Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

A cartoon of H.P. Lamont, a bald man in a suit with a cape, flying away from South Africa on a winged copy of his book, War, Wine and Women (1931). — "Die enigste uitweg vir hom." ("The only way out for him.") Die Burger, 6/8/1932 (Hale 1999, p. 68).

Wilfred Saint-Mandé, War, Wine and Women (1931)

20 August 2024 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

War, wine and women (1931) was published under the pseudonym Wilfred Saint Mandé. The book was received as an autobiographical account of service in the conflict, and was hugely popular at the time. It was scheduled for publication on 31 May 1931, and by 25 June the Daily Herald ran an advertisement proclaiming that 7,000 copies had been sold in the first few weeks; an advertisement in the Western Mail (covering west and south Wales) on 10 January 1935 also promoting other books by the author stated that War, wine and women was in its tenth edition; it was still selling into the Second World War, with a twelfth impression in November 1940 (cited here).

This work was reviewed as following in the footsteps of works by writers such as Remarque, often praised and criticized from different quarters for their depiction of the degradations that war enacted on those serving in it. Saint-Mandé is very graphic about the experience of the trenches. The latter two parts of the title also perhaps contributed to something of a succès de scandale: the descriptions of women were considered particularly racy. Indeed, A.J. Cummings, reviewing for the London Daily News on 11 June 1931 (which is asserted as the publication date) showed some scepticism as to the fidelity of the work:

I stopped trying to count the number of times he was wounded. I cannot recall all his war decoration, though one was indubitably the Victoria Cross. It would be a graceless task to add up all his easy conquests of beautiful and seductive women, the circumstances of which he describes in detail with engaging candour and manly gusto. (Daily News, 11 June 1931, p. 4)

Cummings did not view this necessarily as a failing, describing it as ‘If his actual experiences had been only 10 per cent of all that happens in War, Wine and Women I should salute with respect the undaunted spirit of this war-drenched hero’ (p. 4). Saint-Mandé was later revealed to be a British man of Scottish descent, John Henry Parkyn Lamont. He served in the First World War but acknowledged that, like many such accounts, War, Wine and Women was derived from truth but not faithful to it.

The soldier-protagonist is central to the narrative, which follows a conventional story of the outbreak of war, and the experiences of a band of recruits which shifts as men join up, go on leave, are wounded, and killed. The descriptions of the discussions between soldiers are affecting, and clearly owe something to hindsight and fictional construction. In conversation with a friend called Greening, the latter tells the author that:

war is getting more and more mechanical every day, and tends to develop cunning more than anything else. In a war of attrition such as this promises to be, men lie in wet lousy holes, cursing, and scratching, and sinking, morally, below the level of the beasts. There is courage, comradeship and self-sacrifice, but will anyone gain as a result? When it’s over the world will drift back to the rotten old secret alliances, spying and so forth. […] War develops the qualities necessary to the burglar, the food-pad, the assassin. We mow each other down at long range with machine-guns, and a baboon could do that. (pp. 141-2)

The philosophizing seems out of place in wartime, manifesting the tropes of the war novel which were starting to become entrenched even by this time: the enduring front-line soldiers who are in the right and recognize their poor conditions, the certainty about the iniquities of war, the accentuating of the bestial nature of conflict. Assertions such as this, of course, were unpopular with those who wanted to continue to see value in their own or others’ fighting, and perhaps deaths in conflict, or simply more conservative and nationalist thinkers. There is also a clear nod here to the increasing volatility of German politics.

The eroticism in the work is indicated from its beginning, where a connection is made with a putative Saint-Mandé ancestor’s work in revolutionary France, generally a symbol in the UK of sexual licence and decadence. After two chapters, we move into June 1914, with the protagonist just finished school, and a priapic teenager visiting elderly relatives in Dundee: ‘I longed for romance, and every pretty girl fanned the flame of sexual desire which burnt fiercely within me. It seems to me both stupid and hypocritical to deny the power and persistence of the sexual impulse’ (p. 22). After he has signed up, he uses his French language prowess to seduce a young Belgian refugee called Monique:

I could not control the trembling that shook my body. We were soon locked in a passionate embrace. I could feel the beating of her heart and the pressure of her breasts. She was dressed in black silk and it was impregnated with a subtle and provoking perfume. Since that evening I have had affairs with many women but never met one that could beat Monique at love-making ; she was an artist. Her dexterity must have been the result of a long and delightful apprenticeship, but I in my ignorance believed her when she assured me she had never kissed a man before. (p. 58)

Here, by ‘love-making’ the protagonist means in the early-twentieth century sense, not including sexual intercourse, although the eroticism of the encounter is rendered powerfully. This is made clear when he curses himself for not having sex with Monique, and is particularly chagrined when he tries later to meet her again and sees her with ‘a new cavalier’ (p. 59). The encounters continue, but become, if anything, more fantastic. On leave in Paris, for example, the protagonist has to fight his way out of an encounter with a sex-worker-thief and her violent male accomplices, registering it in his deadened senses as ‘less exciting than a patrol’ (p. 369), although the plot is straight from a thriller. It is difficult not to believe that these accounts are designed to appeal to the salacious interests of readers.

By the time the work was published, Lamont was a Lecturer in French at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa. In the reception of the book there, it was strongly criticized for an unflattering account of British man who had spent a short time in South Africa, Danesford, who in turn criticizes Afrikaners (pp. 292-9; see Hale 1999, pp. 57-9). It took less than a year for there to be suspicions that “Wilfred Saint-Mandé” was Lamont, precipitating a campaign against the book in the local press. A retraction was published, anonymously, in which Lamont highlighted that these views are expressed by fictional characters, briefly, in a lengthy novel (Hale 1999, p. 61). The controversy grew; questions were asked in Parliament by May 1932 (Hale 1999, p. 64)

Having been exposed as the author of the book, on 23 May 1932 Lamont was abducted by a group of four students who assaulted him, stripped him, covered him in grease and feathers, and hung a sign around his neck identifying him as the author of the book. They left him on Church Square in central Pretoria. His assailants were convicted, but freed by their fines being paid by Afrikaner nationalists (Hale 1999, p. 67). Lamont was signed off sick, then suspended, then sacked (Hale 1999, p. 69).

Lamont remains little-known, even in war literature circles, despite his success at the time; he would publish at least four other volumes as Wilfred Saint-Mandé between 1931 and 1935, capitalizing on his success like so many other authors of breakthrough popular novels. Among them was the ironically-titled Halcyon Days in Africa (1934), a self-aggrandising and vengeful account of his treatment in the furore after the publication of his first novel (Hale 2001, ch. 8)

Initial research and writing by Ray Thomson

Edited and developed by Andrew Frayn

Works Cited

A.J. Cummings, ‘The War from the English Side’, Daily News, 11 June 1931, p. 4.

Frederick Hale, ‘Academic Freedom vs. Afrikaner Nationalism: The Case of H.P. Lamont’s War, Wine, and Women (1932)’, South African Journal of Cultural History, 13.1 (1999), 55-70 <https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA10113053_299> [accessed 20 Aug 2024]

Frederick Hale, Literary Challenges to the Heroic Myth of the Voortrekkers: H.P. Lamont’s War, Wine and Women and Stuart Cloete’s Turning Wheels (doctoral thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2001) <https://scholar.sun.ac.za/items/d6c8a5ff-8ee3-4a8b-9e16-eed7367bcdea> [accessed 20 Aug 2024]

Wilfred Saint-Mandé [J.H.P. Lamont], War, Wine and Women (1931; London: Cassell, 1940)

A black and white photograph of a stern-faced moustached man, looking past the camera to its right. — Aladár Kuncz (1885-1931)

Aladár Kuncz, Black Monastery (1931; Eng trans. 1934)

13 August 2024 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

The Hungarian author Aladár Kuncz (1885-1931) spent five years as a prisoner in an internment camp in France during the First World War. Kuncz wrote about his experiences in his memoir A Fekete Kolostor (1931), first published in Hungarian shortly before his death. It was translated into English, by Ralph Murray, as Black Monastery (Chatto & Windus, 1934). Highlighting its popularity, Murray states in his prefatory Translator’s Note that ‘Of this book, in little, impoverished, postwar Hungary twenty thousand copies have been sold’ (n.p.). There were translations into several other languages, including French, German, Italian, Turkish and Romanian.

Black Monastery is one of the few narratives written from the perspective of someone kept in a French internment camp. As Matthew Stibbe points out, ‘the First World War marks the major turning point in the rise of the internment camp as a twentieth-century global phenomenon, [… but it was not] entirely a novelty of the post-1914 period’ (2019, p. 7). Stibbe charts the extent of French internment (2019, pp. 81-9), noting that it was ‘the first belligerent to enact internment measures against enemy aliens during the First World War’ (2019, p. 81).

