Fiction of Gay Interest

A Secondary Character
Montague Haltrecht
Publisher: Andre Deutsch
London, UK

Year


 		1965 FIRST EDITION       
Cover / size: hardcover / 13.5 cm * 20.3 cm / 160 pp

Dustjacket?   yes

ISBN: n/a

Arbery Ref:   000003

Condition Very good

Jacket: wear primarily to edges and spine, slight discolouring and marks to back. Boards (dark brown with gilt lettering): generally good, but slight wear to edges; top and bottom of spine and corners slightly curved. Front endpaper: penciled inscriptions. Pages otherwise clean and binding tight.

Price £20.00
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Secondary Character

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Plot / Content:                              Rating: G

"Christopher, the hero of Montague Haltrecht's new novel, is a sensitive and impressionable young man who urgently needs to escape from the domination of his over-possessive, bourgeois parents. A combination of circumstance and an unusual show of strength serve to break his tie with his suburban home but, once free, Christopher soon finds himself the willing victim in quite another trap. He falls under the spell of the romantically Bohemian Léon and is led by this middle-aged alcoholic into a world of drunkenness, petty dishonesties and open sexual perversion. It soon becomes as necessary for Christopher to break away from this spuriously glamorous world as it was for him to break from his childhood home. But to his flawed nature this brief contact has been fatally corrupting and, physically and morally wrecked, he find his only absolution in violence and death.

"Written with an extraordinary economy and strength, this second novel by the author of Jonah and his Mother gives a horrifyingly real picture of evil under the thin surface of a neurotic society."

(from the jacket)



Background / Biography:



"Montague Haltrecht, whose first novel Jonah and his Mother was published last year [1964] was born in 1932 and since coming down from Oxford he has done a number of jobs, including translating plays from the Spanish for the BBC and running a Bond Street dress shop. At present he is reading for the National Theatre, doing some work as a television extra and book reviewing. At the same time he is working on his third book, a novel in three parts, to be called Everloving Couples."

(from the jacket)

Photo of Montague Haltrecht by Jim Catney from cover


from the UK Guardian, 20 April 2010

In the 1960s, Montague Haltrecht, who has died from cancer aged 78, wrote four strikingly independent novels. From Jonah and His Mother (1964) to The Edgware Road (1970), they were variously set in the worlds of modelling, the garment trade and the London Jewish community, and explored themes of domination and violence in a pitch-perfect tone of amused detachment.

Their starting point was Monty's own life as one of four sons of a Polish immigrant father who worked his way up from Brick



Photo of Montague Haltrecht from the UK Guardian
Lane to Golders Green, finally ruling an empire of dress shops where Monty – after reading modern languages at Oxford – reluctantly spent six years as a manager. "The ghetto," he once said, "is no life for a Jewish boy"; and his plan was to write his way out of it, with translation jobs for the BBC and a string of unpublished novels before Jonah was finally accepted by André Deutsch and won the Henfield Foundation award.

Life as a writer brought poverty which script-reading for the National Theatre and engagements as a film extra did little to cure. He also took in lodgers at his Bloomsbury flat, including a rota of Radio Caroline DJs, one of whom suggested modelling to him as more profitable sideline. With his bespectacled, equine features, Monty was not obvious model material, but he blossomed as a many-faced character performer ("I can do a frantic dad at a party in the morning and a gangster on the run in the afternoon") and was soon swept into an international career that paid him far more than his books.

He said he only did it to buy time for writing, while also fearing that it tarnished his reputation as a writer. For the sake of his future books he also gave up his regular reviewing slot on the Sunday Times: sadly a needless sacrifice since, after The Edgware Road, he never published another novel.

Instead, he turned his attention to opera, in a series of radio programmes and a book on Sir David Webster, The Quiet Showman (1975). Together with his partner, the actor Nicolas Amer, who survives him, Monty made troops of friends in the performing arts; among them were Judi Dench and Michael Williams, for whom he wrote a radio trilogy for the DH Lawrence centenary, a one-woman show on Ellen Terry, and (with Beverley Marcus) a groundbreaking BBC TV play about the domestic impact of schizophrenia, Can You Hear Me Thinking? which won a Bafta nomination in 1990.

In later years, his output declined, and he suffered spells of dejection. What remained gloriously intact was his gift for human contact. I am one of many who treasured his uncompetetive intelligence and deadpan mischief, and remember him as one of the best of friends.






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"Christopher stood at the window and pressed his forehead to the pane. He looked out on the street and imagined himself a prisoner. The house in which his parents had passed their lives was just among many and he wished that he could penetrate the brick fronts of the others. He was sure that the whole street was sighing with lonely boys and frustrated women.

Behind him in the room were his parents. For twenty-four years they had been his gaolers. And now he was going to leave them. He had been chained to them his whole life by their love for him. They had a tremendous capacity to be hurt by what he did and they made sure that he knew it. On him rested all their hopes, he was the consolation for their disappointments, and he felt that he could hardly move or even breathe because of them. Christopher had had dreams, but reality was here in the bound safety of his parents' house, where he lived and moved under their anxious eyes."

opening paragraphs




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