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Long Reviews

The editor’s own in-depth reviews, excerpts, and background information on selected neglected books. This section is the centerpiece of this site.

Constructions, by Michael Frayn

Constructions by Michael Frayn

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Excerpt

  1. For as much of the time as possible, we shut ourselves up in our notations and refuse to come out. It’s when we are forced to observe and think afresh that the discrepancy between this simplicity and that complexity overwhelms us.
  2. By our inmost animal nature we are readers. We read the world around us continuously, obsessively, necessarily. Reading our notations is a late specialization of that skill.
  3. Our reading of the world and our mastery of notations are intimately linked. We read the world in the way that we read a notation — we make sense of it, we place constructions upon it. We see in the way that we speak, by means of selection and simplification. I should like to end up by saying (gnomically, metaphorically) that we read the world by developing from it a kind of notation of itself. You see your hand by seeing it as a hand. You see the branches of the tree against the blueness of the sky by seeing that the branches of the tree are against the blueness of the sky. I say to you (in all the relative simplicity of the language notation), “The leaves on the tree are shaking in the wind,” and, given a context, you take the sense of this (directly — you don’t have to form a mental picture to understand what I say). There is an unremarked parallel between what you do here and what you do when you look at the tree yourself, in all the immeasurable complexity of the natural world, and (without formulating any thought in words) take the sense that its laves are shaking in the wind.
  4. We are significance-seeking organisms.
    We seek out significance from our environment as we seek out food. We crave meaning as we crave warmth.
    If we didn’t find significance and meaning we shouldn’t find food or warmth, either.
  5. We look at the taciturn, inscrutable universe, and cry, “Speak to me!”

Editor’s Comments

  1. The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation.

    Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed.

    Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.

This is the first of the 309 statements — most just a few sentences long, none more than a few paragraphs — that comprise Constructions. Published just a year after Sweet Dreams, Constructions was practically guaranteed to vanish with barely a trace soon after its few copies hit the book stores. Works of philosophy written by philosophers go almost unnoticed outside a few academic circles, and works of philosophy written by non-philosophers rarely even qualify for that, unless they’re a once a generation fluke like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (published, coincidentally, within weeks of Constructions). The problem is that such a work isn’t “serious” enough in the eyes of the philosophy professionals, but it’s too serious for the reading public. Combine these drawbacks with a completely unsexy cover (nothing but text!) and an obscure publishing house, and neglect is assured.

I must admit that I only special-ordered my copy of Constructions, back in the late 1970s when Wildwood House still had a few copies in stock, in hopes that it might have something of the flavor of Sweet Dreams. To that extent, I was confirming a view of the reading public Frayn himself offered a few decades later:

The only advice that I could think of giving to a young writer is to write the same thing over and over again, changing things very slightly and going on delivering it until people accept it. Very simply, people want reliability and continuity in a writer. If you buy cornflakes you want cornflakes.

Well, Constructions is most definitely NOT the cornflakes of Sweet Dreams, at least not at first glance. And so, after thumbing through a few pages, I stuck it into the bookcase. And aside from a dozen transfers to and from moving boxes, there it remained for the next 25 years.

It was after reading Ray Monk’s wonderful biography of Wittgenstein that I finally gave Constructions another try. I knew I’d read something similar to Wittgenstein’s precisely numbered and aphoristic philosophical statements, and some digging into the unpacked book boxes soon produced it. The pages might have been a bit weathered, like aged newsprint, but my copy was just as crisp and undiscovered as it was upon delivery.

It will not serve Constructions very well with professional philosophers to describe it as a poor man’s substitute for Wittgenstein, but in my case, that’s what it was. I couldn’t get past 3 point something in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Yet I think Frayn’s opening construction above is not that far removed from Wittgenstein’s attempt “to draw a limit to thought — or rather, not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts….” I also have a feeling Wittgenstein would not disagree with Frayn’s answer to the question, “Is there an order in the universe?”: “There are orders. And disorders” [#233].

Like Wittgenstein, Frayn sees language as the key with which both we unlock the world and lock off the world that falls outside language:

  1. You can translate out of the German, or out of the Aramaic. But only into another language! Not into the world of which the language treats!
    Moving from one myth to another is in some ways a little like translating between languages. A particular language has its own idioms, its own voice; a topography which favours certain ways of speaking, and makes others awkward.

These differences ensure there is always a certain amount of miscommunication and confusion inherent in any exchange between people of different tongues. This tendency towards miscommunication is one of Frayn’s favorite themes, going back to his earliest novels (The Tin Men and The Russian Interpreter). “Even if lions could speak, we couldn’t understand them,” Wittgenstein once wrote. For Frayn, one doesn’t have to leave our own species to encounter this problem.

Construction #248 offers an illustration of this, one he would later develop into one of the major themes of his play, “Benefactors”:

The people who move us from myth to myth are like the reformers who hoped to cure all social ills by taking people out of the slums, which were the context of their diseases and crimes, and installing them in new, disease- and crime-free housing estates. It was a terrible blow to discover that these estates in their turn developed a characteristic pattern of social disorder.

“What is your aim in philosophy? To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,” Wittgenstein wrote in #309 (another coincidence) of his Philosophical Investigations. Frayn is skeptical of mankind’s ability to escape the fly-bottle. Our fascination with the truth that lies hidden at the heart of things is, in his view, one of the handicaps that guarantees our continued captivity:

  1. … It’s true that in life people sometimes do surprise us at such moments [of stress and crisis], by revealing flaws or virtues we had not known about before….
    … But in most cases the truth that is revealed about us by our behavior in a crisis is just this: the truth about our behavior in a crisis.

Which leads him to this droll, quite un-Wittgenstein-ian parable:

  1. The secret police arrest us all. I, who have been a well-mannered and amusing guest at your dinner parties these past ten years, betray you as soon as they show me the electrodes. That bore Puling refuses, heroically.
    If ever we all get out again, don’t make the mistake of inviting him to your dinner parties instead of me.

To Frayn, the fly-bottle is what makes us human, rather than something else. We cannot get outside it:

  1. What would we be like if we put all our roles off, and emerged from behind them? We smile and stretch, reborn, untrammelled: Now we are playing the role of one who has put his roles off.

Frayn is nothing if not an elegant writer. Elegant in the sense that the term is used in mathematics: balanced, spare, aesthetically pleasing. Take the efficiency with which he encapsulates these paradoxes:

  1. Our complexity is such that we can understand many complex things. But not our own complexity!

  2. A capacious suitcase. We can get everything we want in it: clothes, books, a folding table, a bed, a bicycle…. This suitcase is infinitely flexible! The only thing we can’t get in is the suitcase itself.

I suppose that a professional philosopher could easily demonstrate that most of Frayn’s constructions are derivatives — and low-quality ones — of statements made by Wittgenstein and other thinkers from Pascal to A.J. Ayer. So I feel I am in no position to justify the merits of Constructions as philosophy. Recent scientific research does suggest that there is some truth to Frayn’s statement that “We read the world in the way that we read a notation” than he may have suspected. Mark Changizi and other scientists, as reported in The American Naturalist, found that “… visual signs have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.” In other words, it appears our notations themselves derive from the way we read the world.

But Constructions couldn’t make the grade as “serious” philosophy in 1974, so it probably stands little better chance of making it on this basis today. It may not help us know how to think or what to think, but it certainly does stimulate us to think.

“[T]he glory of writing is its dependence upon the world — the necessity it puts us in of coming back again and again to confront the complexity of what lies before our eyes” [#308]. And to that extent, this slight sliver volume, long out of print, qualifies as a glorious book. A dip into just a few of its pages always serves to remind me of the complexity what lies before my eyes; my own limitations in grasping it — but also my infinite opportunities to try to. Having finally worked through its unnumbered pages, I find I turn to it often to remind myself of the never-ending paradox of trying to understand the world around me.

Thirty-two years after Constructions, Frayn published another foray into the world of philosophy. At four times the length of Constructions, The Human Touch has already managed to attract more reviews and cross the Atlantic, with a U.S. edition coming out in early 2007, but this is certainly due to the growth in Frayn’s reputation since 1974.

Other Comments

· Jonathan Raban, “Is God a Novelist,” Sunday Times, 3 November 1974

These 309 numbered homilies, reveries, and speculations make nods of acknowledgement to Wittgenstein and Pascal, but they are actually the secret marginalia of a novelist who understands how the world works because he has created worlds too.

· Philip Toynbee, The Observer, 20 October 1974

Constructions is a fascinating and endlessly thought-provoking little book of a kind which is so difficult to categorize that it might almost be described as unique. It is poetical; it is philosophical (yet almost anti-philosophizing!); and it is a genuine contribution to psychology…. This is not only an unusually cheerful book; it is also a witty one.

· Jonathan Bennett, Times Literary Supplement, 20 June 1975

It is a philosophical treatise, a wrestle with a set of identifiably philosophical problems, and sometimes the method of sober, prose argument is used in it. More often, though, it works with aphorisms, jokes, metaphors, analogies, questions: the final effect of the work is enlightenment, which is comparable with what linear argument can produce; but the means of its production are more like poetry than prose and there is also something special about what is produced. For example, when Mr. Frayn remarks that “A man dominates his environment by establishing a unifying principle — himself,” and compares this with “a tank laying its own tracks across the wilderness,” something is achieved, for me anyway, which lies outside the reach of the prosaic means of academic philosphy.

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Constructions, by Michael Frayn
London: Wildwood House, 1974

Men of Good Will, by Jules Romains

A Complete Set of the US editions of Men of Good Will

Series of 27 books published in 14 volumes in English between 1932 and 1946

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Editor’s Comments

One of the longest novels ever written, Men of Good Will seemed to some, at least, to be one of the greatest creative works of the twentieth century. Clifton Fadiman was perhaps its most enthusiastic critic in the U.S., but he stopped reviewing the series well before its last volume, so we have no record of how well Romains’ art sustained his enthusiasm until the end.

Of the 14 English volumes of the work, only Verdun has held its head up against the changing tides of criticism and readership, coming back into print within the last ten years as one of the titles in the Prion Lost Treasures series. For the rest, the consensus today is that Romains (in the words of one bibliographer) “went too many rounds with Tolstoy and Marcel Proust.” Still, Romains’ efforts deserve more than entry stub he’s currently earned on Wikipedia.

Jules RomainsFor my own part, I have to admit that I’ve cracked The Sixth of October and Verdun a few times without getting past the third chapter. Details there are galore. Whether there is a narrative energy to pull a reader through them is another matter. But it would be unjustly neglectful on my own part to put this website together and fail to give Men of Good Will a spot that gathers together more words about this magnum opus than currently appear anywhere else on the Internet.

Other Comments

• from Captain Nicholas, a novel by Hugh Walpole, 1934

He had been brought up, like every intellectual young man of his time, on Proust, and now he had been reading the four volumes of M. Jules Romains’ endless novel. The fourth volume in its cheap French paper was lying beside his bed now. That was exactly what his life seemed to him at the moment. Bits and pieces. He had never supposed that he could write, but now it occurred to him that he could write a very good novel indeed about himself in this present manner. Very easy. No wonder so many of his friends were writing novels! Not of course that he could be as clever as M. Romains, but he need not worry about arrangement or form.

• Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic, 29 January 1940 (review of Verdun)

Cover of the first U.S. volume of 'Verdun'It is true that I haven’t read every one of its 4,256 pages, having sometimes been overcome with yawns in the middle of Jerphanion’s arch and soulful letters to his fellow student Jallez. On the other hand, I have read every word of Vols. I, II, III, IV (in French and English), VIII, and the greater part of Vols. V, VI, and VII. The eight volumes stand before me as I write — 612 cubic inches of reading matter, fully indexed, with more than half again as much to follow. Yet I can’t convince myself that this is a work that belongs somewhere between the “Comedie Humaine” and “Remembrance of Things Past.” I can’t convince myself that it ranks much above ordinary novels in any quality except sheer size.

Of course its size in itself is a real achievement, and one for which I didn’t give Romains proper credit when I wrote about the novel some years ago. I doubt that there are a dozen novelists in the world today who could plan such a gargantuan work, then patiently carry out the plan, at the rate of approximately five hundred pages a year. I doubt that there are half a dozen novelists who could give such a complete picture of their nation; Men of Good Will is almost an encyclopedia of modern French life, from aristocrats, financiers, commanding generals and Cabinet ministers down to slum rats, murderers and pimps.

• Jack Ferry, from The Ubyssey, the student newspaper of the University of British Columbia, 1942

To most of you the name of Clifton Fadiman signifies the program “Information Please”. He is much more to me. Fadiman is responsible for introducing me to one of the great experiences of my life, and certainly the greatest experience I have had in literature. For that I love him. Because to me a thing may be good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, but still desirable if it is a memorable experience. You see, he introduced me to Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will.

It all started last year with one of those Christmas books, which in this case was Fadiman’s Reading I’ve Liked. Halfway through it I came to the statement: “Jules Romains is the greatest of collective novelists, and to my mind one of the greatest of living novelists. His Men of Good Will is the most gigantic unified effort in the whole world’s literature.” This was a challenge. But it took this to cinch it for me: “Romain endeavors in Men of Good Will to portray not characters, but ‘life in the twentieth century, our own life as modern men.’ Obviously he must choose a terrain: it is France from 1908 to, one may presume, the present, or very close to it. He is writing, he says, one single novel, and its plot has been drafted in advance.”

Cover of the first U.S. volume of 'Escape in Passion'Once I returned to Varsity after Christmas I lost no time in starting upon volume one. In this book alone I met about sixty characters, most of whom appeared throughout the series. On and on I went. I paused for the Easter exams; and then while I sought volume four, missing at UBC, at the Public Library. Through most of the summer 1 read volume after volume. Each day, clutching my book, I passed the guard at that west coast aircraft factory. I think he thought I was smuggling blueprints. Each volume encompasses two books of the original French version. I read through The Sitxth of October, Passion’s Pilgrims, The Proud and the Meek, The Depths and the Heights, and so on. I followed two young college students through the problems of early manhood. I saw the birth of socialism in France. I saw the automobile-oil combines emerge. I learned a system for writing poetry. I met a man who could stop his heart action. I learned how it felt when a child was born — from the point of view of the baby. I saw a young man search for a faith. I stepped into the inner sanctums of Freemasons and Roman Catholics. I watched four crooks float a bond issue that ruined a million simple Frenchmen. I saw the Great War come, and learned why Verdum (like Stalingrad) could hold — one of the most magnificent passages ever written. I challenge anyone to deny it. And now — I’ve finished the ten volumes completed to date. Over 8,000 pages. There is no question about it “being worth it” In those pages so it seemed, I learned as much as I had during all of the past eighteen years.

Yes, parts of it were dull — just like parts of a summer sunset are dull. Here’s a suggestion: If you want to read about the most important things that have happened since 1900 without discussing dates, and treaties, and agreements, and economic trends, and social trends as such, and still digest all these things — then give this great work a try.

• Denis Saurat, Modern French Literature, 1870-1940, 1946

Romains’ poetic gift is at the bottom of all that is successful in his immense production, but it is obscured and may be unnoticed under the mass of his writing. In the novel his truly amazing effort in Men of Good Will, a series of twenty-seven volumes, relegates to the second rank, as far as quantity in one novel goes, even Balzac himself, who does not connect his pieces so well, or Zola, whose artificiality in construction is too obvious nowadays.

Yet is Jules Romains’ series the really great this is the description of the battle of Verdun in two volumes which are truly an epic presentation of war. The description of the superhuman silence that descended on the front before the world grashed in the great German attack will have a permanent place in literature; it is an achievement of imagination rendered possible by the absence of the writer from the field of battle, which permits the deployment into genius of his capacity for being there in spirit.

Two or three volumes on Quinette raise the detective novel to a height which perhaps that kind of writing does not deserve, and enrich it by the annexation of Gide’s “gratuitous crime.” The description of the mentality and intrigues of professional literary men rivals Lost Illusions of Balzac (not the best Balzac, it is true). Every type of reader will find something in this extraordinary series.

• Time magazine, 2 December 1946

Put out more flags; this is the end.

Jules Romains’ colossal super-novel, Men of Good Will, has at last ground to a wordy stop, after 14 volumes (the original French runs to 27), some 7,500 pages, and about 1,000 characters.

The most grandiose literary project of a generation, introduced to the U.S. public more than a dozen years ago, Men of Good Will has been admired from a safe distance by many, praised to the skies by a few, actually read in its entirety by still fewer. It stands as a monument to the almost incredible industry and endurance of Novelist Romains and his readers. A vast, inchoate panorama, as broad as all Europe and 25 years long, its net effect is more nearly that of a giant notebook than of a novel.

Many of the individual chapters are subtly, brilliantly managed; here & there (as in Volume VIII, entitled Verdun) they blend into a more or less related whole. But ordinarily Author Romains moves his characters about by whim or wind, endows his chance encounters, political musings, philosophic sermons, fancy seductions with no more apparent interrelation than that of news stories in the daily press.

Author Romains once explained that the grand strategy of Men of Good Will was to “reflect a whole generation.” That it does, as faithfully, as arbitrarily and almost as indiscriminately as a mirror set up in a public square.

• Vercors, Les Lettres Francaise, 30 August 1972

Men of Good Will is an extraordinary work, an extraordinary novel. It is not flawless — how could it have been? Pierre Daix said that after its twelfth volume, after the pinnacle of Verdun, it seems more or less to have taken a turn for the worse. Perhaps this is true — but not all that true. If the last volumes gave people at the time an impression of decline, I believe it was in part because these volumes were published a year apart, as if they were separate novels; thus, everyone expected what is generally expected of the latest novel by an author, something different from his preceding novel, be it a deepening or a revelation. But in this novel of twenty-seven volumes, since each book was the equivalent of a chapter, it was not intended to bring something different….

I decided to reread Men of Good Will, to reread this immense novel at one stretch from one end to the other — without being sure I would not stop on the way, especially toward the end, because I remembered my disappointment, during the war and afterward, in reading the last volumes.

This time I was not disappointed…. To be sure, the same shortcomings are there. While Romains is perhaps without equal in depicting male friendship, he is much less at ease in depicting love. The dialogue is dry and even a little awkward, both too sugary and too intellectual….

What had formerly seemed to me to be a rather haphazard structure now appeared a very rigorous design, and one executed by a master. And what a language, what rich expression and vocabulary! The style is perhaps not beautiful, not “elegant.” But it is better than beautiful. It is rich and full, with a precision and an apprpropriateness that have rarely been equaled and never surpassed.

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Below is the complete list of English volumes of Men of Good Will. Alfred A. Knopf published the series in 14 volumes, each, with the exception of the final one, incorporating two books as originally published in French. The volume titles link to listings of used copies available for purchase through Amazon.com.

Volume 1: Men of Good Will

Book 1. The Sixth of October

Book 2. Quinette’s Crime

Volume 2: Passion’s Pilgrims

Book 3. Childhood’s Loves

Book 4. Eros in Paris

Volume 3: The Proud and the Meek

Book 5. The Proud

Book 6. The Meek

Volume 4: The World from Below

Book 7. The Lonely

Book 8. Provincial Interlude

Volume 5: The Earth Trembles

Book 9. Flood Warning

Book 10. The Powers That Be

Volume 6: The Depths and the Heights

Book 11. To the Gutter

Book 12. To the Stars

Volume 7: Death of a World

Book 13. Mission to Rome

Book 14. The Black Flag

Volume 8: Verdun

Book 15. The Prelude

Book 16. The Battle

Volume 9: Aftermath

Book 17. Vorge Against Quinette

Book 18. The Sweets of Life

Volume 10: The New Day

Book 19. The Promise of Dawn

Book 20. The World is Your Adventure

Volume 11: Work and Play

Book 21. Mountain Days

Book 22. Work and Play

Volume 12: The Wind is Rising

Book 23. The Gathering of Gangs

Book 24. Offered in Evidence

Volume 13: Escape in Passion

Book 25. The Magic Carpet

Book 26. Françoise

Volume 14: The Seventh of October

Book 27. The Seventh of October

The Voyage of Forgotten Men, by Frank Thiess

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Excerpt

Cover of the first U.S. edition of 'The Voyage of Forgotten Men'

The clock of world history showed October 14, 1904.

