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Month: September 2008

Atlantic Crossing, by G. Wilson Knight

G. Wilson Knight, 1936, Photography by Howard CosterG. Wilson Knight subtitled this 1936 book “An Autobiographical Design,” and had he stuck to the autobiography and left the design out, I might have been less resentful about the several hours I devoted to assaulting its slopes. Perhaps I lack the mountaineering skills to attempt such a tower of intellect. But Atlantic Crossing struck me as one of the most grandiose failures I’ve tried to read in a long time.

Knight made his name as a critic and director of Shakespeare and other English dramatists. His lifelong immersion in Renaissance poetry and prose left him with a weakness for an intricacy at times beyond his own dexterity:

It was then I watched in twilight where up-piled clouds in rugged Alpine ranges towered and caught the morning and glowed with it, black rocks and giant crags fire-fringed, stained with a gilden glory. Shafts of burning mist, spear-points of the assaulting dawn, slanted angular upward splendours. Watch those breaking palisades, that rock-pinnacle flaming to its ruin, those tufts of red smoke, that heaving, billowing, crumbling, conglomerated mass–was ever such chaos so musically blended?–while the artillery of advancing day fumes the air with its cordite, rolling attar of roses in wave on wave.

Phew! Imagine 300-plus pages of this hyperventilating.

In Atlantic Crossing, Knight hangs on the slender frame of six days’ voyage on a 1930s ocean liner from Montreal to Southhampton enough ornaments and appendages to sink even the most sea-worthy narrative.

There are some promising bits. A fleeting, glancing romance with a lively American ingenue. Some fine purely autobiographical passages in which Knight recalls his experiences as a dispatch rider with British forces in Iraq and Persia during World War One. And enough tastes of luxury liner travel to leave us envious of the past:

Now what to do after breakfast? A pipe in the lounge; a walk on the promenade deck; watch the people; perhaps get to know some of them; shuffleboard and deck-tennis. This is to be unadulterated leisured aristocracy, free from beggars, telephones, letters, money, and all complex interrelations of modern civilization, yet with its best luxury at hand; in a world beyond richness and poverty, for one week.

Unfortunately for the reader, however, Knight can’t wait to hurl in great shovel-fulls of aduleration and complex interrelations:

It is often hard to day whether man’s passionate unrest is a matter of volcanic flame or turbulent ocean. The opposition of Thales and Heraclitus is profound. Fire must be liquid in us, coursing like quicksilver in our veins: that is, man’s fiery ascent drags ocean up mountains through fields of air. I suppose fire is ultimately the Alpha and Omega, earth-centre and empyrean.

OK, folks–a show of hands. Man’s passionate unrest: volcanic flame or turbulent ocean? I know my mind is often torn between these two choices. On the other hand, I have no second thoughts about what category Atlantic Crossing belong in.

Atlantic Crossing, by G. Wilson Knight
London: J. W. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1936

William Blake in This World, by Harold Bruce

William Blake, a portrait sketch by John Flaxman“In 1757 William Blake was born in London; in 1827 he died there; where he has been since 1827 I do not know.” This wonderful line opens Harold Bruce’s William Blake in This World, and that spirit of cheerful skepticism permeates the whole book.

“I doubt if a soul is to be understood, or a ghost to be saved by whitewashing,” Bruce writes in response to a century’s worth of attempts to fit Blake’s wildly original imagination into a more conventional and Victorian form. Instead of following tradition, laying out the story of Blake’s life in chronological order and drawing lessons from its successes and failures, Bruce takes what was, at the time, a very novel, Modernist approach:

To try to sift fact from romance, to try to erase the details of Blake’s life not backed by competent, material, and relevant evidence, will be to blur a smooth and highly-finished portrait, and to substitute a flawed and imperfect one, with lines sometimes dim, wavering, or blotted out. But this portrait, traced by Blake’s own words and by the memories of those who knew him, however flawed and imperfect it turns out to be, has certain sharply clear lines, and is at least a partial likeness of him as he was.

William Blake in This World is a collage, a view of Blake’s life and work from a variety of perspective, studded with quotations from his poems, letters, and the recollections of his contemporaries. He looks at Blake in terms of his view of religion and revolution, of the early signs of the Industrial Age and the mundane demands on his energy of politics and commerce. Bruce addresses the question of Blake’s mental health: was he locked up in Bedlam as a madman at one point?

Today, the book would probably be classed as criticism, but Bruce’s interest is strictly biographical. If Bruce has any particular message, it is that, however ethereal and visionary Blake’s spirit was, it resided in the breast of a man very much of his own time and place. Although I found the author’s own prose at times too elliptical and tangential to follow, there is no doubt that in William Blake in This World, Harold Bruce is a vigorous defender of his subject’s right to be himself.

William Blake in This World, by Harold Bruce
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925

If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover

I vividly remember a few of the first books I encountered as a child. Though I never knew the names of their authors until I had kids of my own and started taking them to the library, I know I was fascinated by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire’s George Washington and Norse Myths. I don’t know if it was Wotan or Odin, but one of those Norse gods set in my mind as the father in “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and I never could quite accept what they taught us in Sunday School about God being Love. I thought Jesus was the nice, gentle guy who protected the little children from getting smote by God, all wrathful over something we did wrong.

Fortunately, the image that stuck with me the most was something a lot funnier:
Squeezed Cat
My family had one or more cats pretty much the whole time I was growing up, and a few of them endured hours of being picked up by the middle and lugged around by one of us adoring little boys–the way it seems all little kids carry cats:
Squeeze the Cat
After having this book read to me and looking through it over and over, I started to consider if maybe there were gentler ways to pick up the cat. See, the message of the book, as I understood it at least, was that if everybody did something like pick the cat up by the stomach and carry them all around the house, well, then, kitties would end up all pinched up in the middle. Which does look pretty uncomfortable, though funny.

