Yes, this is a list of shame. So many great books I have not read! The asterisks mark books I am halfway through, but misplaced at some point during the reading; the paragraph markers are used to indicate books I’ve read, but need to read again.
But this reading plan depends upon a number of factors beyond my control, like surviving the next eleven months: It is all very iffy, “the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.”
Adrian Barnes:
Nod
Julian Barnes:
The Sense of an Ending
Max Barry:
Jennifer Government
H.E. Bates:
Hark Hark the Lark!
Anthony Burgess:
The Kingdom of the Wicked
James Branch Cabell:
Something About Eve * The King Was in His Counting House
Arthur C. Clarke:
The City and the Stars Childhood’s End The Fountains of Paradise
Peter DeVries:
The Prick of Noon
Philip K. Dick:
Ubik The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
Charles Dickens:
Bleak House
Lawrence Durrell:
Monsieur & and its sequels, the whole of the Avignon Quincunx
Vardis Fisher:
Jesus Came Again We Are Betrayed
Günter Grass:
Local Anesthetic
Frank Herbert:
Dune
Hermann Hesse:
Narcissus and Goldmund Magister Ludi §
William Dean Howell:
The Rise of Silas Lapham *
Aldous Huxley:
The Genius and the Goddess * Antic Hay§ Time Must Have a Stop § The Devils of Loudun
Stanislaw Lem:
Solaris The Invincible
Christopher Priest:
A Dream of Wessex/The Perfect Lover Inverted World Expect Me Tomorrow
Ayn Rand:
Atlas Shrugged
Alistair Reynolds:
House of Suns Revelation Space
James H. Schmidtz:
The Witches of Karres The Demon Breed
Tom Sharpe:
The Midden
Olaf Stapledon:
Odd John Star Maker §
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky:
Roadside Picnic One Billion Years to the End of the World
I’ve lost track of two of the novels I’m halfway through reading, one by William Dean Howells and the other by Poul Anderson. Both are likely in my office, which I guess I’ll have to tidy up soon. So here I am well into the night and approaching morning, still wide awake, but tired, looking at a Poe collection, an elegant miniature hardcover from Könemann. I’m thinking of embarking on a formal essay on Nabokov’s Lolita, so Poe not surprisingly came to mind. There is a mystery behind Lolita, one uncovered a decade or so ago, and most of what has been written about it has been pishposh. And here it is, half after the beginning of the new day’s fifth hour, and I cannot remember having read Poe’s longest detective story. I know I read “The Gold Bug” in my teen years. But the others? I forsook Poe’s crime and horror fiction for his comedies, “The Imp of the Perverse” and “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” Now it is time, perhaps, to return to my reading roots.
Or finish this whiskey. I am not awake because of missing books, but because of pain. There is no position of recumbency that evades pain, tonight, so every position prevents sleep. So how to sleep? The whiskey may help.
Most of the reviews on Goodreads of Gore Vidal’s Myron miss the point. These reviews have apparently been written by leftists who do not understand that Vidal points most of his satire not rightward, in this novel, but at leftist sexual [tranny] tyranny. The title character of the previous book, Myra Breckinridge, rapes and castrates her way to cultural power on a Club of Rome de-population agenda, made quite explicit. This is not “sexual liberation” but sexual tyranny and . . . propaganda by the misdeed. But Vidal does croak out the last laugh at conservatives in the final pages. Myron, Myra’s alter ego (they share the same body), literally has no idea that the world has changed and that he has lost his battle of personal identity and identity politics with Myra, hung up as he has been on defending Nixon.
The clue to the interpretation is that leftists seek to emasculate America and rightists have no “powells” (Vidal’s term for testicles — it’s a long story: see below).
Vidal spins a Lewis Carroll-like fantasy to make a grisly point about left and right in America, and straight-left readers would be too clueless to suspect such a thing from the pen of socialist Gore Vidal.
It is a Menippean satire, perhaps. The caricatures that are Myra and Myron make an almost allegorical tapestry, but with no reverence or piety or patriotism whatsoever. This is as thoroughgoing satire as I’ve read from an American. It tops James Branch Cabell’s Hamlet Had an Uncle (if not Jurgen), anyway.
