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Dictatorial Literature

Muammar Gaddafi reading his Green BookWherever Muammar Gaddafi may be at the moment and whatever may be left of his powers as a dictator, it’s safe to predict that the number of readers of his famous “Green Book”–or, to call it by its full title, The Green Book: The Solution to the Problem of Democracy, The Solution to the Economic Problem, The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory–is headed for a swift decline. Such is the fate of long, dull, dogmatic diatribes written in the oxygen-thin atmosphere of absolute power (and without the benefit of an impartial editor) when one can no longer command them to be handed out in triplicate to all of one’s subjects and made the object of hours of close study and memorization.

Libyans will no longer profit from the insights of the Third Universal Theory–although they can now freely ask what happened to the first two. They will have to search for a solution to the problem of democracy without Gaddafi’s handy crib book. And they may find themselves struggling with the basics of human reproduction without the Great Leader’s wise advice:

Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A woman, being a female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a woman does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, less active for about a year, which means that all her natural activities are seriously reduced until she delivers her baby…. The man, on the other hand, neither conceives nor breast-feeds. End of gynaecological statement!

Gaddafi’s The Green Book now takes its place on a shelf much over-filled with the works and memoirs of former dictators. No longer mandatory reading, these volumes languish, neglected by all but die-hard loyalists, masochists, and those inclined to morbid curiousity.

Admittedly, there is something about these books that makes watching paint dry seem thrilling. Vladimir Lenin set the tone a hundred years ago with such cliff-hangers as Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, and Stalin followed suit with Economic Problems of Socialism in the U. S. S. R. and other page-turners. Mao had the bright idea to package his best tid-bits in what became a global best-seller, Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, otherwise known as the Little Red Book. Although perhaps it sold a little too well, for a couple years later he released a tract titled, Oppose Book Worship.

At least Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao wrote their own material. Seeing the number of volumes that comprise the collected works of Kim Il Sung or Enver Hoxha, it’s hard not to speculate about secret forced-ghostwriting camps.

One odd tribute to the freedom of the Internet is the fact that one can get free access to most, if not all, of the works of late 20th century’s dictators. Gaddafi’s Green Book is available at www.mathaba.net/gci/theory/gb.htm, for example, and Lenin and Stalin’s works at the Marxists Internet Archive. Although Saparmurat Niyazov, otherwise known as Türkmenbashi, Leader of all the Turkmens, died in 2006, you can still savor the wisdom of his magnum opus, Rukhnama: Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen at www/ruhnama.info, at the official Turkmenistan government site, and at several Rukhnama (or Ruhnama) fan-sites (although Ruhnama.com is now defunct).

Rukhnama: Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen is my favorite dictatorial opus. In addition to more Turkmen geneaology that you could possibly imagine, there are little parables that I am still pondering the meaning of, such as:

Once upon a time, a wife and a husband without any children were preparing to go to Mecca on pilgrimage. However, they could not decide what to do with the two hundred sikkes, which was their life-savings. Finally they divided the sikkes into two equal bundles. They left one of these bundles in the care of one of their neighbors. And they left the other bundle in the care of their Turkmen neighbor.

The Turkmen neighbor said to them: “Open the box in that corner and put the bundle in it.”

On returning from pilgrimage, the husband and wife went to take their money.

The first neighbor said them: “Oh neighbor, I used your money and increased your 100 sikkes to 150 sikkes. I have taken some of them for myself.”

Then they went to their Turkmen neighbor and asked for their sikkes. Their Turkmen neighbor said to them: “Open the box in the corner and take your money.”

Nothing happens by chance in life. A Turkmen saves the goods left in his care better than his own goods.

Niyazov appears to have taken this particular lesson very seriously. Estimates of his personal holdings in private Swiss and German bank accounts range as high as $3 billion. As one report during his time in power put it, “A figure such as Niyazov, who is not subject in practice to any basic checks and balances, can dispose of state funds through the banking systems of Germany and other European countries without anybody knowing what exactly it is that he does with the money.” A Turkmenbashi, it seems, saves his countrymen’s goods much, much better than his own goods.

North Korea is now headed into its third generation of Supreme Leaders, and we can only hope that Kim Jong-un will produce something to rival his father Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema, where we learn that “The director is the commander of the creative group” and that “A director, however talented, cannot imagine a new and audacious cinematic presentation if he does not know the Party’s policies well.” Here we see the fatal weakness that undermines the capitalist boss-gang productions of Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Scorsese: utter ignorance of PArty policies in the absence of helpful “field guidance” from the Supreme Leader. Thanks to the spirit of Juche, we can all spend hours clicking through the E-library of the works of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Suk (wife to the first, mother to the second).

Not all dictators have had their works preserved online, however. There appears to be just one copy of the English translation of Haitian ruler Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Essential Works Volume 1: Elements of a Doctrine available for sale, and that at a price of $200. Ugandan strongman Idi Amin appears to have been a man of few written works, although a few copies of his pamphlet, The Middle East Crisis: His Excellency the President Al-Hajji General Idi Amin Dada’s contribution to the solution of the Middle East crisis during the third year of the Second Republic of Uganda can be found–the book surviving better than his solution to the crisis. It’s not been transcribed for the web, but there are still plenty of copies of Answer to History, the rambling memoirs of the ex-Shah of Iran, who was dying of cancer as he worked on the book–the very last thing he dictated, so to speak.
Cover of Enver Hoxha's 'With Stalin: Memoirs'
The pinnacle of dictatorial literature, though, has to be Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha’s With Stalin: Memoirs, written a few years before he died (and available online, thanks to Marxists International). In it, Hoxha recalls five trips he made to Moscow to meet with Stalin, between 1947 and 1951. As far as I know it’s the only book in which you get two dictators for the price of one.

In their first conversations, Stalin seemed most interested in how effectively Albania was serving as a buffer against encroachments from Greece, which was coming out of its civil war and headed towards western democracy. But most of the time they discussed such timeless topics as whether the trains ran on coal or oil and how much cotton per hectare the collective farms were producing. Stalin seems to have been especially fond of agriculture. As they parted company for the last time, he and Hoxha had this memorable exchange on the subject of seeds:

“What about eucalyptus? Have you sown the seeds I gave you?”

“We have sent them to the Myzeqe zone where there are more swamps,” I said, “and have given our specialists all your instructions.”

“Good,” said Comrade Stalin. “They must take care that they sprout and grow. It is a tree that grows very fast and has a great effect on moisture. The seed of maize I gave you can be increased rapidly and you can spread it all over Albania,” Comrade Stalin said and asked: “Have you special institutions for seed selection?”

“Yes,” I said “we have set up a sector for seeds attached to the Ministry of Agriculture and shall strengthen and extend it in the future.”

“You will do well!” Comrade Stalin said. “The people of that sector must have a thorough knowledge of what kinds of plants and seeds are most suitable for the various zones of the country and must see to getting them.”

Stalin clearly saw that people who had been farming their lands through many generations desparately needed party cadre officers to tell them what to plant. One had only to look at the remarkable results the Soviets had achieved through collectivization to know that.

Hoxha did see Stalin in person one time after that, in 1952 at the 19th Party Congress, where “for the last time I heard his voice, so warm and inspiring.” He closes by assuring his readers that “the Party of Labour of Albania would hold high the title of ‘shock brigade’ and that it would guard the teachings and instructions of Stalin as the apple of its eye.” One can see the teardrop forming as Hoxha finished this line.

So, as one more dictator debates that eternal choice: suicide or exile?, we can take comfort in the knowledge that no matter what may follow in his wake, there will, at least, be the consolation that a captive audience no longer has to read his nonsense and be expected to take it seriously.

