Hmm, I’m not entirely sure that the book I chose for Karen and Simon’s #1954Club was actually first published in 1954. My mother’s hardback edition of The Untidy Pilgrim by Eugene Walter, wasn’t published in 1954, it was published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in London in 1955. It looks like a first edition, because there’s no acknowledgement of previous publication, but both Wikipedia and Goodreads tell me that it was first published by a different UK publisher, Methuen, in 1954. (E&S merged with Methuen later on, but that wasn’t until the 1970s.) To confuse matters further, there’s a Kirkus review of it dated 1953. Maybe that was an Advance Readers Copy?
Whatever, I am totally intrigued that my mother carted this book all around the world with us on our travels. Many of my father’s books travelled with us, but apart from her beautiful illustrated set of Jane Austen’s novels (which are now on my shelves), The Untidy Pilgrim is the only one that stayed the distance. It’s dedicated to Totty and to Kate, which was my mother’s nickname. Coincidence? There are no details about the author’s personal life on his Wikipedia page. I’ll never know!
Anyway…
Eugene Walter (Wikipedia)
The most interesting thing about reading The Untidy Pilgrim, is that my discovery of its author was more interesting than reading the book. Wikipedia tells me that Eugene Walter (1921-1998) was an American screenwriter, poet, short-story author, actor, puppeteer, gourmet chef, cryptographer, translator, editor, costume designer and well-known raconteur. After a dreadful childhood spent partly on the streets, he seems to have become a free spirit, gadding about and living a “pixilated wonderland of a life”.
Born in Mobile Alabama, he was fending for himself in his late teens when WW2 broke out and he became an army cryptographer in the Aleutian Islands (off the coast of Alaska or Russia depending on exactly where he was). He then pitched up in Greenwich Village in New York City and pioneered spontaneous performance art at the Museum of Modern Art. He got himself to Europe on a cargo ship and lived in Paris during the 1950s, where he helped launch the Paris Review, which published his short story ‘Troubadour’ in the first issue. He interviewed people like Isak Dinesen and Gore Vidal, and went on to edit a multilingual literary journal called Botteghe Oscure in Rome. And after that, he acted in the films of Federico Fellini and translated Italian films into English. His dinner parties were legendary, with guests who included T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Judy Garland, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal and Richard Wright (whose biography by Hazel Rowley in on my TBR). That’s an astonishing CV for a street kid. How did he get an education, I wonder?
Anyway, Walter returned to Mobile in 1979, and that’s where The Untidy Pilgrim is set. It’s a coming-of-age novel, deliberately comic, so they say, and it won the Lippincott Fiction Prize for Young Novelists in 1954. Kirkus found that it had a vernal, rollicking charm that will seduce even the moral-minded and the University of Alabama saw fit to reissue it (with a terrible cover) in 2001, but it didn’t do much for me.
According to the description at Goodreads, Walter’s lightweight style may have been what charmed the judges because of its contrast with the southern literary tradition. That tradition was my first serious introduction to American literature at university: it was established by William Faulkner, (Light in August, The Sound and the Fury) Truman Capote (In Cold Blood, and Summer Crossing) and Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Clock without Hands and The Member of the Wedding). Yes, it’s generally cheerless, but exploring significant themes in memorable novels often is. Wikipedia describes the tradition like this:
Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South’s culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects.
Walter may have been loosely satirising John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. His unnamed ‘pilgrim’ goes south to study law and work in a bank. He talks about the commencement of a lot of voyaging for me, and I don’t mean only in Geography. He exoticises Mobile as a foreign place with banana trees and palm trees there in a profusion and lushness they never attain in Persepolis. But when he meets temptation, unlike Bunyan’s protagonist Christian, he cheerfully succumbs.
At first he stays with his cousins the Morelands, but it’s clear that he’s not destined to stay there for long.
Mrs Moreland — Cousin Annie — is a sweet dopey woman who always looks as if she expects the plaster to fall, she looks up to the ceiling every third word; while Mr Moreland — Cousin Charlie — is a deep one, says about two words a week, makes money hand over fist in real estate. They have these two children roughly my age: Son (I hate that boy!) and this talking-machine daughter Lola.
