A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary (1964)
By Francis Booth | On December 10, 2024 | Comments (0)
“You survived. That’s important.”
“But who am I? An insignificant girl with no great talent. Why was I the one to be saved?”
He smiled a little. “Haven’t you heard that God heeds each sparrow’s fall?”
So many sparrows fell. Was God watching? Did He count them? Why was I chosen to live?”
(from A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary, 1964)
This in-depth look at A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.
In a novel of compelling force the author traces the growth and development of Leni, a Jewish child who grew up in a Nazi prison. Knowing no other life, Leni strives to become like the “normal” people she encounters in her new world of freedom – post-war Vienna: the good citizens who wish to forget, the hypocrites who rationalize guilt, the penitents who try to atone the sins of the Nazis, the neurotics who hope to restore the days of perverse glory.
The very air of Vienna pulsates through the richly ornamented story – the customs, manners and old-world courtesy, and the charming lift of elegant shoulders, which shrug yesterday’s guilt from today’s pleasures.
Enchanted and corrupted by the brittle sentimentality and the splendors of this baroque world, Leni sees herself as the beautiful heroine of the classic fairytale. She seeks compensation in lush romanticism and shuns reality until the time comes when she is confronted by the specter of cruelty she knew in childhood, and the debt of the living (the chosen) to the six million dead. (—Front cover flap of the 1964 edition)
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Those who enjoyed Laura and anticipate another such novel of suspense will find Mrs. Caspary’s latest book far different but just as fascinating. The emphasis here is not entertainment only; the underlying purpose is to point up the disturbing fact that the evils of Nazism are still rampant in Europe today. The author’s imagination has evoked a strange heroine, a combination of the romantically old and the very modern new. (—Chicago Heights Star, April 12, 1964)
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As a novel about the survivor guilt of a Jewish girl growing up in Europe during and just after the time of the Nazis, A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary was preceded among others by Elie Wiesel’s 1956 memoir Night, Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys (1959), both about their early lives in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and by Meyer Levin’s Eva: A Novel of the Holocaust (1959), based on a true story, in which Eva passes for a while as a gentile, working as a maid in the home of an SS officer in Linz but is discovered and sent to Auschwitz.
Eva is set, like A Chosen Sparrow, in wartime and post-war Austria. Vienna-born Jewish writer Ilse Aichinger’s dreamlike Herod’s Children, first published in English in 1963, turns Levin’s and Caspary’s stories about the Jewish girl as outsider on their head: hers is a wartime story of a girl who feels like an outsider because she is not Jewish.
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Lonely Ellen meets a group of Jewish children and befriends them; when they are betrayed by an informer and taken to a camp, Ellen begs to go with them but they will not take her. That night she feels abandoned.
“For a moment Ellen forgot her pain. She forgot that she was free against her will; she forgot that they had let her go, out of the camp, back to the freedom of the damned. And she forgot the sad, jeering laughter of her friends – ‘We told you all along that you don’t belong to us.’”
Ellen decides to wear the yellow star that all Jews have been ordered to bear prominently. She pins one to her dress, at first only temporarily, then makes a decision. “She tore the star from her dress with trembling hands. One had to light the way when it was as dark as this, and how better to light it than with a star?
She would not have this forbidden her, not by her grandmother nor the secret police. Quickly, with big, uneven stitches she sewed the star to the left side of her coat.” Running down the street, “the star on her coat gave her wings,” but when she gets to the cake shop with the right money in her hand and the star on her coat they refuse to serve her.
Ellen looked down. Suddenly she knew the price of the cake. She had forgotten it. She had forgotten that people wearing the star weren’t allowed in the stores and still less in a bakery that served coffee and cakes at tables. The price of the cake was the star . . . The star was searing. It burned through the blue sailor coat and drove Ellen’s blood to her cheeks. So one had to choose. One had to choose between one’s star and all other things.
One reviewer called A Chosen Sparrow “at once a novel of psychological suspense, romance and contemporary Gothic horror,” which “lays bare the peaks and valleys of the human heart – and soul.” This makes it seem more like a psycho-thriller than a coming-of-age novel. In fact it is both.