The Chosen Valley: the Story of a Pioneer Town, by Margaret Snyder

A few days ago, President Obama stopped in the town of Chatfield, Minnesota while on a bus tour of the Midwest. He visited a kids’ summer camp and posed for some photos with them.
President Obama joking with kids in Chatfield, Minnesota on August 15, 2011
By pure coincidence, I just finished reading a book about Chatfield and had started this post when the President’s stop brought this small town into the spotlight for an hour or so. Margaret Snyder’s 1948 book, The Chosen Valley describes how a quiet spot, a small valley where a creek joins the Root River, a tributary of the Missippi, was settled and grew for its first fifty or so years.

Most Americans have a general notion about how we got from the days of the American Revolution to today–about hunters and trappers exploring ever westward, followed by settlers who set up small farms, then small towns, the railroads, industrialization, wars big and small, and somehow, to now. How many, though, have any notion of the step-by-step changes that took us from wilderness to land claims to towns to sewer systems, electic lights, and school districts? The Chosen Valley does just that for Chatfield, population (2010) 2,779, and it’s a story that deserves to be far better known than either Chatfield or Snyder’s book are today.

Chatfield got its start in 1853, when one Thomas Twiford, who was essentially a would-be land developer, scouted out an area along the banks of the Root River, a small tributary of the Mississippi in the far southeast corner of Minnesota. He hurried back to the nearest town of any size and managed to get several other men interested enough to pack family and chattel into wagons and head to the place they decided to name Chatfield after a prominent judge of the new Minnesota Territory. As Snyder shows, through careful tracing of what at times were often intricate arrangements of ownership and financing–particularly during the rush of land speculation surrounding the mapping out of possible railroad routes–money, politics, and wheeling and dealing was far more often at the heart of development than anything we might nostalgically call the “pioneer spirit.”

Not that there weren’t plenty of hardships:

When January let loose its fury the hills were no shelter against the blizzards that blotted the world in a frenzy of snow, or the sly cold that crept into bed with the sleepers. John Luark’s wife died in the depths of that winter’s cold, despite the care of two doctors. Every man in town took his turn in the sad labor of chipping out a burial place in ground flint-hard with frost. They made her grave on the slope between the little house she lived in and the road that wound up the side of Winona Hill The townsfolk stood silent about the grave that January of 1855 as the first of their dead was buried.

The first few dozen settlers were followed by others the next spring. Within another year, the town had a flour mill, several general stores, regular church services if not a church building, a one-room school (private at first), and a land office. The last was set up by one Jason Easton, an ambitious young man from New York state who had arranged through a family friend in Washington, D. C., to win the job of opening a land office for the partitioning and sale of properties throughout the area of southeast Minnesota around Chatfield.

“The biggest thing going in Western business was undoubtedly land and the lending of money for the purchase of land,” Snyder observes. And here we begin to learn that, contrary to the myth of how the West was won, the transfer of land from its uncharted, undeveloped state to small farmers and businessmen–orchestrated through government land offices and countless political arrangements large and small–was the single most important factor in the transformation of the Midwest.

Jason Easton of Chatfield, Minnesota (circa 1876)Jason Easton embodied the zeal for deal-making that was an essential survival skill for an effective entrepreneur in the growing Midwest. He cajoled banks in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia to get loans or attractive rates on his deposits. He fired off volleys of letters asking for patience when money was tight and delighted in managing to foist off a lot of dried peaches that “were wholly worthless but brought 5 cents per pound.”

For Chatfield and its surrounding counties, Easton was at the center of what was perhaps, for the Midwest, its most controversial and significant development: the routing and building of its first railroads. Chatfield had significant competition with nearby towns in the decision of where lines linking St. Paul and other growing cities and towns to Chicago. It failed to win a spot along the main line, but Easton was able to convince the Southern Minnesota Railway Company to run a spur to Chatfield from Winnebago, and to get himself appointed as president of the Southern Minnesota Railway Extension Company. He founded the town’s bank, bought up large plots of property around the town that he hired out to tenant farmers, and organized and invested in dozens of enterprises, more of which succeeded than not.

Easton apparently found it difficult to shift his attention from his latest batch of deals. Snyder recounts that, “there was one direful passage when Easton, deep in a cut-throat fight for the wheat markets of the state, refused to go to his mother, who had begged him to come in her serious illness. His letter to his brother, who had written for the mother, said: ‘. . . the demands of my business are just now so great that it is impossible for me to leave. My comfort must be in knowing that you are giving our mother every care.’ He enclosed ten dollars and urged his brother to ‘call on me freely if anything more is required.'”

In terms of wealth, Easton was an exception in Chatfield. One man did make a small fortune with a dry goods store, but he then moved his family to Minneapolis. Most of the people in and around the town were poor. Some, like the man who set up the town’s first mill, fared better. Everyone had no choice but to work hard. As a result, Snyder notes, there is no evidence of any art or literature, beyond amateur poems for ceremonial occasions, being created in the town.

Most of the first decade’s settlers were Americans–some first generation, some with American roots going back over 200 years. All but three states were represented in the 1860. Nearly a third of these came from New York, where poor families had a harder time getting enough land for a working farm or were moving west as Irish, Poles, and other immigrants began taking jobs for lower pay.

In 1860, one in four Chatfield residents was foreign born. Snyder traces the paths some of these followed to come to the town. Norwegians were spurred by the revolution of 1830. Germans by the revolution of 1848. One man snuck across the border from Bohemia into German one night to escape an abusive miller he was indentured to. The miller, James Marsar Cussons, “son and grandson of millers and with uncles and cousins beyond number in the trade,” came from England to have an opportunity to run his own mill. Ireland accounted for the greatest number by far–in large part due to the great potato famine of 1845-1852. As the figures from the census show, none of them came from southern Europe.

Foreign-born inhabitants of Chatfield, Minnesota (from 1860 Census)

Perhaps as much as a third or more of the new settlers moved on after a year or more. There were enough failed farms and stores to keep anyone from getting too complacent. The soil in the valley was excellent. Wheat was probably the most common crop, but almost everything one could plant was tried by someone at least once. Apples, plums, hops, sugar beets, potatoes, pumpkins, cabbages, and most other plants familiar from northern Europe did well. Most farms had some cows and hogs, but only the latter were raised for meat. Milk was too valuable to let a cow get killed for.

Dairy farming grew to be one of the town’s biggest businesses. In 1889, a few of the dairy farmers formed the Cooperative Creamery, which became a model for much of the country and one of the few employers to meet its payroll throughout the Great Depression.

By the late 1880s, Chatfield was no longer a frontier town but a well-established, prosperous, and stable. Which meant that opportunities were no longer so easy to find. “When the Dakota country opened up,” Snyder writes, “considerable numbers of the younger Chatfield men, some of them with wives and children, turned to that West to seek their fortunes.” Others moved on thanks to the educations their parents’ hard work and success had allowed them. When the local paper surveyed a group of young men who had left the town’s school a decade earlier, it found that over half worked “in business” rather than on the farm and most of these no longer lived in the town.
A postcard view of the main street of Chatfield, Minnesota in the late 1800s.
The town’s social values began to set like concrete, too. “As the population became relatively stable, and the excitement of change and conquest was lost, new ways were found for satisfying the individual’s sense of his own worth,” Snyder writes. It’s hard to believe that sentence wasn’t written with tongue in cheek, though, because the “new ways” she then describes are the Masonic Lodge, the Odd Fellows, and the Knights of Columbus.

The town’s infrastructure also matured. The common well dug in 1854 led to a simple system of distribution through hollowed-out logs and continued to grow until a full system with a pumping station, sewers, and drains was built. The groves of trees that greeted the first settlers were wiped out within a decade to build houses and make fence posts. The telegraph arrived within a few years. Electricity, which made it possible to gather in the evenings for more than a sing-along or a dance, arrived in the 1880s and the telephone not long after.

