Nicholas Blake's The Worm of Death (#1961Club)

 

Dr. Piers Loudron is a successful and well-to-do doctor living in Greenwich, the eastern end of London. 

Nigel Strageways (our series detective) and his partner Clare Massinger have just moved to Greenwich. They're invited over to meet their new neighbours the Loudrons. Dr. Piers' wife has passed, but there are also his adult children, three sons (one adopted) and a daughter.

Dr. Piers disappears on a foggy night. The Loudron children approach Strangeways for advice. A week later his body is found floating in the Thames. Both wrists have been slashed.

Suicide? But the wrists are slashed in such a way that suicide is unlikely, and if it was suicide how did the body get into the river? (As the cover suggests, a slashed-wrist suicide often takes place in the bath.) And just in case you were inclined to the suicide theory, Dr. Piers' daughter-in-law is strangled halfway through the book.

All four of the children have plausible motives to murder their father as does as the daughter's boyfriend, whom Dr. Piers didn't approve of. Strangeways hints he knows who did it pretty early (and I kind of did, too) but Blake does a pretty successful job of keeping us on our toes. I've had mixed results with the Strangeways series, but I thought this one a pretty good entry.

It was fun as a 1961 book because it makes good use of the old East End of London, which, of course is all changed now:

     "When he [Strangeways] got home, Clare kissed him, 'My goodness you've been drinking port.'

     'Yes, with an old tart in the Isle of Dogs." 

The Isle of Dogs isn't the sort of place old tarts live anymore I think.

 

My original list of 1961 candidates is here. 

Nicholas Blake is a pen name for the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, probably better known now as the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1961). Dead body. 

Some Previous 1961 Reads

Two books from 1961 have made it on to the blog before, both by Erle Stanley Gardner. One was a Perry Mason story, The Case of the Spurious Spinster:

The other was a Cool and Lam tale, Shills Can't Cash Chips:

It being Gardner, those two weren't even all the books he wrote in 1961, but I thought both were pretty good entries in their series.

Also in the mystery department, but not on my blog, The Wycherly Woman is one of the best of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. 

I've seen lots of people remark how many great choices there were for 1961 and so, of course, some things will be neglected. But there were two I read before I started blogging that I felt were kind of masterpieces when I read them and they didn't seem to be on anybody's radar, so I thought I'd drag them in:

Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White (1912-1990) was the Australian novelist who won the Nobel in 1973. In his Riders in the Chariot--in spirit the chariot is that of Elijah--four otherwise unrelated individuals in suburban Sydney are marked by mystical experience as hidden saints in a world of prejudice and contempt. Can an Aboriginal artist, an evangelical washerwoman, a childlike heiress, and an Auschwitz survivor redeem this world? 

A clue: in the epigraph to the novel, White quotes William Blake's idea of Isaiah speaking, "...the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for the consequences, but wrote..."

The Death and Life of Great American Cities 

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a writer and activist on urban issues. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her major work. It's full of surprising and brilliant insights: she's a theorist of urban planning who quite often thinks too much planning is bad for cities. I have a couple of pages from an old New Yorker tucked in my copy and in it she says of the city, "...a place full of hope and expectation, and this is has nothing to do with architecture. Those are the emotions that draw us to cities, and they depend on things being a bit messy." Her book isn't Theory with a capital T. It's often said she had a novelist's eye, and it's true: the book is wonderfully readable.

Jacobs cut her teeth as an activist saving Washington Square in New York City from an expressway. She moved to Toronto in 1968, and did the same for us here by helping to squelch the Spadina expressway. The last thirty-five years of her life she lived in a house shown on her Wikipedia page:

  

And the last four years of her life, she was my neighbour. (We live on the opposite side of the street about eight houses up.) In any halfway decent sort of weather I used to see her sitting on the porch--"Eyes on the street" was an important concept for her--but I never had the nerve to introduce myself.

What other 1961 books would you have liked to see?

 Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

Symptoms of Love (#1961Club)

 

Symptoms of Love

Love is a universal migraine.

A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason.

 

Symptoms of true love

Are leanness, jealousy,

Laggard dawns;

 

Are omens and nightmares--

Listening for a knock,

Waiting for a sign:

 

For a touch of her fingers

In a darkened room,

For a searching look.

 

Take courage, lover!

Could you endure such grief

At any hand but hers?

 

-Robert Graves

 

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was an English poet who conveniently wrote a short book called More Poems 1961. What could be better for a year club poetry post, I ask you?  😉

 

 

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I don't actually have that first edition shown above, of course. Allow Gumby to introduce the beat-up paperback I do have:

 

 

John Hawkes' The Lime Twig (#1961Club)

 "And in gloom, with the bells stroking and the wipers establishing the uncomfortable rhythm of the hour, the two wet men withdrew to the cars and in slow procession quit the sooty stables in Highland Green, drove separately through vacant city streets to uncover the particulars of this crime."

