Paul Gallico

Last week I was really chuffed to hear that Bloomsbury are reprinting two of Paul Gallico's novels about Mrs Ada Harris, in one volume, as part of their swanky 'Bloomsbury Set' series of reprints. I've been going on at people for years, about how Mrs Harris ought to be dusted off once more.

'Flowers for Mrs Harris' is the best of his many books, I think. It's the life-affirming tale of a London charwoman of the Fifties saving up her pennies over the years and eventually setting off alone for Paris - an innocent abroad, with the outrageous dream of having a frock made for her by Dior. Of course she encounters snobs and horrors of all kinds, but Mrs Harris is brave and doughty and makes friends everywhere she goes. She's a kind a fairy godmother to the people she encounters, curing their ills with sheer kindliness. It's really funny, too. Gallico is a brilliant mimic and caricaturist.

I've read a bunch of his novels over the years. Only a certain few people I know know his work at all. He's one of those who - massively successful in their own day - have fallen through the cracks in recent decades.

There's a heap of his things that should be brought back into print. 'Love, Let Me Not Hunger' - about a circus that gets stuck in the middle of nowhere, and all the animals, clowns and gymnasts begin to starve. Or 'Love of the Seven Dolls', about a small girl adopted by a creepy Parisian puppeteer: he treats her horribly, but the dolls are her only friends. There are ghost stories he wrote too, about a slightly hapless psychic investigator. He wrote the novel of 'The Poseidon Adventure' - he was responsible for Shelley Winters' brilliant moment of heroism and self-sacrifice! And he wrote the one book that people still seem to remember him by, The Snow Goose.

I think of his books in fifties library editions with highly-coloured paper covers. The kind of books that have gone through many hands and now, fifty years on, are just about falling into pieces. Just as the books of Elizabeths Bowen and Taylor were. But the Elizabeths, etc are rescued by publishers such as Virago and Persephone, who find and bring back lost women writers from the past. But what about the men? Especially those slightly soppy men, such as Gallico, or Howard Spring, EF Benson or Angus Wilson? The ones who wrote fables about intelligent animals, living puppets, weirdos, funny old ladies, harridans, hookers, monsters, effete young men and lonsesome ghosts? Who's bringing them back...?