I had not seen any of this crew since we children were eleven-ish and twelve-ish: so much can happen in the years just after, but those are the sort of knobbly-kneed, cowlick, first-cigarette years when you’ve ceased to exist as a child, but nobody yet notices you as grown up. My memories of spats with these cousins didn’t lead me into any hi-jinks of enthusiasm for this visit, but I was moderately pleased to see that Lola was sort of good-looking, and was happy that Son was away.
Pop had gotten me a job too — it’s an easy thing to do when every tenth person in the county is your cousin, and most of them in solid politics, or the lumber or real estate business: all of them pious on Sunday, at ease on Saturday, and out for blood the other five days of the week. (p.11)
Well, once he’s found a more congenial resting place with the eccentric Miss Nonie Fifield, he abandons any pretence of a Puritan work ethic, beds Miss Fifey’s grandniece Philine, flits off to a brief sojourn in New York without explanation to his host, gets into a fist fight with Son a.ka. Perrin and breaks his nose, and proposes marriage to Ada five minutes after her aged husband has died.
Walter’s style is to deflate pomposity and to celebrate quirkiness, but I found most of it inane. I should have read Alberto Moravia’s Contempt also published in 1954 instead.
Image credit: By http://www.nomadmusicstudio.com/EugeneWalterHomepage.htm, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12571338
Author: Eugene Walter
Title: The Untidy Pilgrim
Publisher: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955
ISBN: None
Source: from my mother’s bookshelves.
Having come to the end of Nathan Hobby’s superb new biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969), I’ve come to the conclusion that I would have liked her very much — but I’m not sure that she would have liked me! Despite all the circumstances against her, she was brave in contesting the prevailing political climate, tenacious in pursuing her craft as an author and generous to a fault. But she fell out with longstanding friends who didn’t share her political views and I probably would have been one of those.
Imagine, if you will, a vintage steam train barrelling down the disused railway lines of modern day cities, occasionally collecting confused passengers and depositing them at some bizarre destination, not necessarily on the same continent. And imagine too, that all the observers of this phenomenon suspend all scepticism, when you’d otherwise expect them to snort in disbelief or rationalise reports of the event as drugs, drunkenness or mental disturbance. A ghost train at large in Tasmania is the premise of debut author Brendan Colley’s The Signal Line, which won the Unpublished Manuscript Prize in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards. It’s a book that requires the reader to suspend all disbelief too, and to enter into the weirdness…
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (2017), the Prix Landerneau des lecteurs (2017), and the Prix littéraire Le Monde (2017), The Art of Losing (L’art de perdre) by Alice Zeniter was recommended to me by 
TBH, I didn’t plan to read this book. I knew the story of Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s incarceration in an Iranian prison from media reports at the time, and when I saw her memoir The Uncaged Sky on display at Ulysses Bookstore, I just thought, after all this woman has been through, at least I can buy her book. Perhaps strong book sales might be interpreted as some kind of empathetic gesture. But the next day, when I opened up the book just to browse it, I started reading.
On this day, in 1984, the Governor of South Australia gave his Assent to the Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act 1984. This historic legislation enabled the return of Maralinga Lands to their traditional owners, in fulfilment of a promise made decades before to the Anangu People. Theirs was a unique dispossession. They were moved off their lands so that the 1953-63 British Atomic Tests could take place. As Hiskey says in his Preface:
With the election finally announced, it’s time to catch up on my reading of the Australian Foreign Affairs journal to which I subscribe. Issue 12 from 2021, Feeling the Heat is still highly relevant and I found it instructive to invest a couple of hours in retracing Australia’s intransigence on climate action while monitoring the progress of my homemade lime ice-cream. My Sunbeam Gelateria signals that the ice-cream is ready by reversing the action of its churning paddle, so the cook needs to act promptly in order to avoid damage to the machine. There’s an accidental metaphor there, and I’ll let you join the dots…
Winged Seeds, the third volume of Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Goldfields Trilogy, is a fitting finale to The Roaring Nineties (1946, 
I learned about this absurd law from reading Anne Sebba’s comprehensive survey of Parisian life during the Occupation, Les Parisiennes, How the Women of Paris, Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. In the chapter called ‘Paris Divided’ I learned that the Vichy regime had adopted German notions about the role of women, because they believed that moral collapse was at the heart of the French defeat. 
