In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she examines a South African writer whose unconventional work has often been left out of the canon.

Photo © Lucy Scholes

When, in 1961, the long-running English literary magazine The Strand relaunched as The New Strand, it made newspaper headlines across the world. Although the London-based periodical had an illustrious history—founded in 1891, it counted the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock Holmes stories debuted in its pages), Agatha Christie, and P. G. Wodehouse among its contributors—its reinvention was hardly breaking news. What was, though, was the identity of its new editor: Noni Jabavu, the Black, South Africa–born writer, journalist, and broadcaster. A woman editor would have been surprise enough, but appointing a Black woman was unheard of at the time. Ernest Kay, joint proprietor of The New Strand (with the crime novelist John Creasey), defended this “bold and imaginative” choice in the press. “Miss Jabavu has led such a varied life that she will bring a completely fresh outlook to the magazine,” he told Ebony in April 1962. “She couldn’t be conventional if she tried.” Read More

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she examines an anomalous work, They, in Kay Dick’s already anomalous oeuvre. 

Kay Dick is a name all but forgotten today, but in the midtwentieth century she was at the heart of the London literary scene. A list of the guests regularly entertained by her and her partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, at their Hampstead home—they lived together from 1940 to 1962—includes a host of successful and popular writers of the era, including C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Brigid Brophy, Muriel Spark, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Angus Wilson, and Francis King. I mention them here, because it was the scathing description of Dick’s treatment of her friends, as detailed in her obituary in the Guardian in 2001, that first attracted my attention.

“For many years,” wrote the writer and journalist Michael De-la-Noy, “the novelist Kay Dick, who has died aged 86, was at the centre of literary intrigue and gossip.” The claim he then makes—that she “expended far more energy in pursuing personal vendettas and romantic lesbian friendships than in writing books”—is cutthroat enough to smack of a vendetta all of its own. He describes her as a failed artist, “a talented woman bedeviled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs.” De-lay-Noy’s obituary is less a celebration of Dick’s life and more an all-out character assassination, one that details a litany of grudges maintained, ambitions thwarted, and friendships cruelly smashed to smithereens. Needless to say, I was intrigued enough to immediately hunt down Dick’s books.

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In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

The Orlando Trilogy—which has just been reissued in the UK by Bloomsbury (under the title Orlando King)—is British novelist Isabel Colegate’s masterwork about personal, political, and public mythmaking. Colegate takes the scaffolding for her tale from Sophocles’s Theban plays. Her Oedipus Rex is Orlando King, a young man who scales the greasy pole of power and privilege in the thirties. “We know the story of course, so nothing need be withheld,” she writes on the opening page. “We choose a situation in the drama to expose a theme: passing curiosity must look elsewhere, we are here profoundly to contemplate eternal truths. With ritual, like the Greeks. With dreams, like Freud. Let us pray.” The trilogy spans the middle of the twentieth century. By the end of the thirties, Orlando is a wealthy businessman and respected politician; he’s also inadvertently killed his biological father and married the dead man’s widow, and she has borne him his beloved daughter, Agatha. But the Second World War brings with it our hero’s downfall. Agatha, like Antigone before her, stumbles around in the wreckage—that of both the wider nation and her individual family—and finds herself forced to choose between her country and her kin.

Originally published as three separate novels—Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971), and Agatha (1973)—this is the third time that Colegate’s trilogy has been reprinted in a single volume. Penguin got there first in 1984, followed by Virago in 1996—so it’s certainly not a straightforward case of overdue reappraisal. As her latest publishers rightly point out, Colegate—who’s still alive today, age eighty-eight—has been ranked among the likes of English literary heavyweights Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, and Elizabeth Taylor, yet until now, only two of her thirteen novels remained in print: her debut The Blackmailer (1958) and The Shooting Party (1980), which won the W. H. Smith Annual Literary Award and was swiftly adapted into an acclaimed film. Though other novels with which The Orlando Trilogy might be fruitfully compared—Lively’s Booker-winning Moon Tiger (1987), for example, or Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy (1960, 1962, and 1965)—have long been claimed as bona fide masterpieces (the former is a Penguin Modern Classic, and the latter an NYRB Classic), Colegate’s trilogy seems to find itself snared in a frustrating loop of rediscovery and neglect.

