Archives: Persephone Forum

 

 

A young medical intern is driving from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Arizona, in a white Cadillac, borrowed from his mother. We surmise, but are not told, that he is young, because he refers to his younger teenage sisters, that he is a doctor because in the trunk (boot) he has stowed his medical bag, and from the car, conspicuous and conspicuously expensive, we infer that his family is comfortably off. We meet him a quarter of the way into his 420 mile journey to attend his niece’s wedding. He is leaving Indio, California, where he has had a minor encounter with a jalopy load of teenagers, which unsettles him more than one might expect, and a long wait at a drive-in for a bacon sandwich gracelessly served, which, surprisingly, troubles him barely at all.

 

There are few cars on the interstate highway, it is early evening but still blisteringly hot as he heads into the desert. Way beyond walking distance from Indio, sheltering in the shadow of a tree, a young girl is hitching a lift. A kind, educated, professional man, from a good family, our young doctor, for whom, in just a few pages, Hughes has enlisted sympathy and admiration, does the right thing. To protect her from some other, potentially predatory, driver, he picks up a vulnerable, charmless teenager, who proves to be both mendacious and needier even than she first appeared.  ‘I let my sympathy rule my judgement,’ he ruefully reflects later. Picking up strangers on empty roads is perilous, ‘he’d known it long before newspapers and script writers had implanted the danger in the public mind.’ Iris Croom, the name she gives, is trouble, and we are as keen as Dr Hugh Densmore to get her out of that Cadillac and onto a Greyhound bus; failing that, and it fails, to see her dropped off in Phoenix, so that our attractive, if somewhat paranoid, young doctor can join his relations for the celebrations.

The family home in Phoenix is a large old frame house, with red roses climbing over the broad porch, and oleanders against the tall hedge. Clytie, Hugh’s niece, has chosen to be married ‘in the ancestral home, to walk down the long front stairway as her mother and her mother’s mother had before her.’ This is picture postcard America, prosperous middle-class, professional: his brother-in-law is a doctor, his father in insurance, grandfather a minister, Clytie and her cousins at or heading for good universities  – far removed from Iris Croom’s dead-end life in Indio, abandoned by her mother to live with an uncaring feckless father.

 

 

 

 

Iris is no more than ‘a small memory far back in Hugh’s consciousness’, not quite erased; told that he has been booked into a motel to make room for the in-laws, he is relieved to know that, in the unlikely event that she were to spot the Cadillac, Iris will not be pursuing him at home. But the links in what he subsequently describes to himself as ‘a paper chain of circumstance cut from sympathy and too much imagination’ have already been joined. In a rear unit (‘there were no second-rate units’) at a luxury motel, Iris tracks him down, as he had feared she would. She is pregnant, he, regretfully, refuses to help, and sends her away.

Once again he has done the right thing. So why, when a girl’s body is found in the city canal, is he the prime suspect? The clues have been there all along. Hughes has planted them, but so subtly that in our haste to read on, they have been easy to miss. Why has Hugh been given a rear unit? Why was he so very anxious about giving her a lift? Why looking for a room the previous night at his regular stop, had ‘he hoped there’d be a vacancy tonight, you never knew. Sometimes even when the sign said there was one, the last unit had been rented just before you arrived’? Why had the official at the interstate inspection station ‘resented the big white Cadillac the moment Hugh drove up in it’? Why had he accepted such ungracious service at the drive-in? Why the paranoia? One word from a foul-mouthed police officer and the pieces fall into place. It is shocking and dramatic and if you haven’t read this brilliant book, log out now!

                                                                   SPOILERS AHEAD

‘This guy says a nigger doc driving a big white Cadillac brought Bonnie Lee [Iris was lying about her name] to Phoenix.’ The first time I read The Expendable Man, I had to turn back to the beginning to check that I hadn’t missed mention of Hugh’s colour. Dorothy B Hughes, indirectly in her hero’s voice, has told us a lot about him, but not mentioned what is, but shouldn’t be, his most significant feature. He is everything we thought, clever, ambitious, kind, and so are his successful relations, and so is his niece’s elegant and beautiful roommate, Ellen Hamilton, from ‘one of the old Eastern families whose status went back to Revolutionary days’. But the ancestral home, with its wide porch and its long front stairway belongs not to a white family, as we had prejudicially assumed, but to an established African-American family. Hugh and his family and Ellen are black.