Kuncz’s memoir begins with him on holiday in Brittany at the outbreak of war, ‘one of the consequences of my Francophile loves’ (p. 1), becoming almost instantly ‘despised and outcast, rubbish thrown out into the street’ (p. 10). He makes a mercy dash to Paris only for the Hungarian consul to be unable to aid its citizens; he is kept under surveillance in Paris, then sent to Périgueux, in the Dordogne, before returning further north to the island of Noirmoutier (1914-16), just south-west of Nantes, from which the memoir takes its title (Noir/black – moutier/monastery). He was then moved south and further offshore to the Île d’Yeu (1916-19); both islands are in the Vendée département, off France’s Atlantic coast.

Throughout Black Monastery, Kuncz adds additional reflections based on hindsight, often forcefully and poignantly. Amid narrating fears of violence against internees at Périgueux at the time, he looks back:

Perigueux, though we did not know it, was only the beginning of the beginning. If we had had the slightest idea that we were to stay under those conditions for five years we should have gone mad or committed suicide. For the moment all our thoughts were bent on sending news home, with obtaining help somehow, from somewhere, from the Austro-Hungarian Embassy of some neutral state, on killing the time from morning till evening. (p. 28)

The gap between quotidian human tolerance and the scale of the injustices wrought is salutary here: wartimes are insistently contemporary, as scholars such as Mary Favret (2010) have argued. A shared experience is of waiting: Kuncz and other internees wait for release; civilians wait for news; soldiers wait between bouts of participation in different ways; all fear in different ways that violence may, or know that it will, interrupt their waiting.

The book’s nearly 400 pages give an extended sense of the torment of a man like Kuncz, a victim of circumstance. He finds out belatedly about his father’s death (pp. 209-10), and inevitably the nature of interned existence brings about literal nightmares, as he struggles to cling to sanity, with an unlikely solution: ‘I had become practised in drugging my consciousness in sleepless nights. So I plunged into a long meditation on Kant and Bergson’ (p. 335). However, there are moments of relief. Kuncz also enjoys the escape from reality offered by a cross-dressing theatre production. Dr. Herz, the German internee who takes on the female parts, is described remarkably:

He lived among us like a feted prima donna. The halo of his womanhood went with him even when he had on his usual shabby, rusty-brown overcoat, patched, baggy trousers, blue workman’s sweater and his ordinary, flabby man’s face with its eye-glasses and its thatching of scanty hair. Now he dared give more expression to his femininity. He was soft, attentive; for all the repugnance of his masculine countenance there was a sort of mysterious, tempting coquettishness in his smile, in the play of his eyes and in the rich modulations of his voice. (pp. 295-6)

The impact of the homosocial environment is registered strongly, Herz’s aura enduring even as he is dressed as some sort of cross between Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character and a labouring man.

The November 1918 Armistice does not lead to their immediate release, but further waiting: ‘The white, emaciated faces of the other Hungarians looked at me like unanswerable question-marks—What is going to happen to us? What is going to happen to Hungary?’ (p. 370). The memoir concludes with Kuncz’s release, in April 1919, and his return to a Budapest in which:

There were very few people in the streets, the shops were shut, the houses neglected and dirty, as though a storm had swept through the town. Everything had aged and grown gloomy and turned its head away wearily, and the red flags hanging everywhere were like big red patches of blood against a smoky haze. (p. 409)

The conditions to which he has returned via a journey of approaching 2,000 km seem little better than those on the Île d’Yeu, but it is the sympathetic offer of a cigarette which provokes the conclusion – also the conclusion of the memoir – that ‘We had returned. From pain to greater pain’ (p. 409).

On his return to Hungary, Kuncz taught in Budapest and as writer and editor participated in Hungarian periodical culture. He returned to his native Transylvania, settling in 1923 in what was then Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), establishing a reputation in letters in the region.

The text is in the War Books Boom database for the Scottish portion only, appearing substantially after the UK-wide peak. The translator, Ralph Murray, had Scottish ancestry, descended from the Dukes of Atholl. Murray would go on to be an internationally significant diplomat (the comedian Al Murray is his grandson).

First version by Ray Thomson

Developed by Andrew Frayn

Works Cited

Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Aladár Kuncz, Black Monastery, trans. by Ralph Murray (London: Chatto & Windus, 1934)

Matthew Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War: A European and Global History, 1914–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Biographical information is from the Hungarian Wikipedia entry for Kuncz, translated via Google Translate.

In a domestic scene, a tall military man in a greatcoat looks moodily offscreen to the left. An old woman talks animatedly to him, holding a plate. — Jock Lambert and Isobel Jamieson in The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, a drama production produced by Moultrie R. Kelsall, first broadcast on BBC Television on 20 December 1937

J.M. Barrie, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (1917)

24 July 2024 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

A hugely popular playwright before the First World War, best known for his Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (performed 1904; published 1928), the Scottish author J.M. Barrie (1860-1937) continued to write during and after the conflict.

Barrie was affected profoundly by the death in the First World War (in 1915) of George Llewelyn Davies, one of the five brothers to whom he became guardian after their parents’ deaths in 1907 and 1910 (Birkin 1979, pp. 243-6), the wounding of another, Peter, the model for Peter Pan (Birkin 1979, p. 257), and other losses of families and friends around the time. These experiences form part of the backdrop for the play The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (1917), first published in the collection Echoes of the War (1918), and later as the title piece of a collection of four plays in the Uniform Edition of Barrie’s work (1921; cited here).

The title character is Mrs Dowey: the ‘medals’ are imagined letters from an imagined son whose name she has taken from the newspaper. This dissimulation, replete with pathos, is situated in the prose introduction as ‘a secret sorrow, namely, the crime’ (pp. 8-9); the narratorial prose voice which interjects among the dialogue throughout the play in place of what might usually be stage directions, later relents: ‘The wicked woman: but let us also say “Poor Sarah Ann Dowey”’ (p. 17).

By fortune and circumstance, the ‘son’ Kenneth agrees to spend his five days’ leave with her. He is described as:

a great rough chunk of Scotland, howked out of her not so much neatly as liberally; and in his Black Watch uniform, all caked with mud, his kit and nearly all his worldly possessions on his back, he is an apparition scarcely less fearsome (but so much less ragged) than those ancestors of his who trotted with Prince Charlie to Derby. (p. 24)

The Scots word ‘howk’ is usually associated with collecting crops, particularly potatoes in the autumn (some areas still today receive an elongated ‘tattie howkin’’ school holiday). The connection with the Jacobite ‘Young Pretender’ is surprising for 1917-18, a time at which we would expect British national unity to be uppermost. At Kenneth’s curiosity for an explanation, she explains that she calls herself ‘Missis to give me a standing’, and mourns that ‘It was everybody’s war, mister, except mine’ (p. 26). The pragmatic response to systemic misogyny and the non-combatant desire to participate, or at least share, is exculpatory, and the latter perhaps also speaks to Barrie’s own feelings, as a man in his late 50s, in the face of the conflict.

After their ‘queer first meeting’ (p. 34) the two reach a rapprochement, as Kenneth reveals that he does not have his own family. He is curious enough, and glad enough of her desire to look after him, that the bargain that she can, ‘for [her] own personal glory […] go on pretending to the neighbours’ seems worth its chance (p. 41). He finds her funny (peculiar and humorous), but does not make her a joke; they share their lack of family, in the wartime state of exception, and for Kenneth in the face of death, form that bond in a matter of days. At the end of his leave they speak to each other as mother and son, and he makes her his next of kin.

The play culminates, inevitably, with her receiving his personal effects, including his ‘bonnet, a thin packet of real letters, and the famous champagne cork’, from the bottle they shared on his leave (p. 57). The end of the play feels odd: ‘Her air of triumph becomes her. She lifts the pail and the mop, and slouches off gamely to the day’s toil’ (p. 58). The triumph is… that she has made this human connection? That she feels she has participated in the conflict? That, deus ex machina, she has not been caught out in her lie?

The play offers many things to a late wartime audience: soldiers returning home on leave, the forming of new emotional connections, the hope that scenarios which seem unlikely to resolve themselves can achieve a satisfactory resolution; the importance of women’s role during the conflict. It also offers the chance to grieve, along with the redeemed title character, who has barely had time to get to know her ‘new son’.

