Dorothy Whipple was a popular English novelist between the two World Wars who enjoyed a resurgence earlier this century, when critics re-discovered her tales of middle-class life, notably High Wages and They Knew Mr. Knight. “The Jane Austen of the twentieth century,” declared the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestly. In their latest installment of re-published memoirs, Slightly Foxed offers us Whipple’s account of growing up the middle child in Lancashire at the turn of the last century. (She was born in 1893.) The Other Day is hilarious and heart-breaking, told from the viewpoint of a child with a keen ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for character. And, as is always the case with Slightly Foxed editions, the book itself is a beauty to hold.
This is an unusual book to describe, which is only one of the reasons to love it. No chapter is longer than a few pages, and the range is wonderfully breathtaking, from actors who met death in car accidents to Lee Miller’s photographs of concentration camps that appeared in, of all places, Vogue, to a neighbor who advised that boiling an egg took four minutes, not five, and that the spoon on the plate must point toward the egg and not away from it. The neighbor also seemed to have a crush on Deborah Levy’s boyfriend. Tender, wise, and wistful, The Position of Spoons does not have a drop of the mawkish in it. Levy is a bracing and subtle writer, and our only hope is this collection leads you not just to her acclaimed novels but to her autobiographies, which so far amount to three volumes.
Long before there were social influencers, there was Will Rogers, the folksy humorist who dominated American culture in the early 20th century, from vaudeville to Broadway to radio and Hollywood, not to mention the lecture circuit and newspaper columns. When talking on the radio, he never relied on a script and was only dimly aware of time constraints, so producers were never quite sure what to expect. And when the movies went from silent to talkies, Rogers found his most popular home, his aw-shucks delivery and drawling voice the centerpiece of movies that Steven Watts describes as “warm, funny, sentimental tales of ordinary rural or small-town people upholding their values or overcoming challenges confronting them.” If there was a moral lesson, it was that decency and common sense, with a dash of humor, would help you bridge the distance between America’s frontier past and the tumultuous times Americans faced during the Depression.
Watts deftly captures both the man and his considerable impact on American culture, but he does not shy away from the flaws, including Rogers’s condescending views about Black people. Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935 at age 55, and the manifestations of grief included not just the more than 100,000 mourners who showed up to view his casket at Forest Lawn but the NBC and CBS radio networks that observed a half-hour of silence. As Watts wisely notes, “His use of gentle, good-natured wit to probe the issues of the day reminds us that such a thing is possible.” In this election season, Citizen Cowboy is the perfect tonic.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl
