Month: August 2009

Perdita, Get Lost, by Alan R. Jackson

There are few good reasons to read a 45 year-old light comedy. Like an opened bottle champagne, light comedy doesn’t keep well. Plot and characterization are usually paper-thin to start with. Moods and manners are much of the age in which the book is written and lose most of their meaning within a few years. One character in this book says to another, “I half expected you to begin banging your shoe on the desk.” How many readers would get that reference today?

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'Perdita, Get Lost'I picked up Perdita, Get Lost in the basement of the Montana Valley Book Store in little Alberton, Montana–one of the dwindling number of bookstores where you can plunge into stacks of books from more than a decade or two ago. I probably bought it as much for the fact that it’s a small gold-backed Pocket Book Cardinal Edition, which is up there with the little squarish Dell paperbacks from the early 1960s and the Yale Chronicles of Americas series among my favorite book formats.

The story, about a spunky young woman named Perdita Chandler (Chan for short) and Jerry Blake, the bachelor millionaire who’s sort of her uncle–but not–is about as well constructed as my first balsa wood airplane model. Key moments turn on such creaky pivots as the fact that Blake’s cat is also named Chan and the unexpected gift and theft of a rather ugly classical Greek statue. Even the construct of the millionaire relative with nothing but time on his hands could be something from a B-movie society comedy of the 1930s. As for the context–well, multiple martinis are downed in an average afternoon and all the young women are expected to be dreaming of a big suburban home in Westchester County complete with three kids and a collie. I kept expecting J. Pierrepont Finch to pop up.

So no, Perdita, Get Lost is no timeless classic. The only thing going for it–which is about all any light comedy with legs can claim–is the writer’s style. In Alan R. Jackson’s case, he comes off quite the clever fellow, far more in the know about his characters than they could ever hope to be about themselves. But at least he manages a light touch through most of the book. Here, for example, he dissects a conversational misstep:

“If we had a golden eagle in this apartment, we would all have hay fever. They’re full of pollen. I know!”

She had committed a social gaffe, which in English is known as a boner and in German undoubtedly by a polysyllabic portmanteau word that only another German would understand.

Her boner was to make a simple, positive, declarative statement.

This stops conversation.

A social gathering, such as Carla had gathered for whatever devious reasons, is like a saraband. There are certain movements, which must be countered by others. Conversation must flow like the waters of the Villa d-Este. A positive statement (like Carla’s “I know”) stops it.

Even had there been present an expert on golden eagles and their pollination (and there was none), he would have hesitated to dispute his assured hostess. So the “I know,” although strictly out of the blue (where the golden eagles live) brought everything to a full stop.

Jackson wrote another novel, East 57th Street, a year or so before Perdita. From the title alone, I suspect it’s also a light comedy of life in early sixties Manhattan. I’ve no idea what became of him after publishing Perdita. While he’s no Wodehouse, he’s certainly of that ilk, if of a different continent and different decade, and I’ll probably give East 57th Street a try one of these days. Marshmallows do have an occasional place in a well-rounded diet.

Perdita, Get Lost, by Alan R. Jackson
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964

Barnes & Noble launches “Rediscovers” series devoted to out-of-print worthies

Source: “Barnes & Noble Launches Out-of-Print Imprint,” Publisher’s Weekly, 19 August 2009

Barnes & Noble, one of the U.S.’s largest booksellers, combining online and “brick and mortar” outlets, launched a new series devoted to the reissue of neglected books this month. As described on the B&N website:

Barnes & Noble Rediscovers brings back to print — in affordable hardcover editions — books of special merit in history, literature, philosophy, religion, the arts, and science. Many have been long unavailable or hard to find. Each is now reset in a modern design to welcome a new generation of readers.

The Rediscovers initiative is something of an extension to the Barnes & Noble Classics, which includes 200 well-recognized classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield in low-cost paperbacks with new introductions by contemporary writers and critics. However, unlike the Classics, the Rediscovers list is intended to be shaped directly by reader/buyer feedback: “The retailer will include customer feedback and online customer behavioral data as criteria for selecting books to publish through Rediscovers,” according to Retailer Daily.

The B&N Rediscovers series was launched with healthy kick, with 33 titles included in the first release. I am frankly impressed by how diverse and esoteric this list is. Here is a sample of what’s now available:

• Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It, by Loren Eiseley

A study of Charles Darwin’s work and ideas within the intellectual context of Victorian England. More a scholarly than a lyrical work, written–as one Amazon reviewer put it–“while Eiseley was wearing his Professor hat instead of his Philosopher cap.”

Cover of Barnes and Noble Rediscovers reissue of 'The History in English Words'

• The History in English Words, by Owen Barfield

One of the books I included on my “Editor’s Choices” list when I first started this site, this is certainly the most approachable of Barfield’s books–but it has the same capacity to shake up your world perspective. Essentially a survey of how the etymology of individual and groups of English words can reveal not just where they came from, but the dramatic differences in how the world was seen and understood in other times.

• Maimonides, by Abraham Joshua Heschel

From the B&N site: “Originally published in German in 1935—the 800th anniversary of its subject’s birth—Maimonides was Abraham Joshua Heschel’s first important work. In it, the author combines an account of the life of this most influential of Talmudic scholars and most celebrated of medieval Jewish philosophers with a subtle introduction to his writings and their place in the broader tradition of Jewish thought.”