The front cover of the Dell paperback calls it “The sensational new novel of romance and suspense by the author of Laura,” though in fact it contains neither romance nor suspense. So I have chosen to put it here in the Politics chapter because it is in fact a Holocaust novel and a very personal, sincere one at that, though unlike Aichinger, Lengyel and Wiesel, Caspary herself was not directly a victim of the Holocaust.
A Chosen Sparrow begins in Austria in 1940 while it is under Nazi occupation. But although their country was occupied, many ordinary, non-Jewish Austrians were not unhappy with the German presence; thousands had lined the streets to cheer the Nazi troops when their tanks rolled into Vienna in March 1938.
Antisemitism had already been rife for years, Jewish families had been attacked and persecuted, businesses had regularly been vandalized and closed down well before the arrival of the occupying German army.
Not all Jews knew about the antisemitism in Austria. In Meyer Levin’s novel, Eva, who is Polish, has a choice of where to settle after the war; she chooses Austria.
We were asked if we had any preference as to where we would be sent. Anya and I had agreed to ask for Austria. I had thought of Austria only because of the friendly telegraph operator from Linz. Perhaps other Austrians felt as he did. And when I was a child my father had gone, a few times, to Vienna on business, and he had spoken of the Austrians as a decent, cultured people, among the best of the goyim.
When she arrives in Vienna, Eva is impressed, “I had never seen this sight nor such a great city, and in spite of everything I was stirred with a sense of adventure.”
But Eva is soon brought down to earth when she is stripped naked in front of leering men at the reception center and subject to a gynecological examination which proves she is a virgin, a fact that amuses the doctor so much that he calls over several young men to witness the phenomenon. “Ah, this belongs in a museum! A maidenhead, at twenty-two!”
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A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie by Francis Booth
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Nearly twenty years after the end of the war, at the age of sixty-five, Caspary has neither forgiven nor forgotten these humiliations of the Jewish people and nor has her heroine/narrator, Leni. A Chosen Sparrow begins: “There is a theory held by good people that evil should be forgotten and only pleasant memories retained.”
Caspary clearly does not hold with this theory: three years later she would publish the cathartic, quasi-confessional The Rosecrest Cell, about her own wartime anti-Nazi activities, things which she had never been able to talk about before for fear of persecution and prosecution.
“Those who made me feel guilty for remembering evil were truly good, but they shamed me into believing it wicked to talk or even think about the degradation I had known in early childhood,” says Leni. Caspary disagrees with these people too and lets Leni think and talk freely. Similarly, Elie Wiesel says in Night:
“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. . . For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”
The first sentence of Meyer Levin’s Eva, like the first sentence of A Chosen Sparrow, is also about preserving memory, about the importance of not forgetting the horrors, of making sure that the world will know and never forget.
“Perhaps you will be the one to live,” my mother said. “Then, Eva, if you live, you must write it all down, how you lived, and what happened to all of us, so it will be known. You must write down everything exactly as it was.”
A Chosen Sparrow is clearly going to be a hard read, harder than any prior Caspary novel, and with an entirely different kind of heroine. No previous Caspary heroine, even going back to Rosalia in The White Girl thirty-five years earlier, has been born into such dire circumstances; most have been born into comfortable, educated middle-class lives if not into actual wealth. Certainly none have had horrific childhoods.
And despite the, as it were offstage murders of young women in several previous novels, Caspary has never actually shown us any horrors directly and certainly never even touched upon the Holocaust. She did undertake a deep investigation into Jewish life in Thicker Than Water of 1932, but this was written before the Nazis came to power and none of her novels since then has addressed Jewish identity and history; indeed there are no explicitly Jewish female characters in any Caspary novel apart from Thicker Than Water and the only antisemitism in her work comes from the appalling Kathleen in The White Girl.
So A Chosen Sparrow represents an abrupt change of tone: Caspary’s previous novel had been the carefree, frothy Bachelor in Paradise three years earlier and in the novel before that, Evvie, both central characters come from quite wealthy backgrounds and have very enviable lives until one of them is murdered. And not long before Evvie, Cole Porter had written the music and lyrics for the musical comedy based on Caspary’s story Les Girls, 1957.[5]
But 1964 was the year Caspary’s beloved husband of fifteen years, Igee, whom she had met at the time of Laura, died; she must have been going through dark times.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Isadore Goldsmith had himself been a refugee from the Nazis in the 1930s, having got into trouble for bringing out a German version of All Quiet on the Western Front and importing Mickey Mouse and the decadent films of Jean Renoir.