Vidal employed similar technique — that is, a satire based on fantasy and gloriously fabulisitic and ultra-silly sci-fi — in his later send-up of early Christianity, too, Live from Golgotha . . . the best thing about which were the two pages explaining the Cleansing of the Temple in terms of loose and tight monetary policy.
These usually ignored fictions by Vidal are, from what I can tell, the novelistic stand-in for satyr plays. I could perhaps write more persuasively about this literary diptych had I read Myra Breckinridge (1968) a few years ago, not, as is the case, a few decades ago: my memory is not reliable about the first book. I have just finished reading Myron (1974) today. But I can offer advice for those who choose to read Myron: read the first edition, where Vidal uses an amusing set of euphemisms for the traditional set of naughty words. In later edition he jettisoned this comic apparatus. Pity. It is indeed funny. Vidal explains, in his helpful prefatory note to the first edition, which I read:
Iris Murdoch published 26 novels during her life. In my late teens, based on a notice in a Britannica yearbook, I read Bruno’s Dream. I was very impressed, and went on to read book after book of hers, including several of her works of philosophy. I would have been more impressed with her work had her politics leaned less left, but her novels were great nevertheless. She became my favorite comic novelist/novelist of ideas, though she denied writing the latter — despite her status as a moral philosopher in the Weil/Anscombe tradition. Her goal was to provide “something for everyone” in her literary efforts. She certainly provided a lot for me.
I have read 19 of her novels, and a few — such as A Word Child, Time of the Angels, and A Severed Head — I’ve read multiple times.
Her mature work, from Bruno’s Dream (1969) onward, falls into two categories: first-person novels with unreliable — or merely overwhelmed — narrators, and vast third-person novels featuring multiple characters.
The early works of hers that I recommend most are Under the Net (1954), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), and, most of all, the breezy The Nice and the Good (1968).
Of the third-person monsters, I most urgently advise reading An Accidental Man (1971) and The Green Knight (1987).
The first-person novels are the most challenging, and perhaps most rewarding.
The Black Prince (1973) is her refraction of Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant and controversial Lolita (1955). Her narrator is a pretentious loser, but his actions are so extreme that one must follow him. At least he falls in love not with a prepubescent girl (as did Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert) but an older teenager. His inamorata is not a happenstance stranger, either; instead, she is the daughter of his best friend, who is also his literary rival whom he envies deeply. A great and vexing novel.
If one determines love of a book by how many times one reads it, then A Word Child (1975) is my favorite Murdoch book: I may have read it four times, once per decade. The narrator cannot make good decisions. His compulsion to repeat his biggest personal tragedy is riveting and quite funny. It is time for a fifth and more careful reading.
The Sea, The Sea (a prizewinner from 1978) may be her best work. It tells the tale of an old actor who retires to live by the sea only to discover that his great lost love lives in a nearby village. So of course he kidnaps her! Comedy and tragedy ensue. And a sea monster. This one packs a wallop.
I am not even aware of Iris Murdoch writing any short stories — I have not read any. Her philosophical work is a mixed bag. I read and enjoyed her The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977) soon after it first came out, and I have also read a number of her most important essays. But I do not fall into her camp of theorizing about ethics — I am closer to Spencer and Santayana. Nevertheless, her philosophical work is both historically and dialectically important. Like Anscombe and Weill, she opposed the meta-ethical turn of British moral philosophy, and her criticisms of that tradition are mostly on point, except to the extent that she misses the point. The meta-ethicians of the emotivist-prescriptivist school were trying to confront the reality of the origins of ethics in utility; their grave errors were in not drawing all the vital connections from this relativistic foundation to a full and substantive ethical understanding.
Alas, she may be most well-known for suffering from Alzheimer’s at the end of her life. There was a movie. It’s good, but nothing like her novels, really.
If I live long enough, I will read the seven novels of hers I have so far neglected. I will probably start with The Message to the Planet (1989), which I may have avoided because I suspected it could not possibly live up to its science-fictional title.