• Physics for the Rest of Us: Ten Basic Ideas of 20th Century Physics, by Roger S. Jones

The youngster on this list, dating only from 1993. Jones’ objective was, “To combine a conceptual approach to modern physics with an exploration of its deeper meaning and philosophical significance.” Thus, this book is not only a clear, well-written explanation of ten concepts of physics developed in the 20th century, but a reflection on the benefits and limitations of science itself.

• Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, by George Santayana

Drawn from one of his Harvard courses, which could claim T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Conrad Aiken among its students, this book is the text of a series of lectures Santayana gave at Columbia University in 1910. At it’s also a pretty good demonstration of just how strong Barnes & Noble’s faith in the “if you reissue it, they will come” theory is. This is one of those titles that university presses usually trickle out in a few dozen copies a year over the course of a few decades–as it the even more intimidating Philosophical Sketches: A Study of the Human Mind in Relation to Feeling, Explored through Art, Language, and Symbol, by Suzanne Langer. Courage et bon chance, mes amis!

• Alpha and Omega: Stories by Isaac Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld has been something of an insider’s legend for decades. After publishing a well-received coming-of-age novel, Passage from Home, in 1946, he wrote some fine stories and influential reviews, labored at some unpublished novels, and eventually faded into complete obscurity. Coming on top of the release earlier this year of Steven J. Zipperstein’s fine biography, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, Alpha and Omega should help revive interest in this classic neglected writer–although I suspect D. G. Myers got it right when he wrote in review of Zipperstein’s bio:

Rosenfeld’s name remains alive for two reasons. First, because he impressed, with his personality and literary promise, the reputation makers of his generation—Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Eliot Cohen (the founding editor of Commentary). He was embraced as the “golden boy” of the New York intellectuals, and then died far too early to fulfill their dreams for him. As Theodore Solotaroff recalled, some of his friends spoke the name Isaac as if it were “a magic word for joy and wit,” others as if “it were the most poignant word in the language.” Second, he was Saul Bellow’s best friend.

Bellow wrote the introduction to Alpha and Omega.

Cover of Barnes and Noble Rediscovers reissue of 'Really the Blues'

• Really the Blues, by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe

Mezz Mezzrow was a clarinet-playing Jewish kid from Chicago who got into jazz back in the mid-1920s and played and hung out with most of the greats from that era–Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton. Unfortunately, his love of jazz was outmatched by his love of reefers. “Mezz” came to be slang for marijuana due to his own use, rather than vice-versa. As a musician, he was no great beans. But teamed up with the young and verbally-inventive Bernard Wolfe, he managed to put together a 400-page swim through more jazz lingo and life that you’ll find between any other two covers. Albert Goldman once wrote of the book and its subject, “Mezzrow was 1) the first white Negro, 2) the Johnny Apleseed of weed, 3) the author of a great American autobiography, Really the Blues, the finest eyewitness account of American counterculture ever published. The book is, likewise, the master-piece of the counterculture’s most characteristics literary medium: the slang-laced, jazz-enrhythmed, long-breathed and rhapsodic street rap and rave-up.” So pick up your shovel and dig it, man!

• ABBA ABBA, by Anthony Burgess

One of Burgess’ shortest novels, ABBA ABBA–whose title refers to the sonnet rhyme pattern–is a lively hodgepodge of historical fiction, literary criticism, original translations (and transformations) of poems of Giovanni Belli, and an excuse for Burgess to blow fine verbal riffs on the theme of writing and translation.

• On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner

Recently recommended by Maura Kelly on this site, On Moral Fiction was one of the more controversial books of 1978–and one of the best-selling works of literary criticism as a result. Gardner challenged modernism and the pursuit of literary invention for its own sake, advocating a return to the traditons of Dickens and Tolstoy.

Marcus Leaver, president of B&N’s publishing subsidiary, Sterling Publishing, suggests the initiative has much grander ambitions than the somewhat esoteric list of initial titles would indicate:

The Barnes & Noble Rediscovers series opens a new door for us and a new window for writers and estates who have earned no income on their works for years. We plan to expand the capabilities of the program to include both e-book and print on demand options.

This sounds as if Barnes & Nobles is taking a lesson from the Faber Finds venture, which has managed to push out over 400 titles in little over a year, thanks to diligent copywrite research and the magic of publish-on-demand. Both of which put the recently-announced AmazonEncore program (with a whopping one title, from 2006, to its credit).

Thanks to Robert Nedelkoff for passing this news along.

Robert Birnbaum Picks Some Recent Under-Appreciated Novels

Source: “Under-Appreciated Novels,” http://birnbaum.themorningnews.org/2009/08/11/under-appreciated-novels.php, 11 August 2009

Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News’ book blogger, recently decided to engage in some of “the anguished hand-wringing that accompanies intoning the cruelty and myopia of the rest of the barbarous world in failing to recognize the brilliance of that which we (meaning I) deem to be genius.” His list of works deserving more recognition and respect than they’ve earned so far has only one unifying criterion: “[T]hey were all read in this century.”

Birnbaum’s list leans heavily to products of this century, too: Don Winslow’s rich novel of drugs and crime, The Power of the Dog, from 2005; Tim Gautreaux’s bayou novel, The Clearing from 2003; Joseph O’Connor’s multi-faceted story of the post-Civil War West, Redemption Falls, from 2007.

But a few fall to the far side of the bell curve: Philip Kerr’s futuristic A Philosophical Investigation dates from 1993, and The Criminalist, the last work published by Eugene Izzi, a Chicago crime novelist, before his suicide, from 1999.