We came erroneously to add this play to the War Books Boom database. It was advertised in the Bookman in December 1926, but this seems not to be a new publication: the edition advertised is the Uniform Edition, which seems to have remained in print over the five years since its publication. This raises a further question which we might take into account: how, and whether it is possible, to account for works which are not newly published in this period, but are enduringly popular.

This play continued to be popular across multiple forms, as with so many of the successes of the War Books Boom. There were two American pre-Code film adaptations (1930, 1933), an early BBC television adaptation first screened over the 1937 Christmas holidays, with further radio performances subsequently and through the war years, as well as a 1952 television revival. There were numerous other US adaptations for screen and radio in the post-Second World War years, as well as a one-act musical (1960). This attests to Barrie’s enduring power, but also the continuing desire for people to process these sorts of emotions via creative works.

Initial research by Ray Thomson

Revised version by Andrew Frayn

Works cited

J.M. Barrie, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, in The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), pp. 3-58

Andrew Birkin, J.M. Barrie & The Lost Boys: The Love Story that Gave Birth to Peter Pan (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979)

The entry for 15 October 1916, in German, from Carossa's Rumänisches Tagebuch. — The 15 Oct 1916 entry from Carossa's Rumänisches Tagebuch (A Roumanian Diary)

Hans Carossa, A Roumanian Diary (English trans. 1929)

9 July 2024 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Hans Carossa (1878-1956) volunteered in the First World War as an army physician for the German army; as his name suggests, he was of Italian descent, but was born and raised in Germany.

Hans Carossa

Already a poet before the War, and later a novelist, Carossa’s memoir Rumänisches Tagebuch (1924; trans. 1929 as A Roumanian Diary) follows his military experiences in Romania. The work was translated by the Scottish author Willa Muir under her pseudonym Agnes Neill Scott; she would also translate Carossa’s Verwandlungen einer Jugend (1928; trans. 1931 as Boyhood and Youth) and Doctor Gion (1931; trans. 1933). Highlighting its position in the War Books Boom, the US edition (Knopf, 1930) advertises other American, German and Russian books on the Great War on the page facing the title page.

The Great War American As I Saw It by Alden Brooks German Prisoner of War by Edwin Erich Dwinger Way of Sacrifice by Fritz von Unruh Russian Red Cavalry by I. Babel

Advertising other War Books Boom books in A Roumanian Diary (Knopf, 1930)

A Roumanian Diary is a remarkably detailed record of his experiences during the Romanian Campaign from 4 October to 15 December 1916. This was shortly after Romania had entered the war in response to an Allied ultimatum, on 27 August 1916. The country had previously been neutral. The Campaign lasted from August 1916 until December 1917 when, following Russia’s withdrawal from the conflict due to the October Revolution, Romania also withdrew; it briefly rejoined the War on 10 November 1918.

Carossa’s diary entries detail his travels with his regiment and his experience of censoring their outgoing letters. He includes his recollections of and reflections on several letters written by a soldier named Glavina, who ‘often writes such wonderful letters to his friends’ (p. 9). Carossa appreciates in Glavina a sensitivity to poetry, and a lyrical use of language, manifested in descriptions such as ‘“The world, rough, raw, and monstrous as it is—I live in it as in a thin and gaudily iridescent soap bubble, holding my breath to keep from bursting it’ (p. 58). Glavina’s death from a seemingly insignificant wound (p. 132) makes him a totemic figure to whom Carossa returns.

A Roumanian Diary was the first of Carossa’s writings to gain popularity outside of Germany. It was described by Lambert Davis in The Virginia Quarterly Review as ‘one of the few spiritual records that have come out of the War’, going on to state that Carossa’s ‘descriptions of warfare in the snow-bound Transylvanian mountains are among the most striking in war literature’ (p. 638).

Carossa would win the Swiss-based Gottfried Keller Prize (1931) and Germany’s prestigious Goethe Prize (1938). The award at this moment in Germany points to his problematic position in that nation’s literature. He did not leave Germany in the late 1930s as other German intellectuals chose or were forced to. He was championed by the Nazi regime, and was included by Goebbels on the September 1944 list of artists and cultural figures exempted from military service. Likely as a consequence, his later work attracted less interest beyond Germany, although he regained his popularity there.

Ray Thomson
(edited by Andrew Frayn)

Works Cited

Hans Carossa, A Roumanian Diary, trans. by Agnes Neill Scott [Willa Muir] (London: Martin Secker, 1929)

Lambert Davis, ‘Armageddon—Twelve Years After’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 6.4 (1930), 630-40 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26433678> [accessed 14 June 2024]

Drawing of Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, from an historic Tatler cover.

Millicent Sutherland, That Fool of a Woman (1925)

3 July 2024 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland (1867-1955), was among the first involved in establishing a Red Cross Ambulance Unit in Belgium in 1914. In 1915, after the German invasion of Belgium, Sutherland escaped to England and then France where her unit then became a British Red Cross Hospital Unit. Sutherland was awarded the British Royal Red Cross, the French Croix de Guerre and the British Red Cross in honour of her service during the War. She was also an advocate for social reform and better working conditions. She wrote a total of seven novels, plays, memoirs and short story volumes, including That Fool of a Woman and four other sombre tales (1925). It is a collection of five semi-autobiographical items, ‘a novelette which titles it and four somber short stories’ (‘New Books’, p. 939).

The title story follows a widow named Chloe. It begins with the death of her husband (Sutherland’s first husband died in 1913) and follows her journey throughout the War. Chloe, mostly like Sutherland, becomes a nurse for the French Red Cross but is quickly captured by German soldiers in Belgium; after escaping she returns to the UK, where she continues to nurse.

While the story follows Chloe’s experiences as a nurse, it is more focused on her relationships, especially with the men in her life and, moreover, the way that war impacts on these. The focus on romance rather than the War was not uncommon in 1925. Prior to the 1928-9 successes of the starkly disillusioned texts of the War Books Boom, the lens was less violent and less dehumanized than it would subsequently be.

Following the death of her husband and her first experience of the War, Chloe becomes overwhelmed by the horrors of war and impulsively marries Freddie. However, their relationship does not last and they divorce shortly after Armistice (Sutherland remarried in October 1914 and divorced in 1919). We also follow her relationship with her son Rex, who is a soldier in the War.

Chloe’s final and most pivotal relationship is with Major Wentworth Longden, who she meets during the War; this makes apparent her incompatibility with Freddie. They correspond during and after the War, their letters providing her with an escape from the conflict. eventually marrying. While her relationship with Longden does begin by being healthier and happier than her previous marriage, they grow unhappy and divorce (Sutherland remarried in October 1919 and divorced in 1925). The relationship seems unable to function in peacetime. Chloe moves back to England before returning to Paris to write pantomimes, plays and essays, returning to her pre-War passions.

The volume was harshly reviewed in The Bookman (US) the summer after its publication, in a brutally brief ‘tabloid review’: ‘Seldom does a title characterize a book so fitly — even the reader feels included’ (p. 474). Other war and post-war books reviewed particularly favourably in this list are Philip Gibbs’s Unchanging Quest and C.E. Montague’s Rough Justice; also commented upon with less distinction are Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son, William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay, R.H. Mottram’s The Crime at Vanderlynden’s, and Sylvia Thompson’s The Hounds of Spring (Andrew writes about both Montague’s and Mottram’s books in Writing Disenchantment). The reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature comments on the ‘emotional but extremely intelligent style’ of the text, but criticizes the weakness of the other four stories compared to the long title story.

This book of 1925 is included in the dataset, as we searched a slightly longer period (1925-34, against 1926-33) in looking for books of the Scottish War Books Boom, to see if it took a different shape (this work was done by Louise Bell, to whom thanks are due). The author was born in Dysart, near Kirkcaldy, Fife. It is clear from this item that the War was still on the minds of both writers and readers alike, and that readers were interested in a range of experiences during it.

Ray Thomson

(edited by Andrew Frayn)

Bibliography

‘The Bookman’s Guide to Fiction’, Bookman (US), 63.4 (June 1926), 471-4 <https://www.unz.com/print/Bookman-1926jun-00471/> [accessed 31 Oct 2023]

‘The New Books’, Saturday Review of Literature, 2.51 (17 July 1926), 939-40 <https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1926jul17-00939a02/> [accessed 31 Oct 2023]

Sutherland, Millicent (1925). That Fool of a Woman (London and New York: Putnams)

Henry Russell, Slaves of the War Lords (1928)

26 June 2024 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Henry Russell’s Slaves of the War Lords, first published by Hutchinson on 1 February 1928, is a vivid and realistic account of the experiences of an ordinary soldier on the front line. He served during the First World War in the 10th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment, joining in September 1916.

