In the Absence of Mrs Petersen

By Nigel Balchin

Katherina Feldic: Yugoslavian typist; young, beautiful, desirable.

 

Jim Petersen: British scriptwriter; lost and lonely, mourning his dead wife.

 

After meeting Katherina at a party in Paris, Jim agrees to travel to Yugoslavia with her to try to smuggle out some valuables from under the eyes of the Communist au

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penhaligon Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914076268

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Praise for Nigel Balchin

A writer of genius – John Betjeman

The missing writer of the Forties – Clive James, The New Review, 1974

Balchin writes about timeless things, the places in the heart – Ruth Rendell, Sunday Telegraph, 1990

…among the great masters of English fiction… – Julian Fellowes, Foreword to Separate Lies, 2004

"Probably no other novelist of Mr. Balchin’s value is so eminently and enjoyably readable" – Elizabeth Bowen, Tatler, 1949

…his characters have only to open their mouths to reveal a personality – L. P. Hartley, Sketch, 1945

Mr. Balchin is a writer of real skill… He has established a firm monopoly on his peculiar but admirable territory – Philip Toynbee, New Statesman, 1943

To some good judges, Balchin, rather than C. P. Snow, was the novelist of men at work – The Guardian, 1970

I’d place him up there with Graham Greene… – Philippa Gregory, BBC Radio 4, 2005

First published by Collins, London, 1966

© Nigel Balchin 1966

Editorial content © Derek Collett 2022

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without

written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a

book review.

This edition published in 2022 by Penhaligon Press.

ISBN 978 1 914076 25 1 (paperback)

ISBN 978 1 914076 26 8 (ebook)

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Nigel Balchin’s son, Charles, for kindly granting me permission to republish this novel on behalf of the estate of his late father.

I am also exceedingly grateful to Andrew Chapman of Penhaligon Press, not only for typesetting the book, preparing it for printing and designing the cover but also for his shrewd advice concerning the overall concept of the Nigel Balchin Collection.

Derek Collett

Prelude

Why republish In the Absence of Mrs Petersen?

The book you are about to read attracted indifferent reviews when it was first published in 1966 and is not in the same league as the three great novels that Nigel Balchin wrote during World War Two: Darkness Falls from the Air (1942), The Small Back Room (1943) and Mine Own Executioner (1945). Many readers will argue that it is inferior to the first release in the Nigel Balchin Collection, 1962’s Seen Dimly Before Dawn, and it is undoubtedly weaker than some of the forthcoming reissues, such as A Sort of Traitors (1949) and The Fall of the Sparrow (1955). But In the Absence of Mrs Petersen possesses a number of interesting features and I think it merits republication for three principal reasons. Firstly, because it is the last really satisfying novel that Balchin wrote in the course of a chequered career (the less said about the book’s successor, 1967’s Kings of Infinite Space, the better). Secondly, because it pleasingly evokes the feel of the 1960s and has intelligent and provocative things to say about both sexual politics and everyday life under a Communist regime, in this case that of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Finally, In the Absence of Mrs Petersen is that very rare beast: a book that consistently improves in quality as its story unfolds. The second half of the book is far superior to the first and the final four chapters constitute a sustained tour de force that ranks as one of the best pieces of writing to be found in any of Balchin’s post-war novels.

When he was writing In the Absence of Mrs Petersen, Balchin only had about five years left to live and was greatly troubled by alcoholism. His work suffered as a consequence, and a few of the more notable flaws of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen are pinpointed and discussed in the notes at the end of this volume. But those minor shortcomings do not prevent Balchin’s penultimate novel from being an amusing, exciting, absorbing and ultimately rewarding book.

Inside In the Absence of Mrs Petersen: The Story Behind the Story

It is respectfully suggested that, so as not to spoil your enjoyment of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen, you should read it before reading this introduction.

Sources and analysis

In the Absence of Mrs Petersen has its origin in a single real event. When Nigel Balchin was working as a film scriptwriter in Hollywood his wife Yovanka flew over from England to join him. He went to the airport in Los Angeles to meet her and arrived just in time to witness her plane land very awkwardly on the runway. It sparked his imagination. All he had to do to set the plot of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen in motion was to switch the landing for a take-off and to wonder what he might have done had the plane crashed on the runway, killing his wife and the other passengers in the resulting fireball. Everything started from there.