For me, the most intriguing item on the list is Michael Doane’s 1994 novel, Bullet Heart. Chris Goodrich of the L. A. Times had some pretty enthusiastic things to say when the book first came out:

Truth is better captured by fiction, we’re often told, than by purely factual accounts; tied not to external events but to feelings and impressions and ineluctable human character, fiction supposedly brings to life what nonfiction paints by number. Well, here’s one case where the analogy actually works, for in Bullet Heart, Michael Doane Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Bullet Heart'tells the story of a confrontation between whites and Native Americans to which neither journalism nor scholarship could possibly do justice. The novel takes place in South Dakota in the 1970s, when local developers start the short-lived Bones War while building a golf course on an ancient burial ground. The American Indian Movement is at its height, government authorities feel under constant siege, the U.S. appears on the verge of living up to its ideals or of falling flat on its face; Michael Doane uses this real-life civil strife to illuminate the individual troubles, and principles, such rebelliousness brings to the fore…. Bullet Heart, Doane’s fifth novel, may be too thoughtful and too well-written to make headlines, but in its own quiet way it’s a literary milestone.

A couple of Doane’s books are still in print–sort of. In the Path of the Whirlwind is print but “out of stock’. His 1990 novel, Six Miles To Roadside Business is available now–until Amazon sells the one copy they have left. Several of Doane’s works, including Bullet Heart, Six Miles, and The Surprise of Burning garnered 5-star reviews from Amazon readers, so there’s got to be something there worth a look.

Isabel Paterson on “If It Prove Fair Weather”, from September 1939

Cover of the 7 September 1940 issue of 'The Saturday Review'Thumbing through issues of The Saturday Review while in the U.S. this summer, I came across an interesting item. A review by George Dangerfield of Isabel Paterson’s last novel, If It Prove Fair Weather, which I featured here a few months ago, was juxtapositioned with a piece about the book by Paterson herself: “As the Author Sees It.”

In my continuing interest in advancing the cause of Paterson’s fiction, I’m taking the liberty of ignoring whatever copyright may or may not still apply and reprint the piece here in its entirety:

What this country needs is a good stiff course in ethics and moral theology. Why I think so is because I have written a novel–If It Prove Fair Weather. To understand the question fully you might have to read the book; but that does not worry me. The main point is, those who have done so, with advance copies, are almost unanimously severe on the man in the story (his name is Wishart). It is a love story. Especially the men readers seem to feel–well, I don’t know what. He makes them mad. There is an unmistakable implication that they would have behaved far otherwise, in his position.

Portrait of Isabel Paterson from 1939Possibly so; and it may be my fault that they don’t seem to notice there was no way for him to behave well. He had only a choice of behaving badly in different ways. What I mean is that like is like that. Many of the most admired moral examples really will not stand close and logical examination. It is so in the nature of things. Human beings are inevitably in an appalling predicament between their emotions and their obligations; the two elements are not even conveniently distinct, but inextricably snarled in a cat’s-cradle. And the more you try to untable it the worse it becomes.

I admit, of course, that Wishart is not wholly admirable. He is a man. He is an upright citizen, with a business and a family; and he becomes interested in a woman not his wife. This is ethically reprehensible, if you allow any ethical standards whatever. I speak seriously. What is more, you’ve got to have ethics. (At present, some countries are saying that you don’t have to, but the results are not entirely satisfactory). Then ethics apparently tell you that you must, if necessary, be completely insensible, incapable of being interested or of wanting personal satisfactions. That is a very hard saying, surely. Shade it a bit, and say rather that it is your duty to repress and restrain such feelings if they go beyond the boundaries of previously established obligation. That sounds very lofty; but it may still be at the expense of another person, or even two other persons. It is not so nice to be the recipient of duty either.

This is extremely obvious, and twenty years ago was thought to be a complete answer. It was then affirmed to be a higher duty to discard the inconvenient obligations and go ahead on the new path. Now one may see what comes of that. A trail of wreckage. It doesn’t work even as well as sticking to the old line.

But let us imagine duty as the constant lodestar from the beginning. All of us have favorite characters; one of mine is Sir Thomas More. He took and held a straight course. Deeply religious, with a strong intellect and character, and scholarly tastes, as a young man he thought of entering a monastic order. But as he was also robust and of an affectionate nature, he feared he had not the authentic vocation, and decided it was better to be a good layman than a sinful cleric. So he married and was a faithful and kind husband and father, all his days.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'If It Prove Fair Weather'He married twice. The first time, he was undecided between two sisters. His personal preference was for the younger and prettier of the two; one may assume he was in love with her. But out of sheer altruism, he felt it would be invidious to leave the elder and plainer sister slighted. So he married the elder. It is not known whether the younger was in love with him. She might have been. He was a man of charm, wit, and general attractiveness. And if the younger girl was in love with him, I can’t make up my mind–I am very fond of him–which of the two girls had the best right to murder him on the spot. Both of them, in my opinion, had every right to do so. He had injured the girl he loved and insulted the one he married.

Nobody but me has ever noticed that, so far as I know. He is always held up as a model of masculine virtue. I guess he was. That’s what I’m talking about…. In later life, he became a widower, and married again, a woman he didn’t like much, to be a mother to his orphaned children. She should have killed him too, if she cared for him. Otherwise, I suppose it was all right. He was one of the best men that ever lived, so he only needed to be murdered three times by justly infuriated females, if he had got his desserts. He is highly praised by men. Though of course a less worthy man would have married the pretty sister, and then maybe fallen for a more attractive woman later.

