Jackdaw Library - 1937
This was the least enjoyable of the three Jackdaw paperbacks which I read on holiday. I had never heard of this author, so I wended my way to the oracle - Wikipedia. Croft-Cooke led a varied and variable life. By 17 years of age, he was working as a private tutor in Paris; in 1923 and 1924 he was in Buenos Aires; in 1925 he was based in London and started a career as a freelance journalist and writer, his work appearing magazines. Between 1929 and 1931 he was a dealer in antiquarian books. 1930 saw him in Germany and 1931 lecturing in Switzerland. He joined the British army in 1940, serving in Africa and India until 1946. From 1947 to 1953, he was a book reviewer for The Sketch. So far, so good. But Croft-Cooke was a homosexual, at a period when the law was firmly opposed to this. He was sent to prison - Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton - for 6 months on conviction for acts of indecency. From 1953 to 1968, he lived in Morocco, then moved to Tunisia, Cyprus, West Germany and Ireland. A peripatetic life! He returned to England in the 1970s and died in 1979. He had been a prolific writer - over 30 novels, as many detective novels under the nom de plume of Leo Bruce, more than 30 non-fiction books, and a couple of hundred short stories, as well as numerous plays and poetry, articles and essays. Moreover, he also penned a twenty-seven volume autobiography, known collectively as The Sensual World. One can read into that title what one wishes.
As for Night Out - why did I find reading it a bit of a struggle? First and foremost, I rather despised the main character (hardly to be called a 'hero'). Justus is a disgruntled twenty-four year old, who lodges in Dulwich with a nondescript family which includes a daughter Maureen - she was fair and small, she was dimpled and witching, she spoke without thought and acted without caution. She laughed very often, but never very deeply or very loud. Her parents did not know that she and Justus had been 'secretly engaged' for a year. Then, one morning, a letter arrives to inform Justus that he has inherited £500. He asks for Maureen's hand in marriage; it is refused. He trundles off to his mind-numbing job at a West End outfitters - dealing with the handkerchief and tie department in an Oxford Street branch of Messrs. Mason. The descriptions of his manager, Mr. Craven, (his cheeks were hollow, yet in some way flabby, hanging in putty-coloured wreaths about his jaw, and his eyes were weak and nervous) and the other assistant Sanderson (self-satisfied and self-confident, a sleek smiling fellow, full of smutty jokes, with long boastful stories to tell of what he called his "binges"), is one of the best chapters in the book.
Justus decides to pack in his job at the end of this Saturday morning and also to leave his lodgings without a farewell to Maureen or her family. So begins a catalogue of events (Justus has not the strength of character to have 'adventures'), which included dismissing any Ulyssean journeys to Africa, Australia or Canada (in the past he had deliberately dreamed of the future...glittering black Eastern eyes, the sweep of a Chilean skirt, the wide Western hats, the pointed peak of a Japanese mountain...but now that they were, each of them, within reach, they were not so magnetic. He did not feel like "the lad of spirit").
His travels instead take in Hyde Park Corner, where he listens to Roman Catholic, Salvationist, Methodist, Mormon and Socialist haranguers - they seemed rather the peculiar specimens in a grotesque Zoo, each labelled and on view, each making its own noise and being pointed at by the demonstrative umbrella familiar to elephant and ape alike in Regent's Park.
We next find Justus in a hired suit of evening dress on his way to dinner at Claridge's. There is a wonderful contrast with Hyde Park Corner, the waiters present him with food and wines all with their French titles. As early on in the novel as this, I felt the author was delivering a rather biting, if even angry, appraisal of the England soon after the Great War. The vodka, caviar and grouse are supported by bottles of Cote d'Avize and Chateauneuf du Pape. Afterwards, in the hotel's lounge, he is accosted by a short, stoutish parson...his smooth skin pallid but unmottled, his small restless eyes. He invites Justus back to his well-appointed flat. Ostensibly, the parson is to help with Justus' problems, but the atmosphere turns rather sinister as the former brings the conversation round to sex and "Nothing unnatural, I hope?" Has this been the author's own experience?
Justus scarpers to a drab saloon-bar near the Marble Arch and proceeds to get even more intoxicated. He tries to get involved with the 'regulars' but, on staggering out into the road, he was conscious of failure. Identification with anyone or anything seemed the hardest feat of all. An episode with an old friend, Manuel Rice (dark too, but full-cheeked and of deeper colouring, with long eye-lashes and heavier lips, looked sensual beside his friend) at a party with a variety of Bohemian types fails to impress Justus - seeing them trying so hard to be abandoned or blasé was like watching the rites of a new religion. But not one, on the whole, which he wanted to join. Borrowing one of Manuel's outfits, Justus next decides to wallow in nostalgia and return to Old Barrow, near Spoonham, in Kent where he had been taken 15-16 years ago, before the Great War to recover from influenza. Again, it is not a success. Rows of newly-built bungalows - dreadful, most of them - now despoil the area; the farming family where he had lived had moved to a new house. Justus realises the overall problem - he was lonely...Maureen was the cause of it all - his love for Maureen! What, then, was the use of going on? If everything he did or tried to do was fated to dry up as he thought of her...was to be dissolved by the deep and inward knowledge that it was all the time only Maureen that he wanted, and the rest vanity.
After another failure, this time back in London, with a prostitute - How awful, how awful! - he finally meets up with a man whose philosophy impresses him. 'The Yellow Vulture' is treated by Justus to a coffee and he, in turn, treats Justus to his take on life. He calls Justus' recent escapade a Comedy of Emasculation...you poor little post-war warrior. All the will to do, to serve, to believe, and none of the power. Born out of date if you like. Frustrated every time...Your whole generation is like that more or less...yours is an unfortunate generation...Emasculated, I said, not in body but in mind...there you have your two days' wanderings explained, as you so aptly, by your two days' wanderings, epitomize the ineptitude of your contemporaries. No wonder, after leaving the Yellow Vulture, Justus was left with a sense of bleak nihilism. No wonder, we read of him scurrying back, sheepishly, to his Dulwich lodgings and then to the Oxford Street job. At least, Maureen's parents keep their promise that he can officially get engaged to their daughter in a year's time, and the whole escapade had only cost our hero fourteen pounds, fifteen shillings and sixpence.
On writing this Blog, I realise I was probably too harsh on Croft-Cooke. It is not his story-telling that was depressing, but the fact that he accurately pinpointed the actual times he wrote about. Looking back, the Age of the Flapper was so seedy, puerile and nihilistic. But what can one expect after the catastrophe of the Great War?
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