In order to celebrate the historic moment, the Czar had torn himself away from Tsarskoe Selo and from the cradle of his infant son, and had come to Libau to bid his fleet farewell. He was accompanied by a strange-looking, ascetic man, with clever eyes in a hard, cold, merciless face. The words that came from his thin lips were in strange contrast to his forbidding face; they were gentle and pious. He was one of the most powerful men in the empire, the Czar’s trusted adviser and the most hated man in all of Russian: Pobiedonostzeff, Chief Procurate of the Holy Synod. He had arrived to pray for the success of the expedition, and to assist the Czar, as supreme head of the church, in bestowing God’s blessings upon it.

There were flags in every window. People crowded the streets leading to the water front, climbed upon lantern poles, strained against the ropes. Galloping Cossacks cleared a path for exalted visitors, policemen shouted, women fainted, salutes were fired from the ships in the harbor and gaily-colored flags and pennants flew from every masthead.

It was an overcast, gray October day. The brassy strains of military bands cut sharply through the cold autumn air. The men who were lined up on board the ships to receive the Czar’s blessing stood motionless, filled with a numbing, speechless sorrow. The harbor was crowded with steam pinnaces and launches carrying relatives who were trying to get a last glimpse of their loved ones. But the blue-jackets who stood at attention high up on the armor-clad decks of the gray hulls avoided looking down at their wives and fathers and children. They did not wish to open up their hearts which they had sealed against further pain. They knew that they were going to their death. They wanted no tears, they did not wish to go again through the grief of parting. Life and hope were left behind. Thus they set ut — the men whom Russia had defeated.

At last the hour approached for which the whole world had been waiting. In every church throughout Russia prayers were offered up for the success of the expedition. The bells in Libau began to toll; and the emaciated ascetic in the black robes with the gold chain lifted his white claw-like hands to the forbidding sky to invoke the Lord’s blessing and protection upon this armada which was to bring defeat upon the unbelievers.

And beside him stood Czar Nicholas II, a pale, handsome man. His lips moved but no one could understand the words.

And finally a last greeting rumbled over the water as the guns fired their parting salute. Anchor chains rattled, hawsers were loosened and the screws began to turn. The bridges of the ships were lined with officers standing at salute, their eyes staring toward the land, toward the teeming masses of people, the cranes and houses and sheds and churches, and at the white face of the Czar who stood motionless, his hand raised to his cap, watching his fleet sail to make this dream come true. His figure was growing smaller and smaller, and became a tiny speck as the squadron moved out to sea.

Editor’s Comments

John Lukacs’ comment about The Voyage of Forgotten Men (titled Tsushima in the original German, led me to locate a copy and see how it compared with some of the other “nonfiction novels” he mentioned, including In Cold Blood and Ragtime. I must admit that I at first doubted Lukacs’ identification of the book as a novel. It reads as colorful history recounted by an omniscient narrator and has a bibliography of sources at the end. Nowhere in the U.S. edition is it called a novel, and the reviews of some U.S. critics at the time of its publication suggest that many readers of the English translation believed it was a work of history.

But the German edition clearly states right there in the title: Tsushima: Der Roman eines Seekrieges (The Novel of a Sea Battle). Knowing that this is a novel and not a strict work of history, one can accept more easily those aspects of the book that critics such as Lincoln Colcord complained about. For Thiess is a passionate writer who displays openly his loyalties and dislikes. The Czarist state is “lazy, corrupt, indolent”; the members of the growing revolutionary movements are “microbes,” “a malignant growth in the body of Russia.” His omniscience allows him to describe unrecorded scenes and conversations. He knows the thoughts of the leading figures and can even take a God’s eye view of the battle:

The truly terrifying character of a naval engagement lies in the fact that it is a clash of machine against machine. An airman flying high above the battle area would see only a seemingly calm procession of little ships, following one behind the other in accurately spaced distance, and emitting white puffs of smoke and darker clouds from belching funnels…. But he would not be able to see what is going on deep down in the bellies of the ships.

There the stokers are shoveling mountains of coal into the glowing furnaces, working as fast as they can — and yet they might be working thus on any peaceful day in May…. Fortunately they do not know what is going on above them. They cannot see the number of wounded carried to crowded sick-bays and improvised dressing stations.

Thiess begins his story with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War, the siege of Port Arthur and the entrapment and destruction of much of the Russian First Pacific Squadron. By a combination of general underestimation of Japanese military and naval strength and skills and a circle of advisers of dubious integrity, Czar Nicholas II rejects the obvious option of a negotiated settlement with Japan. Instead, he decides to assemble a Second Pacific Squadron, rushing new ships through the last stages of constructions and hastily patching up long-obsolete old ones, and to sent it on a twenty thousand mile voyage from the Baltic, down around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and up past the Philippines and into the Sea of Japan. There, his naval experts tell him, the superior military abilities of the Russian fleet will wipe out the Japanese force and restore Russian control over Korea and Manchuria.

It was a plan gigantic as the country in which it originated, exhilarating in its fantastic, utopian appeal. Whether it could be carried through no one could tell. There were immense obstacles in the way of its achievement. Many naval experts throughout the world considered the whole enterprise an unparalleled piece of lunacy.

In reality, despite its ambitions, Russia was a minor naval power with a force as riddled with inadequacies and corruptions as every other element of the Czarist regime. Few officers, let along sailors, had the experience of a long ocean voyage. The ships were masses of imperfections: armor too thin, drafts too deep, guns and radios too short of range. Their shells had little penetrating power, their torpedoes failed, and their gunners had precious little experience with live firing. Anything but the most rudimentary battle tactics was beyond the limited skills of the crews.

And, Thiess adds, “Then there was the food and supply problem for a fleet of some forty ships which represented a floating city of ten thousand inhabitants. Would it be possible to take along sufficient ammunition, in addition to the other huge stores which were required for a twenty-thousand-mil trip without bases? And lastly, where was the leader for such a gigantic venture?”

With this, in walks the hero of the story, as told by Thiess. From the moment he is given command, Admiral Zinovii Rozhestvensky finds he has to fight two battles. Before he can take on Admiral Togo and his fleet in the Pacific, Rozhestvensky must first overcome the politics and corruption within the Russian government and the limitations of his officers, crews, and ships. Just to muster up an adequate force was challenge enough, but he had also to lead that force on an epic voyage despite the lack of any logistics infrastructure to sustain the fleet.

When Rozhestvensky does manage to assemble and prepare a fleet, two or three key ships are forced to drop back for repairs within the first 24 hours of sailing. Thanks to the many holes in Russia’s patchwork set of alliances, he has to avoid more ports than not. Despite an international incident over an accident off the coast of England, constant breakdowns and repairs, and severe weather, the expedition gets as far as the tiny port of Nosi Be in Madagascar before things fall apart.

There, to the existing supply problems is added an unraveling of the arrangements for coal refueling. As the fleet festers in the tropical port, the situation tips from the difficult into the absurd. The scene resembles something from a novel by Garcia-Marquez:

As the days lengthened into weeks, and the weeks into a month, disease and decay began to attack the ships themselves. These armor-clad giants had been the last reality in the African nightmare, the last tangible link with Russia. And now they themselves became afflicted with tropical sores. Sea moss grew on the hulls, and barnacles, algae and a slimy underwater flora clung like parasites to the bottoms and sides of the ships. On the deck, too, alien creatures had taken possession, increasing with tropical fecundity, and turning the warships into an ill-kept menagerie. The officers had brought animals of every description on board to while away their time, but soon these animals became the real masters of the ships. Screeching monkeys scurried up the masts, swung from the tackle and jumped about in the rigging. Multi-colored parrots perched on the rails, croaking and furiously beating their wings when anyone tried to approach them. Shiny lizards crawled out of the gun barrels and sat on the armored turrets.

After weeks of delay, a series of coaling rendezvouses are set up and the fleet resumes its journey. It evades a Japanese trap as it passes through the narrow straits around Singapore, endures a daily round of expulsions from the French Indochina port of Cam Ranh Bay, and finally takes on its last stores of coal before steaming up the Chinese coast towards the Japanese fleet. Waiting in a line ranged around the island of Tsushima between Korea and Japan, the Japanese — repaired, reinforced, and ready for the fight — have virtually all factors in their favor. Defeat, Rozhestvensky and his crews know, is inevitable.

Yet, as Thiess describes in a riveting account of the battle, the Russians fare better than the Japanese — or they — expect. For a moment early on, before his fleet’s inexperience with battle manouevres leads to a fatal error, it even looks possible that some Rozhestvensky’s squadron might reach Vladivostok. In the end, however, the combination of superior forces and Russian mistakes results in the almost complete destruction of the squadron. Even the torpedo boats are chased down and destroyed or scuttle themselves to avoid capture.

As Thiess relates the story, the remaining command ship surrenders while Rozhestvensky lies aboard, unconscious. Imprisoned in a Japanese hospital, he is finally released after the completion of the Portsmouth peace conference, at which Russia agrees to terms no better than it might have achieved before the Second Pacific Squadron even set out. Rozhestvensky returns to St. Petersburg via the Trans-Siberian railway:

In Tula the train was again stopped by workers and soldiers who had heard that Rozhestvensky was on board and wanted to see him. A voice, a nameless voice, cried out from the throng: “Tell us, Zinovii Petrovich, was there any treason in this?” Rohestvensky called back in a firm voice: “No, there was not treason. We simply were not strong enough, and God did not send us luck.”

Again there was a deathly silence, and once more an unknown voice shouted: “Look at him! Here is one man who has sacrificed himself for our country!” … They were grateful to the one man in high position who had not betrayed them as the rest had done.

While Thiess’ characterization of Rozhestvensky never tips into hagiography, it’s clear that one reason he called this a novel instead of a history is that he deliberately develops the view of Rozhestvensky as the protagonist. Aside from a few arch-villains within the Russian political elite and military, most other figures in the book are enigmas. The men of the squadron are treated as a collective character — the simple, trusting, but lazy serf who proves, in the final test, to have reserves of resolution and sacrifice to outlast most opponents. Written before World War Two, The Voyage of Forgotten Men foreshadows the kind of suffering and resilience seen through four years to fighting on the Eastern Front.

The Voyage of Forgotten Men is perhaps a more subjective account than current tastes appreciate, but there’s no denying the dramatic worth of the story. It’s a gripping tale — even with the ultimate fate of the fleet known from the very beginning of the book, Thiess manages to achieve a remarkable degree of narrative tension — enough to lead one reader reviewing a recent account of the Battle of Tsushima to write, “Without doubt, the best book on this subject is one written by a German between the world wars, Frank Thiess….”

Other Comments

Lincoln Colcord, Books, 7 November 1937

The present work, denying once more the human aspects and going far beyond the question of exoneration, attempts at this late date to build Admiral Rozhestvensky up into a hero, a great naval commander, a strategist of superlative ability, the one-eyed public servant in a welter of bureaucratic confusion and national disaster. At times the author grows almost lyrical; faults of character are tossed aside with perfect ease, or turned into virtues by a swift rationalization; facts are cheerfully twisted or evaded. At other times he indulges in sheer fiction, quoting the admiral and others as if he had been present at the scene. The result is a curious hodge-podge of truth and falsehood, and all concerned with a matter so far removed from the present problems and relations of humanity that one can only wonder at it.

Hanson Baldwin, New York Times, 5 December 1937

This book has a peculiar topical timeliness in view of the undeclared war in China…. [It] helps to make the present intelligible, and it again pays homage skillfully to events that will never die. But although it describes a great epic, it is itself far from epic quality…. Nevertheless, The Voyage of Forgotten Men is a brave though hopeless tale, well worth the reading.

Time, 1 November 1937

Solidly dramatized history of the Russian navy’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, with background emphasis on the Tsarist corruption which led to the fleet’s annihilation at the battle of Tsushima after its epic 20,000-mi. voyage under command of much-maligned Admiral Rozhestvensky, whom Author Thiess attempts to vindicate.

John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past

… the protean manifestations of this kind of “semi-documentary” or “novelized history” or “documentary novel” or “nonfiction novel” (none of these terms is really satisfactory) is itself the strongest evidence that such a tendency is indeed in the making; and that others may come to create a more perfect model of a genre that may be the genre of the near future, perhaps eventually dominating all forms of narrative literature.

Here is a very random sample of these “new kinds of novels: Tsushima by Frank Thiess …
The Horrors of Love by Jean Dutourd….

What do these books very bad, perhaps only two of them very good (Tsushima and The Horrors of Love) — have in common?

… they represent attempts to construct or even to break through to a new genre — something of which some of their authors are more aware than are others.

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The Voyage of Forgotten Men, Frank Thiess
Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1937

Capitol Hill, by Harvey Fergusson

Frontispiece of Borzoi Pocket Books edition of 'Capitol Hill'
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The folding room was a long narrow compartment in the basement of the House Office Building, with rough walls and a cement floor, provided with long tables of unpainted lumber and high stools. It looked more like a factory than an office. Its atmosphere was dank, and the small high windows up against the ceiling gave so little light that electricity was kept burning all the time. Here the printed speeches of congressmen were folded, placed in envelopes, and sacked for mailing to their constituents.

The amount of this printed oratory was a thing to appall. Speeches bound into bales were piled to the very ceiling. Other bales were always being hauled in on hand trucks, which went back loaded with tons of speeches folded, sacked, and ready for shipment. At the long tables sat rows of men in their shirt sleeves, folding speeches and putting them into envelopes with swift deft movements. They were the very lowest grades of patronage employees — the minor faithful ones, rewarded with these positions at seventy-five dollars a month for work at the polls, for marching in political processions and whooping and clapping at political meetings and conventions. Here in the very bowels of government they toiled, stirring futilely and incessantly, like colon-bacilli, among its profuse excretions.

Mr. Folard, superintendent of the folding room, to whom Ralph reported for duty, was a man whose politeness, discretion and equability of temper should have won him some higher reward in the game of politics where those virtues are so important. A stout man with a large, concealing grey moustache, he resembled nothing so much as a country undertaker. He always wore black clothes and a black derby hat, which he seemed never to remove. It was a favorite pleasantry of the folding room to speculate as to whether he slept in it. He moved about silently on rubber heels, and when speaking to an employee always laid a hand upon his shoulder and addressed him in a low confidential tone as “my boy.” Ralph learned that Mr. Folard had been appointed to his position many years ago under a Democratic administration, and had held it throughout the long Republican regime by reason of his diplomatic bearing toward the Republican congressmen. Any one of them might demand his head at any moment, so that this position could be given to a deserving Republican. Mr. Folard had a large family to feed and had developed his manner of extreme politeness can care in self-defense. He seemed to feel that any slight jar of movement or utterance on his part might precipitate a political explosion which would blow him out of his berth.

Editor’s Comments

Although Harvey Fergusson certainly qualifies as a neglected writer, what lasting reputation he has is based largely on his historic novels of life in New Mexico, particularly Wolf Song, which some consider the finest “mountain man” novel written. Before devoting himself full-time to creative writing, though, Fergusson worked through the years of the Taft and Wilson administrations as a newspaperman in Washington, D.C. , and his second novel, Capitol Hill, draws heavily upon those experiences.

Capitol Hill tells the story of the rise of Ralph Dolan, and his mastery of the success system of insider Washington politics. Finding himself near-broke after getting rolled by a prostitute on his first night in Washington, he decides to stick around a bit, if only to rebuild his bankroll. Ralph’s sex life is just one example of Fergusson’s remarkably (for its time) frank and world-wise account — among other things, he depicts the evolution of illicit sex in D.C., as various reforms usher the trade along from whore-houses to hourly hotels to discreet private apartments.

Rung by rung, he works his way up the ladder of success, learning the peculiar logic of reward within the political system. After stints as a bus-boy and bill collector, he finally wins a spot in the very basement of government: the Congressional folding room described above. From there, he moves on to become the secretary of an idealistic and ineffective Texas congressman. Ralph plays to the congressman’s vision of pushing a minor bit of populist legislation through the House, but his own instincts are both purely political and utterly lacking in ideology.

Ralph’s approach is studiously pragmatic: find his master’s weakness, and exploit it. He quickly learns to “follow the money,” as Woodward and Bernstein put it. From the populist he ascends to the office of another representative, this one a self-made millionaire interested mostly in climbing the social ladder. Ralph learns how to use legislation to achieve a wholly selfish effect:

The bill was introduced and widely noticed in the press. Most of the papers ridiculed it, and all of the butchers assailed it. Mr. Rauschuld had none of the big packers in his district, so he was not at all fazed. He produced his authority and his figures in reply, thus getting a second allowance of publicity, and fairly overwhelming his enemies, while the measure went to slumber with many of its fellows in the files of the document room.

Unfortunately for Ralph’s aspirations, though, a romance with the congressman’s typist gets him fired. An old room-mate from the YMCA gets him a job as a street reporter on a small Washington daily. Here he covers the “many minor events which were of little news value, but still required the presence of a reporter.” The work does little to further his career until he spots an untapped opportunity. Selling the editor on a weekly automotive section, he trades a cut in salary for a percentage on advertising sales and quickly wins the accounts of the major Washington dealers. “Although both his salary and his prospects for advancement were good,” Fergusson writes, Ralph is unsatisfied with this progress: “The thing that interested him in Washington was the government, and the opportunities it afforded for easy advancement in wealth and social prestige.”

Ralph fits precisely into one of the two stereotypes Fergusson draws of reporters:

The allure of newspaper work lies in the fact that is requires no preliminary training, and offers quick and easy advancement to a certain point. There are two easily distinguishable types who enter it, expecting to leap from that point to a foothold in some other occupation. One of these is the ambitious young adventurer who uses the newspapers as away to useful acquaintances and information, and eventually graduates into politics or business by way of a job as press agent or secretary. The other type is a man with an aptitude for words and an aspiration toward one of the literary arts. These fare much harder.

Fergusson, we assume, was one of the few of the latter type who, “by terrible toil, do evolve into novelists or playwrights,” and not one of those “cynical men” who “get drunk about once a week.”

Ralph uses his vantage point as a reporter to map out his own way ahead. “In general,” he concludes, “the way to advancement in this, as in most lines of endeavor, was to win the friendship of older men who had already succeeded and to serve them faithfully. If this formula sounds simple and old-fashioned, a glance at the career of Dick Cheney shows it’s still put to good use almost a century later. He uses connections among the Washington press corps to win a Capitol Hill beat with a minor Midwestern paper and continues to expand his circle of contacts: “The senators and congressmen with whom he came in daily contact knew him as a polite and accommodating young man, who was perfectly willing to do a favor and who wanted to get ahead.”

Over the next few years, Ralph hitches his wagon to a series of successful older men: a star reporter, a political operator, an honorary “colonel” full of grand ideas for the Red Cross as America edges closer to entry into World War One. By the war’s end, he manages to gain for himself the spot of head of an industry lobby known as the National Commercial Association.

He reflects with satisfaction at his progress:

Life was sweet to him, it was infinitely kind to him. He loved things — concrete, tangible things — money, women, good food, and drink and tobacco, cars and houses. And he knew how to get things. His life was a simple, greedy gathering up of things he very much wanted. All of the world as he knew it seemed to be organized for the very purpose of giving him things. What was Washington but a great crowd of men and women struggling for love and money and security? Most of them were weak and stupid and did not get much. He was strong and clever and got a great deal. That was all of life as he knew it.

Yet, as he takes the podium to deliver his first speech as leader of his association, he falls for his own publicity:

He saw himself in a new light, discovered in himself a new power. He was a brave young knight going forth to save the Holy Grail of property from the infidels and barbarians of Bolshevism…. It came upon him suddenly, as inspiration comes to a prophet, that he was an important man — perhaps, — even (Oh, sweet and daring thought!) — a Great Man!

