,000 words long, and also, as far as I know, first appeared in this edition. (There has been a later single book edition from Ace of Clash of Star-Kings, and a single hardcover edition, from Dobson, of Danger From Vega.)


Avram Davidson (1923-1993) was a truly wonderful writer, usually best at shorter lengths, though such novels as those in the Vergil sequence, or the Peregrine books, are very enjoyable to read, if often a bit rambling.

Clash of Star-Kings is indeed about a clash between beings from the stars, but in the main it is much more subdued than the title would seem to indicate. It is in large part the story of an American couple, the Clays, and their writer friend, Robert Macauley, in the small Mexican town of Los Remedios. Much of the interest in the novel lies in the affectionate description of the ups and downs of expatriate life in Mexico. (I seem to recall that around this time Davidson lived in Mexico.)

The central plot concerns mysterious lights and legends on a nearby mountain. The locals believe that the mountain is the home to certain ancient gods. Eventually of course we learn that there are two groups of gods, the more benevolent Old Ones, and the more violent Aztec gods -- and this being a science fiction novel of course they turn out to be two alien races. (It has been some times since I read the book, so some of the details may be a bit fuzzy.) The climax involves a battle between the two races, as I recall perhaps involving the fate of the human race. All that is handled well enough, but as I hinted earlier, the real enjoyable stuff is the portrayal of everyday life. It's a pretty decent piece of work, probably Davidson's best book-length story at that time, though he would fairly soon surpass that.

John Rackham was the main pseudonym for British writer John T. Phillifent (1916-1976). As far as I know, Phillifent began publishing SF in the May 1958 Astounding with "One-Eye", as by "John Rackham". Though that first story was as by "Rackham", he eventually fell into a pattern -- almost all of his work as by "John T. Phillifent" was for Analog (one story for Fantastic, a couple of novels and some Man From Uncle tie-ins are the only exceptions), while most of his novels and his short fiction for other venues were as by "John Rackham". (In particular, he was a regular contributor to E. J. Carnell's UK original anthology New Writings in SF.)

Danger From Vega, his second novel, fits a certain sub-genre that Avram Davidson has also written in: stories of all-female planets. (In both this book, and Davidson's Mutiny from Space, the planets involved aren't technically "all-female", but close enough for government work.) Other examples include Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Jerry Oltion's incredibly dumb "Kissing Cousins" (one of his Astral Astronauts stories, almost all of which are incredibly dumb). Any more?

As Danger From Vega opens, Lieutenant Jeremy Thorpe is waiting tensely for a hopeless space battle against the implacably hostile Vegans, who have ships that maneuver incredibly, with super high-g's, and who make no effort at communication. Earth has been fighting the Vegans for decades, and due to the aliens' maneuverability advantage, the home team is losing badly. In flashbacks we learn that Jeremy is actually Gerald Corde, but that he switched identities with his college roommate in order to defy his father's orders and enlist in the Space Force. (His father is an Admiral, and had pulled strings to get his son appointed to a research post on Venus, out of harm's way.) In amidst these flashbacks the battle occurs, and Jeremy's ship is destroyed, with only 5 survivors. Through heroic efforts and sacrifice (two more deaths) Jeremy and two other men manage to limp to a unfamiliar planet and crashland.

They are rescued by a number of very attractive but very hostile green-skinned women. Much to their surprise, some of the women speak English. At first they fear that this planet are an outpost of Vega, but it soon turns out that the Vegans are regarded as despicable enemies: they have enslaved all the planets' men, and the now mindless men periodically take a culling of women and rape them, in order to breed more men for slaves, and more women for future breeding. (In a side note, we learn that only perfect specimens of the men and women are left alive -- this is taken to explain why all the women are very beautiful. Once again, aliens are revealed to have exquisite taste in human females! I trust that once we make real first contact, aliens will be recruited as Miss America judges.) (By the way, it is never explained why this planet's people are perfectly human in all respects except for skin color.)

The women are very suspicious of the Earthmen, mainly due to a very natural fear of men resulting from the fact that all the men they've ever encountered are basically mindless and are also likely to rape them. (Let's just take all the obvious jokes as read, OK?) But the Earthmen manage to convince the alien women that their intentions are good, and soon they learn that this planet has a limited but very impressive radio technology, which explains how they learned English (from our broadcasts, over more than ten light-years distance). The human abilities in power generation combined with the alien women's radio abilities, as well as the hints that the Vegans do not use radio at all, begin to point towards a solution. Will the alien women overcome their initial revulsion for the men? Will the Earthmen find a solution that doesn't endanger this new planet? Will each surviving Earthman find a lovely young green mate? Are the Vegans toast? Can anyone doubt it?

The above description must make the story seem silly and sexist and rather stock. And so it is, really. But for all that it's kind of fun, and the sexism isn't nearly as bad as it could be (for instance, part of the solution is to accept the women as worthy soldiers and space pilots), and finally though the science is silly and there are huge holes in the plot, the ultimate solution, while it doesn't hold up to close thought, is kind of clever. In other words, this is a fairly bad book but still readable. Not worth special effort to find, but not a bad way to pass a couple of hours. A guilty pleasure, if you will.

A Not Quite Forgotten Book: A God and His Gifts, by Ivy Compton-Burnett

A Not Quite Forgotten Book: A God and His Gifts, by Ivy Compton-Burnett

a review by Rich Horton

I'm going to be out of town the rest of the week, so I'm dipping again into my backlist of reviews, for a look at an author who is hardly forgotten, though also not that well known. Indeed I would say that this very eccentric writer has perhaps established -- much as she had in life, really -- a permanent small niche as a minor but continuingly significant writer, never likely to be widely read but also not likely to be forgotten soon.

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was the first child of the second marriage of James Compton Burnett (Ivy's mother, by all acounts not a very nice woman, insisted on adding the hyphen), once famous homeopathic doctor. Ivy's life, at least at first, doesn't seem to have been very happy -- her mother was a bully, two of her sisters jointly committed suicide, as did a brother, another couple of brothers died young, one in the Great War. And none of her siblings had children. She herself never married, and lived from 1919 to 1951 with the famous writer on the decorative arts, Margaret Jourdain. Jourdain was far more famous during her lifetime, but by now some speculate that some of her success as a writer was due to Compton-Burnett's editing. It is often assumed that the two were lovers, but Compton-Burnett always denied this, and her biographer Hilary Spurling thinks not. Compton-Burnett's father amassed a considerable fortune, which Ivy had the management of after his death in 1916, giving her a comfortable living throughout her life.

Her first novel, Dolores, appeared in 1911, and is not well-regarded nor very characteristic. She later repudiated it. Her first mature novel was Pastors and Masters (1925). She continued to publish regularly until 1963 (one last novel was assembled from her notes and published in 1971). (Most of her novels, at least when published in the UK, were bylined "I. Compton-Burnett", but my US editions give her name as Ivy.) She never sold well, perhaps partly because her publisher, Victor Gollancz, was not enthusiastic. (Gollancz was an important figure in British publishing, but nothing I've read about him makes him seem like a particularly good person, nor one particularly interested in literature.) But almost from the first she attracted praise from fellow writers, such as Anthony Powell and her good friend Elizabeth Taylor. I will add that I have so far read only one of her novels, and cannot consider myself particularly well-placed to comment on her work as a whole. I do mean to do better ... but the to-be-read pile is so darn high!

A God and His Gifts (1962) was the last novel she published before her death. Based on what I know of her work, it seems fairly characteristic, and fairly well-regarded. It's the story of Hereward Egerton, a baronet's son who is a successful novelist, but perhaps just a shade too popular for critical approval. The first few chapters unfold rapidly, jumping years and decades at a time, as Hereward decides to marry a conventional neighbour (his mistress having rejected his suit), uses his money to save his parents' home, has three sons, and becomes close enough to his sister-in-law that his wife insists she leave. The final portion of the book (half or three quarters of it) happens after his sons have reached their majority. One son decides to marry, only to have Hereward seduce his fiancée. Hereward and his wife adopt the resulting child, without telling his son. The sister-in-law, now a widow, moves back to the neighborhood, and another of Hereward's sons falls in love with her daughter. I think you can guess what they will learn about her parentage! The whole thing is terribly melodramatic, but Compton-Burnett's telling of the story gives it quite a different tone.