Every once in a while in recent years, the image of that pinched kitty would come to me again and I would rack my brain to try to remember what the name of that book was. But I always drew a blank. I know I never came across it in trips to the library with my own kids, so it struck me recently that whatever it was, it might be a candidate for a mention on this site.

Out of the blue, it occurred to me to do a search on “What If Everybody Did?” It came up blank. So I tried, “If Everybody Did”, and lo and behold, there it was on Amazon:
Squeeze the Cat
And it was in print.

If Everybody Did is nothing more than a collection of illustrations of what might happen if everybody did what kids often tend to do: track in mud, leave toys on the staircase, leave water running in the sink, or wipe dirty hands on the wall or window. Some of the extreme results are pretty comical, but in my view, nothing tops the pinched kitty.

Jo Ann Stover wrote and illustrated a few other children’s books, including They Didn’t Use Their Heads, which, like If Everybody Did, has been brought back in print by Bob Jones University Press. Yes, the fundamentalist Christian college that seems from the outside, at least, a little Stepford Wives-like. Apparently these two books are popular with home schoolers.

Still, I’d highly recommend If Everybody Did for any parent trying to foster some manners in a two-to-five year old. At least one of their bad habits is in here, and I can offer personal testimony that seeing the exaggerated consequences is a good way to turn it around. I know there are a few kitties lounging around Cat Heaven now who owe Jo Ann Stover a bit of gratitude for not having to walk around our house looking like an hourglass.

If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover
New York City: David McKay, 1960
Greenville, South Carolina: Journey Forth Press, 1989

Harper Perennial reissue of “The Moonflower Vine” by Jetta Carleton Confirmed

Cover of new Harper Perennial reissue of 'The Moonflower Vine'Easily the most popular neglected book on this site, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine is now firmly planted in Harper Perennial’s release schedule for the first quarter of 2009. In fact, you can pre-order it on Amazon today–if you’re willing to wait about six months to get the book, that is. A sneak peak at the cover is shown to the left. Jane Smiley, who wrote about the novel in her 2005 book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, will provide the foreword for this new edition.

The Problem of Kenneth S. Davis

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Experience of War'A very long time ago, I checked a book titled The Experience of War out of my high school library. It didn’t look too inviting–the cover is a photo of small black figures–soldiers–walking across a dark gray field, silhouetted against a light gray sky. The pages were filled with long, dense paragraphs of small print. But it was two inches thick, and at the time, I thought size mattered–at least when it came to impressing my classmates with my seriousness.

I only got about 200 pages into the book before I had to return it, and for whatever reason, I didn’t check it out again. But I can remember being profoundly impressed by how … well, I guess I would say, cinematic the book was. It wasn’t like other history books I’d read–setting aside things like The Great Escape as adventure rather than history, that is. It wasn’t a sequence of “this happened and then this happened” facts, with an occasional bit of analysis. It was a series of scenes. Wendell Willkie in the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan, listening to the returns from the 1940 Presidential election. General Jonathan Wainwright waiting for the end in a tunnel on Corregidor. Navy pilots spotting and attacking the Japanese carrier Kaga just as they reach the very limit of their range, opening the battle of Midway. Harry Hopkins, already suffering from stomach cancer, flying from Washington to London and then on to Moscow to meet with Stalin in the early days after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union–and then back to Scotland to meet up with Churchill and travel to the first Atlantic conference:

For twenty-four hours he is in troubled air, his sick body tossed and buffeted. He has barely strength enough to jump from the plane to the slippery deck of an admiral’s launch, at Scapa Flow, when at last the flying boat comes down. A sailor with a boat hook hauls him sprawling across the deck to the safety of the cabin. But he laughs! He laughs at this undignified arrival of the President’s personal envoy upon a British boat. He laughs at his sickness, his weakness. He waves a cheery farewell to the crew of the PBY, whose captain will later speak in awestruck tones of his passenger’s “unbelievable courage,” his “splendid devotion to duty.”

Almost twenty years later, I pulled down a copy of The Experience of War from a bookstore shelf and began thumbing through it. My first reaction was much the same as before: “Hmm … looks very thick, slow, and dry.” But then I hit that passage about Hopkins again, and I suddenly remembered, and decided right there to buy the book and immediately begin reading it again. At the time, I was flying regularly from Washington to Denver and back, usually in the same day, and a good, thick book I could sink into was something I really needed.

But then, around 300 pages into it, I ran into the following at the start of chapter ten: “Let George do it, the saying goes. So call him George.” George is a Marine, and Davis leads us through his enlistment, his basic training, his transport to Hawaii, his transport to a ship off an island in the Southwest Pacific, to George’s part in the island’s assault and bitter conquest.

George is a fictional character.

I found this quite disconcerting. Was this whole thing just a crock, I wondered? Was Davis just toying with the reader?

But eight pages later, we were back in real history, travelling around the world with Wendell Willkie on his 1942 propaganda tour at FDR’s request, and for the rest of the book, we stayed in what I considered safe territory. Edmund Morris’ Dutch was still ten years in the future and I thought mixing fact and fiction was like adding even and odd numbers–in the end, the result would always be fiction.

In his prefatory note to The Experience of War, Davis wrote,

This is a book about the American experience of World War II. It is not designed to be a formal academic history, though every effort has been made to assure its factual accuracy. Rather, its essential purpose is literary in that it attempts to rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time something of what Webster’s Dictionary, in the definition of “experience,” calls the “actual living through an event or events; actual enjoyment or suffering.”

Looking through the reviews that greeted the publication of The Experience of War, you can see that the majority of reviewers stumbled over exactly the same point I did. Most praise the work’s overall breadth and richness of detail, but caution the buyer to beware that the whole package could be considered tainted by the one detour into creative writing. Almost three decades later, the fine historian David Hackett Fisher could still sniff that the book “promiscuously mixes fiction and fact.” Eric Goldman, writing in the New York Times was one of the very to express unqualified praise, calling it, “…[H]istory in the grand manner, broad and powerful in its themes, eloquent in style …,” and noting its “sharply etched vignettes of people and scenes.”