Throughout the book, Fergusson contrasts Ralph’s advancement with that of Henry Lambert, his old room-mate from the YMCA. Lambert is one of the second type of journalist defined by Fergusson, the literary type. Despite his ability to write easily and well and rise in the newspaper business, Henry ultimately values the work as little and spends much of the book frustrated and unhappy. Only at the end, as he describes the novel he’s begun to write, does he begin to find some satisfaction and purpose: “It’s a full-length portrait of Democracy in action — of this magnificent explosion of misdirected human energy which is our capital.” His book has no hero, he announces, “But it has a central character. And the central character is going to be you, Ralph, or at least a man like you….”

One might imagine, for a moment, that Fergusson here crosses over into the territory of experimental fiction, as with the very writing of Capitol Hill, he was to abandon journalism for fiction. However, as several of the excerpts above illustrate, Capitol Hill suffers from some of the most common traits of early novels: most notably the tendency to tell instead of show. Ironically, the strengths of the book owe more, in my opinion, to Fergusson’s past as a reporter than to his future as a novelist. His main characters are more stereotypes than fully-fleshed personalities. From his years as a newspaperman, however, Fergusson is able to create the gallery of minor portraits and observations about places, manners, and morals that make Capitol Hill a picture of Washington life still worth reading today.

Other Comments

Time magazine, 5 May 1923

A rapid, interesting story, revealing, with satire and veracity, the hidden, unacknowledged mechanics of our governmental machine, centered about a typically American character not much dealt with in recent fiction, the vivacious modern buccaneer who neither saves his pennies nor makes any genuine contribution to the world, but is enormously successful nevertheless.

H. L. Mencken

The first novel of Washington life that attempts to describe genuinely typical Washingtonians and the essential Washington.

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Capitol Hill: A Novel of Washington Life, by Harvey Fergusson
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923

Sleuthing in the Stacks, by Rudolph Altrocchi

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Sleuthing in the Stacks'
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Excerpt, from “Lust and Leprosy”

Here, then, is the plot [of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Crusade of the Innocent (La crociata degli Innocenti)].

The dramatis personnae are five, with names sonorous and pregnant with symbolical significance: Odimondo (Hate-the-World), a young man; Novella (New-Girl), his passive adorer; Gaietta (the Cheerful One), his infant sister; The Mother, anonymous genitrix of Odimondo and Gaietta; Vanna la Vampa (Johanna-the-Blaze or, shall we say, the Vamp), the contaminated, but ever-pure-at-heart enchantress; a mysterious Pilgrim, plus a Celestial Chorus and White Voices. Even in the list of characters one must make allowances for poetic imagery.

Act I. Place: A dismal swamp, in which rises (geological license) a huge rock full of cavernous recesses; at right, a chuch (architectural license); in a “breath of gold” — which is the miasma rising from the dismal swamp — are heard the noises of innumerable birds, the dirge of snipes “which whimper like juvenile gnats” (insectile license), and the twitter of “divine buzzards” (ornithological license). Time: That melancholy, crepuscular hour, you know, Saturday before Palm Sunday, 1212.

New-Girl is doomfully sitting in the swamp by a cattle-trough which, as always in Italy, is a Roman sarcophagus. (Why a watering-trough in the midst of water? But don’t ask embarassing questions.) Enters Hate-the-World, carrying a horribly heavy little bundle of olive sprigs. The bundle is heavy, as New-Girl soon discovers by thrusting into it her hand, which collides with an icy little foot, because it contains the corpse of the Cheerful One. For Hate-the-World has just cut the throat of his infant sister, fortunately before the rising of the curtain….

Act II. Dewy sunrise, though the “bluish darkness is as silent as at the bottom of the sea.” The mysterious Pilgrim, emerging from the thick timber, approaches the doomful tower and instinctively makes for Johanna, the still much-lepered Vamp….

Act III. Front stage: One of the many boat loads of mystic infants sailing on their voyage to the Holy Land. They are packed “as a herd doomed to slaughter,” and though tortured by hunger, seasickness, and vermin, they are full of heroic fortitude and still singing…. Hate-the-World, who happens, for no reason at all, to be on deck too, has been lashed to the mainmast by the jealous sailors for casting amorous glances at the still beautiful, though pure, ex-leprous enchantress….

Act IV. Two of the infant-laden vessels are wrecked on the rocky shore of a deserted island. The shore, the decks, the sea as far as naked eye can penetrate, everything is bestrewn with innumerable defunct babes. Hate-the-World is again carrying the heavy corpse of his infant sister, the Cheerful One. “It seems,” says the uncertain author, “that in his delirium he has sacrificed her once more.” He was pure again and now he is again guilty, so, according to this subtle symbolism, he must again carry the heavy burden, and Sister must again have that wicked wound in her intermittently molested jugular vein….

… [D’Annunzio] must have been convinced, judging from his words, that this play was full of high emotion. Emotion without restraint, and that is the trouble, without that artistic restraint which Dante called “il fren dell’arte,” and Babbitt “the inner check.” D’Annunzio was far more interested in another kind of check.

Editor’s Comments

Sleuthing in the Stacks collects seven essays by Rudolph Altrocchi, a professor of Italian and long-time member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Altrocchi describes them as accounts of literary detection, but literary archaeology might be more accurate, for he consistently uncovers layer after layer of precedents behind each piece of “original” work he examines.

Despite Altrocchi’s considerable expertise and serious studies, in no way does he attempt to make any profound claims for this book:

The research scholar who has lots of fun in his bookish hunting also wishes to share this fun. Although he does his happy hunting, he sleuthing, alone, he wants to share his game….

Some might say that in this time of global war [the book was published in 1943] literary research acquires, by comparison, a petty significance. That may well be so. But it also acquires the value of “escape.” The author hopes that this book may be a jolly, bookish escape to readers as it was to him.

“A jolly, bookish escape” is the perfect description of Sleuthing in the Stacks. In each essay, Altrocchi starts with a particular text, usually obscure. In “Handwriting in Search of an Author,” it’s a small collection of poems by one Monsignor Giovanni della Casa, a patrician member of the Florentive clergy from the mid-16th century. The book is filled with tiny marginal notes that the bookseller speculates belonged to a much-better-known poet, Torquato Tasso. He graciously loans the book to Altrocchi, who proceeds to unravel its provenance and then, the rightful source of the notes.

“Now somebody might ask: Why question the authenticity of it at all? Why go to so much trouble?,” Altrocchi admits. But forged handwriting, he explains, is so common that it’s riskier than not to assume authorship without a thorough investigation. His own follows two lines: the handwriting itself, and the content of the notes themselves.

His suspicion was fed by the fact that one Mariano Alberti, a captain in the Papal Guard, had been convicted of forging Tasso’s handwriting in the 19th century. Altrocchi locates the suspect book in the inventory of Alberti’s belongings included in the record of his trial “magnificent folio volumes (oh the grandeur of those Papal days).” Not satisfied, though, he then carefully matches up the notes against those in an authoritative compilation of Della Casa’s works, meticulously commentated, amounting to an “oppressive total of 2018 pages.” He finds that 75 per cent of the notes attributed to Tasso match those written between 1707 and 1728 by one Sertorio Quattromani. The last nail (literally) in the coffin is provided by a chemical analysis, which finds the aged, reddish ink isn’t ink at all, but hydrated iron oxide — the water Vatican authorities found filled with rusting nails in a glass in Alberti’s apartment.

This gloss makes “Handwriting in Search of an Author” sound far too pedantic. Altrocchi lightens every step along the way to his conclusion with wry asides and gentle judgments on all parties. There are no great villains or saints in his world, and after resoundingly demonstrating Alberti’s guilt in forging the annotations, he passes the mildest of sentences: “May his rascally soul and his clever, extremely clever hand rest in peace.”

The other pieces in Sleuthing in the Stacks take similarly esoteric subjects for entertaining rides. In “Lust and Leprosy,” excerpted above, he deconstructs a truly awful bit of kitsch by the Italian poet and proto-fascist, D’Annunzio, and traces its roots in a variety of Catholic miracle plays. In “Where there’s no Will, there’s a Way,” he recalls a play he once wrote with a fellow alumnus in hopes of winning a prize offered by the Harvard Dramatic Club. The play won no prize and was promptly forgotten. But Altrocchi proceeds to unravel the long literary tradition behind its principle dramatic event, in which an heir conspires to gain the rights to his just-deceased father’s estate. He convinces a neighbor who resembles the father to take to the recently-vacated death bed, recite a last will and testament, and then play out a convincing death scene. Altrocchi’s source is none other than Dante’s Inferno, where among the Maleboge (“Evil Pockets”) in the eighth circle of Hell he spots one Gianni Schicchi, who impersonated a rich man and dictated a false will in his own favor. From that source, however, he traces a wealth of derivations, adaptations, and reinventions, concluding:

Wherefore I stopped this line of sleuthing, which make me now stop my discussion. But haven’t I proved how much jollity can come out of Dante’s Hell and from a corpse?

Upon this sleuth, who now feels qualified for the exalted title of “third grade digger” or perennial (through seven centuries) literary undertaker, may the forgiveness come of the reader … (oh no, there is no reader left).

If you Google Altrocchi’s name, you’ll find he’s best remembered on the Internet for his essay, “Ancestors of Tarzan,” which appears in Sleuthing in the Stacks. In it, he uncovers dozens of accounts, reaching all the way from antiquity to contemporary “factual” accounts of jungle life, in which one or more of the essential elements — the abandoned child, the nuturing she-beast (gorilla, wolf, dog, etc.), and the mastery of survival skills and eventual rediscovery — are blended. The ur-story behind Tarzan, he writes,

… survived not because of casual animal foster-mothers, but by virtue of its essential humanity. Young maidens who succumb to passion; secret fruit of their transgression exposed and saved by miracle, surviving through coincidence and adventure for heroic accomplishments in history or philosophy — this is of the very tissue of life, at all times and in all places, and therefore also of literature.

Sleuthing in the Stacks is certainly the “jolly, bookish escape” Altrocchi hoped for. But as each essay proves in its own special way, it’s also a sly and subtle revelation of the depth, breadth, and intricacy of the web of connections that can be found beneath the surface of just about every work of literature, whether great or small, authentic or forged.

Reviews

· J. T. Frederick, Book Week, 16 July 1944

Prof. Altrocchi writes so frankly of his hobbies, with so much humor and pleasant personal detail that there is much enjoyable reading in Sleuthing in the Stacks even for the person who knows little or nothing about the field of the researches described.

· Robert Altick, New York Times, 23 July 1944

To the unsympathetic bystander these discursive essays might almost represent the reductio ad absurdum of literary source-investigation, but they are nevertheless fun to read. It can never be sufficiently deplored that so few academic men can deliberately write unacademically and get away with it. Professor Altrocchi is carried away in his zeal to be companionable.

· E. L. Tinker, Saturday Review, 26 August 1944

The book is full of unlimited scholarly research, and an acute reasoning worthy of Dr. Holmes. It is often very interesting in its breadth of learning with its varied and recondite facts….

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  • Wikipedia entry on Rudolph Altrocchi
  • You can find a brief biography of Altrocchi at “Guide to the Rudolph Altrocchi Papers” from the University of Chicago Library Special Collections Research Center.

  • After a long and distinguished career as a neurologist, Altrocchi’s son Paul Hemenway Altrocchi published his own work about a murky figure from literary history. In this case, his novel, Most Greatly Lived, he recounts the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, often claimed as the true author of Shakespeare’s works.

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Thanks to an enthusiastic boost from San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Joseph Henry Jackson, Sleuthing in the Stacks sold far better than most academic books when it was first printed in 1943. Although it was reprinted in 1968 by the small Kennikat Press, there are still dozens of copies of the original available for as little as $5 from online dealers.

Sleuthing in the Stacks, Rudolph Altrocchi
Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1943

The Office, by Nathan Asch

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Excerpt

Title page of the first U.K. edition of 'The Office'

They were six in the crowd. There had been many more before; the entire office. But some of these had stopped being a crowd earlier and began to think for themselves; and, frightened, left the office, and took up their thoughts. But these six that remained, stayed in the crowd, and from then on until late evening, when they were all drunk, and had no thoughts even as a crowd, these six acted together, did things together. When one suggested something to do, they all grasped his suggestion eagerly, and all acted upon it.

There was Bill, who had been the head of the trading room. An older and more intelligent fellow, who should have known better but didn’t. A man with a wife and a child. A man with a future before him. A man who, when he knew where he was going, was as unbent as a steel knife, but when he was broken looked like this same steel knife snapped in two: lost and useless, and good for nothing in the world. A man who should have had somebody to guide him, but who didn’t, and just by a lucky chance had gone as far as he had.

Then there was Blackbird. A braggart. A stupid little fellow. Was always talking about what he had done. Whatever anybody ever talked about had already happened to him. He knew everything. Anyway, he said he did. Contradicted himself in every other word. Shrewd, too. But in a little way. Never had the sense to be large in little ways and clever in big. Anyway, he couldn’t be big. Couldn’t if he had tried to. He was little in everything. And in this little way he was mean.

Ferrari was a wop. Even a God damned wop. With his slick, black hair and long nose. If you didn’t know him you’d say you wouldn’t have liked to meet him at night. He looked like that: tall, and beaky, and not to be trusted. But he was the best telephone clerk on Wall Street. Everybody said that. A holy wonder, this fellow. You couldn’t beat him. And fast! Fast as hell! If he weren’t a God damned wop he’d get somewhere. But you wouldn’t trust him if you’d meet him.

And then there was Eddie: Eddie Drucker. A good fellow. Damned nice fellow. A peach of a guy, a white man. Only a little bit too good. That’s why he wouldn’t go far. He couldn’t. He’d take off his hat, shoes, and underwear and give them to the first person that asked him for them. And he was a bit dumb too. Kind of slow and big. And he wouldn’t have kept this job long if the others hadn’t helped him.

And Charlie. You couldn’t keep a straight face when Charlie was around. They said he could almost make Zuckor laugh. Always cracking jokes and playing tricks, and singing, and raising hell generally. He’d make a funeral laugh.

And finally Phil Johnson. Never say much. Never talk. He’d work like hell, and you wouldn’t know it. Now Ferrari, when he worked, you’d see the feathers flying. Everything with gestures. Stage work. But not Phil Johnson. He was almost as fast as Ferrari, but you’d think he did nothing at all. He didn’t belong in this crowd. He was out of place in it. He should have gone home, and stayed in his little room, and smoked his pipe. That’s what a Swede does. But somehow of other he got into this crowd, and stayed in it, and he was almost as much part of it as Charlie or Eddie.

These six played poker, shot craps, and wanted to fight. And then when they had nothing else to do, they stayed still, slightly out of breath, looking around them.

Then Charlie said:

“Let’s go uptown.”

They said all right. They had been paid off, and their pockets were full with the two weeks’ pay. And they were ready to spend that money. The day before they would not have done it. The day before each one would have said: “This much for rent, this for the grocery bills, and this for the movies.” One or two might have gone into a saloon and bought a drink of whiskey. That would have been all. But this money that they received now, that was all they would get until the next job. And they didn’t think about the next job. They didn’t give a damn what would happen tomorrow. They were a crowd. And they were willing and ready and were going to spend every cent of their money this same evening. They were all going to be broke that night. Tomorrow they would all have to go to the savings bank, or to their relatives, or borrow from their friends, or just go hungry. But they didn’t care about that. They were a crowd.

So they all picked up their hats, and were walking out. And they saw Zuckor. And Charlie being the first wanted to play a joke on Zuckor. He wasn’t afraid of him any more. Like a little boy who on the last day of school tells his teacher to go to hell, wanting to revenge himself for all the wrongs the teacher had committed toward him, Charlie wanted to pay back to Zuckor, to get even with him. So this is what he did: he bowed before Zuckor, tipped his hat, and said:

“Good night, Mr. Zuckor.”

And Blackbird who followed him, also tipped his hat, and said:

“Good night, Mr. Zuckor.”

And Eddie, Phil Johnson, Bill, and Ferrari all did the same: they all tipped their hats to Zuckor and said:

“Good night, Mr. Zuckor.”

This was the worst insult they could think up to show Zuckor what they really thought about him. To show him that before, when they had greeted him, they had never really wanted to. That they had had to do it. Had been forced to. Their job had depended upon their saying, each morning, “Good morning, Mr. Zuckor,” and each evening, “Good night, Mr. Zuckor.” That they had never meant it. That they had never wanted him to have a good morning or a good night. Because he had always been mean and small to them and had wanted to persecute them. Because they had been in his power. He could have made them suffer, go through the agony of being jobless, of not knowing what they would do tomorrow, where their next meal would come from. And he had taken advantage of that, a mean advantage over them, being stronger than they were. So they said to him, “Good night, Mr. Zuckor,” and of all the ways they could have thought up to hurt him, this was the worst way.

They felt that as they were going down the elevator, and they were astonished that they could have thought up such a fine insult. It was more than they could have done had they really thought about it. They didn’t remember who had said it first, but they were glad that they had said it, and even proud of their own cleverness. And thinking of their cleverness made them quiet, not boisterous, as they went down, and as they took a taxi for uptown. They were quiet and dignified, self-conscious of their own cleverness.

Editor’s Comments

The Office is a Wall Street brokerage. In the first three brief chapters of the novel–“Wall Street,” “The Voice of the Office,” and “The Office,” Asch uses a series of impressionistic techniques to sketch his context:

  • “Wall Street”:
    • New York — downtown — streets — buildings — firms

    • buy — sell — exchange — beg — borrow — steal — cheat — give — take — donate — endow — deceive — lie — sympathize — pity — love
  • “The Voice of the Office”:
    • hey Glymmer I see where Federal Tel went up to par I guess we can let go a few Jacobs get the market on Federal Tel
    • zing-ing-ing-ng-g-g

    • Mex fours five to a quarter Mexican Irrigation thirty-two to six Mex large five to fifty
  • “The Office”
    • The office consists of three rooms: one large, one small, and a third cut into smaller cubicles.

    • The office gives its employees a living; they work in it and in return they receive pay, for which they buy food, clothing, shelter, amusements, pay the doctor, the undertaker, pay taxes.

… and then one day the office failed …

So Asch titles the second, longer part of the book. Why does the office fail? Asch offers no explanation. The cause is of no special interest. The fact is, the office fails, and suddenly, everyone who works there is out of a job.

Asch’s attention focuses on the immediate impact of the failure, on the thoughts and actions of a cross-section of the people who worked there, from the principal partner to the switchboard operator and the clerks depicted above, in the first few hours after they’re told.

Whatever the cause, the failure comes as a sudden and unexpected shock to almost everyone. In an instant, a fundamental element of each person’s life is wiped out, and the blow sends each reeling. For the clerks, the impact is visceral: they wonder “where their next meal would come from.” One walks down the street, confident in his ability to land another position the next day, until the sight of a vagrant leads him to consider what little separates him, now jobless and with little more than his final pay to his name, from the vagrant’s lot:

He would come in after having long looked for work, looked everywhere and had not been able to find it. Everywhere he came they would look at him and say or only think: “You’re a bum, see? It’s no use giving you work. You’d quit after the first pay-day. You don’t want a job, you only want a meal.” And they’d say, “No, nothing today.”

Another returns home resigned that the loss of her income now dooms her to become a dependent — literally. Without a job of her own, the only alternative she can see is to marry a man she neither loves nor respects:

She was to go home and stay with Jim Denby. She was made for such as he. For men with warm, moist palms, and warm, moist faces, and warm, moist looks. For men who do not take but beg. For sixty dollars a week, and a book-keeper’s household, and a book-keeper’s children, and a book-keeper’s life. Oh, hell!

For others higher up the management chain, the economic impact is multiplied by the social stigma of failure. The principal partner, Glymmer, brought in for his name more than his resources, is a former Treasurer of the United States. A career politician brought up through the ranks by machine politics, he now realizes how little substance stands behind his resume. He has no wealth of his own: he has always lived off his salary. He has no real business acumen to offer, and now that his own firm has failed, his name is only a liability. He is trapped like an animal, and Asch does a stunning job of showing the range of instinctive reactions he experiences as he ride home quietly in the back of his chauffeured limousine.

In his panic, Glymmer latches onto his wife as the source of all his troubles, and he begins to fantasize about how to best humiliate her with the bad news. “You know, we are ruined,” he plans to announce that night at dinner, in front of guests, shattering her world. But something even more fundamental than money and prestige brings Glymmer back to reality:

He had taken the cigar out of his pocket, and was chewing on it, as he always did when he was satisfied with something.