I'm not sure what to say about it. Compton-Burnett's style is decidedly unusual. The story is told almost completely in dialogue, with very limited tags. The dialogue is arch, at the same time distant, almost emotionless in utterance despite what must be fury and revulsion behind much of it. I cannot say I believe in her characters -- they really seem artificial. Hereward perhaps excepted -- he is quite a monster, egotistical beyond bearing, self-indulgent, spoiled forever by his spinster sister. The story is indeed quite funny at times -- the deeply cynical views of the family butler are particularly to be noted -- but the humor is very cold. There is no question that she was an original writer -- I am not sure how ultimately worthwhile this novel is, however. But it does seem that I ought to try some more ... Manservant and Maidservant, from 1947, is often called her best.

Old Bestsellers: The Great Impersonation, by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Old Bestsellers: The Great Impersonation, by E. Phillips Oppenheim

a review by Rich Horton

Here's another book that fits this blog's overall theme pretty much perfectly: it really was a major bestseller on first appearance (the 8th bestselling book in the US in 1920 according to Publishers' Weekly); and by now it is being forgotten, though not as completely as some other books. (You can find "new" copies at Amazon, but they look like rather inferior POD editions.)

E. Phillips Oppenheim was a very prolific and successful writer of thrillers. He was born in London in 1866, and died at his house on Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands) in 1946. He seems to have been a writer his whole adult life (though he worked for the Ministry of Information (presumably writing!) during the First World War, and before that he worked in his father's leather business, one assumes until he made enough money from writing to quit). His first novel appeared in 1887, and he published over 100. His life seems, from the Wikipedia description, to have been fairly uneventful, and probably fairly happy. He married Elise Hopkins in 1892, they had one daughter, and a yacht and a French villa as well as the house on Guernsey.

The Great Impersonation is far and away his most famous novel. It was published in 1920. According to my Pocket Books edition, the first American printing was from Little, Brown in January 1920. The Little, Brown edition went through 20 printings, and there were at least 23 printings of the A. L. Burt edition (Burt was a reprint hardcover publisher, one of a few houses that served the same role, more or less, as mass market paperbacks did beginning in the late '30s). My copy is from the first printing, dated June 1943, of the July (!) 1943 Pocket Books edition.

It's a pretty fun and implausible mixture of spy story and gothic romance (with a mystery plot too). It's set in about 1913, as tensions increase between Germany and England. Everard Dominey, a dissolute Englishman, is drinking himself to death in East Africa when he runs into the German Baron Leopold von Ragastein, who bears a remarkable resemblance to him. Both men have been exiled from their homelands after being accused of causing the death of a rival for their lover's affections (though in Dominey's case the woman was his own wife, in von Ragastein's case he was the adulterer who caused his lover's husband's death), but von Ragastein has borne up much better. He hatches a plot to regain favor in his homeland by taking over Dominey's identity and becoming a spy in England. He leaves Dominey for dead in Africa, and decamps to England.

There he runs into a variety of complications. Dominey's wife seems certain he is not her husband: he is much colder and more controlled than Dominey. But she has been on the edge of madness since her husband killed Roger Unthank, her presumed lover, whom she is convinced is haunting her. He also encounters his erstwhile lover, Stephanie von Eiderstrom, who is also convinced he is not Everard Dominey, as she recognizes him as von Ragastein. And he finds himeslf torn between the German Ambassador Terniloff, who favors peace, and the Kaiser, who reveals that he regards Terniloff as a tool, to be used to gull the English into thinking the Germans want peace.

Dominey's wife tries to kill him, then decides to spare his life, perhaps because she realizes he's not her husband. But the shadow of Roger Unthank still lies over them. The novel, of course, turns on resolution of both issues: the mystery of Roger Unthank's death (and ghost), and the problem of von Ragastein's spy mission, and whether he should support the Ambassador's peace party or his ruler's desire for war.

There's more going on of course, and a couple of twists along the way. It is precisely as preposterous as it sounds, and also quite enjoyable, if you can tolerate a fair amount of guff, and implausibility, and slightly old-fashioned writing. It strikes me as a book that deserved its bestsellerdom in its time, and that is still worth reading for that subset of us fascinated by older popular fiction, though hardly a book requiring a major revival.

It was filmed three times, by the way, first in 1921, again in 1935, and finally in 1942. The latter version doesn't seem well-regarded, partly I suspect because it moved the action to the runup to WWII. The 1935 version was apparently a faithful adaptation, and seems to have been a decent enough film.

Old Bestsellers: Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse

Old Bestsellers: Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse


a review by Rich Horton

P. G. Wodehouse (full name Pelham Grenville) was born in England in 1881, though he lived in China until he was three. His parents planned a career in banking in Shanghai for him, but he didn't much like banking and found he had a knack as a writer. His early work was mostly for newspapers. His first stories to make a somewhat lasting impression were perhaps vaguely autobiographical, concerning a young man named Psmith, who, like Wodehouse, tried his hand at both banking and journalism.

Though in some ways seemingly quintessentially English, Wodehouse's career was arguably built in the U. S. He came over in 1909. Some of the early Bertie Wooster stories were set in Greenwich Village. His best-remembered early novel, Something New, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1915. Perhaps most importantly, he met Jerome Kern and began writing musical comedies for Broadway. Though most of his Broadway work seems out of the repertory today (save perhaps his modest involvement in Cole Porter's Anything Goes, and one song he wrote for Show Boat), at the time he was very popular and fairly influential. Wodehouse split his time between England, France, and the U.S. until 1947, after which he moved permanently to the U. S., as a result of the (understandable but still perhaps excessive) hard feelings in Britain as a result of his having given 5 radio talks while interned by the Germans during the Second World War. MI5 investigated his actions, and determined that while he was naive, he was not a traitor, nor did he materially benefit the German war effort. However, he still refused to return to England, even after he was knighted very late in his life. Wodehouse died in 1975.

He is best known for a variety of series characters: Lord Emsworth, the owner of Blandings Castle; Archibald Mulliner; Psmith; and most of all Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. Over the years I've read a great many stories in all those series, and many other standalone novels, with great enjoyment. Wodehouse excelled most of all in his comic prose; and secondarily in his intricate and inspiredly silly plots.

I ran across Piccadilly Jim in an antique store. I had not heard of it, and I noticed its early date, so I assumed it was fairly forgotten, though that turns out not to be quite true. It first appeared as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916, and was first issued in book form by Dodd, Mead in 1917. My copy is from Dodd, Mead, possibly a first (Good condition, no dj). It's signed by someone named Campbell Jackes, dated (I think) Feb. 6, 1917. (The date could be 6/17, with what looks like Feb being something else.) (I do like to see these signatures in books, which if nothing else reliably support the notion that standards of handwriting were much higher a century ago than now.) The book is illustrated, quite nicely, by May Wilson Preston. (It's dedicated to Wodehouse's stepdaughter "Lenora, conservatively speaking the most wonderful child on Earth". (Wikipedia says her name was actually Leonora.))

The story is a typical Wodehouse romantic comedy. Peter Pett is a wealthy New Yorker, ruler of his business, but henpecked to death in his home, after his marriage to Nesta, who has an odious son named Ogden, and who is also fond of allowing penniless Bohemian types to stay in their home. Mr. Pett's only ally is his red-haired niece Ann Chester. Nesta's great rival is her sister Eugenia, who married a former actor, Bingley Crocker, and moved to London. Eugenia is angling (implausibly, to say the least) to get Bingley a peerage. The fly in that particular ointment is Bingley's son by an earlier marriage, Jimmy Crocker, a former newspaperman who has been making a reputation in London as "Piccadilly Jim", for his rackety exploits. It turns out he also made an enemy in his previous career, having made fun of Ann Chester's poetic efforts in his newspaper column.

The plot turns on the Petts' visit to London to fetch Piccadilly Jim home, and on Ann's plot to have Ogden kidnapped and sent to a veterinarian to straighten out his nutritional and exercise habits. Bingley Crocker pretends to be his own butler, and impresses Peter Pett with his knowledge of baseball. Jim meets Ann and falls hard for her (having forgotten her poetry), and realizing she hates "Piccadilly Jim" for some reason, pretends to be his father's son in his role as butler. Back in New York, Jim becomes involved in Ann's kidnapping plot, but complications ensue when it turns out there are real criminals on hand, trying to steal an explosive invented by another of Nesta's protegés. Also there is the threat of Lord Wisbeach, who wants to marry Ann ... etc. etc., of course, this being a Wodehouse plot.

This is all good fun. It's not quite Wodehouse at his fully developed best ... the prose is fine, and often Wodehousianly funny, but not so consistently as inventive as later Wodehouse. The plot is complicated but less illogically logical, if you see what I mean, than the better later stories. It would be easy to imagine that this was a decent early Wodehouse that had been eclipsed in reputation by his later stuff.