Soon after publishing The Experience of War, Davis began work on the project that consumed the rest of his life–over thirty years–and ultimately end unfinished: his massive five-volume, nearly 4,000-page biography of Franklin Roosevelt. His first volume, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928 published in 1972, was a critical and commercial success, earning him the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.

From there on, however, it was a long downhill slide. Walter Goodman’s Times review of the second volume, FDR: The New York Years 1928-1933 (1985), ended with this litany of faint praises: “He is an assiduous researcher, a creditable psychologist, a fair-minded analyst and, when he isn’t trying too hard, an inviting chronicler of the most fascinating political personality of our age.” Irving Howe was much more enthusiastic about the third volume, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (1986), calling it an “admirably rich book – rich in historical substance, political thought and character portraiture.”

He did note, however, that, “Sentence by sentence, Mr. Davis is not a bewitching writer: he has a curious weakness for stiff syntax and cumbersome phrasing.” And it must be said that the significant obstacle for Davis’ readers is less an occasional dalliance with fiction but his almost nineteenth century prose style.

At times, it can be completely over the top, as in this passage from The Experience of War:

High hopes. Bright hopes …

But then, abruptly, deep disappointments. Dark disappointments, and even despairs …

The bright and the dark ran side by side in a rush of contrasting events through the weeks after Yalta; they thrust against one another and tumbled over one another as if struggling for the minds of men …

I can only imagine what Professor Sale would have written if I’d turned in a paper with that tempestuous bit of prose. It’s Bulwer-Lytton grade stuff.

Throughout Davis’ long career, which began with a wartime biography of Eisenhower in 1944 and continued through over a dozen works of biography and history and three novels for over fifty years, reviewers took exception to his stylistic foibles: thousand-word paragraphs composed from sixty-word sentences, topped off with telegraphic exclamation points for dramatic effect: “It made a great stir. Of course it would.” And, yes, those bits of poetic excess no self-respecting dispassionate historian would attempt today:

With decision came liberation. A heavy weight was lifted from Roosevelt’s mind: his long-oppressed spirits could again rise.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'FDR: Into the Storm 1937-1940'Despite the fact that Random House gave the fourth volume, FDR: Into the Storm 1937-1940 (1993), the biggest publicity push of the whole series, Davis’ reputation continued to decline. Although Robert Dallek acknowledged that the work would “take its place in the Roosevelt literature,” he found the most distinctive aspect of the book “the mass of detail on all the major and many minor events of Roosevelt’s second term.” Boy, ain’t that the kind of acclaim that sells a book: “‘A Mass of Details’ says the New York Times!”

Davis died in 1999, leaving the fifth and final volume unfinished. Mary Ellen, Ralph Titus, and Robert Loomis collaborated to shape the completed portion of the book and Davis’ notes into FDR: The War President, 1940-1943, which was published in 2000. Even so, the book ends in the middle of the war, with Roosevelt screening Casablanca at the White House.

Davis was spared the indignity of the book’s reception, which reminds one of the old joke, “The food here’s terrible–and the portions are so small.” Here is Michael Lind, again from the Times:

FDR: The War President, 1940-1943 is not history. It is sensationalistic historical fiction of the kind associated with Oliver Stone and the Edmund Morris of Dutch. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reputation as a historical figure will survive this book. Kenneth S. Davis’s reputation as a historian will not.

One pictures Lind spiking his copy of the book into Davis’ grave and dancing a little touchdown jig.

Kenneth S. Davis in 1993So is that the fate of Kenneth S. Davis? To have steadily and diligently written himself into oblivion? At the moment, all but his history of Kansas are out of print. While his FDR books have been referenced by dozens of historians since their publication, as a quick Google Book search reveals, most of the time it’s for their details of color and character than the historical insights. And for readers unprepared for the task, the prospect of lugging a few pounds of a Davis book or sticking with his long, dense paragraphs probably seems like that of reading Proust without the payoff of being able to brag about it at parties.

For a few persistent and diligent readers, though, there are considerable rewards. I said early on that I remembered The Experience of War as a cinematic book. Irving Howe, on the other hand, saw the parallel for Davis’ approach in an earlier century: “… [T]he total effect of his book is strongly dramatic, reminding one of those naturalistic novels that marshal lumbering sentences in behalf of narrative drive.” Yes, there are plenty of lumbering sentences. But there are also such vivid, memorable scenes: Eisenhower pacing up and down the runway in Gibraltar, anxiously wondering how successful (or costly) the American Army’s landing in North Africa would be. John Hersey encountering the realities of combat in Guadalcanal. Oppenheimer torn between hope and dread at the first atomic bomb test. David Lillienthal wresting control of the Tennessee Valley Authority from the powerful electric utilities. An ordinary visitor experiencing the marvels of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Or FDR’s first fireside chat:

There was nothing fake about the hearty, laughing good humor, the optimistic faith (he knew everything would come out right in the end!), the indomitable courage, the incessant, stupendous joie de vivre which he exuded and which others, needful of it, soaked up as parched earth does water.

If what Davis set out to do in his books was, as he wrote in his prefatory note to Experience, to “rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time” experience–“the actual living through an event or events,” I think we can say he succeeded, even if it was counter to critical preferences.

For the past umpteen years, I’ve usually had one or another of Davis’ books in my nightstand. In between books, I’ll pick it up, open a page at random, and dip in. And almost always, I find myself carried away through the next dozen pages by the power of his story-telling. And for that, I am grateful.

Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov

Excerpt

A dark man with a burning torch was running down the street on a bleak night in late autumn. The little girl saw him through a window of her home as she woke from a bleak dream. Then she heard a powerful shot from a rifle and a poor, sad cry–the man running with the torch had probably been killed. Soon afterwards came the sound of distant, repeated shots and of uproar from the nearby prison. The little girl went back to sleep and everything she saw during the following days got forgotten: she was too small, and the memory and mind of early childhood became overgrown for ever in her body by subsequent life. But until her last years the nameless running man would appear unexpectedly and sadly inside her–in the pale light of memory–and perish once again in the dark of the past, in the heart of a grown-up child. Amid hunger or sleep at a moment of love or some youthful joy–suddenly, the sad cry of the dead man was there again in the distance, deep in her body, and the young woman would immediately change her life: if she was dancing, she would stop dancing; if she was working, she would work more surely, with more concentration; if she was alone, she would cover her face with her hands. On that rainy night in late autumn the October Revolution had begun–in the city where Moscow Ivanovna Chestnova was living.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of Harvill Press edition of 'Happy Moscow'When I read the above opening passage of Happy Moscow, standing in an Oxford bookstore, I knew I had to buy the book and immediately go find a quiet place to sit and read it through to the end. Although quite different in subject and mood, Happy Moscow reminded me of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things: a dream-like book, where the characters are drawn along by some kind of irresistible force, taking actions that would seem irrational out of this context but that we and they go along with, caught up as if in a trance.

Happy Moscow is an unfinished novel first published in Russian in 1991. From what I could tell, “unfinished” in this case means “without finishing touches” rather than “without an ending.” The title refers to the woman, Moscow Chestnova, so named when tragedy leaves her orphaned and nearly amnesic, but it also refers ironically to the city, in which much of the novel takes place. I gather that this double entendre is typical of Platonov, and one of the reasons that some Russians believe his writing to be untranslatable. That should not be taken, though, to suggest that Platonov’s prose is at all difficult. On the contrary, as you can see from the excerpt above, this is simple, limpid prose–at least on the surface.

There is no real plot to speak of–just as in a dream. Moscow becomes a Soviet heroine as a daring experimental parachutist, but after an injury, turns her back on the state and spends the rest of the book wandering through a series of relationships with people who have also decided to become outcasts and marginal characters. Stalin is said to have written “Scum” in the margins of one of Platonov’s works, and you can see how the writer’s subtle rejection of Soviet idealism must have irritated him. In Happy Moscow, Platonov celebrates not the new and clean and heroic, but the second-hand and cast-off:

And there were people trading things which had lost all reason for their existence–house-coats that had belonged to enormous women, priest’s cassocks, ornamented basins for baptising children, the frock-coats of deceased gentlemen, charms on waistcoat chains, and so on–but which still circulated among people as symbols of a strict evaluation of quality. There were also many items of clothing worn by people who had died recently–there truly was such a thing as death–as well as clothes that had been got ready for children who had been conceived but whose mothers must have changed their minds about giving birth and had abortions instead, and now they were selling the tiny wept-over garments of an unborn child together with a rattle they had bought in advance.

I dog-eared the page on which this passage appears when I first read the book, but now that I type it out I can see how many chinks Platonov points out in the fine facade of the Soviet state in just two sentences: the remnants from the Tsarist days that still circulate “as symbols of a strict evaluation of quality”; the notion of women changing their minds about giving birth–bringing a child into the bright future of Stalinism–and having abortions instead; that fact that even in this best of all possible worlds “there truly was such a thing as death”. It seems hard to believe that publication of Happy Moscow wouldn’t have earned Platonov and his editors a trip to the gulag.

A reviewer once wrote that, “”In Platonov’s prose, it is impossible to find a single inelegant sentence”, and another that, “Rarely does literature come this close to music.” Happy Moscow is rich with examples of such writing. Yet he also embraces the crude, the dirty, the obscene. One character, a surgeon, gets wrapped up in a search for the place in the body where the soul resides and becomes convinced that it lies in the intestines. Grabbing a handful of the excrement from a corpse, he exclaims, “This really is the very best, ordinary soul. There’s no other soul anywhere.”

Platonov’s star is finally on the rise, some fifty-plus years after his death. Harvill, which published Happy Moscow, also has two other Platonov works–Soul and Return–in print. Northwestern University Press released Mirra Ginsburg’s translation of The Foundation Pit in its European Classics series, and New York Review Books has released its own volumes of Soul and The Fierce and Beautiful World. NYRB has also announced the release of a new translation of The Foundation Pit in April 2009.

Find a copy

Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Angela Livingstone, Nadya Bourova, and Eric Naiman
London: The Harvill Press, 1999

Neglected Books and Movie Tie-ins

As I read Nicholas Lezard’s review of the new Pushkin Press edition of Stefan Zweig’s novel, The Burning Secret, I thought, “I think I saw this movie.” And sure enough, thanks to IMDB, I quickly confirmed my suspicion: it was filmed in 1988, under the same title, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway.

About a month, ago, my wife and I watched the DVD of “Separate Lies”, starring Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson. It’s a perfect sort of movie for tired married people to watch on a quiet weeknight: human drama, a bit of tension, a murder, good acting, and well-dressed characters. Not great art, but certainly fine craft. But one credit caught my end at the opening: “Based on the novel, ‘A Way through the Woods’, by Nigel Balchin.

I recognized Balchin’s name from this page–his World War Two novel, The Small Back Room, is mentioned a number of times. Its story was also, incidentally, filmed in 1949, a Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger production. A Way through the Woods proved, upon a bit of research, to be a 1951 novel motivated, according to Clive James in what is perhaps the most extensive work on Balchin easily acccessible, “The Effective Intelligence of Nigel Balchin“, in part by the break-up of Balchin’s own marriage due to infidelity.

