The stories in this issue of John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing are pretty grim, but the photographs and artwork lighten the mood. In his introduction Lehmann talks about the ‘young men and women who for six years had lived on dreams of devoting their time and energies to writing … I would take a bet that most of them have the notes for a war book or an escape book in their pockets‘. This issue is drenched in wartime experiences interpreted by male writers: no women authors were chosen, unless they are some of the poets published here under their initials, and only one woman artist. Women are the subjects, however, of most of the short stories: sexualised, sex-obsessed or objects for sexual transaction. It’s depressing, as I said.
Nigel Heseltine’s ‘Break away if you can’ is a horrible and powerful story about a not-so-young woman struggling to get away from her mother’s Welsh tenant farm, existing on dreams of having once been kissed, before the war began. The girl’s experience is bitter, the setting and other characters are uniformly hopeless and trapped, the social codes are relentless, and it reads as a wallow in the awfulness of being a girl left behind by life because she is denied the chances that men have and take, and oppressed by the emotional demands of older women. It is more or less sympathetic, but also sub-Lawrentian, and somehow also gives the impression of taking Cold Comfort Farm seriously. If a woman had written this it would be less pompous and good deal more practical.
Oliver Messel’s ‘Design for the film Caesar and Cleopatra’: simply gorgeous.
Oliver Walker’s ‘Kaffir truck’ is the story of the end of Robert Ncgobo’s life, when he goes to Pretoria to meet his brother who has a job for him. He doesn’t have the right pass, is thrown in jail, and dies at the hands of a hungover prison guard. Nonetheless, this is a beautiful story, uplifting and resolute in the face of South African apartheid. Walker must have been one of the first novelists to write about apartheid as a political system of repression from the perspective of black Africans: it succeeds on every level.
William Chappell’s ‘The Sleeping Beauty‘ is a summary of all that is wrong and right with the way dance is taught and executed in Britain by one of the leading dancers and (later) a designer and director of British ballet. ‘No-one admired Markova more than I.’ It’s accompanied by some glorious photographs of Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann and other cast members performing in The Sleeping Beauty.
Clifford Hornby’s ‘The Tin Box’ tells of an encounter between a French prostitute in London and a man who has survived a Japanese internment camp. He tells her what has happened to him, and why he was searching on the pavement for the tin box he’d thought he’d seen, and why it was so important for him to be scavenging the streets. The narrative is desperate, and heartbreaking. I would have guessed that this author would be the one most likely to have gone on to greater things after this issue, though he seems to have become a film director rather than a novelist.
Denny Mackintosh in collaboration with Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Eel and the Whiskers’. All my Mitchison books are in another country so I can’t check up on this story, but she and Denny Mackintosh were close friends, possibly occasional lovers, and lived in Carradale where Naomi and her husband Dick Mitchison were the owners of the ‘Big House’ of the estate. Denny was a fisherman and occasional actor, and a powerful influence on Naomi’s understanding of the Highland culture and history she had reclaimed (her father was a Haldane) on moving to Carradale from London in 1939. This story is told in direct speech, about the night fishing fleet going out after herring with an unwanted passenger whose request to accompany them they feel they can’t refuse out of politeness. The story is about town-rural relations, as well as the contrast between summer seaside visitors and working fishermen. There is an eel, and the whiskers are drawn on in kettle-black while the visitor is asleep.
Other issues reviewed:
Sax Rohmer (
Rohmer was a British writer who began his career writing for the music hall before writing novels. He seems to have fostered a reputation for being active in the occult, and certainly wrote a great many novels in the 1920s and onwards that dabbled in mysterious religions. The Fu-Manchu books did not have so much to do with the supernatural or the weird as with basic Imperialism, with a dash of drama based on science. They were serialised in weekly fiction magazines, and were wildly popular, with Rohmer being persuaded after a ten-year break to write more Fu-Manchu novels from the 1930s, until his death in 1959. I’ve only read two or three, but because they were very formulaic, and had a simple structure, I’m going to assume that they shared the same form and delivered the same messages to the readers, who wouldn’t have bought them in such large numbers otherwise.
The narrator of The Mystery of Fu-Manchu (the American title of the novel was The Insidious Fu-Manchu, by the way, if you’re looking for the free download from Project Gutenberg) is Dr Petrie, and he is a medical man, as he often tell us. He is settling down to do some writing one evening, when his old friend Nayland Smith walks in, and the drama begins. Dr Petrie and Nayland Smith are a very obvious Watson and Holmes re-run, right down to the eccentric investigator’s smoking habits, and his ability to make deductions out of nothing. But unlike Sherlock Holmes stories, the pace of the action in this first Fu-Manchu novel is, initially, a headlong torrent. There is no let-up for the reader. It seems as if Rohmer wanted to write an action-packed thriller with a dollop of detection, where the speed of events and the drama were to be the attraction for the reader. There is no time for narrative reflection, but, interestingly, there is a lot of time in Petrie’s narration for repetition, and repeated tirades against the ‘Yellow Peril’ which threatens the entire white race. Reading this fiction now, it seems extraordinary that anyone could have thought in such a way, or even enjoyed the sweeping generalisation, because it is so blatantly all for effect, not for sense, rationality, or even plausibility. And that’s where the interest in novels like this lie: people liked this kind of writing, and bought it to read for pleasure. What does that tell us about what their enjoyment was based on? And should we read this stuff today?