What I most enjoyed about The Chosen Valley was that Snyder describes almost all these developments by telling us who took the first steps–which were usually to a neighbor’s door to try to stir up interest and support. Three men decide the town needs a cemetery, and arrange to have a plot of land on the ridge behind the town set aside for it. The town’s first Catholic residents bring a priest over from nearby Winona to say the first mass in 1854. By 1874, they had their own church, paid for entirely from their own contributions. An amateur bucket brigade becomes the Fire Company and eventually the town fire department. Through all these stories, The Chosen Valley makes it crystal clear that the pioneer spirit was as much about interdependence as it was about independence.

If the book has any significant weakness, it is Snyder’s limitations as a writer. There is little romance in the story of the settlement and development of Chatfield, but that didn’t prevent her from inserting lyrical little passages that read like bad high school literary club prose. And as she brings the town’s story up to her present day, she seems to have run out of ideas completely. Instead of any stock-taking or long view of the ninety years she has covered, the book ends with a description of the start of World War Two and its effect on the town that is one of the worst pieces of writing I’ve come across in quite a while: “For the future, in its turn, would become the present, and no present can wholly escape the effects of its past. Where should the people begin the task of understanding the things-that-are, if always they set it aside for the headier wine of things-to-come?” Just typing that out was painful.

The Chosen Valley appears to have been the only book Margaret Snyder ever published. Aside from the few and brief passages of purple prose, it is well worth reading if you have any interest in American history with a small h. Through the small example of Chatfield, Minnesota, you can learn a great deal about a patch of land with trees and a little river running through it became a microcosm of America (at least up to the middle of the 20th century).

The Chosen Valley: the Story of a Pioneer Town, by Margaret Snyder
New York City: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1948

The Whale and the Grasshopper and Other Fables, by Seumas O’Brien

Now I know where Samuel Beckett really got his inspiration.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Whale and the Grasshopper'Seumas O’Brien’s The Whale and the Grasshopper and Other Fables is one of the most absurd books written before the rise of surrealism, full of tales tall as Paul Bunyan that serve as the backdrop for a series of philosophical debates that wrap nihilism in a cloak of old country weave.

At heart, it’s nothing more than a collection of Pat and Mike stories–except in this case, it’s Padna and Micus. “I want to tell you about the morning I walked along the beach at Ballysantamalo,” Padna says to Micus at the start of the title story.

So I ses to meself, Padna Dan, ses I, what kind of a fool of a man are you? Why don t you take a swim for yourself? So I did take a swim, and I swam to the rocks where the seals go to get their photographs taken, and while I was having a rest for myself I noticed a grasshopper sitting a short distance away and ‘pon my word, but he was the most sorrowful-looking grasshopper I ever saw before or since. Then all of a sudden a monster whale comes up from the sea and lies down beside him and ses: ‘Well, ses he, is that you? Who’d ever think of finding you here? Why there’s nothing strange under the sun but the ways of woman.”

“Tis me that’s here, then,” ses the grasshopper. “My grandmother died last night and she wasn’t insured either.”

“The practice of negligence is the curse of mankind and the root of sorrow.” ses the whale. “I suppose the poor old soul had her fill of days, and sure we all must die, and tis cheaper to be dead than alive at any time. A man never knows that he’s dead when he is dead, and he never knows he’s alive until he’s married.”

That’s a pretty good taste of the whole book. Each tale is nothing less than fantastic. The Czar of Russia comes to visit the Mayor of Cahermore. Johnny Moonlight meets up with the Devil and Oliver Cromwell on a lonely country road. The King of Montobewlo finally gives up cannabalism after an encounter with his first Irishman. Matty the Goat seeks the advice of the King of Spain on whether it would be better to commit suicide in New York or Boston. Shauno the Rover, feeling underappreciated by the world, dresses up as Henry the Eighth and cons a Royal Navy captain to take him on a royal cruise to Sperrispazuka, where he pays a visit on the Shah. (Shauno, by the way, is “a gentleman withal,” Padna assures Micus: “Never known to use his rare vocabulary in the presence of ladies, but would wait until their backs were turned, like a well-trained married man, and then curse and damn them one and all to perdition.”)

But the actual stories themselves, even at their most ridiculous, are just excuses for Padna and Micus to play games of platitudinous one-upmanship. In the first few pages of the book, it seems as if O’Brien is doing nothing more than using some wild tales as an odd way of celebrating naive folk philosophy. “Decency when you’re poor is extravagance, and bad example when you’re rich,” Micus counsels Padna at the start of “The Whale and the Grasshopper.”

OK. I’d accept that as a wee bit o’ wisdom from the Oud Sod. But take a close look at what follows:

“And why?” said Padna.

“Well,” said Micus, “because the poor imitate the rich and the rich give to the poor and when the poor give to each other they have nothing of their own.”

“That’s communism you’re talking,” said Padna, “and that always comes before education and enlightenment. Sure, if the poor weren’t decent they’d be rich, and if the rich were decent they’d be poor, and if every one had a conscience there’d be less millionaires.”

“But suppose a bird had a broken wing and couldn’t fly to where the pickings were?” said Micus.

“Well, then bring the pickings to him. That would be charity.”

“”But charity is decency,” Micus replies. At which point it becomes clear that Padna and Micus are less country sages than precursors of Vladimir and Estragon. Indeed, one could argue they have even less of an idea what’s going on than Beckett’s pair waiting for Godot.

I suspect that the whole book is nothing more than an attempt to pop the bubble of fuzzy nostalgia surrounding the softer-headed elements of the Irish Renaissance. In O’Brien’s view, Crazy Jane isn’t insightful–just crazy. Indeed, H. L. Mencken wrote in one review that the book, “saved the Irish Renaissance from its prevailing melancholy.”

Seamus O’Brien was born in Cork and trained as a sculptor and taught at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. He took up writing in his mid-twenties. His play, “Duty” (available with four other O’Brien comedies on Project Gutenberg) was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1913, and has been called the best Irish comedy every written. But soon after that he moved to America, where he remained for decades. The Whale and the Grasshopper and Other Fables was published in 1916, after which he appears to have written nothing but an occasional article or short story. The Whale and the Grasshopper and Other Fables is available in print from a number of direct-to-print republishers, but don’t pay their exorbitant prices: get it free and use your eReader or print out a copy. After all, as O’Brien writes, “Flies never frequent empty jam-pots, but money always brings friends.”

Whatever that means.

The Whale and the Grasshopper and Other Fables, by Seumas O’Brien
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916.

Harper Perennial to release lost Jetta Carleton novel, Clair de Lune, in March 2012

Cover of forthcoming release of 'Clair de Lune'Robert Nedelkoff passed along Harper’s list of new publications for Winter 2012, which includes a listing for Clair de Lune, a hitherto unpublished novel that came to light after the Harper Perennial release of her first novel, The Moonflower Vine.

I wrote about The Moonflower Vine in late 2006 after finding a piece about it in Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. That post garnered more of a response than any other on this site. Since then, several dozen people have written to express how much they loved this book, many saying that they’re read it ten times or more.

Carleton wrote Clair de Lune between 1995 and 1997, after the death of her beloved husband, Jere Lyon. She wrote the novel, which had a working title of The Back Alleys of Spring, on a friend’s computer. Neither the writing nor the use of the PC (she’d never touched one before) was any mean feat for someone in her early eighties at the time. Before she had the chance to start looking for a publisher, however, she suffered a stroke that took her ability to speak. She died in 1999.

The story in Clair de Lune derives from Carleton’s own experiences as a young teacher in Joplin–in the same area of southwest Missouri that The Moonflower Vine is set in. Harper’s Winter catalog provides a fragmentary synopsis of the plot:

The time: 1941, at the cusp of America’s entry into WWII. The place: southwest Missouri, on the edge of the Ozark Mountains. A young, single woman named Ailen Liles has taken a job as a junior college teacher in a small town, though she dreams of living in New York City, of dancing at recitals, of absorbing the bohemian delights of the Village. Then, in her seminar, she encounters two young men: George, a lanky, carefree spirit, and Toby, a dark-haired, searching …

I’m sure it will prove less Danielle Steel-y than that last sentence suggests.

