Rediscovered, a young English novelist’s warning of the Nazi threat
Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel that is now being hailed as “an electrifying masterpiece”.
Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to walk a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Fuhrer’s aims. A stage adaptation of her story was even censored, shorn of all its “Heil Hitlers”.
It is the story of a German family, struggling in an uncertain economy, but looking forward to the marriage of their daughter, Alexa, to a young doctor – that is, until his Jewish background jeopardises their engagement.
Taking its title from the shape of the swastika, Crooked Cross was immediately recognised as essential reading and widely praised, including in the pages of the Observer of July 1934, where Gerald Gould judged it “a very good novel” that avoids any “propagandist tendency” by letting “the story stand on its merits”. Reading the manuscript last year, the contemporary author Rachel Joyce described it as an “electrifying masterpiece”.
Despite its involving depiction of pre-war Germany, where Carson had spent time, Crooked Cross had been consigned to the cultural archives. Then it was rediscovered by the biographer and founder of Persephone Books, Nicola Beauman.
“Once she’d tracked down a rare remaining copy she was struck that such an extraordinary and important novel could have been lost to history,” a spokesperson for the publisher said this weekend. “To have the opportunity to rescue this literary masterpiece from being entirely lost is an immense privilege. As the lessons history has taught us seem worryingly close to being forgotten, now feels like the right time to share it with the world.”
The novel opens on Christmas Eve in 1932 and charts the growing disaffection of a group of German youth who feel lost and ignored, and so turn towards a new authoritarian leader. On the back of its critical success, the book was quickly turned into a stage play and performed first in Birmingham and then in London. A 1937 West End production was hailed by the New York Times’ theatre critic as the “tragedy of a Bavarian girl’s love for a Jewish doctor in the early days of the Nazi revolution” that captivated “without indulging in propaganda and without bias”.
The critic for the Times of London also praised Carson’s approach: “The real strength of the play lies in the nature of its criticism of its subject … Through it all she never preaches, or loses touch, through hate or prejudice, with the human beings she represents. She has a point of view, but she is an artist, not a tub-thumper, with the consequence that all her people live and her truth is spoken in their nature and their suffering.”
The stage script of the book earned the attention of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which had to approve public plays until 1968. It called for every “Heil Hitler” to be cut from the script. Even in this censored form, the play went on to draw protest from rightwing factions in Britain, who viewed it as anti-German propaganda and argued it was too negative about the Nazi government.
Persephone Books will now mount its own revival of the play, with a fully cast, professional public reading of the script in April to be held above its bookshop in Bath. It will be the first time audiences have heard the dramatisation since the curtain came down on the original London production.
Sylvia “Sally” Carson was the youngest of three sisters brought up by a widowed mother in Dorset. As a young woman she taught dance, while also working as a publisher’s reader and spending her holidays in Bavaria with friends. She started writing the novel there, completing it in England and then penning two sequels, The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938). She married the Bradford publisher Eric Humphries and had three children in three years – a twin son and daughter, and then another daughter. But in June 1941, when she was only 39, Carson died of breast cancer.