Then, little by little, a look of fright came into his face. His jaw tightened, the cigar fell out of his mouth, and he trembled.

He, he, he, that’s what he would do? That’s what he was doing? Who was he? How could he? Who …

Perhaps I’m reading too much into such a short passage, but I think this is one of several places in The Office where Asch shows a remarkable talent for bringing out depths in his characters with the slightest and subtlest of strokes. Although much of The Office brings to mind the works of his contemporary, John Dos Passos, particularly U.S.A. and Manhattan Transfer, Asch is far more successful in creating three-dimensional characters.

In a few cases, the failure opens an opportunity. One junior partner decides to take his chance as an aspiring writer. Another, the “brains” behind the firm, merely see it as another challenge to be overcome through charm and persuasion:

All around him men trying to get ahead. Men forging ahead. Using all of their wits, all of their powers. Building. Building. Creating new things. Selling. Buying. Exchanging.

And so was he. So was he. He was trying to build too. He also was working.

What if it failed? Other things fail. A man may be down, but he’s never out. And he wasn’t even down. Wasn’t he waiting for the two men to join him for the conference? Wasn’t he going to build a new office? Start things again?

Not all opportunities are taken. Second, skeptical thoughts come and undermine the first optimistic speculations about possibilities and bold choices. In one case — Miss James, the switchboard operator (a wonderfully effective sketch by Asch) — emotions run the full gamut from shock and anger to resignation and disinterest before she even puts on her hat and leaves the office.

Asch wrote The Office in 1925, when business failures were not unknown, but rare. When the Depression hit a few years later, the same experience would be repeated a thousand-fold, but as far as I’m aware, no writer succeeded so well in describing it. FDR’s New Deal introduced a network of social services that provides something of a buffer between the loss of a job and basic survival, but even now, I suspect people would feel many of the same emotions Asch portrays in the first few hours after getting the news. Certain works of literature manage to stay in print because they capture so well something — the death of a child, the loss of faith — many people experience. On this basis alone, The Office deserves to be brought back into print — and kept there.

Other Comments

• from Conversations with Malcolm Cowley, edited by Thomas Daniel Young, University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Nathan was the son of Sholem Asch, who was an enormously popular Yiddish novelist; all of his books were translated into English and many of them were bestsellers. Nathan started out quite young with a novel called The Office, which received very good reviews here. Didn’t have much sales, most first novels don’t have, but for some surprising reason it sold better in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Then he wrote a second novel that was disappointing to me, called Love in Chartres, and a third novel called Pay-Day, which was more or less suppressed on moral grounds. That was the best of his novels. Pay-Day was also the day of the Sacco-Vanzetti execution, so he worked that into the novel. After that he wrote a book called The Road, about traveling over America by bus, and he wrote a novel about this area, called The Valley. That ended his publishing career. During the war he was a sergeant in the Air Force, really in their public relations, a P.R. non-commissioned officer. Not having to do it, he nevertheless flew a large number, a dozen or more, of bombing flights over Germany, and he wrote letters that were extraordinary. I used to get them. He came back and lived in Mill Valley and wrote, and nothing he wrote was published. Each of his manuscripts would have been accepted if it had been a new book by a new author, but his bad record in the bookstores frightened publishers, and they wouldn’t take his other novels. Then he started to work on memoirs…. He wrote an extraordinary memoir of his father, Sholem Asch, which he gave to Commentary and Podhoretz printed it, after cutting the heart out of it. Then he died of lung cancer. I think he was almost a paradigm of the failed author, but he had loads of talent. He was in Paris with Josie Herbst, another author whom they are making efforts to rescue from obscurity, and John Herman and also Hemingway, who was the great star of Paris in those days….

Reviews

· Boston Transcript, 14 November 1925

It is powerfully written. It is swift, relentless. It is New York as people generally conceive New York. It is human nature under the grinding wheels of economic disaster.

· New Republic, 16 December 1915

The opening chapter is a sensational accumulation of words. The second chapter carries the method into conversation, and is sensationally effective.

· New York Times, 11 October 1925

A Wall Street office of “bucketshop” brokers is evoked by Nathan Asch in sharp, staccato phrases, almost in isolated words. His portrait is completed in less than twenty pages, yet the atmosphere, the nervous tension, the incessant telephoning, the relentless outpouring of tickertape, aimless, meaningless interjections of conversation, and a vague, submerged suggestion of human presences are fully indicated.

“And then one day the office failed.” Thereupon Mr. Asch pursues twenty of the office help, from porter to President, as they wander home or resort to pallid, unimaginative, disheartened efforts at amusement….

His selections are amazingly apposite. He varies his pace and adjusts it unerringly and precisely to the mood he wants to convey. It might be called expressionism in fiction, yet it is not a blind and rigid application of a technical principle. It is fluid and plastic and enormously fresh and stimulating. The effect amply justifies the form.

• Time magazine, 9 November 1925

Some staccato words are ripped out. There is The Office: tape, shares, toil, sex, money. The office fails and you go home with the various people whose lives centre in it. A stenographer has to forget the junior partner and marry her boyfriend. The stupid figurehead of the firm trembles, tells his wife. Clerks curse, get other jobs. The junior partner brandishes his cane, plans to run away and be a heman; slinks to his father instead. The crooked partner plans another office. Author Asch seems to know his Wall Street and hate it thoroughly. Striking as an experiment, his book never gets beyond its starting point.

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The Office, by Nathan Asch
New York: Harcourt,Brace, 1925

Antoine Bloyé, by Paul Nizan

· Excerpt
· Introduction by Richard Elman
· Other Comments
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Excerpt

Cover of Monthly Review Press reissue of 'Antoine Bloyé'Antoine left with two stretchers, their bearers silent. They went on foot. In the depot at night you have to watch where you put your feet. The ground is full of traps and pitfalls, switch heads, ditches, and engines under steam, a tiny wisp of smoke coming from their stacks. Antoine was thinking. He did not take such deaths very easily. People said, “Accident at work.” And they tried to make you believe that work is a field of honor, while the company provides the widow with a pension, a niggardly pension, it parts with its pennies like a miser, it thinks that death is always overpaid; later it hires the sons of the dead and all is said.

Nothing is said. Every morning Antoine still saw on his arm the scar made by the explosion of a water gauge when he was an engineer. It dated from yesterday, this severing of a radial artery. He was “off the foot plate” too short a time not to feel close to men who die on their job from the blows of their profession. Engineers, people who give orders from afar, administrators, die in their beds more frequently than do the men of the train crews, firemen, conductors. General staffs rarely fall on the fighting line. How does one get reconciled to these things? Already there were so many stretchers in his memory, smashed chests, figures mangled like charred wool. He knew the life of the men who run the trains, their joys, their work, their code of honor, and their death, and now he was going to announce the final episode. It was a boss’s mission, the bosses announce the deaths and injuries. The bosses send messages of condolence. The bosses sometimes experience the uncomfortable feeling of guilt.

The stretcher bearers and Antoine arrived before the engineer’s house and then before that of the fireman. Antoine climbed their dark stairs, stifling his breath and muffling his tread as though to wake each new-made widow as late as possible, to delay the moment when he had at last to face the cries, the stammering of a woman blinded by the pepper of pain, befuddled by the coils of sleep. It was nevertheless necessary to knock and await the woman’s cough, the shuffling of her slippers, her fumbling with the latch. The door opened and all the warmth and security of the rooms evaporated. He entered the quiet semi-darkness as a thief, as a demon. And he spoke at first of wounds; he said, “We have brought him home.”

Then of severe wounds, then at last — and the wife had understood from the beginning — of death.

“Be brave, madame. It is a fatal accident.”

It left an unforgettable impression on his memory — the hastily lighted lamps, the plates on the oilcloth beside the wine bottle, the rigid bodies heavily borne to beds still warm from the women’s bodies, a dazed child standing in a corner, the widow’s wrath.

“You take away our men from us, you bring them back in pulp. Company of murderers!”

That night, Antoine discovered death. A certain death that he could not forgive himself.

To lay out the driver’s body on the bed, he had taken it in his arms. What terrible weight a dead man is. Besides the seventy-five or eighty kilos of his flesh, bones, and blood and all his fluids there is the weight of death itself, as though all the years the man had lived had suddenly accumulated in his body, weighing it down, coagulating like lead grown cold. A wounded man still knows how to make himself light; he has the magic warmth of his breathing, of his blood circulation, but this dead man was as rigid and motionless as marble. This dead man no longer looked like a man. Only his clothes were like all other clothes. Antoine held him tight, he embraced this body fraternally. Living men do not clasp each other thus, their bodies do not come into contact save through their hands. Embraces are decently reserved to love; men scarcely venture to touch each other. So it needed death for him to embrace this man.

Antoine could do nothing for him save stretch him out, and the weight of the dead man drew him toward the bed. He felt like saying to him, “Come on, old boy, help yourself a bit.”

He wanted to ask for forgiveness as though he had killed him with his own hands.

Introduction by Richard Elman

From the 1973 Monthly Review Press edition of Antoine Bloyé:

Paul Nizan never reached middle age. He died in 1940, aged thirty-five, with the French army at Dunkirk. He wrote six complete books: the novels Antoine Bloyé, La Conspiration [English title The Conspiracy, and Le Cheval de troie (translated in England as The Trojan Horse); two polemics, Les Chiens de garde (American edition, The Watchdogs) and Aden Arabie; and Chronique de Septembre. He had been a philosophy student of the idealist academician Leon Brunschvig at the Ecole Normale, a writer for L’Humanité and Le Soir, a Communist who broke with the party over the Hitler-Stalin pact. According to his former schoolmate Jean-Paul Sartre, he enjoyed the company of women. Nizan’s was a short though not an ordinary life and Antoine Bloyé is a major novel of such great intensity and compassion that its strength is still available to us. It is one of the truly great Marxist novels I know of, a work that incorporates the imagination of Marx to treat of the alienation of ordinary men from their fellow and their work, yet does so without once becoming scolding, combative, or sneering. It’s a thirties book that has not become time-locked.

This edition of Antoine Bloyé uses a translation that was published in the Soviet Union in 1935. Edmund Stevens, then Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, found a way to make hard, clear, intelligent English out of Nizan’s precise thoughtful French with its meditative echoes of Pascal. Published only a year before the Great Purges of Stalin, it must have had the force of novelty in party-hack Moscow literary circles. Nizan had been a Communist but, in literary matters, never a Sovietist. His literary inclinations were gravely modernist and French, and English publication of a novel such as this in the Soviet Union had to be something of an anomaly, explained perhaps by the fact that it was issued by the Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R..

… The power of this artist, she [Tilly Olsen] observed, had only once been expressed — in Antoine Bloyé, a book which she said had been important to her life. Tilly’s gift of mind was shortly thereafter followed by Nizan’s text.

The feelings aroused by my first encounter with Nizan’s funereal moral fiction remain with me even know, like a hurt one cannot forget. Tilly spoke of Bloyé in the reverential way that one reserves for masterpieces, although, as with any true masterpiece of this century, its language and feelings are understated, and much of the force of Nizan’s work derives from his ability to transform an ordinary life into a drama of suffering without redemption, of failure without pathos.

Antoine Bloyé’s terrible death in life was to manage his existence so that, in fact, he had never lived. Sartre tells us Nizan was obsessed by his father. All his life the man had cheated himself. He had led a life that denied his own humanity, his feelings. But within this parable of the career of the railway functionary is the choice each of us confronts, almost daily: to remain vivid and in touch with one’s experiences, to grow, to be one with one’s comrades, brothers, friends, and lovers; or to withdraw into oneself and bitterly await death, to suffer the slow, wasting passing of the timid, the intimidated, the encapsulated, the bourgeois whose life is wrapped “in cotton wool” (to use Nizan’s phrase), those whose selves have been shrunken into the deals they have made with their own lives. It is this constant test of humanity which Bloyé so plainly fails….

Antoine Bloyé is a child of the working class, a locomotive engineer who seeks to better himself by becoming petty bourgeois. He joins the bosses: he marries his boss’s daughter. At moments throughout his life, he is seized by a certain dull anger and regret. For he has given up everything in his life that was vivid for certain smug assurances. As Nizan puts it, “All his work only served to hide his essential unemployment…. There were times when he would have liked to quit the life he was leading and become someone new, a foreign someone who would be more like his real self….”

Time and again Nizan wants us to see Bloyé’s defeat as our contemporary defeat. It is the sort of life, Nizan tells us, that one could sum up in two brief obituary paragraphs in one of the provincial papers; that is just what he refuses to do. He treats Bloyé’s promise and vividness and yearnings empathically. He is able to make us accept, like breathing, the subtle social and political corruption of youthful spirit, that cruel banalization through marriage and getting on that our culture imposes on so many men as their rite of passage. He forces us to know this nobody — but never abstractly, as Camus might do, or with Sartre’s contempt. Bloyé is an authentic man set loose on a course of death, who lives in a world of schedules and trains, of honest accomplishments, domesticities, and occasional celebrations. He seeks to improve himself. He becomes declassed. He becomes a traitor. He dies alone, with only a wife to look after him, their pretense at love and sharing long a waste. His education has been to be selfish. He has been encouraged only to be isolated, greedy, and resentful, a mere atom, or monad. His oppression is the cultural — finally political — oppression directed against so many males; because they have been told they must get on, they must choke themselves emotionally….

… He wrote a book that is as current as the slogans of the best of our young people. It is a Marxist book: not only, or simply, because it sometimes incorporates into its analysis the language of Marxist economics as diction and metaphor with which to dramatize Bloyé’s betrayal; nor because its central event is a workaday life, its action the precise way in which the illusion of well-being is manipulated to imprison most of us and, in turn, to make us exploit our wives, our so-called friends, our mistresses, our children; but also because, as in most of Marx’s finest work, its instincts are poetic, its seeming prosiness is about a way of feeling that is materialist; and its expression is by psychological insight.

Other Comments

Karl Miller, New York Review of Books, 15 November 1973

There are those rare novels — Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep is one — for which the label of masterpiece always seems slightly beside the point. Both Antoine Bloyé
and Call It Sleep suffered the similar fate of being lost literary classics that had to wait a generation or so after their publication before being restored to their rightful literary place. Antoine Bloyé, although of an entirely different literary tradition than Call It Sleep, has the same obsessive, wounding power.

Chicago Daily News

Its revival is a gift to modern literature. No one writes this way any more: Nizan tells a story that can be read on many levels and is expressed with a classic use of language. Antoine Bloyé is in the tradition of the great novels … it concerns a man, a class and a society…. This is a profound book, profoundly moving and profoundly sad. It makes the reader examine himself; it causes him to look again at the world he lives in, at the life he has chosen…. It is not a long book, but it is beautiful, satisfying and unforgettable…. This masterpiece will spur many readers to fill their lives, to search for the secret….

James Atlas, The Nation, 22 October 1973

Now, what distinguishes Paul Nizan’s Antoine Bloyé from the work of his fellow writers in France is the manner in which it illustrates the character of dialectical materialism–from the inside–without sacrificing the aesthetic possibilities of realism….

… It is a matter of real importance, then, that we have this translation of his best novel, not only, because Antoine Bloyé is a brilliant example of modern European literature but because it can serve to refine our awareness of the life and work of a significant literary figure….

What makes Nizan,s chronicle of a wasted life so vivid is the author,s awareness of Bloyés human possibilities. Writing from within the mind of an “ordinary” man, he was able to depict the circumstances, emotions and desires, the consciousness of which is necessarily diminished in those whom labor has robbed of the abillty to reflect. School, sexual adventures, marriage into a bourgeois family, the death in early childhood of a daughter; the birth of a son, promotions, vacations: these are mere events, and their qualities as lived experience he buried beneath obligation and blind will. Nizan tells us that Antoine Bloyé wasn’t “meditative,” that “events rolled past without his taking notice.” But the texture of Nizan’s prose, viscous and laden with sensation, imitates the world through which Bloyé moves. While his own life is crushed, “caught like an insect in this quivering web of railway lines,” the richness of the natural world surrounds him like a penumbra of unrealized hope. And that is what is most remarkable about Nizan’s achievement. Despite Antoine Bloyés docility, he sees, through the lens of Nizan’s sensibility, the world’s possibilities: the heaviness and indolence of Sunday, summer evenings on the waterfront, the memories of childhood whose atmosphere settled over the dinner table on visits to his parents’ home.

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Antoine Bloyé, by Paul Nizan
Translated by Edmund Stevens
First English publication: Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society Of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935
Reissued: New York, Monthly Review Press, 1973

Winds of Morning, by H. L. Davis

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• Editor’s Comments
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Excerpt


Clallum Jake was a Columbia River Indian by residence, though he was heavier-built and more dignified than river Indians generally were. He lived most of the year on an Indian allotment sand spit that stuck out into the Columbia a few miles above the mouth of the Camas River, where he operated a seining ground during the salmon run, with the help of four or five squaws of varying ages and uniform homeliness. He was a hard-working old buck, and usually hung up from ten to a dozen tons of salmon in a season. He was also a sharp trader. Instead of selling his salmon to the cannery at some starveout price, he preferred to home-dry and peddle it to the upper-country Indians for such raw material as deer hides and the pelts of winter-killed sheep, which his squaws tanned and converted into genuine Indian-beaded buckskin gloves, moccasins, belts and handbags. Knickknacks of that kind found a ready and profitable sale at tourist stores and curio shops around the country, besides supplying the squaws with something to do so they wouldn’t be tempted to start fighting among themselves.

Nobody knew anything precise about the relationship subsisting between Clallum Jake and his squaws. Some public-spirited people in town had tried to find out about it from the squaws a few times, but the squaws knew only a few words of English, all brief and forceful, so the investigation had never got far. Clallum Jake had escaped it himself, being too dignified in appearance to be questioned about his domestic eccentricities by a set of town busybodies who might not have stood up very well under any searching inquiry into theirs. He could understand English moderately well when there was anything in it for him, though he usually professed ignorance of it to be on the safe side. He had no language of his own, or none that anybody could pin him down to, having wandered into the plateau country in the early days from somewhere down on the Coast, where all the native languages were different. In his trading with other Indians, he relied partly on his squaws and partly on a scattering of English mixed with Chinook jargon, the simplified mixture of mispronounced French, Indian, Russian and Eskimo that had once been the universal trade lingo among the western tribes all the way from the Bering Straits to the California line.

One Coast Indian trait that had stayed with him was clumsiness with horses. In spite of the fifty-odd years he had been riding, he still rode like a shirttail full of rocks, but with an air of weighty deliberation that made it look as if he was doing it in fulfillment of some plan too deep and far-ranging to let the general public in on.

Editor’s Comments

Thirty years ago, the University of Chicago Press quietly released a collection of three pieces of short fiction by a retired professor of English, Norman MacLean. Purely through word-of-mouth, A River Runs Through It became a best-seller and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize. More than anything, it was MacLean’s remarkable voice — spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor — that distinguished the book from anything else published in a good number of years before it. You had the sense that there was nothing the least bit fake in this book — as well as the sense that in waiting so long to tell his stories, MacLean was able (to turn Pascal’s quote around) to make them as short as possible.

I was often reminded of A River Runs Through It while reading Winds of Morning. The two books are set in roughly the same time and place — the Northwestern U.S. in the 1920s. Aside from that, they don’t share much else in common, at least on the surface. The stories are quite different. Winds is a little bit about unraveling the truth behind a murder, more about a young man and an old man herding some horses to a new pasture, and mostly about people and a place in the midst of changing from one era to another. What really reminded me of A River was the voice of Amos Clarke, H.L. Davis’ narrator.

The book is Amos’s recollection, told from a distance of thirty years or so, of one particular experience from his time as a sheriff’s deputy, back when he was barely twenty. Out delivering a summons, he stumbles onto a shooting that looks to be accidental. A ranch hand, Busick, has killed an old Indian, and Amos dutifully takes him into custody. Although it’s an open-and-shut case of manslaughter, Busick gets off — mostly through the collusion of a jury of local businessmen who’d rather have him working and paying off loans that stewing away in prison. Busick gives up his rights to a small patch of grazing land, however, and this sets off the main story in the book.