And to some extent that's true ... except that Piccadilly Jim has been filmed three times! First in 1919, starring Owen Moore, then in 1936, starring Robert Montgomery, then again as recently as 2004, with the great Sam Rockwell as the title character, and such other fine actors as Allison Janney, Brenda Blethyn, and Tom Wilkinson on board as well. I wanted to rent the movie before writing this review ... but alas, it's not available at Netflix, or pretty much anywhere else, it seems. Used copies run for $20 or $30, with no obvious guarantee they'll even play on U. S. DVD players. The movie got decent if not ecstatic reviews ... and, hey, Sam Rockwell! But it just doesn't seem readily available.

Old Bestsellers: A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling

Old Bestsellers: A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling

A review by Rich Horton

I have no idea if this was a bestseller, but Rudyard Kipling was a very popular writer, so doubtless this sold nicely enough. A Diversity of Creatures was published in 1917, but most of the stories predate World War I, and it shows. The book resembles the just preceding adult collection, Actions and Reactions, more than it does the postwar collections such as Limits and Renewals. It does include one of his all-time great stories, "Mary Postgate", and one other very fine story, the odd SF piece "As Easy as A. B. C." Perhaps not surprisingly these close and open the collection. The other fairly famous story here is "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat".

I won't go into my usual detail about Kipling's biography: it's pretty familiar. Born in 1865, died in 1936. He had his foot in three countries: England, where his loyalties lay and where he lived more than half his life; India, where he was born and spent much of his youth and young manhood, and where he made his reputation and set most of his early stories; and the United States: he married an American woman, and they lived in Vermont for about four years. Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature (before much of his very best work appeared, which is not to say that the stories up until then, including his best-known novel, Kim (1901), weren't often outstanding). He is one of my favorite writers, and a great example of the fact that you can disagree profoundly with many of an author's views and still love the work. (A maxim many would do well to remember.)

The most obvious recurring theme in A Diversity of Creatures is revenge -- indeed, this is a central theme in much of Kipling, and not always in a good way. Quite often the revenge is by characters Kipling appears to approve of against hapless or awkward antagonists, and seems out of proportion to the original offense. In "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat", a group of people in an early motorcar are caught in a sort of speed trap, clearly a revenue grab by a local Baronet. They are newspaper people, as well as an M. P. and (in another car) a theatre man. They get together to subject the village in which they were mistreated to humiliation by such means as arranging for them to be hoodwinked into voting that the Earth is flat after a presentation by a fake member of the Flat Earth Society. That annoyed me enough on first reading to put me off the story entirely, but on rereading it this time I realized, for one thing, how funny the story can be; and, secondly, that the story takes an ambiguous view of the appropriateness of the "revenge". In many ways this is really about the sometimes dangerous power of the press. (It also introduces a character, singer Vidal Benzaguen, who shows up later in another revenge story, one of Kipling's very greatest, "Dayspring Mishandled", from Limits and Renewals. Kipling was wont to reuse characters, even minor ones, as we shall see again in this book.)

In "The Honours of War", a "Stalky as an adult" story, a rather silly young officer too much taken up with book-learning is the target. The story, from 1911, defends old-style traditional officers and military values -- and by the time the book was published surely it was already clear how horribly these were faring. (The following poem, "The Children", is a wrenching lament for young men dead in war -- whether it was written in response to WWI I don't know.) Another revenge story is "Friendly Brook", in which a drunk blackmails (more or less) a country couple who have adopted his child by threatening to assert his parental rights. He ends up drowning in the title brook, clearly a response of a "friendly" entity to the threat to the brook's local couple. "The Edge of the Evening" is a pre-war spy story. Laughton Zigler, the American entrepreneur who showed up previously in "The Captive" (Traffics and Discoveries), has now married and rents an English estate. The narrator character runs into him and comes up for a weekend, at which he hears a story of a German plane crashlanding on the estate, and Zigler and company (half by accident) killing the occupants and sending the plane off to harmlessly ditch in the Channel. In "The Vortex", a foolish representative of one of the Empire's Dominions, spouting rot about going it alone independent from England, etc., is given his comeuppance via a drive in a motorcar, some bees, and an accident. "In the Presence" tells two stories of Indian soldiers: in one, a pair of Sikh brothers take vengeance on the locals who take advantage of their absence in the British Army, in the other, a group of Goorkhas faithfully mourn the death of the King.

There is also a Pyecroft story, "The Horse Marines", about mishaps with a motorcar stumbling into a military exercise. "'My Son's Wife'" is one of those Kipling stories where a city boy discovers the value of country life and country people. In this case a foolish young radical bohemian sort ("He had suffered from the disease of the century", the story opens), depressed after his free-loving girlfriend dumps him, inherits his aunt's estate. At first he plans to sell it, but the attractions of hard work, hunting, and a local girl all work to turn him into a man of the land -- and a Tory too, no doubt! "'Swept and Garnished'" is one of the two war stories, a ghost story in which a German woman is visited by the shades of the children of a French village overrun by the German army. It's a pretty powerful piece. "Regulus" is another Stalky story, though he's not a main character. It's set in school, and concerns a prim and virtuous young man getting in some trouble and being compared to the Roman hero Regulus.

"In the Same Boat" is a tale of drug addiction. Two young people are treated for addiction to sleeping pills by the same doctor, and they support each other on train trips as they try to go cold turkey. Both have terrible dreams that drove them to their addictions. The source of the dreams are eventually revealed, and give the story a slightly supernatural edge. The two seem well suited to each other, but one point of the story is that even though they become friendly they can never love each other -- perhaps the knowledge of each other's weakness is too much for them. "The Dog Hervey" is about an old maid who gets a rather mangy dog as a pet, and how this unlovely beast finally leads her to romance.

Now to the cream of the crop. "As Easy as A.B.C." is a sequel to "With the Night Mail". It is set in 2065. The world by this time has become a mostly libertarian paradise, with a declining population and a horror of invasion of privacy. One form of invasion of privacy, in this formulation, is democracy, with its imposure of majority will. Paradoxically (or not), the generally libertarian nature of this society is maintained by the Draconian rule of "The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated, body of a few score persons", as the introductory paragraph has it. In this story some members of the A.B.C. are traveling to Chicago, where it seems a few idlers and no-accounts have been assembling and trying to force votes on various issues. The other locals, horrified, call in the A.B.C. demanding that they take over -- if they don't, they say, people might get killed. And so the A.B.C., rather drastically it seemed to me, takes things in hand -- though with magic tech that supposedly won't actually really hurt anyone. Politics aside (the views put forth are, I think, purposely exaggerated for effect), I really liked the story. It seems very fresh, very science-fictional and well thought out, for all that it dates to 1912. It is probably my favorite of Kipling's "Science Fiction" stories.

The title character of "Mary Postgate" is a spinster hired to be companion to a well-off woman, Miss Fowler. Miss Fowler's nephew Wynn is orphaned, and she and Mary Postgate more or less raise him, until he joins the nascent Flying Corps at the outbreak of war. Soon he dies in a training accident. Through all this we gather something of Mary Postgate's relationship to him: clearly she dotes on the boy while he treats her with casual disrespect that one supposes includes a reluctant admixture of affection. Mary Postgate suffers in silence through the funeral, and the cleaning up of his effects. The two women decide to burn some of Wynn's belongings, and as Mary is working on his there is another accident -- a building collapses, and a local child is killed. At about the same time an airplane crashes near the incinerator where Mary Postgate is burying Wynn's effects. Mary immediately (and almost certainly erroneously) decides that the airplane had dropped a bomb, causing the building collapse. When she finds the downed pilot, she refuses him any help (though he speaks in French, albeit possibly German-accented French), instead guarding him until he dies -- an event she reacts to in a stunning scene in which she seems perhaps to come to orgasm as the man dies.

It's an odd odd story, and Mary Postgate is one of Kipling's stranger characters. You might think that the story, written in about 1915, in the midst of the War, should be read straight -- that Mary is simply doing her bit for the War effort, killing her German, as it were, while mourning her lost surrogate son, who died as a result of the War. But everywhere this is undermined. Mary's actions are hardly heroic, and her orgasmic reaction to his death is distasteful. The German pilot isn't even necessarily German -- he could be French, an ally. Mary assumes he dropped a bomb on the village and killed a child -- but that does not seem likely. Mary's beloved Wynn does not die in action but in a training accident. To me the story seems rather to be concerned with the tragic waste of war, with the danger of excessive vengefulness, and with one particular character: the spinster Mary Postgate.

Old Bestsellers: The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

A review by Rich Horton

As I have said in one form or another here, this blog's main aims are to a) examine books from at least 50 years ago (and preferably rather more) that sold well in their time; and b) to bring unjustly forgotten books to (minimally, alas!) wider attention. Sometimes posts do more of the one, some more of the other. (For example, some "Old Bestsellers" pretty much deserve to be forgotten!) And some, of course, are really about neither category. This week my aim was more at bringing a somewhat unjustly forgotten book (and author) to wider attention ... though the book in question likely sold nicely enough. But I find, searching the Web, that this book, and this author, beginning perhaps a decade ago, are quite often written about, with the same intention: to restore a sadly neglected writer, and his consensus best book, to our attention. So perhaps he's not that neglected after all? But ... I still sense he is, to some extent.

Peter De Vries (1910-1993) was one of the great American comic novelists of the latter half of the 20th Century. While never, I think, precisely a bestseller, he was a popular writer through the '50s and '60s. His most enduring theme was suburban adultery, already expressed in his first "mature" novel, The Tunnel of Love (1954). (He wrote three earlier novels that he largely repudiated.) This theme seemed to lose its force -- perhaps through repetition, perhaps because of societal change, perhaps because De Vries lost energy -- and his novels after the late '60s, though still fitfully funny, were also at times tedious. Four of his novels became movies, perhaps most notably Pete'n'Tillie (1972, based on the 1968 short novel Witch's Milk). De Vries was also a long-time editor at the New Yorker, having previously worked at Poetry. He served in the OSS during the War. All in all, a very impressive career. And for all that, he seems on the road to being forgotten already. Indeed, at the time of his death, all his novels were out of print. (About 10 years ago, the estimable University of Chicago press reprinted a few of his novels (The Blood of the Lamb included), so I think it has become easier to find his work.)

I read a great many of De Vries' novels 15 or 20 years ago, with tremendous enjoyment. My particular favorites are The Tunnel of Love (1954), The Mackerel Plaza (1958), and the book at hand, The Blood of the Lamb (1961). Also well regarded are the diptych The Cat's Pajamas/Witch's Milk (1968), Reuben, Reuben (1964), and another linked pair, Comfort Me With Apples (1956) and The Tents of Wickedness (1959) ... the latter composed of chapters quite brilliantly parodying well-known writers of that time.

De Vries was born to Dutch immigrants in Chicago, and raised in the Dutch Reformed Church (technically, the Christian Reformed Church of America). This is an explicitly Calvinist sect (much more so, it seems to me, than the largest American denomination in the Calvinist lineage, the United Church of Christ (especially the Congregationalist branch of same)). (I visited a Reformed Church of America church a few years ago, and was struck even then by the predominance of Vans and "oe"s among the names listed in the bulletin.) De Vries attended Northwestern, but graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, a well-respected college sponsored by the CRC. (By rank coincidence, I met two unrelated graduates of Calvin within days of reading that detail of De Vries' biography.)

The Blood of the Lamb is narrated by Don Wanderhope, who shares significant elements of De Vries' biography -- he too was born to Dutch immigrants in Chicago, and raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, and attended Northwestern. His father is first an iceman, then a garbageman. His beloved older brother Louie dies of tuberculosis at about 20, leaving young Don a legacy of skepticism about religion. Don later gets tuberculosis himself, leading to a critical interlude at a church-run sanatorium. (In De Vries' case, it was his sister who died of tuberculosis ... and while his father did not go insane, he did suffer from depression, and did a stint at a church-run sanatorium>)

The general tone of the novel is at first comic, De Vriesian, one might say, but one quickly notices that Wanderhope's life is full of loss. His brother dies. Then, at the sanatorium, he falls in love (his one true love, it seems) with another patient, who then dies. His father goes insane (requiring Don to take over the family garbage business). Before Don's stay in the sanatorium, he had, er, compromised the virtue of Greta, another girl in his church, and was at the point of marrying her, but they broke off after his illness. He meets her again at his father's asylum -- he is accused of having driven her mad by "ruining" her, and agrees to marry her (even though he is blameless as to her condition). Wanderhope sells his garbage route and moves to New York to work in advertising, and they have a girl, Carol, before Greta has another nervous breakdown and commits suicide. The woes continue ... his father and mother both die.

But all this is nothing next to the closing of the novel, which is an extended depiction of the horrors of Carol's long losing battle with leukemia, and it is here that the novel moves into another dimension. It is one of the most moving books I have read ... the depiction of a father's love for his daughter is wholly convincing and utterly wrenching. The portraits of other parents in extremis is likewise wrenching, particularly Wanderhope's new friend Stein, a Jewish man with a daughter just Carol's age (they become fast friends: one of the lines that struck me most on this reading was from Stein, looking at Carol and his Rachel: "'Lifelong friends,' said Stein, who gave, and asked, no quarter.") De Vries does not lose his comic touch here, though of course the comedy is, not black but, rather, agonized, as he describes the physicians and their treatments; and his housekeeper, Mrs. Brodhag; and the sometimes silly but never other than human fellow sufferers. There is also much beauty: Wanderhope trying to experience life with his daughter as fully as possible, knowing it will not last. And finally there are the last spasms of Wanderhope's skepticism about religion, his half-hearted attempts to believe at last (hoping, perhaps, that that way might lie some amelioration for Carol's suffering), and finally her granting him absolution, posthumously ... The arguments presented here are never convincing (and perhaps not intended to be so): they are the old sophomoric plaints (all having their root in Louie's arguments: after all, he was a sophomore when he died): the only real argument is purely emotional, and that is where it connects.

Autobiography as an explanation for a novelist's imagination is always a treacherous crutch. It is obvious that Don Wanderhope's history shares a fair amount with that of De Vries (perhaps extended to the War: it is curiously not mentioned at all (one assumes perhaps his illness gave Wanderhope a deferment), but one notes that De Vries never elaborated on his OSS experience (doubtless because it was classified). Still there are differences: Wanderhope was in advertising, not editing and writing like De Vries, other details like their marriages are radically different ... but in the most crucial area, De Vries did draw on his own life for The Blood of the Lamb. His daughter Emily died in 1960 of leukemia. I didn't know this when I first read the book, and it doesn't matter to the text, but it does add another layer of sadness once you have heard of it. (Kingsley Amis, a great admirer of De Vries' work, describes meeting him once (presumably in 1959 when Amis was at Princeton, writing New Maps of Hell) with a seriously ill little girl in tow.)

The Blood of the Lamb is a stunning, moving novel. The rest of his oeuvre, at least until his late decline, is also remarkable, if never as moving as in this book, it is often remarkably funny, and also shadowed, quite serious in its comedy. One could do much worse than to seek out the University of Chicago reprints of his work.

Old Bestsellers: Stormswift, by "Madeleine Brent" (Peter O'Donnell)

Stormswift, by "Madeleine Brent" (Peter O'Donnell)

A review by Rich Horton

Again, this book is not really that old, and not really a bestseller, though I imagine a decent seller at least. But I do sense that just a few years after his death, the author is slipping from the public consciousness a bit.

"Madeleine Brent" is a pseudonym for Peter O'Donnell (1920-2010), by far best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise novels (and comics). These books, about an orphan girl, displaced by the Second World War, who becomes first a criminal and then a spy for the British government, are tremendously enjoyable. (They actually began as a comic strip. The comic strip and the novels have different continuity.)

As Madeleine Brent O'Donnell wrote a number of historical romances, generally featuring a woman in peril who finds resources within herself to make her own way -- and, of course, to eventually win a good man. Apparently he maintained the Brent pseudonym as a secret successfully for some time. The Brent novels were generally quite well received. I saw Stormswift, one of the later Brent novels, from 1984, for $1 at a book sale, and as an admirer of the Modesty Blaise books I figured it was worth a try. And I was on the whole rather pleased.

Stormswift opens in Afghanistan in the 1880s. Jemimah Lawley, the spoiled daughter of a British civil servant who was killed in the Kabul massacre in 1979, has spent the past couple of years in an isolated "kingdom", at first as the "wife" of the local pacha, then as the slave of the local doctor, a Greek/English man who has himself been a captive of the local Kafirs for decades. After her rape by the pacha, who then discarded her after she failed to provide him a child, she has adapted well to being the doctor's assistant, and she is no longer spoiled. But then she is sold to another local pacha -- this one with a reputation for extreme sadism. She decides to escape, and the doctor arranges for her to go in the company of a peddler, Kassim.

