[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

In 1955, when Lloyd Alexander published his first book, he didn’t seem poised to become a children’s writer. The back-cover blurb for And Let the Credit Go emphasizes his studies at the Sorbonne, notes his published translations of Éluard, Sartre, and other French writers, and mentions his gigs as a piano player and cartoonist. Drawing its title from Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, this brief memoir makes a promise on its dust-flap that even a skilled fantasist might struggle to fulfill: to explore “one of the most hilarious and heartbreaking of worlds: banking.”

And Let the Credit Go is neither hilarious nor heartbreaking, but it may interest Alexander fans who want to know more about the author’s teenage years. Forced by his practical father to get a job (“And some day you might even be head of a department”), Alexander doesn’t fondly recall his pre-college, pre-war stint as a Philadelphia bank messenger, but he does sketch memorable characters: misers in moth-bitten afghans wheeled into the lobby to make deposits; a trigger-happy security guard (“I don’t think he was fundamentally interested in banking”); an investment counselor who kills himself in the safe-deposit vault.

In time, Alexander midwifes the epistolary courtship between a personnel manager and a legal secretary, and he watches, bemused, as a deluded clerk proclaims his Nazi sympathies in song. There’s a French chef here, too, who’s too busy writing reports for bank management to do any cooking, and a frustrated accountant who blackmails his boss while devising a mathematical system for betting on horses, all because he dreams of buying a case of champagne.

Later, Alexander observes the pathetic love between two strange analysts who discover mutual interests in “vital fluids and magnetism, the strange forces of nature; and of course, the ten lost tribes.” If anything, And Let the Credit Go paints an eccentric picture of banking culture in 1939. “Belief in the occult was not uncommon in The Bank,” Alexander explains, in one of this book’s few real insights into banking. “I knew half a dozen clerks who consoled themselves with astrology; or some other mystical system which allowed them more authority in another world than they had in the present one.”

Some elements of 1939 office culture are drearily familiar: a joyless party (rented phonograph, potted plants, ham-and-cheese sandwiches); a wedding shower for a secretary nobody likes; a Secret Santa game (here called “Polly-Anna”); and subdued Yuletide murmurs in upstairs cubicles, “many furtive celebrations, rather like those of the Christians in the catacombs.” But then Alexander invites us to sample the strange, lost custom of “Milk Time”:

Most of The Bank’s employees were very young or very old, and to sustain them throughout the day The Bank supplied two free glasses of milk, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The milk was consumed in the company restaurant on the fifth floor. Waitresses brought the milk, unskimmed, warm and delicious and the clerks crowded around the trays. Monsieur Piquet, a genuine French chef in charge of the restaurant, watched to see that no one took more than one glass.

And Let the Credit Go is a gentle book by a famously gentle soul, but it does offer one real surprise for lifelong readers of Alexander: Unlike his books for children, this one is not entirely chaste.

When Alexander visits Atlantic City with his buddies, he puts on a British accent and tells girls he’s a banker, an misadventure that leads him to a brothel, where he implies the obvious through detail, elision, and self-deprecation:

Sandra was sitting on the edge of an unmade bed. She was completely unclothed. Somehow I hadn’t expected that.

“Hello, honey,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

The light from the parlor shone through the curtain and gave it a grainy look. The curtain did not quite reach the floor and in the gap I could see the maid’s shoes and heavy ankles. I thought of my aunt’s lodger sitting out there.

From that point, I knew everything was impossible.

Later, in a chapter called “Dorothea,” Alexander dates a girl messenger who has been abandoned by her father, manipulated by her mother, and educated into droll boredom. When he lands in her boudoir, he faces a challenge worthy of a hero of Prydain:

“Would you marry me?” she asked again. “Or would you rather go to school. You don’t have to marry me, you know.”

I walked over to the piano and tapped the keys with one finger. Had she been sober and asked me that question, asked me to go to Algeria, insult Mr. Flathers or do any number of other insane things, I would have done it.

Dorothea giggled. I turned around.

She had taken off her white blouse and was trying to unhook her little brassiere. She gave me a silly grin.

“I can’t make it,” she said.

The brassiere ripped and fell. Dorothea started to laugh again. She was very pale and slight.

“Is there anything wrong with me?” she asked.