Women are annoyed at Wishart. They have reason. Still, women also might examine the premises. That masculine line, “loved I not honor more,” has always filled women with silent rage. Because they can’t answer it. A woman friend of mine says that, reading the book, she hated every hair of Wishart’s head. She ought to. She is married to a delightful and honorable man, a sea-captain. I can’t think what she would answer if compelled to decide whether her husband, in the course of his vocation, ought to go down on the bridge as the rules prescribe, and never mind about her; or should he leap into the first lifeboat and save himself for her sweet sake. The fact is, in such contingency, when a woman might have to think whether her husband must put his duty or herself first, she really believes he ought to do both, and could if he put his mind to it. That’s where there is no other woman in question at all. In case another woman deflects his thoughts from her, she isn’t going to debate the matter for a moment. She will merely scalp him and boil him in oil, and see how he likes it.

[Published in The Saturday Review, September 7, 1940.–Ed.]

Now, if that isn’t one of the most astute and amusing things ever written on the subject of men and women, I’ll eat my hat. The world is long overdue for a Portable Isabel Paterson with a collection of her Herald Tribune columns, Never Ask the End, and excerpts from The Golden Vanity and Fair Weather. Her libertarian tracts can fend for themselves.

Bruce Allen recommends the work of Francois Mauriac

Cover of 'A Mauriac Reader'Bruce Allen wrote recently to recommend the novels of François Mauriac:

I wonder how many readers remember François Mauriac (1885-1970), whose best novels (e.g., Thérèse Desqueyroux, Vipers’ Tangle, Woman of the Pharisees, A Kiss for the Leper, and at least a half dozen others) began appearing in English translations during the 1960os.

An un-apologetic Catholic apologist, Mauriac has always been marginalized as a writer of narrow sympathes and range. But at his best he’s an eloquent composer of stark tragedies of ancestral and faith-driven conflicts framed as allegories of sin, redemption, and retribution – often complicated by the unruly realities of sex and greed. No novelist ever understood, and engaged the seven deadly sins (and all the other un-numbered ones) as well as Mauriac. He ought to be revived every generation or so, and readers who’ve never sampled the brimstone pungency of his best work have missed out on one of the great 20th century bodies of work.

François MauriacFortunately for would-be readers, a good deal of Mauriac’s work is in print and easily available for purchase online. All of the above books are in print, as are several less-known works: The Frontenacs, The Mask of Innocence, and Young Man in Chains. Actually, A Kiss for the Leper is in print by virtue of its inclusion in A Mauriac Reader, which collects it and four other novels under one cover, with an introduction by Wallace Fowlie. Farrar, Straus and Giroux have heroically kept it in print for over forty years now.

Mauriac is often compared with Graham Greene: both Catholics, both dedicated to writing about modern and his struggle with sin. “I have tried to make the Catholic universe of evil palpable, tangible, odorous. If theologians provided an abstract idea of the sinner, I gave him flesh and blood,” Mauriac once remarked. Asked about the comparison, however, Greene drew a fine distinction between their works: “Mauriac’s sinners sin against God wheareas mine, however hard they try, can never quite manage to.” Mauriac also won, in 1952, the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor that eluded Greene.

The Seventh Gate, by Peter Greave

Cover of Penguin edition of The Seventh Gate by Peter Greave

As recounted in his 1976 memoir, The Seventh Gate, Peter Greave’s life up to his mid-thirties was one no reader could envy. Born in Calcutta in 1910, he enjoyed a few years of privileged childhood as his father climbed the ladder of business success with an English merchant trading firm in India.

But by the time he was about to start school, he found himself on a tramp steamer on a slow and trouble-filled voyage to New York City as his father took the family off in search of a fresh start. His father, as Greave later learned, had run through a string of failed business schemes, insulted or stolen from much of proper society in Calcutta, and been bankrupted and politely asked to leave the country. He had also, as Greave only came to understand slowly and obliquely, been on the verge of being jailed as a chronic exhibitionist.

With utterly no connections in America, Greave’s father still manages to persuade another English firm to bankroll him in a venture to sell a now-forgotten car, the Dixie Flyer, in South Africa. His tiny stipend forces Greave’s mother to find ever-worse lodgings in ever-rougher parts of New York City. His days were spent avoiding, battling with, or being chased by gangs of young boys “engaged in continuous warfare.” At one point, she fell ill and the boys were taken into the city’s foster care system, spending weeks in a bleak orphanage stuck in the midst of a grey forest. His mother prayed for her husband to return and rescue them.

Instead, he returned accused of having blown through $600,000 in South Africa, and antagonized the Afrikaaners, and run off to the Congo with a black mistress in search of a lost mine. So he took his family off again, back to India on another cheap passage. Greave and his brother were enrolled in a threadbare boarding school where a schoolmaster straight from Dickens loved to beat morality and Catholic virtues into the boys.

Used to running wild in the streets of New York, Greave found the school intolerable and engineered an escape. Smuggling himself onto trains and ferries, hiding from the police, stealing food and finding unexpected support from an occasional Indian, he made his way from the Punjab to the far reaches of Assam. There, he enjoys some months of refuge, peace, and unsupervised play in the jungle from a friendly American couple he had met on ship.

The rest of Greave’s childhood was spattered with brief family reunions, more troubles due to his father’s grifts and sexual addiction, and a variety of poor excuses for schooling. With such an upbringing, it’s not surprising that his own experiences as a young man involve hopping from one job to another, great bouts of drinking, gambling, and whoring, and barely managing to exist on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society.

Then, sometime in his late twenties, he noticed a spot on his face. It stayed for weeks, growing slowly, and then was joined by similar spots on his legs and buttocks. He finally heads to the public hospital in Calcutta, where an Indian doctor calmly informs him that he is suffering from leprosy.

