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Last Notes

2026-10-26 03:52:00 GMT

From This Foundation, by Thomas Brackley (Dawson Jackson) (1949)
Cover of From This Foundation by Thomas Brackley (pseudonym of Dawson Jackson). Design by Evadne Rowan.
From This Foundation begs the question, “What is a novel?” Or rather, “If this is a novel, then what is a novel?” The book’s opening line declares its answer: “This book is not a novel and has no plot of main character. It belongs to you to live at Saxborough as if the place were part of your flesh and you were interpenetrated among the people’s lives.” The reader’s task, says the author, “is to get the town into focus … to walk about a bit…. Leave your prejudices or chariot or celestial swaddling-clothes or whatever you have come in, on the descending steps, and stroll at ease.”
And so we do, if we continue. We wander down streets and through walls, into kitchens and bedrooms and pubs, the narrator telling us what we see and occasionally why it should inspire us:
Entering detachedly, observing a person, you can sometimes so travel down the filament that you might wake up to find yourself walking off inside them, become them, so much by sympathy, yourself forgotten, and seeing the world from where they stand. Or looking more personally you catch the gleams of response to you and break into flower, building the arches of which our human life is made. A gleam from them gives you a foothold, one from you gives them more root, till the branches can grow and each stands, a tree, in the other’s atmosphere. This between you is an arch, by which each is drawn out upright; beneath which the heavenly bird flies, whose roost is not on this sphere.
Held in your hand a person may blossom, break open and become transfigured. If everyone knew how ravishing they were the street would be blind with light. They are according as you see them, as you grasp the actual, sense the possible, and affirm the world to be, out of knowledge in yourself prior to it.
There is no destination in this wandering. We will end up in a park in early spring looking at a young woman in pink corduroy trousers and a green jacket and be asked, “From this foundation” — this connection we feel with another fellow creature — “what spires of affection and friendship, love liking and laughter may be raised?”
One of the very few reviews From This Foundation received, by Norman Shrapnel in the Guardian, described it as “not a novel but a collection, as it were, of a novel’s physical and emotional material.” Shrapnel compared the experience of reading the book to sitting in a theater and watching the sets being prepared hours before the actual performance. That seems both inaccurate and unfair. After all, the author states from the start that we’re not dealing with a novel.
In The New Statesman, novelist Antonia White wrote that she struggled to categorize the book and kept coming up with objections to seeing it as a novel: “Though I kept telling myself this was material for a film or a series of paintings I must reluctantly admit that the particular effect could probably only have been produced in words.” She closed, however, with a schoolmarm-ish warning to Brackley, saying that “He has just got away with it this time, but only just.”
It seems to me that From This Foundation is a novel if we take that term in its broadest sense as a work of imaginative fiction generally written in prose. Saxborough and its inhabitants are all taken from the writer’s imagination, though there are no significant differences between Saxborough and any real city of equivalent size in the Midlands in the late 1940s. A novel needs neither plot nor main character, though there is usually some structure. There are eight chapters, with titles like “Mareham Road,” “Mr. Webber,” and “The Winter Soil,” but they could just as well be short stories and there is little sense of a deliberate sequence among them.
There is no trace of Thomas Brackley, author, before or after the publication of From This Foundation, but fortunately, James Bainbridge, now of the University of Liverpool, connected the dots between Brackley and the poet Dawson Jackson in this blog post from 2013. Brackley was the pseudonym Jackson adopted for the sole purpose of publishing this book, and it may help approaching From This Foundation as a poet’s prose creation rather than trying to fit it into any given definition of “novel.”
In Jackson’s Selected Poems, published by Carcanet Press in 2002, editor Nicola Simpson includes a brief “Apologia — literary” that he wrote in 1992, just two years before his death. Writing in the third person, Dawson admits,
He approached things from a quite different direction from his contemporaries, which no doubt is the reason why publishers and reviewers did not at once take to him.