Just this year, Persephone Classics , a model publisher of neglected books, had the biggest break in its history when Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a novel by Winifred Watson that Persephone rescued from oblivion, was made into a film starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams, thereby raising the book’s visibility and sales considerably.

I won’t start excavating the many other examples available of film versions of neglected books–but I will recommend paying close attention to the writing credits: you never know when a good (or even bad) movie will lead you to discover an even better book.

What People Said, by William L. White

Editor’s Comments

Hardly anyone outside Emporia, Kansas today remembers William Allen White, but a hundred years ago, this editor of the town’s leading paper, the Emporia Gazette, was a figure of national renown, a major influence within the more liberal wing of the Republican Party, a man consulted by governors, senators, even Presidents. His columns were reprinted in hundreds of papers. He was considered one of American’s wise men. “The Sage of Emporia” some called him. Teddy Roosevelt usually stopped off at White’s home when crossing the country. He wrote Coolidge’s biography, advised Hoover, helped other Republicans do damage control during the Harding years. Writing from a small town at the heart of America, William Allen White was a symbol of much that was right and just.

William Allen and William Lindsay WhiteWhat People Said was written by his son, William L. White–a Harvard graduate, a highly-respected foreign correspondent and, eventually, successor to his father as editor of the the Gazette. It was his first and only novel.

“This book is fiction” states the epigraph. The assurance was necessary because, at the time, it told a story that was still familiar to most of its readers: the Kansas Bond Scandal. In 1933, a Kansas business man, Ronald Finney, was arrested, accused of numerous counts of fraud. That alone would hardly have made it national news, however, had it not been for the circumstances of his frauds. Finney’s schemes involved forging public bonds–for school construction, for sewer work, for country roads and bridges–and using them as security for substantial loans. The paper trail in this case led to some interesting places, including the office of the Kansas State Treasurer, and, just possibly, the governor himself–Alf Landon, that is, FDR’s Republican opponent in the 1936 Presidential election.

It led to the impeachment of the state’s attorney general and auditor and conviction of the Treasurer. It also led to the doorstep of the Emporia bank owned by Warren W. Finney–Ronald’s father … and a close friend and neighbor of William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia. Ronald Finney was convicted and sentenced to a whopping term of 30 to 600 years in the Kansas State Penitentiary. Soon after, bank examiners shut down the bank. Implications about improper loans, check kiting, and, yes, forgery. Warren Finney was tried and convicted, but as the county sheriff waited on the front porch to take him to prison, he went out the back door, drove off into the countryside, and shot himself.

There was never the slightest suggestion or indication that William Allen White was involved in any of this. But the mere fact that for decades he had lived with, supped with, sat in church alongside, and vacationed with Warren Finney without ever inquiring about Finney’s affairs or the recurring rumors of questionable activities led many people to wonder just how sagacious and upright was the Sage of Emporia. And to wonder what that then said about some basic American home town beliefs.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'What People Said'In What People Said, William L. White recounts the intertwined histories of two families–the Carroughs (the Whites) and the Norssexes (the Finneys)–and plays out the trail that led from the Norssexes’ arrival in Athena, Oklarada (Emporia, Kansas) to the frauds of father and son: the downfall of one family and the loss of faith in the other. Charles Aldington Carrough (William Allen White), editor of the Athena Sun is a man of national repute, a leader of the Progressive. Isaac Norssex (Warren Finney) buys the Athena Power and Light Company, moves to town, then sells the company and settles into a life of banking and various business ventures.

The families become friends. They attend the same church, visit each other when sick, spend summers together at the lake. Lee Norssex (Ronald Finney) and Junior Carrough (William L. White) grow up, fishing and hunting, going to parties, playing games. Junior goes to Oxford; Lee to Oklarada State, but they stay in touch, returning to Athena and starting careers and families as their fathers sit together in church, pillars of the town establishment.

Except that Isaac Norssex is never quite as well accepted by the people of Athena as he is by Charles Aldington Carrough. A murmur of suspicion and distrust runs throughout their talk:

The substantial people in Athena accepted the Norssexes slowly. They felt it was a little presumptuous for them to buy on Federal Street as soon as they came to town. Just because you lived on Federal Street didn’t mean you immediately became intimate with Athena’s first families, whose fathers had organized the first stores in the sixties, and had saved their money and invested it in big pastures and ranches in the seventies and eighties.

The older men had a feeling that you Isaac Norssex was tricky in business. They agreed he was smart. But what did he have back of him? He had started as a trader in the equities of small light companies–buying, developing, consolidating, selling only to buy again.

The power business was probably all right. But it was new. Probably it was going to be permanent–maybe it was going to expand. Yet in the early twentieth century it was not so respectable as running a bank or a general store.

The people of Athena represent the third point in What People Said‘s dramatic triangle. Throughout the book, through every twist and turn of the narrative, through the good times of the Twenties and the bad times of the Depression, their commentary reflects upon events and characters. WPS is an apt title, for people serve as the chorus in White’s tragedy, and what they say throughout the book constitutes perhaps the most significant aspect that makes it worth rediscovery.

White’s chorus does not speak in unison. We hear different sides–from the store owners and day-labourers, from the farmers and the city folk, from the Progressives and the Stand-patters:

Oklarada’s Progressives favored child-labor legislation and safety guards over whirring gears in factories and compulsory accident insurance and couches in each women’s rest room so girl workers could lie down, and paper drinking cups. In these objectives they were opposed by the Standpatters, who found the world quite satisfactory as it was, who believed unshakably that man’s function on earth was to acquire as much as possible of its rich surface for himself and his children, and that these ends could best be served by keeping soft-headed cranks out of the Oklarada State House.