In Aldington, there's a horse race, the Golden Bowl. William Hencher lures his landlords, Michael and Margaret Banks, into a scheme to run a dodgy horse. It doesn't work out. Two detectives have just been led to Hencher's body in a stable, seemingly kicked to death by the horse. Things ended no better for Michael and Margaret Banks. 

It's a crime story, but what I've quoted above is the very end of the novel. We have no particular reason to believe that the detectives will solve the crime.

The novel is divided into eight sections plus a prologue; each is prefaced by excerpts from the column of (fictional) sports writer Sidney Slyter. The prologue takes place during World War II when Hencher's house in London is bombed and his mother killed; later after the Banks have bought the restored house, Hencher takes one of the flats and starts the scheme.

The American John Hawkes (1925-1998) is usually labeled an experimental novelist. But as you can see from above the prose isn't Joycean-level difficult. It's not plotless. There are characters that feel real enough, even if they're generally objectionable--half of them gangsters, and the other half would-be crooks. The Lime Twig was his fourth novel, and was his breakout.

It's a violent story, though if you read Andrew Vachss or the Jack Reacher novels of today, it may not seem all that violent. But sometimes that's the way: something that seemed outrageous in 1961 comes to seem middle of the road later on. But I'd read another Hawkes before another Vachss or Child.

Hawkes seems to have been the anti-Hemingway: he wrote his rather violent novels, but in this interview aired on PBS, he says, "I like the idea of the author as an ordinary person." No need to hunt lions or go to war for him.

He taught writing at Brown for most of his professional career. He and his wife and kids would go every three years or so to the South of France where he'd write a new novel. He seems rather a nice guy for such a violent story... 😉

It's 1961 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting. 

My original list of candidates is here.
 

Peter de Vries' The Blood of the Lamb (#1961Club)

"as I saw myself, a sort of reverse Pilgrim trying to make some progress away from the City of God."

Don Wanderhope is born to a Calvinist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago before World War I. Both his parents were born in Holland. His uncle is a minister, but his father Ben's faith in God is shaky. Ben Wanderhope delivers ice; later when that's no longer a viable job, he switches to picking up garbage. Don Wanderhope intends to achieve a different sort of life.

Don's beloved older brother Louie is a student at the University of Chicago. Though the UofC was founded as a Baptist institution, it's already a hotbed of free-thinking, and Louie's faith has gone well beyond shaky to outright disbelief. But then Louie gets a severe flu, and the family gathers round to pray. His mother asks:

"You have no doubts, have you, Louie?"

"No doubts on my part."

Those were Louie's last words. You will see the ambiguity in that statement. Mrs. Wanderhope takes it one way; young Don Wanderhope in exactly the opposite way. Even dying, wise-cracking Louie probably meant the ambiguity.

 

It's the first of several out of sequence deaths, often having to do with lungs, in Don Wanderhope's life. The last is that of his daughter Carol from leukemia. What is faith in the presence of such blows? How can one accept God or even this world?

Peter De Vries, (1910-1993) like Don Westerhope, was born in Chicago to family of Dutch Reformed immigrants. He went on to become editor of Poetry magazine for a stretch and then after World War II, a staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote twenty-plus comic novels, a couple of which were made into Hollywood movies. This novel, too, is funny--one chapter is a parody of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain:

"Thus were banished my visions of a sanitarium as a place were one sat on benches philosophizing in the sun in the manner of The Magic Mountain, or contracted imprudent passions in the music room."

But then the sanatarium does have two old men philosophizing, and a notorious libertine, who unlike Mynheer Peeperkorn, isn't Dutch. And Wanderhope does contract an imprudent passion.

So the novel is funny--just not in a guffawing way. I've read other novels by de Vries, though a long time ago, and I remember them funnier. But this is a dark subject, and it was inspired by the death from leukemia of de Vries' own daughter in 1960. So: moving and thoughtful, and not without humour.

It's the week of the 1961 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. Thanks to them for hosting!

 My original list of candidates is here.

 

 

1961 Club Candidates

 

Monday begins the week of Kaggsy and Simon's year club, and this spring the year is 1961. I piled up some candidates, because who doesn't like to look at a pile of books? (Right? You do agree, don't you?) In case the picture is hard to make out that's:

Nicholas Blake/The Worm of Death (Mystery)

Peter de Vries/The Blood of the Lamb (Comic, Chicago)

John Hawkes/The Lime Twig (Experimental) 

Iris Murdoch/A Severed Head (British, Literary)

Freya Stark/Dust in the Lion's Paw (Autobiography, Travel)

Constantin Stanislavski/Creating a Role (Acting manual)

Frantz Fanon/The Wretched of the Earth (Political)

Charles Olson/The Maximus Poems (Poetry)

 

Naturally...I won't read them all over the next week, though I have already finished two (and will have posts early next week). I hope to get through one or two more.

