Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' Library paperback - 1937
This is the third book in a trilogy. The author writes, in his Foreword, the three novels, while quite independent of each other, make a trilogy of the stories of these young men, who, while born to the same class, and given the same education, and living in the same part of the world, have differed widely in character and experience. The second novel in the trilogy, Night Out (1932) (also in the Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' paperbacks as No. 17), I read over two years' ago (see Blog 28th May 2024). I started that Blog by saying, This was the least enjoyable of the three Jackdaw paperbacks which I read on holiday. And then went on to write: 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. Both Justus and Maureen turn up towards the end in Release the Lions. Finally, I commented that 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? Well, if Justus was disgruntled, bordering on a ne'er-do-well, then the main protagonist in this book, is far worse. He is an unashamed misanthropist.
Twenty-seven year-old Max Dionysius walks smartly out of Girlstone Gaol, after a year 'inside'. Within the hour he has committed his first petty crime - a girl has bumped a car he was standing next to. He gets a quid from her for the damage and makes off on a passing bus before the real owner appears. He has also recognised the girl. A decade ago, during his last summer holidays from Bembridge School - not long after the Armistice - as a snub-nosed 16 year-old he had met the then 16 year-old Una Bray, seduced her (but she never completely gave herself) in the nearby woods. They had never spoken again. For years after he resolved to find her, he would persuade her into a car. Or he would abduct her by aeroplane to a far island. Anyhow - get her for his own. A thread running through the ensuing tale is his determination to track her down.
Before this, however, he must continue his life of (almost mania for) petty crime. He successfully seduces the barmaid of the Three Shovels; pretends he is her brother when her husband returns earlier than expected; steals £9 5/- from the pub's till and swiftly departs. The next day finds him knocking on a vicar's front door. The Rev. Pybald-Prichard listens to Max's cock-and-bull story about turning over a new leaf and not knowing what to do about a bag of gold sovereigns he needs to change to pay another man his share. The Rev. falls for it (the coins are counterfeit), and Max makes off with more ill-gotten gains. A mildly amusing aspect of the tale now occurs. Pybald-Prichard's young curate - plump and perspiring, with baby-blue eyes - bumps into Max. The curate is bored and falls into a near-worship of Max's bravado. The two of them link up and go on a spree - an adventure for the excited Eric Brodie -of crime. As Max remarks: A neat reversal. The practical Quixote, the romantic Panza. Do you know, little man, I believe I'll take you.
In their wanderings, they come across a group of naturists; they join them; Brodie is deputed by Max to steal all their money from their nearby clothes. The haul £17 12/- in 1933 is equivalent to £1,635.04 nowadays. This section of the novel is quite amusing, in the rather cruel description of the aged naked bodies. It is always dangerous to identify a character in a novel's opinions with its author, but the strength of the narrative when Max explains his modus vivendi and operandi to the spellbound curate is quite chilling. I think it's about time you ceased regarding me as Robin Hood, Don Quixote, Dick Turpin, Raffles, or anything in fact but a plain thoroughbred crook, out for money. Over the next dozen pages, Max sets out his credo. It not not just out and out passive misanthropy, but active, persistent criminal behaviour against other individuals and society as a whole. Love of my fellowmen is the commonest Society gives. But I don't love them. I find them on the whole selfish, unlovely, hypocritical, and dismally uninteresting...the most satisfactory future for the species of which I am a member would be extinction...sexually they are emasculated by excess, devoid of inspiration through facility, or chirruping perverts, with hairless chins and shifty eyes...for literature they are satisfied with the meandering silliness of sterile women-novelists, or the asinine mediocrity of popular writers...there's your human race today - the women a cluster of scarcely distinguishable bipeds whose faces are painted to a semblance of natural colour, and whose conversation gibbers insipidly on. And how does the curate respond? "I think you are a great man."
They remain together to near the end of the story. They rob a jeweller's shop; they hide away from the police with some travelling fruit-pickers in their caravan; and they reach the chocolate-box cottage of Justus and Maureen. I found it interesting, having read Night Out, to find out what had happened to those two characters. They are depressingly 'suburban'. Of course, Max tries, but this time fails, to seduce Maureen. At last, Brodie has had enough, leaves Max and returns to Rev. Pybald-Prichard with his tail between his legs. Meanwhile, Max has finally tracked down where Una lives. After relieving a group of young cricketers from his old school of their wallets - he had promised to look after them when they went out onto the field - he ends up at her home. Now Mrs Una Lipcott, she quickly rolls back the years, accepts he is a jail bird and ends up in bed with him (the husband is fortuitously away), mainly because she is bored stiff with her marriage. The future? She starts to pack; abroad beckons. But it is clear Max is having second and third thoughts - he suddenly saw it all as a piece of rather flat fiction - this meeting with an old lover, the planning of a new life. Not for him. Surely not for him. Luckily for them both, certainly for Una, at five-clock a police inspector and a constable knocked peremptorily at the door. They had tracked Max down after the cricketers had reported their loss. And in due course, as he had by then foreseen, the doors of Girlstone Gaol opened, and Max walked smartly in.
He was where he thoroughly deserved to be. A misanthropic, pathetic outsider.
Was the fact that the author was a homosexual, which brought him into conflict with the laws of his time (actually sent to prison for six months on conviction for acts of indecency), and who moved to Morocco fearing continued persecution, relevant when one reads the powerful and bitter sections of his novels on society? I would be quite interested in reading the first novel in the trilogy - Troubador (1930), about the third young man, Manuel Rice, to find out how different he was from his two mates, Justus and Max. However, it was not published in the 'Jackdaw' Library, so I expect I never shall have that doubtful pleasure.
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