But like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, the people of Athena also pass moral judgments on the characters in the drama and their actions. Suspicions of Isaac Norssex are fed by rumors, and rumors become more and more explicit about the nature of his misdeeds:

After a few years an occasional disquieting rumor began to drift into Athena from out of town. It seemed that Mr. Norssex had a reputation for kiting checks with other bankers. It was never anything definite–just Sos-and-so said he heard it from Such-and-such, that Norssex was running a lot of checks through the Clearing House to Old Man Perky’s bank in Toluca, that Perky was a notorious old kiter, and they guessed Norssex and Perky between them must have a thirty- or forty-thousand-dollar kite floating most of the time.

When Lee graduates from Oklarada State, his father sets him up with a small bank to run. Lee soon finds it something of a dead end, less a stepping stone than a millstone around his neck. But he also learns his father’s purpose in putting him in charge–to help out with the floating of an occasional big check or two. Purely a matter of convenience, just a matter of avoiding some unpleasantness due to mistiming of intake and outflow. Unfortunately, a bank examiner eventually detects a hint or two of what’s going on in Lee’s bank and confronts Isaac. Purely a matter of inexperience, Norssex assures him. Youth and poor judgment. Lee quietly leaves the bank and goes into the insurance business. There are rumors, of course, more murmurs of suspicion. But nothing’s proved. No charges are filed. Perhaps the rumors are just spiteful.

Soon, Lee’s fortunes begin to turn. From insurance he moves into bonds, and bonds expand into speculation into stocks and commodities. No one quite understands how he manages to make money. He tells people he’s a bond broker, but just what that involves isn’t quite clear to anyone. He seems to get access to some of the top men in the state–the treasurer, legislators, maybe even the governor. But still ….

And the intermittent rumors about his father keep popping up. Charles Aldington Carrough remains far above the hub-bub and whispering, an ivory tower of rectitude. But his son Junior struggles to remain objective. He resists attempts to publish stories about questions from auditors and examiners in the Sun, going to extraordinary lengths to give the Finneys the benefit of the doubt. Even up to the point that a warrant for Lee’s arrest is issued, Junior finds it difficult to see him as anything but a life-long friend:

A guy you had always known–who you knew liked books about travel and adventures and hunting, and liked his hamburgers not rare but medium rare, liked pickled beets with cloves in them, and did not like tapioca pudding very much or dogs at all.

Yet now he was something else. He was headlines in the morning paper, he was a public newsprint figure who had a “whereabouts” which “had not been ascertained” by the morning papers. He was the “daring speculator,” he was a lot of other things besides being a guy who watched to see that they took the hamburger off when it was just medium rare.

The people’s chorus, however, is ready to pass judgment:

All that week everybody in Athena was awfully sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Norssex. People who had never liked them were sorriest of all, could imagine most vividly how awful it must be to have your boy accused of a penitentiary offense, how broken the Norssexes must be under the blow!

People who did not like Lee could now say that they had always thought something like this would happen and that they were sure sorry for Henny and the kids.

Those who liked neither the Norssexes nor the Carroughs were of course sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Norssex, but to Junior they would say, looking cynically off into space: “Oh, he’ll get out of it! You’ll see! Lee Norssex’ll never go to the penitentiary, his friends will get him off!”

In the end, Lee Norssex is convicted and sentenced, and as in the real-life Kansas Bond Scandal, the investigators carry on to indict and try his father for similar frauds. And as Warren Finney did, Isaac Norssex quietly slips out the back door of his house for a last drive, out to the family’s vacation house by the lake. Despite the fact that Isaac seems a pretty wooden figure through most of the novel, White pulls out some of the book’s best descriptive prose for his last moments:

He lifted the oak-framed kitchen mirror from the nail where it hung by a picture wire on its back. He walked out onto the screened porch, his footsteps again echoing on the wooden floor as he went evenly about what was to be done–slipping the shiny cartridges into the black holes of the chamber, which clicked as it revolved.

The springs of the long porch swing creaked familiarly as he sat down on its gaily striped cushion. The surface of the kitchen mirror was wavy, but by holding at arm’s length he could see that the slender black barrel pointed at the proper angle into the neatly trimmed iron-gray hair. When he was sure it did, he met the gaze of the calm and determined eyes that looked at him from the wavy mirror.

Afterward it was very still again except for a breeze which now and then rustled the awning outside the screened-in porch, and the car engine, which ticked away the last of its heat on the hilltop, at the end of the long, straight road.

What People Said betrays some of the weaknesses of many other first novels–a narrative thread or two that wanders off, never again to be seen; characters that exist purely to fill in a gap in the story; and a protagonist (Junior) who manages to see and hear more than anyone else but himself lacks any solid characteristc. It’s a long book, over 600 pages, that could easily lose a hundred without much disadvantage.

But it’s also a remarkable novel with a very strong narrative momentum. I devoured the book in under six days, usually gulping down a hundred or more pages at a sitting. You know from the very beginning that something is going to go very wrong with the Norssexes, but White manages to sustain the reader’s morbid fascination in seeing it all unfold, step by step.

It’s also substantial portrait–in large scale and small–of small town, middle America in the first third of the 20th century. Hardly anyone in town owns a car at the start of the book. Roads peter out a mile or so out of town. Everyone knows in fine grain the stratification of the Protestant churches–Presbyterian on top, Methodists in the middle, Baptists on the other side of the tracks, Lutherans for the Germans and Swedes. Athena sends some of its boys off to France in 1917. After the war, some of them revive the Ku Klux Klan to “protect the working man.” Publicly, the town supports Prohibition. Privately, you know who to call if you want a bottle of “gin” brought round the kitchen door once a month.

As a town built around agriculture, Athena feels the effects of the Depression early and deeply. Farmers default on mortgages. Hoovervilles rise up beside the city dumps. The proud businessmen who were optimistic boosters during the Harding years grow “hopeless, staring out of empty stores with a hopeless little stubble on their chins, hopless bags in the knees of their once natty gray worsted suits.”