Kassim, it turns out, is not what he seems. He hates Jemimah, out of resentment for his obligation to rescue her. But in the end she saves his life -- and she learns that he is actually a British spy posing as an Afghan. And she hears his mysterious delirious reference to "Melanie ... Stormswift ... bitch-goddess".

Jemimah returns to England, only to find that an imposter claiming to be her has taken over her home. She ends up touring the countryside in a Punch and Judy show ... the beginning of a journey that will lead her -- by a series of coincidences (mostly in the end reasonably well explained, I should say) -- to meet once again Kassim, and to learn the secret of Stormswift -- and to learn who her true love is -- and to even help another long lost friend ...

It is certainly in many ways quite preposterous. But it is also great fun. There is no point complaining about the contrivances involved -- they are part of the deal, and "Brent" embraces them thoroughly rather than trying to make this any sort of naturalist novel. I will say that the end is a bit unsatisfying -- Jemimah is put in a wrenching personal situation which ends up resolved very conveniently -- the whole finish is a bit abrupt, really. Still, fun work.

Old Bestsellers: Edmund Dantes, by "Alexander Dumas"

Edmund Dantès, by "Alexander Dumas"

A review by Rich Horton

A short while ago in an antique store I saw this book, Edmund Dantès, subtitled "The Sequel to the Celebrated Count of Monte Cristo", bylined Alexander Dumas. I haven't read much Dumas ... The Three Musketeers, when I was a teen, might be the only one. I know the story of The Count of Monte Cristo, of course, and I've seen a couple of versions in other media. I knew Dumas was prolific (and that he ran a sort of fiction factory, a bit like James Patterson does these day), so I thought it very plausible that he might have written a sequel. So I bought the book ... seemed like a worthwhile thing to try, an obscurer work by a famous author.

Alexandre Dumas was born in Picardy in 1802. His father was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a Marquis and a slave woman. His mother was an innkeeper's daughter. Dumas was his grandmother's family name, adopted by Alexandre's father after a break with his noble father. Alexandre's father was a successful general under Napoleon, but died of cancer in 1806. Dumas's family connections got him a decent position with Louis-Philippe, future King of France. Dumas soon began writing articles and then plays, and after a couple of successes became a full-time writer, and turned to novels. His most significant works appeared in quick succession between 1844 and 1847: The Three Musketeers and its sequels; The Corsican Brothers, and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas died in 1870.

His son, also illegitimate, also named Alexandre Dumas, became a successful writer as well, best known for La Dame Aux Camellias (or Camille), source material for the opera La Traviata.

Dumas was known, as I said, for running a sort of fiction factory: a variety of assistants helped write his books. The most famous was Auguste Maquet, who suggested the plots and wrote first drafts for a number of Dumas's novels (including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers). Dumas would then rewrite the books, adding dialogue and details and presumably finishing the prose. Maquet later sued Dumas, asking for credit and more money. He got the latter.

But what of this novel, Edmund Dantès? I began it with some optimism, and the opening is at least mildly interesting. Dantès and his beloved Haydee are sailing to Dantès' private island, where they get married and have a boy and a girl. Some ten years later, though, brigands led by one of the men Dantès ruined in his thirst for vengeance attack his house, and kill Haydee. Edmund and his children return to France. And suddenly the novel becomes a political novel. Edmund becomes a representative for Marseilles, and a leading Republican advocate, inveighing against the injustice of the political structure. He writes a popular play. The revolutions of 1848 are approaching ... And this goes on and on, at boring and very tiresome length.

Not much else really happens. There is a bit of a subplot involving his daughter and her love affair with an Italian, which seems doomed to failure because her brother swears that the Italian is a villain (apparently, or so her brother thinks, he kidnapped and raped a peasant girl). Alas, this story is not resolved in the book -- instead, in the last pages, we are directed to another sequel (The Countess of Monte Cristo). There is a trival subplot in which Dantès becomes very ill and is nursed to life by the very woman who had rejected him in The Count of Monte Cristo.

So anyway ... as the book went on -- really, from very early -- I was thinking, "My gosh, this is awful stuff. Can it really be by Dumas?" At first I thought, maybe it's a bad translation. But no translator (well, maybe the Swedish translator who rewrote sections of Last and First Men to make Stalin win) could make a good book THAT bad. So then I thought, maybe it was a product of Dumas's "factory" that he didn't really pay much attention to. But that's not how Dumas worked. Besides, Dumas was an ally of Louis-Philippe, the King who was deposed in 1848, so I doubt he'd have written a book promoting the February revolution. (And indeed Dumas had to go into exile after Louis Napoleon took over, later in 1848.)

So I did some more investigating, and finally found the truth ... There have been, in fact, a number of sequels to The Count of Monte Cristo, by various writers, probably none of whom got permission from Dumas or paid him anything. This particular one is by an American named Edmund Flagg (1815-1890). It seems to have been first published in 1878, though my edition is dated 1884. Flagg actually wrote two sequels to this book: Monte Cristo's Daughter (1880) and The Wife of Monte Cristo (1884). I suppose perhaps Monte Cristo's Daughter reveals the conclusion to the sublot about his daughter's love affair with the Italian nobleman, though perhaps also it is in the book mentioned in the text, The Countess of Monte Cristo, which was by Jean Charles du Buys, published in 1869.

In the end, then, I was another, very late, victim of a fraud perpetrated some 140 years ago. A look at the Amazon reviews, as well as the Goodreads reviews, of Edmund Dantès, by the way, will reveal that I'm not the only contemporary reader to be quite disgusted by this book. But all in all it's an interesting story of the publishing world of the past (and of American copyright laws, which were quite lax in the 19th century -- nowadays, if anything, they are too strict, at least since Disney took over the job).

Old Bestsellers: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A review by Rich Horton


This is hardly a forgotten book -- it's one of those old bestsellers that has remained popular for a long time, though when it first appeared I bet few would have predicted that.

In 1912, before such a thing as SF existed as a separate genre, I'm not sure how the serial in All-Story called "Under the Moons of Mars", by "Norman Bean" (the magazine editor's typo for "Normal Bean"), was received. Probably simply as an adventure story, one that harkened back pretty clearly to the lost race tales of the likes of H. Rider Haggard. (And to be sure at the very same time Edgar Rice Burroughs was publishing the first of his Tarzan stories, which much more overtly can be placed in the "lost race" lineage.) "Norman Bean", of course, was a pseudonym for Edgar Rice Burroughs, and in 1917 "Under the Moons of Mars" was reprinted in book form as A Princess of Mars, under Burroughs' own name. (As far as I or anyone I have asked can tell, the two versions of the story are identical.

art by Frank Schoonover
(photograph from "Mars Book Covers: Science Fiction and Fantasy")  

Burroughs (1875-1950) was born in Chicago. He had a spotty early career, attending a couple of private high schools, failing to get into West Point, and serving briefly as a soldier before being invalided out. He worked for his father's company for some years, apparently with little distinction, before decided that he could write stuff better and more interesting than the junk he was seeing in pulp magazines. And he was right ... "Under the Moons of Mars" was his first sale, followed quickly by the first Tarzan story. Tarzan made it to book form first, but by 1917, with four further Barsoom serials already having appeared in magazines, A. C. McClurg published . Interestingly, Burroughs is the great-grandfather of one of my favorite movie directors, Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

Burroughs was for a long time one of many perhaps surprising lacunae in my SF/F reading. I knew much of him, naturally, and I have a dim memory of reading a chapter or two of Tarzan of the Apes at a cousin's house long ago. I rectified that in 2004 when I found a paperback of A Princess of Mars. (At the time a movie was supposedly in development, to be directed by Kerry Conran of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but that never happened, perhaps because of the relative failure of that movie. Alas, the eventual movie version of A Princess of Mars, directed by Andrew Stanton and called John Carter, was a bit of a mess.)

How necessary is it to describe the plot of A Princess of Mars? Briefly, Civil War veteran (for the South) Colonel John Carter and a friend discover a gold mine in Arizona. They run afoul of Indians, and while hiding in a cave, Carter is mysteriously transported to Mars. There he encounters the rather brutish "Green Martians", and is taken captive by them. They are constantly battling each other, and the rather more civilized (and humanoid, though egg-laying) "Red Martians". They capture a Princess of the Red Martians, the beautiful Dejah Thoris. After a rocky start, John Carter and Dejah Thoris fall in love. The leader of the Green Martians plans terrible tortures for them, so it becomes necessary to escape. They become separated, and Carter makes his way to a rival city of Dejah Thoris's. He and a friend plot to undo the dastardly plans of this rival city, and rescue Dejah Thoris's city, which they do in very adventurous fashion. By the end, John Carter has managed to effect positive political change among both the Red Martians and Green Martians, and he and Dejah Thoris are husband and wife, awaiting the hatching of a child, when a crisis in the air-manufacturing plant intervenes.

