by Whispering Gums

A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post is an article that was published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 31 May1924, and is by the Sydney-born daughter of a Ethel Turner.

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Jean Curlewis circa 1920

Versatile writer, Jean Curlewis (1898-1930), featured twice on our blog in November last year. The first was a guest post by Debbie Robson providing a bio of her short life, the second was a short story by her, “The lonely lady”, which was published in 1920.  Today, we are sharing one of her newspaper columns, published in 1924.

I won’t repeat all that Debbie Robson wrote last year, but Jean Curlewis, who died of tuberculosis produced an impressive body of work during her short life, including four novels, poems, short stories, book reviews, interviews and essays for newspaper columns and journals. In her post, Debbie discusses her work as well as her life, paying particular attention to her four novels, The ship that never set sail (1921), Drowning maze (1922), Beach beyond (1923), The dawn man (1924).

Due to our1924 focus this year, I am supplementing Debbie’s essay with two reviews of her last (1924) published novel, The dawn man. One review was measured, whilst the other was positive. The former appeared in The Queenslander (December 13) and starts with:

Jean Curlewis is suffering from the desire to add a new book to her list every year. That is probably why she has never done anything so good as “The Ship that Never Set Sail.” One imagines that book must have been written and rewritten and polished and repolished until the result, was one of the most charming contributions to the library of Australia’s girlhood. “The Dawn Man” (Ward Lock and Co.) is a very readable story, but one feels that it could have been with a little more care a serious rival to “The Ship.”

It briefly describes the story which is about conflict between two anthropologists over bones. It says she manages to include “most of the human emotions” and is most positive about her “descriptive passages”, describing them as “among the gems of the book”. The review ends curiously with:

Miss Curlewis, who is the gifted daughter of Ethel Turner (Mrs. Curlewis), really finds story writing too easy, and it needs a master to treat it in that way.

The other review appeared a couple of months earlier in The Sydney Morning Herald (September 4), and calls the story “Back to the dawn”. The setting and the plot concerning the anthropologists are the same, so perhaps the title changed. This review makes the point that Curlewis “has helped to dissipate the idea in some quarters that Australian story writers have to look abroad for setting and atmosphere if they are to achieve success”. It suggests that it will appeal to those who enjoyed her previous story, Beach beyond, and concludes that

It is a good story racily told; it is not overburdened with characters – the few with their diverse temperaments who are in it are cleverly drawn and the setting has the charm of home.

The column we are sharing here is titled “The bomb shop (and some others)”. It was published in a column – or series of articles – titled “The lights o’ London”. It is interesting for its discussion of socialism (a big issue amongst the intelligentsia of the time), for her reference to Australia’s missing out on the “new” in the arts, and for its insight into Curlewis’ lovely lightly satiric touch.

The bomb shop (and some others)

By Jean Curlewis

The conventional bookshop of romance is a grey and cobwebbed den with first editions thick with dust in the twopenny tray. Not so the Bomb Shop.

Painted vivid scarlet, inside and out, it bursts bomblike on the eye from the dingy greyness of Charing Cross-road. There are no doors to pass—not even a window, for there is no fourth wall. The whole fourth side is open to the street and over the inner lintel is inscribed in gilt letters the welcoming message “Abound in hope all ye that enter here.” Overhead the celling glitters with gilt stars, and on each panel of the wall is inscribed in gilt letters the name of a prominent bombthrower of the past Jack Cade, Wat Tyler, Shelley, Karl Max, William Morris.

But it is not only Socialism that lies in crisp paper covers on the scarlet book shelves. There are playlets that fizzle like fire crackers, drawings which look as if the artist had shaken the raw colours together in a cocktail mixer to whet appetites jaded by art of the pink raspberry syrup variety; there are booklets of verse, for the most part extremely bad—but all new—stinging and tingling with newness.

In Australia, which we invariably describe as a new country, we do not, as a matter of fact, get anything very new. Our theatre managers, our art gallery authorities, our booksellers, look after us too carefully. Very properly they do not bring across 12,000 miles of sea crackers that might fizzle out en route, or drinks which might go flat. We get only the proved, the established, the successful.

So it is rather fun for a change to find one-self in a shopful of odd, provocative, original, stimulating, ambitious failures.

To return to Socialism. The Bomb Shop is not the only shop selling bushels of Socialist tracts. Look over a man’s shoulder in the tube or in the British Museum Reading Room. Whether he wears spats, or ties his trousers with string, the chances are quite two to one that, whether he hates Socialism or upholds it, he will at least be trying to find out what it is. Even at Harrow, builded on its hill of ancient decorum, recalling with every dreaming rose-coloured brick the day when it was founded by a queen, tradition was rudely shattered last month. At the school debating society one of the youthful speakers rose to discuss the Labour Government, attired not in the sober tailcoat of custom, but in a bright redshirt.

And in the school library—the Vaughan— where Mr. Baldwin spent studious hours (and to which Byron enthusiasts are flocking this year of his centenary to see, among other relics, the letter from his mother which explains that her son refused to return to school “being distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth”) the librarian laments that his shelves are totally neglected, the school being absorbed in “red rags.”