I believe that Murdoch is the writer who took George Meredith’s method and made it high art. Her books are better than Meredith’s, for the most part, mainly by controlling her need to “riff” off of the action and characters. She let her characters have independence from her control and her personal perspectives. She did not “editorialize.”
One of the main themes in her work is the problem of predatory and domineering egoism. (Meredith explains his take on egoism in his famous and worthwhile 1877 An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit and in the preface to his 1879 novel The Egoist.) This antagonism to egoism puts her in fascinating contrast to Ayn Rand, a novelist more popular with my friends. Rand infamously celebrated a kind of “a new concept of egoism.” Years ago, after reading Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand (1987) and while reading the opening pages of Nathaniel Branden’s Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989), it became clear to me that Rand herself was a figure out of a Murdoch comedy — an enchanter figure — as was the much-younger Nathaniel, whom she made her lover. Indeed, I do not think the whole “egoism” thing of Rand’s “Objectivism” can be fully understood until one recasts the whole silly drama as if from the mind of Iris Murdoch.
I have known enchanter-egoists. But then I have known enchanter altruists, too. The worst sort of people on the planet are enchanter-egoists who pretend to be savior-altruists, but that is not, alas, a theme that Murdoch explored seriously. Rand could have, had she not been broken in spirit by Nathaniel Branden.
But I read Rand too late in my life — after reading Murdoch, actually — so I had been immunized against the kind of traps set by the worst sorts of enchanters.
I mention all this not merely to round out my reading notes, but also to indicate, if clumsily, that one can indeed learn important truths from literature. Moral lessons. You just cannot stop thinking. You have to read between the lines and think between the books. And figure out that both egoism and altruism can be poisonous to the virtuous life . . . to what Murdoch expressed no hesitancy in calling The Good.
twv
The pristine date-of-publication order that I try to establish in my library here obviously failed.
The recent ITV reënactment (adaptation) of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair looks really good, but it seems unfortunate that the character Sambo — described as badly legged and black on the first page of the novel — is here a well-shaped, stately black African (played by a British actor), not an Indian, and is called “Sam.”
Racial, racism, stereotypes, blah blah blah. What would Thackeray make of P.C.?
The show is on Amazon Prime, but the book is everywhere. I have in my hand a very nice Könemann two-volume, boxed edition.
This is a taunt from the pages of Jack London’s great novel Martin Eden, 13th chapter:
Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park, but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer’s appeared, a seedy tramp with a dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet.” Martin was puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned “First Principles,” Martin drew out that volume.
So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer, and choosing the “Principles of Psychology” to begin with, he had failed as abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There had been no understanding the book, and he had returned it unread. But this night, after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he got into bed and opened “First Principles.” Morning found him still reading. It was impossible for him to sleep. Nor did he write that day. He lay on the bed till his body grew tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading on his back, the book held in the air above him, or changing from side to side. He slept that night, and did his writing next morning, and then the book tempted him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him. His first consciousness of the immediate world about him was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if he thought they were running a restaurant.
Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the world. But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known, and that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and wandering forever. He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations—and all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance. The mechanism of the flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but it had never entered his head to try to explain the process whereby birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been developed. He had never dreamed there was such a process. That birds should have come to be, was unguessed. They always had been. They just happened.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was a Victorian Era polymath, remembered for
his early development of evolutionary theory — “The Development Hypothesis” (1852), “A Theory of Population, deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility” (1852), Principles of Psychology (first edition, 1855) and “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857);
his political liberalism — in Social Statics (1851), Justice (1891, Part IV of Principles of Ethics) and The Man versus the State (1884), all celebrated only by libertarians, today;
his pioneering of sociology — Study of Sociology (1878), Descriptive Sociology(19 vols., 1873–1934), and Principles of Sociology (1876–1896 );
coining the term “survival of the fittest” after hearing Charles Darwin’s initial presentation of “natural selection,” and as introduced formally in Principles of Biology (1864).