The whole thing is a wild mess of faintly plausible SFnal ideas, totally ridiculous SFnal ideas, and pure fantasy. Much is absurd, but much is really quite fun. The writing is rather stilted but occasionally striking. The characters are very stiff. The attitudes are consistent with the time -- the references to Indians are pretty racist, and there is no reason to believe that the Confederate John Carter would be any more admirable in his attitudes toward black people, but on the whole these aspects are much in the background. It can't be regarded as a great book, but it remains appealing.

Old Bestsellers: Finnley Wren, by Philip Wylie

Finnley Wren, by Philip Wylie

a review by Rich Horton

Philip Wylie was once a very famous writer, both for his polemics and his fiction. He was born in 1902, died in 1971. Much of his work was SF, though he did not work within the confines of the genre. His most famous novel may be The Disappearance (1951), in which the world splits into two timelines, one with all the men, the other with all the women. His two collaborations with Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934), concern a rogue planet colliding with Earth, and an escape to the planet's moon. They were very popular, and a movie was made in 1951, produced by George Pal (and departing quite a lot from the plot of the novels). Wylie's non-fiction screed Generation of Vipers (1942) also attracted a lot of attention. Novels like Gladiator (said to be an inspiration for Superman) and The Savage Gentleman (said to be an inspiration for Doc Savage) also were noticed. He also wrote a great many stories about deep sea fishing, featuring the characters Crunch and Des: these appeared regularly in the Saturday Evening Post, and became a TV series in the 1950s. Many of his later novels concerned nuclear war, and close to the end of his life he wrote the screenplay for a special episode of the TV series The Name of the Game, set in LA in 2017: this episode was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg.

Wren's family members gained a bit of notoriety, in one case quite tragically: his niece Janice Wylie was murdered with her roommate in 1963 in a famous case called the "Career Girls Murder". A man of limited intelligence was originally charged with the murders and was coerced into confessing ... he was eventually exonerated and the actual murderer was caught, but the case was one of those that led to the Miranda rules. Janice Wylie's father Max was an advertising man and a novelist. Philip Wylie's daughter Karen Wylie Pryor wrote an influential book on breastfeeding, and was married at one time to Charles Lindbergh's son Jon.

Though his reputation was well-established in the literary world, a quick look at the above list shows an abiding interest in genre fiction, including outrightly pulpy stuff. (He also wrote some mysteries.) But he did also write straightforward literary fiction, and one perhaps his best-known effort in that vein is Finnley Wren, from 1934. I say best known, but I have to confess that while I was very familiar with The Disappearance, Generation of Vipers, and When Worlds Collide, and had at least heard of Gladiator, I had no idea Finnley Wren existed until Gregory Feeley pointed me in its direction a couple of months ago. Based on that, I think it qualifies this days as a largely forgotten book.

Finnley Wren appeared during a period of tremendous productivity for Wylie: he published 10 novels between 1928 and 1934, three in that last year alone. It has a long subtitle that describes the novel reasonably well: "His Notions and Opinions together with a Haphazard History of His Career and Amours in These Moody Years as well as Sundry Rhymes, Fables, Diatribes and Literary Misdemeanors". My edition is the Thirteenth Printing, from Rinehart and Company (owned by Mary Roberts Rinehart's sons). It is marked by some minor typographical experiments ... not sure how they are reproduced in newer editions.

It opens in a bar in New York, on a Friday afternoon, in perhaps 1932 or 1933. The narrator, Philip Wylie, at loose ends because his wife is traveling to the Caribbean, meets a man named Finnley Wren who starts to tell him the story of his life. Much of the early history of his life is given in a few long conversations over the next couple of hours -- Finnley was born in South Dakota in 1900, went to elementary school there (described cynically), had a brother and sister named Tom and Vi. (I thought of T. S. Eliot and his wife, called Tom and Viv: I am sure Wylie was not thinking of them.) Sometime in Wren's teens they moved to New Jersey. At a dance just before going to college Finnley is spurned by his longtime sweetheart, and ends up sleeping with another girl, who then accuses him of getting her pregnant, even though the baby shows up far too soon to be his. Finnley is ostracized, and ends up playing piano on a cruise ship heading to Europe, where he is seduced by the wife of an advertising man and then falls in love with her daughter. After some travail, they get married and Finnley takes a job working for his father-in-law ... and at the time of the story, he is a fairly prominent advertising man, though no longer married to his boss's daughter.

All this seems quite simple but there is much more going on ... vicious description of Finnley's rather awful father ... revelation of Finnley's early loss of faith and his cynicism about education and women ... portraits of his brother, sister, and mother, all of whom he loves but all of whom seem weak ... etc. etc.

The novel continues as Finnley takes Wylie to a strange party on Long Island, where Wylie seems ready to sleep with a beautiful married woman but instead inveigles from her the story of Finnley's horrible second wife, who decided to become a single mother despite having no intention of raising the child, and who ruins another man's life in the process. We learn what happened to Finnley's first wife (a rather gothic tale) and the also rather gothic tale of his second wife's pregnancy. Wylie eventually sleeps with a different woman, a nice but apparently stupid chorus girl ... but she has a secret too. There are brief cynical depictions of the other people at the party, an apparently typical messed up bunch of affluent New Yorkers and suburbanites. We see a couple of Finnley Wren's efforts at fiction, which he calls "Epistles", and which are fable-like SF stories actually.

More of Wren's life story comes out over the weekend, including a gruesome episode in the Canadian woods, and the story of his second marriage, and the story of his spinster secretary ... There are crises in Finnley's siblings' lives, and then in his marriage ...

It's a curious construct, this novel. Much of it is indeed given to Finnley Wren's Amours, and much to Fables and Diatribes (not just by Finnley), and there is plenty of often cynical philosophical musing. It is often funny, but sometimes quite tragic. It is certainly polemical. And in the end, one realizes somewhat unexpectedly that Finnley Wren is actually a somewhat ordinary man -- after all, he's in advertising. Perhaps that's the point -- the extraordinary ordinary life. Or perhaps he's a tragic case ... trapped in a career unworthy of his talents. Or perhaps it's just a story of its time.

Perhaps Neglected Short Fiction: Collected Short Stories, by Kingsley Amis

Collected Short Stories, by Kingsley Amis

a review by Rich Horton

Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is one of my personal favorite writers. He's best known for his many novels, mostly comic novels set in contemporary Britain, including of course his first novel, and still most famous, Lucky Jim; his Booker Prize winner, The Old Devils; Ending Up; The Alteration, The Green Man; Take a Girl Like You; and many more. In addition to novels he wrote a fair amount of reviews and criticism and some poetry. (He was one of the Movement poets, a group of poets in the UK in the 50s who pushed for more natural imagery and emotion, and somewhat more traditional forms: others included most notably Philip Larkin (the best of the Movement poets and probably Amis' best friend), but also Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Conquest (another great friend of Amis and best known as a Sovietologist), Donald Davie, and one or two more.) Amis was an SF fan, and he is famous within the genre for writing one of the earliest academic studies of genre SF: New Maps of Hell. He also wrote several SF or Fantasy novels: most obviously The Alteration (an alternate history set in a Catholic-dominated world) and The Green Man (a ghost story in which God is a character); but also Russian Hide-and-Seek (set in 21st Century England under Russian rule), The Anti-Death League (near future to its time of writing, tangentially about the development of a secret weapon), and Colonel Sun (as by Robert Markham, a James Bond novel). (Ending Up is also set in the future, but it's not precisely easy to notice that.

Amis also wrote a fairly small quantity of short stories, no more than a couple of dozen in about 40 years of active writing. His imagination was clearly a novelist's imagination. I had previously read his collection Mr. Barrett's Secret, which I believe included most or all of his post-1980 stories. I have just finished his Collected Short Stories, which was published in 1980, and includes everything Amis felt worthy of preservation at that time. (It subsumes a previous collection, My Enemy's Enemy.) Amis in his introduction somewhat sardonically mentions that he felt his story "The Sacred Rhino of Uganda", written when he was a schoolboy, was "uncharacteristic" -- it's not clear to me, though, whether there were other stories written and published during his adulthood that he also declined to collect.