Harper’s announcement says it’s planning on a release of 30,000 copies in trade paperback, along with release in several eBook formats. Let’s hope it’s as good as The Moonflower Vine fans would wish for.

Digging into the Popular Libary at the Montana Valley Book Store

Every summer for the last few years, our family has spent a good chunk of the summer in Missoula, Montana. Each time, I take a day and travel about thirty miles west on I-90 to the little one-street town of Alberton (pop. 418) to visit the Montana Valley Book Store. Housed in an old frame building with a store front straight out of the 1900s, the store holds over 100,000 books–mostly hardbacks upstairs, with paperbacks only in the basement. It’s also–amazingly–open 365 days a year.

There is a long set of trays with relatively recent books that leads from the door to the cash register, but in general the inventory dates from the 1920s to the 1960s. Its stacks run floor to ceiling and are always worth at least a few hours of careful browsing. My favorite section is the basement, which is a treasure trove of old paperback fiction. I find it’s harder and harder to find bookstores that have more than a handful of paperbacks from earlier than the mid-1980s, so it’s a real pleasure to pick through the basement, where there’s only a handful of paperbacks newer than that.

This time, I made a point of pulling many of the titles I didn’t recognize and comparing the publication dates of the original and the paperback edition. Back in the heyday of pocket-sized paperbacks, when Pocket Books, Dell, Avon, Signet, Bantam, and other publishers were pumping out a relentless flow of releases, grabbing a dusty title from the past and slapping a gaudy cover on it was a quick and cheap way to pad out a catalog. Perhaps no other company was as fond of this practice as Popular Library, which didn’t have the advantage of being tied to a major publisher with an active line of new hardcover titles to draw upon. And sure enough, my excavations dug up a number of interesting Popular Library artifacts.

Cover of Popular Library edition of 'Johnny Bogan'The earliest title, Johnny Bogan by Leonora Baccante, published by Popular Library in 1959 with a typically suggestive cover, dates from 1931. It’s the story of two young people struggling between their desires and social mores (this was a time when pre-marital sex was still a largely taboo subject) and ends with a rape and then a murder. When first published, by Vanguard, the book received pretty positive reviews. One reviewer called it, “the finest novel I have read this year,” and the New Republic’s reviewer wrote, “Her technical method is vigorous and sure, her projection of character, especially that of Johnny, is admirable in its honesty and veraciousness [veracity?], and there is no trafficking with sentiment in a theme in which opportunities for it are endless: she accomplishes, neatly and precisely, what she sets out to do.” Johnny Bogan appears to have been the only book she ever published, although there are notices that Vanguard was going to release a second novel, Women Must Love in 1932.

Cover of Popular Library edition of 'Dusk at the Grove'The next, going in chronological order, is Samuel Roger’s Dusk at the Grove, which won the Atlantic Monthly’s $10,000 Prize in 1934 for best English-language novel of year–the first American novel to do so. At the time, the award was the biggest in the publishing business, but the list of prize winners could easily be added as another of this site’s Sources (does anyone remember the 1936 winner, I am the Fox by Winifred Van Etten? Or 1940’s winner, The Family by Nina Fedorova (also reissued by Popular Library in the 1960s)?). Opinion among contemporary reviewers, however, was mostly unanimous that Roger’s book well deserved its prize. “There should be little complaint, however, with the judges who picked Dusk at The Grove for this year’s $10,000 Atlantic Prize Contest. The still waters of this quiet novel run deep. Author Rogers deals sparingly with what his people do, more with what they say, most with what they think,” wrote Time magazine’s reviewer. The New Frontier rated it “… too good a book to be known as “‘a prize novel.'”

Dusk at the Grove follows the lives of the Warings, a family of no great means, through a series of scenes set at “The Grove,” their summer house in Rhode Island, between the years 1909 and 1931. Rogers relies heavily but apparently effectively on use of the stream of consciousness technique–indeed, one reviewer wrote that he had taken the technique as far as anyone could go with it. The story ends with the sale of “The Grove” to avert a bankruptcy, but Rogers seems to have taken an open attitude toward such changes: “I cannot help having still faith in life,” thinks Linda, the Waring’s daughter, even as she reflects on how much she regretted leaving “The Grove” as the end of each summer neared. Dusk was Roger’s third novel. He went on to publish five more, of which Lucifer in Pine Lake (1937), a study of an egotistical college professor (Rogers taught French at the University of Wisconsin for many years) was the best received.

Cover of Popular Library edition of 'The Anointed'Next in line is Clyde Brion Davis’ The Annointed, from 1937. I wrote about Davis’s second book, The Great American Novel, in one of the earliest posts on this site. Davis was a pretty prolific novelist through the 1930s and 1940s, but his work has utterly dropped from site. This is a real shame, as he’s one of the most likeable writers you’ll ever come across. A veteran newspaper reporter, he’d seen enough by the time he took up fiction to have a very clear-eyed view of human nature, but he was just too generous and optimistic a soul to let his cynicism cut too deep. Reviewing The Annointed for the New York Times, Robert van Gelder called it one of the two best first novels he’d ever read (the other was Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory, which I see finally made it in the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics last year). And the New Republic‘s reviewer wrote, “There is a Mother Goose-like combination of naivete and shrewdness to the book, a simplicity of style, an acuteness of characterization and observation”–a good summation of Davis’ approach in general. The Annointed was often compared to one of the 1930’s biggest best-sellers, Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse. While both books told the story of young men who got into a series of adventures at sea and on foreign shores, Davis managed to fit his into about one-sixth the number of pages.

Cover of Popular Library edition of 'Ceremony of Innocence'Last on the list is Elizabeth Charlotte Webster’s Ceremony of Innocence, which was first published in South Africa as Expiring Frog (not a title that even the folks at Popular Library would have taken on) in 1946. The book was selected for the Afrikaanse Pers prize (along with Daphne Rooke’s first novel, A Grove of Fever Trees). Webster was not South African, however: born in Scotland, she was living there for health reasons. To no avail, sadly–she died just two weeks after receiving the award and several months before the book actually found a publisher.

Popular Library’s cover for Ceremony of Innocence does show a nun–but it’s easily the most misleading of this batch. Ceremony, which uses the figure of a young novice, Sylvie, living in a convent outside Geldersburg (read Johannesburg), rather as Voltaire does Candide–to highlight the vanities and hypocrises of contemporary religion and society. Sylvie is found to having some kind of healing power, but this disturbs the quiet order of the Catholic church and she is smuggled out of sight while the church leaders figure out the right “spin” for her story. Unfortunately for them, she falls for one of the men hiding her and ends up bearing his child. As with Candide, Sylvie is an instrument rather than a character, and Webster uses her to cut deeply into her targets. “Several of her scenes are expert in her caustic malice,” Orville Prescott in the New York Times. Writing in 1948 for , novelist Alan Paton wrote, “I thought it was an extraordinary book. I have just read it again, and am still of the same opinion. It is not only written with a fine economy of words, but it is written with a fine economy of narrative as well; it moves on, and I do not find myself being impatient for any chapter to end.” Prescott differed, rating the book “diverting rather than moving. The rapturous acclaim which it has already received in this country seems wildly extravagant.” Nonetheless, it’s probably well worth discovering and assessing now from the distance of sixty-five years.

These Popular Library titles are just a sample of the armload I took away from this summer’s visit to Alberton. I expect at least a few of the rest to show up here in the course of the months between now and next year’s visit.

