Valancourt Books, based in Richmond, Virginia, may be the premiere reissue-focused publisher in the U.S. outside of New York City. Their success in the Gothic/horror genre, however, has for some readers overshadowed their work in championing lost works of gay and literary fiction in general. Just the other day I was fondling my first edition of John Wain’s quiet little 1967 novel about the challenge of getting “alone time” in the modern world, The Smaller Sky, which was first published by Macmillan in a dust jacket that was a giant train ticket (much of the book takes place in a hotel by Paddington Station in London). “This book deserves to be reissued,” I thought. Usually, when I have that thought I check on Amazon to see if anyone’s already done that. And lo, Valancourt has brought out it and three more of Wain’s novels–which is more than can be said of any British publisher in the thirty years since the man died. Indeed, Valancourt has done outstanding service to a fair number of English authors.
I asked James Jenkins, who runs Valancourt with his husband Ryan Cagle, to suggest some wafer-thin titles from Valancourt’s catalog, and I tossed in another to make a baker’s dozen. I should also mention that U.S. readers who want to join our read of Michael Frayn’s novel Sweet Dreams in June (my favorite novel in my life so far, I will add) will find the book’s in print thanks to Valancourt. Here they are, in chronological order (the titles link to the corresponding page on Valancourt’s site so you can get yours straight from the source).
Ronald Fraser, Flower Phantoms (1926, 94 pages)
Girl meets orchid. No, not an orchid, but a “savage lord of some green and temperate forest on Himalayan slops, delicate rajah of some marble palace among lakes and hanging gardens and mysterious woods.” Romance, if unrequited, ensues. Sir Ronald Arthur Fraser was a wounded and decorated veteran of World War One, a Commercial Minister in Argentina and France, a director of the Suez Canal, and knighted in 1949 for his services to the Crown. He also possessed one of the most askew imaginations in English literature. I wrote about his later novels Financial Times (1942) and A Visit from Venus (1958) on NeglectedBooks.com. Mark Valentine, whose taste in esoteric literature is impeccable, wrote the introduction to Valancourt’s edition and calls Flower Phantoms Fraser’s best book. A perfect place to discover this underappreciated author.
John Hampson, Saturday Night at the Greyhound (1931, 118 pages)
A story Balzac could be proud of. In the course of one Saturday night, John Hampson shows how hopes get crushed by human failings as often as by greater forces. Mrs. Tapin, the housekeeper at the Greyhound, has seen fourteen sets of owners come and go. Now, she watches the latest, the Flails, seal their fate. Hampson had submitted a set of explicitly gay stories to Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, but they rejected it and asked for something different. This intense, grim novel became his best-known work and Hampson’s other novels and story collections still deserve rediscovery.
Michael Arlen, Hell! said the Duchess (1934, 114 pages)
Young men are found murdered in London:
Both victims were young men, the one a shop assistant and the other a bank clerk, who lived alone in lodgings. In each case the youth was discovered naked on his bed, naturally much disarranged, and with the head almost severed from the body by an inhuman slash across the throat from ear to ear. There were other mutilations of a fanciful nature which it will serve no purpose to describe. No weapon was found in either lodging. There were further similarities: a faint perfume, agreeable rather than sickly, much to the surprise of the detectives, who had been brought up to believe that all perfumes were sickly: and cigarette ends with the clearly-defined marks of lip rouge.
Suspicions fall on the unlikely figure of Mary Dove, Duchess of Dove and Oldham, a charming young widow beloved by all her friends. Michael Arlen, who had great success in the 1920s and 1930s with his slightly satiric, slightly sycophantic novels, plays with the murder mystery format in a book he called “A Bed-Time Story.” Elegant fun.
Robin Maugham, The Servant (1948, 100 pages)
Perhaps the best known book of this lot, given Joseph Losey’s terrific 1963 film of the same name starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox. It’s a sinister little parable about the dangers of mixing a strong-willed person with a weak-willed one–regardless of who stands where in the social hierarchy. I read this during lockdown in the U.K. and I projected Dominic Cummings onto Hugo Barrett and Boris Johnson onto Tony, the master who gets mastered.