With a lot of help, Caspary managed to get to London to see Igee during the war. The couple then returned to Europe several times after the war, including the time when, in 1951, two years after they were married and while “American troops were fighting the Reds in Korea,” they left America, at least partly to escape from the Hollywood witch-hunts.
They ended up in Austria, where Igee had both old friends and bad memories. “He had said that he would never go back,” but Caspary “begged to see her husband’s homeland and when he relented he showed me the country as proudly as if he had created the mountains, aquamarine, ultramarine, jade and heliotrope lakes, as if he had designed the onion domes of the village churches, planted the pretty modest flowers of the meadows.”
In an Austrian village called Seewalchen-am-Attersee they found a villa called Amthof, “a mansion built in the seventeenth century as a counting house of the diocese and home for the monks who handled the Church’s funds.” During the war the villa had been occupied by Nazi officers and later had been used to give asylum for people displaced from German-speaking Romania. “The silver, porcelain, paintings and Oriental rugs had been stolen, much of the fine furniture used for firewood.”
While in Austria, Goldsmith was “overcome by nostalgia that dissolved his prejudice” but after some more sightseeing the couple went back to “London and frustration. Two months later we were back at Amthof with scripts and typewriters. We had found our European home.”
Vera wrote happily during her time in Austria, working undisturbed “in my tower room at Amthof with the Attersee beneath my window,” including producing a version of Wedding in Paris. So A Chosen Sparrow is in its way a homage both to her husband’s homeland and to her own happy days there.
A Chosen Sparrow is the only one of Caspary’s novels to be narrated in the first person by the central character herself. Thelma and Evvie are both related in the first person by the best friend of the title character so that we see their experiences filtered through another consciousness.
Laura is mostly narrated by two very different men who have very different relationships to and impressions of Laura so we see her as if refracted through a prism, as we do the mysterious Elizabeth X whose “true” identity we literally do not know; Like Laura, Elizabeth briefly takes over the narration but she has amnesia and she does not know who she is. And in Stranger Than Truth we had a portfolio of overlapping narratives.
But in A Chosen Sparrow, there is no questioning of the nature and status of narrative, no distancing or prism effects: Leni simply tells us what she knows, what she remembers, in a straightforward, affectless, deadpan manner almost as emotionless as the “I am a camera” narratives of nouveaux romanciers like her Jewish contemporary Nathalie Sarraute and of Marguerite Duras, whose husband was imprisoned in Buchenwald, or of the young narrator of Jerzy Kosinski’s harrowing The Painted Bird (1965), who relates the unspeakable, remorseless horrors of wartime Europe with an unblinking eye.
The narrator of A Chosen Sparrow, known as Leni, was named Leonora because at the moment she was born her violinist father was in the orchestra pit at the Vienna Opera playing the overture to Beethoven’s Fidelio, which is about the self-sacrificing Leonore [sic] rescuing her husband from prison; Fidelio premiered in Vienna in 1805.
When Leni is eight years old, the Germans enter Vienna and the family move to Prague where her father continues as a musician. But then the Germans enter Prague too. Leni’s father disappears and her mother will not leave the apartment until he returns. They are captured and, because of a clerical error, sent to a prison rather than a concentration camp.
Her mother dies and Leni, now an orphan, is looked after by some of the many women in the prison who have lost their own children. The Americans arrive, liberate the prison and Leni is sent back to Vienna to live in a large villa with other orphan girls. All this in chapter one.
Leni is then fostered by a poor and dishonest family who are paid to take her in and are only interested in her food coupons; Leni sleeps on the floor in the corridor while they steal, cheat and connive their way through post-war Vienna. The antisemitism in Austria is just as bad as before the war.
“The Jews’ll get all the money again, by hook or crook. They always do. Take it away from them and they’ll get it back every time,” says her foster father. And later a self-righteous Viennese tells Leni that she believes “the stories of Jewish persecution were foreign propaganda. None of their friends had ever seen good Jews badly treated. It was only the swindlers, traitors, communists and international moneylenders who were exiled and punished.”