Whenever one begins to read a novel, it is necessary to suspend one’s disbelief and to trick the mind into believing that the characters, settings and plot presented by the author are real, not fictional constructs. In the case of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen, that process is not an easy one to accomplish. We are asked to believe not only that Yugoslavian typist Katherina Feldic looks very much like British scriptwriter Jim Petersen’s recently deceased wife Sarah but also that a handful of Jim’s old acquaintances cannot tell the two women apart. Similarly unlikely is Balchin’s contention that Yugoslavian customs officers in the 1960s were sufficiently indifferent as to the true identity of those entering their country not to check that a passport photograph was a good likeness of the passport holder. To make this improbability seem slightly less improbable, Balchin finds it necessary to inform the reader that the photograph in his late wife’s passport is ‘a better photograph of Katherina than it had been of Sarah’.

But it is worth trying to make the necessary mental adjustment at the beginning of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen because everything thereafter unfolds in a clear and logical fashion, as is usual with Balchin, and although the novel is far from being one of the author’s best it still possesses many appealing features.

The opening chapter of this book is a singular entity as it is evidence of the only occasion on which Balchin drilled down into his memories of working as a film scriptwriter in search of material for a novel. Balchin was closely associated with the film industry for almost two decades, beginning in 1947 when he adapted his own novel Mine Own Executioner (1945) for the big screen. In that time he completed at least twenty-five film scripts. Balchin laboured in Hollywood, without conspicuous success, in the later years of the 1950s and then again for a while in the mid-1960s and it is this Tinseltown period that informs Chapter I of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen. However, as the poet and novelist Roy Fuller perceptively observed in his review of the novel, the scriptwriting background does not make much of an impression on the reader, featuring as it does ‘script-writing talked about in a way a hundred other novelists never within 2,000 miles of Hollywood could have fudged up’. Perhaps Balchin’s finest disquisition on the film industry is to be found not in In the Absence of Mrs Petersen but in a play for television broadcast by the BBC in 1962. The Hatchet Man attracted very good reviews in the British newspapers when first broadcast but as the tape has long since been wiped it is no longer possible to attest to either its quality or veracity.

After its unpromising Hollywood opening, the setting of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen swiftly changes, first to Paris and then to Venice. These were locations that Balchin knew well, having taken frequent trips there in the company of both his first wife, Elisabeth, and his second, Yovanka. It was Yovanka Balchin who inspired the character of Katherina, the beguiling young woman who persuades Jim to undertake a journey to Yugoslavia, the country of her birth, in an attempt to smuggle out some valuables that her grandparents have been hoarding on her behalf. Yovanka, whose parents were both Yugoslavian, was twenty-two years younger than her husband and although the age gap between Jim and Katherina is not explicitly stated, one forms the impression that it is considerable and that he is significantly older than her. When I spoke to Yovanka about the origins of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen she was very clear that she was the model for Katherina:

all her mannerisms are me… I recognize [that] I used to do that or I used to be childish and react in this or that way.

Given that Katherina is partly based on Yovanka, it is no surprise to learn that Jim is a thinly disguised version of the author. In this context, Clive James once remarked, with characteristic perspicacity, that in Balchin’s novels, ‘There is always a character, usually a major one and often enough the holder of the main viewpoint, who knows how things ought to be done.’ This sort of character originated with Bill Sarratt in 1942’s Darkness Falls from the Air and runs right through the novels that Balchin wrote over the course of the next quarter of a century, exemplars being Felix Milne in Mine Own Executioner and James Manning in A Way Through the Wood (1951). In the form of Jim Petersen, Balchin’s man ‘who knows how things ought to be done’ creation reached its apogee. Jim’s superciliousness and patrician attitude towards Katherina—their relationship is more akin to that between an overbearing father and his prickly teenage daughter than one between two lovers—are beautifully encapsulated in a scene set in a Parisian restaurant in Chapter IV. Replicating something that he used to do with Sarah, Jim hands the wine list to his Serbian dining companion and asks her to choose a suitable wine to accompany their meal because to do so would be ‘good practice for her in knowing what the whole wine affair is about’.

Mirroring Jim’s behaviour towards Katherina, Balchin enjoyed playing the role of pedagogue when in the company of Yovanka. Thinking of the early days she spent with the novelist, Yovanka said that, ‘the moment I met him I started to learn’. In Italy in 1949, for example, Balchin, in Yovanka’s words, had taken ‘great delight in showing me all the famous places and paintings and I [was] a very appreciative pupil’.

Despite surviving for more than twenty years, the relationship between Balchin and Yovanka was a turbulent and tempestuous one. Often on the verge of collapsing irretrievably, it survived numerous bitter arguments, affairs by both parties and several trial separations. The many flare-ups between the priggish Jim and the sulky, combustible Katherina that pepper the central section of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen possess the ring of truth because they were drawn from life. Some readers may feel that these scenes constitute entertaining fiction. Others may find them just a little too realistic for comfort.