But Spencer first made his name as a metaphysician and religious philosopher. His main concept was “the Unknowable,” as indicated in the quip in above. It received its main exposition in the first half of First Principles (1860). Spencer was trying to show the limits of human knowledge, but also address an understanding of what he regarded as the underlying foundation to all existence, which, he argued, we know of but cannot actually know. Spencer believed that awe and reverence for this “Unknowable” is the remaining — “ultimate” — religious idea, after science had done its work.
The best treatment of this peculiar element to his philosophy is by George Santayana, in his Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1923, “The Unknowable.” I highly recommend this beautiful and profound essay, to every thinking person — see Obiter Scripta (1936), but I first came across it in Clifton Fadiman’s Reading I’ve Liked (1945).
Spencer’s agnostic concept of “The Unknowable” was once all the rage. Victorian scientists such as John Tyndall, rapidly losing their faith, grabbed at it as if a lifeline in deep ocean. Since then, however, it has dropped out of circulation. I did once hear it discussed in the 1990s’ TV dramedy Northern Exposure, though.
So why the sneering remark? It apes the famous Islamic credo, sure. But it was from a socialist character. Herbert Spencer was deeply anti-socialist. No more need be said.
As you can see by the image of my Goodreads review, it took me a while to finish reading it. But since there is no story, no plot, it doesn’t much matter. Little “violence” is done by intermittent reading, as is also the case with Impressions of Theophrastus Such and The Book of Disquiet.
In my reading, though, this long span of occasional picking up and putting down of the book was the result, mainly, of repeatedly losing track of it. My library is too large, my reading spots too numerous, and my office is too messy: it is easy to lose track of books. There was no plan — or even economizing of effort — going on in my seemingly studied inattention.
Gissing’s reflections on the British national spirit.Gissing was not very “pro-science.”
Back cover to the edition I read.
This reminds me of Pessoa’s reflections.
Since it is mainly just a series of reflections it is not an autobiography. So what is this genre? Belles lettres, I think.
Angus Wilson was a second-tier literary figure of post-war Britain. Does anyone read him any longer? I know that I have not. But I do own four of his novels. And the openings are quite good:
This opening of The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot strikes me as perfect. We are going to get a good character study by a competent observer of the social world. The book is my age. I really should read it.
Perhaps only because I recognized the fine writing of the first novel, above, I bought this second, on a whim. I did not carefully read this first page in the book store. Buying Late Call was an impulse purchase. But his 1964 novel’s first page is unexceptionable, indeed worthy of more attention than I have given it. It is a pity that Angus Wilson just looms in my imagination as an less as a vital author and more as Terra incognita.
Old Men at the Zoo (1961) is one of his most popular books, from what I have so far gathered, and I bought the Granada/Panther paperback with assurance from John Wain on the front cover — the back cover blurbs being most unhelpful. Wilson’s cautionary note up front is fairly amusing:
The fourth book of his in my library is the oldest, from 1956 (though this is a second edition), and the paper cover of my copy is creased and worn. Somebody almost certainly read it, years ago.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was written long before the very concept “Anglo-Saxon” was considered racist, as it is today amongst the college crowd and cognitive elite in America, but not before the notion conveyed some comic embarrassment and a whiff of the absurd. The main character appears to be “depressed”:
Now, Angus Wilson usually suffers from the inevitable comparison with Kingsley Amis, whose comic novels usually place him above the rest of the Angry Young Men set. Lucky Jim (1954), which I have read three times, at least, is a perfect confection. In my Twenties I read a whole shelf of Amis books, including Take a Girl Like You (1960) and One Fat Englishman (1963) and even The Alteration (1976). But I haven’t read Amis’s fiction in years, and what I have in my shelves includes several I haven’t read past the first chapter.
Indeed, I have read only two of these: Jake’s Thing (1979) and The Green Man (1969). The former is hilarious and first rate while the latter is a surprisingly good ghost story, with a transcendent aspect (God makes a showing).