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In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

“Shameless” and “unpublishable”—this was the reaction of her publishers when the Dutch writer Dola de Jong first submitted her novel The Tree and the Vine (De Thuiswacht) in 1950. Four years later, it made it into print, thanks in large part to the backing of prominent literary figures such as the Dutch poet Leo Vroman and the Belgian writer Marnix Gijsen, both European exiles living in America (as was de Jong by this point in her life). She also had the support of renowned New York editor Maxwell Perkins, the man who’d discovered both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and who’d published de Jong’s And the Field is the World (1945), the story of a young Jewish couple who flee the Netherlands for Morocco on the eve of the Second World War.

What made The Tree and the Vine so shocking was its candid depiction of queer desire. It follows two young women in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the late thirties: Erica, a rash and impatient fledgling journalist who doesn’t live by anyone else’s rules, and the much more guarded, inhibited Bea, the narrator of the tale. De Jong’s publisher’s concerns were predictable. A bold and groundbreaking work, The Tree and the Vine caused a stir, both in Holland when it was first published, and then later again when it was translated, by Ilona Kinzer, into English and American editions, in 1961 and 1963 respectively. Though it clearly struck a chord with many readers—de Jong, it was said, received piles of fan mail from married women who questioned their life choices after reading it—its nuances were lost on many. As Lillian Faderman explains in her afterword to the Feminist Press’s 1996 reprint, a reviewer writing in The Statesman and Nation (May 12, 1961) was “unable to appreciate the book’s subtleties and larger meanings.” A new translation, by Kristen Gehrman, published this month by Transit Books, hopes to appeal to a broader readership today. As Gehrman argues, it’s a novel that deserves to be appreciated as something more than just a tale of war, or a lesbian romance.

Though the Statesman and Nation’s reviewer describes the novel as a portrait of “exotic vice,” “compulsive sin,” and “sexual pervert[s],” by today’s standards, de Jong’s depiction of lesbian love really couldn’t be any tamer. This is not a book that titillates; its emphasis instead is on the pain and damage caused by repressed desire. Although they have their more theatrical moments, on the whole Erica and Bea are far from histrionic. As Faderman reminds us, though, the reviewer is using “cliché terms […] characteristic of cover copy for the lesbian pulps of the era.”

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In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

When I read the extract from the writer and activist J. J. Phillips’s novel Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale in Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (1992), I immediately knew that I had to track down a copy. Phillips’s writing is raw, but it’s astonishingly lyrical, too, mesmerizingly so. Later, trying to find out more about the book, I came across the novelist and academic John O. Killens’s verdict in Ebony magazine, congratulating Phillips for having “captured the beauty of Negro language and put it down without fear.” This is all the more impressive a feat considering she was only twenty-two years old when this, her debut novel, was first published in 1966.

Reading Mojo Hand in its entirety only confirmed my initial impression; it was unlike anything else I’ve read. It was also a book I’d never heard any mention of outside Busby’s anthology, which seemed particularly bewildering given its strange, unique power. I quickly came to agree with the American historian, novelist, music critic, and longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, who, in 2015, described it novel as “the most neglected book I know.” Perhaps this disregard has an explanation. Reading it today, it’s clear that Phillips was a writer ahead of her era, and Mojo Hand, as summed up by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carolyn Kizer, was simply “too rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.”

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In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. 

Turns out that watching an actual pandemic unfold in real time isn’t enough for many of us. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is being streamed by droves across the globe, sales of Camus’s The Plague are through the roof, and I just received a message from a friend asking if Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year was worth a read. Seems like none of us can get enough of stories that echo our current moment, myself included. Fittingly, though, as the author of this column, I found myself drawn to a scarily appropriate but much less widely known plague novel: One by One, by the English writer and critic Penelope Gilliatt.

Originally published in 1965, this was the first novel by Gilliat, who was then the chief film critic for the British newspaper the Observer. It’s ostensibly the story of a marriage—that of Joe Talbot, a vet, and his heavily pregnant wife, Polly—but set against the astonishing backdrop of a mysterious but fatal pestilence. The first cases are diagnosed in London at the beginning of August, but by the third week of the month, ten thousand people are dead. Initially the government is more concerned with covering its own back than looking out for its citizens, so it’s slow to take action: “No one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Soon, however, it’s impossible to ignore the bodies. The eerie “glow in the sky” above the city at night is evidence of vast makeshift crematoria. London is put under lockdown, cut off from the rest of the country. Joe gallantly offers his much-needed help in one of the capital’s overcrowded, understaffed hospitals, while Polly, scared about her impending confinement and increasingly lonely, obtains a medical certificate verifying her health so that she can make the arduous journey to her mother-in-law’s house in a distant, uninfected coastal town. Some enterprising journalist hails Joe as a national hero, but then another digs up a gay sex scandal from the selfless vet’s adolescence and he becomes persona non grata.

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