It was a beautiful day in April.  Crocuses, forsythia, etc.  Alas, I was on the verge of a reading breakdown.  First I read the cereal box.  Then  I read the slogan on a cough drop wrapper: “INSPIRE ENVY.”  (You will not find enlightenment from cough drop wrappers.)

And then I picked up C. H. B. Kitchin’s engrossing, witty novel, Mr. Balcony (1927),  a neglected book that deserves a revival. In the introduction to the Faber Finds edition, Francis King says it is “both the strangest of Kitchin’s novels and one of the strangest of the twenties.” 

I admit it is pretty strange.  The protagonist, Mr. Balcony, is a confirmed bachelor, i.e., gay, and a homespun philosopher who rejects not only the humdrum routine of “quiet lives of desperation” but deconstructs the English language.  

If only one could thus isolate the pure form of a whole language, expurgate a dictionary until a commonplace sentence like ‘Will you shake the other end of that cylinder?’ became meaningless – from the point of view of its translation into French. 

Although Mr. Balcony – who refers to his balcony as his namesake – is at the pivot of the action, he is not necessarily the main character.   Perhaps the most vivid, realistic character is the imaginative Gloria Swing, a wistful milliner with a hat shop, who wishes she would fall in love and marry. She is happy and hopeful as she prepares for a party on her balcony where she and her friends (most of them customers) will watch the parade.  They watch the royal carriage roll by, followed by a phalanx of women in uniform. 

One of the guests, the domineering  Lady Hoobrake, objects to the women in uniform.  “’Absurd,’ Lady Hoobrake continued, ‘aping the men like that.  How wretched they look!’”  She also compares them to waddling ducks.

We would hardly call Mr. Balcony a hippie, but he persuades Aubrey, Lady Hoobrake’s witty, hapless son, slightly reminiscent of Saki’s Bassington, to quit his deadening job and refuse to waste his days doing repetitive tasks.  Meanwhile, Mr. Balcony has divested himself of all his stocks and money. He uses what’s left to hire a yacht.

But Mr. Balcony doesn’t have any more friends than Gloria does. And so at her party, he invites the hostess and guests to travel on the yacht with him to Africa.  And on that existentialist journey, the character types evolve, with nods to disparate genres, including the satires of Horace and Apuleius, morality tales, Agatha Christie, Oscar Wilde,  Joseph Conrad, and H. Rider Haggard.

In fact Mr. Balcony does his best to take care of them, but whether he succeeds is questionable. Let’s call it an existential comedy!