Jake’s Thing benefits from being a comedy of impotence and growing old — built-in hilarity — but more substantive is the satire on modern faddish therapeutics. I remember this being one of Amis’s very best novels.
But I probably enjoyed The Green Man more. It is the Amis book I am most likely to re-read.
Until taking this snap of the first page, I may never have cracked open The Crime of the Century (1975). It does not really move me to read on.
I tried to read The Russian Girl (1992) just this last winter, but the writing struck me as bad; looking at it again, now, and I am mystified as to why I leveled such a strong negative judgment against it.
Difficulties With Girls (1988), on the other hand, entices. It is probably the next Amis I will read. But I don’t think it has much of a reputation. Which is probably why I have neglected it so far.
Deep River is a novel about the valley over the hill from where I live. My mother grew up in that valley. She and my father built their first home in the valley head. My older siblings spent the early years of their lives there. I have fond memories, for the most part, of that shadowy place not far from home.
The novel is said to be quite good, and its author, Karl Marlantes, a genius.
He does not seem like one.
Not on the basis of the Seattle Timesarticle about the novel, anyway. I got stuck on something he said, a comment about Communism. I raise more than a mere single eyebrow:
Today we have this fear of anyone who has a different political attitude from us. My grandmother was a communist, but her kitchen was clean. She wasn’t scary, but today we gin up the fear.
Oh, is that what we do? Gin up the fear. How thoughtless of us! How bigoted!
Replace one word in his defense of his grandma, though, and would anyone still consider his defense of his grandmother’s radicalism reasonable?
Today we have this fear of anyone who has a different political attitude from us. My grandmother was a Nazi, but her kitchen was clean. She wasn’t scary, but today we gin up the fear.
Karl Marlantes would not write that. He knows that National Socialism was evil. And had one of his relatives been a Nazi who worked as “a political agitator” stirring up “a heap of trouble” in trying to organize for a cause he approved of — like, I bet, a welfare state (which Nazi Germany did indeed establish) — he would rightly be too squeamish to brush aside our abhorrence of the ideology.
But it is worse than that. Communists killed over 100 million of their fellow citizens last century. Hitler, an utterly evil dictator, was a slacker compared to Stalin and Mao.
Oh, and Hitler praised Karl Marx’s economic analysis, too. Leftists cannot hide behind unhistorical platitudes of “anti-fascism” and a witless love for “the left.” The bodies pile up higher the further left you push. And even the “anarchist-communists”/“communist-anarchists” of bygone years have something to answer for, because they promoted ideas that led to revolution that in turn led to tyranny and mass slaughter.
And it is not as if the Wobblies, whom Marlantes’ character Aino — based on his grandmother — “agitated” for, were all sweetness and light. They engaged in quite a number of riots, and several forms of terrorism. Along with the bomb-throwing (and bomb-throwing adjacent) anarchists, they understandably got caught in the anti-terrorist backlash in the early 20th century, and were suppressed.
Marlantes appears to be a typical “progressive” moral moron. He carries on a long leftist tradition of taking sides in the Pick Your Tyranny game that has played for nearly a century. Fascism is bad; communism is . . . well, “communists mean well.”
I am not sure I have ever encountered a leftist willing to plumb the depths of the Totalitarian Ideology Problem, willing to not Pick Your Tyranny. They exist, sure. But once one really comes to grips with the problem, one tends to cease being a leftist.
Leftism is a culturally acceptable Yog-Sothothery, an open flirtation with outrageous moral horror. It is a cult. It corrupts minds. And it is very widespread among moderately bright artistic types. Like Karl Marlantes.
Oh, and for the record: my grandfather hated the Wobblies. Not all Finns were commies.
There were Red Finns, sure, but there were about an equal number of Church Finns — “Whites” — at least in America. My education in politics did not rest upon this divide, but it did haunt the back of my mind. I grew up knowing about the tragedy of “Karelian Fever.” I also knew of the terror of living under Stalin. Socialism of any kind was always a bit suspect.
What made me so lucky, when so many of my culturally “left” artists succumbed? Well, much older relatives of mine, who were Reds, knew it all too well. And told their story. Which was repeated.
