Colin Spencer (1933-2023): bisexual novelist of the 60s

Today I saw the Guardian obituary for Colin Spencer, treating him primarily as a food writer, which he became in the later part of his career. 

However, last year I did a re-reading (because they turned up during a reorganisation of some piles of books) of his quartet of autobiographical novels, Anarchists in Love (1963), The Tyranny of Love (1967), Lovers in War (1970)  and the rather later final volume which was not in my collection but available as ebook, The Victims of Love (1978). I'm not sure whether they have 'enduring literary value' but they are certainly of historical and sociological interest

As the obituary mentions, Spencer was an out bisexual, and this was very much expressed in these novels, though these days Reg might be considered pansexual: 'I just like sex, a lot'. And it is bisexuality, not attempts to 'go straight' or conceal homosexuality for prudential reasons. 

That said, there are extremely vivid scenes of gay life at various levels, from the alleys of artsy bohemian Brighton to posh London literary circles. On the Brighton scene, re-reading Anarchists in Love after, what, maybe 40 years, I realised why the Brighton section of Queer Beyond London seemed somehow familiar!

There's also a good deal of wider relevance for the historian of sex at the period (and indeed, society in general during this time of change) - there's a certain amount on STIs, from Eddie's panic when he discovers his mistress's husband is dying of tertiary syphilis, to Matthew's experiences as a VD orderly when doing his National Service. There's also mention of contraception ('cock-socks') and abortion.

The bisexuality, however, is primarily male: while Sundy and Jane both admit to some lesbian experience (though in Jane's case possibly on an emotional rather than physical level) this appears to be 'just a phase' in primarily heterosexual lives. 

I felt that there were certain rather period gendered attitudes to Jane as a female academic - and particularly in the later volumes considerable misogyny, but given that she was based on his first wife and they had a bitter divorce during which his bisexuality was invoked over child custody, that was perhaps more individual than generic. Sundy is on the whole a sympathetic figure and indeed in his autobiography, first volume of a planned trilogy (the rest has not yet appeared), Backing Into Light: My Father's Son (2013) Spencer claims that Sundy as well as Matthew was based on himself.

The tetralogy has been reissued with introductions by Spencer in paperback and ebook by Faber Finds.

Forgotten vs somewhat neglected novelists

I was recently brought up short during a re-read of Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, when Wimsey scans Ann Dorland's bookshelves: 'Dorothy Richardson—Virginia Woolf—E. B. C. Jones—May Sinclair—Katherine Mansfield—the modern female writers are well represented, aren’t they?' I think Richardson, Woolf, Sinclair and Mansfield would be familiar names to anyone with some acquaintance with women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century - but E. B. C. Jones?

In fact, Emily Beatrix Coursolles ("Topsy") Jones (1893-1966), has a remarkably substantial Wikipedia entry, which says her novels

focused on the social and psychological traumas of World War I, on large-family dynamics among young adult siblings, and on relationships among the young "liberated" middle-class intelligentsia of the Twenties. She was also known in the interwar period as a reviewer of contemporary fiction in British literary journals.

provides a useful biographical summary and plot outlines of the novels. She also has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

I have managed to gain a sight of a few of her novels, Quiet Interior (1920), The Singing Captives (1922), and The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), well worth reading and would like to read the others.

I shall now be adding Jones to my webpage British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s: The 'middle-brows' along with some additional updates - I discover that there is interest being taken in Romer Wilson, and that Sarah Salt's Sense and Sensuality (1929) has lately been republished by Cutting Edge Books.

But considering these works and authors which can reasonably described as having been 'forgotten' at least for a signficant length of time, made me think of certain works and authors claimed to have been 'rediscovered' e.g. by Virago Press, but I wonder if they had ever been truly entirely lost.

There is a difference between a book which may have made a great sensation in the 1920s and then vanished, and other books which may never have gained enormous critical cred but have gone on not only being read, enjoyed and recommended, but continuing to be republished. Books which appeared in cheap reprint editions and in Penguin and later mass-market paperback formats (a substantial portion of my Winifred Holtby collection consists of the Corgi paperback editions issued, one suspects, in the wake of the success of the Yorkshire TV South Riding) - and also circulated in public libraries.

The popularity of certain works with library patrons led to the production by Cedric Chivers of Bath of New Portway Reprints, robust hardbacks specifically for libraries of works that librarians knew would be much borrowed. Paula Byrne notes in The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym that Pym was a little cheered during her years in the wilderness of publishers' lack of interest by reprints of four of her earlier books as 'Library Association reprints by Chivers of Bath'.

I surmise that there may be studies to be done on these books which are neither critically-acknowledged  'classics' nor perennially popular genre bestsellers but go on having what was perhaps a word of mouth reputation. 

Just possibly these might be what Stella Gibbons was alluding to as ' the minor classic, a type of book that has perhaps given more pure pleasure to more readers than any other kind'? (In My American, 1939).

 

She was Chloe, or maybe Olivia

 Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together. . .’ I read on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia

A famous line from Virginia Woolf's famous essay of 1928, A Room of One's Own, describing the imaginary novel, Life's Adventure, by the equally fictitious novelist, Mary Carmichael.

And yes, these are both fictitious and not rather poor covers for the 1928 novel by Marie Stopes under her pseudonym of 'Marie Carmichael', Love's Creation. Chronology alone would suggest that Woolf could not have encountered this work while preparing AROOO. The novelist's name fits in with the other Marys in the text, who echo the 'Ballad of the Queen's Maries' - 'Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance'. I discussed this misapprehension and the unlikeness between the imaginary novel and Stopes' work in my chapter 'Uniting Science and Sensibility: Marie Stopes and the narratives of marriage in the 1920s' in Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939 edited by Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai, University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The fact that Chloe and Olivia are mincing liver to cure pernicious anaemia surely identifies them with Janet Vaughan, daughter of her friend and relative Madge Vaughan, who devised that pioneering treatment - recently mentioned in a 2019 article in The Lancet by Patricia Fara, 'Battling for life: the wartime work of Janet Vaughan', The Lancet, 394(10202), 910–911. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(19)3209. Fara makes this same identification, and I briefly mentioned the Woolf-Vaughan connection in 'Chloe, Olivia, Isabel, Letitia, Harriette, Honor and many more: women in medicine and biomedical science in Britain, 1914-1939', in This Working-Day World: Women's Lives and Culture(s)in Britain 1914-45 edited by Sybil Oldfield, Taylor and Francis, London, 1994

(I was led to think about this by reading something which rather underplayed Vaughan's significance in another context - she had one of those varied careers that perhaps do not lead people to make cross-connections they might.)

 

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 28th March

These two women care for each other more than they care for any man. They are bound together by a curious feeling about men, a sort of muffled contempt, a mixture of mild antagonism and irritated sympathy, and they have an obscure stifled feeling of impatience with an instinct in themselves which draws them to men.

Mary Borden, Flamingo (1927) 

I see that someone has now, quite recently (2009) produced a biography of Borden, further details on this website here. Borden sounds like a fascinating character, but I'm not sure her novels have lasted very well, on the basis of the ones I've read.