The Jester’s Reign, by Boyne Grainger

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'The Jester's Reign' by Boyne GraingerI was immediately intrigued when I came across the dust jacket of The Jester’s Reign in the Digital Gallery of the New York Public Library several years ago. The Jester’s Reign, according to the dust jacket blurb, is “A series of mysterious cosmic phenomena broke upon a startled world, defying the laws of nature and baffling the scientists” that takes place in the course of one month somewhere in the 1930s. After months of being put off by the fact that the handful of copies for sale all commanded prices of $40 and up, I finally broke down and bought one in March.

I wish I could say it was worth the wait and expense.

It starts with promise. An odd, loud, but unmistakable noise like laughter sounds for just a moment throughout the entire world. Most people are startled. Those of good humor feel the better for it. Those with shriveled up hearts feel uneasy and fearful. And a small collection of people in Manhattan sharing a small open space not much larger than an airshaft begin to find their lives coming together in unexpected ways.

At the center of this group is Mister Ergo. A quiet older man, Mister Ergo seems to have some connection with the “phenomenon,” as the newspapers quickly dub it. Or phenomena, to be more accurate, as the laughter is soon followed by a series of fantastical and gently whimsical occurences. In one of the earliest, everyone in the world stops for a moment to greet each other:

Diplomats said “How do you do?” to messenger boys, bank presidents said it to the charwomen. Functionaries said it to elevator boys. Spinsters said it to bachelors, stenographers to street sweepers, sweepers to ladies in limousines. An opera singer said it to a coal heaver, magnates said it to beggars, policemen to cab drivers, a queen said it to a lunatic, a duchess to a ragpicker. Theives said it to ministers, chorus girls to managers, general to privates, ships’ captains to stokers … and so on all through the walks of life where life was walking at that moment occurred this involuntary interchange of mutual recognition and solicitude.

Certainly the like had never been known on this planet before.

It was true that there were strange complications as a result of the phenomenon. Some were chagrined afterwards, and even mortified. For instance, two lady club members, deadly enemies, who chanced to stand side by side at a bargain counter went home and had nervous prostration because they had spoken to each other. A farmer and his wife in Vermont, who had shared farm, and farmhouse, and even bed, for forty years but had not spoken to each other since 1907, immediately applied for a divorce, unable to survive the shame of the breaking of their resolution.

Soon, the phenomena bring together a cast of characters a bit like a collision between “Major Barbara” and “Golden Boy.” There is a wealthy playgirl; an even wealthier armaments magnate; a boxer with the soul of a poet; his poor but gorgeous neighbor with an operatic voice; her snivelling gonif of a brother; a sweet spinster; and roughly a dozen others. Not one of them acquires the slightest depth of characterization in the course of the book’s 300-plus pages.

If a novel’s characters are flat and undeveloped, then its narrative could make up for that. And at first, it seems there might be some direction, some shape, some meaning to the various phenomena. Some are a bit dewy-eyed, like the rain of flowers that drop from the skies and sprout from the mouths of every cannon and rifle. Others are downright worth wishing for in real life:

… every frenzied activity was suspended, every adult straining muscle and thought relaxed, surrendered, enjoyed the mysterious hiatus in which the very idea of Hurry melted out of the human brain. In that marvelous fragment of time mankind had an experience never known before. It saw, down a vista like a deep green tunnel of woodland boughs, the future stretching thousands and millions of years away, with time for everything to be done without haste or concern.

By the time the book is nearly 95% done, however, nothing much more has happened than a month’s worth of phenomena and a lot of scurrying around by the various characters. Mister Ergo tries to explain what it all means in the climactic scene : “The New Hope will come. A New Hope always has come, created out of the need that is the core of Desolation. What will it be? Who can say … and how does it matter?” There is more of this, but it’s all essentially New Age-y babble.

Personally, I have always found that when a novel ends with a speech in which one character that tries to explain what it all means, what it really means is that the novelist ran out of ideas and is trying to substitute argument for imagination. It’s like cutting directly from Shakespeare to a Presidential debate. Whatever it is, it ain’t art. Is what Mister Ergo has to say really going to make a difference to any of other characters–or the reader?

If this technique ever worked–and if it didn’t for Tolstoy in War and Peace, why would it for a lesser writer?–then criticism would be indistinguishable from art. But it isn’t, and The Jester’s Reign doesn’t succeed where War and Peace failed. You’d be better of stopping 10-15 pages short and making up your own ending.

From what little I could piece together about her, Grainger was born Bonita Ginger, either in Colorado or England, in the late 1800s. She moved to New York around the time of World War One and was one of the colony of writers and artists like John Reed and e. e. cummings who settled in Patchin Place at the end of the war. She wrote a novel called, The Hussy, which was published by Boni and Liveright in 1924. It appears to have been a satire on the double standards of romantic/sexual behavior that existed between men and women at the time. Aside from The Jester’s Reign, she only published a short bundle of poems (Five poems) and a sweet memoir of Greenwich Village life in the 1920s (We Lived in Patchin Place). She apparently ran an informal speakeasy called “Bonnie’s Office” to make ends meet during the Prohibition, and befriended artists and writers old (brothers Theodore and Llewellyn Powys) and young (Esther McCoy) during her time in Patchin Place. She died sometime around 1962.

The Jester’s Reign, by Boyne Grainger
New York: Carrick and Evans, 1938

Life of Campestris ulm, the Oldest Inhabitant of Boston Common, by Joseph Henry Curtis

Title Page of 'Life of Campestris Ulm'I’ve read the biography of a dog, of a cow, of an elephant, of a lion, and of a seagull (yeah, that one). But this is my first biography of a tree. Life of Campestris Ulm: Oldest Inhabitant of Boston Common is a quirky tribute written by Joseph Henry Curtis, a Boston native, around the time of the 130th anniversary of the oldest living tree on Boston Common.

Campestris Ulm, the oldest tree on Boston Common, around 1910Campestris ulm is the scientific name for the English elm. Although a different elm–the Old Great Elm, an American elm sometimes known as the Liberty Tree–was better known until it fell in an enormous galestorm that hit Boston in 1876, this elm was one of a number planted at the behest of John Hancock, prominent signer of the Declaration of Independence (literally) and first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachussetts, around the time he took office in 1780 and outlasted it.

At the time, cows grazed on Boston Common. The Common itself survived only because it served practical concerns, although Hancock–very much a lover of fine clothes, fine living, and beautiful public spaces–was beginning to change things. Still, Massachussetts at the time was a state strongly under the Puritan influence. Curtis recalls Sundays in the early years after the tree’s planting:

From midnight Saturday to sunset Sunday was weekly a day of rest for Campestris. He hardly dared to stir a leaf; even the cows abstained in large measure from chewing their cuds and the Common was deserted. One Sunday, however, he was astonished and shocked to observe the Governor taking a turn in the mall on his way home from church. He was glad to learn the next day that the Governor was fined, and, much as he respected his sponsor, felt that it served him right.

As Curtis tells us, Hancock fell afoul of a relatively recent statute, that ruled that “travelling or other secular employments, unless for some purpose of necessity or humanity, was prohibited on the Lord’s day; and wardens, tithingmen, and other functionaries, were clothed with unusual powers to enforce its observance.”

As time passed, certain of the old time prohibitions lapsed and the beauty and benefits of the Common came to be increasingly accepted and protected–particularly after the return of Oliver Wendell Holmes and others from Paris, where, as David McCullough describes it in his new book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, they marvelled at the Garden of the Tuileries and other public spaces. Yet not so fast that a few victims of pragmatism remained. In 1820, for example, a local bit of folklore was obliterated on the simple policy that a boulder takes up valuable productive soil:

One morning in 1820, in his fortieth year, Campestris observed a cluster of workmen around his old friend, the Wishing-Stone, one holding a drill, while another was swinging a heavy sledge-hammer. After a time this ceased, and another man seemed to be busy ramming and tamping something into a hole. Shortly after there was a great scampering of cows driven wildly at a distance and the cluster of men dispersed in various directions along the several paths, waving their hands as a warning. One man left behind lingered a short time, and then ran rapidly away. There was a flash, an explosion, the air was filled with smoke, and when it cleared, to the astonishment and grief of Campestris, his beloved boulder, the friend of his youth, was observed blown to fragments.