 

 

And that is why the police have come for Hugh. If we have wondered who the ‘expendable man’ might be, now we know.

Hugh is vulnerable,  not because of age or poverty or wretched parenting like Iris/Bonnie, but because of the colour of his skin. A white girl has been murdered. She has been seen in a car with a black man. Why look further for the culprit? For the police, lazy and racist, further enquiries represent a waste of time and effort. The press is crying out for an arrest. No wonder Hugh asks himself, ‘How long before he’d be thrown from the sleigh to appease the wolves of discontent?’.  The uncomfortable truth is that: ‘He was the wrong man to have played Samaritan, and he’d known it, known it there on the road and in every irreversible moment since.’

 

 

 

The Expendable Man was first published in 1963, the year of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, the year in which President Kennedy proposed civil rights legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pushed through by President Johnson, helped by the shock-wave of sympathy following Kennedy’s assassination. When Hughes was writing The Expendable Man, segregation was still enforceable by law in the South: the ‘Jim Crow’ laws (‘separate but equal’) covered schools, housing, employment, and transport, public lavatories, waiting rooms and restaurants.

 

 

 

‘This wasn’t the Deep South,’ Hugh reassures himself, ‘it was Arizona.’ Nor, although he does not specify this, was it liberal California, where Hugh’s immediate family had settled and where he has pursued his medical training. In most Western states, including California, there was no legislation. In the North-Eastern states segregation was forbidden by law (although de facto segregation existed in both housing and employment); but in Arizona, along with New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming, racial segregation was ‘a local option’,  not required but allowed. A contemporary blogger, writing about Phoenix in the 1960s, describes it as ‘culturally a Southern city’, which suggests that the ‘option’ was quite widely taken up.

Hugh’s grandparents would not have been unusual in owning their own home – in the 1920s, 75 percent of African-Americans living in Phoenix owned their houses – but their neighbourhood, though still relatively prosperous, would by the 1950s have been predominantly black. ‘Mortgage discrimination’ (African-Americans refused mortgages on homes in ‘Anglo’ areas) and rigid racial deed restrictions set by the Real Estate Board, forbidding the selling of homes to ‘members of any race or nationality, or any individuals detrimental to property values’, had ensured that. Racial drift completed the ghettoisation. Hugh’s brother-in-law, Edward, father of the bride, has his office in a building  ‘housing two doctors, a dentist, an architect and a pharmacy. All Negro. The white tenants had moved out when the pioneer, the architect, moved in.’

 

 

But by the early sixties things were changing, albeit slowly and erratically. In this relatively short novel, with a small but vividly characterised cast, set over a period of less than a week, Hughes provides a snapshot of a city in transition. Hugh has observed the changes. When Ellen waits to take over his Motel unit, the receptionist explains, ‘We haven’t any other space unreserved right now’.

‘It was a lie and they all knew it was a lie, but there was no rancour among them. This clerk couldn’t cancel the system; her genuine friendliness was her contribution toward eroding it. Five years ago she wouldn’t have had a vacant unit; ten years ago she would have said, “We don’t take Negroes”, if any had had the courage or spunk to inquire.’

Change, but still some uncertainty: when Hugh decides to hide himself away in a cinema he finds that ‘he didn’t know what the current rules were for seating but, remembering childhood, he took a seat in the balcony.’ That he does this without rancour strikes us, fifty years on and from across the pond, as rather surprising, but reflects the fact that this is the world in which he has grown up, while at the same time confirming his rooted self confidence – ‘He, Dr Hugh Densmore, product of his heredity and environment, sufficiently intelligent and well-adjusted to his mind and body and colour and ambition.’ – which he knows he must defend, and which will be, viciously and crudely challenged.