Russell begins by feeling optimistic and excited, looking down on soldiers who have been there longer, while recognizing the dehumanizing nature of warfare, and calling them ‘Dirty beasts’ (p. 18). However, the realities of the war quickly turn his tone from optimistic to realistic, following what was already a characteristic narrative of disillusionment.

Russell also vividly describes the British offensive of the Battle of Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917, which was won by placing mines under the German lines: ‘There was a huge tearing crash, the trench shook as if by an earthquake, and over the length of the front from Hill 60 to Messines appeared a scene like so many volcanoes in eruption. Simultaneously, from the rear came the dreadful roar of a thousand cannon, and the rattle of countless machine-guns. The battle had begun. It was bewildering. The volume of sound made men sweat in an agony of fear.’ (p. 148)

Much of the value of the book lies in vivid descriptions such as these, and the account of a regular soldier’s experience. Russell remained with the Worcestershires until he was wounded on 21 March 1918, the first day of the German spring offensive, after which he returned to England. A brief account of his service is posted on a site dedicated to the regiment.

Russell did not oppose the war but was critical of those leading it, a not uncommon view among soldiers epitomized by Siegfried Sassoon’s famous protest. He was especially critical of the two military raids he was involved in which he argued resulted in them gaining no military advantage, despite officials at the time saying otherwise (p. 97).

Typically for a man of his generation, Russell offers some thoughts and opinions, while resisting more colourful commentary. This is perhaps due to the book’s early appearance in the War Books Boom: major works such as Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front are yet to appear, and the horizon of expectations has not yet shifted sufficiently to allow a more thoroughgoing critique.

Henry Russell’s Slaves of the War Lords was reprinted by the Naval & Military Press in 2001, but is once again out of print.

Ray Thomson (edited by Andrew Frayn)

Daisy, Princess of Pless, by herself

31 October 2023 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Daisy Cornwallis-West (1873-1943) became the Princess of Pless after marrying the German Prince Hans Heinrich XV in 1891. She was the daughter of politician William Cornwallis-West, the Lord Lieutenant of Denbighshire, and the aristocrat Patsy Cornwallis-West, a former mistress of King Edward VII. Daisy states that despite pressure on her to be a lady, as a young girl she ‘never really wanted to be anything but a tomboy’ (p. 35). In her memoir her personality comes across clearly: she asserts herself as a strong-minded woman who is not shy to voice her viewpoint. John Murray published her first volume of memoirs, Daisy, Princess of Pless: By Herself (1928),* with an introduction by Major Desmond Chapman-Huston, an Irish aristocrat, author and publisher. It includes 13 chapters spanning 1873-1918 and has 28 illustrations, mostly of Daisy (see figure 1).

An image of Daisy, Princess of Pless, wearing a crown and in an off-the-shoulder-gown, in 1901.

Figure 1: Daisy, Princess of Pless, in 1901.

Just before she moved to Germany on her marriage in 1892, Daisy was advised by King Edward VII to ‘learn German and become a good subject of [her] adopted country’ (p. 49). Pless occupies a distinctive position: part of Prussia at the time of the First World War, it became part of Poland in a 1921 plebiscite following the Treaty of Versailles. Daisy was unable to assimilate and continued to be viewed as English throughout her life there, including during the First World War.

Prior to the War, Daisy attempted to use her position to maintain peace between England and Germany. While she opposed the formality and regulations that came alongside her title and position in court, she did grow close to the German Emperor (see e.g. pp. 184-6; p. 271). Similarly, she maintained contact with members of the House of Lords in England and attempted to make connections and introductions between the two countries. As Chapman-Huston writes in his introduction, ‘Through whosoever fault it may be that the European war broke out, it was certainly not through hers; for years she foresaw and dreaded it, and did all that one woman could possibly do to avert it’ (p. 14).

On 6 August 1914, Daisy writes in her diary of her intention to become a nurse and aid wounded soldiers (pp. 274-5; see figure 2). She states that if she had been a boy the first thing she would have done would be to join a Regiment and become a soldier, but as this was impossible she would ‘go off to the front as soon as I can with the Red Cross’ (p. 277). She did, however, have to watch her son (known as Hansel, to distinguish from his father Hans) join the German army and go to War against her home country (p. 418).

A civilian-military medical unit of male and female doctors, captioned Templehof Hospital, Berlin, Autumn 1914.

Figure 2: nurses including Daisy, Princess of Pless, 1914 (between pp. 348-9).

Daisy’s experience in the First World War was not an easy one. She was distrusted by the German people who suspected her of spying and subjected her to consequent scrutiny due to her English heritage (e.g. p. 311, p. 325, p. 438). Moreover, her home became the Eastern headquarters to the German Armies (1914-17; p. 347). She was regularly accused of being a spy and criticised for her attempts to help English prisoners of war (pp. 293-8).

Following the War, Daisy divorced her husband and moved to Munich and wrote her memoirs, with By Herself being the most successful of the three she published; later volumes were Better Left Unsaid (1931) and What I Left Unsaid (1936). Murray would publish a volume of her pre-war diaries (1931) during the War Books Boom period, also edited by Chapman-Huston. After her impoverished death in Poland in 1943, Daisy was rumoured locally to be buried with the Pless pearls. Her body has been moved multiple times, due to the supposed presence and value of the necklace and as a result of Russian Army actions (Klimczak).

Ray Thomson (edited by Andrew Frayn)

* Some sources give 1928 and some 1929 as the publication date. I follow the National Library of Scotland’s catalogue and Ouditt (2000), p. 105.

Bibliography
Daisy, Princess of Pless: By Herself, ed. and intro. by Desmond Chapman-Huston (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928) <https://archive.org/details/daisyprincessofp017081mbp/page/10/mode/2up> [accessed 31 Oct 2023]
Klimczak, Natalia, ‘The Strange Story of Daisy of Pless and Her Long Sought After Necklace’, <https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/strange-story-daisy-pless-and-her-long-sought-after-necklace-005232> [accessed 31 October 2023].
Ouditt, Sharon, Women Writers of the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography (London: Routledge, 2000)

The Scottish Soldier and/in the War Books Boom

26 January 2022 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

The First World War took a devastating toll on the Scottish population. Michael Brown states that “military identity, military tradition and military nationhood have been claimed as defining characteristics of Scotland and Scots” (2016, p. 50). Throughout the first years of the war, Scotland provided – and lost – a disproportionate number of men (Harvie, 1998, p. 24). During the Battle of Loos in late 1915, the majority of those fighting were Scots; there were more Scots present during this battle than at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

Scotland has a strong military tradition, and at the outbreak of war in 1914, the Scottish nation returned to tales and myths of legendary Scottish battles, such as Bannockburn, to motivate and excite them at the prospect of combat. Plain writes that the ‘myth of national identity and martial prowess’ (2016, p. xiii) that was so prominent in Scotland’s culture was a driving force in pushing young Scotsmen to enlist. Scotland’s military tradition was recognised by other nations involved in the war, and T.M. Devine states that Scotsmen were seen as ‘excellent, aggressive shock troops who could be depended upon to lead the line in the first hours of battle’ (2012, p. 309). However, the unprecedented devastation caused by the world’s first mass mechanical war was unlike any battle any nation had ever witnessed. Myths of medieval soldiers engaging in hand-to-hand, face-to-face combat were far from the new, technological gas and machine gun combat that soldiers were thrust into during the Great War. Ideas about Scottish valour and hardiness were challenged by the unforeseen mechanical and inhumane destruction of this war.

In the post-war decade, many soldiers across many nations wrote about what they saw as the true brutalities of the First World War, opposing romanticised narratives of glorified soldiers and heroic battles. However, looking at several reviews of these novels, the potency of military folk myth and tradition in Scotland seems to have endured, with many reviewers denouncing gruesome, melancholic, and anti-heroic narratives about Scottish military identity. F.E Whitton, a reviewer for The Bookman in 1930, reviews H.D. Gauld’s memoir, Scotland Yet!, stating that there is ‘some fine writing in it, but there is a “Dismal Jimmy” air about the book’ (Whitton, 1930, p.358). The reviewer of Phillip Gosse’s Memoirs of a Camp Follower (1934) for the Aberdeen Press and Journal writes that Gosse ‘has written the first war book in which birds and little beasties are given more prominence than shells and strafes’ (1934, p. 2). Narratives that deviate from the brave and heroic Scottish military imagination are met unsuccessfully. Similarly, a reviewer of the Canadian author George Godwin’s Why Stay We Here? (1930) for The Aberdeen Press and Journal applauds the novel, stating it was ‘inspired by a realism which is not revolting’ (1930, p. 2). A.A. Hanbury Sparrow’s The Land Locked Lake (1932) is praised by a reviewer for The Montrose Review, who approves that ‘there are no squalid or dreadful tales of horror’ (1932, p. 7). Books that do not conform to the narrative during the War Books Boom of gruesome viscera are praised by Scottish reviewers, perhaps because they do not disturb the nation’s romanticised military tradition.