 

Alas, the Olson is probably aspirational: I've been reading that for a year, and I'm about a hundred pages in... 

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jane Welsh Carlyle

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jenny kissed me when we met

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

  Say health and wealth have missed me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

 

-Leigh Hunt

 

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is better known as an essayist, but also wrote poetry. The story goes that in 1838, Hunt, just recovered from a bad illness, visited Thomas and Jane Carlyle at their home, and Jane Carlyle was so happy to see him recovered, she kissed him. That portrait doesn't make Jane Carlyle look like the jumping up and kissing type, but I guess you never know...

 

I pulled Virginia Woolf's The Second Common Reader off the shelf for its essay on George Gissing, and one of the other essays is about Jane Carlyle and how she is one of the great letter writers in English. That got me to thinking about the only other thing I know abot Jane Carlyle, which was this poem.

 

Hunt called the poem a rondeau, though if so it's a simplified one. It starts with a refrain that's half the first line, and ends with that refrain occupying only a half-line. But a writer of the true French rondeau would have 'Jenny kissed me' as a half-line at least once more in the middle of the poem.

 

Not that it has much relevance to all that above, but I can't resist, while I have the Virginia Woolf off the shelf, quoting the final words of the last essay, 'How Should One Read a Book?'

"...the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have been reading.'" 

Florian Illies' The Magic of Silence (Caspar David Friedrich)

"You can dream about his works, but you can't understand them clearly because they are indefinite, even in his own soul...He says himself he can explain neither the idea nor the picture that expresses it."

-Alexander Turgenev

 

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter. Illies' book, which came out in German in 2023 and last year in an English translation by Tony Crawford, is about Friedrich's life, but also about the history and reception of his paintings after his death. Friedrich had fallen into obscurity when he died in Dresden, and it wasn't until 1900, when a Norwegian art historian interested in a friend of Friedrich's came across some paintings and made Friedrich his cause.

Illies' style in the book is anecdotal and impressionistic. Looking at a Friedrich painting in Dresden gave Samuel Beckett the idea for Waiting for Godot. Goethe awarded Friedrich the Weimar art prize in 1805, but later said that Friedrich was taking art in the wrong direction.

Both the Nazis and the East German Communists thought Friedrich was one of theirs; they may both have been wrong... In the late 1930s, a Jewish art dealer came to a Berlin museum and said I have a painting of Friedrich's that I want to sell. The museum agreed to buy it, at a fair value, but it didn't have enough money in its acquisitions budget, so it appealed to Hitler to cough up. Which he did. And which enabled the art dealer to get his family out of Germany in time.

A couple of years ago I read Illies' 1913. It works the same way: an anecdotal style that jumps around, but still it suggests a larger picture. It's not straightforward history, but it works and makes good reading. While I'd known of Friedrich before, I got to know him better when I saw several of his paintings in Germany last fall.

One of  the paintings I saw (at the Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin):

The Cross on the Baltic

Covering Germany for my European Reading Challenge.

 

George Gissing's New Grub Street (#CCSpin)

"Best or worst, novels are all the same. Nothing but love, love, love. What silly nonsense it is."

Gissing's novel of 1891 New Grub Street isn't that kind of novel. Or not exactly.

It's not that there isn't talk about love: that's Amy Reardon above and she has just been discussing with her friend Edith why it is divorce is so difficult in England at the time. She had loved her husband Edwin at one point, but that point is probably past, beaten down by the couple's unbearable poverty.

So what it is, is a novel of money, or more, the lack of it. Balzac is referenced several times as a novelist writing on the right kind of subject.

Edwin Reardon is a novelist, maybe aspiring to be what we would now call midlist. And as in Balzac, we learn about the finances; in this case what it takes--and what you can make--as a novelist. Reardon's biggest success brought him £100, an amount that is the barest minimum for a respectable existence in London for a year. That was for a so-called triple-decker, a novel of 200,000 words or 600-800 pages. Think Middlemarch in size. He needs to write one of those a year, and with no guarantee he'll meet the demands of the moment. He can't. Book reviewing? Articles for the magazines? These pay, but not well. Reardon writes a shorter novel with a sensationalist plot; he hopes to get £75 for it, but nobody is willing to buy.

Reardon is not the only writer; the novel is set among a circle of writers. There's Whelpdale: 

"And what's more, he made six guineas in the first fortnight; so he says, at all events. Now that's one of the finest jokes I ever heard. A man who can't get anyone to publish his own books makes a living by telling other people how to write!"

