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.”

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More