Peter Marchant - “At the office Miss Finlay was something of a dark horse”... It garnered a few reviews, but its combination of an unconventional heroine and a theme of escape through fantasy was perhaps a little too far ahead of its time. The most frequently-used adjective in its review was “odd”

 

Peter Marchant, Give Me Your Answer, Do, 2022

[1960]

First-ever new edition of Peter Marchant's only novel, originally published in London in 1960 Michael Joseph, Ltd.

"A woman secretary, who bicycles every day from Ebury Street to Fenchurch Street and back, has from childhood (unhappy—parents divorced) indulged in conversations with an imaginary pony called Bradshaw. Older and socially superior to the cockney girl typists at the office, she has held herself aloof from them, but feeling out of it when they discuss their boy friends or forthcoming marriages she is goaded into announcing that she herself is engaged—to Bradshaw. She keeps up the deception when she is befriended and later desired by a middle-aged insurance clerk." — The Daily Telegraph, London, April 14, 1960

“At the office Miss Finlay was something of a dark horse.” That opening line hooked me.

A while ago, someone on Twitter posted a picture of Give Me Your Answer Do in answer to a request for books that changed readers lives. I’m always intrigued when I come across a book that’s completely new to me, and this one was a blank slate. The poster provided no further information, but the sheer scarcity of the book (fewer than five copies for sale) was enough for me to take the plunge.

There’s something comfortably nonconformist about Give Me Your Answer Do. This might have been what made the book a life changer for its fan on Twitter.

Miss Finlay, Marchant’s heroine, is both dark horse and ugle duckling. She’s “tall and ungainly, with large feet and hands which made sudden, gawky movements. Her hair was flat, her upper teeth protruded, and she wore spectacles with plain, tortoise-shell rims.” Her fellow typists at Boothby, Gold & Co. think she looks “as if she scrubbed herself very regularly with carbolic soap.”

Miss Finlay engages with the other women at Boothby, Gold as little as possible without seeming rude, offers nothing about her private life. Which is probably wise. To them, her practical diversions when off work — mostly taking long bicycle rides into the countryside beyond London — would merely confirm she is as dull as they think. And her imaginative diversions would have been too wild and grand for their sedate little office.

For Miss Finlay — Margaret, not that anyone seems interested in her first name — has for many years carried on a passionate friendship with a large white horse named Ponikwer Peter Aylestone Bradshaw, or Bradshaw for short. Through dreary years at a bleak girls’ boarding school and further years of workday routine at Boothy, Gold followed by solitary nights in her little coldwater flat, Bradshaw has comforted and amused Margaret.

Margaret’s mother was happy to be rid of the girl. Beautiful and easily bored, she’d only had the child because an abortion was too hard to obtain and she’d only married Margaret’s father to put a wrapper of propriety around her pregnancy. Once Margaret could be put in the care of someone else, her mother could resume amusing herself with handsome and vapid men like her husband’s former commanding officer, Margaret’s real father. And to keep up with Margaret’s school fees and her mother’s expensive tastes in clothes and men, her father dutifully returns to labor at the coalface in India.

Socially awkward, physically inept, and deeply introverted, Margaret finds the experience of boarding school near unbearable. It’s only the odd moments when she can escape to the WC, lock herself into a stall that she has any privacy, and carry on a conversation with Bradshaw that can find any respite. He is the perfect companion: understanding, a good listener, always ready with a hug. She lulls herself to sleep each night imagining herself in the strong, protective arms (legs?) of Bradshaw.

When school comes to an end, Margaret’s mother deems her too ugly to be marriagable material and so packs her off to London to find secretarial work. Margaret soon manages to find herself a room of her own: a coldwater flat with a WC down the hall, perhaps, but a haven nonetheless. Within its four walls, she is free to paint the ceiling yellow, to fix the food she likes, and to carry on long conversations with Bradshaw.

Then, one day, Mr. Bacon, a divorced Yorkshireman as uncomfortable in his own skin as Margaret, invites her on a Saturday outing. One outing leads to another and soon companionship blends into friendship and begins to blend into … well, neither one of them feels quite comfortable putting a name on it. These are two extremely introverted people.