There's the nearly heroic Biffen, who lives in utter poverty in a garret, has (almost) no hope of marrying, toiling away on his novel: Mr. Bailey, Grocer. Nobody expects it to be read when he does finish it. Biffen himself says of it, "The result will be something unutterably tedious...If it were anything but tedious, it would be untrue." A nod to the naturalism still mostly in the future in English?

Amy Reardon's uncle Alfred Yule writes for the magazines with the aid of his talented daughter Marian. Someday he hopes to edit his own magazine. But until then:

"Seeing him in the title-lists of a periodical most people knew what to expect, but not a few forbore cutting open the pages he occupied." 

Dora and Maud Milvain (and mostly it's Dora) write religious stories for magazines; once their mother dies, and her annuity with her, that's what they will have to live on. Dora finds the work beneath her, but she is good at it. Her brother Jasper tells her: "Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the earliest opportunity."

The other main character is Jasper Milvain. He can't write 'stories' he says, but he sees making his way in the writing trade, via magazine articles, then an editorship:

"First of all, my qualities are not of the kind which demand the recognition of posterity. My writing is for to-day, most distinctly hodiernal. It has no value except in reference to to-day."

And he knows how to go about it: 

"Art must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade."

Milvain is a goer, and it's he who largely makes the plot go. At the beginning of the novel Milvain and Reardon are friends, with the impractical, somewhat older Reardon, having had some success.  Milvain tries to get him to capitalize on it, but to no avail, with little effect other than increasing Amy Reardon's dissatisfaction. They don't become enemies, but their differening trajectories pull them apart.

Milvain meets Marian Yule (Amy Reardon's cousin) and falls in love with her. He certainly can't afford to marry when he first sees her, but if one or the other of them should ever come into enough money? But until then Milvain cannot acknowledge his love to anyone, scarcely even to himself. And maybe he could marry an heiress?

"You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame."

How to get around that conundrum? That's Milvain's problem and he intends to solve it. There's an inheritance to be sorted out, and there are marriages--though are any of them for love? (I'd say maybe one. If you've read it, what did you think?) Milvain's a bit of a monster, but not entirely. Milvain's advice to Reardon is sound, if unhelpful. When Mr. Bailey, Grocer finally does appear in print, Milvain does what he can to puff it.

The book was my Classics Club spin book, and I finished it last month, but I've only now gotten around to the post. (We went on vacation--though since I'm mostly retired, what exactly was I vacationing from? Blog posting, perhaps.) The novel is dark, but funny, complex, and engaging. It portrays a believable segment of society in interesting detail, different from today, but maybe not so different: even today midlist authors today scramble to publish articles, get grants, teach writing, all in order to achieve a bare middle-class existence, if that.

It's one of those novels I've known of for a long time, more read about than actually read, and I pulled off the shelf a couple of things I'd previously read to remind myself what they had to say.

Woolf's essay from the second volume of The Common Reader is a little harsh on Gissing, I thought, even though she remains positive. Her complaint is Gissing is a novelist who can only write about himself, unable to create other characters. Despite the current fashion for auto-fiction, I would agree if this were true it would be a valid complaint. Give me Middlemarch over Leaving the Atocha Station. But I don't feel it applies to New Grub Street. Edwin Reardon is no doubt a roughly accurate self-portrait of Gissing. But Jasper Milvain, Amy Reardon, Marian Yule, Dora Milvain are also rounded characters. Even a comic type like Whelpdale has some substance to him. (Woolf's may be a more fair charge for something like Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.)

But she also writes, "Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of the mind, who makes his people think," and this is quite true. He's not Dostoevsky, but his characters do think, do have ideas, those ideas come into conflict, and nobody is tendentiously given the right answer ahead of time. Milvain is perhaps shallow, but Reardon is unable to function.

As for Orwell, I feel Gissing is all over him, and the index of my four-volume Collected Essays, Letters, and Journalism backs me up. Well, one would expect the author of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier to be deeply interested in a novelist of poverty. But in 1948 Orwell was requested to write an essay on Gissing for the magazine Politics and Letters on the occasion of the reissuing of two lesser-known Gissing novels. The magazine went bankrupt before the article appeared, and Orwell had difficulty recouping his manuscript from the empty offices. The article only appeared in 1960, so it was Orwell's heirs who got paid, an ironic outcome Gissing would have darkly appreciated, I'm sure.

Orwell separates out what Gissing does from picaresque novels and other earlier types of narrative. 

"A true novel...will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability..."

The very criteria for which Woolf faulted Gissing. But Orwell writes:

"But merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain England has produced very few better novelists."

I think Orwell has the better of this argument.

From the last page of New Grub Street: 

"'Ha! Isn't the world a glorious place?'

'For rich people.'

'Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils.'"

Maybe the world hasn't changed so much?