Interestingly, the great bulk of Amis's short stories seem to be genre pieces. Most or perhaps all of the stories in Mr. Barrett's Secret qualify, as I recall. (Not necessarily as SF: the title story is historical fiction (about Elizabeth Barrett's father) and another story is a spy story.) In Collected Short Stories, the first six are pretty standard contemporary mainstream fiction, but the remaining 10 are all genre pieces: several SF stories, a vampire story, an odd thriller about strange goings-on in Crete in 1898 that may not be precisely SF, fantasy, or a spy story but combines them all in a curious fashion, a "weird tale", and a Holmes pastiche.

The three opening pieces are linked stories about a Signals unit in the British Army, in the days just after the end of World War II. Amis is rather cynical about the quality of officers. The first two stories. "My Enemy's Enemy" and "Court of Inquiry", put a somewhat sympathetic main character in a sticky moral situation and watch him fail. The third, "I Spy Strangers", is set against the post-war election that gave a huge majority to Labor: a somewhat foolish Tory officer is shown gobsmacked by this.

"Moral Fibre" appears perhaps to feature the protagonist of Amis's second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, though he denies in his introduction that the story is an outtake from a draft of the novel. A pushy social worker tries to set a sluttish lower class girl straight (she has a baby at the age of 16 or so and quickly turns to prostitution), but the social worker's insensitive actions only make things worse. "All the Blood Within Me" is a subtly devastating look at the relationship between three people: a man and his wife, and their old friend who has always hopelessly loved the wife. At the occasion of the woman's funeral, we meet the old friend, and he reminisces on his idealized view of their old friendship and his perception of their characters -- only to have his views challenged in a short conversation with the couple's daughter. "Dear Illusion" is a rather intriguing story, in which Amis gets in his whacks against pretentious meaningless contemporary poetry (i.e. everything the Movement was against). A journalist interviews a celebrated poet about his methods, and learns that he (the poet) isn't really sure he's any good. The poet threatens to quit, but instead produces one last book, to great acclaim. The journalist gets one more interview, after reading the book in horror: the poet admits to have written these last poems more or less randomly, in an attempt to see if his readers can be trusted -- of course, they can't. Part of this is Amis's rather Blimpish anti-Modernism, and rather crude in that way, but his portrayal of the poet, seen through the eyes of the journalist, manages to be quite moving.

"Something Strange" is a rather good straight SF story, about a group of four people inhabiting a space station in a remote area of the galaxy. They deal with interpersonal issues (who's sleeping with whom, etc.) and also with strange, unexplainable, manifestations outside the station. At the end things are revealed (not too surprisingly) to be very different than they think. This appeared in the Spectator in 1960, but I could easily imagine it in New Worlds of that time, or even in Galaxy (though it's a very British story in flavour). (No doubt Amis was paid better, and received more prestigious notice, for placing the story with the Spectator, to be sure.)

There are three slight, humourous, SF stories about the future of drinking, "The 2003 Claret", "The Friends of Plonk", and "Too Much Trouble". In each story a man is sent forward in time, and after gathering data on the general state of future society he manages to end up in a drinking establishment, learning horrible things in each case about the future degradation of drink. Slight and faintly amusing stuff, but pretty minor, with jokes on the level of the acronymic names of the time travelling equipment: TIOPEPE, TIAMARIA, TAITTINGERS.

"Hemingway in Space" is just what the title might lead one to expect: a parodic recasting of a Hemingway story (in this case "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber") as SF (i.e. the hunt occurs with blasters in the orbit of Mars).

"Who or What Was It?" is a pretty neat story, a piece of metafiction in which Amis and his then wife Elizabeth Jane Howard are portrayed as visiting an inn that coincidentally bears considerable resemblance to the title inn of his novel The Green Man. The Amis character in the story decides that he is fated to reenact an encounter from the novel (in which the protagonist faces a terrifying monster made of foliage, a "green man"), with curious results that lead to a very nice closing stinger.

"The Darkwater Hall Mystery" is a Holmes pastiche, though Holmes does not really figure in it. Watson orders Holmes to take a couple of weeks of rest, and in the great man's absence he consents to substitute for him and investigate a threat on the life of a baronet at his country home. The real interest in the story, of course, is the portrayal of the various characters: Watson, the baronet and his beautiful wife, the baronet's dissolute and bitter twin brother, another guest, an Army veteran, who is besotted with the wife. The "mystery" is (quite on purpose) almost trivial. Not a particularly great story, but interesting. "The House on the Headland" is the Cretan story, in which a pair of British spies, keeping on eye on Crete as the Turks leave, investigate strange goings on at the title house, which turn out to have little indeed to do with international affairs.

"To See the Sun" is a long (19,000 words) story that first appeared in this volume. It tells of an Englishman coming to a mysterious castle in Dacia, investigating the vampire legend. He is a skeptic, but he falls instantly for the beautiful lady of the castle -- who of course is in fact a vampire. Things work out not quite as we might expect. The story is probably a bit long, but otherwise it's really a pretty solid vampire story, very much in the basic vampire tradition. (I.e. it's not a sendup, but a sincere piece of vampire fiction.)

Finally, "Mason's Life" is a short-short that originally appeared in the Sunday Times, though I read it years ago in a volume of the Aldiss/Harrison Best SF of the Year series. It's slight, but not bad, about a man in a bar confronted by another man, who insists that he must be a figment of that man's dream. Leading to a quite predictable resolution.

One certainly comes away from this volume convinced that Amis was first and best a novelist, but on the whole it is still pretty enjoyable reading, and occasionally quite good indeed.

Old Bestsellers: When Knighthood Was in Flower, by "Edwin Caskoden" (Charles Major)

When Knighthood Was in Flower, by "Edwin Caskoden" (Charles Major)

This is an interesting case, I think. For reasons not always having to do with the book: I'll be blathering about the movies made from it, the career of one of the actresses in the movies, and publishing history ...

When Knighthood Was in Flower was a true bestseller. It was published in 1898, and it was the second bestselling novel of 1899, and the fifth bestselling novel of 1900. Yet it seems all but entirely forgotten today, as does its author. (It was at least modestly well-remembered into the 1950s.)

Charles Major was an Indiana lawyer (and one-term state legislator), born in 1856 in Indianapolis, a graduate of the University of Michigan, and resident in Shelbyville (only 30 or so miles SE of Indianapolis) for most of his adult life. He died quite young, in 1913. When Knighthood Was in Flower was his first novel. He closed his law practice after its success and continued to write. He had one more major bestseller, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1902), set in Elizabethan times (and later filmed starring Mary Pickford). He wrote several more historical novels, as well as a few children's adventure stories set in Indiana.

Major published When Knighthood Was in Flower under the pseudonym "Edwin Caskoden", partly perhaps to avoid interfering with his law practice, but also as part of the novel's conceit: the narrator is named Edwin Caskoden, and the story is presented as being an edited version of Edwin Caskoden's memoir, done by his distant descendant of the same name. Not surprisingly for such a successful book, it became a successful play and movie. The first movie version was as early as 1908, produced by D. W. Griffith, and retitled When Knights Were Bold. (No copies survive.) The next version was made in 1922, and starred William Randolph Hearst's mistress Marion Davies. Finally, Disney made a live-action movie in 1953, renaming it (in the US) The Sword and the Rose.

(That version starred Glynis Johns, whom I remember (not from seeing the play, just from listening to the soundtrack) as the original Desiree Arnfeldt in Sondheim's A Little Night Music, and thus the original singer of "Send in the Clowns". Johns also played Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins. She was the daughter of actor Mervyn Johns, and more importantly, she shares a birthday, October 5, with no other than ... me!. She is still alive, aged 91.)

My edition of the book is a Grossett and Dunlap reprint, called the "Theatre Edition", presumably because it is illustrated with still photos from a production of the play. (That seems to have been common at that time. The picture I have so clumsily reproduced above (my son not being available to do the photography) is of Roselle Knott playing Mary Tudor, though the role was actually originated by Shakespearean actress Julia Marlow.) This edition is undated, but may have appeared in 1907, as it is inscribed "Mr. Virgil S. Kenninger, from Mamma, Christmas 1907". At least by the time this edition appeared, Major was acknowledging his authorship: the title page says "Rewritten and rendered into modern English from Sir Edwin Caskoden's memoir by Edwin Caskoden (Charles Major)". The original publisher was Bowen-Merrill, the predecessor to the Bobbs Merrill publishing firm. Bobbs-Merrill was best known for publishing The Joy of Cooking, as well as L. Frank Baum. They were based in Indianapolis, hence the connection to Major: a salesman for the firm tried to sell him some law books, and instead he brought back a copy of the manuscript.