Over the next seven years, Greave spent much of his time holed up in a tiny, squalid room in a boarding house. One eye was blinded by the disease, the other nearly so. Only the tenderness of his lover, a beautiful but wayward Anglo-Indian girl rejected by both races, and an incredible forbearance and patience on Greave’s part, got him through. Finally, in 1946, a letter came to him out of the blue with an offer to take for him for free in a special clinic back in England. Greave tracked down his father–still concocting schemes in India–and begged enough money to pay for his passage. Scraping through the medical inspection, he got on board and set sail, never to return to India.

This is a pretty grim story. I suspect few reading my synopsis would imagine The Seventh Gate as anything but a study in black and more black.

Yet Greave (who died in 1977) seems to have possessed a spirit made of pure stainless steel. In the most degraded and dehumanizing situations, he managed–at least in reflection–to have been able to latch onto the tiniest bits of sunlight. Yes, he was trapped in some god awful boarding school run by a sadist–but he could always escape for a few moments:

Pacing endlessly across the wet, deserted playing field, I forgot the shoddy classrooms and the soaring, aloof grandeur of the Himalayas, and returned to those happy months when I had been free to wander beside the waters of Bombay harbour. Soaked in dazzling sunlight, the smell of the sea in my nostrils, I saw again the white sails of the dhows as the wind carried them towards Africa, and mingled happily with the cosmopolitan crowds that drifted beside the waterfront.

The cover of the Penguin paperback edition of The Seventh Gate shows a bright orange sun shining across some Indian river, and despite the many hardships Greave recounts, this is one of the sunniest books I’ve ever read. It may be that in having had so little, having been able to take so little for granted during his childhood, Greave simply developed an extraordinary capacity for acceptance and finding life and humor in the most dismal situations.

It’s also a book rich in description, with remarkable scenes, such as the one where Greave stumbles across a pack of vultures in the middle of the night as he escapes from school. I found it a little like David Copperfield, where you keep turning the pages wondering what worse trouble the young hero was going to face in the next chapter. I zipped through it in the course of a single flight back from the U.S..

Although Greave was cured of leprosy once safe in the English clinic, the disease permanently weakened him and his blindness eventually became complete. Despite this, he managed to write, starting with his 1955 memoir of his cure, The Second Miracle. He wrote several plays and novels and appeared as a monologist on BBC television and radio. He lived in the clinic where he was treated, the Homes of St. Giles, until his death.

A thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Let’s hope John Seaton at Faber Finds adds this to his list.

The Seventh Gate, by Peter Greave
London: Maurice Temple Smith, Ltd., 1976

Flamingo, by Mary Borden

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Flamingo'Flamingo is a spectacular failure. I kept thinking as I read of the time I saw a Titan III rocket blow up less than a thousand feet off the launchpad. No one would call that a success–but it sure was spectacular, awesome in its size and power, hitting us with a tremendous roar and shock wave seconds after we saw the explosion. Millions of dollars and the work of thousands was scattered in bits over the southern slopes of Vandenberg Air Force Base. A considerable effort lay behind that failure.

I’m not clear exactly what Mary Borden was aiming at, but it certainly was high. The two novels that come to mind when looking for something to compare Flamingo to are The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead–and no one could argue that either one of them lacked for ambition. Flamingo is about the Old World colliding with the New World, about politics and money and art and power, about love, lust, jealousy, and ambition, and about Jazz Age New York City, with all its frenzy, noise, music, low lifes and skyscrapers. It has the potential to be a candidate for the Great American Novel.

Borden’s ambition led her to draft London and New York as characters:

London and New York had been talking all that summer. They had been trying to understand each other, but with very moderate success. They saw things differently, or perhaps New York didn’t try very hard to understand that old woman across the Atlantic, that old fogey.

Take a god-like view of things when she feels like it:

But, of course, in the star swarm that was traveling the heavens, this spinning of the earth through day and night was too rapid to be visible. An eye watching the stars splutter, fizzle, and go cold could not count the rotations of that little top. As for the building activity in New York, that would be less noticeable than the appearance of a slight feverish roughness, a tiny wart, on the side of the earth’s face.

Speak as the voice of fashion:

The Radio Building, Brown, Johnson & Campbell, Associated Architects, was the very latest thing in skyscrapers a year ago. It isn’t now. While I write, other buildings are going up that will put it in the shade, and there is a rumor that a rival firm is going to build just behind it a building that will make it look quite insignificant.

And even make her bold enough to admit her weaknesses to the reader:

From now on this story becomes very confused. It is going to be very difficult to keep track of these people once the Aquitania is tied up to the Cunard pier in the North River. It is going to be like a game of hide and seek, a sort of treasure hunt on switchbacks, in a crowd, in the dark, that jangles and jiggles, in a great confusion of noises, and it will be impossible to keep my eye on the clock and tell a straight narrative of how one thing happened after another.

To Borden’s credit, I have to say that I think Flamingo would have been far more effective if it had been 300-400 pages longer that it is. For what is great about it is Borden’s courage to do what Dickens and Zola and Tom and Thomas Wolfe did–to grab her narrative in her teeth and plunge with it into the depths of her subject, to force us to take time to really get to know someone, some place or some thing.