Family lore about my great uncle and aunt was this: early in the mad “experiment” of Communism, they had moved, as newlyweds, to the USSR — and within six months became almost afraid of each other. Political correctness under a totalitarian state is one of terror, not mere ill manners and inconvenience. They fled, lucky to escape.
Finnish-Americans who will not honestly confront their history with communist evil don’t do anyone any good.
I will wait to read Marlantes’ latest novel, I think, perhaps pick it up used. Call it my personal boycott of apologists for totalitarianism, “politically correct” fools who make light of mass murder, regimentation, and the philosophy of pushiness and plunder.
It seems apt to have finished reading this novel as Valentine’s Day begins in the wee hours. For this is not romantic comedy, it is romantic noir.
I am not really an avid reader of “pulp fiction,” though I did recently read an early Jack Vance crime novel — The Flesh Mask, originally published under the pseudonymous signal “Peter Held.” Oh, and I am a Charles Willeford enthusiast, favorite novels including his tough guy/Stirnerite spins on Ayn Rand themes, Burnt Orange Heresy, Cockfighter, and The Woman Chaser. I would not be surprised to learn that Willeford studied not only Woodford’s writing manuals, but also pulp novels such as this one, originally called Lady Killer and published under a pseudonym (Howard Kennedy) in the 1930s, the decade in which he produced his largest fictional output.
This book is less a novel of ideas than the author’s Illegitimate and Unmoral, which I have reviewed here; it is much more like Willeford’s work. It is less talky, and does not elaborate Woodford’s “selfism”; it is more along the lines of a standard love triangle — except that Woodford’s method is more aptly termed a “love tangle.” Here we have a revenge scenario worked out. The plan fails, and, after a few twists and a murder, we have a happy ending. As usually with Woodford, the opening chapter is brilliant, while the happy ending will probably please today’s readers least.
I have a theory about the value of this author’s fiction. Woodford considered his work in this field — which he called “sex novels” — to be junk. He thought of himself a manipulator of readers for whom he had little respect. (But he showed much more disrespect for publishers. I recommend his Loud Literary Lamas of New York as a fun book-length rant against his bêtes noir. Woodford made his living as a self-publisher, and recommended to would-be authors that very publishing method — though he had to give it up in his final decade.) The nature of his “sex writing” method was the ramping-up of sexual excitement. It worked back in his day, when there were multiple taboos against “prurience” in speech and in literature. And Woodford found the perfect way to navigate through the Comstockian minefield: by never mentioning a sex organ, in either technical or vulgar wording, euphemistic or dysphemistic. This book is no exception. But nowadays all that sexual frustration has dissipated. Vanished. Nothing sexual is hidden from us, free on the Internet — even Network TV is far, far more explicit than Woodford was. So we are left with the strength of his prose, the ingenuity of his characterization and plots, and the charm of his cynicism.
It is rather like Greek statuary: their true greatness was revealed eons later, and in no small part because the original gaudy painting had worn off. The sexual repression and titillation constitute the ancient Greeks’ paint.
This is one of his better efforts. I am pretty sure he despised it, or at least pretended to. But I don’t. I think it has merit. I enjoyed it, and studied how it was constructed. Many a literary “masterpiece” of his era is no longer worth reading. This “trash” is.
Here is an oddity, though. Twice in the novel he used the word “strengthy.” I had never encountered that word before. Why not, simply, “strong”? I am pretty sure Woodford did not choose the word lightly. And I was almost taken aback at discovering that it was a once-common word. I am a bit surprised I had not noticed it before. Checking Google’s Ngram viewer, I see it has dropped out of the language. The word’s heyday was the 1840s, a century before this paperback hit the racks.
There is an advertisement for his line of books from “The Woodford Press” — including two of the novels I mentioned above — and was undoubtedly a provision Woodford insisted upon adding to The Hard-Boiled Virgin’s publishing contract.
The title of this novel is, of course, classic — and was cribbed from Frances Newman’s modernist monstrosity made infamous in the Twenties.
Wirkman Comment 