We know, of course, that a collision between Margaret’s fantasy world and her real world is inevitable, but the tension derives from our uncertainty over just how disastrous that crash will be. I’ll just say that Peter Marchant would have had Hollywood rom-com producers knocking on his door if he’d published this book in the 1990s instead of 1960. His ending is suspenseful, sappy, and satisfying in equal measure.

Marchant dedicated the book to Marguerite Young. Yes, the Miss Macintosh, My Darling Marguerite Young. Marchant had followed an unusual path to arrive at Young’s seminar at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1950s. He’d taken an MA in the classics at Cambridge and taught a variety of subjects while serving in the British Army Training Service, then emigrated to Iowa, where he both taught in the School of Education and attended the Writer’s Workshop.

“I’ve heard you have a story about a girl with an imaginary pony,” Young said to Marchant soon after meeting him. Marchant told her it was a flop, having been rejected by magazines and even his agent. “T’d like to read it,” she insisted.

Marchant had few hopes for the story. If it was going to survive and get published, it would have to be cut back severely.

No, Young told him: “You must let it grow. It’s a treatment — it needs expansion.”

When he next brought her a draft, it had grown to over eighty pages. Young’s criticism was harsh but supportive: “With unerring ruthlessness,” she said, “you’ve crossed out the best parts of your writing…. You’ve massacred all your flowers, leaving only the bare branches. She pointed out a passage where Margaret is sitting alone on a hillside. Mr. Bacon, in a fit of passion, has tried to kiss her — an act that she receives like a full-fledged sexual assault.

“She saw the sun glittering on hothouse roofs and wondered why it didn’t crack from the heat,” Young read. “Why did you cut it?” she asked.

“It seemed to me nonsense. Hothouse roofs don’t crack from sunlight.”

“Her fear of sex has nothing to do with her fantasy about glass shattering? Come, now,” Young scolded him.

“Oh,” said Marchant. The lightbulbs were beginning to come on. Over the next weeks, Marchant wrote furiously, soon producing a 300-page manuscript he turned in as his MA thesis for the workshop. He sold the book to the British publisher Michael Joseph, which released the book in 1960. It garnered a few reviews, but its combination of an unconventional heroine and a theme of escape through fantasy was perhaps a little too far ahead of its time. The most frequently-used adjective in its review was “odd” — which probably turned folks off in that conformist day but ought to pique the interest of today’s readers. I think the book would do very well if reissued now.

Marchant put fiction behind him after publishing Give Me Your Answer Do. According to his obituary, he stayed in academia, becoming a specialist in the 19th century British novel and teaching for decades at Penn State and the State University of New York – Brockport. Instead, it was his wife, Mary Elsie Robertson, who focused on fiction, writing a half dozen novels starting with After Freud in 1981. A Quaker, holder of a black belt in judo, and a historian of the Holocaust, Marchant must have been a remarkable man, and Give Me Your Answer Do deserves a high place in any list of his accomplishments. — Brad Bigelow, The Neglected Books Page, November 25, 2021https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=8682

Erga Netz - What really happened to Gulliver in his famous travels? And what did his wife do in the meantime? In this satirical novel, laced with a bit of eroticism, Mary Burton-Gulliver recounts her life as a "widow-of-the-sea" and the events that her husband didn’t dare to publish

 

Erga Netz, Oh, Gulliver!: Mary Burton-Gulliver's

Diary and Her Memoir of Gulliver's Travels,

Tough Poets Pres, 2023

What really happened to Gulliver in his famous travels? And what did his wife do in the meantime?

In this satirical novel, laced with a bit of eroticism, Mary Burton-Gulliver recounts her life as a "widow-of-the-sea" and the events that her husband didn’t dare to publish in his 1726 Gulliver's Travels.

"As a fan of the Gulliverian world, I must admit that you succeed in capturing its magic and charm even more successfully than T.H. White in his love letter to the Gulliverian world, Mistress Masham's Repose."— An early reader's comment

John Sanford - This is, quite simply, a noble and beautiful book, savage in its interpretation of our heritage, absolute in its integrity, and almost miraculous in its language

 

John Sanford, A More Goodly Country: A Personal History of America. Tough Poets Press, 2023 [1975]

Beginning in A.D. 1000 with Leif Ericson and ending with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, John Sanford (1904-2003), recipient of the PEN Award and the Los Angeles Times Lifetime Achievement Award, presents in poetic prose a searing personal history of the United States.