The sheriff instructs Amos to round up Busick’s horses and lead them up to public pasture with the help on an old man, Hendricks, left to look after them. Hendricks was an early homesteader in the area who built up a healthy estate, but who left under a cloud of rumors after one of his daughters accused him of molesting her. The big story percolating in the background as Amos and Hendricks head north with the horses is the hunt for a murderer. A wealthy rancher married to one of Hendricks’ daughters has been shot dead as he stood in the doorway of his house. In the sheriff’s mind, though, Amos’ job has nothing to do with that.

As it turns out, however, Amos and Hendricks find themselves getting closer, rather than further, from this murder. They stumble across a few threads that Amos’ curiosity and Hendricks’ knowledge of the area and the people in its enable them to follow and, ultimately, solve the case. But this is not the real story in Winds of Morning.

Though horses and wagons are still the main ways of getting around for most people, railroads, cars, and trucks are also regular fixtures. The first wave of homesteaders has receded, leaving a few successful big ranchers and businessmen, more struggling farmers and hired hands, and a lot of abandoned places. Power has shifted, subtly and permanently, from the hands of the rugged individualists like Hendricks to those with money and influence. Although still a wild and beautiful but potentially dangerous land, this West is full of signs that life is changing. Literally, in this passage:

There were some printed signs, mostly faded and weatherbeaten, scattered among the stumps. An old one proclaimed the area to be a part of the Prickettsville municipal water district, and carried a caution against trespassing that didn’t appear to have had much effect, since it was shot full of holes. A newer one from the government printing office stated that the territory thereto adjacent had been stocked with poisoned bait against predatory animals, and advised against permitting sheep does to run loose on it, which, since the buzzards always ate all government poisoned bait and scattered it over half the sheep ranches in the country before the predatory animals got near it, was a way of insuring that there would be enough to go around among the sheep dogs, and they could all poison themselves right at home instead of having to walk miles out into the timber to do it There were smaller signs of varying ages forbidding hunting, fishing, camping, or building fires without a suitable permit, cutting trees or pulling wild flowers, or picking huckleberries except in duly posted and assigned areas and under properly authorized supervision. None of them were supposed to mean anything till summer. They were put up to draw city vacationists, to whom such things gave a pleasantly excited feeling of being the objects of somebody’s attention.

Clarke suspects the change he sees going on aren’t for the better. At one point, he muses:

In old Hendricks’ younger days, there had been more value set on people. Nature had been the enemy then, and people had to stand together against it. Now all its wickedness and menace had been taken away; the thing to be feared now was people, and nature figured mostly as a safe and reassuring refuge against their underhandedness and skullduggery.

But Davis refuses to settle for a simple polemic against progress. This is not the Wild West of good guys versus bad guys, white hats versus black. From the very first scene, it’s clear that Amos is more inclined to try to understand than to judge the people he encounters, and he finds Hendricks shares much the same disposition. “A man can’t tell what’s layin’ around inside of him. There’s too many corners, and things reach out from ’em sometimes that you’d thought was all dead and buried.”

In part, this is because Hendricks is struggling with his own demons. Though innocent of his daughter’s charge of rape, he still took off and lost himself somewhere for a few years before returning to the Columbia River valley. He had his own sin he was trying to escape. One hard winter when most homesteaders were losing whole herds, he had taken up with an Indian squaw for the sole purpose of getting the use of some sheltered pasture, and he kept up the arrangement until he no longer needed the help.

“I couldn’t see how it hurt anybody much,” he tells Amos.

“You can’t tell what will hurt people sometimes,” Amos responds.

“I was out to pile up money in them days,” Hendricks reflects. “Gittin’ ahead in the world was what we called it. nobody ever figured out what they was gittin’ ahead of, I guess. There’s more things than that for a man to git ahead in, anyway. It’s took me a hell of a long time to fin it out….”

Though the pair spend much of the book piecing together the truth about the murder, this is never viewed as a matter of justice or punishment. The culprit, it turns out, is a young Mexican boy traveling with them. His motivation proves to have been his own misguided sense of justice, and they agree to let things rest at that.

“You can’t make up for what you’ve done,” Hendricks tells Amos. “When you do it, it stands against you. You pay for it, no matter what you do afterwards. Good and bad don’t cancel each other out. It don’t lighten a twenty-pound load on one end of a pole to hang twenty-one pounds on the other end. The pole’s got to carry ’em both.”

I hesitate to call this a Western for grown-ups, because that usually just means the sexual element isn’t completely repressed. But Winds of Morning is certainly written from a more mature and morally, economically, even ecologically realistic perspective than just about anything I’ve ever come across that had the label “Western” applied to it. Several dozen characters pass across the stage in the course of the book, and not one gets less than a fully-rounded treatment.

Even the landscape gets a fully-rounded treatment — and what book could qualify as a Western without plenty of landscape:

The river had changed color a little; it was not blackish, as it had been when we looked at it from the hillside, and not roily, as lowland rivers always were after a hard rain, but milky green, like snow water that has thawed too fast for the air to separate from it. The current was swift, but it held to its ordinary level as if the torrents of rain flooding into it had all been beneath its notice.

And, of course, there have to be horses. Amos and Hendricks have both spent their lives caring for, and relying on, their horses. The horses have come to command a certain amount of respect:

It was useless trying to ride the horses down such a place; they had enough work merely to keep their feet under them and keep going, so we dismounted and followed along behind. Halfway down, the slope steepened so we could hardly stand up on it, but the horses by then had discovered how to manage it without wearing themselves out. Instead of trying to walk with the rocks moving and shifting underfoot, they merely started a patch sliding, set back, and coasted on it till it stopped, and then moved on and started another one to coast on. Not many animals are smarter than a range horses, when he is left free to figure things out for himself.

There’s a limit to this respect, though. In fact, we find that horses may have formed a bit too much of Amos’ perspective:

Horses and women. Leave either of them alone with only a man to depend on for company, and they could develop an intelligence so quick and sensitive that it was uncanny to be around. Herd them back with others of their species, and they dropped instantly to a depth of dull pettiness and mental squalor that made a man wonder how he could ever have credited them with intelligence at all….

Personally, I haven’t met many women who’d say that being left alone with a man raises the net IQ. And though Davis tosses a romance in to top Winds of Morning off, it’s the weakness element in the novel, and the most expendable. Men, horses, landscapes, and weather are already enough to make this a rich, intelligent, and thorough enjoyable piece of writing.

A Book-of-the-Month Club selection at the time it was first published, Winds of Morning sold well, but vanished after one paperback run. The Greenwood Press reissued it for academic libraries in 1972 and a small Western press, Comstock Book Distributors, reissued it in hardback in 1996, but these editions are harder to find that the original Morrow release. Fortunately, there are plenty of used copies to be found on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, so there is no excuse for letting this terrific book gather dust. Heck, I’ll even offer to buy your copy if you’re not satisfied after reading it.

Reviews

• Manas Journal, 13 February 1952:

Once in a while — once in a very great while we find the temerity to comment upon what is commonly called the “artistic value” of a novel or drama. Having so long championed the view that ideas and ideals are always the Real, and that even the most impassioned recounting of experiences is valueless unless it points a way toward realization of an ideal, a reviewer cannot help but feel a bit of a turncoat if he first stakes out claims for a piece of writing chiefly because he warms to the way it is written. Yet H. L. Davis’ Winds of Morning tempts such extravagance, despite the fact that it is a Book of the Month selection and that BoM reviewers have praised it for much the same reasons.

Davis does have a marked sort of idealism, however, even though it is not addressed to any particular social or psychological problem. It is felt, for instance, in attitudes toward the creatures of nature and the beautiful land which supports them. It is present in the form of compassion and understanding when the subject is crime and criminals, and it emerges most of all in the respect shown for those who are courageously independent. Perhaps good writing always does something of this nature, if it is really good writing, at all.

Winds of Morning is not, in the usual meaning of the word, an “exciting” book. Being so well done it needs none of those emotional injections which often are made to reinforce the efforts of even skillful writers to convey a point of view or an interpretation of experience. Instead, without in the least giving the impression of trying, Mr. Davis helps the reader to feel that each moment of common, everyday life may hold a further awakening of the mind.

• Time magazine, 7 January 1952

The story begins with a young deputy sheriff who is sent out to herd an old hoss-wrangler and his strays through the wheat country and into open territory. On the trip, by a series of stumbling inadvertencies, he runs down a murder story and falls in love. He chews over old times and old ways in dozens of small passages of talk with the oldtimer, and with himself. He also takes a deep breath of the wilderness around him, and the reader breathes it with him.

“The noise of a late-lingering flock of wild geese going out to its day’s feeding in the wheat fields woke me the next morning,” Davis may write, with a mildness that is really intensely restrained affection. “The sky was already beginning to fill with light, and there were a few cold yellow sun streaks on the high ridges…”

Such passages give Davis’ prose, and his story too, a quality of imminence—as though at any moment they might break out in crashing event. They never do. The action of the book, though now and again it holds some excitement, has no importance; it rises quietly out of the big land, and sinks quietly back into it. The natural world, in fact, is the only real character in Winds of Morning; the people in the book appear chiefly as traits of that character. Ordinarily, this would be a fatal flaw. The measure of Novelist Davis’ success is that he will almost certainly make a great many readers decide that his favorite country deserves the affectionate priority he gives it.

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Winds of Morning, by H. L. Davis
New York: William Morrow & Company, 1952

Alamut, by Vladimir Bartol

UW librarian translates classic Slovenian novel

from University Week, Vol. 22, No. 8, Thursday, November 18, 2004 :

It’s a novel about the founder of a sect of assassins driven by an extreme interpretation of Islam. His fanatical followers, who have a cult-like attachment to their leader, are trained to become “live daggers” in a holy war, and are promised an afterlife in paradise as a reward for their martyrdom.


The location of this tale? Eleventh century Persia. And the novel itself, a fictionalized account of a real historical personage (sometimes called the world’s first political terrorist), was written in 1938 by Slovenian author Vladimir Bartol. Now, thanks to the work of a UW librarian, the novel, titled Alamut, is available in English for the first time.

Michael Biggins, Slavic and East European librarian and affiliate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, spent the last 18 months translating the nearly-forgotten novel that in the past 20 years has been recognized as a classic in Slovene literature….

Bartol’s work was written as Slovenia saw the rise of totalitarianism in three of its neighbors, Italy, Germany and Russia. “The novel,” Biggins says, “is sui generis, unlike anything else published in Slovenia up to that time. It is an exploration, in novel form, of the nature of totalitarianism, and the ways that political power can manipulate the public’s consciousness, and, he said, “resonates with 20th and 21st century experience in many ways.”

The main character is portrayed as sympathetic, a well-read man with great humor and intelligence. “The novel doesn’t supply any ready answers or snap refutations of totalitarianism,” Biggins says. “In fact, the trappings of totalitarianism are portrayed as quite appealing.”

Even after examining the novel at the microscopic level of a translator, Biggins still finds it “delightful. It is well crafted, and being that close to it was a pleasure.”

The publisher is Seattle’s Scala House. The publisher’s representative walked into Biggins’ office one day looking for the Slavic Studies librarian, to see if Biggins knew a suitable translator. Biggins, who has many book-length translations to his credit as well as numerous poems and short stories, jumped at the opportunity. I’d known about Alamut for at least 15 years. It had become a cult classic in Yugoslavia in the 1980s.”

Note: You can find out more about Alamut at the Scala House Press website: http://www.scalahousepress.com/titles/alamut.php.

Reviews

Midwest Book Review

First published sixty years ago, Alamut is a literary classic by Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, a deftly researched and presented historical novel about one of the world’s first political terrorists, 11th century Ismaili leader Hasan ibn Sabbah, whose machinations with drugs and carnal pleasures deceived his followers into believing that he would deliver them to a paradise in the afterlife, so that they would destroy themselves in suicide missions for him. Flawlessly translated into English (and also published in eighteen other languages), Alamut portrays even the most Machiavellian individuals as human – ruthless or murderous, but also subject to human virtues, vices, and tragedies. An afterword by Michael Biggins offering context on the author’s life, the juxtaposition of his writing to the rise of dictatorial conquest that would erupt into World War II, and the medly of reactions to its publication, both in the author’s native Slovenia and worldwide, round out this superb masterpiece. An absolute must-have for East European literature shelves, and quite simply a thoroughly compelling novel cover to cover.

The Seattle Times

This novel is loosely based on the life of 11th-century Ismailite Hasan ibn Sabbah, whom some credit with masterminding the idea of suicide missions and whose very name, by some accounts, has given rise to the word “assassin.”

Before tackling this novel, Bartol engaged in a decade of research. He offers interesting insights into the origins of the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam, and “writing as he was during the ascension of totalitarianism in Europe” he also conveys broader meditations on the nature of fanaticism.

For all of its provocative ideas and sometimes eerily prescient incidents, “Alamut” is also successful simply as an entertaining yarn.

Bartol devises a shifting collage of passions, adventure and sacrifice. The book’s exotic settings are sumptuously described, and the characters are charismatic and complex — despite the fervent aims of some of them to subscribe to single-minded devotion.

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Alamut, by Vladimir Bartol
Seattle: Scala House Press, 2004

The Great American Novel, by Clyde Brion Davis

Excerpt

In my year as a newspaper reporter I have interviewed several other prominent men, but they were as chaff blown in the wind. Probably the most famous of these was Admiral George Dewey, hero of Manila Bay.

Admiral Dewey was here to make a speech and I interviewed him at Hotel Lafayette. He is scarcely taller than I, but quite bulky. He seemed pompous and imperious. I did not like him.

I tried to talk to him about the destruction of the Spanish fleet in the Philippines.

“Everybody knows about that,” he blurted. “Happened eight years ago. Every school child knows all about it. Silly to write anything more.

“What the papers need to print is that Admiral Dewey says we need a bigger navy. Write that. Write that Admiral Dewey says we need more ships and more men. We’re rich and we can afford it.”

I said, “Admiral, don’t you think we have a pretty good navy now?”

He twisted one prong of his big white mustache and glared at me. When he is thinking about something else Admiral Dewey is a rather placid and comfortable-looking man. But he fancies himself as a fierce old sea dog. So he looked fierce at me and growled, “Pretty good! Fellow, I’ll have you understand the United States has got the best navy in the world.”

“Well,” I asked, “why, then, do we need a bigger navy?”

He shook his head in disgust. “We’ve got to have a still bigger navy because we’re the richest nation on earth. The whole world is healous of us. And we’ve got to keep them afraid. But one of our American ships is equal to two of most nations’. Take our enlisted men. They’re all young Americans. You know what that means?”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose–”

He interrupted me. He hadn’t asked the question to find out what I thought. He wasn’t a bit interested in what I thought about anything. He made that quite plain.

“It means,” he said, “that if all the offiers in the fleet were killed the enlisted men could fight the ships and do it successfully. The United States navy takes only the cream of the nation’s youth.”

He looked me up and down pointedly. “The navy will take no skinny, undersized men. A man lacking in bodily vigor is usually lacking in mental vigor. The navy wants only those young men who may work up to command. A man has got to be well-nigh perfect physically before he even gets by the recruiting officer.”

Of course I was there to meet a great man and to get an interview, but it seemed to me he was making a deliberate attempt to affront me because of my physical limitations. So I looked him up and down pointedly also. And I said, “I presume, Admiral, that must be a rather recent ruling?”

My sarcasm was lost. “Not at all,” he said, “not at all. That ruling has been a tradition with the United States navy. It used to be iron men and wooden ships. Now it is steel men and steel ships.”

Comments

Great American Novel is the journal of a newspaper reporter and editor over the course of nearly 40 years. Early on, he falls in love with a girl in his neighborhood, but through a silly misunderstanding, comes to think she has spurned him and takes off for another town in spite.

He never does reunite with her. He ends up marrying and having children, but continues throughout his years to fantasize about the love that might have been. In the end, he learns that she has died, having married after–probably–giving up hope for his return.

Davis tries to make an ironic point about his protagonist living the Great American Novel through all the years that he kept meaning to sit down and write one. And he does manage to convey a pretty vivid account of American life from the 1900s to the late 1930s. But there isn’t much beef to the Homer, his lead character, so perhaps Davis’ joke is on us as much as on the protagonist.

Review

Time, June 6, 1938:

A solemn sap, scrawny, cartoon-faced Homer Zigler was a 23-year-old, $1-a-week cub reporter on a Buffalo newspaper when he decided to become a novelist. But first, said Homer, “to the purpose of preparing myself for that career,” he would keep a journal. “The Great American Novel—” is the journal—a satire that starts off by tagging after Ring Lardner, turns off on an oily road marked Irony-&-Pity, skids into caricature, and comes to a happy halt as the June choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club—as did Author Davis’ first novel, The Anointed, a bare ten months ago.

Homer’s dogging muse is his blonde sweetheart, Fran, who “is sure I shall become a novelist of the Irving Bacheller type—which is exactly the goal at which I am aiming.” When the next best-seller type appears, he aims at it (“I can learn much of style from David Grayson,” he writes). In 1936, 30 years later, his aim is still waving around, but he hasn’t fired a shot. He just goes on filling his journal with fatuous, trite, sentimental, philistine, ingenuous, graphic practice notes: about newspaper jobs in Cleveland, San Francisco, Denver, everything from news happenings to a synopsis of his novel (a stupendous family chronicle from Jeremiah I to Jeremiah IV), from election returns to querulous data on his wife’s raising the baby on candy, from denunciations of automobiles and airplanes to pompous credos favoring Democracy. Typical of his talent is his alibi for hanging around his Kansas City landlady’s daughter: “When a man denies himself all feminine companionship,” reflects Homer, “he is likely to warp his cosmos.”

The really important entries in Homer’s journal, recurring about once a week, are his dreams of his old sweetheart Fran. These dreams start soon after he runs away from Buffalo, jealous because she talked to another boy. Homer believes his visions are mystic bulletins telling in exact detail what happens to her; he is, of course, 100% wrong. When, in one of them, Fran’s clothesline breaks, Homer writes severely: “I should think Clark [her dream husband] could at least put up a wire clothesline for her.”

Toward the last third of the journal, when Homer is in his 40s, he begins reading Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Hemingway, confesses that his “whole attitude toward literature is undergoing a renascence.” When, despite his sobered new outlook, he continues right up to his sudden end to be almost as dumb as ever, most readers will call his story a libel on even the most fatuous of would-be novelists.

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The Great American Novel, by Clyde Brion Davis
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938

The Bottom of the Harbor, Joseph Mitchell

Excerpt

from “The Rivermen”:
There are six or seven large factories in Shadyside and six or seven small ones. The Aluminum Company factory is by far the largest, and there is something odd about it. It is made up of a group of connecting buildings arranged in a U, with the prongs of the U pointed toward the river, and inside the U, covering a couple of acres, is an old cemetery. This is the Edgewater Cemetery.
Most of the old families in Edgewater have plots in it, and some still have room in their plots and continue to bury there. The land on which Edgewater is situated and the land for some distance along the river above and below it was settled in the seventeenth century by Dutch and Huguenot farmers. Their names are on the older gravestones in the cemetery–Bourdetts and Vreelands and Bogerts and Van Zandts and Wandells and Dyckmans and Westervelts and Demarests. According to tradition, the Bourdette family came in the sixteen-thirties–1638 is the date that is usually specified–and was the first one there; the name is now spelled Burdette or Burdett. Some of the families came over from Manhattan and some from down around Hoboken. They grew grain on the slopes, and planted orchards in the shelter of the Palisades. In the spring, during the shad and sturgeon runs, they fished, and took a large part of their catch to the city. The section was hard to get to, except by water, and it was rural and secluded for a long time. In the early eighteen-hundreds, some bluestone quarries were opened, and new people, most of whom were English, began to come in a settle down and intermarry with the old farming and fishing families. They were followed by Germas, and then by Irish straight from Ireland. Building stones and paving blocks and curbing for New York City were cut in the quarries and carried to the city on barges–paving blocks from Edgewater are still in place, under layers of asphalt, on many downtown streets. Some of the new people worked in the quarries, some worked on the barges, some opened blacksmith shops and made and repaired gear for the quarries and the barges, some opened boatyards, and some opened stores. The names of dozens of families who were connected with these enterprises in one way of another are on gravestones in the newer part of the cemetery; Allison, Annett, Carlock, Cox, Egg, Forsyth, Gaul, Goetchius, Hawes, Hewitt, Jenkins, Stevens, Truax, and Winterburn are a few. Some of these families died out, some moved away, and some are still flourishing. The enterprises themselves disappeared during the first two decades of this century; they were succeeded by the Shadyside factories.