I looked at her green eyes, her thin shoulders and tiny breasts and I knew that whatever I did would be wrong.

“Dorothea,” which appeared in an anthology a year before the book was published, is by far the best story here. I wonder if Alexander and his agent used its strength to sell the publisher on the lengthier recollections of a bank messenger—and if so, what they thought of the strange book they received.

Alexander’s humane nature is evident throughout. When his friend falls in love with a girl at the beach, he says only that she “was pretty in the way girls are pretty at the seashore.” When he creeps into the mansion of the blind, ancient bank chairman, he lets the old man’s utterances—”They feed on me” and “I wish I was dead”—speak for themselves. There are short stories to be written here, not chapters that veer drearily back to banking, so And Let the Credit Go is a hodgepodge. The bank never becomes a microcosm, an allegory, or a source of moral and ethical insight; it’s as if Alexander dislikes the place too much to give it greater meaning.

Readers who want to see the adult(ish) side of Lloyd Alexander or catch a highly censored view of 1939 bank culture as glimpsed from its bottom rung may be intrigued by this book, but I’m glad Alexander moved on and allowed other places, and other experiences, to shape his writing. “Working in a bank,” he concedes, “does not encourage generosity.”

[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

Lloyd Alexander invented Vesper Holly in 1986. She possesses, he wrote in The Illyrian Adventure, “the digestive talents of a goat and the mind of a chess master. She is familiar with half a dozen languages and can swear fluently in all of them. She understands the use of a slide rule but prefers doing calculations in her head.” Vesper has opinions about electromagnetism and women’s suffrage, is fluent in Latin and Turkish, and knows how to play the banjo. She’s also, improbably, a teenager in 19th-century Philadelphia—and by her third book, The Drackenberg Adventure, Vesper Holly begins to wear a little thin.

Of course, that’s the judgment of an adult. The Drackenberg Adventure is comfort food for Lloyd Alexander fans, and young girls, now as in 1988, are likely to be charmed by the Vesper Holly formula: A cry for help leads Vesper and her guardian, Professor Brinton “Brinnie” Garrett (who is also the narrator), to a fictional foreign country, where Vesper demonstrates her brilliance, flouts local mores, ingratiates herself with royalty, and discovers that her arch-enemy, Dr. Helvetius, is somehow involved. This time, the country is Drackenberg, a impoverished and strategically useless land notable only for “zither music and chicken paprika”—and only Vesper can solve the mystery behind a priceless painting and save the locals from invasion by neighboring Carpatia.

Alexander alters the formula slightly—Brinnie’s wife, Mary, joins the heroes on their mitteleuropäisch adventure—but there’s little new here otherwise. Brinnie’s narration is again comically stuffy; Dr. Helvetius is again a soulless aesthete who uses his knowledge for evil; and Vesper demonstrates, by contrast, that education can bring about wonders. When she falls in with gypsies, for example, she confronts a horse that refuses to ferry a wagon across a river:

Since Romany had failed, she tried French, German, and Italian. None of these brought any response. We moved neither forward nor backward. Mikalia, atop the vardo, had begun whimpering, and the despairing Zoltan clapped his hands to his head.

Vesper, of course, is fluent in most languages. By now, though, I feared she had exhausted her vocabulary. Suddenly, her eyes lit up and she launched into the majestic cadences of classical Greek, declaiming passages from what I immediately recognized as the Iliad.

The horse pricked up its ears. Zoltan, open-mouthed, stared at her as she continued to ring out those mighty lines, while the animal reared and snorted and began to heave with all its strength.

Naturally, Vesper becomes an honorary gypsy—but only after helping Drackenberg discover its valuable stash of bauxite and demonstrating, accidentally, her understanding of art history. And did I mention her expert knowledge of paint chemistry?

Sure, the Vesper Holly books are both preposterous and formulaic, but a jaded adult who finds The Drackenberg Adventure predictable might point out that Lloyd Alexander was a good enough writer to develop an entirely new formula for himself, plus a rare and effective first-person narrator, well into his sixties. Alexander’s cartoonish fondness for gypsies notwithstanding, the fun he has in his Victorian alternate universe is infectious, and any line of kids’ books that celebrates the arts and sciences as springboards to adventure is a series I just can’t disdain.