He not only struck out on a different technical path but also challenged the whole destructive, eventually suicidal, course that our culture has embarked on.
At the same time, through what was around him, the commonest things above all, for him heaven shone: a heaven in no way to be divorced from the hell which is the other side of things.
For Jackson, Everything Everywhere All At Once was a state we all should aspire to.
In her introduction, Simpson quotes an early poem that gives us a glimpse into Jackson’s perspective, which harks back to William Blake’s invectives against the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the mercantile economy:
Property
Is a double
Theft. From
The thing
Itself and its full
Relation to
Us, and
From its full
Relation to
Others.
Connectedness is perhaps the single most important quality in Jackson’s world view, and From This Foundation is a both prose poem to connectedness and a call for the reader to become attuned to it, to discover it in everything we encounter in this apparently mundane English city.
I went back and read parts of From This Foundation again with this in mind, and it raised my appreciation — indeed, respect — for Brackley/Jackson’s accomplishment. You can sense him whispering in your ear with gentle urgency, “Look! Feel! Travel down that filament!” And when you set the book down and walk out into the world, you do, at least briefly, feel a wonderful sense of connectedness.
From This Foundation, by Thomas Brackley (pseudonym of Dawson Jackson)
London: Harvill Press, Ltd., 1949
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=11638
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#thomasbrackley #dawsonjackson #foundation #evadnerowan #shrapnel #newstatesman #antoniawhite
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2026-10-19 03:18:59 GMT

No. 2 Shovel Street, by Mary Borden (1949)
“Nothing is more nerve-wracking than a family conference on finance when the family finances are in a bad way,” Mary Borden writes in No. 2 Shovel Street, her 1949 novel of a widow desperately attempting to resist debt’s steady, ruthless effort to drag her daughters down the class hierarchy. In the mid-1930s, as her daughters Dinah and Sarah were approaching the age of society debuts and consideration as matrimonial prospects, Millicent Pryde (inventing names was never Mary Borden’s forté) sells her pearls to buy No. 2 Shovel Street. Despite the name, Shovel Street is something of a prestige address, near enough to Mayfair but compact and not too costly to maintain: a “bijou residence” as she likes to describe it.
As the novel opens, however, No. 2 Shovel Street also sits next to one of London’s larger bomb craters. All that remains of Lord Borrowdale’s mansion next door is “a naked little wall sticking up into the air beside a devastated area of monstrous depth.” Dinah, the older and more attractive daughter, has spent much of the war working for the BBC in the Midlands, her husband, Sir Reggie Penfold, an early casualty whose family swiftly ejected his widow. Susan, the younger daughter, returns home in a truck full of soldiers after years as a nurse’s aid in a field hospital unit that’s wound its way from Egypt through Italy to France — a path similar to that followed by the unit Borden established and led (see Journey Down a Blind Alley (1946)).
A house in London damaged by German bombs.
Before the war, both girls had been stars in the constellation of bright young things (not capitalized, mind — this was a decade later) on London’s scene. Dinah’s photograph had appeared in magazines and the interest that John Frobisher, a wealthy and rising politician (and married man), had been taking in Susan was leaving Millicent uneasy. Now, they are older, wearier — and poorer. Her dividends having dwindled to a few hundred pounds a year, Millicent has been reduced to pawning her wedding ring — enough to perk up her bank balance, perhaps even enough to afford a luxury she thinks essential: hosting a few parties in hopes of reviving the dispersed and decimated constellation of promising young people. The clock, Millicent is certain, can be turned back:
The old days would come back. Lights would shine again in dark windows, discreet footmen in livery would open scarred and battered doors. Silver and crystal would gleam once more on snowy damask in deep candlelit rooms, and beautifully groomed men in white ties, all faintly resembling Barrington Pryde, would linger over their port, while the ladies swept up gleaming stairs to drawing-rooms heavy with the scent of roses. Life, the life she had known, would begin again. The world of her youth would rise again from the ashes of war and would belong to her girls; anything else was unthinkable.