"It was, and it is, an unrelenting and accusatory book. No one who values his country can find its charges easy to bear—and yet I value my country, too, and the book was written only to make it better." — John Sanford, in his preface to the 1982 Black Sparrow reissue of A More Goodly Country

"This is, quite simply, a noble and beautiful book, savage in its interpretation of our heritage, absolute in its integrity, and almost miraculous in its language." — The Tennessean (Nashville, TN), May 5, 1975

"It is a work for all time, a work of love, of wry humor, of devastating criticism... It is a work of poetry, a work of greatness, and while it is almost blatantly subjective it is never subservient to any ideology."— Corvallis Gazette-Times (Corvallis, OR), December 27, 1975

"... an oozing, raucous treat of a book... a sprawling chorus on this country, sparing none of the harsh voices, leaving none of our pimples unpicked."— Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1975

"One day it will be a classic."— York Daily Record (York, PA), December 27, 1975

"Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich . . . it would have been all right."-- John Brown, 1859

INTRODUCTION

John Sanford published in nine decades, a remarkable feat for anyone, but particularly remarkable for someone who came to his profession relatively late in life. Sanford's first published piece appeared in the expatriate little magazine Tambour in 1929, when he was 25 years old, and his first book was not released until 1933, when he was 28.

Little Preparation for a Career in Writing

All the more remarkable is how little formal preparation Sanford had for his career as a writer. He was a poor student in school. He did not graduate from Manhattan's DeWitt Clinton High,--where his main extracurricular activity was cutting classes,--when he failed English his last semester. Sanford spent a year at Lafayette College, where he unsuccessfully attempted to write for the student newspaper. This tenure was followed by the shortest of stints at Northwestern and Lehigh, where he lasted just two weeks. Afterward, he needed a fraudulent diploma obtained by bribing a state official to gain admission to Fordham Law School, but he dropped out after less than a month. Finally, the next term, Sanford returned to Fordham, where he completed his law degree. He then joined his father's legal practice. However, it was during his law studies that Sanford chanced to meet a childhood friend on a New Jersey golf course; this 1925 meeting would forever change Sanford's path in life. To Sanford's astonishment, the friend--Nathan Weinstein, who was now going by the name of Nathanael West--announced that he was writing a book. Suddenly, the wayward and goal-less Sanford knew he wanted to write one too.

Sanford renewed his friendship with West, often accompanying him on walks through New York City and listening to West discourse on art and literature. It was West who introduced Sanford to an enduring model: an obscure short story writer named Ernest Hemingway. Sanford helped read proof on West's first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. And, Sanford shared a hunting cabin with West one summer in the Adirondacks, where West worked on Miss Lonelyhearts and Sanford his first novel, The Water Wheel. Later, West induced Sanford to exchange his given name, Julian Shapiro, for the name of the principle character in The Water Wheel. That decision Sanford would come to rue.

While not as self-consciously lean as Hemingway's or West's writing, Sanford's prose has an unembellished spareness that clearly shows his friend's influence. Early on, James Joyce's influence could be seen in Sanford's eschewing of apostrophes in contractions. Later, Joyce's inspiration endured in Sanford's continuing quest for arresting and unconventional expressions. Sanford rarely used simile; rather, he preferred the directness and power of metaphor. He used nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns. Often his prose has poetic elements, such as multiple interior rhymes. Sanford's work is marked by a constant striving for innovation.

A Second Career at Sixty-three

Sanford's remaining influence was William Carlos Williams, whose book of historical vignettes, In the American Grain, Sanford read in the mid-1920s. The concept of history as literature took root in Sanford early. From the outset of his career, Sanford salted his works of fiction with historical interludes. These episodes were often a source of contention with publishers and cost him contracts. For example, Seventy Times Seven did not appear in England, because Sanford refused to remove historical material.

