In her column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she looks at Inez Holden’s There’s No Story There.

Canadian Munitions Worker during World War II

In the late twenties, London’s Bright Young People were on a mission to ensure that each of their many parties was more opulent and riotous than the last. At the “Impersonation Party,” for example, guests were asked to come dressed as well-known personalities. “London’s Bright Young People have broken out again,” announced the Daily Express in July 1927, reporting on the soiree. “The treasure hunt being passé and the uninvited guest already démodé, there has been much hard thinking to find the next sensation. It was achieved last night at a dance given by Captain Neil McEachran at his Brook Street House.” There’s a famous group portrait from the evening that serves, according to the biographer D. J. Taylor, as “a kind of Bright Young Person’s symposium.” It includes the brightest of them all, the socialite Stephen Tennant; his hedonistic partner in crime, Elizabeth Ponsonby; the photographer Cecil Beaton; the writer and aesthete Harold Acton; Georgia Sitwell; and the American actress Tallulah Bankhead. Despite the obvious visual draws of the scene—Ponsonby’s wig, Sitwell’s false nose, Tennant elaborately dressed as Queen Marie of Romania—one can’t help but be intrigued by the beautiful young woman wearing a Breton top in the very middle of the tableau. Her name was Inez Holden.

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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 Republic of South Africa is a country divided into two worlds,” wrote Miriam Tlali in the opening chapter of her debut novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, which was published in 1975. “The one, a white world—rich, comfortable, for all practical purposes organized—a world in fear, armed to the teeth,” she explains. “The other, a black world; poor, pathetically neglected and disorganized—voiceless, oppressed, restless, confused and unarmed—a world in transition, irrevocably weaned from all tribal ties.” Set at Metropolitan Radio, a busy furniture and electric-goods store in Johannesburg, Muriel at Metropolitan depicts the collision of these two worlds. It is narrated by one of the white-owned store’s black employees, a typist named Muriel, who recounts, in dogged, meticulous detail, the reality of life in the “black world,” the residents of which live on “shifting sands” as every parliamentary session brings in “fresh, more oppressive laws” that seek to dehumanize nonwhite South Africans while maintaining the power and privilege of their oppressors. The book is fictionalized autobiography, the verisimilitude of which can be traced to Tlali’s own experience working as a clerk-typist in a Johannesburg store. “The sunny Republic of South Africa,” Muriel notes derisively, “the white man’s paradise.”

Such truth-telling was radical at the time Tlali was writing, but she was a trailblazer. She was the first black woman to publish a novel written in English in South Africa, and her work was at the forefront of the new protest writing movement that emerged at the beginning of the seventies. For Tlali, writing was activism. She wrote in order to raise political consciousness and expose the evils of apartheid, both across South Africa and internationally.

“For the first time literary expression in our writing took on a completely political perspective,” explains the activist and author Lauretta Ngcobo in her introduction to the Pandora Press edition of Tlali’s 1989 short story collection, Soweto Stories (published in South Africa as Footprints in the Quag: Stories and Dialogues from Soweto). A contemporary of Tlali’s, Ngcobo was forced to flee South Africa in 1963, and lived in exile for the next three decades. “Protest writing had arrived, to the virtual exclusion of anything else that might engage the literary mind,” Ngcobo continues. Both Muriel at Metropolitan and Tlali’s second book, Amandla (1980)—about a young freedom fighter involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising and the underground resistance—deliberately subvert certain novelistic traditions. Exposition, for example, something often frowned on in literary fiction, is absolutely integral to Tlali’s writing, while plot and character development cease to function in the ways we might expect. “The force of her work,” fellow South African writer Richard Rive explains, “was its honest attention to detail and its complete lack of histrionic gestures.” Tlali herself had this to say in a paper given in Amsterdam to the Committee against Censorship in 1984—a full decade before the end of apartheid— addressing her comments to “the Philistines, the banners of books, [and] the critics”:

We black South African writers (who are faced with the task of conscientising ourselves and our people) are writing for those whom we know are the relevant audience. We are not going to write in order to qualify or fit into your definition of what you describe as “true art.” Our main objective is not to receive ballyhoo comments on our works. What is more important to us is that we should be allowed to reach our audiences. Our duty is to write for our people and about them.

Considering the importance of Tlali’s work, the fact that none of her four published volumes are currently in print is really quite astonishing. It’s all the more unforgivable given that both Muriel at Metropolitan and Amandla were immediately banned upon their initial publication in South Africa. This alone is evidence of their significance, for, as Tlali asks her persecutors in the closing comments of her 1984 paper, “If we write what you so readily describe as ‘devoid of any artistic value,’ ‘too obsessed with politics’ then why are you afraid to let our people read the books? Why do you bury them? Why does the truth hurt you?” I could make a strong argument for republishing all her books, but it’s the revolutionary Muriel at Metropolitan that I think most warrants the rediscovery. Read More

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

Photo: Lucy Scholes

In April 1962, after a day of sailing in Dorset, the fifty-year-old English writer and teacher Rosemary Manning got into her car and drove inland, up a long river valley and into the chalk country of the South Downs. She stopped briefly, to eat some biscuits and two bananas and to post a letter to a solicitor acquaintance in London, after which she continued up a deserted track. Parking her car under some trees, she took a short walk in the moonlight before burning a stash of personal letters. Manning then climbed back into her car, locked the doors and poured herself a whisky, which she washed down with over seventy sleeping tablets. Waiting for the drugs to take effect, she began to read T. H. White’s The Goshawk, but after about twenty minutes she became worried that the car’s interior light shining in the otherwise pitch-black night might attract unwanted attention. She switched it off and settled back in her seat, and, “with the suddenness of a tropical night, blackness overwhelmed me.”