Although it is impossible to meaningfully establish what books sold better throughout Scotland during the War Books Boom, through looking at contemporary reviewers’ opinions, there is some indication that Scotland’s military cultural identity influenced receptions. Despite the horror and brutality of the mechanised combat in the Great War, images and memories of heroic medieval battles and courageous soldiers continued to influence Scotland’s collective cultural identity.

Beth Campbell

(edited by Andrew Frayn)

Bibliography

“Among the Books from Day to Day.” Aberdeen Press and Journal. 22 March 1934. 2.

“Among the Books from Day to Day.” Aberdeen Press and Journal. 28 February 1930. 2.

“Books to Read.” The Montrose Review. 25 November 1932. 7.

Brown, Michael (2016). “‘Men Brave And Strong’: Bannockburn, the Auld Alliance and Scottish Martial Identity in the Late Middle Ages.” In Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Bannockburn, ed. by Gill Plain. Bucknell, PA: Bucknell University Press. 49-64.

Devine, T.M. (2012). The Scottish Nation: A Modern History. London: Penguin.

Harvie, Christopher (1998). No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Twentieth-Century Scotland. 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Whitton, F.E. (1930). “Five Books on the War.” The Bookman, 79.271 (December 1930). 223 <https://data.journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=bp1000302143419301434_19301201_3089261pdf&terms=bloem%20whitton&tab=date> [accessed 25 November 2021].

Note on funding

This blog is part of a research project on The War Books Boom, 1928-30 led by Andrew Frayn. This was partly funded by Edinburgh Napier University, and funding for a cognate project came from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Beth Campbell’s work on this as an intern was funded by the Centre for Literature and Writing at ENU.

Project twitter account: https://twitter.com/warbooksboom

Walter Owen’s hallucinatory The Cross of Carl (1931)

5 January 2022 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

The Scottish author and translator Walter Owen was not permitted to join the army during the First World War due to a painful physical illness which he self-medicated with opium. During one of these episodes, Owen had an out-of-body experience which transplanted him into the mind and body of a soldier on the Western Front. The Cross of Carl is his record of what he experienced. It was written in one night in 1917 whilst Owen was hospitalised for his illness. It was accepted for publication but was then refused by censors as anti-war propaganda for its brutal and gruesome depictions of the Western Front. In 1931, as the disenchanted view of the First World War became more and more prevalent among the slew of books that appeared in the War Books Boom, it was finally published.

The long, descriptive subtitle calls the novel ‘An allegory; The story of one who went down into the depths and was buried; who, doubting much, yet at the last lifted up his eyes unto the hills and rose again and was transfigured.’ The novel uses religious allegories to structure its narrative: the four chapters are titled after the stages of the Passion of Jesus, ‘Gethsemane,’ ‘Golgotha,’ ‘Sepulture’ and ‘Resurrection.’ The nationality of the soldier protagonist is not explicitly stated in the novel, suggesting that all soldiers in the conflict are subject to the same processes, that there is not inherent enmity between the enlisted men on either side. The plot follows this soldier, Carl, as he goes over the top in an attack.

Carl is injured in the attack; he passes out as a consequence and is mistaken for a corpse. He is then transported to factory where soldiers’ bodies are used as ‘pig-food, fats, glycerin and manure’ (Owen, 1931, p. 11). This reiterates a notorious example of atrocity propaganda which circulated during the War. Once awake, Carl escapes from the factory but is driven into a psychotic episode, and subsequently digs his own grave and lies in it. He becomes possessed by a prophetic voice. Two generals come upon him and carry him out of his grave, only to then shoot him due to his prophetic ramblings and his denunciation of them as minions of Mammon (Owen, 1931, p. 10, p. 16). This suggests that Carl views the conflict as a war of capital ordered by class structures.

L.A.G. Strong, reviewing for The Spectator (1931, p. 1022) named Owen’s novel ‘the most appallingly vivid narrative [they] have ever read.’ In the preface, General Sir Ian Hamilton calls it a ‘book of ghouls, ghosts, and nightmares.’ Owen combines the supernatural with a brutally realistic narrative of the war, and it has been categorised both as gothic and science fiction.

Beth Campbell

(with edits by Andrew Frayn)

Bibliography

Owen, Walter (1931). The Cross of Carl: an allegory; the story of one who went down into the depths and was buried; who, doubting much, yet at the last lifted up his eyes unto the hills and rose again and was transfigured. London: Grant Richards.

Strong, L.A.G. (1931). ‘Review of The Phoenix-Kind by Peter Quennell, The Thief by Leonid Leonov, Buttercups and Daisies by Compton Mackenzie, The Cross of Carl by Walter Owen.’ Spectator, vol. 146, iss. 5374 (27 June 1931), 1020-22 <https://www.proquest.com/docview/1295534434> [accessed 4 Nov 2021].

Note on funding

Project twitter account: https://twitter.com/warbooksboom

Interview with Man Booker Prize Shortlisted Author Graeme Macrae Burnet

10 May 2019 / anneschwan / 0 Comments

In February 2019, Glasgow based author Graeme Macrae Burnet visited Edinburgh Napier to discuss his Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel His Bloody Project (Saraband, 2015) with final-year students on Professor Anne Schwan’s module “Crime in Text & Film.” Following the class, he was interviewed by English & Film student Calum Rosie.

Graeme Macrae Burnet (left) with Edinburgh Napier student Calum Rosie

Introduction by Calum Rosie:

I sat down with author Graeme Macrae Burnet to discuss his novels, his influences, and his process. Burnet told me before the interview that there was only one question he didn’t like being asked, but that he wasn’t going to tell me what it was. Read on to find out if I ask it. Or rather, how soon I asked it, because of course I asked it.

CR: I thought the first thing that I’d ask you, is a general question about crime as a genre because three of your books are centred on… that is, that is the question…?

GMB: Yes.

[both laugh]

GMB: Yeah, brilliant. But no, it’s a perfectly valid question, so just ask the question.

CR: Just what is it that attracts you to that?

GMB: Well first of all with regards to His Bloody Project, although it’s a novel about a crime, I don’t really see it as a crime novel. I just see it as a novel and I think crime fiction tends to have a certain structure, whereby very conventionally there’s a crime, a mystery, usually a murder and then there’s a journey through the narrative, whereby somebody solves the crime and that forms the narrative arc called the book. His Bloody Project isn’t really like that because we know from the beginning that Roddy is guilty of the crimes. So yeah it’s a crime novel in that it’s about a crime, but I wasn’t attracted to write that book for generic reasons; it was because I was very interested in the idea of somebody who has committed these very violent acts being able to write an articulate account of the events leading up to the murders, and as I was discussing earlier this idea from the French case of Pierre Rivière. My other two books, they are crime novels and they are certainly within the crime genre, but I think they kind of play a little bit with the expectations of the genre, the expectation generally being that when you get to the end of the book the crime will be solved.

CR: Yeah.

GMB: And you will be returned as a reader to a sort of position of certainty and knowledge and to some extent neither of these two other books, The Accident on the A35 and the Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, really fulfil the expectation of the genre. What I’m most interested in, in both these books and in His Bloody Project, is the psychology of the characters. So in the Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau it’s a disappearance first of all; it’s not a crime. There is no crime.

CR: Yeah in the end there is no crime really at all.

GMB: Yeah so it is a crime novel even though there’s no crime in it; the central event is not a crime. And The Accident on the A35 – it’s an accident. But these events are a springboard for me to explore the characters who are involved in the events and that’s what interests me most. I mean The Accident on the A35 has a structure just like a crime novel, and there are actually two investigations going on, one by the cop Georges Gorski and one by the son of the deceased, Raymond Barthelme, who are both trying to find out what happened on the night of the death of the father, so there’s a crime novel structure and bizarrely it’s not necessary for there to be a crime. So yeah I’m kind of interested in generic expectations, but I think they are sometimes there to be played with as well. Sometimes really hard-core readers of crime fiction don’t respond that well to my books, because they don’t fulfil the normal expectations. They’re just really slow. [laughs] Nothing happens.

CR: Especially in The Accident on the A35 there’s this subplot of the strangling in Strasbourg and in any other novel that would probably be the main thread.