In the language of trees, Campestris exclaimed, as he shook his limbs, “What have you done, you stupid louts, you churls and sons of churls? Know ye not, that it was no common stone; that, hallowed as it was by the vows of countless swains and maids, it possessed a sentimental value which, translated into dollars and cents, the only measure of value your vulgar, commonplace lives can appreciate, would amount to a sum you could never replace by your labor, if your lives were prolonged beyond the age of Methuselah? Would that you were buried in the debris of your own blast. “Alas, alas!” he soliloquized, “a large part of the pleasure of my life has departed,” and sadly he watched the stupid, indifferent men load the fragments on a drag and carry them away.

In after years Campestris could never allude to the destruction of his old friend without manifesting his grief and sorrow.

The tree survived the great storm that felled the Liberty Tree, as well as some man-made cataclysms such as the construction of the MTA and of public restrooms in gloriously hideous late Victorian style within its eyeshot. Curtis writes of regular visits to converse with the elm and reports on some of its recent complaints. “He lately had been greatly disturbed by the borings for the new Cambridge Tunnel,” Curtis tells us.

I don’t know if this tree is still standing on the Common. Other than Curtis, no one seems to have taken particular notice of it within the last century. And though Life of Campestris Ulm: Oldest Inhabitant of Boston Common is certainly no more than a pleasant bit of amusement, Curtis deserves some credit for having managed to organize an interesting social and historical panorama around the figure of a simple sturdy tree providing some shade to those walking along one of the paths through the Common.

Life of Campestris ulm, the oldest inhabitant of Boston Common is available free online through the Internet Archive in PDF, EPUB, Kindle, ASCII, and other formats.

Life of Campestris ulm, the oldest inhabitant of Boston Common, by Joseph Henry Curtis
Boston: W. B Clarke, 1910

The Search for Good Sense, by F. L. Lucas

Cover of first U.K. edition of 'The Search for Good Sense'“It seems to me,” F. L. Lucas writes in the introduction to The Search for Good Sense, “mere common sense never to undertake a piece of work, or read a book, without asking, ‘Is it worth the amount of life it will cost?’ … ‘Will it make life more vivid, more intelligent, more complete, more real?'”

To which, in this case, I can answer, most heartily, Yes!

On the rare occasions when the name of F(rank) L(aurence) Lucas comes up these days, it’s in connection with his masterpiece, Style, which is one of the best things ever written about writing prose and, sadly, scarcer than hens’ teeth. Lucas wrote dozens of books–novels, poetry, drama, essays, history, political pieces, great swaths of historical literary criticism, and numerous compilations of the works of writers major and minor. Of the last, T. S. Eliot once wrote that Lucas was “the perfect annotator.” Pretty much none of it is in print today.

The Search for Good Sense deals with four masters of eighteenth-century English literature–Samuel Johnson, Lord Chesterfield, James Boswell, and Oliver Goldsmith. Its companion volume, The Art of Living, covers four more: Hume, Burke, Franklin, and Horace Walpole. “It would have been easier,” Lucas acknowledges, “to combine both in a single volume; but in this age of growing bustle and mounting prices there is, more often than ever, truth in the adage of Callimachus, librarian of Alexandria–‘a big book is a big evil.'” And this is a perfect example of the pleasures that come with taking an excursion into some past lives with such a profoundly well-read and yet profoundly pragmatic guide. Hardly a page goes by without a delicious quote that begs to be repeated.

Each of Lucas’ biographical essays is between 60 and 120 pages long. He “attempts to omit nothing that is really vital, and to include nothing that is not….” Yet he manages to include more than a few detours that no one would choose to delete for the sake of a page or two. Though Lucas is a passionate defender of the essential importance of the main principle of the Age of Reason–namely, that civilization depends upon our ability to master our emotions through the application of reason–he acknowledges that, “Part of the composure of the educated in the eighteenth century came, I suspect, from their power still to digest what was known….”

In fact, as he later shows in his essay on Goldsmith, even in the eighteenth century, working writers sometimes had to venture well beyond what was known–at least to them. “If he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that, I believe, may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history,” Dr. Johnson once said of Goldsmith. That didn’t prevent Goldsmith from writing an entire book–and a big one–on the subject, one which included gems such as the account of the tragic squirrel flotillas excerpted here recently.

Dr. Johnson is, of course, the grandest figure of the four men covered in The Search for Good Sense. “We treasure his memory partly because he was often wise and good, but partly–let us own it–because he could also resemble an intoxicated hippopotamus.” Although Lucas gives credit to the merits of Johnson’s own works, he is clear-eyed enough to admit that much of it embodies the worst of eighteenth-century English prose: verbose, oratorical, and inclined never to take the shortest path between two points. Yet “few men seem to me to have struggled more against the constant human temptation to say and believe, or pretend to believe, what is comfortable, conventional, lazy, or pleasant.” For Lucas, who had survived gassing and shelling on the Western Front, witnessed the devastation caused by Fascism and Communism, and railed against the evils of groupthink long before Orwell gave it a name, this was no small accomplishment.

In contrast to Johnson and his war with conventions Lucas then offers the example Lord Chesterfield, who held good manners above all other values. “I am very sure,” chesterfield wrote in one of his once-highly-regarded instructional letters to his son, “that any man of common understanding may, by proper culture, care, attention, and labour make himself whatever he pleases.” To which Lucas responds, “In what world, one wonders, do people live who can imagine such nonsense?” Having watched his own children grow up, Lucas rates “inborn nature definitely more important than upbringing.” As a father of twins, I put myself squarely on his side: most of what they are or ever will be comes with them out of the womb. “All the pages ever penned in defence of Chesterfield’s paternal preachments do not seem to me worth four words of honest old Augustine Birrell–‘Ugh, what a father!'”

Lucas is not one to kick a man when he’s down, though:

After all, it is fair to remember that we have one unfair advantage over him–he is dead, and we live later. Let us not abuse it. If we find much to critize in him, he would have found much to disdain in us–in our follies and vulgarities, in our press and our advertisements, in our literature, our art, and our society.

From stuffy old Lord Chesterfield, Lucas then launches into messy, earthy, pushy, self-obsessed James Boswell: “The central dissension over James Boswell turns on the question–ass or genius?” Lucas had the benefit of writing after the discovery and publication of Boswell’s journals. The journals helped set Boswell’s Life of Johnson into their proper context–that of an extract from Boswell’s magnum opus: “part of the far vaster, journalized autobiography of Boswell himself. The Life of Johnson is really only an outwork of a far huger Life of Boswell. Still, he rates Boswell’s obsession with recording events in his journal “an attitude to me as fantastic as the ancient Egyptian feeling that what happened to one’s body living mattered less than having it properly pickled for eternity.”

All the same, despite Boswell’s constant indulgences of his appetites, Lucas most definitely positions himself on the side of those who consider Boswell a genius:

In this aspect Boswell was a kind of grotesque anthropologist–a species of scientist. But he was also an artist. Biography, like history, remains art as well as science. Its paramount duty is truth. But though it should tell nothing but the truth, it cannot possibly tell the whole truth. It must select, or die of its own unwieldly corpulence. The thoughts of a single day might burst a whole volume of autobiography; sufficient research might swell the life of a single man to the size of an encyclopedia in thirty volumes. But it would leave the man’s personality, which is the central theme of biography as of portrait-painting, swamped and blurred. To read it would be as tedious and impractical as a walking tour of Siberia.