As well as functioning as a series of snapshots of his second marriage, the novel also contains what Balchin described as ‘some of my deepest thoughts about women and what makes a marriage tick’. Some of those thoughts make for unedifying reading in 2022. When Balchin first aired them in 1966 he admitted that his views on women would ‘probably get me assassinated one day’. They didn’t at the time but if he were to promulgate them today he would run the risk of being denounced in the newspapers and pilloried on social media, the present-day equivalents of public assassination.

When Jim and Katherina leave Venice behind and begin their journey behind the Iron Curtain, Balchin is on much safer ground. This is the point at which I feel the book comes alive, and it remains consistently interesting and exciting, and generally believable, until it reaches its dramatic conclusion. Balchin prudently used his 1965 summer holiday as an opportunity to gather local colour for the latter part of his forthcoming novel. He and Yovanka journeyed from London to Venice on the Orient Express, spent a few days in the floating city and then proceeded by sea from Venice to Rijeka. This part of the book undoubtedly benefits from the fact that Jim and Katherina’s journey faithfully replicates the reconnaissance mission undertaken by Balchin and Yovanka a year earlier, and also from the information the author had on tap in the form of his wife’s memories of Yugoslavia and her expert local knowledge. Balchin even went so far as to visit various London gambling venues, including a casino in Knightsbridge, to gather material for Chapter VIII, which is set in the casino on the Venice Lido.

Once the protagonists reach Belgrade and the real action of the novel begins to unfold, Balchin enters the realm of pure fiction: everything that happens from this point onwards is a product of his imagination, not his memory. But even this imaginative sequence is partly grounded in fact. Yovanka recalled that she had received ‘some jewellery from my grandparents, so that I think that gave him the idea’ (i.e. for Katherina’s plan to smuggle her rightful inheritance out of Yugoslavia). Balchin also met his wife’s relations on a number of occasions when visiting Yugoslavia and his pen portraits of Katherina’s grandparents may have been influenced by character traits abstracted from members of Yovanka’s family.

As more than one book critic pointed out when In the Absence of Mrs Petersen was first published, the adventures that round off the story are reminiscent of the work of thriller writer Eric Ambler, a man with whom Balchin clashed shortly after the end of World War Two over the film recording of the launch of a captured V2 rocket (see His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin for details). Ambler’s heroes tend to be professional men such as engineers or journalists who find themselves taken for a ride as they become innocently caught up in shady goings-on overseas. Balchin’s scriptwriting hero fits the description of the innocent abroad and, in his review of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen, Fuller explained the similarity between the work of the two authors: ‘Mr. Balchin’s new novel has the Amblerian theme of a cat’s-paw prevailed upon to journey to foreign parts’. Although Fuller maintained that ‘Mr. Ambler himself has come in his post-war novels to do such a tour de force with far greater subtlety and power’ there is no denying that the decisive piece of action that concludes In the Absence of Mrs Petersen stands comparison with similar material in some of the post-war Ambler novels that Fuller seemed to have in mind, such as Judgment on Deltchev (1951) and The Schirmer Inheritance (1953).

Whether Amblerian or not, In the Absence of Mrs Petersen is a satisfying thriller, a forthright and truthful depiction of the battle of the sexes and a book in which the scenery and background are refreshingly different from those in the novels of Balchin’s heyday. Every time I read it, I enjoy it far more than I was expecting to. I hope you will too.

Press reaction

Critical reactions to In the Absence of Mrs Petersen in the newspapers and literary periodicals were mixed, but predominantly lukewarm.

Most reviewers commented adversely on the unlikeliness of Balchin’s plot. Anthony Burgess in the Listener described it as ‘preposterous’ and Frederic Raphael in the Sunday Times said that it was ‘shamelessly unlikely to the point of fantasy’.

The critics were, however, broadly united on the subject of the novel’s readability. The New Statesman and Nation reported that the book was ‘smoothly readable’ and Burgess contended that Balchin’s narrative skill was ‘as brilliant as it ever was’. But there was a general feeling that Balchin was treading water, trading on past glories and not doing justice to his considerable talents. The reviewer in The Times expressed this feeling of disappointment better than most: ‘the author of The Small Back Room is capable of much more’.

Other reviewers were more positive. The critic in the Sunday Telegraph lauded In the Absence of Mrs Petersen as being better than anything Balchin had written since The Small Back Room, benefitting as it did from a ‘faster-moving, more intricately spun plot than those in the intermediate Balchin novels’. The New York Times Book Review said that the book was ‘a fine wry entertainment by an accomplished story-teller’ and the Observer summed it up by way of a memorable apophthegm: ‘another expert tale of the middle-aged man on the flying trapeze’.

