The Croquet Player (1936) by H G Wells is set in an alternative universe where croquet and archery have the same exalted sporting status as tennis. It’s a novella of serious frivolity, and seems to be most highly regarded now for its apparent foreshadowing of the Second World War. Given its publication date, after six or more years of literary anticipation of conflict with Nazi Germany, it would be astonishing if anything Wells wrote at this period did not anticipate war. His First World War novel, Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), and his own first-hand knowledge from that period, supply the detail of what happens when civilians are bombed.
Much more interesting is how he channels H P Lovecraft with Gothic horror. Georgie Frobisher is an international croquet and archery champion, and resides with his maiden aunt, Miss Frobisher. Out of season she and he concern themselves with the Woman’s World Humanity Movement, but as soon as mallets and longbows may be brandished, she drops political agitation and they go on tour. They are at the English seaside resort of Les Noupets, for its fine club croquet lawns, which is near Cainsmarsh, a village name with the highest Lovecraftian implications. The local doctor buttonholes Georgie with a dark and unnerving tale of hauntings, terror, tortured children and open graves.
The delight of this story is the impressive inverse bathos that Wells produces by making the frivolous Georgie, who only lives for his game and is under the severe thumb of his aunt, the serious, unaffected hero character. Wells piles on the Gothic, with a Neanderthal skeleton, a dog beaten to death, murderous threats, endemic panic and a thoroughly objectionable psychiatrist. The reader is thrilled and repelled: Georgie simply listens calmly and then leaves to play a game of croquet for which he has been engaged.
Lifting the surface layers of this intriguing and entertaining story, some interesting elements emerge, not least the wartime predictions, and Wells’ views on the misappropriation of science by the barely educated. I was so happy to stumble upon it.
H G Wells, The Croquet Player (1936), (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1998, 2003), ISBN 0-905488-89-X.
Some time ago in Penguin New Writing John Lehmann asked for funny stories to print. He also suggested that both women and men would be leaping to their desks at the end of war to write the fiction they’d been bottling up during the war years. None of this is showing in what he’s publishing in Penguin New Writing. There is no humour at all, and several male authors are becoming regular, repeat contributors, while the women authors published so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In his Foreword for this first issue of 1948 Lehmann rails against National Service, and the impossible hoops that authors have to jump through to gain exemption. Given that only male authors feature in this issue, and only men were conscripted in peacetime, it’s pretty obvious that Lehmann doesn’t consider post-war women as authors, or have much interest in publishing what they might write. With editors like him, who needs enemies?
However, with authors like P H Newby, the woman’s perspective is not wholly ignored. ‘Crowning Glory’ is about the cutting off of a teenage girl’s long hair, at her mother’s instructions, against her father’s wishes. The barber’s hands are delicately intrusive, and the gypsy’s warning comes true. Newby is one of the few authors that Lehmann publishes who writes about women as fully and perceptively as he does about men.
Pause here to admire the emotion shared by Alec Guinness’s Richard II and Harry Andrews as Gaveston, in the Old Vic’s 1947 production.
In lengthy succession we have Andre Gide’s essay on Paul Valéry and Lehmann himself on James Joyce. Both are undoubtedly important but I could not summon the interest to read them. Penguin New Writing seems to have a tediously instructive element which is beginning to annoy me. However, William Sansom’s essay on Edgar Allen Poe explains much about his alarmingly gothic fiction that we’ve read in earlier issues: this was worth ploughing through.
John Lehmann opens this issue’s Foreword by apologising for the sudden disappearance of the coloured plates. They’d vanished in issue 31, presumably a last-minute or force majeure decision, because in this issue the reasons are discussed. All the good colour printers in Britain are booked up for months at a time, so there is no room in the queue without unacceptable delays, affecting the whole magazine’s schedule. It’s a pity, but I expect that readers would have preferred reliable delivery and black and white photographs, rather than uncertain and unpredictable beauty.
P H Newby’s ‘Khamseen’, however, isn’t about predictable English privilege, but unaccountable and alien privileges. Fawzia is sold to the Widow Hamed as a child, and after a week of eating well is revealed to be a child of twelve rather than a scrawny seven or eight. She is the servant-of-all-work, but she comes to dominate the household, and her estranged mother begins to haunt the street outside, aware now of a daughter’s value as a very saleable trained beauty. The men in the story seem to be ineffectual and hated: the three women prowl around each other’s spaces, debating ownership.
Modern French tapestries by Saint-Säens and others are sparkling, like crisper, more colourfully precise Chagalls.
Angus McBean’s photographs of Twelfth Night at Stratford upon Avon (starring Beatrix Lehmann: another sister, John?), Paul Scofield and Walter Hudd show a sturdy, primary-coloured production with some odd hats.