GMB: Yes, absolutely, I mean that’s there to draw Gorski the cop in a certain direction, but that’s a kind of dramatic crime novel murder but I’m not really interested in it and we’re not really interested in who committed that murder. It’s there again because it takes Gorski into a sort of a subplot with the big cop Philippe Lambert from Strasbourg, where he feels out of depth and he gets into these scrapes, and goes to the sleazy bar you know, humiliates himself and misses a date with his wife. See I’m more interested in Gorski’s relationship with his wife than whether he solves this crime or not. So you’re right it’s very much a sub plot.

CR: You mentioned early on that the I, Pierre Rivière dossier was sort of central. What did you think about the way Foucault and colleagues responded to it?

GMB: Well I read the book in full back in 2012 and I didn’t reopen it, because it did have a central role in His Bloody Project, but I didn’t want to replicate it. So my memory of the surrounding documents are pretty sketchy to be honest, but what I remember is the competing discourses trying to make sense or create meaning from, but basically to interpret this text from Pierre Rivière. What was the meaning of the text? What is the meaning of the text in relation to the murders? Does it change the nature of the murders because the murderer is capable of writing this account? Does it change it in a negative way or positive way? My sort of overriding memory of the book was the dossier format of the book, and that’s what had the influence on me, to create a book where there are different documents and the reader can kind of come to their own conclusions about what’s been going on.

CR: How did you feel about the conclusion that I think in particular Foucault came to; he seemed like he was admiring Pierre in a way. At one point they almost try and compare crime to art. Do you think that is problematic in any way?

GMB: Yeah well, Foucault was a very creative thinker I think. You know, I am a fan of his or at least some of his work, but I don’t think you need to read Foucault and say “Well this is what Foucault said, so Foucault’s right”. I think Foucault’s a creative thinker, and sometimes he writes stuff and it makes you think. So if he compares a murder to a piece of art, that’s an interesting thought. It doesn’t mean that you have to endorse that thought, but what would it mean to think about a violent act in the same way you would the creation of a work of art. By having those thoughts it’s stimulating, but you don’t have to endorse the idea. Foucault wrote some pretty odd stuff. There’s a thing in Discipline and Punish about the scaffold and the spectacle and I think, sometimes it’s better to say something reasonably extreme and seemingly black and white because it’s interesting to say it. And if you hedge too much and qualify everything, you end up saying nothing. So in a way, Foucault is being a polemicist and that’s probably why we are still reading him and talking about him. I mean I’m not a fan of Freud; Freud was full of shit.

CR: I’d agree.

GMB: But Freud was also an amazing creative mind and you could read him as literature and read him as a character and you know some of his later work, you know Civilisation and its Discontents and so on. I find it really interesting, which doesn’t mean I think it’s the truth. I don’t believe in the Oedipus complex but it’s interesting to read that stuff as literature. So I feel pretty similarly with Foucault.

CR: So kind of following on from that, you mention the death of the author, interpretation as being key; was that one of the reasons that you, in your three books you’ve kind of presented them as… in two of them, you’re a translator, was that a way to distance yourself?

GMB: Well, with the first book, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, yes, I claim to be the translator, and the author of the book is Raymond Brunet, a French author who was born and brought up in Saint-Louis and wrote this autobiographical novel. And what happens is Raymond Brunet, he dies;, he commits suicide. So it is death of the author, in the book.

CR: Oh, right I see.

GMB: But yes, absolutely, it’s a great question. So what we’re doing there is, because the book, Adèle Bedeau, contains a short biography of the author, so I’m kind of inviting the reader to play that game whereby they interpret the text in relation to the life of the author. Which is not the same as the intentions of the author; that’s another strand of that very traditional approach to literature, biographical criticism. I’m now making a yawning gesture! So yeah I’m very much playing with the idea of interpreting the text in relation to the life of the author by presenting this fictional author and, when the book came out in 2014, I was obviously completely unknown and the book came out with no fanfare, small publisher. And I went down to London to sign some copies in shops, and the booksellers there, they all thought it was a French novel, written by Raymond Brunet.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: So when I went into a small bookshop in Primrose Hill and the manager greeted me with the words “Ah, the translator!”

CR: [laughing]

GMB: I was like “Eh, yeah, haha.” And he was like “Yes, isn’t it amazing how the life of the author paralleled the life of the characters in the book?”

CR: Oh dear.

GMB: And I suddenly realised that, you know, there’s no reason for people to disbelieve this. I hadn’t intended to trick anybody, but people felt that they had been tricked. And that’s really interesting because, when we read a novel, we are tricking ourselves. We are engaging with a fictional character. We’ve been having a conversation about Roddy Macrae and whether we empathise with him; we follow his journey. He’s not real.

CR: Yeah.

GMB: And you know, His Bloody Project is kind of the opposite of these other two books in the sense that I present it as a real case, and I go to great lengths to make it seem real, and probably fifty percent of readers think it’s real.

CR: My mum did, actually.

GMB: Yeah.

CR: I spoke to her last night saying I was going to do this, and she said “Oh yeah, cos he wrote about the thing that happened,” and I was like “Oh no, it didn’t happen.” And she got really annoyed actually.

GMB: Yeah!

CR: She was like “So he lied about it?”

GMB: Yes!

CR: And I thought, in as much as anyone who’s ever written any story ever, yeah I suppose he did. [laughs]

GMB: But that conversation is exactly the conversation I’ve had about… “So it’s a lie?” All fiction is a lie. And I’m drawing attention to that by presenting my fiction as non-fiction. People sometimes react just like that, as your mum, they’re annoyed. They feel like they’ve been duped. And it’s made me reflect on what we’re doing when we read fiction, and the relationship between fiction and non-fiction, and I find it all very interesting.

CR: I was wondering what, was that part of the reason, because both of your fictionalised authors share one of your names, or similar in a way, because there’s Roddy Macrae–

GMB: Oh yeah.

CR: And Brunet which is very similar to…

GMB: Well it’s an anagram. Sorry, is it deliberate?

CR: Yeah, was that kind of…?

GMB: Well, with Raymond Brunet it’s a deliberately obvious anagram. And yet, because of the French pronunciation, Brunet sounds quite different from Burnet. There are only two letters swapped around, but Brunet is a very easy French name. So, surprisingly, most people don’t notice. So that was, you know, an anagram making it obvious that this is fiction, and he’s also me, sort of thing. With Roddy Macrae, the set up at the beginning of the book is that I’m looking for some historical, some family historical records of my grandfather, whose name was Macrae, so it would be logical that within that, I would come across a document by another Macrae. So that was really the reason, I wasn’t trying to, you know he’s not my doppelgänger.

CR: Did you ever consider passing Roderick off as a member of your family, or were you a bit reluctant to?

GMB: Well I did, actually; originally, my intention was that the book, because Roddy’s mother in the book dies of childbirth and the offspring from that birth was taken away and taken care of by extended family in Toscaig. It’s alright, nobody remembers that.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: So I was going to pretend that I was the offspring of this other son, so Roddy would have then have been my great-great-great-great uncle, I think. But I decided, A) it wouldn’t have added anything to the book and B) I would have had to ask everybody in my family, “Would you mind if I create this character who is a triple-murderer, from the same part of the country as us, and then say he’s actually part of our family?” And I couldn’t, as I say it wouldn’t have added anything to the book so there was no point. But funnily enough though yes, I did think about it. [laughs]

CR: I actually know some Macraes from up sort of Inverness way.

GMB: Oh yeah? Oh right, well it’s certainly a pretty common name; you know Wester Ross where my mum’s from, Macrae and Mackenzie are the biggest names. There are so many Mackenzies up there. But I think that’s why there are so many nicknames, to differentiate between different–

CR: Of course.

GMB: You know, there’s no point saying “Roddy Macrae” because there are so many Macraes. I mean if I’d been really realistic in the book, there would have been more Macraes and Mackenzies. But in a novel you can’t do that, because you’ve got to differentiate people by name.

CR: And on the subject of that actually, you write a lot about, small, kind of provincial towns. Do you have any sort of experience with that, or is there a reason, or has it just happened to…?

GMB: [laughs] Well, I mean I come from Kilmarnock, which I guess is a small provincial town, and when I was growing up I certainly had a strong desire to leave Kilmarnock. And it’s nothing against Kilmarnock, particularly; I think I would have felt that way whether I’d been in Motherwell, Hamilton, Ayr, Dunfermline, Inverness or wherever. It was a desire, which I think is a positive thing as a teenager, to go elsewhere. And so Saint-Louis, the small town in the French novels is a real place. And I just happened to visit there, around 2000, and I went to the restaurant in the novel, and I had lunch.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: And that’s where the novel arose from that moment of inspiration, observing what was going on around me, the sense of routine, the sense of a very unremarkable town. The feeling that if you grew up there you would have this desire to escape, so in some ways I was projecting my own feelings onto this other place. I mean the way I’ve written about Saint-Louis is really unfair! [laughs] Because I’m very rude about that town.

