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Category Archives: Re-Covered

May 6, 2019
Re-Covered

Re-Covered: To the One I Love the Best

By Lucy Scholes

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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April 17, 2019
Re-Covered

Re-Covered: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings

By Lucy Scholes

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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March 29, 2019
Re-Covered

Re-Covered: Not So Quiet … Stepdaughters of War

By Lucy Scholes

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

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February 28, 2019
Re-Covered

Re-Covered: In the Ditch

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

Photo © Lucy Scholes

“Who will be interested in reading the life of an unfortunate black woman who seemed to be making a mess of her life?” This was the question Buchi Emecheta asked herself in the early seventies before she began writing what would become her first published novel: In the Ditch (1972). Closely based on Emecheta’s own life, it’s the story of Adah (the author’s fictional alter ego), a young Nigerian single mother living on a London council estate. Like the other “problem” families around her, Adah’s doing her very best, but life is a daily struggle. Unable to work because there’s no one else to look after her children, she’s entirely dependent on the welfare state. There’s never enough money to make ends meet, and the apartment block she lives in is a site of almost Dickensian squalor: the stairwells are “smelly with a thick lavatorial stink,” the trash chutes are blocked and overflowing, and the apartments themselves are damp and poorly heated, the cupboards all “carpeted” with mildew. It’s a world rarely brought to life on the page with the candor and intensity of firsthand experience. “She, an African woman with five children and no husband, no job, and no future, was just like most of her neighbours—shiftless, rootless, with no rightful claim to anything. Just cut off … none of them knew the beginning of their existence, the reason for their hand-to-mouth existence, or the result or future of that existence. All would stay in the ditch until somebody pulled them out or they sank under.”

Upon learning that Emecheta had written up episodes from her life, a friend suggested she try sending them to Richard Crossman, then-editor of the New Statesman, Britain’s socialist paper. Emecheta typed up a few “Observations” and began sending one to Crossman every Tuesday (the day she visited the post office to collect her weekly family benefit payment). After a few weeks, she heard back, and he began printing her work as a regular column. This led to interest from publishers and agents, and soon Allison & Busby published In the Ditch—the collected columns turned into a novel. This was the beginning of Emecheta’s long and acclaimed writing career. By and large the reviews were excellent, but some critics wondered how a supposedly well-educated woman found herself in the ditch in the first place. These questions, Emecheta explains in her autobiography Head Above Water (1986), motivated her to write a prequel: Second-Class Citizen (1974).

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- Buchi Emecheta
January 11, 2019
Re-Covered

Re-Covered: The World My Wilderness

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

Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) was one of the most prolific English writers of the first half of the twentieth century. She published twenty-three novels, twelve nonfiction volumes, and an abundance of journalism. I could make a case for the republication of any number of her novels, especially since the only one currently in print in the U.S. is The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Perhaps Potterism (1920), an entertaining, if now slightly dated, murder mystery that satirizes tabloid journalism—it was a best seller in both England and America. Or the intriguingly titled Told by an Idiot (1923), one of Macaulay’s most successful novels of ideas, in this case the examination—via three generations of one family—of sexual politics. Maybe Crew Train (1926), which tells the story of Denham Dobie, a young woman trying to adapt to life with her highbrow London relatives, and skewers the pretensions of the literary establishment. But of all Macaulay’s books, it’s one written much later that we most need to reread today: her penultimate novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), an elegiac, evocative depiction of the aftermath of World War II.

Although Macaulay was born in England, she and her siblings enjoyed a rather unorthodox childhood. In search of Mediterranean sun to ease their mother’s tubercular throat, the family spent seven years living in the small fishing village of Varazze in Italy, where, roaming the countryside and beaches, the children found what Macaulay’s biographer Sarah LeFanu describes as “a vision of paradise.” In 1894, they returned to England, settling in Oxford, where Macaulay quickly had to adapt to the more conventional life of a well-brought-up young Englishwoman. She attended Oxford High School and then Somerville (though she suffered a nervous collapse that meant she was unable to take her final examinations), after which she began writing. During World War I, she took on various roles in aid of the war effort: she was a nurse in a military hospital and a Land Girl in Cambridgeshire, followed by a stint at the Ministry of Information. It was while working there that the thirty-seven-year-old Macaulay met the man who was to be the love of the rest of her life, Gerald O’Donovan, a married writer and former Jesuit priest nine years her senior. Macaulay and O’Donovan fell in love and began a clandestine affair that was to last until his death in 1942. Macaulay never married or had children, nor did she have any other significant romantic relationships, even after Gerald died. Given that one of the legacies of the Great War was a generation of surplus women, her celibacy wouldn’t have necessarily been considered exceptional, though she was a little older than most of the partnerless women of the era. In the early twenties, she moved to London and quickly established herself on the city’s literary scene as a writer of sharp, satiric, and witty works that addressed the pertinent issues of the day. Widely liked and admired—she counted among her friends and acquaintances Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Ivy Compton-Burnett—in the interwar years Macaulay was a well-known writer, broadcaster, and public intellectual.

Though it’s been out of print since the early eighties, The World My Wilderness was reissued by Virago Modern Classics last year. That it reappears in the UK amid the current vogue for new nature writing—a phenomenon spearheaded by the popularity of works by Robert Macfarlane, novelist Sarah Hall, and memoirist Helen Macdonald to name just a few—is perhaps no coincidence. At the heart of the novel are Macaulay’s gleaming descriptions of how the natural world has reclaimed the ruined postwar urban environment: “this scarred and haunted green and stone and brambled wilderness … a-hum with insects and astir with secret, darting, burrowing life.” Read More
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- The World My Wilderness
- Virago Modern Classics