Late Reviews Read online

  The novel was originally written in German, and published as Märchen vom Stadtschrieber, der aufs Land flog (1935). “Hans Fallada” was the pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen (1893-1947), derived (so the author said) from characters in two of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the happy simpleton in “Lucky Hans” and the horse “Fal[l]ada” in “The Goose-Girl,” who bears witness to the truth even after being beheaded. According to Fallada’s biographer, Jenny Williams, in More Lives Than One (1998), Fallada wrote Sparrow Farm in seventeen days in October 1935, soon after Fallada’s works had appeared in a “List of Harmful and Undesirable Writings,” possibly as a prelude to the banning of his works in Germany. Thus Sparrow Farm is seen as an uncharacteristic work of Fallada’s, and of considerably lesser stature than his other novels. The only hint of Fallada’s more characteristic satire is to be found in the view of mankind as expressed by one of the sparrows: e.g., “What a despicable being is this pale and largest maggot of the universe, called man!” (p. 140). Williams also notes that the English translations of five of Fallada’s novels, made in the early 1930s by Eric Sutton, were often abbreviated or made from unreliable editions. Despite these qualifications, Sparrow Farm remains an interesting if less-ambitious work, enjoyable on its own terms without being judged against Fallada’s more characteristic writings.

  Fay, Erica. The Road to Fairyland (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927).

  A collection of twelve short fairy tales, written by the British polemicist and birth control advocate, Marie C. Stopes (1880-1958). I have not seen the UK edition of this volume, published by the London office of Putnam’s in 1927, but in the American edition Stopes’s name as author is revealed on the title-page in parentheses underneath the pseudonym “Erica Fay.” Arthur Rackham contributed a frontispiece to both the British and American editions of the book.

  The fact that all but one of the twelve stories begin with the familiar phrase “once upon a time” signals that these are fairly traditionally styled fairy-stories. Three were previously published in magazines, all under Stopes’s name. These three are also the best in the book. “The Princess” (The Fortnightly Review, June 1916) concerns the titular work of art, a figure being carved out of ivory by the Great Carver himself as the summit of his art. “Lilette” (The English Review, August 1916) tells of Ivan the poet, who grows up with Lilette, who loves him; but Ivan doesn’t notice Lilette until after he is discovered to be a poet and called to Court, where he find the three Princesses to be shrill and unbearable. He returns to the simple Lilette and marries her. “The Yellow Stalagmite” (The English Review, February 1920) has similarities with the early stories of Lord Dunsany. Here a small silver idol finds himself dropped on the muddy floor of the great Kent’s Cavern at Torquay. He finds a godly brother in the Yellow Stalagmite, with whom he shares stories. For the most part the tales are fresh, without descending to preachiness, though one (“The Centipede’s Bedsocks”) verges on the twee.

  Fessier, Michael. Clovis (New York: Dial Press, 1948).

  For generations, the von Lerner family has bred parrots—breeding them for intelligence—off the Brazilian coastline. Eventually only one von Lerner is left, with one very book-wise parrot named Clovis. Of course Clovis seeks his freedom in the outer world, first experiencing dismay at being rebuffed by his own parrot-kind, and then being chased by a man who wants to exploit him as a sideshow. Both man and parrot end up first in New York, where Clovis gets taken in by a rich and treacherous family, and later in Los Angeles, where Clovis is exploited into starting a new religion, only to be disillusioned yet again.

  This is a strange but compellingly readable novel. It is filled with a dark humor that fails entirely to mask what is its main theme—the depressing ignorance which every being of intelligence encounters at virtually every turn of modern life. The story takes a sharply satirical turn when it reaches Hollywood, where Clovis finds his talents unwanted. A producer laments to him, “What this business needs, Clovis, is smarter people, not smarter parrots.” Here the cynicism of the author (who wrote screenplays for Hollywood beginning in the late 1930s) comes to the fore. Under the tutelage of a Hollywood con-man called Brother Christmas, Clovis becomes the principal face of a new phony religion. Fessier, writing in 1948, seems prophetic about the power of Hollywood for promoting charlatans.

  Fessier, Michael. Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935).

  Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind, Michael Fessier’s first novel, is listed on one of the three lists of horror novels recommended by Karl Edward Wagner in Twilight Zone Magazine back in 1983. It appears as number nine of Wagner’s list of the “13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels,” and Wagner noted that “Fessier takes a screwball situation and adroitly twists it into something evil.”

  Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind is the first-person tale of John Price of San Francisco, and his encounters with two people who appear to be in some way supernatural. One of them is a little old man who appears and disappears with regularity, casually going about his mysterious business while claiming credit for killing various people, all the while with a laconic attitude that Price finds increasingly sinister. The other person is Trelia, a girl who swims nude almost every night in Golden Gate Park. Price becomes enchanted with the girl. His artist-friend Laurence Dorgan attempts at different times to paint each of the two unusual people, but finds each one to have some elusive quality that he can’t figure out. Thus his paintings are unsuccessful. The suspense builds as the little old man becomes more openly menacing—his machinations and lies put John Price in jail awaiting trial for murders that he didn’t commit. The end of the book is rather a let-down after the slow and skilful build-up. The prose is modern and straightforward, with a slight tendency to run-on in long sentences. One certainly must question Wagner for categorizing this book as non-supernatural.