Manning was discovered the following morning—she would later describe the story of her rescue as “shot through with a positively Hardyesque irony”—and rushed to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. All this is recounted in frank and straightforward detail in A Time and a Time (1971), the autobiography she wrote in the aftermath of these events—she began it two years later, in 1964, and finished it in 1966. It’s not the complete story of Manning’s life—this would come later, in her second memoir, A Corridor of Mirrors (1987), published just a year before her death at the age of seventy-six. A Time is an attempt to “come to terms with living.” Manning recounts the events that led up to her suicide attempt: the breakdown of her relationship with her lover, Elizabeth, which Manning believed was proof of her inability to find “a woman with whom I could live a full life, sexually and in companionship,” and her failure to achieve success as a writer. Most poignantly, though, it’s an uninhibited examination of the unanticipated road that now lay in front of her. Read More

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

“She weighed about ninety pounds without her jewels, and when I met her she was ninety years old.” So Ludwig Bemelmans’s introduces Lady Mendl, Elsie de Wolfe in his 1955 memoir To the One I Love the Best. De Wolfe seems almost too eccentric to be true, a “wonderful living objet d’art,” her “crepy throat” festooned with jewels and her “arthritic hands” encased in her trademark spotless white gloves. Bemelmans—a celebrated illustrator and writer—first encountered de Wolfe in Los Angeles in 1945, a city in which they’re each more unmoored than most. He’d been working for MGM but the “elegant world of Hollywood” had left him feeling jaded, longing to take to the road as an “itinerant painter,” while de Wolfe had been living out the war in Beverley Hills after having fled her beloved Villa Trianon in France.

Bemelmans is best known today either as an illustrator—some readers will undoubtedly be familiar with Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, decorated with murals he painted in the forties, or recognize his work from vintage New Yorker covers—or as the author of the Madeline books, the first of which was published in 1939 and has sold over 14 million copies to date. Less well known, however, is the fact that he was actually the author of over forty books, and although he began his writing life by penning volumes for children in the mid-‘30s, he went on to also write books for adult readers, too, many of which are now out of print, including To the One I Love the Best.

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

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, the 1960 short-story collection by British writer Penelope Mortimer, carries a note of gratitude to the editor of The New Yorker, “in whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.” Three years earlier, Mortimer had signed a contract with the magazine for six stories a year, after which she provided them with what she describes as a “steady stream” of pieces drawn from her day-to-day experience. “There was no need to look for ideas,” she explains in About Time Too (1993), her second volume of memoirs. “I mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.” Mortimer—who, by the time she died, at the age of eighty-one in 1999, had published nine novels, one short-story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism—drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. “None of the stories could accurately be described as fiction,” she goes on to confess in About Time Too; “the moment I fabricated or attempted to get away from direct experience The New Yorker regretfully turned it down.”

During the late fifties, when she wrote the twelve stories included in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Mortimer was famous for being the beautiful, lauded authoress wife of the renowned barrister-cum-writer, John Mortimer. Profiles of the writerly couple ran in magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping through Tatler, by way of Books and Bookmen. There were often photographs of them with their six picture-perfect children. Wife and mother were the identities that defined Mortimer, even as a writer. She had a regular parenting column, “Five Girls and a Boy,” in the Evening Standard newspaper, and her fiction dealt predominantly with the subjects of marriage and motherhood. She wasn’t writing twee, cosy tales of domestic bliss though; instead she penned sharp, shrewd portraits of marital infidelity, strained, unhappy housewives and their insensitive husbands, impotently railing against the draining demands of parenthood. Much of this material she drew from her own life: namely the cracks in her and John’s marriage, and the conflicts associated with finding much of her worth and value in the role of caregiver, while feeling stifled by domesticity. Her fourth novel, for example, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1958), the book that precedes Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, depicts a suburban mother’s attempts to procure an abortion for her student daughter (the situation Mortimer had found herself in the previous year when her eldest daughter, then at university, fell pregnant). It was a daring topic for its day, not least because of the resistance and disgust with which Mortimer’s protagonist Ruth’s attempts are met: “You would really advise her to do this thing? Your own daughter? Good God Ruth, I’m sorry. You make me sick,” expostulates the family doctor when she turns to him for help. The reviews, however, were excellent. “A remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement,” declared one. By the time Saturday Lunch with the Brownings was published, Mortimer had quite the reputation for dismantling the domestic idyll.

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

When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, became an international best seller. The blackly brutal account of life in the trenches touched a nerve with readers who were still reeling from the aftershocks of the Great War. Hoping to cash in on some of Remarque’s success, the following year Albert E. Marriott, an enterprising London-based publisher who was new on the scene, approached the children’s writer and journalist Evadne Price and asked whether she’d be willing to write a spoof response about women at war. He had in mind a title—“All Quaint on the Western Front”—and a pen name for her, Erica Remarks. Price had a talent for pastiche—she was the author of a popular series of girls’ stories that mimicked Richmal Crompton’s hugely successful Just William books—but she had no intention of making light of such a serious subject. Instead, she offered to write a realistic account of a woman’s experience in Flanders.

In a bid for verisimilitude, Price relied heavily on the diaries of a woman named Winifred Constance Young, an Englishwoman who had served as an ambulance driver behind the front line. Price, ever the consummate professional, wrote quickly, and the novel was finished in only six weeks. Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War (1930) is a shockingly visceral and realistic documentation of the cost of the conflict written as the firsthand account of a woman ambulance driver. It is a world of “wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise … of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair,” and the book is a shattering denunciation of the jingoism that kept the war machine turning. Although last year marked the centenary of the end of World War I, Europe is teetering on the brink of a new era of incendiary nationalistic fervor. As such, a new generation of readers would do well to turn to Price’s novel. It’s as much a warning for our future as it is a reminder of our past. Read More