In all, Sanford published eight novels, which showed increasing strain with the bounds of fiction, as the books became more and more dominated by teachers and preachers, who delivered sermons and lectures to Sanford's readers. Finally, in 1967, with the publication of The $300 Man, Sanford had exhausted the novel form as a medium. At the suggestion of his wife, screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, Sanford embarked on what would become his second career, at the age of 63.

Three years in the writing, A More Goodly Country established Sanford's mature narrative voice, or rather voices. Consisting entirely of vignettes about historical events and figures, this book allowed Sanford to explore history by means of fable, parable and brief dramatic monologue. Sanford brought history to life through magnificent flights of imagination. However, so unconventional was the book that it would take another three years and over 200 rejections before Sanford could find a publisher.

With the issuing of A More Goodly Country in 1975, Sanford's second career, as a nonfiction writer, was underway. There would follow eighteen more volumes of history, memoir and autobiography. It is remarkable that twelve of these books were published after Sanford reached the age of 80. At an age when most writers are retired or dead, Sanford was hitting his literary stride. And he continued to write until just a month before his death, when deteriorating eyesight made writing impossible. He died in March 2003, leaving three unpublished works.

The Finest Unread Author Writing in English

Despite the beauty of Sanford's writing, and the gravity and pertinence of his themes, Sanford remains mostly unknown and almost entirely unread. His books have been issued only in small editions, and only one has gone into a second printing. Early on, Sanford's work was published by the premier houses of the day. But Sanford quarreled with editors and publishers, and he refused to compromise.

As a result of Sanford's intractability, his publishers would each decide in turn that Sanford was more trouble than he was worth: one book was enough. Thus, they had little investment in his work. They did not promote his books, because Sanford would never be a member of their stable. Un-promoted, his books did not sell. And the chore of publishing Sanford would be passed on to another house. If Sanford had intentionally tried to sabotage his career, he could have done no more damage than he did by being rash and intransigent.

It was not until 1977, when Sanford had been writing for over 40 years, that the Capra Press followed Adirondack Stories with View from this Wilderness, thus becoming the first of his publishers to issue a second Sanford volume. And it was not until 1984 that Black Sparrow Press began what would be the longest run of Sanford titles from a single publisher, six in all. However, by the 1980s, Sanford was an old man, whose work was of interest only to small, art-house publishers. His chances of wider success had expired.

In addition to his quarrelsome ways with publishers, Sanford's lack of success must necessarily also be traced to the content of his books. From the start, one can see Sanford's obsession with the darker side of American history. In The Water Wheel, there is an episode musing on Philip Nolan, the Man without a Country. In Seventy Times Seven, there is a historical poetic interlude depicting man's inhumanity since America's earliest days. From that book onward, the harshness of Sanford's examination of the inequities in American history would only become more strident.

Literature as a Weapon

In 1936, Paramount had hired Sanford as a screenwriter. In late 1939, he joined the Hollywood cell of the Communist Party. The works that followed Sanford's political awakening became progressively more leftist. In a period when many American communists were reassessing their party membership, any doubts Sanford may have had only served to increase the fervor of his dedication to the cause. Even the Communists condemned 1943's The People from Heaven as too radical. The following A Man Without Shoes and The Land that Touches Mine are even more deeply political works, which criticized the American social and economic system as fundamentally unfair. This hard-line stance would eventually force Sanford to self-publish A Man Without Shoes.

Even in his later non-fiction historical books, Sanford's devotion to progressive causes remained intense. To read The Winters of that Country, a blistering indictment of America, is to find oneself denounced for having profited from centuries of injustice; the book is an accusation aimed at all Americans. Even Sanford's peerless prose could induce few readers to endure such a withering rebuke of the values in which they were raised to believe. Sanford must have known that these works would find little acceptance with the general reading public, who seek diversion, not chastisement. But he could not dim his ire, or the fire of his dream.