Here, for example, is the start of her sketch of a supporting player in the story. Ikey Daw is a Jewish financier, a deal-maker who would probably beat up Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” for their lunch money:

To Ikey Daw, who was equally at home in all the numerous Ritz Hotels of the earth, crossing the Atlantic was so much a matter of habit that he scarcely noticed whether he was stepping on or off a ship. His activities were much the same wherever he was. When the telephone was switched off, the wireless got busy, and the many threads that he spun from his fingers held taut, spreading out from him in a beautiful elastic web that covered the earth. He didn’t appear to be aware of the sea sliding and heaving beyond the rail of the Aquitania. It didn’t affect his appetite, and he didn’t look at it. Natural phenomena like storms, heat and cold, a lot of water, or dry land, and the things described in the geography books, never attracted his attention. Nor did the antics and idiosyncrasies of human beings, except for so far as they came into his scheme, and for the most part they didn’t. He could afford to despise them, and so, wherever he was, he was always in the same place, and although he traveled pretty constantly, he never seemed to himself to be moving and yet never had the feeling of being put. If he had any feeling of being somewhere, it was of being suspended in the air, like a spider at the center of his web, and the web, since he had spun it out of himself, revolved round him, contracting, twisting, and adjusting itself to cover the globe with himself continually at the middle of it.

Borden spends over dozen pages introducing us to Daw, telling about his rise to wealth and power, revealing his passions and foibles, taking us along as he walks along the deck of the ship, smugly dismissing the importance and concerns of the other passengers, hoping to corner Sir Victor in a conversation. It’s wonderfully descriptive and detailed stuff, and as a reader I was happy to plunge in along with Borden and swim through it regardless of where we might eventually surface.

Manhattan, 1928'Not there isn’t any action in Flamingo. There’s a storm at sea, an attempt to manipulate the stock market, an unsuccessful coup on a board of directors, parties, a fox-hunt, even a shooting in a nightclub. Most of the time things move along at a reasonable clip, aside from the dreadful passages about Peter Campbell’s saintly mother and holy fool brother upstate in simple, wholesome Campbelltown.

Unfortunately, Borden’s grand design is undermined by the weakness of its basic story. Peter Campbell, the boy genius of American architecture, has been in love with an Englishwoman he first met when they played together as children on a beach in Cornwall. He’s only seen her three times since, and even then, just in glances–across an opera house in Vienna, entering a car outside the Ritz in Paris. As Peter is about to launch his boldest project ever–a multi-block complex combining train station, corporate headquarters, stores, radio transmitters, and even a church–the woman arrives in New York.

She is Lady Frederika Joyce, wife to Sir Victor Joyce, who is coming to America to tell the President that Great Britain will not repay its war debts. As the Joyces step off the gangplank of the Acquitania (243 pages into a 418-page book), Peter hops on a train to Chicago to pitch a skyscraper for that city. Numerous things happen to both parties, but the net result is that Peter and Frederika do not meet face to face until page 379. Thirty-nine pages later, the book’s over. And no, they don’t run off together to live happily ever after. There are several sub-plots and a cast of dozens, but that’s it as far as the core story goes. And as a protagonist, Peter Campbell leaves a lot to be desired. Even Frederika muses at the end of the book, “He was a great artist but a weak little man ….”

To use an architectural analogy–since Borden devotes a lot of the reader’s time to Peter Campbell’s unique, inspiring designs and constructions–the flaw that topples Borden’s own grand design is the weakness of her foundation. It’s as if she slaps down a layer of tarmac and then proceeds to build the Empire State Building on top of it. For Flamingo to work, it either needed to be equipped with a rock-solid substantial foundation or to have everything that wasn’t essential slashed away in a ruthless fit of editing.

Still, as failures go, this one is awe-inspiring and very much worthy of revival and reconsideration. Among her contemporaries, only John Dos Passos, in U. S. A. carried out a grander design. In neither case does the final product quite fulfill the promise of its initial chapters, but that in no way should suggest that either book is not interesting, as fascinating at times as a kaleidoscope.

Lady Edward Spears (Mary Borden), 1931It’s particularly noteworthy when one realizes who Mary Borden was and what she was up to at the time she wrote Flamingo. Borden was the daughter of a Chicago industrialist, who was married with two daughters and a third on the way and living in England when the First World War broke out. She used her money and influence to establish a field hospital and deployed with it to the Western Front, where she worked as a nurse throughout most of the war.

During the war, she fell in love with Edward Spears, who played a key, if sometimes controversial, role as a liaison officer between the British and French armies. She divorced her first husband and married Spears just before the end of the war. After the war, they set up house in London. Spears went into business and Parliament. They both wrote memoirs of their experiences in the war: Borden’s The Forbidden Zone in 1929; Spears’ Liaison 1914 in 1930.

Somewhere between the war, divorce, marriage, and keeping up an active social life, Borden also found time to write novels, publishing her first book, The Romantic Woman, in 1920. Flamingo, 1927, was her fifth novel and sixth book. Before the end of the decade, her critical reputation had earned her a place alongside Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow in at least one survey of American women writers.

Though most of her family fortune was lost in the 1929 stock market crash, Borden continued her hectic pace, publishing seven more books before the Second World War broke out. Once again, she and Spears went to the front. Spears, now a general, served as Churchill’s military liaison with the French government during the desperate weeks in June 1940 when the Germans invaded. Borden, with the help of Lady Frances Hadfield, formed the British-French ambulance unit and went with it to support the French troops in the Alsace. She arranged the evacuation of the unit from France and then led it to Syria and Egypt, where they provided aid to Free French forces. Borden and the ambulance unit returned to France after DDay and took part in the grand liberation parade in Paris. However, Charles DeGaulle soon after disbanded it, reportedly in a pique, having issued a ban on British units participating in the parade.