Ringle and Venner, the police officers investigating, if that’s not too generous a word for an instant assumption of guilt, operate by the old rules, preferring to believe ‘their own’.  Even when ‘their own’ is poor Iris’s violent boyfriend, his word is worth more than ‘a dark alien stranger’, however well educated, and well connected. For a moment at the wedding celebrations Hugh wishes that Ringle and Venner could have been looking in: seeing how there was no segregation with Clytie’s university friends and her husband’s Air Force crowd, ‘they might realise that poor shoddy little Iris couldn’t have been the outworn cliché of sexual interest to Hugh.’ But, as the novel draws to a close – no spoilers – he is compelled to accept that ‘the Venners would not be changed in their generation’. Looking at recent television footage of police violence coming out of the United States, that estimate seems wildly optimistic.

But Ringle and Venner are low down on the law enforcement ladder. Higher up is the Marshal, whom we sense at heart prefers the old ways, but is anxious to keep things legal and clear, without taint of prejudice. He doesn’t want a lot of do-gooders weighing in, and furthermore he has political ambitions: public opinion is moving towards civil rights, and that’s where he’s hitching his wagon.

Until this month probably the best known, and revered, American literary legal hero was Atticus Finch, but Harper Lees’s recently published sequel/prequel to To Kill a Mockingbird has revealed him to have feet of clay. Finch was a racist after all. Not so Skye Houston, the white lawyer who takes on Hugh’s case and who, perhaps not coincidentally, lives on Mockingbird Lane.  Not only is Ellen Hamilton beautiful and intelligent her father is a Washington judge. It is he who suggests Skye, and Skye who insists on first names – he is the future. Skye Houston has made his reputation, and his fortune; unlike Marshal Hackaberry he is able to do the right thing for the right reason.

Even with Sky Houston at his back, Hugh must do his own investigating (helped, of course, by the brave and resourceful Ellen – think Agatha Christie’s Tuppence, Durbridge’s Steve or Dorothy Sayer’s Harriet Vane).  A desperate search for Iris’s killer or killers leads him to some seamy areas of Phoenix, a world away from the Densmores and the Hamiltons, where Hughes introduces us to some unsavoury characters, brilliantly, and not wholly unsympathetically, drawn, brought down not by colour but by poverty, and inadequacy, whose moral compasses have long ago been ditched, expendable in their way, but protected by the colour of their skin, for as long as the ‘Venners’ survive .

This page-turning thriller carries a powerful but non-polemical message: small details and subtle hints describe what Hugh Densmore calls ‘the tedious inching forward’ towards racial equality. It also offers a rare picture for the period of middle-class African-American life, rarely touched on by white novelists.

In an attempt to fill in the many gaps in my knowledge about the civil rights movement in the United States, and in particular in Arizona, I came across an article by Phoenix Municipal Court Judge Elizabeth Finn who grew up in Phoenix in the 1950s. She describes the dramatic breakthroughs that were made by lawyers working pro bono and by ‘just plain citizens, of all races and creeds, giving their time and effort to a cause they cherished’, noting particularly the important role played by women, who were not worried about offending people in power  and did not hesitate to express their feelings about the fundamental issue of civil rights.: women, perhaps, like Dorothy B. Hughes, who had lived most of her life in New Mexico (which borders on Arizona) and took the same equivocal stance on segregation.

The arrival of the first trains from Victoria to Bognor, considered by some to have lowered the tone of this previously exclusive resort, would have encouraged London couples to choose it for their honeymoon. Since the visit of the future George V and Queen Mary in 1900, the pier had been completed – good for wet and windy days – and a flurry of house building begun in the 1880s had continued. There would have been no shortage of seaside landladies to welcome the newly-weds.

 

 

The Stevens find ‘Seaview’ in an advertisement, the newly acquired property of Mr and Mrs Huggett, ‘well done up and scrupulously clean’. Built in 1890, just ten years before the Stevens own house in South London,  it owes its name to the fact that ‘from the lavatory window you could see the top of a lamp post on the front’. The honeymoon is lovely, both agree on that, and one fortnight in September leads on to another and another, with one child, then two, then three. Other resorts are considered – Brighton, Bexhill, Lowestoft – but Mr Stevens dislikes change, and Mrs Stevens defers to Mr Stevens, in all things. She is younger, less educated, and of a lower social class, carelessly, to the dismay of her husband, dropping aitches when over-excited, and inclined to pronounce really as ‘reely’.