Of course, after the war, there are far fewer Jews in the city, for obvious reasons. In Meyer Levin’s Eva, after the war she and her Jewish friend in Krakow are physically safe but are similarly surrounded by “shiksehs” – non-Jewish girls. Unlike Leni, they decide to integrate rather than separate. “Now the shiksehs got ready for bed, as did we; one after another they dropped to their knees and prayed. We did the same; we had learned the Hail Mary and other prayers by heart, and now we mumbled them with the same murmur as the other girls.”
Leni’s foster mother has “many tricks for getting extra food,” but nothing that Leni can eat, just “pig’s heart or liver, treats she always denied me. It was mortal sin, I was told, for a Jewish child to eat the flesh of swine.” Leni has to eat what she can.
“I ate my ersatz spread and drank my watered wine while my foster mother, eating heartily, promised that such pious deprivation was for the good of my immortal soul. So far as I could understand, the possession of a soul brought nothing but suffering. As a Jew I lived in danger of eternal torment for a sin I had not committed. Because of this my parents had been harassed and chased from Vienna to Prague, my father had disappeared and my mother sent to prison. Now I was deprived of a good Sunday dinner and often during the week forced to eat only potatoes. Why? Naturally I asked questions.”
But Leni only asks the questions of herself. “I had no answers because I did not know the facts and was ashamed to ask questions.” Similarly, Elie Wiesel in Night says, “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” Leni does not talk to God and does not understand when she is told that “the fact of my having been born a Jew was an act that I had willed before I was conceived.”
Leni’s unspoken questions are not answered, even when she is taken in by a far kinder, middle-class Christian couple with four daughters of their own; the musician father had known Leni’s father. Leni finally has a bed, though she has to share it with the youngest daughter. They become friends.
“Elfy worried about my immortal soul. She was my first and my best friend.” But even Elfy believes that Leni’s people “killed Christ. She had been told this by an older girl at the very door of the church. The accusation hurt. Who were my people? Jews. Was I to blame for something they did . . . if they had done it . . . two thousand years ago? Elfy said I was.”
Elfy’s father gets sick and dies; Leni has to earn money. She finds work as a singer in a cafe where she meets an older, wealthy Prussian, Gerhard Metzger, owner of “one of the oldest and finest castles in the Salzkammergut.” Metzger woos Leni solicitously and buys her presents without expecting anything physical of her. He mainly seems to want her to talk about her time in prison, which she does, though she has never done so before. It is cathartic for her.
“As I spoke the memories crowded back, forgotten faces came to mind. I heard the terror of voices raised in helpless grief, the cries of women marched off, suddenly and without preparation, to certain death.”
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11 Novels by Vera Caspary
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Leni’s memories pour out as italicized reveries, streams of consciousness bubbling to the surface from her repressed subconscious.
Leni tells Gerhard about the sexual exploitation by the women guards in this all-female prison. “‘I want you tonight,’ they whisper to the youngest and prettiest of the prisoners.” Sometimes at night Leni watches but she does not understand what the women are doing. One guard, “big-stupid, foul-mouthed,” is rebuffed by Leni’s mother.
“Gretl’s revenge is endless. She cuts the rations of a sick woman trying to stay alive on ten decas of bread a day and one ladleful of potato-skin soup; she spits when Mutti passes or strikes her with the truncheon. To make my poor mother suffer more Gretl beats me or, as brutally, picks me up and presses terrible moist kisses on my mouth.”
But it is not the urbane Gerhard’s wealth or even his kindness that attracts Leni, it is his need for her. “No one had ever expressed a need for Leonora Neumann. I had found a place in the world, a man who needed my sympathy to soothe hidden wounds.” Metzger whips Leni off to Paris and marries her; she wants to get married in Vienna with Elfy as bridesmaid but Gerhard will not hear of it.
Leni leaves without the chance even to say goodbye to her foster family. In Paris, Gerhard proudly shows off his new wife to his sister, visiting from America, salaciously repeating the horrors she has seen. “And he told her in great detail about my life in the prison, repeating with relish the most brutal facts. ‘Beaten!’ He sipped cognac and licked his lips. ‘Starved! Exposed to every sort of vice! Blood and rape! Both by men and women!’
