James Laver

Nymph Errant

First published in London by William Heinemann Ltd and in New York by Alfred A Knopf, 1932. Evergreen paperback published 1941.

The publisher's blurb on the Evergreen paperback edition quotes J B Priestley: "A very gay, witty, impudent affair ...". And indeed it is so. Not "gay" as in William Jack Sibley or Adam Mars-Jones, but gay as a term of youthful abandon, very much how the Thirties seems to have been for those insulated or isolated from the problems of unemployment, fascism, stock market collapse and the like. The wit is also of its age, not Oscar Wilde's vicious barbs, but a gentler debunking of pomposity or arrogance.

In some respects, Nymph Errant reads like a piece of trivial romantic fantasy. Even the basic premise is fantastic. An English Rose, Evangeline Edwards, on her way home to Oxford (and dullness) after three years of expensive finishing school in Lausanne, decides on a whim to be picked up by a handsome stranger. Often leaving her luggage behind her (if she has any to leave), Evangeline manages to complete an alternative "Grand Tour", bedhopping around Europe and seeing high and low life in half a dozen countries. To provide a counterpoint to Evangeline's experiences, in most locations she meets one of her ex-schoolfriends, who have their own tales to tell. While there is a darker side to some experiences, such as suicidal depression in an artist, the uncaring self-interest of social climbers and the sordid nature of exploitation, a lot of the time this is underplayed, as if in the hope that it will be ignored. Laver does finally confront the sheer awfulness of which humanity is capable, with explicit descriptions of the sack of Smyrna.

One chapter is set in a German nudist camp, Himmelheim. This uncompromisingly back-to-nature establishment features plenty of regimented physical exercises, regimented vegetarian meals, regimented worthy instructional lectures, unregimented washing in streams, etc - as you can read in the extracts. As usual in a novel of this sort, the weather is always dry and sunny, although Evangeline does wonder how the Spartan regime could be endured in winter.

The novel's publication created a storm in a teacup, as some of its content was (deliberately?) outrageous. This publicity did the author no harm at all, and was probably instrumental (sorry) in securing a rapid translation to the stage, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. The original score included a scene set in Himmelheim, with a song Sweet Nudity. Both were dropped during rehearsals, although the song was included in the "Appendix" of the 1989 London revival, staged purely as a concert recital. It was not just the nudism which was edited out of the novel for the finer sensibilities of theatre-goers, since Porter's Evangeline retains her virginity throughout.

This is certainly not great literature, but nor is it trash. It is not as light and frothy as Thorne Smith's fantasies, but it is written with a light touch and an easy style, which has dated a lot less than the story and the attitudes it portrays. Like so many of the older yarns in this collection, it is long out of print, with secondhand copies relatively tatty and uncommon - those in reasonable condition are fairly expensive. If you do come across it, I recommend taking the time-travel trip through its pages, but I don't think it is worth hunting for.

The only picture I can find of author James Laver is a tiny one in the booklet from the CD of the 1989 concert performance - presumably the LP had a larger one. The CD booklet also provided lyrics of Cole Porter's Sweet Nudity, which had been very elusive (they also appear to be kept behind ferocious copyright barriers). The lyrics seem remarkably banal, with a chorus of "boys" delighting in things like "No fights with laundries and no tailor bills" while the "girls" offer "no hats to choose, no frocks to tear". Since it seems that the elmination of the nudist colony scene may have been anticipated from the beginning, and that this concession to the censor allowed other risqué material to be passed with less scrutiny, perhaps less effort was expended on this song than on the rest.

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2006 April 23.
 
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