But there are black shirts in England, too. At the primmest afternoon tea table one’s host may look up casually and say: “Have another muffin. Or some strawberry jam. And do join the British Fascists. Twenty of us are secretly recruiting 20 others each.”

FOURPENNYWORTH’S OF POETRY.

But this article began about bookshops. Hidden away in a main street is the shop where for fourpence one can buy broadsides and rhyme sheets-long delightful strips of paper printed with verses by Drinkwater or Davies or, perhaps, an old song of Herrick’s, decorated with a coloured drawing by brilliant Claude Lovat Fraser (now dead), who designed the Beggar’s Opera. Or on Thursday evenings, at dusk, one may pay a shilling to sit in the shop and hear Alfred Noyes read his own poems, or Mrs. Arnold Bennett read Verlaine, or three short plays read from behind curtains-a method to be commended to all reading circles. We all know how difficult it is to get the proper atmosphere of say, the “Tempest,” in a suburban drawing room with Caliban taken by the president in immaculate evening dress, and Ariel by the hon. secretary, a woman with a charming voice, but a ponderous figure.

Whole plays have been wireless-broadcast lately, but, on the same principle, one is advised to turn out the lights while listening, to avoid receiving the impression that a railway crash or a duel scene is taking place on one’s own drawing-room carpet.

BUTTERCUP, YELLOW.

Up a winding stair above Bumpuses, the famous booksellers in Oxford-street, one comes to a landing. One opens a door and stops two stops down into the most charming nursery of white and buttercup yellow, the walls lined with low bookcases, brimming with children’s books. Low white chairs are drawn up to low white tables, on which are left, negligently open at the most exciting page, “Kidnapped,” the “Jungle Book,” “Peter Pan.” Or there are soft rugs for those who are at an age when one prefers to consume one’s literature extended flat on the floor.

Then there are the Bloomsbury refugee bookshops-Russian, Czecho-Slovakian, Serbían whose tiny windows, crammed not only with books, but with bright painted wooden toys, stiffly embroidered peasant smocks, and crude, bright pottery, make a splash of colour in the grayness of Museum Land. Some of those pottery patterns resemble exactly the patterns daubed on his clay vessels by prehistoric man in the days when he first discovered the curious pleasure it gave his eye to see the same forms repeated over and over. Among the peasants some of these combinations and motifs have never fallen out of use. It is strange, by the way, to note the pleasure our twentieth century minds take in folk songs, folk dancing, peasant art. Is it a healthy return to sturdiness and simplicity, or is it that our educations standards have declined until the children or savages we can no longer appreciate anything but the simplest, crudest rudiments of an art.

THE SLEEVES THAT WEPT.

Talking of Russia, why have we, otherwise so well treated musically and theatrically, never had in Australia the Russian Ballet? There is almost always Russian Ballet in London, while in Sydney we have got no closer to it than the late Claude Shepperson’s drawings in “Punch,” entitled, “If we all behaved like the Russian Ballet,” those graceful policemen, waiters, and tram conductors, floating about their work in absurdly beautiful Russian attitudes. (There is a movement afoot to erect a monument to Shepperson in the West End, where, in spite of profiteers and swarthy foreigners, some of those slim, charming English women and children whom his pencil immortalized still have their dwellings.)

Perhaps the Russian Ballet fears its beautiful limbs might get stiff on the long voyage to Australia. Genee complained of the real agony it was to begin dancing again after the enforced idleness-she did not dare to risk spraining a priceless ankle by practising on board.

But it is sad Sydney should miss Boris Romanoff’s ballet. Lately at the Coliseum, it was a revelation not only of dancing but of poetry and drama. Without a spoken word they made the story of the Harlequinade, which of late has grown so thin and sugary with over-use, new, strong, and poignant.

There was quaint futuristic scenery, an entrancing moving pattern of reds and blues, and yellows and greens, a dazzling Harlequin in lozenges and black wizard, marvels of technical dancing, but the Impression that remains is of a white wraith of a Pierrot, flitting among them, with them, but not of them-for that is the heart of the Pierrot tragedy-with ludicrous sleeves dangling two feet below his hands. Not wide, graceful angel sleeves, foolish narrow ones like too long pyjama sleeves. With these, with his miming mouth, and with his narrow feet that mimed as well as danced, Boris Romanoff expressed the whole gamut of emotion. Those grotesque sleeves crowed with triumph, they languished heart broken, they flew like banners above the light, they writhed with the stark horror of the Pierrot in Du Maurier’s drawing for Trilby the Pierrot who, “au clair de lune,” hears the knocking on his door.

But it is impossible to describe. As one of the Russian ballerinas said herself when asked by an interviewer to describe to a few words the message of her dance, “If I could express my meaning in words, do you think that I should have given fifteen years of my life to learning to dance?”

Sources:

Jean Curlewis “The bomb shop (and some others)“, The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, May 31, 1924). [Accessed 30 October 2024]

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