One historical figure to whom Sanford repeatedly returned is John Brown, the abolitionist whose assault on the armory at Harper's Ferry led to his execution. Sanford oft repeated Brown's statement: "Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich. . . it would have been all right." One could also apply that idea to Sanford's work: had he so written in behalf of the rich, he might have sold well and perhaps been a household name. Instead, Sanford chose to risk all in a quixotic attempt to right the wrongs of society. He sacrificed potential success to his cause. He wrote not to entertain the public, but to condemn it. He wrote to goad Americans to abandon complacency and to right society's wrongs.

The Luxury to Write What He Pleased

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, John Sanford met fellow screenwriter Marguerite Roberts at Paramount Studios. The couple would wed two years later, and Roberts would go on to become one of the most successful and highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, including twelve straight years under contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After Sanford's year-long tenure at Paramount was up, he had a brief stint at M-G-M. Following that, he would be gainfully employed only once more, when he co-wrote Clark Gable and Carol Lombard's Honky-Tonk with Roberts. For the rest of his life, Sanford would be supported by his wife's earnings.

Thus, Sanford experienced a rare luxury among professional writers: the luxury to write what he pleased, without consideration of economic consequences. Sanford was not compelled to sell books to put food on the table. He did not have to seek out other writing assignments to pay the bills. Sanford did not do book tours, did not attend signings, did not make public appearances or give lectures. He left the selling of his works to others, as if he believed that to curry the favor of readers would taint his work.

Unlike many writers of his stature, Sanford did not review books, did not write articles for magazines, did not have to interrupt the process of writing books that did not sell, so that he could make a living. In fact, aside from several pieces in literary little magazines at the outset of his career, and during a brief editorship of Black & White/The Clipper in 1940-41, Sanford hardly published in periodicals at all.

On the one hand, this lack of economic necessity freed Sanford to pursue his art wherever the muse took him. Without this freedom, his life's work would not exist in its current form. On the other hand, one wonders what Sanford would have produced, if he had been forced by economics to temper his indignation and recast his reforming vision, so that his books would sell.

If he had needed to write to make money, would Sanford have been capable of writing for the popular audience, and what would have been the result? Would his missteps have been fewer? Would he have muted the excesses of politics that flawed his later fiction? Would he still have achieved the high splendor of his style under these mundane constraints? Certainly, he would have had to write more and differently to earn a living. But, could he have achieved the mass appeal that always eluded him? One wonders whether economic necessity would have improved Sanford's art, or merely blunted his talent.

Nonetheless, despite its excesses and imperfections, John Sanford's writing has achieved a sustained beauty and passion that is rarely seen. Even his less fully realized works have passages of brilliance that commend them. And, in those works where style and content felicitously meet, Sanford is revealed as a master of his craft; his writing sparkles with the clean lines of a gem.

Although nearly unknown to the wider reading public, Sanford's work evokes fervor in critics and academics, as well as an almost fanatical devotion from a small cadre of collectors. It is, in particular, for these people this bibliography is written.

https://www.oakknoll.com/pages/book-excerpt/94202/jack-mearns/john-sanford-an-annotated-bibliography

Born Julian Shapiro in 1904 in Harlem, John Sanford was inspired to write by his childhood acquaintance Nathanael West. William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce also were important early influences on Sanford's themes and style. But Sanford's work displays a style uniquely his own. Sanford authored 24 books, including novels, creative interpretations of history and several volumes of memoir and autobiography. His monumental five-volume autobiography was titled Scenes from the Life of an American Jew. Both Sanford and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, his wife for over 50 years, were blacklisted during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Just before Sanford's death in 2003, the Los Angeles Times called him "an authentic hero of American letters." Sanford's career as a writer was star-crossed. His first ten books were issued by ten different publishers. Sanford quarreled with editors and alienated people throughout the publishing industry. Each of his books represents the culmination of a struggle. Thus, for Sanford, perhaps more so than most writers, there is a story that goes with each book. This bibliography recounts those travails to chart Sanford's development into the unique writer he became. Annotations address style and content of the works described, as well as the often winding road these works took toward publication. There are three appendices, including indices of historical pieces and of his family members and acquaintances. This book will prove to be a valuable and interesting resource for scholars of American literature. Author Jack Mearns is professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton. He has previously published Deadline News, a novel (iUniverse, 2006).