 

The Fortnight in September is a scrupulously and delightfully detailed account of the twentieth of these holidays, the fortnight around which Mr Stevens regularly pivots his calendar, and which his wife finds a burden, sometimes a nightmare. There is an uncomfortable truth to the cliché that ‘a holiday takes you out of yourself’, and Flossie Stevens who is content with her suburban life, at home in Dulwich, where the roads are long and friendly and dotted with people she knows, doesn’t want to be taken out of it. ‘At home the children were hers: they loved her: came to her in everything. At Bognor, somehow they drew away from her – became different. If she paddled, they laughed at her: saying she looked so funny. They never laughed at her at home.’ For her husband Going Away Eve is the happiest evening of the year, but not for her.

 

If she is ‘almost elated’ at the start of this particular fortnight in September, it is because ‘the holiday brought such joy to the others’,  her husband, Mary and Dick, grown-up and close to leaving the nest, and little Ernie. She will watch as they shed their work clothes, hats and ties, heavy shoes and thick stockings, ‘to join the bareheaded, open necked, bare legged crowd’ but she has no holiday wardrobe, ‘she had tried without success to think of something she could do to make herself look different – but neither she nor the family could think of anything for her to put on or take off.’ She tried white sandshoes once but they made her insteps ache, and she feels uncomfortable without a hat. Sherriff is touchingly sensitive to Flossie’s unease.

 

 

Every year the journey fills her with dread: top of her fear list is the change of platforms at Clapham Junction, from which might ensue the loss of the trunk, or of her husband (this had happened once, briefly); this is closely followed by the possibility of a fellow passenger feeling faint (once, in nineteen years) or having ‘some kind of fit’ (similarly, once), and, more realistically their daughter Mary being sick (regularly as a child, but she is nearly twenty and those days are over). Mr Stevens is no less imaginative when it comes to potential disaster. The ten minutes allowed to walk from Corunna Road to Dulwich station, following the porter trundling their trunk (what a fascinating detail), could prove insufficient were a lady to faint, or accidentally fall down across their path, require care, maybe a policeman, or an ambulance, draw a crowd. They would miss the train, then the connection, and would have to go home and wait an hour in their hats and coats. Vividly he likens it to ‘breaking open and waiting in the tomb if you missed the train back from a funeral’. Manfully, paternally, he conceals his fears. For the fortnight in September he is in charge. The family will follow the marching orders he has drawn up, and refined over the years. Pre-departure tasks have been allocated and ticked off.

 

He rises to the challenge of Clapham Junction, to the delighted relief of his wife and his own satisfaction, a Pooterish smugness, reminiscent of Edgar Hopkins in The Hopkins Manuscript,Persephone Book No 57, which Sherriff delights in describing and gently pricking: ‘He was conscious of it – this instinctive power – leadership, he supposed it was. His ordinary life gave little chance to draw upon it. It required a Clapham Junction or a burst pipe to bring it to the surface.’ The train journey always ‘put down as a doubtful quantity in the sum of human happiness’, is controlled as far as possible, not always to his total satisfaction – fellow passengers can prove noisy or too numerous – but the familiar landmarks provide reliable pleasure plotting the distance from the slights and disappointments of his daily life. With a cinematic eye for passing detail (little surprise that he would later become a Hollywood script-writer) Sherriff puts his reader in a window seat, pointing out the family cat on the tool shed, the inexplicable detritus along the railway bank, the broadening Arun river, the first seagull, harvesters and housing developments, while allowing his characters vividly to present themselves through their various reflections and in their own distinctive voices. The journey takes up almost half the novel, and isn’t a page too long.

 

Bognor is seventy miles from London, no more than three hours by train in 1930, but the distance is everything. It’s not physical change they go for: what they love about Bognor is that it stays the same: the shop with the sandshoes hanging outside, the shop with the fat rods of rock, and the fish shop, the toyshop and the postcard shop, ‘where you bought the little folding cards that let down a zigzag strip of pictures’. The change they look for, and find, is in themselves, even Flossie during her quiet happy evenings alone with her needlework and a ‘medicinal’ glass of holiday port.   ‘The man on his holidays’, reflects Sherriff, ‘becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out differently.’