The best contributions appear at the end of the issue, by which time people will be flicking through the pages sleepily. Dunstan Thompson’s ‘A traveller to Deptford’ is reportage of a journey he took by train to Deptford. He was advised to get a train to New Cross and then to walk, since it would be faster than the direct train an hour later. Having once lived in Brockley I know exactly how long it takes to walk to Deptford from New Cross, so this intrigued me. Turns out he was ill-advised, and enters a foreign land. His account of a bombed-out and desolate urban wasteland teeming with savage children is so close to Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness as to corroborate all her descriptions of the devastated City churches. Thompson is looking for St Nicholas, Deptford, and Marlowe’s grave, and finds it a ruin. The vicar lives ‘very far away’, nowhere near this milling bombsite of graffiti, broken tombs, chapel alcoves used by prostitutes and ruined stonework. The curate is exhausted, with no hope of restoring the site. ‘His voice was passionless with the weary right accent: he was from some university. There was nothing to be done, he said. Everything that had not been bombed had been stolen. “They have taken the last of the timber for firewood.” I asked “Can no one stop the children from breaking into the graves?” This is post-war London, very far away from Mayfair and the servant problem. This is also post-war Europe.
I’m a bit behind the pack in reading Simon Morden’s novel Down Station (2015). I’m not sure I’m going to stay on board for its sequel, The White City, published in 2016, but there are a lot of very good things about this London fantasy novel.
New Writing, John Lehmann’s influential British literary magazine, first appeared in 1936, and fostered politically Left writers and artists. It stopped publication in 1950, with issue 40, just as Tennessee Williams and John Wain (for example) joined the contributors. I found issues 27 to 40 in an Oxfam shop, and bought them for a fiver. I’ll be reviewing each issue each week: you’ll find links to the other issue reviews at the end.
The war creeps in again with beautiful lithographs or pen-and-ink works by Edward Bawden and Anthony Gross.
Angus McBean‘s photographs of Peter Brook’s production of Love Labour’s Lost sit beside a melodramatic scene from J B Priestley: British theatre of the period.
KM: I didn’t like them. Well, I did like quite a lot about quite a lot of them, but her style did not work for me. The book was republished with an additional 13 stories in 1994, with not one but two prefaces by the author, both largely incomprehensible. And that’s the problem; you have to really buy into Riding’s reputation and oeuvre to enjoy these stories. They are modernist, surrealist fairy tales, written in a flat, disassociated style that hides wonders and makes the remarkable ordinary. Leonora Carrington did something similar with 
BB: Like you, I have mixed feelings about this book. There are a handful of stories that I consider just stunning in their refusal to be like anything else I’ve ever read (I must confess that I’ve not read Leonora Carrington’s stories). Certainly there is that deliberately abstract and absurdist approach that we all know from Kafka, where a man transformed into a cockroach overnight is taken at face value. But unlike Kafka, Borges, and others, Riding has no problem inserting herself into the story, commenting upon the narrative, at times almost poking at it like some odd specimen she’s examining with her magnifying glass.
KM: I could not be bothered after the fifth page of garbled nonsense in the first preface. It didn’t tell me anything other than she had a lot of mixed feelings about the process and intent of writing, but neither preface was interesting enough to try to untangle.
Here’s a bit of Second World War literary and theatrical history I had no idea existed. T S Eliot’s main theatrical collaborator was the actor and director E Martin Browne, who was the first to produce Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of Thomas à Becket, and The Family Reunion (1939) with Michael Redgrave in the leading role. Browne and Eliot worked together for twenty years, with Browne being most famous for his revival of ‘poetic drama’, with a strongly religious leaning.
The actors were paid very little on the road (each member of the company was paid the same democratic amount, with an emergency fund for essentials like a new warm coat). Henzie’s descriptions of their war work are coloured by green-room earnestness, struggles with rations, eccentric land-ladies and unreliable cars, and the company’s practical Christianity. This seems to be a kind of High Anglican staring into the middle distance while intoning, draped in elegant austerity curtaining to denote medieval costumes.
An important secondary theme of this memoir shows rural and isolated communities enduring the war under privation, desperate for distraction. It dovetails neatly onto the middlebrow-woman-at-war memoirs that were so popular a few years ago. Those memoirs usually have the leading character staying in one place because it was simply too difficult to move around wartime Britain, what with travel permits and petrol rationing and restricted areas. This memoir shows us what it was like to negotiate all those hurdles, even with the goodwill of the authorities. Henzie makes sure we know – and with good reason – when the County Commissioner or other regional bigwig bestows approval on the Pilgrim Players for keeping his villages and barracks entertained and educated by hearty, solid Christian theatre that no-one could get upset by. The underlying inference, that isolated communities needed such distraction badly, is under-explored, and begs the question of what might happen if order was not maintained, if local orders were not obeyed.