  Michael Fessier (1905-1988) published only two novels, the one described above and Clovis (1948), a satire about a highly-educated and highly opinionated parrot. In the early 1930s he was a California newspaper editor at The San Rafael Independent Journal. He published many short stories in slicks like Esquire, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and The Saturday Evening Post, but he also contributed occasionally to pulps like Blue Book Magazine and Argosy, and to genre magazines like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (where two stories appeared in 1958). Fessier was best known as a screenwriter. He co-wrote several Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth musicals in the 1940s, including You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942). In the 1950s and 1960s, he wrote mainly for television, including such programs as Have Gun—Will Travel (1957), The Thin Man (1958-59), Bat Masterson (1960), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960), Mr. Ed (1963), Lost in Space (1966), Gilligan’s Island (1967), Bonanza (1968), and High Chaparral (1967-69).

  Francis, Francis. Eternal Enmity: A Novel (London: F.V. White & Co., 1892) [two volumes].

  Despite being published in two volumes, Eternal Enmity is not a very long novel. The plot concerns Tristran Hulne, who marries his orphaned cousin Ivel, and Tristran’s twin brother, Lamern Hulne, who loves Ivel and who has otherwise devoted himself to occult studies. After the birth of Tristran and Ivel’s daughter, Lamern apparently murders Tristran, and he forces Ivel to run away with him as his wife, leaving the child behind. The Hulne family originally came from the East, and settled in a large castle on the south coast of England. In addition to Lamern’s occult studies, there is a “curse of the snake” associated with the Hulne family. The bulk of the novel takes place some twenty years later, when the child, Escadel, is a full-grown woman, and her “parents” suddenly return. From there, the novel turns into melodrama, concerning Escadel and a potential suitor, as well as the mystery concerning Escadel’s parentage. The supernatural aspects, while described, are undeveloped and often incoherent (e.g., the “curse of the snake” is very ambiguous). On the whole, the book is poorly executed and mostly forgettable.

 
; Francis Francis [II] was the son of Francis Francis (1822-1886) and Mary Cole (1823-1892). He was born in Richmond, Surrey, in 1853, and died in London in 1928. He married Frances Fannie Evelyn Bostwick (1872-1921) in 1903, and they had a daughter and a son. His other books include political essays, sketches, and novels, including Mosquito: A Tale of the Mexican Frontier (1889), and Mother of Gold (1931), the latter a lost race thriller for the circulating libraries published by Wright & Brown—presuming that it is (as the British Catalogue indicates) by the late Francis Francis II and not by his son, Francis Francis III (1906-1982).

  Frank, Waldo. Chalk Face (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924).

  I read this novel because I had seen it described (by Robert Knowlton, in a L.W. Currey catalogue) as follows: “Psychological horror thriller, beneath which lies a deeper meditation on Life, Death and Beauty. A literary shocker, more akin to Leonard Cline than Mary Roberts Rinehart.” Well, it’s not much of a shocker, and it certainly doesn’t belong on the same shelf as anything by Leonard Cline.

  I found it irritating and long-winded, with a central idea that might have been interesting if handled very differently. It is the first person narrative of one Dr. John Mark, who is writing his story in order to escape from his own “eternal Twilight” and to “dwell once more in the innocent world of men: in the world where the sun is luminous because the night is black, where life seems good because death is real.” This novel is filled with page after page of this kind of blather.

  John Mark is a self-absorbed bore who pines after the woman of his dreams, Mildred Fayn. When he divulges his love to Mildred, she tells him of another suitor for her hand, Philip LaMotte, who is subsequently found dead, stabbed by a white-faced man. John Mark’s wealthy parents refuse to give him money to wed Mildred, and then they die in an auto accident, after which it is discovered that a chalk-faced man has interfered with the repair of their vehicle at the car shop.

  What this leads up to is that John Mark is so ambitious that his own will has embodied itself and killed off the people who would stand in the way of what his intellect wants. Mark slowly learns this, and then tells Mildred, who rejects him and believes him to be insane.

  What makes this novel even more confusing is that most of it is written in an annoying present tense, though in many places it slips back and forth clumsily between the present and the past. This could possibly have been an interesting novel, but it is crippled by the style in which it is written, and the form in which the author chose to tell it.

  Freyer, Dermot. Night on the River: A Queer Story, together with Two Stories of Childhood & The Cloud: A Love Episode (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1923).

  This slim collection contains four stories, printed in a limited edition of one hundred copies on hand-made paper. The title novella is an impressionistic sketch of a night punt on a river. Of the two childhood stories, “Another Secret Treaty” tells how a young girl gets secret sugar in her morning porridge despite being under punishment by her strict father; while “Behind the Soot-Curtain” is an imaginative sketch of a young girl who sees Teddybearland behind the soot-covered curtain of the fireplace. “The Cloud’ tells of a metaphoric cloud that dampens a budding romance. Only the title story has real elements of fantasy, and its slow languid style is not especially well-done or enticing.