The land surrounding the Edgewater Cemetery was once part of a farm owned by the Vreeland family, and the Aluminum Company bought this land from descendants of a Winterburn who married a Vreeland. As a condition of the sale, the company had to agree to provide perpetual access to the cemetery.
To reach it, funerals go through the truck gate of the factory and across a freight yard and up a cement ramp. It is a lush old cemetery, and peaceful, even though the throb of machinery can be felt in every corner of it. A part-time caretaker does a good deal of gardening in it, and he likes bright colors. For borders, he uses the same gay plants that are used in flower beds at race tracks and seaside hotels–cannas, blue hydrangeas, scarlet sage, and cockscomb. Old men and old women come in the spring, with hoes and rakes, and clean off their family plots and plant old-fashioned flowers on them. Hollyhocks are widespread. Asparagus has been planted here and there, for its feathery, ferny sprays. One woman plants sunflowers. Coarse, knotty, densely tangled rosebushes grow on several plots, hiding graves and gravestones. The roses that they produce are small and fragile and extraordinarily fragrant, and have waxy red hips almost as big as crab apples. Once, walking through the cemetery, I stopped and talked with an old woman who was down on her knees in her family plot, setting out some bulbs at the foot of a grave, and she remarked on the age of the rosebushes. “I believe some of the ones in here now were in here when I was a young woman, and I am past eighty,” she said. “My mother–this is her grave–used to say there were rosebushes just like these all over this section when she was a girl. Along the riverbank, beside the roads, in people’s yards, on fences, in waste places. And she said her mother–that’s her grave over there–told her she had heard from her mother that all of them were descended from one bush that some poor uprooted woman who came to this country back in the Dutch times potted up and brought along with her. There used to be a great many more in the cemetery than there are now–they overran everything–and every time my mother visited the cemetery she would stand and look at them and kind of laugh. She thought they were a nuisance. All the same, for some reason of her own, she admired them, and enjoyed looking at them. ‘I know why they do so well in here,’ she’d say. ‘They’ve got good strong roots that go right down into the graves.'”

Comments–from A Reader’s Delight, by Noel Perrin

“Mitchell [was] a North Carolinian who became a New Yorker. He went straight from the University of North Carolina to a New York newspaper [The New York Herald Tribune–ed.]. First a reporter, he quickly turned into a feature writer, and then he became an essayist, the best in the city. [He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1938 and remained with the magazine until his death in 1996, although his last piece for the magazine was published in 1965–ed.]. Some think he was … the best in the country. Others, more temperate, put him in a tie for first with John McPhee.

Before he ceased to publish, Mitchell brought out five books. At least two of them are masterpieces: McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and The Bottom of Harbor. I love them both, but I love The Bottom of the Harbor more. I’ve reread it every three or four years for twenty-five years, and my opinion of it is still climbing.

The book contains six long essays, all connected with the waterfront. One–the only one some lesser person might have written–is abouut rats: the three varieties that inhabit New York, spread plagues, come and go on ships. That piece is merely brilliant reporting.

The other five are a kind of writing for which there is no name. Each tells a story, and is dramatic; each is both wildly funny and so sad you can hardly bear it; each tells its story so much in the words of its characters that it feels like a kind of apotheosis of oral history. Finally, like the Icelandic sagas, each combines a fierce joy in the physicality of living with a stoical awareness that all things physical end in death, usually preceded by years of diminishment. One winds up admiring Mitchell’s characters (all real people), loving them, all but weeping for them, maybe hoping to live as gallantly.

… Mitchell, who has a genius for finding real-life metaphors, tells you early on about an old graveyard in the lower part of the town. It’s quite a large one, and it’s still in use. It is entirely surrounded, however, by a modern factory–a huge one, belonging to the Aluminum Company of America. The cemetery forms a two-acre garden in the middle. Funerals go in an out through the factory gate, as do people visiting graves or people who simply want to picnic in the beautiful old graveyard. That was part of the agreement when the company bought part of what was once the Vreeland farm.

Not only that, there are rosebushes in there, descended from a rosebush that came from Holland in the 1630s. Or so, at least, Mitchell hears from an old woman whom he meets (and naturally gets to know) while she is gardening in the graveyard.

Mitchell himself could be called a gardener in a graveyard, if that didn’t make him sound much more lugubrious and much less fun to read than he actually is. … I do know that Mitchell has the gift of making roses bloom in the darkest and most unexpected places.”

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The Bottom of the Harbor, by Joseph Mitchell
Boston: Little, Brown, 1959

The Evolution Man, by Roy Lewis

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


The entire horde, we saw with relief, was at home and sitting round the fire, which was, however, spitting, sizzling and crackling in a most extraordinary manner. Every now and then an aunt arose, stuck a green stick into the embers and drew it forth again with a chunk of burning material on the end.

“Why, that’s a shoulder of horse,” gasped Oswald.

“And that’s a loin of antelope,” I replied. We took the last mile at a run, and, with our mates hotfoot behind us, burst into the family circle.

“Welcome home, my dears,” shouted Father, starting up.

“Just in time for dinner,” cried Mother, and there were tears of joy on her dear, soot-streaked face. Then there was such a shouting, hugging, sniffing, embracing and laughing. “Clementina? Oswald is a lucky man!” “And who is Miss Bright Eyes? Griselda? Just what Ernest needs, my dear!” “Petronella? but her figure is superb–who’s have thought our Alexander could get a girl like that to look at him!” “And Honoria? Well, well, how nice–and what is this you have brought us? A lovely big rock? But how thoughtful of you, dear, to bring us anything,” and so on, until I made my voice heard.

“Mother! Why on earth are you using good meat for firewood?”

“Oh, Ernest, I quite forgot my joint in all the excitement; I’m afraid it will be dreadfully overdone–” and she hastily disengaged herself from the mêlée and pulled a great, smoking hunk of antelope from the fire.

“Oh, dear,” she said, inspecting it. “This side is burnt to cinders.”

“Never mind, my love,” said Father. “You know I like a bit of crackling. I’ll take the outside with pleasure.”

“But what are you talking about?” I implored them.

“Talking about? Cooking, of course!”

“What’s cooking?” I inquired patiently.

“The dinner,” said Father. “Oh, of course, now I come to think of it, your mother hadn’t invented it before you boys went away. Cooking, my sons, is–well–is a way of preparing game before you eat it; it’s an entirely novel method of reducing–er–ligaments and muscles to a more friable form for mastication–and–er–”

He frowned, and then a happy smile broke on his face. “But after all, why am I trying to explain it? The proof of the roast is in the eating. Just try some and see.”

My brothers and our mates were crowding round the strange, aromatic piece of meat which Mother now proffered to us. The girls who had already shied at the fire, backed timidly away; but Oswald boldly seized the joint, raised it to his muzzle, sank his teeth into it and tore away a piece. Immediately his face went crimson; he spluttered, choked, gasped, swallowed violently, dropped the joint (which Mother neatly caught) and writhed in agony; water ran out of his eyes and he madly pawed his mouth and throat.

“Oh, sorry, Oswald,” said Father. “Of course, you didn’t know. I ought to have mentioned it’s hot.”

Editor’s Comments

The Evolution Man is one of my favorite things in the world: a superbly well-crafted joke. A well-crafted joke wastes not a word, yet usually manages to encompass some fundamental flip of logic, twist of phrase, or shift of perspective, such as:

Two atoms are walking along when one cries out, “I’ve lost an electron!”

The other atom asks, “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m positive.”

In The Evolution Man, Roy Lewis tells the story of “the greatest ape-man of the Pleistocene era”–at least, in the view of his family. Now, when most novelists approach the problem of writing a modern novel set in prehistory, they quickly have to confront a rather ugly practical fact: how do you write about something that took place before there was such a thing as writing? And how on Earth do you write dialogue when, as far as we know, it was all a matter of grunts and shrieks?

The default answer seems to be to create some crude subset of modern English loosely related to what the Indians speak in Hollywood westerns: “Antelope run from great noise. White man carry big fire stick.”

Lewis dispensed with such artificial devices. To him, the tale of prehistoric man could only be told in his own tongue. The fact that it turned out to be purest Oxbridge English was simply a lucky accident:

We were often hard put to it to keep up the supply of fuel for a big fire, even though a good edge on quartzite will cut through a four-inch bough of cedar in ten minutes; it was the elephants and mammoths who kept us warm with their thoughtful habit of tearing up trees to test the strength of their tusks and trunks. Elephas antiquus was even more given to this than is the modern type, for he was still hard at it evolving, and there is nothing that an evolving animal worries about more than how his teeth are getting along.

That prehistoric man also grasped concepts such as the measurement of time and distance, the classification of species, and evolution also goes a long way towards eliminating many of the discomfiting aspects of having to understand the situation of beings related to us through only genetics and deeply-buried instinctive psychology.


Thus, instead of fumbling around at several removes from the characters, we are blessed with an eloquent and perceptive narrator–Ernest. A likable chap just on the cusp of manhood, Ernest is one of a band of ape-men and -women struggling to survive near the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in the days when “the great ice-cap was still advancing.”

Ernest’s father, Edward, is the head of the band, and it is Edward’s ambitions that fuel the central conflict of the novel. Edward and his brother, Vanya, carry on a running argument: “Each went his own way, firmly convinced that the other was tragically mistaken about the direction in which the anthropoid species was evolving….”

The argument escalates suddenly when Vanya drops out of the trees to confront Edward’s latest discovery: fire.

“You’ve done it now, Edward,” he rumbled. “I might have gueesed this would happen sooner or later, but I suppose I thought there was a limit even to your folly. But of course I was wrong! I’ve only got to turn my back on you for an hour and I find you up to some freshy idiocy. And now this! Edward, if ever I warned you before, if ever I begged you, as your elder brother, to think again before you continued on your catastrophic course, to amend your life before it involved you and yours in irretrievable disaster, let me say now, with tenfold emphasis: Stop!”

Edward himself is skeptical of Vanya’s premonitions: “I mean, is this really the turning point? I thought it might be, but it’s hard to be quite sure. Certainly a turning point in the ascent of man, but is it the?”

For Vanya, however, fire is the first step down a slippery slope that can only lead to mass destruction: “This could end anywhere. It affects everybody. Even me. You might burn down the forest with it.”

Control of technology, it turns out, has been an issue for quite some time. Fire proves a lovely innovation, enabling the family to wrest a cozy cave from a band of bears, but it takes quite some effort at first. Each time the fire goes out, Edward has to hike up to the top of the nearest volcano to light a new torch and convey the flame, stage by stage, back to the cave.

The family is happy to enjoy the comfort and safety of the cave and fire, but Edward is ever restless. He sees only one direction in which to move: forward. He is ever mindful of the evolutionary imperative:

“The secret of modern industry lies in the intelligent utilization of by-products,” he would remark frowning, and then in a bound he would seize some infant crawling on all fours, smack it savagely, stand it upright, and upbraid my sisters: “When will you realize that at two they should be toddlers? I tell you we must train out this instinctual tendency to revert to quadrupedal locomotion. Unless that is lost all is lost! Our hands, our brains, everything! We started walking upright back in the Miocene, and if you think I am going to tolerate the destruction of millions of years of progress by a parcel of idle wenches, you are mistaken. Keep that child on his hind legs, miss, or I’ll take a stick to your behind, see if I don’t.”

This zeal for progress eventually leads Edward to gather his older sons, including Oswald, and lead them away from the cave. After a trek of many days, he brings them to a halt, announcing to the boys, “It is time you found mates and started families of your own for the sake of the species; and that is why I have brought you here. Not twenty miles to the south there is another horde…”

The boys protest: “People always mate with their sisters,” one cries. “It’s the done thing.”

“Not any more,” responds Edward. “Exogamy begins right here.”

Edward sets his sons in search of mates, at the threat of a run-through with his trusty spear. Off they head, each chasing an ape-girl over hill and dale, until they encounter “one of the very greatest discoveries of the Middle Pleistocene”: love.

Cheerfully mated, the brothers head back to the camp with their women, and in the scene excerpted above, find the family yet further evolved through the invention of cooking. Eating cooked meat brings unexpected benefits, including healthier teeth, better digestion–and leisure.

The family masters group hunting, and celebrates its new members with a great feast of elephant, antelope, and bison, sauced with berries, blood, and aepyornis eggs. Edward rises to offer an after-dinner speech brimming with hubris: “To every other species we cry: Beware! Either you shall be our slaves or you shall disappear from the surface of the earth. We will be master here; we will outfight, outthink, outmanoeuvre, outpropagate and outevolve you! That is our policy and there is no other.”

“Yes there is,” Vanya retorts. “Back to the trees.”

As ever, pride goeth before the fall. A few days later, Edward and one of his sons discover the magical combination of flint and lodestone. They make their own fire, and run back to the family bursting with pride: “We’ve done it! Hurrah! Hurrah! We’ve done it!”

Unfortunately, Edward lacks the foresight to envision the cautions of Smokey the Bear. Vanya’s direst predictions come true, and the family finds itself on a forced migration in search of new hunting grounds. Perfectly wonderful new grounds it does eventually find, but these, inconveniently, already have occupants. This leads to the dilemma: to share the secret of fire or not?


Edward the booster’s reaction can be expected, but how the family resolves the dilemma is not. And therein lies the great twist in this joke. Progress, it turns out, is not inevitable. (I would leave it at that, but the title of the French translation of The Evolution Man telegraphs the punchline: Pourquoi j’ai mangé mon père).

Despite his hand in Edward’s demise, Ernest does note, with respect, “that in his passing he helped to shape the basic social institutions of parricide and patriphagy which give continuity both to the community and to the individual.”

Plato’s parable of the cave may predate The Evolution Man by a few thousand years–but Roy Lewis’ version is inifinitely funnier.

Note: The Evolution Man was recommended on Crooked Timber’s “A different book list.”

Other Comments

· Review of The Evolution Man by novelist David Louis Edelman:

While Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man is filled with Cro-Magnon humor, the book has much more simmering in its prehistoric pot than gags about stone tablet typewriters. Beneath its mammoth-skin covering, the book wrestles with the very idea of technology and how far humanity should take it, from the point of view of a culture where turning back to all fours was a tangible possibility.

· Terry Pratchett on The Evolution Man, from “Close Encounters: Eminent writers, editors and critics choose some favorite works of fantasy and science fiction”, The Washington Post, Sunday, 7 April 2002:

I first read The Evolution Man by Roy Lewis (in and out of print all the time — a Web search is advised!) in 1960. It contains no starships, no robots, no computers, none of the things that some mainstream critics think sf is about — but it is the hardest of hard-core science fiction, the very essence. It’s also the funniest book I have ever read, and it showed me what could be done. It concerns a few hectic years in the life of a family of Pleistocene humanoids. They’ve learned to walk upright and now they’re ready for the big stuff — fire, cookery, music, arts and the remarkable discovery that you shouldn’t mate with your sister. Because it’s too easy, says Father, the visionary horde leader. You can’t get a head of water without damming the stream. In order to progress humanity must create inhibitions, frustrations and complexes, and drive itself out of an animal Eden. To rise, we must screw ourselves up. Nonsense, says his apelike brother Uncle Vanya. Get back to the trees, it’ll all end in tears! And so the debate rages under the prehistoric sky until, one day, someone invents the bow and arrow. . . . And we know what happened next. The debate continues. But never has it been put so well as in this insightful book.

Find Out More

Locate a Copy

The Evolution Man, by Roy Lewis
London: Penguin Books, 1963

First published as What We Did to Father
London: Hutchinson, 1960

Also published as Once Upon an Ice Age
London: Terra Nova Books, 1979

House of All Nations, by Christina Stead

Excerpt


The only political shadows were the first great Japanese attack on Manchuria and the terrifying rise of Hitlerism in the May, 1932, elections. All those who had been depending on German Social-Democracy, and on a return to liberalism or monarchy financed by Germany’s creditor states, were bitterly disappointed; at this moment the wing of terror spread its shadow over Europe, and the governing classes, in despair since 1929, began to see that Fascism was not simply an expedient to be used on a lackadaisical southern people, but a real salvation for their property. At this time the socialist friends of Alphendery began to tremble; the wisest predicted a hundred years of domination. Jules even became captious and cruel and couldn’t bear Alphendery to mention socialism or to wish the comfort of it all….

“If the stock exchange is abolished,” said Jules, “men like me will always set up a black bourse: it will come back. What you dream of are opium-den dreams, and besides you’re wasting time … You can make money … That’s what I want you to do … none of yur communist friends has ever made money, and so what brains have they? Forget them. You’re working for me!”

Alphendery laughed with contempt. “Jules, don’t worry. You’ve got time. There are plenty of tricks they can and will pull yet: every measure designed not for economic recovery but to put up the market, as if that were the first reality of economics, not merely the mercury of the middle classes…. This is the period of effrontery of capitalism and you think right, Jules, you’ve got the general line!”

“Yes,” said Jules, cooling. “I know it won’t last long, and I won’t last long; my three sons will be engineers, don’t fret! This is the day of the short-play heroes. No more Rhodes and houses of Rothschild!”

Comments from Michael Upchurch’s essay in Rereadings, edited by Anne Fadiman

“It was an odd sensation, more than two decades after first encountering House of All Nations, to look again at a book that had shaped me in such serious and absurd ways, for it unerringly revealed how much one can’t know, or can’t remember, about one’s own reading and writing.

“In House of All Nations, it is this very lack of judgment that in collusion with her giddy, caustic humor, allows Stead to probe so deeply. The book may feel like an indictment, but it’s not an indictment of particular characters–it’s an indictment of a society in economic anarchy that is heading inexorably toward war. Her characters, as they see it, are just making the best of a bad hand….

“A second reading confirms how well assembled the book is, how deftly Stead juggles her vast cast and her many narrative strands, and how clearly she keeps a subplot’s pivotal details before the reader over a stretch of five hundred pages or more. A second reading also reveals a vein of the book that somehow escaped my notice the first time around, or else had faded from memory: the finely shaded and loving tribute it pays to European and Levantine Jewry. … More than half the main characters in House are Jewish, and they compose a rich mosaic of personalities and types–some rascally, some generous, some observers of their faith, others ebulliently cynical.

“Everywhere there is a sense that an intrinsic part of European character is being squeezed into an impossible corner. Stead had no way of imagining the particulars of the death-camp horrors in store. Yet she, like her characters, sensed something awful, just over the horizon, with a conviction approaching clairvoyance….

“Clearly, House of All Nations does plenty of things I’ll never be able to do. For a start, it catches me up passionately in a subject matter that, on the surface, I have no interest in as a reader and no talent for as a writer. (Surely this is one definition of a great book.) It shows me that in the right hands, even the most unpromising topics–wheat shipments, letters of credit–can give rise to fictional wizardry.

“For the longest time, I have to admit, the book misled me. It was a holy grail, a talisman, a reference point, and I embraced it the same way I’ve stepped aboard the wrong train, eager to begin my journey but headed in the wrong direction. I remain in awe of House of All Nations, knowing I’m not likely to pull off anything like it.

“But after all, there’s no need; it’s already been done.”

Locate a copy

House of All Nations, by Christina Stead
First published New York: The Viking Press, 1938

Fables in Slang, by George Ade

Excerpt

The Fable of the Caddy Who Hurt His Head While Thinking

One Day a Caddy sat in the Long Grass near the Ninth Hole and wondered if he had a Soul. His Number was 27, and he almost had forgotten his Real Name.