CR: But I think you say in the afterword that it’s not justified; you kind of bring it back.

GMB: Well spotted! I did, because when I wrote the second book, I went back to do some research, and the first couple of times I’d been to Saint-Louis, it was the middle of winter and it was really grey and horrible. And when I went back to do research for The Accident on the A35, it was June, and it was 35 degrees, and there was blossom on all the trees and it was sunny, and people were sitting outside, and actually the town seems quite nice. But because I was written within the persona of Raymond Brunet, who was himself trapped in the town, I couldn’t then suddenly be nice about the town. Hence in the afterword to The Accident, I say “Saint-Louis is by no means as unpleasant Raymond Brunet says it is!” And I’m really glad I wrote that because, bizarrely, there’s a literary festival in Saint-Louis.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: And because it’s a fake translation into English, the book’s now been translated into French. Or back into its original language.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: And actually, so The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau has come out in France; I think there seems to be quite a lot of curiosity about why some Scottish guy wrote this book, which is very heavily influenced by Georges Simenon. So the books actually had quite a lot of attention in France, and I’m going to go to the festival to appear and answer for why I’ve been so rude about this town. So that will be an interesting experience.

CR: Just take a couple of pages where you’ve said nice things about them.

GMB: Yes absolutely, I’ll get it on a t-shirt: “I love Saint-Louis.”

CR: Yeah that’s a good idea.

GMB: I’ve probably done something for their tourist industry.

CR: Oh I’d think so, yeah. I’d go there.

GMB: I think, just to back to your actual question, I have a fascination with slightly unremarkable places, and I think when you’re an outsider in a place, as writer, that’s a far more productive experience. If I’m in a bar in Glasgow, I’m with my friends; if I walk around Glasgow, I don’t notice anything. But when you’re alone, abroad, maybe your grasp of the language isn’t great, so that’s kind of filtered out, I find that your powers of observation are much more heightened. And actually when I went back to the research for The Accident, this was an act of deliberate observation. If you sit in a bar, or a cafe or in a park for an hour, without your phone, without a book, without a newspaper, that’s actually quite a long time, and you see stuff. And stuff that I observed went straight into the book, and helped to shape the texture of the book, so I think people think it’s very odd, and it is odd, to have written two books about this town in France, not being French myself, but it’s that feeling of outsider-ness, which I think is really important for writers.

CR: So was Saint-Louis one of the inspirations for the story or was it just a place that happened to fit?

GMB: No I went there, I went for lunch in what becomes in the book the Restaurant de la Cloche. The original idea for the book would be that it would be entirely set in the Restaurant de la Cloche. That was too restrictive. So when I was there, there was a character who was in the restaurant, very traditional French bistro, everybody goes there for their lunch, you know office workers, people from the building site, just go in and have a three course meal and a glass of wine. Love France for that! And there was a guy at the bar, and he was wearing a suit and looked ill at ease, and uncomfortable, and I felt, he comes here every day, and these other people come here every day and they never speak to each other. There’s all these unspoken tensions. I wrote a sketch of the scene; this was about fifteen years ago, and it always stayed with me. And all I did, I took that, I started writing. I created the character of Adèle Bedeau, who’s the waitress in the restaurant, and then she disappears, and that’s the springboard event to examine the lives of the characters. And I knew nothing more, when I started writing, than that. So I just built it up as one event begets another, and then you find the characters. I knew who the character of Manfred Baumann was from the beginning, because I share some of his neuroses.

CR: Not all of them I hope.

GMB: Not all of them yes, just to be clear!

CR: I’ll put that in the official record. So what is it that made you want to start really writing it, as opposed to, I think you said you worked in television for a while?

GMB: Well I’d been writing since I was a student at Glasgow University, off and on, short stories. I’d finished writing what I would call a straight crime novel, in the nineties. It was set in a version of Kilmarnock and it was called Hard Rain. You know, proper crime novel title. But you know, I finished it and that’s an achievement. You know, get to the end. It’s easy to start. And then in the interim, I’d started about three or four other novels and got to maybe thirty-thousand words or something, and given up. And somehow this scene in this French town has just stayed with me. I mean, it was definitely ten years between starting to write the novel and being there. So, I remembered it, utterly crystal clear, but when I went back to the place, ten, twelve years later, it was exactly as I remembered it, and I had this feeling that nothing ever changed there, and what I loved was when I went back twelve years later, I had exactly the same lunch. The menu hadn’t changed!

CR: Oh wow, yeah.

GMB: So you know, I went back to it because it stuck in my mind, and I’d had these failures, if you want to call it that, or unfinished novels, and I played a little trick on myself. Actually I got made redundant from my TV job, which was good.

CR: I just got made redundant recently actually.

GMB: Oh congratulations. That’s a good life experience. And I thought right, time to write a novel Graeme, get on with it, and for some reason I plomped on that. And I told myself I was writing a short story. Just a little mind-trick. It’s like “It doesn’t have to be a novel. It could be twenty-thousand words; it could be a novella.” And because I read a lot of Simenon and other European crime fiction, and a lot of that stuff is maybe fifty-thousand words. There’s a much bigger tradition of the short, very brief crime novel. So I was kind of aiming for fifty-, sixty-thousand words, which is a more attainable goal than eighty-, a hundred-thousand words, especially when you’re starting. Maybe you’re writing yourself?

CR: A bit, yeah.

GMB: I kind of played a trick. I loved the world of the book, you know; I loved it. And I found it very easy to write the character of Manfred Baumann. I struggled with narrative; I still struggle with narrative, but I enjoyed the milieu, and that’s why I wrote the second book, because I wanted to go back to that milieu, and just be in it again.

CR: Are you planning to go back to it?

GMB: There will be one final book featuring Georges Gorski. If you remember at the beginning of The Accident, two manuscripts are delivered to the offices of the publisher.

CR: Oh, of course!

GMB: But I’m not interested in writing a series. Publishers loves series. You know I killed the author. Sometimes the big mistake of crime writers is to kill off their character, but I actually killed the author of the books. So there was a certain amount of contrivance in writing the other book, but again The Accident is far more of Raymond Brunet’s book, because it was about the death of his father, and he is writing a fictionalised account of this fictional event. Then I’m inviting the reader again to interpret how much of what’s in the novel was “true” to Raymond Brunet’s actual biography which is, of course, also fiction. I have real trouble explaining this.

CR: It makes sense when you read it, yeah.

GMB: So that’s all fun. And I think that it adds a little layer. Some readers find it a little bit unnecessary, pretentious, but that’s fine, you don’t need to read it and I enjoy it and I think it’s fun, and as a reader it’s the sort of thing I would like.

CR: Yeah, definitely. Because when you’re reading, and I think you mentioned this earlier, you don’t want to fall into the trap of “What’s the author trying to say; how much of this is true?”. These kinds of books almost let you do that, without doing it, if that makes sense.

GMB: Well, you’re invited to relate the text to the life of Brunet. And you used the phrase – you asked me earlier if I was kind of stepping back. And I suppose yes, absolutely, all the books I’ve written so far, the text has been presented as having been written by somebody other than me. And to let you into a secret, without having thought it through, I’m doing the same with my current book. So obviously there was something going on there. Obviously I’m a really shy, anti-social person.

CR: [laughs] Maybe that’s it, yeah.

GMB: But again, as we were discussing in the class, you don’t necessarily analyse everything before you do it, or do it for a rational reason. Sometimes you just do stuff because it appeals to you, or you’re going with the flow, then afterwards people expect you to have a rational explanation, and that’s not the way I work.

CR: I guess we’re taught as students to always assume that there is a reason, but there often isn’t.

GMB: Well, if you talk to twenty different writers, you’ll get twenty different answers, in terms of to what extent. Some writers set out to “explore a theme.” [he makes a vomit face].