  Dermot Fryer (1883-1970) was born in India of Irish parents; he lived for many years in Cambridge, England, where he died. He published four collections of verse before World War I, and later, a collection of nine short stories (not including any from Night on the River) entitled Not All Joy (1932), many of which had appeared in The Dublin Magazine, edited by Fryer’s friend Seumas O’Sullivan. Fryer was also close friends with Oliver St. John Gogarty. Fryer became known posthumously for having written a reader’s report in 1908 on James Joyce’s manuscript Dubliners for the publisher Elkin Mathews. The negative remarks in the report (the stories “are never enlivening, and often sordid and even disgusting”) are more often quoted than the positive (“the writing is smooth-flowing, and the stories often subtly and skilfully evolved”). Dubliners was not accepted by Elkin Mathews, and was not published until 1915.

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  Garnett, David. Lady into Fox (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922).

  The title tells the set-up of this short novel. One day in January 1880, Richard Tebrick, a country gentleman, finds that his wife Silvia has metamorphosed into a fox. Tebrick tries as best as he can to deal with this situation, firing the servants, making up a story of his wife going away, and determining to care for her in this new condition. There is occasionally a bit of social commentary, as Tebrick considers his life married to a beast, who brings to him children who are not his, etc. But these worries are minimal, especially when compared with the threat of Silvia being killed in a fox hunt. This conceit is a slender one onto which to build a novel, even a short one, but within its very narrow aims Garnett pulls it off. Lady into Fox won its author both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize soon after its publication.

  David Garnett (1892-1981) had a considerable literary pedigree. His grandfather Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, and author of delightful fantasies collected in The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1888; expanded 1903). His father Edward Garnett (1868-1937) was a well-known publisher’s reader and critic; while his mother Constance Garnett (1861-1946) was a translator of Russian literature. David Garnett was an integral member of the Bloomsbury literary group. Lady into Fox was his first novel published under his own name, preceded by Dope-Darling: A Story of Cocaine (1919), a short lurid romance of drug addiction published under the pseudonym Leda Burke.

  Gaskell, Jane. The Shiny Narrow Grin (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964).

  This rare novel owes its desirability to the fact that, in a 1983 Twilight Zone Magazine article, R. S. Hadji listed the book as one of his “13 Neglected Masterpieces of the Macabre,” a list which includes some truly neglected masterpieces like The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline, A Book of Bargains by Vincent O’Sullivan, The Hole of the Pit by Adrian Ross, and other works by writers such as Hanns Heinz Ewers, Violet Hunt, and E. H. Visiak. Since then, I, like many others, have searched in vain for a copy of this book to read. Finally I broke down and ordered it via interlibrary loan, figuring I’m unlikely ever to stumble on a copy any other way.

  It is a short book, only 128 pages. The story centers around a young London school-girl, Terry, and her family and friends. Her long-lost father has re-appeared, which thrills Terry. Her on-again off-again boyfriend is the curiously-named Fishfinger, but Terry has become intrigued by a cold and distant Boy she has met. The Boy doesn’t appear much in the book, which is mostly concerned with intrigues about Terry’s parents, and in particular about her father, who seems to be using Terry as a means to set up amorous relationships for himself with her roommate Kathy and with one of her schoolteachers.

  Yes, the Boy turns out to be a vampire, one of the undead. Gaskell’s novel (her fifth, published when she was only 23) puts vampirism in a context of cool modern youth, and can be seen as a precursor to other writers such as Nancy A. Collins and Poppy Z. Brite. But there isn’t much in the book that could be called horror or suspense.

  After finishing the book I went back to see just what Hadji had written about it: “A vampire novel set in sixties London, exploring the fascination of a dark, mysterious boy for a plain girl, and by extension, of the vampire myth for adolescent girls in general. Moody, ambiguous, with a sharp eye for the ‘Mod’ milieu, this could be considered an anti-Romantic fable.” All of which is a good description of the book, but is it in any sense a masterpiece? My answer: No, it is not.

  Gerould, Katharine Fullerton. Vain Oblations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

  Vain Oblations is the first of three story collections by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879-1944), whose name, from the early 1910s through the 1930s, dominated the most significant American literary mag
azines, to which she contributed both fiction and essays. Gerould’s stories tend to be rather long, so her three collections contain only twenty-seven stories, roughly one half of her published output.

  Vain Oblations collects seven stories. With some assistance from Edith Wharton, whom Gerould had met while abroad, the title story originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1911. It is the tale of a white woman kidnapped by natives in Africa. When at length the woman is found by her fiancée, she refuses to let herself be recognized. As with all of Gerould’s fiction, the writing style is elegant and the characterization exceptional.

  The only strictly supernatural story in this book is “On the Staircase” (Scribner’s, December 1913), in which three men see foreshadowings of their deaths while on a staircase in a newly built house. “The Wine of Violence” (Scribner’s, July 1911) is another excellent but non-supernatural tale (though there are some discussions of the afterlife). It tells of Filippo Upcher who is tried and executed for the murder of his wife. But his wife was not dead, she had merely fled. The other four stories are also non-fantastic, but all good. Gerould deserved the contemporary comparisons her work received with that of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Edith Wharton.