The book is held to have been at the forefront of a sudden fashion for historical romances. I found it quite enjoyable, but it does not have much of a remaining reputation. I found the following in a 1955 article by a Professor of History at Indiana University, Howard J. Baetxhold:

"Charles Major's works will be long remembered in American literary history. To be thoroughly honest and objective, however, we must admit that, dear as they are to the hearts of Hoosiers, their place has not been determined by intrinsic literary merit. They have the characteristics of the historical novels of the time -- overly rhetorical and bombastic language; heroes possessing impossible skill, bravery, and foresight; plots determined largely by coincidence. Modern critics do not always deal kindly with Major. One contemporary scholar writes: "Although his importance may be said to be entirely in the historical field, Major made no real contribution to the development of the historical novel created by Scott and Americanized by Cooper. He had their faults but seldom possessed their powers." But the books do tell an exciting story, and Major certainly holds his own in the genre with his contemporaries: writers like Maurice Thompson, George Barr McCutcheon, and the early Tarkington."

Baetxhold was quite wrong in his assertion that Major's works will be long remembered -- they are now nearly forgotten. But I think he, and the scholar he quotes, are also off the mark in their judgement of his work. Major, at least in this first novel, is not terribly bombastic in his language, and while the primary hero does possess unusual skill, and lots of bravery, and perhaps overemphasized virtue, the plot is not really driven by coincidence at all, and in fact much goes wrong for the characters. But most of all, the chief virtue of this book is one seemingly completely missed by those commentators: the narrative voice of "Edwin Caskoden", which is a purposely self-deprecating mixture of some pomposity, some family pride, and lots of (probably deserved) modesty about his abilities in certain spheres. Moreover, he is witty throughout, and plausibly and funnily observant about most of the characters around him (the perhaps too perfect hero, Charles Brandon, excepted). It's really not bad stuff at all, though it's not earthshakingly great either.

The novel's title comes from a couplet by Leigh Hunt: "There Bred a Knight, when Knighthood was in flow'r/Who charmed alike the tilt-yard and the bow'r". The novel has a long subtitle: The Love Story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the King's Sister, and Happening in the Reign of His August Majesty, King Henry VIII. It opens with a preface detailing the supposed origin of the story: one Edwin Caskoden gives a short history of his often illustrious family, especially noting how one of his ancestors made a fortune by wisely ignoring the then King's cuckolding of him, instead gaining favor and selling him lots of jewelry (he was a goldsmith). The goldsmith's grandson is Sir Edwin Caskoden, Master of the Dance for King Henry VIII, and the story is supposed to be a rewritten extract from his memoirs.

Caskoden tells of Charles Brandon, a commoner who had made something of a name for himself by fighting in the wars in Europe, and who after returning home, fought a duel with a man famous for having killed numerous men in other duels, including Brandon's father and brother. It turns out the other man was a cheater, wearing mail under his clothes, and Brandon disarms and blinds him. His fame leads to an invitation to King Henry's court. As Caskoden notes, the King's 19 year old sister, Mary Tudor, is the leading beauty of the court, and many men had fallen for her only to be rejected (Caskoden included, though on the rebound he started courting Mary's best friend, in the end successfully). Naturally he assumes that Brandon will fall for her too, which could be disastrous as he is a commoner. The two men are soon close friends, and by convincingly feigning complete indifference Brandon manages to attract Mary's attention.

Before long the two are completely in love, to Henry's anger, as he wishes to marry her off to the aging King Louis of France. A further complication comes from a former suitor of Mary's, the dastardly Duke of Buckingham, who attempts to disgrace Mary when she makes a visit to a fortuneteller who happens also to run a house of ill repute. When Brandon rescues the girls, he kills two of Buckingham's hired men, and Buckingham has him thrown into prison.

Brandon is finally released and plans to travel to New Spain (i.e, America) because he knows that the King will have him executed for daring to mess with his sister. Before long Mary plans to come along with him, dressed as a man, but that plan fails because she it too beautiful to pass herself as a male. Brandon ends up in the Tower, and Mary can only save him by finally promising to marry the French King.

The rest of the novel is fairly true to the historical record ... the King of France dies soon after the marriage (Caskoden suggest, and in fact contemporary wags thought so as well, that Mary (presumably on purpose) wore the old man out), and Brandon goes to France and secretly marries her, despite the odious attentions of the Dauphin, the new King (a married man it should be noted). Henry VIII makes the best of things by making Brandon 1st Duke of Suffolk.

Major claimed to have deviated from the historical record only in small ways (Brandon's father is supposed to have been killed by Richard III, not in a duel; and Brandon was given his titles before marrying Mary Tudor); but there are other departures. Most obviously, the novel's Brandon is portrayed as quite young and unimportant, but in fact he was 31 in 1515 (when the action takes place), and had already been married twice (scandalously, Wikipedia says) and widowed twice, and was engaged to his 8 year old ward, Elizabeth Grey. He married another ward (this one 13) after Mary Tudor's death. Clearly not the paragon portrayed in the novel -- though he was in fact a notable soldier, and a very influential man in Henry's court. He and Mary were the grandparents of the tragic near-Queen Lady Jane Grey.

A Not Quite Forgotten Book: Palladian, by Elizabeth Taylor

Palladian, by Elizabeth Taylor

a review by Rich Horton

One of the great mid-20th century English writers was Elizabeth Taylor (needless to say, not the actress). Taylor, daughter of an insurance inspector, was born in 1912 and died in 1975. She married John Taylor, who owned a candy company, in 1936. Her friend the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard declined to write a biography of Taylor due to "lack of incident" in her life, though as Taylor was notably a very private person, it may be that Howard was simply deferring to her friend's presumed wishes.

I discovered Taylor because Howard's husband, Kingsley Amis, one of my favorite writers, called her "one of the best English novelists born this century". Taylor can be placed with others of the great run of English women writers of quiet but sharp social comedy of roughly the middle of the 20th Century: the obvious comparisons are Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, perhaps Anita Brookner or Muriel Spark, even. (Even perhaps another friend of Taylor's, the somewhat older and decidedly odder Ivy Compton-Burnett.) I've read a few of her novels: I like in particular Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, one of the great novels of old age. (Amis has one too: Ending Up; and so does Spark: Memento Mori.)

This book certainly wasn't a "bestseller" -- none of Taylor's novels were. She might have been in danger of becoming forgotten at some point, but her champions such as Howard, Amis, and Anne Tyler have kept her novels in people's minds. Many of her books were reprinted in trade paper by Virago Press, a feminist imprint, in the 1980s. My copy of the book at hand, Palladian, is the Virago reprint. Taylor's work got some more notice in the 2000s with the appearance of a couple of movies based on her best-known novels, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (starring Joan Plowright) in 2005, and Angel (starring Romola Garai) in 2007.

Palladian is her second novel, from 1946. The nominal protagonist is Cassandra Dashwood, who becomes governess to Sophy, daughter of a rather ineffectual widower, Marion Vanbrugh, who lives in a decayed manor house with his drunk cousin Tom, Tom's pregnant sister Margaret, a couple of not very respectful servants, and Tom and Margaret's somewhat dotty mother. Cassandra is a romantical young woman who determines in advance to fall in love with Marion. And so she does. But that is a small part of the story. More important, perhaps, is Tom's tawdry relationship with the local publican's wife, and Tom's secret past involving Marion's dead wife. There are also telling tidbits from the POV of the two servants. Margaret's rather bossy and excessively bracing nature. Sophy is depicted as a pretty normal girl of her age, not at all a prodigy, desperate about her failure to be the beauty her mother was.

The novel turns on a shocking event with about 40 pages to go. I admit I put the book down for a day or so at that point -- it seemed unearned, unfair. But -- though I am still unsure that that plot development works -- Taylor still brings home the novel quite effectively. It's by no means her best novel, but it's fine work. Delicately funny, acute, honest about its characters' failings but still fair to them. Taylor was a fan of Jane Austen, which is fairly clear in all her work, but perhaps never more so than here, as indicated by her protagonist's name, by the reference to the Greer Garson*/Laurence Olivier vehicle Pride and Prejudice, which is shown at the local theater, and by a couple further overt references to Austen.

(*As it happens I just the other night watched another Greer Garson film, Random Harvest, based on the novel of the same title by James Hilton, which I covered in this space a couple of months ago.)