The irony of invoking Joan of Arc as a domestic goddess seems to have escaped Zanta, but was probably not lost on her students.
*chuckle* And I’m pretty sure that many of these valiant young volunteers would have been wearing trousers! I say this because I am an avid fan of the French TV series, 
Only Birds Above is the second novel from WA author Portland Jones who describes herself 
Dark as Last Night, by Tony Birch
The Dogs by John Hughes, 
The Performance by Claire Thomas, 
Night Blue by Angela O’Keeffe, 
After Story by Larissa Behrendt, 
Bila Yarrudhangglangdhuray, River of Dreams by Anita Heiss, 
Reading Mothertongues is so much fun, it takes a while to realise how political it is.
Gosh, I thought when I opened this book to 6 pages of enthusiastic praise from advance readers… what can I possibly say about The Idea of Australia, a search for the soul of the nation, that hasn’t been said by these eminent Australians?
I’ve been listening to 
Paddy O’Reilly is the author of three unforgettable social novels: 
This month’s 
However, one of my favourite authors did make the longlist: Kiwi Catherine Chidgey is there, with her wonderful novel Remote Sympathy. (
I have read almost everything Chidgey has written but was most impressed by The Beat of the Pendulum. TBH, I was not expecting to like it… novels about the detritus of ordinary life don’t usually interest me much. But Chidgey makes it a marvel and I could not put it down. As you can see in 
As I said in my post announcing the winners of the 2018 Ockhams, I was disappointed that The Beat of the Pendulum didn’t win it… but at that time I had not read the winner The New Animals by Pip Adam. This is what the Ockham judges said about it:
Well, when I got hold of a copy of The New Animals, I was impressed too. (As you can see in 
An Australian debut author who’s also a keen observer of the craziness of modern life is Helen Meany, co-winner of the Seizure Viva La Novella prize last year with Every Day is Gertie Day. This is how I summarised it in 
Every Day is Gertie Day is a book that is both amusing (because of the way it satirises Trumpism) and horrifying (because of the way it satirises Trumpism). Horrifying in a different way is Sean Rabin’s thoughtful new book The Good Captain which explores what happens when desperation about inaction on climate change and environmental vandalism crosses over into eco-terrorism. You can see my thoughts about the book 
Next month’s starter book is Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang. And that means that I really ought to get round to reading it…
In Australia until recently, corruption was most often perceived as a problem in other countries, especially developing nations where it is not uncommon to have to supplement the official price in order to get things done. But in 2021 Australia’s worst-ever score on the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) at 
Exciting news!
Scapegallows is run-of-the-mill historical fiction, competently written but at 448 pages, it’s far too long for itself. It had been on the TBR for too long, and I needed to make space on the AB shelf after chancing on Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga, on the book swap table at U3A. (
Continuing my quest to read meaningful books that are outside the swamp of grim MiseryLit, I collected Gravel Heart from the library. Gurnah’s Nobel citation is “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures” but he’s also ruthlessly honest about the post-colonial debacle in Africa, linking it not just to colonialism, but also to the vagaries of human nature. I like his interrogation of what it means to belong, and who takes responsibility for the loneliness of the migrant experience, and I like his sly humour too.
Another remarkable collaboration is the subject of the literary bio I have just read. Taking a breather from the plethora of grim books that are stalking us these days, at night I am reading Gravel Heart by 
I hadn’t heard of either of them, I thought, until discovering that Leslie Rees was the author of 27 children’s books, including the Digit Dick series, some of which I had read to The Offspring when he was a little boy. The first of these was Digit Dick on the Great Barrier Reef (1942), and his last children’s book was The Seagull Who Liked Cricket (1997). These children’s books were inspired by the Rees children, to whom Leslie told stories when he returned home from research for his travel writing.