Gerhard is proud of his new possession, his creation even. “One would never think to look at her that she had experienced such horrors. And she will become more elegant when I have taught her a bit more.” It is clear that Gerhard sees himself as Galatea to Leni’s Pygmalion, as in a later novel Chauncey Greenleaf will seem to Elizabeth X.
Coming back to Austria, the couple move in to the nine hundred-and-forty-year-old family castle. Caspary describes it in almost exactly the same words she used to describe the real life Villa Amthof, which was in a village called Seewalchen-am-Attersee; the much larger and more Gothic fictional Schloss Liebhofen is in similarly-named Altbach-am-Sternsee. Like Villa Amthof the castle had been used by the Luftwaffe during the war and now “much of the fine furniture had been burned as fuel, brocades and tapestries were torn, damask stained.
Valuable carpets had been carried off, as well as candelabra, porcelains and silver.” This is almost exactly what Caspary said about Villa Amthof. Leni even sleeps in a tower room, similar to the one Caspary used for writing while she was in Austria. Leni at first wonders whether she has come to Bluebeard’s Castle but it turns out that locked-up former wives are not Gerhard’s secret.
“Bluebeard had shown a peculiar smile when he unlocked the cupboards where the bodies of previous wives were hidden. The companions of my husband’s lonely hours were thus introduced.”
We may be wondering whether Leni has in fact come to somewhere like the château in Roissy from The Story of O where the woman with no name is to be made available for sadistic men. But O was not published in English until 1965, and Gerhard does not in any case have any such intentions towards Leni, even though she may have been prepared to participate if he had.
“Some men beat their wives. My husband showed greater refinement; he also suffered. I was trained in submission, had learned endurance by long practice. It never occurred to me to pack my bag and, like the heroine of a modern novel or film, walk out. I was not such a stupid young thing that I did not find perversity in love that needed such provocation, but I also found certain satisfactions.”
Leni is no Hedda Gabler shooting herself in the temple to avoid a scandal, no Nora from A Doll’s House: “That’s right. Now it is all over. I have put the keys here,” says Nora as she walks out of her own play.
But Leni has not yet discovered all of her husband’s secrets; there are more revelations to come. She meets Victor, an American journalist writing about “Nazi officials in government posts, of recent acts against Jews, anti-Semitic propaganda and the desecration of synagogues.” Leni almost has an affair with Victor but she finds out that he is merely using her to find the truth about her husband’s wartime activities.
Gerhard has told her that during the war he was in the army but he was never a Nazi, was not a senior officer and only worked in an office; but he would say that, wouldn’t he – that’s what they all said. Victor implies that her husband was attached to one of the smaller concentration camps; Leni refuses to believe him and leaves but she is still attracted to him.
The next revelation comes swiftly. Leni has already discovered in the wardrobe a dress that she does not recognize and questions the maid, who is very evasive. Then, coming home early one evening with her friend the cynical, serial divorcee Hansi, Leni hears music upstairs; a waltz is playing.
“I threw open the door without knocking, was immediately aware of the pungent, oriental perfume. Quietly in the doorway I watched the waltz, noted every detail; the black décolleté, the chain with the diamonds set in platinum lozenges, the matching platinum and diamond ear drops which Gerhard sometimes took from the safe for me to wear at important parties, the short crop of dyed chestnut hair, several bracelets from the safe. Satin slippers had pointed toes and thin high heels but the ankles above them were thick and not at all shapely, the ankles of a man.”
Both men are shocked at the intrusion. “Frozen in the waltz while the music trilled on, they could only stare.” Gerhard tries to recover the situation with an icy “I didn’t expect you so early,” as Hansi tries to get Leni out of the room to come home with her. With perfect timing, the old Hungarian family retainer comes into the room.
“Imre limped in with the coffee pot and two cups, brandy and a silver dish with sugared fruit. He knew his master’s tastes, had served him long before a wife had been brought to the house.”
This situation almost prefigures Liliana Cavani’s 1975 film The Night Porter, in which an SS officer who had both gay and masochistic tendencies had taken photographs in a concentration camp during the war and had had an ambiguous sadomasochistic relationship with a female teenage prisoner; they meet later in Vienna and re-establish their bizarre relationship.