 

 

Mr Stevens’ long solitary walks, longer since the early days, thanks to the introduction of buses, give him time and space to reconcile himself to what he is accustomed to thinking of as his failures, to accept, for a while, his limitations, and then, taking a different turning, to dream again, to plan ‘the things he would do when his stroke of luck came.’ We do not need reminding that he has walked these paths twenty times over, dreaming the same dreams, no more changed than the shops or the pub on the corner where he enjoys his nightly holiday drink with his holiday friends. The fortnight doesn’t alter him, but it gives him a rest from himself. After a day or two ensuring that the right impression is made, on the beach and at the bar – ‘no buckets and spades, yachts or even kites on your first day’s visit to the sands’, and no going to the Clarendon Arms when tired after the journey – he can begin to relax, to enjoy a little (secret) flirtatious banter with the buxom barmaid, to find his inner child playing beach cricket, and allow himself to be photographed wearing ten-year-old Ernie’s little striped hat.

 

Less attractively, in micro-managing the holiday, he is able to enjoy a degree of control way above anything he could aspire to in his working life. Not that he sees it that way; ‘It was not that he enjoyed bossing people and running the show: it was simply that he knew how necessary it was to have some general scheme if every hour of the holiday was to be properly enjoyed.’  Part of his wise plan, leaving nothing to chance, is to timetable days off. This suits him very well, and as it turns out suits the family, freeing them from his boisterous calls to action, driven by a longing to revive the holiday spirit of previous years when David and Mary were still children,  a futile longing which blinds him to the more grown-up benefits that the two of them, unexpectedly, derive from the fortnight. David’s own long walk gives him time and space to re-assess his past and consider his future, to work out a plan that will liberate him from his dead-end job, while his older sister, thanks to a little judicious fibbing, gets the opportunity to wear her best holiday dress for a slightly illicit meeting with a new found girlfriend, followed by an even more illicit meeting with a young man. Granted a little more freedom, what might have been the last family fortnight in September may prove not to be.

 

 

The shadow of the older children wanting to go away on their own in future had rather hung over the holiday, as does the possibility, the likelihood in fact, that Mrs Huggett won’t be taking in summer visitors for much longer: the house, so sparkling and bright 20 years before, has grown shabby, Molly, the maid-of-all-work has aged and her cooking has deteriorated.  Mrs Huggett’s regulars are deserting, hotels and bungalows and day trips are defeating her.  But the Stevens will return, they will pre-order the crate of dinner ale and the two jars of ginger beer, Flossie will take her list to the local shops, they will protect their exposed skin with olive oil and look forward to the military band, ‘much smarter than the ordinary kind’, and reserve a bathing hut with a balcony in good time.

 

 

The period detail is fascinating, and The Fortnight in September is full of humour, rarely unkind. For all his bossiness, and old-womanish fussiness, we can believe that Mr Stevens is doing his best to create the perfect holiday.  Only once does Sherriff put poison in his pen, to describe Mr Stevens’ rich clients in their newly and very, very expensively built villa, with rolling lawns and dying trees: ‘his eyes, nose and mouth were crowded very close and rather meanly together considering the large amount of unused face that lay around them’, while ‘she looked as if she had been boiled in too much water, then artificially flavoured’. We have met those people.

 

And, although we no longer travel with trunks, or change at Clapham Junction, except perhaps to catch an Easy Jet plane from Gatwick, and the beach huts have all been sold for the price of small houses, and our photographs are on our phones. not waiting in envelopes to be collected from the chemist, the anxieties, delights and disappointments of the family holiday haven’t changed that much. Down to the ‘whisper that comes from the little stream of sand that falls from your shoe as you undress on the night you return once more to your bedroom at home’, Sherriff gets it so right. Search Google for ‘holiday + psychology’ and you will find pages and pages of advice from ‘Stress Management During the Holidays’, ‘Strategies for Surviving the Holidays’, to ‘Summer Break or Summer Break-up’ and worse. Sherriff wonders in his introduction why his novel ‘took off’, which it did, spectacularly, and modestly suggests that it was because it was ‘easy to read’. It is easy to read, but much more importantly it is beautifully observed, with no less insight than shelves of holiday-psychology articles.