Neither Dinah nor Susan are so sure. Dinah is a little too old for the game now. Having cared for thousands of wounded men, having witnessed hundreds of them die, she still understands the rules: “A respectable fortune, a nice place in the country, a name in Debrett, all that in exchange for her mouth, her breasts, her poor, small inviolate privacy.” But what did it matter now? she asks herself. One day, she thinks, No. 2 Shovel Street will lean over “and drop into the chasm next door with Dinah and Nannie and Mamma and herself and all their make-believe.”
Yet making believe is a survival skill for the game of winning suitable husbands for Millicent’s daughters: “You must keep up appearances. You must appear, that is to say, to be comfortable, however uncomfortably strained you actually are; above all you must not, to put it another way, be shabby.” Unfortunately, shabbiness is outpacing aspiration. Dinah, recognizing her handicap as a widow in her late twenties, takes up with film people with funny names and funny accents — Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and the like. Susan tries on several of her pre-war relationships and finds them all ill-fitting.
Then, quite unexpectedly, John Frobisher’s wife, Ann, reaches out from the past and invites Susan to tea. A formidable dame with her own fortune and intimidating hauteur, she seems the last person who would ever take an interest in this pretty but thin and disillusioned young woman. But Susan sees immediately that Ann Frobisher is not only unwell but possibly suffering from terminal cancer, and quickly the two women enter into an alliance of sorts. Ann protects Susan’s need for time and space to reflect, Susan protects Ann’s right to approach death on her own terms.
Mary Borden in a portrait photo from 1952.
No. 2 Shovel Street was Mary Borden’s first work of fiction since Passport for a Girl (1938). She and her husband, General Sir Edward Louis Spears, had come out of intense and contentious service in the war, working closely with French forces and personalities such as General Charles de Gaulle, worn, bruised, and embittered. Borden had also watched as her husband’s affair with Nancy Maurice endured and became common knowledge in London society. Both Borden’s biographer, Mary Conway (Mary Borden: A Woman of Two Wars (2010)) and Jennifer Gromada, whose PhD dissertation is the only extended critical study of Borden’s work, see parallels between the Frobishers and Borden/Spears. Like John Frobisher, Edward Spears was a Conservative member of Parliament, one of Churchill’s closest advisors in his dealings with the French but viewed as too cold and calculating to be fully trusted. As Borden writes of Frobisher, “The men he had worked with thought well of him as a public servant but they didn’t love him, and at the end of it his relations with them were formal and more chilly than warm. He had no gift or intimacy.”
No. 2 Shovel Street begins like a French novel: sympathetic but chilled by the cold winds of ruthless fate. The Prydes — Millicent, Dinah, and Susan — teeter, literally and figuratively, on the edge of a chasm and all they need is one last accident to send them plummeting into poverty. And perhaps as a result of her years of wrestling with French processes and mentalities, Borden portrays them without a trace of sentimentality. I was reminded several times of Henri de Montherlant’s grim masterpiece, The Bachelors. If Dinah and Susan are to survive, they must find and master a new game, one for which their mother has never prepared them. Their crash seems inevitable.
And then it’s not, and only through plot developments that seem more resorted to than foreseen. As I read No. 2 Shovel Street, I flagged numerous passages that reflected Borden’s maturity and insight as both a writer and a veteran of two wars and six decades of life. But toward the end — say, the last fifty of 250 pages — I found I was reading solely for plot, and I suspect that’s how Borden was writing it. Her interest in observation gave way to a desire to wrap things up neatly — and happily, in a manner most un-French. What began as my most satisfying novel-reading experience in months ended in frustration over the risks that Mary Borden stopped taking. Mary Borden was a woman of unquestionable strength and courage: I have to wonder why she chose to take the commercially safe route at the end of what promised to be a work of uncommon wisdom and realism.
This is a contribution to the #1949Club.
No. 2 Shovel Street, by Mary Borden
London: Heinemann, 1949
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=11617
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