“It is strange to know people who have written books and so on; people who have seen things, and sat down, and made a kind of twisted spiral smoke out of their thoughts.”
I discovered the writer Malachi Whitaker while reading a few different anthologies of English short stories, one edited by A.S Byatt, another by Philip Hensher, who also wrote an introduction to Whitaker’s stories published by Persephone Press. I am always on the lookout for strange writers and here she was, born in Yorkshire in 1895(I am I admit, since visiting in November, obsessed with everything Yorkshire) a few generations younger than the Bloomsbury group. In her time, the 20s and 30s, she was described as the “Bradford Chekov” but I think she has more in common with her fellow Bradford born literary sisters, the Brontës. Her work is Gothic, sometimes violent, and vivid. She also brings to mind the southern American Gothic, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers- (I think the literature of the North of England has a lot in common with the literature of the American South in that they are both basins of emotional and linguistic richness and the gothic.)
She published several collections and appeared in magazines including Adelphi. Many of her stories take place on trains; transitional non-spaces which for her, open the gateway to the surreal and the forbidden. Her trains are dirty and sinister the carriage of the train was badly lighted. It has a low, yellowish-white roof, smeared and dirty. The seats were of horsehair, smooth, slippery and cold. On the uneven floor were several small pools, made by the rain from umbrellas, which trickled for a time like springs begins a sad story, Brother W, about two brothers who live together and even sleep in the same bed as they did when children, but haven’t spoken in 30 years because one borrowed the other’s suit without asking. One dies, and the other, when trying to buy a headstone bears the humiliation of the stone carver perpetually asking if it is for his wife, the reality of two single brothers without any other family beyond the stone carver’s comprehension of normality and the status quo. The still living brother has a leather bag which smells like “old stale bread” and wears “imitation shirt-fronts” made out of coloured paper under his overcoat, to save himself the washing.
In Landlord of the Crystal Fountain, an unmarried school teacher meets a group of pub landlords in a train carriage. One says he owns a pub called The Crystal Fountain on “the moor edge” and proposes to her because his wife has died and he needs a new one. I’m wanting another wife. I’m wanting her quick and you’ll do. The school teacher, who is naive and wants nice things says yes, sending her sister a telegram to not worry about her, she is going to the Crystal Fountain. We know, though it is unsaid, the Crystal Fountain doesn’t exist and that the teacher will end up dead on the moors.
One of my favourite stories is Sultan Jekker, about a bigamist. A man who eating his lunch realises his sandwich is just bread says “the bitches! They said they would put some meat in.” The two women in question take turns sleeping on a horsehair couch or with the man in his bed. They all live in a little cottage together like a unhinged and sexual version of the Three Bears. One, whose husband is in jail, is a rag picker who also makes smelly rugs out of the bits she steals from work, the other ‘sold lavender and peppermint-cordial which she made herself with essence and questionable water from the well behind the cottage’ The man has ‘a torn gabardine raincoat on and a cap so shrunken by the rain it made his face look enormous.’ The story is grotesque and funny, with a brutal ending.
Whitaker is a wonderfully descriptive writer. women have ‘cream coloured teeth’ moustaches are like ‘six or seven pieces of old string hanging over his upper lip’. A woman smeared with dried blood eats a cream bun in a café. Another woman kills her dominating sister by biting her neck and blaming it on a thin, flying black pig with the same teeth as her. A policeman’s overbearing mother manicures his fingernails and washes his razor.A fishmonger also sells gramophone records in his shop, has three creepy sons who deceive the female shop assistant.
Malachi Whitaker was born Marjorie Olive but changed her name to Malachi after the Old Testament figure, the name meaning Messenger, though she still went by the pronouns she/her (“Nearly everybody called me ‘he’ because of my biblical name”). She was one of 11 children of a bookbinder. As she recalls in her personal essay Beginnings (1939) this is where her love of literature began. She read whatever books passed through the house to be fixed. David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, Les Misérables, old bibles, Andersen’s fairytales, Vanity Fair. She stopped school at age 13.
She is unusual, in the history of British literature, in that she only published stories (She says she wrote a novel but it fell into the sea on a steamer, and that this, according to her, was a good thing in the end) and a memoir And So Did I which has various recollections, from the sad experience of going to the ‘baby hostel’ to adopt- she ended up adopting three children with her husband as they couldn’t have any of their own- to her earlier experiences of poverty.
“I still think that the most grinding misery of poverty is cardboard shoes- shoes with paper soles that will not turn even a thin shower of rain. And how sitting about with wet, chilled feet will make even the hardiest throat sore. I used to envy policemen and soldiers and postmen. I used to look in shop-windows and hate the rich and pretend that lovely shoes were silly because they had thin soles. The thought of comedians in great shoes with large, useless lumps of lather flapping at the front of them would turn my stomach over. I used to look around with eyes of cunning for strong pieces of cardboard, and cut them to size( how often the wrong size!) with blunt scissors, and insert them over the holes or near-hole in my shoes. When the cardboard was new, and I had two pieces, I would gain a new confidence. I would say with satisfaction, “No sore throat tomorrow.”
Stevie Smith wrote a poem of Whitaker which goes
“Malachi Whitaker
Has the Common sense of the matter
And the attitude a writer should have to his own book,
I mean: look, look.”
I've never read Malachi Whitaker before, but the stories you described oddly reminded me of Daphne du Maurier. I'll definitely check.
She is like du maurier! Good comparision