The cross dressing man sneers at Leni: “You know why he married a Jew girl, don’t you? Out of spite. He was angry with me.” Leni remembers one night in a restaurant when Gerhard had taken a phone call and come back angry with “the devil’s bitch” but had given her no further explanation; straight afterwards he had proposed to Leni.
“During a marriage proposal a man can hardly confess that he has kept a male mistress. I had been impressed because the rejected bitch had called from Rome.” But Leni realizes now that she is a “bride of spite,” a poor substitute. She could perhaps fight against the attentions of another woman, but not of a man.
Still, Gerhard pleads with Leni to stay, saying he still needs her and will confess everything. He apparently does, telling Leni that during the war he was in love with a senior officer whom he calls Konni, who was stationed near to the Wardenthal concentration camp that Victor had told Leni about.
Rather than being appalled, Leni accepts Gerhard’s story; she takes it as “a confession of perversity, which it was, also truthful so far is that part of the past was concerned.” For Leni this decadent world seems almost romantic, literally looking down on but removed from the reality of the horrors of prison camp; it almost becomes a form of escapism for her. Gerhard’s “boyish blushes made me see it as a love story, twisted and tragic. I suffered as though I were reading a sad novel.”
But Leni still does not really understand why Gerhard married her: surely not simply out of spite? Then, in his private room one night, where the books of photographs are, he talks to Leni about the portrait of his mother on the wall, looking down on them.
“I thought about you. I thought of you together, I often have, Leonora, you and my mother.” So this is why Gerhard, a gay man afraid of disappointing his mother, wanted to marry Leni, “to prove that he could live like other men, take a wife,” so that he could say to the dead woman’s portrait, “you see, mama, I am doing what you always wanted me to. Better the Jew girl than the devil’s bitch.”
Despite his confession, though, Gerhard still seems lost. “‘Help me,’ Gerhardt said and, humbly, several times, ‘I need you.’” What happened to Konni, Leni wants to know. Konni is now dead, Gerhard says; all that is over. I am yours now, if you will have me. “The story should have ended here, like all the tales about the lucky goose girl who comes to live in the castle.”
But, reader, the story is not over; Holocaust stories do not have happy endings. Gerhard has lied about Konni. Victor tells Leni that the man is in fact a war criminal who had been detained by the Americans but escaped.
Later, wandering lost around a part of the castle she has never been in before, Leni comes across Gerhard with two other men, one she knows, the other she assumes is Konni. They are playing cards, living an underground life of prewar decadence.
“Without victims to torment and excite them, without beatings and hangings and odd medical experiments to heighten the temperature of their love, they found other diversions, exquisite dinners, masked balls, mystic rituals, secret night games.”
Leni immediately gets in her car intending to report what she saw. She drives right past the local police station, worried that they might be to under the influence of the people in the castle, and carries on all the way to Vienna where she finds an apparently sympathetic police officer. But Leni then discovers that nothing has been done about her report; the castle servants have of course remained loyal to their master and denied everything.
Leni is even threatened with prosecution for adultery with Victor if she pursues it; the implication is that there is enough sympathy for ex-Nazis in the upper echelons of the Austrian government to keep him and other people like him hidden. Still, Leni does not intend to give up, she sees now why she was chosen, as perhaps Caspary saw why she was chosen to live long enough to write this book and keep the flame of collective Jewish memory burning brightly.
Surely it had been inefficiency or error on the part of some petty official that have saved me from the sealed trains, the concentration camp and death, but I can think of it only as a miracle. For what? Delights and disillusion, starvation and opulence, injustice and good fortune, perverse and garish and contradictory as the tormented saints and merry devils of a baroque church column.
God is life, child. I do not know God, I cannot make a prayer, but I can promise with all the truth that is in me that I will never again forget one brutal moment; and that I will not allow comfort nor complacence nor even compassion to keep me from shouting out against those sentimental, self-pitying murderers.
They try to show penitence in many ways, offer charm, kiss hands, practice skills, lure us with luxuries, urge us in the name of decency and good manners to bury the infamous past. Not me! I am a chosen sparrow. And even one small bird can keep the guilty from peaceful slumber through the haunted nights.
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Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England.
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