UK publication history

First published in hardback 27 June 1966 by Collins.

First paperback edition published by Pan in 1969.

Penhaligon Press paperback and ebook editions published in 2022.

Interesting fact

The character of Jovan Petrov (aka Pelic) may have been based on Jovan Milicevic, a Serbian actor with whom Yovanka had a short-lived affair while working in Belgrade in the mid-1950s. Yovanka characterized Milicevic as ‘devastatingly good-looking, a charmer, highly intelligent and great fun’.

IN THE ABSENCE OF MRS PETERSEN

The Thane of Fife, had a wife:

where is she now?¹

I

There was an article in a magazine the other day, pointing out the remarkable safety of present-day air travel. According to the writer, statistics show that there is a greater chance of being kicked to death by a mule, or of dying of laughter in the theatre, than of being killed in an air accident.

Properly selected and carefully trained statistics often show some very odd things. No really close acquaintance of mine has ever been kicked to death by a mule. Perhaps I live in the wrong part of the world. I have never been in a theatre when anybody has died of laughter. Perhaps I don’t go to the right plays. But I was present when Flight 265 left Los Angeles International Airport for New York, and since then, except for one brief period, I have been very much alone.

*

There are people who like living in Hollywood—or, as they more frequently do, in Beverly Hills or the San Fernando Valley. They like that monotonous sunshine, and the house with the swimming-pool, and the hut on the beach, and the curious illusion of earning a lot of money, and settle down perfectly happily to live the rest of their lives there, and presumably to be buried at Forest Lawn. But for me it has always been purely a working place—somewhere to go to do a specific job, and then to come away from, with no further criticisms on either side. Living there, I have always felt like a man driving a car at night with all his lights on, and all his electrical equipment working. A lot is going out, mentally speaking, and very little is coming in; and after a few months of it, one must go away and drive the car somewhere else in daylight, in order to recharge the batteries.

I had never thought that Sarah would like Hollywood. I even tried, admittedly rather feebly, to prevent her from coming with me. If you are working all day, particularly if you have been lucky enough to get decent, clever, and interesting people to work with, the life is just possible. But if you are simply somebody’s wife, living there for a few months in a luxurious furnished apartment, it must be desperately difficult to get through the time. And Sarah was never very good at doing nothing.

Yet when she finally struck, I was strangely unprepared for it. We had only been in the place two months, during which I had been fully occupied in doing my first rapid draft of a script in which I was interested. To me, the really heart-breaking part of a scriptwriter’s work—the meetings with the Front Office, the gradual tearing away of all distinction from what one has written, the fatuous suggestions which have to be treated politely and respectfully, and the eventual realisation that you are talking a completely different language—all these had yet to come. We had acquired the usual beach hut at Malibu. We had duly been to Disneyland, and down across the border into Mexico; and we had only been about four times each to all the obvious restaurants. This, so far, was the classical Hollywood assignment.

It was also part of the classical assignment that we should go that evening to Barry Fowler’s party. Barry was the executive producer of the picture on which I was working. He was a well-known figure in Hollywood, with an excellent record of productions—a big, rather portly grey-haired man, with excellent manners, who prided himself chiefly on his taste in such things as French wine and English clothes. He had just married a new wife (his fourth, I fancy) who was very beautiful and some thirty years younger than he was, and had built her a new house. Hence the party.

The house was a huge affair right up at the top of one of the canyons, perched on the edge of a mountain, so that it looked as though at any moment it might slide down, complete with the swimming-pool, into Beverly Hills. It was one of those places where, as you look at the view, they tell you that on a clear day you can see Marine Land² or something. On these occasions it never is a clear day, and this one wasn’t; but even so the view was magnificent, and I am quite prepared to believe that on a really clear day one could see Japan.

There were about thirty people at the party, every one of whom, as far as I know, was connected with the film industry in some capacity or other. They included half a dozen top ranking film-stars, several directors and producers, and a world-famous Funny Man of television, who had become so used to being a Funny Man that he could not stop, even in private life. Altogether, by Hollywood standards, it was a very distinguished gathering. It would have been a splendid opportunity for any keen autograph hunter.

Unfortunately neither Sarah nor I were keen autograph hunters, and from the outset it was clear that the whole party was not going to be quite our cup of tea. We all went and looked at the view and agreed that it was marvellous and that on a clear day et cetera et cetera. We then had to go and look at the new house. The only thing I remember about it with any clarity is