And, throughout the book, there is that chorus–wonderfully catty, hypocritical, Puritanical, earthy, cynical, altruistic, bitter, hopeful, but always ready with something to say:

That winter, people were afraid to grumble much about Lee Norssex’s success. You could see plainly he was making a lot of money. And nobody else was. He was into all kinds of things. Probably some of them would not turn out so well.

But if you said this, people would say you were jealous, picking on some little detail, just because your business was bad. Because you hadn’t been smart enough to think up things which would make money, as Lee Norssex had.

People would be right, too, because you were jealous. But you tried not to be. Every time you heard that Lee had made some money on a deal, or heard that he had bought something which you would like to own but probably never could, you would smile and say, “Well, by George, that’s fine. I’m awfully glad to hear that!” You would try to be glad, too. Even though your business was going to pieces before your eyes in spite of everything you could do, you did not want to become a bitter little man.

It would be unfair to label What People Said a “regional” novel. I think it deserves a place on the shelf alongside and perhaps ahead of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Main Street. It’s a rich tapestry of American life well worth rediscovery.

Find a copy

What People Said, by William Lindsay White
New York: Viking, 1938

The Horrors of Love, by Jean Dutuord

Rabbi David Wolpe writes to recommend a favorite title that’s now long out of print and largely forgotten: Jean Dutourd’s 1963 novel, Les Horreurs de l’amour, released in English in 1967 as The Horrors of Love. This description of the book and its plot comes from Time magazine’s original review:

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Horrors of Love'The Horrors of Love is an often ridiculous, sometimes funny tale of a middle-aged member of the French Chamber of Deputies who becomes tragically involved with his young mistress. At first glance, the story seems to be as obviously and simply French as a pair of lovers sneaking off to a bedsitter in the Square St.-Lambert. Yet it is not only the Gallic spirit that intrigues Dutourd, but the human spirit as well.

The rambling story unfolds in a dialogue between Dutourd and a friend. As they stroll in Paris, they discuss the unhappy case of Edouard Roberti, the 52-year-old Deputy who has been sent to prison for killing his mistress’ brother. It is apparent that Roberti, a respectable, loving father and husband, was all too ordinary — not so much evil as weak, not so much stupid as pitifully vain. By way of examining how it was that such a commonplace, decent man could become trapped in a senseless and sordid mess, Dutourd’s dialogue ranges through all sorts of philosophical detours. Courage and cowardice, honor and honesty, art, letters, manners, politics and morals become way stations as the two friends chat and argue.

This is not the first mention of The Horrors of Love in these pages. In the Los Angeles Times’ 1999 feature, Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium, John Lukacs called it a “stunning exception” to the overall decline of the novel. Lukacs wrote,

One oddity about it is that it is written in the second-person singular; it is a long dialogue between two super-intelligent Frenchmen (both sides of Dutourd’s own character) walking through Paris, ambling in and out restaurants, reconstructing the pride and fall of a Parisian politician who gradually falls in love with his younger mistress and ends up in jail. It is a delicious and profound work of art, from beginning to end. Andre Maurois likened it to Proust; but in some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and more imaginative. The language itself is superb.

And in nosing around the Net, I found a third strong thumbs-up from the fine novelist, Diane Johnson, in an issue of Archipelago from a few years back:

My first choice would be Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love, which is translated into English and was published in the sixties. It is an incredible tour de force — a dialogue running to more than 600 pages, between two men who are walking through Paris, talking about the fate of a politician friend of theirs who was brought down by an erotic entanglement. Urbane, wise, humane, funny, even suspenseful — this is a worthy successor, as someone said, to Proust. Dutourd is the greatest living French novelist, and the only witty one since Proust; and before that? Voltaire? Laclos?

Jean DutourdPraise such as this makes me want to hang my head in shame for not having read it yet, even after skipping past used copies in bookstore stacks perhaps a hundred times over the year (I think it was a Literary Guild selection, so there are plenty of cheap used copies out there in the U.S.).

Dutuord, who’s managed to put out nearly a book a year since 1946, is still living and, I assume, writing. His 1950 satirical fantasy, A Dog’s Head, was reissued by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Fiction series in 1998 and is still in print. His other novel of that year, Au bon beurre, scenes de la vie sous lâ Occupation, translated as The Best Butter has been called the best French novel to come out of World War Two.

The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976, by Charlton Heston

Excerpt

July 19, 1967
Another long day sloshing around inside that space capsule, gargling my lines through torrents of water spraying in from off camera. It occurs to me that there’s hardly been a scene in this bloody film [“Planet of the Apes“] in which I’ve not been dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated. As Joe Canutt[son of the legendary Yakima Canutt–Ed.] said, setting up one of the fight shots, “You know, Chuck, I can remember when we used to win these things.”

Editor’s Comments

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'The Actor's Life'This book has stuck in my head ever since I heard Wallace Shawn (the character, not the actor) say, in the 1981 film “My Dinner with Andre”,

I’m just trying to survive, you know. I mean, I’m just trying to earn a living, just trying to pay my rents and my bills. I mean, uh…ahhh. I live my life, I enjoy staying home with Debby. I’m reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, and that’s that! I mean, you know, I mean, occasionally maybe Debby and I will step outside, we’ll go to a party or something, and if I can occasionally get my little talent together and write a little play, well then that’s just wonderful. And I mean, I enjoy reading about other little plays that other people have written, and reading the reviews of those plays, and what people said about them, and what people said about what people said, and…. And I mean, I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook; I enjoy going through the notebook, carrying out the responsibilities, doing the errands, then crossing them off the list!

I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, or, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night, still there for me to drink in the morning!

If Charlton Heston’s autobiography (or journal, to get picky about it) was worth mentioning in “My Dinner with Andre”, I figured, it must be worth checking out. So when Heston died earlier this year, I decided it was time to give it a try.

