Gerald and Elizabeth by D.E. Stevenson was first published in 1969 and I really enjoyed it, up until page 188, then I got a shock.
Gerald Burleigh-Brown is on a ship, on his way home from South Africa where he had been working as an electrical engineer at a diamond mine. He left under a very dark cloud, without any references as he had been accused of attempting to steal uncut diamonds and as you can imagine he was very depressed about his future. He was going to London to look for work, but his half-sister Elizabeth has become very successful on the stage and Gerald doesn’t want to contact her, he’s too embarrassed about his situation and is worried that it would somehow harm Elizabeth’s career if anyone found out about the accusation.
But Eliabeth spots Gerald in the audience one night and is determined to keep in contact with him. She has a problem of her own. She’s in love with a wealthy shipbuilder. Sir Walter owns a shipyard in Glasgow and he’s keen to marry Elizabeth, but she is sure that there is a strain of mental instability in her family and refuses to marry him. Of course Gerald manages to sort it all out.
There’s quite a bit of travelling from London up to Glasgow and then on to the Scottish Highlands involved in the storyline and it’s all very scenic, especially if you know the areas mentioned, but for me it was ruined by D.E. Stevenson’s anti-semitic attitude. When Gerald is looking for a gift he visits an antiques shop in Glasgow.
The bell jangled as he opened the door and an elderly man with a hooky nose emerged from the back premises. I was surprised by the mention of a hooky nose and I thought ‘surely not’. Then Gerald is annoyed when the dealer refuses to accept a cheque as he doesn’t know him and he has lost money before that way. This is before bank cards of course. Gerald wants him to make enquiries at the bank.
“I’ve no time for that,” replied the little Jew nastily. You’d better go to the bank yourself and come back with the money.” He had been turning Gerald’s cheque over and over in his dirty hands; now he handed it back.
Honestly I was absolutely gobsmacked, and mortified that any other readers might think that that sort of attitude was normal in Scotland, especially considering that Gerald is portrayed as a decent chap all the way through the book. I can assure you I’ve never heard anything like that. I was ten years old in 1969, but that sort of attitude to Jews seems to me to be medieval. As Robert Burns said a couple of hundred years earlier, “A man’s a man for a’ that.”
I’m also wondering why an editor didn’t strike it out? Days later my heid is still birlin’ just thinking about it. Up until page 188 this was a good read. It was her penultimate book with House of the Deer published in 1970 being her last so maybe she was going a bit odd in the head in her old age, she died in 1973.
Wow! I find that really disappointing and disturbing; she should have known better considering the Holocaust was recent history in 1970. I usually read everything I can find by D.E. Stevenson but I think I’ll avoid this book. Thanks for the warning, Katrina.
Christine,
It is very disturbing and mortifying if you’re a Scot that another Scot could write that, especially as you say the Holocaust was fairly recent at that time and D.E. Stevenson must have seen all the news about that as it happened.
Thanks so much for mentioning this, and your reaction does my heart good! I checked my American edition, where this passage is on pp. 207-208. The hooky nose is there, but this edition just says, “he replied nastily, ” no “little Jew.” I was having the same thought as Christine, that you’d really expect D.E.Stevenson to have rethought antisemitism by 1969.
Sulie,
There’s absolutely no excuse for it, thinking of my grandparents who would have been about the same age as D.E.S. I know that none of them had a particle of antisemitism in them, and their children all fought in a war to stop that sort of thing. I think D.E.S. might have been quite religious so she may have had that ‘They killed Jesus’ thing in her background – and conveniently forget that he was Jewish himself.
I’m glad to know that the worst of it has been cut out of later editions of the book.
Well yes and no. She uses Dago often as does Christie. I know that adenoidal bothers some people, but everyone knows someone who speaks through their nose.
The treatment of the Hoffman Bros. Villainous diamond dealers got through in Bertram’s Hotel, and the nappy head comment was Vittoria Cottage. (Stevenson)
The best and cleanest books Stevenson wrote were the Bunckle series, although they may have been sanitized for reissue. In any case it’s disappointing and off putting.
This is a response not a redundant remark.
Minda Kahn,
I agree with you completely. I was gobsmacked when I read D.E. Stevenson’s anti-semitic descriptions and comments about a pawnbroker in her book Katherine (I think it was that one). My grandparents were of her generation and I never heard any of them speak like that about anyone of any race. It put me right off Stevenson. Apart from anything else it’s so un-Scottish, in my experience anyway. I found it embarrassing. It was a first edition I had so the 1970s reprints were probably sanitised by an editor. I don’t know of Elizabeth Cady Stanton at all. Thanks for dropping by and taking the time to comment.
Regards, Katrina
DE Stevenson’s books are loaded with all kinds of racist comments. At one point I wrote it off as her being a woman of an era, but that doesn’t explain why in the latter part of the 20th century they weren’t struck out by the editor.
My grandmother was a woman of that era, she was an immigrant from Hungary. She was also a suffragette. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a blatant racist. The Irish, Italians, and black women marched together, and lived in the same neighborhoods in Detroit. I never heard her say the kind of things that are in Stevenson and Christie books, and she was from their generation.
A bigot is a bigot. I love many of the books, but I can’t absolve either of them for their racist comments.