Let’s go back to the plot. Nayland Smith is a civil servant, an old Burma hand, back in England on leave because he knows that Dr Fu Manchu has reached these shores, and is going to do evil and terrible things. The plot progresses as Petrie follows Nayland Smith from one locked room mystery to another, in which Eastern experts die in horrible and inventively implausible ways. It’s interesting that the power and secret knowledge that the East wants is located in the West. There is no shortage of knowledge in the East, as well as secrecy, glamour, villainy and multitudinous deadly methods: it’s astonishing how much nonsense was laid at the East’s door that the readers of the West were willing to believe. Again, that’s something worth thinking about: why did readers fall for such claptrap, even if only at the level of reading cheap and entertaining fiction?
In another case, Petrie is taken to see the recovery of an Egyptian boy, Aziz, because the boy’s sister, the lovely Karamaneh, has been vamping Petrie from the moment she appears in the book. She wants Petrie to help her escape from Fu-Manchu’s clutches, and so she keeps appearing in exotic outfits wearing a highly traceable scent, to tell Petrie to come with her secretly and not tell Nayland Smith, and the poor fool does it every time. He is really a very unprofessional sidekick, constantly getting himself into danger, and never learning from his mistakes. Karamaneh starts off as just a glamorous villain, but Rohmer seems to have changed his mind about her quite quickly, possibly because he had such a good time writing about Petrie’s susceptibility. Petrie even thinks about marrying her, but in the end, she and her brother sail back to Egypt, and Nayland Smith gives Petrie an ambiguous mission to Egypt as well, to encourage the readers to buy the next instalment.
A highly satisfying novel of wish fulfillment bounds onto your screen in this 
Edward Henry goes out in a huff one evening, hurt that his domestic helpfulness is rejected in his own house. He finds himself at the theatre. To his surprise some business cronies invite him to join them in their box, and he finds himself being lobbied to buy 50% of an option to develop a plot of land off Piccadilly into a theatre. That’s Piccadilly, London, not Piccadilly, Manchester, and Edward Henry has hardly ever been to London. But he does know business and he is no fool. Somehow, as part of the discussion, he rises to an additional challenge, which is to stay at London’s most exclusive hotel, the Grand Babylon, while he’s down there looking at this plot of land. (The Grand Babylon Hotel is an invention, of course, by Bennett, whose rather good novel of the same title was published in 1902.)
When Edward Henry meets the other shareholders he finally feels in control. They’re all theatrical types; more concerned with naming the as yet unbuilt and undesigned theatre than with discussing its business plan or its capacity. Edward Henry can run these amateurs singlehanded, and in fact he runs them off the project entirely, getting rid of this useless baggage by buying their shares. They’re all so impoverished they will happily take his ready cash and abandon the idea of their own theatre in return of the assurance of some rent paid and expensive meals. And now that they’re off his hands, so he thinks, Edward Henry can get down to making his own plans for the theatre.
With hindsight, it is perfectly obvious that Buchan was a born writer. What is not so obvious is that, unlike many of his peers, he ignored the tug of words for over fifteen years before being able to write them full-time. Other novelists got their heads down and did this: it was their job. Buchan tended to write his fiction in the evenings of his day job, and perhaps this less intense application showed in the time it took for him to finally get it together and write the novel that the times, and the public wanted. The market and his developing writing style finally came together in the first months of the First World War and burst upon the waiting world in 1915. The Thirty-Nine Steps really was a breakthrough for him, a masterpiece in many ways. What is interesting about the over-shadowed The Power-House was that it was the last novel but one before The Thirty-Nine Steps, and contains many of the elements that made The Thirty-Nine Steps a winner.
With Nelson’s he had a captive publisher he could persuade to give him good terms, and the novel was short enough not to matter too much if it failed, but Buchan was clearly after more than in-house publishing comfort. He wanted independent fame (and who can blame him?) Blackwood’s Magazine was also a lot more prestigious than Thomas Nelson, which was more known for its Christian and children’s lists. Nelson’s was not a natural home for a best-seller, and Buchan really wanted this. Getting his novel in a magazine for its first publication was also very good business. He’d be paid for that publication, and be paid again if any US magazine wanted to do the same (though, as it happened, no other magazine did reprint The Power-House). He undoubtedly expected that afterwards there would be book publication royalties, but for The Power-House these took their time, because Blackwood didn’t do anything with the story until after The Thirty-Nine Steps had had a massive success, and so The Power-House didn’t appear as a book until 1916. This must have been galling, because it proved, once again, that as a novelist Buchan was not considered (by the prestigious but stuffy and old-fashioned House of Blackwood) to be worth much investment. What Buchan needed was a real hit, and a new publisher, and The Power-House did not give him these. After The Thirty-Nine Steps was a smash success for William Blackwood, despite their almost complete lack of advertising or publicity, Buchan’s next novel went to Hodder & Stoughton, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life.
So why was The Power-House not the kind of book that Blackwood preferred to invest in? It was not steady, reliable, Victorian or safe. It did not rehash Imperial adventures and colonial values. In fact, it did the opposite. A dastardly spy plot is discovered, and an innocent man is being hunted by wicked foreign conspirators in the exotic and very nineteenth-century adventure playground of the Victorians, Bokhara and the Pamirs. But the central joke behind the novel is that all this conventional drama happens off-stage, while the really thrilling events happen in London, on the narrator’s own doorstep. With The Power-House Buchan invented the thriller that could happen to any one of us. The novel’s narrator, Edward Leithen, is a barrister and an MP, he has easy relations with the police and Embassy staff, he has a chauffeur (this was the early period of driving, when a car routinely needed a driver, because the owner didn’t know how to drive), but for all of this, Edward Leithen is One of Us, an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.