By the time he died, Charlton Heston had become a figure it was tough to take a truly objective look at. Although a vocal and visible supporter of civil rights and other liberal causes in the early 1960s, he came out as in favor of Richard Nixon in 1968, and for this and other political stands, especially his stint as president and chairman of the National Rifle Association, Heston got dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated all the way to his grave. Or, if you were of a different political viewpoint, he got exactly what he deserved.

Whether you agreed with his politics or not, however, credit is due to his body of work as a serious film actor. For some, his seriousness can get a bit relentless at times. Imagine sitting through a marathon of “Ben Hur”, “El Cid”, “The War Lord”, “The Agony and the Ecstacy”, “Khartoum”, “55 Days in Peking”, and “Soylent Green”, just to name a few of his big movies. In all of these and more, Charlton Heston was the archetypal Stoic hero. Heston’s character never trembled in fear, screamed in pain, or whined about his hardships. Hell, he almost never smiled or laughed–a serious man didn’t lighten up. When your Dad told you to, “Be a man!”, this is what he meant.

The Actor’s Life is a generous selection of entries from the journals Heston kept through his most active and successful years as a major star. As he explains in his introduction, Heston began keeping a journal because a yearly agenda book his wife gave him had space at the bottom of each page for a hundred words of diary notes for the day. Heston stuck with these books and this regime for at least twenty years, publishing this collection in 1978, as his career was beginning to wane.

The constraint of space at the bottom of the agenda page gives this book a somewhat odd feeling. There are no long, introspective entries or rambling meditations or verbose descriptions. Rather, this is a collection of 480 pages of life-bites. To be perfectly crude, this is an excellent bathroom book. Just leave a copy by the fixture, catch up on progress toward getting a backer for “The War Lord” or the many Roman dinner parties held during “Ben Hur” or “Agony”. Read about Charlton playing tennis with Rod Laver. Or dining at the White House. Or taking innumerable flights between L.A., London, Rome, or New York–all in first class, of course.

Heston makes no great bones about the trappings of celebrity, of course–it came with the job, in his view. If you enjoy reading about lifestyles of the rich and famous, The Actor’s Life provides plenty of material.

But there is also a wealth of information about all the details and steps involved in getting a movie conceived, produced, and distributed. And about the problems and considerations of acting on film (and on stage–Heston kept up a steady stream of stage work throughout this period). Shooting “The Greatest Story Ever Told” at Cinecitta in Rome, Heston recognizes costumes from “Ben Hur” among the extras. Days are lost on “Hur” thanks to Stephen Boyd’s blue contact lenses (because, as we all know, real Romans had blue eyes). A scriptwriter comes in and makes a hash of things; another (Robert Ardrey) hands in a first draft that proves to be almost verbatim what they end up shooting on “Khartoum”. You learn about some heroic stuntmen, some asinine producers, and, yes, some temperamental actresses.

And you learn that Charlton Heston truly was a serious actor–meaning, an actor serious about his craft, his profession, his technical and artistic skills. The one consistent motif throughout his entries about film-making is his analysis of his own work.He criticizes himself for not achieving the effect he wanted, or for forcing a shot to taken and retaken. He considers what he might have done better. He gives himself credit for getting it right sometimes.

The Actor’s Life could never be considered great literature. A hundred words or so a day cannot lead to art unless you’ve been trained in haiku. But it is a book of undeniable interest and merit if you want to know something about acting, film-making, and life in the public eye. And if you don’t come away from reading it without some measure of respect for Charlton Heston as a man who took his work and his life seriously–well, then I’d have to say that you’re better off sticking with comic books. There are certainly worse role models if you’re trying to “Be a man.”

The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976, by Charlton Heston
New York: Henry Robbins/ E.P. Dutton, 1978

Old Street Books publishes Max Blecher’s “Scarred Hearts”

UK publisher Old Street Books has just released the first English translation of Scarred Hearts, a 1937 novel written by the Romanian-Jewish novelist, Max Blecher. The publisher provides the following precis on the novel:

It is Paris in the 1930s and Emanuel, a young Romanian student, finds himself dangerously ill with spinal tuberculosis. He is sent to a sanatorium near the French coast where for a year he remains wrapped in a plaster body cast – the conventional treatment for his disease in the thirties.

In the eerie, isolated world of the sanatorium Emanuel discovers that life goes on. He suffers his horrendous cure and his body slowly deteriorates – but, unexpectedly, he falls in love. This tender, doomed love affair between two patients is at the emotional core of an rare, unforgettable novel that leaves the reader with a fresh understanding of what it means to be human.

In his introduction to the book, Paul Bailey calls it, “… a masterpiece, and all the more poignant for being so beadily accurate about human behaviour in extremis. It is a book to live with, to read again and again, as only great literature demands us to.” Its recent German translation has sold well and been cited as a notable work by several papers.

Writing in the The Independent, on the other hand, Mark Thwaite rates it, “… a weak pastiche of Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Sadly, this is a lost classic that did not need to be found.” The Financial Times reviewer found it, “an elegant and powerful rejoinder to Emmanuel’s despair at life’s futility.” The always fair-minded Complete Review takes a more balanced view:

Like many books in the briefly flourishing sanatorium-genre (think The Magic Mountain), Inimi cicatrizate [the original Romanian title] describes an isolated world standing almost still, full of longueurs and the frustration of not being able to move towards a future, many of the patients almost completely immobilized in a body-armour that keeps the world even more at bay. Blecher conveys this atmosphere more convincingly than most: presumably writing from experience helps, though occasionally he seems almost too close to his material, trying but unable to maintain the distance that he’s trying to achieve in this fiction.

A site visitor alerted me to another work by Blecher now available in English–in this case for free, from www.maxblecher.org. Titled Adventures in Immediate Unreality (from the Romanian original ÃŽntâmplări în irealitate imediată ), it’s translated by Jeanie Han and available in an easy-to-read 97-page PDF file.