John Metcalfe, The Feasting Dead (1954, 92 pages)
John Metcalfe’s work was known mainly by cognoscenti of fine horror fiction for most of his career. This novella was first published by August Derleth’s boutique press, Arkham House (based in that hotbed of publishing, Sauk City, Wisconsin) and quickly disappeared, with its few copies being highly prized among collectors. This is a touching but disturbing tale of a father who’s struggling to understand why his son, Denis, seems to be getting sicker and sicker. Is it Raoul, the young man he’s hired to help Denis?
Raoul, I was certain, was somehow the cause of Denis’s poor appetite, his wan and wasted look, and alternating fits of nervous stimulation and depression. Denis slept in a room close to mind, and once or twice I fancied I heard noises of bumping and what I could then only describe as a kind of dull sustained metallic humming coming from it. A dark suspicion visited me. Could Raoul be there? But on softly opening the door I found Denis alone and apparently asleep. The noises, if there had been any, had entirely ceased.
Perhaps. Or something more powerful and sinister? You’ll have to read it to find out. P.S.: For neglected book fans, I should mention that John Metcalfe was married to the mostly-forgotten modernist writer Evelyn Scott.
Thomas Hinde, The Day the Call Came (1964, 138 pages)
Thomas Hinde confounded critics and readers throughout his career. Was he an Angry Young Man (Happy as Larry, 1958)? Was he another Brit satirizing American college life (High, 1968)? Or was he Sir Thomas Chitty, 3rd Baronet and chronicler of English country houses and elite colleges (most of what he published from 1980 on)? His most interesting work, I think, was a spate of novels starting with Ninety Double Martinis (1963), which all seem to blend the abstraction of the nouveau roman and the extreme existentialism of J. G. Ballard with a sort of bland English suburban complacency.
“That was the day the call came. It came without warning. For years I’d known it would come, sooner or later. I’d got used to knowing it would come. I’d stopped expecting it.” The narrator is Harry Gale, gentleman farmer. The call is from “Them.” They want Harry to do a job. A job he hasn’t done for years. A deadly job. But a job he has to do without tipping off the wife and neighbors, which is how Hinde introduces a comic thread that makes this story different from all the blurb-ish comparisons I just made. Probably Hinde’s best book, well worth the read.
John Wain, The Smaller Sky (1967, 144 pages)
Arthur Geary is a scientist who’s decided to step out of his life for a bit to sort things out. Some alone time, some me time, we might say today. He takes a room at the station hotel at Paddington and wanders around the station trying to avoid people. In 1960s England, though, this is odd behavior in the eyes of everyone from Arthur’s wife and colleagues to a producer with a major television channel. And so, from the very beginning, he is a pursued man:
Where was safety? He thought of the hotel, then shuddered briefly. Not till night. It was all right at night, when he could lie down and sleep, knowing that all round him eight million others were lying down too. But if he stayed on the platform he was wide open to Blakeney’s appraising, probing eyes. The platform . . . which platform? Across on the other side of the station was a strange, dark hinterland, a platform inhabited only by the railway staff, with a series of openings that seemed to lead to dark caverns. He would be safe there, and surely any employee who saw him would imagine that he was some inspector or other legitimate person. Stepping with brisk dignity, he crossed the station foyer, went past the taxicab rank, and walked down the long platform under the notices that said ‘STAFF ONLY’.
It’s certainly a satire of the challenge of privacy in the modern world–even before the introduction of the Internet and 24-hour news–but it’s also a bit like Albert Camus meets Ealing comedy. I don’t know of another book quite like it and salute Valancourt for championing this odd little book that deserves more love than it’s had for most of the last 50+ years.
Michael Frayn, A Very Private Life (1968, 136 pages)
A utopian dystopia, about a very distant future in which the world is divided between the Insiders, who live, um, inside in comfort and leisure, and the Outsiders, who suffer poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives in the wild environment outside the bubbles. A sort of Romeo and Juliet tale, only Romeo is a rough-hewn Outsider and Juliet is the lovely and elegant Uncumber. There is always a subtext of philosophical musing in Frayn’s work and this may be his most theoretical work of fiction.
James Kennaway, The Cost of Living Like This (1969, 154 pages)
“No one really guesses the games which are special to the dying. No one would believe them, if they were told. No one has mastered them, except the dead.” Julian is a government economist, married, comfortable, living in London. And he has cancer, which he refers to as “a great big crab…lying asleep amongst the seaweed of my bowels.” We follow him through a few days in which he tries at times to accept his fate, at other times to forget his fate, and yet again to pretend as if nothing is happening. “A hard little book about dying,” Time magazine’s reviewer called it–and a book made even harder by the knowledge that Kennaway died in an automobile accident not long after its publication.
