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TRAVELLERS
Strong, Leonard Alfred George. Travellers / Thirty-one selected short stories. [With Tinkers' Road / Mr.Kerrigan and the Tinkers / West Highland Interlude / etc.], With a preface by Frank Swinnerton. London, Readers Union / Methuen, 1947. 19 cm. xii, 297 pages. Hardcover. Binding a little shaky. Otherwise in very good condition with only minor signs of external wear. Leonard Alfred George Strong (8 March 1896 – 17 August 1958) was a popular English novelist, critic, historian, and poet, and published under the name L. A. G. Strong. He served as a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 to 1958. Strong was a versatile and prolific writer of more than 20 novels, as well as of short stories, plays, children's books, poems, biography, criticism, and film scripts. His oeuvre includes mystery novels, featuring Detective-Inspector McKay of Scotland Yard, and horror fiction. Many of his adventure and romance novels were set in Scotland or the West of England. The classic short story Breakdown, a tale about a married man who has the perfect plan to murder his mistress, and which has a twist ending, has been reprinted often; it was a favorite of Boris Karloff. (Unhappy marriages were an occasional theme in his fiction, in works such as Deliverance.) His supernatural stories were often reprinted, as well. Strong was interested in the paranormal, as his haunted house and other horror stories attest, and believed he had seen ghosts and witnessed psychic phenomena. One of his earliest writings, A Defence of Ignorance, was the first book sold by Captain Louis Henry Cohn, the founder of House of Books, which specialized in first editions of contemporary writers. Cohn was a New York book collector who of necessity became a bookseller due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and he had Strong's manuscript, a six-page essay, in his collection. Cohn published 200 signed copies of the title, priced at $2.00 eac..
297 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1945
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May 1, 2025
The edition of LAG Strong’s Travellers that I have just read was published in 1947 in Vienna under the banner of the Readers Union. This is significant in hindsight, because the book title “Travellers” seems to indicate to a modern reader that borders might be crossed in the text. By and large, however, they are not, since the majority of these thirty-one stories are set very much in the British Isles.
In this collection, characters do go to Belgium, and to France, but rarely stay there. An enigma passes by when a couple of unlikely companions arrive in the town astride giant carthorses. There are other such opportunities to exploit situations, but LAG Strong usually sticks to the predictable, and, in the main, the stories stay at home.
Home, that is, if home is either Ireland or Scotland. Though England does figure, it does so in nameless locations and in places which are never urban. One feels that LAG Strong, despite his years at Methuen, might be the type to say he is “going up to London” from a base in the rural home counties.
What also comes across strongly in these tales is that they seem to date from years before 1947, even decades before. The social relations described are certainly not post-World War II and some of them surely predate 1914. The author neatly avoids discussing religion or politics, and children may be seen, but rarely heard, with one glaring exception. Sex is clearly taboo, but somehow babies appear apparently like clockwork sometime after weddings. The glaring exception of a child making a noise happens in the story, “A Shot in the Garden”, in which an upper middle-class lad deliberately shoots a neighbour in the backside because he assumes that she is taking flowers from his dad’s garden. The upshot, no pun intended, is that the dad sticks up for the son, forelocks are touched, and social relations continue very much as before. There is much scope here for irony or comment, but the author offers neither. What he seems to be saying is that this is what society is, and this is how it should stay. Stability is maintained only if justice and rights are ignored.
But there are some real gems in the volume. Personally, I found the descriptions of a tinker’s life in Ireland fascinating. In one story, two tramps await a red-bearded man, and I was throughout expecting his name to change to Godot, but it did not, and the absurdity of the situation evaporated into mundane reality.
Some of the descriptions of Ireland and especially Scotland were memorable, but overall there is a sense of stuffiness about these stories that does not transcend the author’s obvious prejudices. School means public school. (That is “private” school for the non-British!) One feels that he would lay a great store on “breeding” and would rarely find its prognosis questioned.
But overall, these stories remain worth reading, especially if they are viewed as a form of museum exhibit representing social class relations of a bygone era. A schoolmaster, for instance, urges his students to “buck up”… As such, they are interesting, but perhaps they are best taken one at a time. Taken as a whole, they take some swallowing.
In this collection, characters do go to Belgium, and to France, but rarely stay there. An enigma passes by when a couple of unlikely companions arrive in the town astride giant carthorses. There are other such opportunities to exploit situations, but LAG Strong usually sticks to the predictable, and, in the main, the stories stay at home.
Home, that is, if home is either Ireland or Scotland. Though England does figure, it does so in nameless locations and in places which are never urban. One feels that LAG Strong, despite his years at Methuen, might be the type to say he is “going up to London” from a base in the rural home counties.
What also comes across strongly in these tales is that they seem to date from years before 1947, even decades before. The social relations described are certainly not post-World War II and some of them surely predate 1914. The author neatly avoids discussing religion or politics, and children may be seen, but rarely heard, with one glaring exception. Sex is clearly taboo, but somehow babies appear apparently like clockwork sometime after weddings. The glaring exception of a child making a noise happens in the story, “A Shot in the Garden”, in which an upper middle-class lad deliberately shoots a neighbour in the backside because he assumes that she is taking flowers from his dad’s garden. The upshot, no pun intended, is that the dad sticks up for the son, forelocks are touched, and social relations continue very much as before. There is much scope here for irony or comment, but the author offers neither. What he seems to be saying is that this is what society is, and this is how it should stay. Stability is maintained only if justice and rights are ignored.
But there are some real gems in the volume. Personally, I found the descriptions of a tinker’s life in Ireland fascinating. In one story, two tramps await a red-bearded man, and I was throughout expecting his name to change to Godot, but it did not, and the absurdity of the situation evaporated into mundane reality.
Some of the descriptions of Ireland and especially Scotland were memorable, but overall there is a sense of stuffiness about these stories that does not transcend the author’s obvious prejudices. School means public school. (That is “private” school for the non-British!) One feels that he would lay a great store on “breeding” and would rarely find its prognosis questioned.
But overall, these stories remain worth reading, especially if they are viewed as a form of museum exhibit representing social class relations of a bygone era. A schoolmaster, for instance, urges his students to “buck up”… As such, they are interesting, but perhaps they are best taken one at a time. Taken as a whole, they take some swallowing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review