Fiction of Gay Interest

Jonah and his Mother
Montague Haltrecht
Publisher: Mayflower-Dell
London, UK

Year


 		1966       first published: 1964
Cover / size: paperback / 18 cm * 11 cm / 157 pp

Dustjacket?   n/a

ISBN: n/a

Arbery Ref:   000489

Condition Fair

Cover: severely worn, spine almost illegible. Short ink inscription on pre-title page. Pages browning but otherwise clean.

Price £14.00
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Haltrecht: Jonah and his Mother






Plot / Content:                              Rating: G

"Jonah's mother, Frederika, was born to be young, gay, rich. She still feels young and gay; but not rich. She is drowning her son in her love for him. It is into this situation that the antique dealer, Gray, steps - to fall in love with Jonah. The crisis is brought about by the intervention of Susan, young and attractive. Here, though, there is no conventional solution. Mr Haltrecht, with his delicate blend of comedy and pathos, is too honest for that."

(from the cover)



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 of Haltrecht's second novel, A Secondary Character )

Photo of Montague Haltrecht by Jim Catney from cover of A Secondary Character


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.






Reviews:





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"It was mid-afternoon, and Frederika looked around the lounge of the hotel in Kensington where she had shored up. The clerk at the reception desk was nodding, and a middle-aged woman rested her legs on a cretonne pouffe.

'That I should come to this!' Frederika moaned to her self. 'And at my time of life!' she continued, before she could suppress the thought. 'That I should be in a hotel where the clerk has the effrontery not to lower his eyes when I glance in his direction. That I hshould have to bear the sight of legs in elastic stockings! It's disgusting the way that woman has let herself go. And above all, to be in a hotel lounge in mid-afternoon, and not a man at large! Before this had happened, I wish they had taken me away, put me against a wall and shot me.'"

opening paragraphs








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