Woe on he who takes on an industrious woman with a gift for the pen. Less than a year after the war, Borden published Journey Down a Blind Alley, which recounted the many ways in which DeGaulle and others in the Anglophobic Free French leadership went out of their ways to make things difficult, even as French soldiers were lying in the unit’s beds. (I picked up a copy of Journey some months ago in hopes of writing about it, but I found it no better than the average war memoir aside from the uniqueness of Borden and the unit’s circumstances.)

Borden’s pace slowed only a bit after that. Her last book, The Hungry Leopard, was published in 1956 when she was 70. She died in 1968 and Spears passed six years later.

Locate a Copy

Flamingo, by Mary Borden
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1927

Ruminator Finds added to Sources

Ruminator Finds (originally known as Hungry Mind Finds), which was part of the catalog of Ruminator Books (originally known as Hungry Mind Books), the publishing arm of Ruminator Books, a legendary St. Paul, Minnesota bookstore (originally known as Hungry Mind Books), which also published the literary quarterly The Ruminator Review (originally known as–you got it–The Hungry Mind Review), has been added as a new Source (see under “Sources” to the left) with a list of the dozen or so titles issued during the first five years of Ruminator Books.

The Ruminator Books storeThe story of Hungry Mind/Ruminator Books is a parable of how far a passion for books can take you … until simple economics kick in. David Unowsky, who founded his independent bookstore, Hungry Mind Books, near the campus of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1970, and it acquired a reputation as one of a handful of truly great American bookstores. In the mid-1990s, he and his wife, Pearl Kilbride, along with other partners, started up an independent press, also known as Hungry Minds Books. Over the course of its nearly ten years’ existence, the press published 50 titles, with an emphasis on literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry, including a series of reissues of quality non-fiction under the rubrics of Hungry Mind Finds and Ruminator Finds.

In early 2000, they changed the company’s name to Ruminator Books after selling the name to Hungry Minds, publisher of the hugely successful [Fill in the Blank] For Dummies® series. Hungry Minds was later acquired by the technical publishing giant Wiley.

Unfortunately, that move was motivated mainly as an attempt to inject a positive cash flow into what was already a failing business. By mid-2004, the bookstore was forced to close its doors. The press was abandoned as an unsupportable venture, and the literary magazine Unowsky and Kilbride had also established became the last casualty in late 2005.

The Ruminator Finds list is an eclectic sample of some of the best non-fiction writing of the late 20th century and includes such well-recognized classics as Pat Jordan’s baseball memoir, A False Spring, and Bill Barich’s Laughing in the Hills, as well as a few fine but lesser-known works like Carl Raswan’s 1934 memoir, Black Tents of Arabia (My Life Among the Bedouins).

Wettermark, by Elliott Chaze

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Wettermark'

Cliff Wettermark is a burnt-out case. After burning his bridges with the Associated Press, the Times-Picayune, and a hack PR job for a chiropractor, he’s now stuck in a dead-end job as a reporter for the Catherine, Mississippi Call. He lives in a dump next to a couple of Baptist zealots. He owes the bank $600. His wife needs her teeth fixed and he has something on the side of his nose the local GP says looks cancerous.

As Wettermark opens, he’s sitting outside the office of the local bank manager waiting to ask for an extension on the loan when all hell breaks loose. A bank robber has just held up the drive-up window of another branch and made off with ten grand. Wettermark heads off to get the story, but he can’t shake the bandit’s action from his thoughts: “No wheedling or simpering. It contradicted everything in Wettermark’s experience with the process of securing money from a bank.”

Wettermark has managed to shake the booze that got him into trouble with the AP, and cigarettes, too. But his troubles, the endless tedium of life in Catherine (“a long gray nothing, starting with nothing and leading to nothing”), and the lingering thoughts of having enough cash to live for years without a care lead him to pick up a fifth before covering a local televised press conference. By the time of the show, he’s well-lubed and fires off an unplanned, sarcastic question at the visiting senator. And soon enough, he’s out of a job.

Which leads back to thoughts about the bank job. The reality of the act had opened his eyes to new possibilities:

He had known, of course, that banks could be robbed but before today it never entered his mind that he himself could bring off such a thing. He had thought of a bank robbery the way he thought of having a girl when he was fourteen–it could be done, it had been done, but only by experts who possessed extraordinary courage, skill and persistence. Actually there wasn’t much to it once you had your first girl. The astounding revelation was that some girls really and truly wanted to be bad, and apparently there were banks in the same category.

The quality of the local police also helps build up his confidence in his ability to pull off a similar heist. Of the town’s captain of detectives, Wettermark muses, “He was able to make drinking a cup of coffee look as if the fate of the nation depended on it and this was the primary reason, if not the only reason, for his promotion to captain. He could not track an army tank in fresh mud.”

And so Wettermark stakes out a bank in a town a few counties away and begins making preparations. I won’t spoil the book by revealing whether he successes and what happens after, except to say that Chaze manages to make it suspenseful, comical, sickening, and vivid with some of the best writing in the novel:

He was sweating heavily beneath the rubberized coat. He tried to kid himself into believing that this wasn’t what it was, that this wasn’t the edge of the platform and he wasn’t going to have to make the dive at all; that he was simply farting around out in the country and when he got to Knoll Springs he would stop at a filling station and get a cold drink and exchange a bit of rural-route shit with the attendant. They loved to joke about motorcycles. They grinned and said: “You want me to wipe that windshield, suh?” Or they said: “I see you got yourself some pure-dee air-conditionin’.”