As he sat and Meditated, two Players passed him. They were going the Long Round, and the Frenzy was upon them.


They followed the Gutta Percha Balls with the intent swiftness of trained Bird Dogs, and each talked feverishly of Brassy Lies, and getting past the Bunker, and Lofting to the Green, and Slicing into the Bramble–each telling his own Game to the Ambient Air, and ignoring what the other Fellow had to say.

As they did the St. Andrews Full Swing for eighty Yards apiece and they Followed Through with the usual Explanations of how it Happened, the Caddy looked at them and Reflected that they were much inferior to his Father.

His Father was too Serious a Man to get out in Mardi Gras Clothes and hammer a Ball from one Red Flag to another.

His Father worked in a Lumber Yard.

He was a Earnest Citizen, who seldom Smiled, and he knew all about the Silver Question and how J. Pierpont Morgan done up a Free People on the Bond Issue.

The Caddy wondered why it was that his Father, a really Great Man, had to shove Lumber all day and could seldom get one Dollar to rub against another, while these superficial Johnnies who played Golf all the Time had Money to Throw at the Birds. The more he Thought the more his Head ached.

MORAL: Don’t try to Account for Anything.

Comments

from Reader’s Delight, by Noel Perrin:

There was no way I could talk about George Ade without beginning by quoting him. He is irresistably quotable. And not just to casual reviewers, but to Serious Novelists. For example, when Theodore Dreiser was writing Sister Carrie, he wanted to describe the traveling salesman that Carrie meets on the way to Chicago in terms that would make instantly clear how deft the fellow was at picking up girls. It was the work of a moment to lift about a page from Ade’s “Fable of the Two Mandolin Players and the Willing Performer” and insert it in his text as if written by him. (He did remove most of the capital letters. Sister Carrie is written in normal orthography, and the passage would have been Extremely Conspicuous if he had not.)

I don’t blame Dreiser for a second, and I understand why he was so hurt when he was accuseed of plagiarism. What he said in substance was that no one ever had described a fast operator so well, and no one ever would describe one so well, so it made every kind of sense to use these marvelous words, and he was simply paying George Ade the sincerest of compliments. Besides, they were both from Indiana….

George Ade was a famous man from a few days after Fables in Slang was published until around 1920. Rich, too. He made so much money that he bought up most of his native county in Indiana to have for a hobby–and that was just one way of spending it.

Then he gradually dropped into obscurity–though as late as 1927, some of the fables were being syndicated as a comic strip. There are two reasons, I think. One is that success spoiled him. He published ten volumes of fables in all, and the second five aren’t nearly as good as the first five….

The other is that his vein is a very narrow one. The best hundred or so of his fables are nearly flawless–and they would be even without the capitals, just as e.e. cummings would still be a good poet with them. But in any other form of writing he was just a competent if remarkably prolific writer….

It is irresistable to quote George Ade. If there were more room, I would probably quote the entire fable of the Stuffer family, prosperous farm folk who move to town and attempt to continue eating in the heroic style to which they had been accustomed–and since it is one of Ade’s longest fables as well as one of his funniest, I would wind up seriously unbalancing this book. Instead I’ll merely urge you to find out what happened to the New York Person who had them trembling in Fostoria, Ohio. It’s not what a complacent eastener might suppose. There is a Turnabout of the most satisfying sort. Ade was good at that.

For More Information

Locate a copy

Fables in Slang, by George Ade
New York. Duffield & Company, 1899

Proud Destiny, by Lion Feuchtwanger

Excerpt

The Theatre francais advertised the first public performance of The Crazy Day, or The Marriage of Figaro by Monsieur de Beaumarchias. Admission free. The cost would be met by the King.

This announcement was greeted with astonishment, laughter, exultation. That Beaumarchais shuld produce his famous comedy, which the King had vetoed, on this crazy day and at the King’s expense was a master-stroke, and the performance was looked forward to with far greater excitement than was the royal procession through the streets of Paris.

The management of the Theatre francais had its hands full. The people of Paris had been invited, the people of Paris would come, the people of Paris were numerous. No more than an infinitesimal proportion of the thousands who would clamour for admission could find accomodation in the theatre, and thousands of others were asking for tickets–aristocrats, courtiers, relatives of the actors, writers and critics. It was decided to reserve a quarter of the seats for these distinguished applicants and to throw the remaining eight hundred places open to the populace.

When the doors were opened at five o’clock there was a wild scrambling in which men and women struggled with one another and many were trampled underfoot. The well-schooled police of Paris had the utmost difficulty in preventing women and children from being crushed to death.

At last all had taken their seats, shouting, lamenting, laughing. Then the guests of honour made their entrance. According to an ancient tradition, at these free performances the best seats were reserved for the ladies of the halles and the coal-heavers. As guests of honour they arrived, as was only fitting, after all the rest of the audience was assembled. The attendants cleared a path, and the other spectators greeted them with cheers as they were escorted to their seats, the coal-heavers to the King’s box, the fishwives to that of the Queen.

Never thad the Theatre francais seen such a queerly assorted audience for a premiere. Side by side sat ladies of the Court and glove-stitchers, fermiers generals and chair-menders, duchesses and women from the halles. Academicians and butchers’ assistants, in short, the people of Paris. The actors were in a fever of excitement and most of them were already regretting their rashness. Monsieur de Beaumarchais’ comedy had not been written for such an audience. This was not Athens, and it was hardly to be expected that the salted wit of Figaro would be appreciated by this motley gathering.

The three thuds were heard and the curtains parted. The audience blew their noses, cleared their throats, and went on chattering for a time. Figaro-Preville had to start three times, until eventually, after cries of “Hush! Hush!” and “Really, Madame, don’t you think you might finish your conversation at home?” the spectators setteled down to listen in silence. There was some perfunctory clapping after a moment or two, and a voice asked, “What did he say? I didn’t understand,” while others shouted, “Repeat! Repeat!” but the audience was evidently in a good humour.

Gradually the people began to grasp who these gentlemen and ladies on the stage were and what they wanted and what it was all about, that was to say that this aristocrat wanted to sleep with the bride of this nice fellow who, by the way, was one of their own class. That was nothing unusual and not much to bother about, but the aristocratwas particularly arrogant, and Figaro, who was one of themselves, was particularly engaging and had his good brains, and it was amusing and heartwarming how he told the aristocrat off. It became evident in the first half-hour that Pierre, with his sure sense of the theatre, had written a comedy which could stand the test of any audience.

Comments

Proud Destiny was German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s first work written after his rescue from occupied France by American journalist Varian Fry. The German title of the book was Waffen fur Amerika, or Arms for America, and its subject is the effort of supporters of the American revolution–first the playwright Pierre de Beaumarchais and later the American envoy Benjamin Franklin–to convince King Louis XVI of France to fund arms and other supplies to the revolutionaries.

The line from an absolute monarch to a group of revolutionaries could never, willingly, be a straight one, and it takes Feuchtwanger nearly 600 pages to get from Beaumarchais’ first audience with the King to Louis’ commitment of millions of francs to the colonial cause. Along the way come many twists, turns, and diversions through the many personalities and competing interests in the French court and society.

Some, such as Franklin’s struggle to restrain his jealous and combative co-envoy, Arthur Lee, or Beaumarchais’ maneuvers to avoid his creditors, can get a bit tedious, but Feuchtwanger manages to keep the reader’s interest with superb episodes of characterization such as the visit to Paris by the Austrian Emperor Joseph, Queen Marie Antoinette’s older brother.

Proud Destiny suffered from over-selling when it first came out. Picked up as a Book-of-the-Month Club featured title, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, which is why you can find dozens of copies for under three bucks at AddAll.com and eBay. Time‘s reviewer complained that “the novel smells faintly of the Hollywood atmosphere in which it was composed. The period sets are painstaking, the main characters are photogenic.”

Feuchtwanger himself said that the real hero of the novel was “that invisible guide of history: progress.” Although he’d started work on the book before leaving France, he felt it was only in the freedom of America that his characterization of Franklin could ring true. Critically, Proud Destiny is considered one of Feuchtwanger’s lesser works, but it’s a rich and entertaining read. The book certainly holds up now much better than many other best-sellers from 1947. Even Time admitted that “the reader can savor from one large dish a thousand tidbits of 18th Century custom & morality that he would otherwise have to root for in the garden of biography and memoirs.”

Locate a copy

Proud Destiny, by Lion Feuchtwanger
New York: The Viking Press, 1947

Working with Roosevelt, by Samuel Rosenman

Working with Roosevelt, by Samuel Rosenman
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952

Excerpt

If a visitor, familiar with the appearance of the Cabinet Room on an ordinary day, were to have looked into it, say about midnight of February 21, 1942, he would have been quite startled.

All the lights were burning. But there were black curtains pulled across the windows now; we were at war, and it was blackout time. The shining surface of the large table was hardly visible, for it was covered from one end to the other with papers, books, telegrams, letters. At one end of the table was a large tray; on it were a big thermos pitcher of coffe, two piles of sandwiches covered by a damp napkin, a large number of bottles of beer, Coca-Cola, ginger ale, and plain charged water, some cups and saucers and large glasses, a bowl of cracked ice, and a bottle of whisky.

Seated around the table were three men. They were all in their shirt sleeves and were obviously tired, for the had been working all day on a speech. They had just said good night to the President in his study in the White House, and then walked over to the Cabinet Room to do some more work on the speech. The tray of food and drinks had come over from the pantry of the White House at the direction of the President.

Robert E. Sherwood poured himself a whisky and soda; Harry Hopkins helped himself to a cup of black coffee and a sandwich; I took a bottle of Coke and two sandwiches. I phoned upstairs to the four stenographers who had been asked to report for duty at 11:00 PM to work with us….

Whatever the speech, the general pattern of our collaboration was always the same. When Bob had finished, he would silently pass to me what he had written; and Harry and I would read it together. We might say, “OK” or “fine” and clip it in the right place; or we might say “try again–that’s too complicated or too oratorical for the Boss”; or we might suggest a few changes here and there. The same thing would happen with what I had dictated to Grace, and with what Harry had written.

The inserts the President himself had dictated got the same close scrutiny. We changed his language and often cut out whole sentences. Where there was some dissent among us, we made a note to talk to the President about it the next day.

There was no pride of authorship; there was no carping criticism of each other. We were all trying to do the same thing–give as simple and forceful expression as possible to the thoughts and purposes and objectives that the President had in mind. Whatever language and whoever’s language did it best was the language we wanted.

“Here is a suggestion from Berle which is OK and one from Marshall which is a peach,” I said that evening, passing them around. By common consent, they went into the next draft, each marked as an insert clipped to the right sheet.

After a few pages of the carbon copy of draft five were corrected and added to in this way, I pushed a button in the table near the Presiden’ts chair. It was a bell connected with the messenger room. A messenger came in and took the pages to the girls upstairs to make six copies. This draft would be number six. From then on we sent the new draft up page by page, so that almost as soon as we were finished they could sent it down retyped, and we could immediately begin working all over again on the seventh draft–polishing, correcting, adding, deleting.

Comments

When the US invaded Iraq, I was moved to reread Working with Roosevelt, Samuel Rosenman’s memoir of his years as FDR’s speechwriter. It’s a terrific book that’s pretty much been out of print since it was first published in 1952 or so. Rosenman essentially takes the reader through FDR’s career from 1928 on by, using key speeches that he worked on as milestones.

What I recalled from first reading it, and was particularly struck by in contrast with Bush’s rhetoric the second time around, was how sensitive FDR was to the mood and temperament of the public. He wasn’t a guy who made his decisions by polling, as Clinton was sometimes accused of doing. His genius was in understanding when and how to move the country forward on an issue and when to back off and let people figure things out. Faced with a decision like invading Iraq, FDR would certainly have taken a much longer-range perspective and put a lot more work into building a case that had public and coalition support that would last more than 90 days.

Rosenman also shows throughout the book how positive and sympathetic FDR was on a public and private level. He could have his fits of pique, but he certainly wouldn’t have engaged in the kind of “Either you’re with us or you’re against us” crap we’ve had to endure from the Bush administration. When, as in the famous “Martin, Barton, and Fish” speech, he did choose to strike back at his opponents, he did so with humor, not vindictiveness.

I’ve read a number of Roosevelt biographies, as well as first-hand accounts from people like his secretary, Grace Tully, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and even the head of his Secret Service detail, but Rosenman’s is by far the most illuminating when it comes to capturing how FDR balanced the public and private worlds of the presidency. I find it interesting that several Republican presidential speechwriters (including Peggy Noonan and Stephen Hess) single out Rosenman’s book as “a classic,” “wonderful,” and “one of my favorites.” President Carter himself is reported to have read and appreciated it–although, in his case, he certainly failed to learn from FDR’s example.

Reviews

• G.W. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune Book Review:

This is, in fact, basically not a partisan but a technical book. It is a detailed and authoritative account of how the public utterances of a President of the United States are put together…. The particular value of the Rosenman account is that it deals with a President who was conspicuously successful in his employment of the method. It is all the better because it carefully describes the errors, as well as the triumphs. The book admits that Roosevelt made mistakes, and points them out. Indeed, it goes further–it admits that Samuel Rosenman made mistakes, and points them out, too. This makes it admirable as a textbook for aspiring politicians.

• The New Yorker, 31 May 1952:

An engrossing study of the late President in one of his less familiar roles–that of man of letters.Judge Rosenman, who helped write a great many of Mr. Rossevelt’s speeches from the time of his gubernatorial campaign in 1928 until his death, believes that the President was more of less propelled into authorship by the fact that in the very early thirties “there were few boks and no national precedents for the philosophy or legislation that came to be known as the New Deal. He had to write his own books in the form of speeches and messages, and then create the precedents himself to carry them out.” In his survey of this twofold creative process, which of necessity grew more and more complex as Mr. Roosevelt’s burdens multiplied, Judge Rosenman–an admiring but by no means purblind biographer–conveys an excellent idea of the development of both the content of and the philosophy behind most of Roosevelt’s major addresses, and analyzes, as far as possible, the literary contributions made by the President’s collaborators. Although Judge Rosenman gives full credit to these assistants (especially to Stanley High and Robert Sherwood) for their labors, he makes it abundantly clear that in his opinion they merely added graces notes to compositions that were the President’s own.

Locate a copy

Working with Roosevelt, by Samuel Rosenman
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952

Strange Conquest, by Alfred Neumann

Excerpt

They pushed through the roadblock and ran along the houses in two columns without losing a single man. They received fire, but it was irregular, inaccurate, and seemingly hesitant. Two men were lost at the next roadblock and here it became apparent that the enemy took poor aim, fired too high, and couldn’t face a frontal attack, especially when the attackers yelled. The Falange got through.


But then there was yelling behind them in their own tongue, terrible in its agony. Now they knew that one of the two who had gone down before the roadblock had not been dead, but would be soon. They wanted to go back.

“Keep going!” roared Kewen, brandishing his pistol.

They got a few paces further, then drew fire from every window, and behind them the road block closed like a cattle gate.

“Keep going!” Kewen yelled, and they snarled at him like angry dogs. He dropped his pistol, stunned by their mutiny.

They crawled into the two nearest houses on their right and left and, roaring with rage, cleaned them of five snipers each. They cleaned them out with their bayonets.

They didn’t budge from those holes. Five of them now lay outside, between the two houses, and two lay back by the roadblock. That made seven. Jonny Felice lay in the outskirts of the town. That made eight. In Tola under the rattling coconuts lay Crocker. That made nine.

Achilles Kewen was still around. He popped back and forth between the two houses, made speeches, insulted the troops, wasted his luxuriant stock of Kentucky curses on them. They didn”t budge from their holes. Every time he skipped across the street, he was fired on, and finally it got too much for him, or he lost his head. He planted himself in the middle of the street and yelled: “You yellow bastards! You yellow bastards!” He yelled it only twice. Then he ripped his mouth wide open as for a huge laugh, and only when he pitched forward did anyone see the hole in his forehead. Now there were ten gone.

Comments

This is one of the few books discussed on this site whose publisher seems to have deliberately set out to keep it neglected. First published in German in 1949 as Der Pakt, it was translated by Ransom Taylor and published by Hutchinson in 1950 as Look Upon This Man. Unable to find a major publisher in the U.S. for the book, Alfred Neumann settled for its release by the fledgling paperback publisher, Ballantine Books. Ballantine sat on the book for several years, at a loss for how to market this fictional account of William Walker’s invasion and takeover of Nicaragua in 1855, decided to treat it as a Western. That any serious reader ever discovered the book after that was close to miraculous, and any fan of Westerns would have given up after finding it had nothing to do with sheriffs and cowboys.

Neumann himself faded from critical and popular attention even before the book was published. Once considered an equal of Arnold Zweig and Hermann Broch, Neumann saw his star peak in the late 1920s. His medieval tale of courtly intrigue, The Devil, was a best-seller in the U.S. and Ernst Lubitsch directed an Oscar-nominated film of his play, “The Patriot”.

Within a few years, however, he found himself worse off than when he started. His magnum opus, a trilogy about the life of Napoleon III, was panned by most critics as overwritten and tedious. His books were among the first to be banned by the Nazis, who also pressured Mussolini to force Neumann to leave Italy, where he had settled in the 1920s. Like Brecht, Mann, and other less famous German writers, he eventually found refuge in Hollywood, where he got occasional work as a screenwriter. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Story for “None Shall Escape” and his novel, The Six of Them, the earliest account of the White Rose resistance movement in Germany, was well received. But Neumann had little luck finding work or publishers from then on, and he died in 1952, a self-exile in Switzerland like Mann.

Influenced by Laurence Greene’s 1937 biography of Walker, The Filibuster, Neumann wrote Der Pakt quickly, hoping to regain his former popularity with German readers. While the novel failed to win more than passable sales, its narrative and style clearly benefits from Neumann’s haste. In contrast to his rather verbose historical novels of the late 1920s and 1930s, in Strange Conquest Neumann’s writing is lean, fast-moving, and, at points, almost telegraphic in its brevity.

Yet he manages to squeeze an almost panoramic view of Walker’s career into less than 200 pages. Much of the novel is related in vignettes of three to five pages, most of them dramatic set-pieces like the retreat of Walker and his 36 men from their abortive attempt to form an abolitionist republic in Baja and Sonora, Mexico in 1853, or the destruction of Granada as Walker’s rule in Nicaragua collapses. Walker himself remains something of an enigma, yet Neumann manages to suggest how the appeal of power ultimately led Walker to turn from abolitionist to dictator, even reinstating slavery in an attempt to maintain his power.

Neumann also sketches in a wide cast of supporting players, from his officers–an idealistic socialite from San Francisco, a gambler of murky French origin, a Prussian baron–to the scoundrels and saintly figures he encounters in Nicaragua. One might go so far as to argue than Strange Conquest prefigures the magical realist style of later Latin American novelists such as Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa. Take the author’s name and date of publication off Strange Conquest and it could easily be taken as the work of one of their contemporaries. Whatever the case, it certainly deserves a better fate than to be lost forever in mouldering stacks of Westerns in a few scattered bookstores in the U.S..

In Print?

Strange Conquest, by Alfred Neumann
New York: Ballantine Books, 1954

The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt

“Atomics is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra but you would want to take it by degrees because you might spend the whole night proving a bit of it with rulers and cosines and similar other instruments and then at the wind-up not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened you would have to go back over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures as delineated from Hall and Knight’s Algebra and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole thing properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hurting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in bed.”

“Very true,” I said.

“Consequently and consequentially,” he continued, “you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings out of the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?”

“What?”

“When the wallop falls, the atoms are bashed away down to the bottom of the bar and compressed and crowded there like eggs under a good clucker. After a while in the course of time they swim around and get back at last to where they were. But if you keep hitting the bar long enough and hard enough they do not get a chance to do this and what happens?”

“That is a hard question.”

“Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you persevere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer and the other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar.”

“That is well-known,” I agreed.

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.”

I let go a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture.

“And you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half-human almost half-man, half-partaking of humanity.”