C.H.B. Kitchin, A Short Walk in Williams Park (1971, 120 pages)
The manuscript of this novel was found among Kitchin’s papers after his death and even his friend, the novelist L. P. Hartley, call it a lesser book. But it’s such an elegant work, combining the almost Henry James-like tentativeness and nuance-riddled manners of English upper-middle class life with a palpable love of London life and parks. Francis Norton, an elderly and comfortably well-off gentleman, observes a man and woman while sitting on a bench in Williams Park. He becomes intrigued, sees them again, speaks to them, learns their names (Edward and Miranda), comes to understand that they are lovers, and soon becomes slightly obsessed with “solving” their problem.
The next day renewed his frustration, and so did the days that followed. He felt like someone in the shadow of a love-sickness—not, let it be clearly understood, love-sickness for Miranda in person— for she was a bird, and he only liked pigs—but for the abstraction of the passion which she radiated, and with which she consumed herself. Surely, it was his task to fan that divine flame, however humbly. He conceived fantastic projects. He would write to Edward, c/o the Mersley Cultural Institute, and suggest meeting him for lunch, during which he would tell him that he needn’t fear the production of the letters, because a job of sorts would be available for him with Cyrus Norton and Co., Spice Importers, if the worst to the came worst. Or with greater justification, he would write to Miranda and ask her to dine with him. She would probably accept, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted. There would be a sterility in seeing her without Edward, who by now had roused in him a curiosity nearly as great as that which he felt about Miranda, before he saw her.
This is a small, deftly-written little soap opera in a teacup.
James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave (1975, 130 pages)
A man hideously disfigured in Vietnam returns to his home town in Virginia. Holed up on his family estate, he relies upon two men, one black (Quintus), one white (Daventry), to care for him, do his errands, deliver letters to the woman who once loved him. Despite his prejudice, despite his hitherto heterosexuality, he finds himself drawn to both of them:
The pen had froze in my hands, for I became aware Daventry himself was standing over me watching my hand. The effrontery, the nerve, the cool gall. But instead of taking my ire out on Daventry it was poor Quintus now I rated and abused, for I could hear his honey voice still reading from that old Roman history book, like an elocution pupil, droning on about a Roman cherry which has an agreeable flavor but only if it is eaten under the tree on which it grows as it is so delicate that it won’t stand carriage.
In a Shallow Grave is often described as Southern Gothic, but James Purdy was a writer more than a little resistant to labels, so let’s just call this an odd, ornately written and observed human story.
Peter Prince, Play Things (1972, 124 pages)
It would be hard to get more anti-hero than the protagonist of Peter Prince’s first novel. He’s quit a good job at an architectural firm to become a “Playleader” at a playground in a bad part of town. He quickly finds himself having to pay off two different gangs to keep them from trashing the place. He’s coerced into letting thieves stash their stolen goodies in his equipment shed. His wife decides she’s gay and would prefer to live with another woman. And his playground is a pretty depressing place:
The Playleader gazed about him. The Playground looked like a conquered province. There, in one corner, were the charred remains of the hut. Directly in front of him, the Playground’s fence sported great gaping holes, some apparently torn open by brute force, others professionally created with wire-cutters. A blackened patch on the hill behind him showed where the kids had been imitating the TV news pictures from Belfast by chucking lighted petrol-filled milk bottles at each other and at those set in authority over them. There were even axe-marks on the great oak tree which towered above the centre of the Playground—someone in the night had been trying to hack it down. Several smaller trees had already been successfully reduced to stumps.
And yet…Play Things is a funny, sweet, even uplifting book–and one based on Prince’s own experiences when he, too, decided to drop out and take on a similar post. Play Things won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1973.
Alan Judd, The Devil’s Own Work (1991, 100 pages)
“The moving hand writes” (and writes and writes and writes). A modern version of the Faust legend, in which literary success is yours…for a price. One of the most economically-written books you’ll ever read. Not a sentence, not a scene is dispensable. Hard to read without speculating who Alan Judd had in mind when he created the great writer O. M. Tyrell.
