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

Right, Hrabal with one of his cats (courtesy of New Directions)

“If you want to write, keep cats,” Aldous Huxley famously said. As I read Bohumil Hrabal’s haunting but strange slip of a memoir, All My Cats, I wondered if the Czech writer would have agreed with him. Hrabal’s book was originally published in 1986, as Autičko—which translates as “the Little Car,” the nickname Hrabal gave first to his Renault 5, a small white car with ginger-colored seat covers. He later gave the same name to one of his cats, a kitten with “white socks and a white bib, and the rest of it had a tabby pattern, but in ginger.” The volume has only recently been translated into English, excellently so by Paul Wilson. Do not be fooled by the cuteness of the book’s original title, though. In it, we encounter a cat lover trapped in a hell of his own making, driven to the brink of madness.

Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Morovia, began writing poetry in the forties, and by the following decade switched to prose. Little of what he was writing made it into print—instead he read his work aloud at meetings of an underground literary group, attended by the novelist Josef Skvorecky and run by the poet Jiri Kolar. Some of Hrabal’s stories appeared in samizdat editions, but his first officially published work, Lark on a String, was withdrawn in 1959, a week before it was due to be released; his formally inventive style regarded as the antithesis of the realist works glorified by the Communist regime. (It eventually appeared, four years later, as Pearl on the Bottom.) In the early sixties, Hrabal’s émigré friends helped distribute his work abroad, where it found a success that allowed him to write full time. He’d worked, before then, as a railway laborer, an insurance agent, a traveling salesman, a laborer at a steelworks, a compactor of wastepaper at a trash plant, and a theater stagehand. Those odd jobs inspired certain of his novels, such as Closely Observed Trains, a story about a Czech railway worker who defies his Nazi oppressors, and Too Loud a Solitude, in which the narrator builds his own library from books he’s salvaged, as Hrabal did during his time at the trash plant. The publication, in 1963, of Pearl on the Bottom launched Hrabal’s career properly in Czechoslovakia. This was followed, only a year later, by Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age—a book that, like Lucy Ellmann’s recently lauded Ducks, Newburyport, unfurls in a single, rambling sentence—and the year after that by Closely Observed Trains, which further cemented Hrabal’s success when it was adapted into a movie. Directed by Jiří Menzel, Ostře sledované vlaky won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and remains today one of the popular works of the Czech New Wave.

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

Lorenza Mazzetti, 1950s. (Unknown photographer, courtesy of Shelley Boettcher)

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.

She’s even less well known as an author, especially beyond the borders of her native Italy. Although her first novel, Il cielo cade (1961)—translated into English, by Marguerite Waldman, as The Sky Falls (1962)—was awarded Italy’s prestigious Premio Viareggio Prize, and is still considered something of a contemporary classic there, the English translation has been out of print for years. Told from the point of view of her child narrator, Penny, the author’s fictional alter-ego, it details the tragic events of Mazzetti’s own childhood during the Second World War: namely the murder by the Germans of her aunt and her cousins, followed by the suicide of her distraught uncle. The Sky Falls is ripe for rediscovery, not least because recent years have seen significant efforts to restore Mazzetti’s place in the cinematic canon. It’s only fitting her equally audacious literary work be celebrated as well. Mazzetti valued the same intensity of personal experience in her writing that she did in her filmmaking. Despite having been written nearly sixty years ago, Penny’s voice is astonishingly fresh, urgent, and compelling.

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

Let’s play “guess the novel”: It was written and first published in French in the mid-50’s, and is set over the course of a single summer. Its heroine is one of the jeunesse dorée, dissatisfied and bored despite her wealth and privilege. She drives a fast sports car, and idles away her days sunbathing on Mediterranean beaches and flirting with her boyfriend. She’s a capricious enfant terrible, and she’s stricken with jealousy at the happiness of a couple close to her, so she amuses herself by sabotaging their relationship, with unexpectedly tragic consequences.

Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, but a lesser-known work by the Algerian writer Assia Djebar. La Soif was first published in France in 1957 (three years after Bonjour Tristesse) and nimbly translated into English by Frances Frenaye, as The Mischief, the following year. There are plenty of parallels between the two novels. Both were debuts written by precociously young women writers—Sagan was eighteen and Djebar twenty-one—a description that also applied to their heroines: Sagan’s seventeen-year-old Cécile and Djebar’s twenty-year-old Nadia. However, while Bonjour Tristesse remains famous, recognized today as a mid-twentieth-century literary sensation-turned-French-classic, The Mischief is barely remembered, out of print in both the original French and the English translation.

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

Today, the words “written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger” are considered a stamp of genius. The mid-twentieth-century creative partnership between the son of a Kentish hop farmer and a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré is the stuff of legend. Powell and Pressburger met in 1938, when Alexander Korda, then the owner of London Films, hired Pressburger to rewrite the script for The Spy in Black, which was being directed by Powell. The chemistry between the two men was immediate. “I was not going to let him get away in any hurry,” Powell recalled. “I had always dreamt of this phenomenon: a screenwriter with the heart and mind of a novelist, who would be interested in the medium of film, and who would have wonderful ideas, which I would turn into even more wonderful images.” Theirs was a unique collaboration, not least because Pressburger should have been Powell’s subordinate; “in the 1930s,” the director (and Pressburger’s grandson) Kevin Macdonald explains in the biography he wrote of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, “the scriptwriter had about the same status as the electrician—the foreign scriptwriter even less so.” Instead, the two worked together on equal terms. When, in 1943, they formalized their relationship—what Powell called their “marriage without sex”—creating their production company, The Archers, “their separate creative identities” were, according to Macdonald, fully “submerged.” The two men shared equally both the financial rewards and the creative responsibility for the films they made together. The movies that followed in the forties, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (“which may be the greatest English film ever made,” surmised The New Yorker in the mid-’90s), A Matter of Life and Death, and Black Narcissus, are today beloved and admired the world over. Yet mention the The Glass Pearls, and the title is unlikely to ring a bell. Read More

Margaret Drabble is so well known that seeing her included in this column might confuse some readers. Writing in the New York Times only two years ago, when Drabble’s most recent novel, The Dark Flood Rises, was published, Cynthia Ozick described the then seventy-eight-year-old as “one of Britain’s most dazzling writers,” and the work in question—Drabble’s nineteenth novel—as “humane and masterly.” In her sort-of memoir, The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble describes writing as a “chronic, incurable illness,” one she caught “by default when I was twenty-one”; her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was published three years later when she was only twenty-four. And yet, though she herself is not forgotten, certain of her works have fallen out of print. Perhaps it’s inevitable that in a career as long as hers, some of what she’s written would, despite its brilliance, have slipped through the cracks.

The Ice Age—Drabble’s eighth novel, originally published in 1977—is one such example. Having spent much of this summer reading Drabble’s perceptive, elegantly written work, I can say with confidence that this one stands out from the rest. First, it marked the moment when Drabble turned her attention from the small-scale worlds of a protagonist’s individual struggle to what Patrick Parrinder described as her later, “settled, capacious, Condition-of-England chronicles, prolonged ruminations on the way we live now.” Her earliest protagonists were young women, often of the same age and background as Drabble herself—she grew up in Sheffield, was educated at a Quaker school in York, took a double first at Cambridge, tried her hand at acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then moved to London and began writing while also looking after her young family (she had three children with her first husband, Clive Swift)—who find the values of their youth challenged when they come up against a more metropolitan world. In The Ice Age, however, there’s a shift in focus from the individual to the collective, and Drabble’s fiction takes on a strong sociological angle. Interviewed for this magazine in the fall of 1978, only a year after The Ice Age was published, she admits that “the whole idea” for it “came from reading newspapers.”

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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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