Editor’s Comments

The works of Flann O’Brien are not neglected at all–at least in Ireland. All of his books can be found on the shelves of any major Dublin bookstore, as can a number of compilations and critical volumes. Flann was a pen-name of Brian O’Nolan; under another, Myles na Gopaleen, he was for years a popular comic columnist for The Irish Times. A drinker himself and a resident of Dublin all his adult life, O’Nolan/O’Brien would likely win a popularity contest over that expat James Joyce any day of the week.

Outside of Ireland, however, his works surface intermittently and with few witnesses, rather like the Loch Ness Monster. Some of it is understandable. His best-regarded novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, is perhaps too full of talk and Guinness not to seem a bit like a wound-up Irish drunk to more Puritanical minds.

There’s no good excuse for The Third Policeman not being a fixed feature of undergraduate courses on the modern English novel. It’s got plenty enough symbolism and message to make it teachable, and you can’t argue that going to Hell isn’t a serious enough subject for the book to hold its own with any other English novel since the 1920s.

What’s more, it’s also a hell (no pun intended) of a lot of fun. First off, you have the talk, which starts with the narrator’s own recounting of his tale. As Myles na Gopaleen, O’Nolan/O’Brien wrote his column in English, Irish, Latin, and sometimes a mixture of all three or a new language of his own resembling none. He would offer, as a didactic exercise, elucidations on words from the Gaelic:

Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.
Act of putting, sending, sowing, raining discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling,addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprachauns denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump….

Another recurring feature was the “Catechism of Cliche,” which poked fun at the language of the very newspaper that printed him:

“What can one do with fierce resistance, especially in Russia ?”
“Offer it.”
” But if one puts fierce resistance, in what direction does one put it ?”

” Up.”

This was a writer who could go on a word bender for days longer than just about any other word drunk except Joyce. His newspaper columnist side could never let himself stray too far away from the point of keeping the reader entertained. So while we witness a brutal murder and gradually realize, along with the narrator, that what makes Hell Hell is that there is, in the words of Satre’s play, no exit, there are also plenty of superbly odd and funny moments. O’Brien/O’Nolan admitted it himself in a letter to William Saroyan: “When you are writing about the world of the dead–and the damned–where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks.”

Many of these come in the form of comments on the subject of one or another theory of a nineteenth century scientist (or sorts) named de Selby. Night, for example, he conceived of as “an accretion of ‘black air'”–i.e., volcanic ash. The noise of a hammer striking an object came from the bursting of “atmosphere balls” (air being composed of millions of such balls). There are too many choice de Selby theories not to quote at least one:

Human existence de Selby has defined a “a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief,” a conception which he is thought to have arrived at from examining some old cinematograph films which belonged probably to his nephew. From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or serialism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even “living.” If one is resting at A, he explains, and desires to rest in a distant place B, one can only do so by resting for infinitely brief intervals in innumerable intermediate places….

… Whatever about the soundness of de Selby’s theories, there is ample evidence that they were honestly held and that several attempts were made to put them into practice. During his stay in England, he happened at one time to be living in Bath and found it necessary to go from there to Folkestone on pressing business. His method of doing so was far from conventional. Instead of going to the railway station and inquiring about trains, he shut himself up in a room in his lodgings with a supply of picture postcards of the areas which would be traverse on such a journey, together with an elaborate arrangement of clocks and barometric instruments and a device for regulating the gaslight in conformity with the changing light of the outside day. What happened in the room or how precisely the clocks and other machines were manipulated will never be known. It seems that he emerged after a lapse of seven hours convinced that he was in Folkestone and possibly that he had evolved a formula for travellers which would be extremely distasteful to railway and shipping companies.

There is more than sublime silliness going on here, though. Note that almost parenthetical “or even ‘living’.” This is precisely what the narrator, in effect discovers to be his situation. Although he has a succession of experiences, he finds in the end that his sense of being alive is genuinely only a hallucination. Hell has no exit, which means he is doomed to keep walking around in circles, repeating the same bizarre experiences, but each time in some subtly different way. The narrator and Divney meet again right at the end and find themselves walking into a police station. The same enormous policeman greets them and with the last line of the book brings them around for another lap:

“Is it about a bicycle?” he asked.

Comments

Howard Moss, The New Yorker, 28 September 1968

Starting out as a realistic novel, The Third Policeman rapidly changes into a book of magical deeds and transformations. Divney and the narrator kil a rich old man, Phillip Mathers, in order to get their hands on a black box containing three thousand pounds. The narrator is finishing off Mathers with a spade when Divney disappears, taking the black box with him; he returns, empty-handed, a few moments later. He eludes the narrator’s questions about its whereabouts for months, then finally leads him to Mathers’ house, where the box has been hidden under the floorboards. Divney remains outside, and the narrator enters the house, but when he reaches in under the floorboards to get the box it slips out of his hands. (We learn later that Divney has sustituted explosives for the pounds.) Immediately, the narrator becomes aware of Mathers’ presence in the room–a ghost, the narrator thinks, though, unknown to him and the reader, he is now a ghost himself….

Complicity in Mathers’ murder leads the narrator to a kind of Hell dominated by a surrealistic police barracks–one-dimensional from one point of view, three-dimensional from another–the governing center of a countryside populated by people who are in part bicycles. An exchange of atoms between a cyclist and his machine produces various percentages of man-bike or bike-man, and it is one of the chief tasks of the policemen to keep track of the percentages from moment to moment….

The Third Policeman is a comic but sinister invention: on the one hand, a regional farce in which a criminal struggles with an entrenched rural bureaucracy, and, on the other, a mysterious allegory of universal pitfalls. It is a metaphysical comedy in which tricky camerawork and fleet ballet maneuvers of style bear the stamp of a technical master who has an occasional Irish weakness for blarney. Wit sometimes descends into whimsey. Completely original, it paradoxically brings to mind, as so many less original works do not, the world and tone of other writers, and of Joyce and Finnegans Wakes in particular. (A one-legged man who first tries to murder the narrator and then befriends him is named Finnucane.) Though O’Brien’s book makes no claim to the grandeur and sweep of Joyce’s epic, its hero is dead, Joyce’s asleep. Both books are circular in construction, slyly erudite in a similar fashion, and depend for a good deal of their force and comedy on linguistic invention. The outsize, cardboard caricatures of the three policemen suggest Kafka’s “assistants” in managing simultaneously to appear both innocent and forbidding, and their cryptic dialogue owes more than a little to Alice in Wonderland.

O’Brien belongs to a school of fiction more interested in archetype than in character and in metamorphosis than in action. His puppetlike figures do not suffer as individuals in any ordinary sense; they suffer for everyone in some general amusement park of the soul while confronting their unexpected fates. In O’Brien’s Hell, guilt is a moral implication, not a matter of psychological anguish, and intimidation is the major terror, not humiliation. O’Brien mines and transforms; he takes the weather of other writers and creates a climate of his own. The Third Policeman, written in Ireland in 1940 and published here a year after the author’s death, is both sui generis and the product of a literary convention. And for no reason one can definitely point to, it is as strangely emotionally affecting as it is funny.

Charles Foran in Lost Classics

I believe it is a novel charged with the same weird energy as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Both deal with the aftermath of a bomb. In Pynchon, the consequence is social derangement; all changed utterly by humanity having bitten into the apple of mass destruction. In The Third Policeman, the consequence is a narrator transported from his own familiar but deeply strange world into a parallel one that is strange but deeply familiar. O’Brien invest slapstick and lowbrow comedy–a blowhard cop, gags with bicycles and dogs–with overtones of menace. Tall tales turn swiftly dark; the “crack,” as the Irish call good banter, starts to crack up. Where we are is Ireland, the book infers–pace Marlowe’s Faustus on hell–and must ever be.

The Third Policeman is about how our subconscious propels us where our conscious selves wisely refuse to go. It is definitely a parable. It definitely heads down a narrow and dark thematic road. But the novel is also a first draft by an author who shows signs of being disconcerted, perhaps even scared, by what he is creating. (The use of footnotes, supposedly to mock academic pomposity, is a clear hedge.) When I read the book as a graduate student in Dublin I thought it an amazing piece of writing. Few agreed with me. When I did my thesis on the novel, I kept finding more and more there: layers and fears, dares and cop-outs. I couldn’t believe so few scholars took the work seriously. In the end, I doubt I convinced many to reconsider.

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Locate a Copy

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967

The Lake, by George Moore

Excerpt

He turned into the woods and walked aimlessly, trying to escape from his thoughts, and to do so he admired the pattern of the leaves, the flight of the birds, and he stopped by the old stones that may have been Druid altars; and he came back an hour after, walking slowly through the hazel-stems, thinking that the law of change is the law of life. At that moment the cormorants were coming down the glittering lake to their roost. With a flutter of wings they perched on the old castle, and his mind continued to formulate arguments, and the last always seemed the best.

At half past seven he was thinking that life is gained by escaping from the past rather than by trying to retain it; he had begun to feel more and more sure that tradition is but dead flesh which we must cut off if we would live. . . . But just at this spot, an hour ago, he had acquiesced in the belief that if a priest continued to administer the Sacraments faith would return to him; and no doubt the Sacraments would bring about some sort of religious stupor, but not that sensible, passionate faith which he had once possessed, and which did not meet with the approval of his superiors at Maynooth. He had said that in flying from the monotony of tradition he would find only another monotony, and a worse on–that of adventure; and no doubt the journalist’s life is made up of fugitive interests. But every man has, or should have, an intimate life as well as an external life; and in losing interest in religion he had lost the intimate life which the priesthood had once given him. The Mass was a mere Latin formula, and the vestments and the chalice, the Host itself, a sort of fetishism–that is to say, a symbolism from which life had departed, shells retaining hardly a murmur of the ancient ecstacy. It was therefore his fate to go in quest of–what? Not of adventure. He liked better to think that his quest was the personal life–that intimate exaltation that comes to him who has striven to be himself, and nothing but himself. The life he was going to might lead him even to a new faith. Religious forms arise and die. The Catholic Church had come to the end of its thread; the spool seemed pretty well empty, and he sat down so that he might think better what the new faith might be. What would be its first principle? he asked himself, and, not finding any answer to this question, he began to think of his life in America. He would begin as a mere recorder of passing events. But why should he assume that he would not rise higher? And if he remained to the end of his day a humble reporter, he would still have the supreme satisfaction of knowing that he had not resigned himself body and soul to the life of the pool, to a frog-like acquiescence in the stagnant pool.

Comments

I picked up The Lake inspired by Kay Boyle’s comments about it in Writer’s Choice:

The Lake, which I first found in Paris in 1923 among the tattered second-hand books on one of the stalls along the Seine, gave me the courage then, and through the years, at least to attempt to live and to take action without moral or physical fear. The young Irish priest, whose story this book is, spoke to all my uncertainties, and I came to see his love story not only as metaphor for his country’s long political and religious conflict, but metaphor as well for the condition of all mankind.

A powerful claim to make. The Lake tells the story of Father Oliver Gogarty, who has spent his whole life around the large Irish lake of the title. Coming to the priesthood at first from a sense of mission, as he comes into his thirties he finds himself in great distress over his treatment of the woman who was his organist and choirmistress.

Rumors begin to spread around the small rural parish about the woman–that she has been meeting an unknown man, that she is pregnant with his child. Father Oliver confronts her and she admits it. Mistaking his jealousy for righteous indignation, he condemns her at the next mass, and she is forced to leave the parish.

Within a few months, he begins to regret his actions and becomes distraught over the thought of her plight as an unwed mother. Eventually, a priest in London writes to say that she has given the child to be raised by a farm couple and is making her way giving music lessons. The priest chides Father Oliver that his “responsibility is not merely local, and does not end as soon as the woman has passed the boundary of his parish.”

The woman, Nora Glynn, is clearly strong and independent, and when Father Oliver writes to beg her forgiveness, she is far more ready to move on than he. He first tries to entice her back to the parish with the offer of a job teaching music at a nearby convent and girls’ school, then stoops to telling her that she must save him from an eternal damnation for allowing her soul to be lost.

Nora finds a job as secretary to an agnostic writer working on a book about the historical roots of Christianity, and travels with him around Europe and the Middle East conducting research. Father Oliver continues to torture himself over her situation, long past the point where it’s clear she no longer needs or cares about his anxious attention.

In the end, Father Oliver realizes that his feelings for Nora were intimate, not religious, and with that, he comes to accept that he must let her go. But this realization also forces him to confront his reasons for staying in the priesthood, serving a parish he’s known since childhood. He has to decide if he will stay in hopes of someday recovering his faith, or go and risk taking his chances in a larger world without the familiarity and structures of the priesthood and the lake he’s lived beside every day of his life. I leave it to the reader to learn what he decides.

Most of The Lake is told through the thoughts of Father Oliver, along with the letters he exchanges with Nora and Father O’Grady, the priest in London. Moore is particularly effective in capturing the changing features of the landscape around the lake, the woods and fields that Father Oliver often walks among to escape from his parishioners. He sees not only the life of the plants and animals around the lake, but also its history–the Welsh castles, an abandoned abbey, a mill town passed over by the Industrial Revolution.

The result is a highly effective balance between the exterior and interior worlds, which keeps The Lake from becoming morbidly introverted. The love story is really just the mechanism through which Moore brings about Father Oliver’s awakening, and he never tries to make it anything else. Even though The Lake was written over a hundred years ago, it’s a remarkably fresh and alert narrative, very much to be recommended to any fan of Irish literature. W.B. Yeats considered it, along with A Drama in Muslin, one of Moore’s two masterpieces.

Although Amazon lists The Lake as out of print, it is still available from Colin Smyth Publishers, Ltd. in the U.K..

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The Lake, by George Moore
First published 1905

Sweet Dreams, Michael Frayn

Excerpt

There’s always a bad moment, Howard knows, after the porter’s unlocked your room, switched everything on, drawn the curtains, and gone away with a huge tip because you had only a folder of fresh banknotes in your pocket, when you sit down helplessly and think, well, here we are, this is it, I’ve arrived. Now what? Shall I go down and eat in the hotel restaurant, or shall I go out? And if you’re not careful you sit there blankly in the one armchair, with the curtains drawn and your bag on the stand, until it’s too late to do anything.

But just before this moment arrives, as soon as the door closes on the porter, Howard notices the writing-table, and all the little giveaways which the management has arranged under the lamp–books of matches, a long-stemmed rose in water, writing-paper, and picture postcards of the hotel. The postcards absorb him at once. They show (for instance) guests dining in the hotel’s famous Oak Room, with the celebrated choice of 142 dishes from all over the world, to the accompaniment of a three-piece Mariachi band. If you tilt the card back and forth a little, the picture appears to move. The hands of the Mariachi players strum their guitars. The forks of the diners flash from plate to mouth and back. Sommeliers reach discreetly forward to refill glasses. The waiters’ spoons dig up down up down in the great trifle on the world-famous dessert trolley. Gentlemen’s jaws chomp, ladies’ smiles flash. A couple in one corner kiss discreetly over the brandy.

Howard tilts the card back and forth until he has seen the couple in the corner leave, and the manager quietly coping with a customer who refuses to pay the bill, then puts it carefully into his pocket to save for his children, who love this kind of toy. He puts four books of matches into his pocket as well. These are for his wife, who smokes. For himself he will take a handful of the pencils they always leave out for you … But here he makes a surprising discovery. At the top of the blotter, where the pencils should be, is a pencil-case. It’s made of red plastic, and there’s something familiar about it which he can’t quite identify; something about the feel of its grained texture, and of the shiny red popper button on the flap … He pulls it open. There’s something even more familiar still about the contrast between the grained texture on the outside, and the red smoothness of the inside.

Then for some reason, he smells it–and at once he knows. It’s his first pencil-case, that he had for his sixth birthday. For nearly thirty years it’s been lost. And now it’s been lovingly found again by the management of the hotel to welcome him. It has its new smell still–the perfect red plastic smell, the smell of writing numbers in arithmetic books ruled in squares; the smell it had before it got mixed up in the dust and Plasticine and tangled electric flex in the toy-drawer.

Comments

There are very few books I’ve ever read a second time. For me, the bigger problem is what not to read. There is only one book, however, I’ve read a third, fourth, and, recently, fifth time: Michael Frayn’s Sweet Dreams.

Frayn’s name is considerably better known now than when I first read the book in the late 1970s. At the time, the US paperback edition I bought compared him to Vonnegut, guaranteed bait for a geeky undergrad like me. In reality, Frayn’s writing is not that much like Vonnegut’s, but by the time I’d reached the fourth page, I no longer cared.

Sweet Dreams opens as the protagonist, Howard Baker, a thirty-something Englishman, is sitting at a stop light. A dozen different thoughts flash through his head while he waits to proceed onto what he thinks is Hornsey Lane. But when he puts the car into gear and accelerates, he finds it’s not Hornsey Lane: “It’s a ten-lane expressway, on a warm mid-summer evening, with the sky clearing after a day of rain.”

The highway approaches a great metropolis. Neon signs flash against the pale sunset and the black clouds in the north. “He recognises some of them–the Pan-Am symbol, Dagens Nyheter, the Seven Names of God.” Over the car radio, St Juliana of Norwich tells him, “And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

The city proves to be a marvelous place, the best of all cities blended into one. He checks into a wonderful hotel, where the porter shows him that he can fly–if he wants to. Frayn’s limpid prose–and if any writing deserves that adjective, it’s the writing in Sweet Dreams–is perfect for capturing this heavenly place. Take this description below of Howard’s first night’s sleep in the city.

He goes to sleep with the feeling that things are going to go right for him in this town.

And enjoys a perfect night’s sleep–deep, clear, and refreshing, like gliding down through sunlit water on a hot day; such a perfect night’s sleep that he is entirely unconscious of how much he is enjoying it, or of its depth, clarity, and refreshingness, or its resemblance to gliding through sunlit water on a hot day; so perfect that from time to time he half wakes, just enough to become conscious of how unconscious of everything he is.

As you may have guessed by now, Howard has, in fact, gone to heaven, even though he never quite realizes the fact. Heaven turns out to have all the same problems Howard ran into on Earth. Still, Howard has such sincerity and wonder that these problems seem somehow new, fresh, and full of possibilities, not difficulties.

I think that spirit is what brings me back to Sweet Dreams. Frayn achieves such a delicate balance between innocence and cynicism that he leaves you optimistic, light-hearted, but not naive. The tone of this book is comic but not boisterous; satirical but not biting; affectionate but not cloying. It’s one of the most perfectly realized books I’ve ever read–and perhaps the only book I’ll read a sixth time.

Frayn himself once remarked on the book,

Sweet Dreams is an ironic examination of the illogicality of the idea of heaven. I feel the same way about the idea of an ideal society on earth–they all fall to pieces logically. You can improve society piecemeal, of course, but I think the awful thing about changing anything is how many other changes that one change must necessitate. You can’t make one thing better without making other things worse…. Sweet Dreams is the best book, and the prose there is as good as I’ll ever write. But I don’t like what it reveals about me.

Sweet Dreams was long out of print, but it seems to be back on the shelves again thanks to the success of Frayn’s Spies. Anthony Burgess put it on his list of the best 99 English novels since 1939, and it deserves to be kept in print and widely read from now on.

Reviews

Margaret Drabble, New York Times Book Review, 13 January 1974

Frayn has a most unusual talent. His books see, so deceptively simple, but they linger in the mind for years, and can be re-read with the greatest pleasure. “Sweet Dreams” is no exception. … The novel is a satire on modern fashions–clothes, houses, jobs, attitudes, beliefs–but it’s more than that. It’s an account of growing older, it’s a comment on the nature of man. … The accuracy of Frayn’s observation is dazzling; in a few words, he creates a man, a room, a dinner party. What he does, he does precisely. … Most satirists and writers of Utopias dislike people profoundly, but Frayn’s work is informed with the most beautiful goodwill.

New Yorker, 14 January 1974

Frayn, as he must be to carry off this sort of thing, is an impeccable writer. He is not a science fictionist but a moralist, and his novel is a kind of Candide–a vividly contemporary Candide, full of the most serious high comedy and the most enormous belly laughs

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Sweet Dreams, by Michael Frayn
London: Comstock, 1973