THE UNCOMFORTABLE INN

London/New York/Toronto: Abelard-Schuman, (1960).. (1960).. Very good. INSCRIBED & SIGNED BY DACHINE RAINER - Octavo, tan pictorial cloth with an illustration in blue on the front cover in a dust wrapper. The dust jacket is soiled with its spine a bit darkened, There is a small area of staining to the front panel with a tiny stain to the front flap. Half-title, title, [4] leaves & 340 pages. Near fine in a good dust wrapper. <p>First edition.<p>Inscribed by the author on the front endpaper: "To Raleigh & Rush Harp / Best Wishes for / THE WEDGIT / Dachine". A postcard to the Harps inviting them to a reception in honor of the book is laid in. The book is signed below the inscription by E. J. Ballantine, an actor and sculptor with whom Rainer lived in London. Ballantine was the father of Ian Ballantine, the founder of Bantam Books and of Ballantine Books, which published an extract from Rainer's novella "A Room at the Inn".<p>Dachine Rainer [1921-2000] "was an American-born Anglophile poet, an anarchist with a house in Belgravia [London], and friends with W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings and Dame Rebecca West". In the early 1950s, she and cummings were instrumental in the formation of the Committee for the Liberation of Ezra Pound, who had supported Fascist ideas in Italy during the war and was arrested and tried for treason. "During this time Dachine Rainer loudly defended Pound's reputation as a man and as a poet, although her own political views were very different to his. She was a lifelong anarchist who believed that the state interfered too much in people's lives and that it should be abolished. She envisioned mankind living in harmony with nature, a theme evident in her poems, which were influenced by German romantic writers and by Yeats, as well as by Pound himself....From 1946 until 1960, Dachine Rainer...edited the quarterly magazine Retort, which was hand-produced by herself and Holley Cantine, a writer with whom she was then living. Like the newspaper that they ran, The Wasp, this was dedicated to the politics of the Left and the arts. The pair also edited 'Prison Etiquette' (1950), a volume of writings by conscientious objectors who had been jailed...." [Both Cantine and Rainer had been confined in a federal prison as conscientious objectors during World War II].<p>"Her first [full-length] novel was 'The Uncomfortable Inn' (1960), a picaresque, semi-autobiographical tale that revolved about an odd collection of lodgers living in Greenwich Village. It was reviewed in Britain by Rebecca West, who chose it as her favorite first novel of the year, and the two women subsequently became firm friends." [Quotations from the obituary in The Daily Telegraph of September 8, 2000].