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Bread and a stone (1941)

by Alvah Cecil Bessie

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Single mother Elizabeth Carstairs had no illusions about getting married. Tying the knot the second time around wouldn't be about love and romance. It would be about friendship and compatibility and making a home for her family. Then she met her sons' sexy baseball coach.... Will Hollingswood liked his life as a footloose bachelor. That was before his matchmaking cousin introduced him to Elizabeth...before the Widow Carstairs and her lively twin boys started him dreaming about white picket fences and forever after. Could he convince Elizabeth to say "I do" to a lifetime of love?… (more)
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This is Bessie's second novel, from 1941, later made into a film (Hard Traveling, 1986) by his son Dan Bessie.

It's a crime novel that attempts to put flesh on the bones of that defence-lawyer's cliché, "victim of society". Ed Sloan has had an absolutely appalling life, abused in childhood, in and out of institutions, illiterate, bruised and damaged in every possible way and barely surviving in Depression America with short-term work as a farmhand and odd-job man. Just about the only good thing that has ever happened to him is meeting the widowed schoolteacher Norah and her little daughter Katy, the first people who have ever taken the trouble to get to know him and find out what sort of a man he really is. Yet, only nine months after Norah surprises all her friends by marrying Ed, he is arrested and charged with murder and armed robbery.

Although the story is framed rather like a mystery, and there are elements that we don't discover until the end of the book, there's not much mystery about what has happened: what Bessie wants us to do is to think about why it happened. How does someone who clearly isn't violent by nature or inclination get pushed into a position where the only way out he can see is to borrow a gun and go out and rob someone? Bessie doesn't come up with a single answer, naturally, but he shows us Ed has not only been deprived of education by the system he's grown up in, but he's also systematically been kept away from any opportunities he might have had to express himself or to take any decisions about his own life. Poverty, unemployment, and social prejudice — as the title suggests, all the people who give him stones when he asks for bread — have pushed him into a corner; for the first time in his life he feels responsible towards someone other than himself, but he has no other idea what he could do to save his new wife and stepdaughter from hunger and debt.

It's a very sad story, and Bessie is careful not to sound as though he's excusing Ed's crime or absolving him from responsibility for it. But he is indicting society for the way it has neglected its responsibility to look after people like Ed. (As well as careless left-wing writers who have hung on to guns brought back from the last war...) ( )
  thorold | Dec 4, 2020 |
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Single mother Elizabeth Carstairs had no illusions about getting married. Tying the knot the second time around wouldn't be about love and romance. It would be about friendship and compatibility and making a home for her family. Then she met her sons' sexy baseball coach.... Will Hollingswood liked his life as a footloose bachelor. That was before his matchmaking cousin introduced him to Elizabeth...before the Widow Carstairs and her lively twin boys started him dreaming about white picket fences and forever after. Could he convince Elizabeth to say "I do" to a lifetime of love?

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