CR: [laughs]

GMB: And that’s not the way I do it. I hate the word “theme,” but that’s something that can come out as a matter of interpretation after the text is in existence. I think for me, if I wanted to explore a theme, then I would create characters who represent different aspects around that, and my fear would be that it would be schematic, and I wouldn’t have those moments where I feel emotional engagement with the character. Because I think when we read novels, and I think it’s amazing that we are still reading novels in the world we’re in, I think people predominantly read novels because of character, and it’s character that draws people into the narrative and makes people care about the book. And so you can have all the intellectual ideas you want, but if you’re not engaging a reader on the level of character, or on the level of story maybe, then nobody’s going to finish the book. So I kind of approach it form the bottom up and if there are interesting conversations to be had afterwards, you know it’s like “oh yeah yeah, I see what you mean. Oh providence, yes!”

CR: Yeah of course, yeah.

GMB: But sometimes an idea will arise during the writing of the book, like the idea of providence that we were discussing earlier. And you might see it reappearing in some way and you might draw that out a little bit, I would say. But I don’t want to start by thinking I want to push something, on a rational, intellectual level. I want, first and foremost, very old fashioned, I want emotional engagement.

CR: So can you tell if you’re reading another book, can you be like “Oh I see they’re trying to talk about the issues”?

GMB: Well I mean yeah, it’s called bad writing.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: I mean a really obvious way that you might come across that is if you feel that the author is putting words into the mouth of their character, they’re making a little speech about something, and you feel that it’s not motivated by the character. So yes, I would say that I can tell. And I think that most people could. You know, I’m a reader, just like you’re a reader, just like anybody who reads novels is a reader. Maybe as a writer I’m a bit more aware of the techniques that people use. I’m not sure that’s true, but I think the last thing I want from a novel, or any piece of art, is to feel that the creator of that work is hitting me over the head with making their meaning overly obvious. I love Georges Simenon because Simenon never judges his character. He describes the action and locations, but it’s very much for you to make up your own mind. But if you read somebody like Emile Zola, you’re always aware of what Emile Zola thinks of his characters’ behaviour.

CR: [makes a scoffing noise to pretend he knows about the writing style of Emile Zola]

GMB: He’s a moralist. And he writes in terms where he will be condemning of their vulgar, depraved behaviour. I mean I like Emile Zola, it’s great stuff, but there’s a difference; you can see that Zola, the moralist, had a moral drive in his books that Simenon doesn’t. So I prefer the Simenon method.

CR: You see that kind of moralism a lot? Do you ever read or watch any true crime stuff?

GMB: Well, I used to read quite a lot of true crime. But I think with non-fiction it’s slightly different. It just depends on the writer. I mean I like reading non-fiction and I would like to write a non-fiction book one day. An actual non-fiction book.

CR: Do you think people would say “Hang on, is this one actually real, or…?”?

GMB: Well, that would be really fun though, wouldn’t it? I was reading this little book by a philosopher; I’m not a big philosophy reader, but I was reading this book about suicide, and he tells this story about this 14th century Italian guy who’d written a treatise on suicide. And because of my way of thinking, I was like “I wonder if he’s just made this guy up.” I could go and google him, and with His Bloody Project, many people have googled characters in the case. And in fact, with the French books, people go away and google Raymond Brunet, the author. And what’s bizarre is, a friend of mine made a trailer for the alleged film.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: Which is online. So that muddies the waters even further.

CR: That’s really funny.

GMB: The trailer is obviously fake, but it’s very well done. So yeah look it up.

CR: I will do; that’s really cool. Do you have any tips for anybody who wants to get into writing?

GMB: Yes. Stay the fuck away from all these books about creative writing. Stay away from the tips. I see a lot of it on social media, and I totally understand when you’re beginning. I’ve been there, but I think these endless lists of tips for writers, they drive me up the wall. I mean I avert my eyes. Because once you’ve read them, you can’t unread them. They stick in your mind, “Do this, do that, do it this way, don’t do it that way.” I’d say: read a lot, re-read. It’s much better to know one book well than to have read ten books in a superficial way. And there’s no substitute for the actual writing. I get asked at every event I do, at the end, someone asks, and I can see them, they’re shuffling all shy, and I say “Aw are you a writer; do you write?” “Aw yeah a bit, you know.”

CR: [laughs] Exactly what I said a minute ago.

GMB: Yeah, totally. And I understand that, we’re Scottish! And I say “What are you working on?” And they say: “Oh I haven’t started, I’ve just been thinking about this,” often for thirty years. And I’m like “Go home and tomorrow, write a thousand words.” Because if you can’t do it, you can’t do it. There is no substitute. A lot of people who are “stuck,” they say they have a desire to write; they’re the ones reading the books on creative writing. I’m not saying there’s no place for that sort of stuff, but on the other hand, I was forty-six before I published a novel. So a lot of people go “Oh my god, that’s ancient.” It’s actually about average. So you have to find your own way, absolutely, and that’s why I’m sceptical about prescriptions about how you should write. I mean I have my own proscriptions, or prescriptions, about how I go about stuff. I’m very, very strict on point of view. I will never violate point of view in my novels.

CR: Yeah.

GMB: And that’s me. I’ve just read Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. Wow! It’s amazing; one of the biggest selling novels of the twentieth century. It’s a real door-stopper, pulp fiction kind of story, but it’s amazing. And she doesn’t care about point of view. She can enter the head of any character at any point. So that’s fine, but if you set up the rules, you’ve got to follow the rules.

CR: Yeah, because in yours, it’s Gorski, plus Manfred.

GMB: So you never know what any other character is thinking because we only ever see them through either Gorski or Manfred’s eyes. So I use the phrase “as if” a lot. Because, “as if they were doing,” because we don’t know.

CR: Oh right, yeah.

GMB: So yeah. But you just got to be doing some writing. Write stuff, throw it away. Be prepared to throw a lot away. I mean people say “Oh, I’d like to see that earlier novel you wrote” and I’m like “Yeah, no chance.” But it was a great learning experience.

CR: And you’ve got a new one in the pipeline?

GMB: I’m working; I’m getting towards the end of the first draft.

CR: Okay so a wee while yet.

GMB: Yeah, 2020 at the earliest. But yeah I just want to make sure it’s as good as it can be. It’s a struggle. But I always struggle; I struggle with narrative. Putting things in the right order seems simple, but it’s difficult for me.

CR: I guess then my last question is, if someone were planning to write an essay at university on His Bloody Project, where would you recommend they start?

GMB: I would say, read the text. The book is the text, that’s all that matters. Don’t listen to interviews with the author.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: Everything required to write an essay about any book is the book. If you’re writing an academic essay, you are required to read and cite previous sources, that’s the game, that’s fine. I don’t know how much, if anything, has been written about His Bloody Project. But I’m a big fan of primary sources as well, as a researcher. So I would say it’s more important to go and read articles about James Bruce Thompson, or go and look at some documents relating to some real life murder cases. Read the style of writing that was prevalent at the time. Read about the history, the way of life at the time. I would say reading around the subject raised by the book. There probably isn’t much criticism. You’ll know better than me if there is any. I mean the novel’s only three years old.

CR: Yeah that’s the difficulty with writing about recent things.

GMB: You should see it not as a difficulty but as being a liberation; you don’t have F. R. Leavis looking over your shoulder. Or another hefty literary critic. You can just come to your own view.

CR: When you were a researcher, did you ever have difficulty in deciding when the research stopped? And finding the balance there?

GMB: That is a difficulty. I read a novel relatively recently where the person included far too much of their research in their novel, where it was completely not motivated by the story or the characters. So it’s like, yeah you’ve done your research, you’re just showing it off. I tried to be careful with that in His Bloody Project. For example, earlier I was talking about these superstitions I came across in research. Absolutely fascinating and anybody you talk to, they go “Wow, that’s amazing,” and I’d written bits where I’d contrived use of those superstitions; I’d sort of shoe-horned them into the story. And I read it back over and I knew I’d only written it in because I’d done the research, and that’s the wrong way round. So you have to start writing at some point. The thing I’m writing at the moment is set in 1960s London. I could do endless research, but I’m at the point now where I’ve been writing and my research will be more of the kind of, not fact-checking, but I just need to find a little bit. It’s a very directed research, rather than general finding out about the milieu, kind of research. So it’s a bit of back and forth.

CR: Thank you very much, Graeme.

Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

Wilfred Saint-Mandé, War, Wine and Women (1931)

Aladár Kuncz, Black Monastery (1931; Eng trans. 1934)

J.M. Barrie, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (1917)

Hans Carossa, A Roumanian Diary (English trans. 1929)

Millicent Sutherland, That Fool of a Woman (1925)

Henry Russell, Slaves of the War Lords (1928)

Daisy, Princess of Pless, by herself

The Scottish Soldier and/in the War Books Boom

Walter Owen’s hallucinatory The Cross of Carl (1931)

Interview with Man Booker Prize Shortlisted Author Graeme Macrae Burnet

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