Seeker of strange obscure books

I did a great deal of reading and writing this summer; it was one of my most productive ever on both counts. Most of the reading was of obscure, forgotten novels that nonetheless were mostly excellent. One strange book was entitled A Fool There Was, a 1958 paperback I bought in an inexpensive batch of novels online. Me being me, I was attracted to the femme fatale cover. 😉

As I read the book, I realized the gal on the cover was far more glamorous than the femme fatale in the story.

The novel is about a guy, Cameron, who is obsessed with a girl, Lise, he met in college before he went off to World War 2. They never consummate the relationship physically, and that’s one reason why he is so obsessed. When he comes back from the war, they go in separate directions, he gets married and she goes off to Europe to become an artist; but his obsession remains. (Spoiler alert.) He eventually upends his entire life, personal and professional, to join her in Europe, and after abandoning his former existence, he learns that she is not the illusion, or romantic dream, that he had of her, and that she projected herself as. Instead she is a lonely alcoholic and he doesn’t understand what went wrong.

The paperback used a Rudyard Kipling poem as an epigraph, but after reading the story I felt it didn’t match the character of Lise. She might have been elusive but she never seemed like the hard-hearted vampire type of Kipling’s verse.

 

My guess is that the paperback publishers wanted to use a more lively title than had been on the 1957 hardcover, so they added this poem and changed the novel’s title.

It wasn’t a great novel but it was well written enough and memorable in its obsessive sense of desperation. At the same time, the paperback noted that the original title was It Is A Dream, so I began to wonder if “A Fool There Was” had not been part of the first publication. So I tracked down a 1957 hardcover copy and my intuition was correct: no Kipling epigraph. I also couldn’t find any information about the author, John Manson, anywhere online, until I got the hardcover and learned a little about him.

 

In its blunt, prosaic quality, the original title is oddly memorable.

I’m always curious to know a little about these now-obscure writers from decades past. John Manson had quite an impressive war record, too, like the protagonist of his novel; and it sounds from his author bio that he kept busy at writing in different formats. 

 

 

This was a melancholy book and I couldn’t find any others online by John Manson under this byline, but I’m glad I read this one; it gave a good sense of yet one more aspect of the kinds of personal anguish caused by World War 2…or other wars.

Fun factoid note: A Fool There Was, however, was the title of a 1909 Broadway play by Porter Emerson Browne,  which was indeed inspired by the Kipling poem; and the play was adapted into the 1915 silent film that put Theda Bara on the cinematic map as the first great femme fatale or “vamp.” 

Theda Bara and her victim in the film that put her on the silent movie map. 
Pic from Wikipedia: By Box Office Attractions Company / Fox Film Corp. – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37513365