Reading Fantasy in 1928-29: Part One

In the late 1920s, May Lamberton Becker hosted a column in The Saturday Review of Literature (NY). The column was called "The Reader's Guide," and readers were invited to send in questions related to books. In the 22 December 1928 issue the following query appeared from one W.S. of Philadelphia, who was interested in doing a study on fantasy. So far as I know, the study never appeared, and I do not know who W.S. was, or what else this person might have done. One significant response appeared in the column some weeks later, and I will reprint it in a follow-up blog post. Meanwhile, besides commonly known titles, there are some real obscurities referenced herein. Has any one read Barry Benefield's A Little Clown Lost (1928) or René  Thévenin's Barnabé and His Whale (translated into English in 1923)?  Mark Valentine just wrote last month on Wormwoodiana of the centenary of Helen Beauclerk's The Green Lacquer Pavilion. Barbara Follett's The House without Windows (1927) was written when she was twelve. (In 1939, at age twenty-five, she had a fight with her husband and left their Massachusetts apartment and was never seen or heard from again. For more of the story, see here.) Christopher Morley was quite prolific, and there are more books and stories of fantasy interest in his oeuvre than the two mentioned below.  

W.S., Philadelphia, is planning a study of the fantasy and its technique, and asks for a list of books of this nature. He suggests as examples "Thunder on the Left" and "A Little Clown Lost." [by Barry Benefield]

The Viking Press, started upon a career of fantasy-publishing by the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner, "Lolly Willowes" leading, followed with Bea Howe's "A Fairy Leapt upon my Knee," one of the most successful examples I know of the art of making the incredible happen under your eye, Edith Olivier's unforgettable "The Love Child," and as a climax, T. F. Powys's "Mr. Weston's Good Wine" which manages somehow to get the cosmos upon the canvas. Meanwhile Miss Warner sent us through this house her "Mr. Fortune's Maggot" and another that I hear is now in press.

The nearest I know to pure fantasy un­complicated by allegory, is Garnett's "Lady into Fox" (Knopf), into which well-mean­ing people often try to cram a protesting moral, but without making it stick. "A Man in the Zoo" and "The Sailor’s Return" are still in this manner, but "Go She Must" gave warning that a change in Mr. Garnett's methods was impending, as it was clear by the deeper note in Stella Benson's "Goodbye, Stranger" (Macmillan) that her art had come to a bend in the road. In this beautiful novel, it will be remembered, a fairy marries an American girl in China, a sufficiently fantastic situa­tion. "Seducers in Ecuador," V. Sackville-West, disingenuously titled tale of the ef­fect of colored spectacles (Doran), Helen Beauclerk's disturbing "Green Lacquer Pavilion" (Doran), Walter de la Mare's "Henry Brocken" (Knopf), the melodious romances of Dunsany, especially "The Char­woman's Shadow" (Putnam), Ronald Fraser's effort to transmute into literature images called up by Chinese art in "Land­scape with Figure." (Liveright), Margaret Irwin's gentle, ghostly "Who Will Remem­ber?" [UK title, “She Who Wished for Company”] that was published here by Seltzer— her recent "Fire. Down Below" (Harcourt, Brace) returns, after a successful ex­cursion info artistic society, to her earlier manner—Thévenin's rollicking "Barnabé and his Whale" (McBride), the scarcely veiled satire of Eimar O'Duffy's "King Goshawk and the Birds" (Macmillan)— these are some of the fantasies I can call back from a grateful memory without con­sulting a catalogue. Four writers in America match in this respect anyone who writes elsewhere: Elinor Wylie with the un­forgettable "Venetian Glass Nephew" (Doran), Robert Nathan with a shelf-ful [sic] of subtleties crowned by this new one, "The Bishop's Wife" (Bobbs-Merrill), Barbara Follett, for whose "The House Without Windows" (Knopf) I must dust off the set-away word unique, and Christopher Morley, whose "Thunder on the Left" is approached only by his own "Where the Blue Begins." It stands out against the sky in contemporary American literature; I should not be sur­prised if this and Stephen Benet's "John Brown's Body" (Doubleday) were the two books by which this literary generation in America would be remembered. Certainly it would be a good thing for our post­humous reputation if these were the two that lasted.