Elliott Chaze, 1969'The writing is what makes Wettermark more than a run-of-the-mill mystery. Chaze, who worked for the Hattiesburg American for thirty years, knew his setting well: the woods and swamps, the sleepy towns, the cheesy politicans and slyly dumb cops, the racism and veiled caste system. He’d also written novels before Wettermark. The Stainless Steel Kimono, about about a group of American paratroopers in Japan, was reputed to be a favorite of Hemingway’s, and his 1953 pulp novel, Black Wings Has My Angel is considered by some to be, in Ed Gorman’s words, “the single best novel Gold Medal published during its heyday”–which is the tough-guy crime writing equivalent being given an honorary National Book Award by Philip Roth.

I do have to say that Chaze considerably undermines the fine writing of most of Wettermark with the clumsy plotting of the book’s last twenty-some pages. But the narrative voice is what makes or breaks most crime novels, and even on page one, Chaze’s writing made me want to follow wherever his story might take me. He’s funny, cynical but self-deprecating, succinct, and a master of picking out little images–the stick orange plastic chair outside the bank manager’s office, the town mayor’s penchant for publicity shots of him pointing at empty space where some warehouse or fast food restaurant is going to be built–that stick in memory long after the book is finished. If the rest of his books have anything like the same style, I look forward to reading more.

Bill Pronzini wrote an admiring piece on Chaze’s work on his Mystery File blog a couple of years ago, which prompted a similar reflection by fellow writer Ed Gorman: “Chaze would have been right at home with the other hardboiled greats, Fredric Brown, Peter Rabe, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford and many others.” There was a report back in 2007 that Elijah Wood was going to produce a film version of Black Wings Has My Angel, but it appears that may have gone the way of John Leguizamo’s Esquivel bio-pic and other much-anticipated unproduced works. Black Mask Books has reissued Black Wings and has Amazon in Kindle format, but since it’s in the public domain, you can just download a PDF version of the book from Scribd.com thanks to a user named jvorzimmer. You can also find biographical sketches of Chaze on the Mississippi Writers and Musicians site as well as on Murder with Southern Hospitality, a special exhibit site from the Ole Miss library.

Find a copy

Wettermark, by Elliott Chaze
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969

Short Drive, Sweet Chariot, by William Saroyan

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'Short Drive, Sweet Chariot'“In the summer of 1963 I bought a 1941 Lincoln limousine in New York, so that I might be chauffeur in California to the few remaining dignitaries in my family,” William Saroyan explains at the start of Short Drive, Sweet Chariot. This slim book is his account of his trip to Fresno, accompanied by his cousin John, to take his uncle Mihran and other relatives out for rides in style. Or rather, his account of part of that trip. The part from Ontario to the edge of South Dakota, where Saroyan cuts to the chase and a short postscript saying, in effect, “So anyway we got to Fresno and took Mihran out for a drive.”

This is Saroyan at the point in his career where he’d just about given up any pretence about sticking to any particular literary form, when most of his work consisted of perambulating, wise-cracking monologues. For a few fans who truly love his idiosyncratic meanderings for the loose, baggy messes they are, these books are Saroyan in his purest, most brilliant form. For most of the reading public that had made early books such as The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze best-sellers, a book like Short Drive, Sweet Chariot wasn’t worth noticing.

Personally, I kinda prefer these latter messy books. I still have a copy of his last book, Obituaries, from 1979, which was nominated for an American Book Award and helped–a bit–to restore Saroyan’s critical reputation. Obituaries has the structure of an entry for each day of the day, with each entry discussing someone whose obituary appeared in a paper that day. However, more than a few entries start out along the lines of, “So-and-so died today. I never met him. There was another guy I knew, though, and he ….”

But you don’t read one of these books because Saroyan follows the rules, you read it because he’s almost always at least interesting and occasionally brilliant, funny, poetic, or tender. And when he’s not … well, the momentum along will carry you and him along to the next good bit. Like this little meditation:

In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, “One of those things,” impelling me to remark to my cousin, “Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn’t time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it’s being written.

Or this one about the precedent Kennedy set as the first Catholic elected President:

President Hamazasp Azhderian, that’s the man I’m waiting to see in office. I’d like the order to be about like this, for the purposes of equity. After the Catholic, a Jew. Then, a twice-married, twice-divorced beautiful woman, known to be fond of bed and gazoomp. Then, a Negro, preferably very black. Then, a full-blooded Blackfoot. And finally Hamazasp Azhderian.

C’mon now–wouldn’t it be cool to have “a twice-married, twice-divorced beautiful woman, known to be fond of bed and gazoomp” after President Obama?

“Americans,” Saroyan writes, “have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.” Short Drive, Sweet Chariot is certainly one writer’s celebration of the pleasures of driving a fine vintage automobile along the mostly pre-freeway roads of America, but in Saroyan’s case, there doesn’t appear to be anything he needed to be healed of. More, it was a golden opportunity to expound for hours on end to a capture audience–namely, his cousin John. John comes off as an intelligent and enormously patient man who only occasionally finds it necessary to burst one of his cousin Bill’s bubbles.

And fortunately, cousin Bill was a pretty interesting guy to listen to. No, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot is no masterpiece and not much more than a bit of intelligent, poetic, meandering fluff. But it’s also an entire work, in the sense that Saroyan used that word: “incomplete, impossible to complete, flawed, vulnerable, sickly, fragmented, but now, also, right, acceptable, meaningful, useful, and a part of one larger entirety after another, into infinity. Kind of a modern age equivalent of the Great Chain of Being.

Short Drive, Sweet Chariot, by William Saroyan
New York: Phaedra, 1966