Boswell’s genius, in Lucas’ estimation, was in two crucial choices: to choose Johnson, of all the contemporaries he could have taken up with; and to have “the further good sense to select Johnson’s talk as the main feature of that subject.” If he had erred in either decision, the Life would have been no better remembered today than any dozen other biographies published the same year.

Lucas rounds out his quartet with a sketch of the life and works of Oliver Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield is no longer the staple work of 18th century literature it was in my father’s and grandfather’s day (my sons and probably most of their contemporaries read Candide instead), but for Lucas, he earns his place through the quality of his character and humanity as much as through the quality of his pen: “Goldsmith remains an example of what goodness, good sense, grace, gaiety, and simplicity can do, even in a harsh world preoccupied with many meaner things.”

I dog-eared so many pages while reading The Search for Good Sense that even if I quoted from just one in four, this post would have to run on for another thousand-plus words. But out of respect for Lucas, who once wrote that “Brevity is first of all a form of courtesy,” I must confine myself to just one final aphorism from the many gems that lie waiting in this book:

In lovers’ quarrels, only the lovers know all the facts, but cannot judge them dispassionately; while those who might judge them dispassionately, cannot possibly know all the facts.

The Search for Good Sense, by F. L. Lucas
London: Cassell and Company, 1958

Operators and Things: Barbara O’Brien’s classic memoir of schizophrenia–now in print AND online

Cover of first US edition of 'Operators and Things'The always-alert Robert Nedelkoff just tipped me off on the release of one of the most memorable and–until now–rarest neglected books discussed on this site: Barbara O’Brien’s 1958 memoir of schizophrenia, Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic. First published by an obscure press, Arlington Books, then reissued as an Avon paperback with a cover that probably led more than stores and buyers to consider it a pulp SF novel, O’Brien’s book remains unique in its depiction of schizophrenia as experienced from the inside out.

In the book, O’Brien describes waking up one morning to find herself living in a world populated by “Operators,” who are the ultimate embodiment of the paranoic’s concept of the people in control, the ones working according to a secret plan, the ones pulling the strings of power and influence–and by “Things,” the puppets manipulated and exploited by the Operators. She, of course, is a Thing, and she spends the next six months travelling around the country by Greyhound bus, following (but also trying to resist) the instructions of the Operators.

Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic was reissued back in the mid-1970s as a mass-market paperback in both the US and the UK, but it’s been out of print since then, commanding prices ranging between $25 and $250 in the last decade. Now, however, it’s available in trade paperback from Silver Birch Press with an introduction by Michael Macoby, who’s better known for his books on leadership in the business world, a preface by scriptwriter Melanie Villines, and an afterwood by Colleen Delegan. Villines and Delegan have written an unproduced screenplay based on the boook.

However, I also found that, over a year ago, someone published Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic as an eBook on Smashwords.com. You can read it online or download a copy in PDF, EPUB, Kindle, and other formats–with Macoby’s introduction but sans Villines’ and Delegan’s pieces.

Either way, I recommend discovering this remarkable book–which moved 14 different people to post 5-star reviews on Amazon despite its being out of print and virtually unheard-of in the last decade.

Update

After posting this, I received an email from Melanie Villines with some additional information about the new release:

The Silver Birch Press edition of Operators and Things includes a NEW (!) interview with Michael Maccoby (conducted in Sept. 2010) that offers some fascinating insights into the book. Our edition also includes beautiful period photos by iconic photographers Esther Bubley, Russell Lee, and John Vachon. My foreword also offers an overview of how the book has been received by the public and press since its publication and includes info about my personal interactions with some of the original players (agent, publishers, and others connected with the book). Thanks for your kind consideration and thoughtful attention.

Bubley, Lee, and Vachon were all members of Roy Stryker’s remarkable team of Farm Security Administration photographers, by the way, which created one of the greatest photographic records of American life during the 1930s and 1940s.

Second Reading, by Jonathan Yardley

Cover of 'Second Reading' by Jonathan YardleyNext week, Europa Editions, a New York-based publishing house with ties to the Italian publishing firm Edizioni E/O, releases Second Reading, which collects 60 pieces from the series of the same name, which appeared in the Washington Post between March 2003 and January 2010. Frustrated at having his column in the Post’s renown “Book World” section taken away without explanation after twenty years, Yardley was casting about for new ventures when the idea of a series based on his reconsiderations of selected books from a lifetime of reading came to him. As he soon discovered, he was not alone in appreciating the chance to step away from the weekly onslaught of press releases and review copies:

It didn’t take long for me to realize how much fun it was to reach back into my past reading–as you’ll see, the word “fun” appears frequently in these pieces–or to discover how much pleasure it gave many of the Post’s readers to be offered discussions of (mostly) worthy older books. The fixation of journalists on the new and the trendy is a forgivable occupational hazard, but it neglects the interests of readers who want something more substantial than the latest Flavor of the Day. My own tastes certainly are not everybody’s tastes, but the steady, heavy volume of incoming e-mail convinced me that I had stumbled onto something that readers wanted.

While I’ve never been deluged with a “steady, heavy volume of incoming e-mail,” I can certainly second the view that wandering away from best-seller lists–and even from the stock of a good bookstore’s stock of in-print titles–can be great fun. It’s certainly part of what had kept me going for a little over five years now.

The full list of the 94 books that Yardley covered over the course of seven years can be found on this site at the link to “Jonathan Yardley’s Second Readings” in the list of Sources at the left of this page.

It should also be noted that Europa Editions has already done its share in rescuing neglected books, having brought two worthy novels–Alfred Hayes’ The Girl on the Via Flaminia and Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square back to print in handsome paperback editions.

The Tragic Fate of Squirrel Flotillas, from Oliver Goldsmith’s A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature


I’m reading E. L. Lucas’ The Search for Good Sense. In his chapter on Oliver Goldsmith, Lucas reprints the following particularly fantastic yet wonderful passage from A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, one of the many works written by Goldsmith in the interest of keeping a roof over his head.

In Lapland, and the extensive forests to the north, the squirrels are observed to change their habitation, and to remove in vast numbers from one country to another. In these migrations they are generally seen by thousands, travelling directly forward; while neither rocks, forests, nor even the broadest waters, can stop their progress. What I am going to relate appears so extraordinary, that were it not attested by numbers of the most credible historians, among whom are Klein and Linnaeus, it might be rejected with that scorn with which we treat imposture or credulity; however, nothing can be more true than that when these animals, in their progress, meet with broad rivers, or extensive lakes, which abound in Lapland, they take a very extraordinary method of crossing them. Upon approaching the banks, and perceiving the breadth of the water, they return, as if by common consent, into the neighbouring forest, each in quest of a piece of bark, which answers all the purposes of boats for wafting them over. When the whole company are fitted in this manner, they boldly commit their little fleet to the waves; every squirrel sitting on its own piece of bark, and fanning the air with its tail, to drive the vessel to its desired port. In this orderly manner they set forward, and often cross lakes several miles broad. But it too often happens that the poor mariners are not aware of the dangers of their navigation; for although at the edge of the water it is generally calm, in the midst it is always more turbulent. There the slightest additional gust of wind oversets the little sailor and his vessel together. The whole navy, that but a few minutes before rode proudly and securely along, is now overturned, and a shipwreck of two or three thousand sail ensues. This, which is so unfortunate for the little animal, is generally the most lucky accident in the world for the Laplander on the shore; who gathers up the dead bodies as they are thrown in by the waves, eats the flesh, and sells the skins for about a shilling the dozen.

“It may be doubted if this is very sound biology,” Lucas observes. What an understatement. But he does go on to credit that there is something sublime in this bit of ridiculousness: “Yet there is about it a charming sympathy with the little squirrels; far more genuine, I feel, than Coleridge or his Mariner really felt for albatrosses ….”

Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt

By the time he wrote Take Today: The Executive as Dropout with the help of Barrington Nevitt, an engineer and consultant, Marshall McLuhan had learned that an effective way to keep his name in the media was to give his books provocative titles, such as The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village. Aside from the–at the time–“with-it-ness” of its title, however, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout probably attracted more readers–not that there appear to have been all that many–more with McLuhan’s name than anything else.

One might think that McLuhan was trying to follow in the footsteps of Robert Townsend’s 1970 best-seller, Up the Organization, which took a counter-culture look at big, bureaucratic organizations–without questioning their basic purpose or the value of the life and goals of the typical businessman. But McLuhan, it turns out, didn’t think much of Townsend’s book: Townsend manifests the [Harold] Geneen pattern of hotted-up ‘camp.’ If there is one thing that is perfectly obvious about Geneen U., it is that it is a ‘replay’ of some very worn-out organization ploys and patterns.” Anyone who knows a bit about McLuhan’s ideas will recognize that “hotted-up” is not a complimentary term.

And it’s unlikely that the average Wall Street Journal reader of the early 1970s would have found much in the book that could be put to any use on the job or in getting up the career ladder. It’s true that one can find occasional statements in Take Today that seem to leap off the page in their prescience:

It is in this new dimension of “software” design that the difference between the old mechanical industry and the new electric circuitry becomes manifest. It is a difference not only of speed and diversity but also of knowledge and of the programming for special, personal needs.

Written at a time when programming inevitably involved lugging around long, rectangular boxes full of hundreds of punch cards (all of which had to be in exactly the right order), the idea of doing it for special, personal needs was more than a bit ahead of its time.

But for every glint of genius, there are a dozen examples of the sort of writing that may one day earn McLuhan the reputation of a 20th century Nostradamus–meaning, the sort of writing that just about anyone can interpret to mean just about anything he wants it to. Which is also, of course, the sort of writing one’s not sure really had any meaning in the first place. Take this example:

As concertmaster, satellite man would have to audition such selections as the Manhattan Project with exquisite prescience of “audience” effects. The “audience” of satellite man includes the “actors” and is not merely human but consists of all the resonances awakened everywhere.

Both sentences are grammatically correct–but meaningful? They’re like a conversation or radio broadcast you’re not quite close enough to hear fully: you hear the fragments, you understand what each fragment means by itself, but you can’t quite piece together what’s going on.

And then you get the beauts:

What the “practical man” doesn’t know is that facts are something made, as the word tells us (facto). Moreover, a fact cannot be connected without “seizing up.” The interval or gap is necessary to any practical action. The gap is where the action is. “Ask the man who owns one.” The artist and engineer exist to create the right gaps and to avoid unfunny connections.

It’s writing like this that reminds me that, at about the same time that McLuhan was working on this book, gurus like Maharaj Ji were managing to get people to offer up their life savings and clean toilets with similar gobbledygook–albeit spiritual rather than intellectual.

I spent an entertaining and amusing hour thumbing through Take Today. McLuhan was never anything if not an eclectic reader, and like his other books, this one is full of striking quotes from sources ranging from James Joyce and T. S. Eliot to Peter Drucker to an IEEE Transactions article to an obscure work on the structure and function of the Chinese civil service during the Ming dynasty. And he had a knack of coming up with headline statements that owe more than a little to Wyndham Lewis’ blasts:

TORTURES, LIKE GAMES, ARE THE ART FORMS OF WORK IN ANY CULTURE

LIKE THE FUTURE, THE PAST IS NO LONGER WHAT IT USED TO BE

They Had the Looks When Cooking the Books

CARS ARE NOT MADE TO LAST BUT TO TURNOVER

Loved Labels Lost

But I found much of what I read to be as windy as a winter in Chicago without being a fraction as invigorating. It’s hard to believe people wrecked their lives to follow a smiling 15-year-old Indian guru, and it’s hard to believe there was a time when a book like this was considered profound.

Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972

Recent Recommendations

I’ve received more than the usual number of emails from other fans of neglected books in the last few weeks, which is a bit embarrassing as I’ve had almost no time to devote to the site recently. Among these were some recommendations worth passing along.

Cover of NY Review Books' reissue of Judges of the Secret CourtJohn Crowley, whose 1981 novel, Little, Big, has itself been called a “neglected masterpiece,” wrote to mention that New York Review Classics just published David Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court. Judges is considered by some to be the best of Stacton’s trim, elegantly-written historical novels. It recounts the story of John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Crowley’s introduction is unfortunately not available online, but you can find a short post and a lengthy series of comments about the book on Crowley’s LiveJournal site. When Stacton’s novel was first published, Robert Kirsch, reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times, called it “a superior historical fiction, accurate in detail, moving and compelling narrative and character. But it is something more than this as well, an exploration by a brilliant and thoughtful writer of the labyrinthine ways of good and evil.” I wrote about Stacton’s 1962 novel about Wendell Wilkie, Tom Fool, about four years ago, but put it in the “Justly Neglected?” category, comparing it to, “a cocktail party hosted by a brilliant but overbearing host — who drives his guests to the bar for another martini to tune out their host’s insufferable banter.”
Cover of Virago Modern Classics edition of Cullum
From Sweden, Bengt Broström wrote to recommend E. Arnot Robertson’s first novel, Cullum: “It caused a sensation with its sexual frankness.” was reissued as part of the Virago Modern Classics series back in 1990 but is out of print once again. At the time Cullum was first published, it received mixed reviews. The Saturday Review (UK, not US) said, “… it not only fails, it almost goes to pieces by the end.” Another reviewer found it showed “quiet dignity and well-restrained emotion,” while the Nation and Athenaeum found, “The whole love episode between Esther and Cullum is psychologically convincing.” Eighty-some years later, readers seem to find much to relate to in the story of the literature-mad Esther, who falls completely when she meets Cullum, her first real live writer.

Cover of Crest paperback edition of The Notion of SinFinally, Herschel Roth, catching up with my article on Mignon McLaughlin’s wonderful collection of original aphorisms, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook, wrote to bring my attention to the work of her husband, Robert E. McLaughlin: “A minor Cheever, perhaps, but I’m surprised no one has brought back his novel, The Notion of Sin, to capitalize on the Mad Men craze.” Indeed, the Crest paperback edition of the novel makes the connection plain as day: “Madison Avenue, Sex & Success!” The book, which tells about a young Mad man torn between a sexy, sophisticated–and married–woman and his farm-fresh hometown girl–who turns out more comfortable with amorality than he–did get pretty positive reviews back in 1959. Time magazine gave it a feature notice, writing in a passage that can’t help but bring some of Mad Men’s characters to mind:

“His characters are the kind whose gay yet joyless lives make for gossip over countless canapes, but they have rarely been described with such quiet precision or understanding. Some of them are merely foolish, some merely mistake manners for morals, and some merely hurt themselves by being themselves. But the most interesting of them come close to having no self to hurt; they are hollow at heart, capable of sensation but not of feeling.”

Under Gemini, by Isabel Bolton

Our twin sons will be heading off to college in a few months, and it occurred to me recently to look into the subject of neglected books about twins. Despite the fact that twins are not, statistically, all that uncommon, there are relatively few books on the topic, aside from parenting guides. Probably the best known these days in Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel and Oprah’s Book Club selection, I Know This Much Is True, about an identical twin’s coming to grips with his highly disfunctional family and his place in the world.

At the other end of the commercial success spectrum from Lamb’s best-seller are two diametrically different books about twins. Donald Newlove’s Sweet Adversity his 1978 integration of two earlier novels, Leo & Theodore (1973) and The Drunks (1974), a 600-plus page whirlwind about siamese twins, their rough-and-tumble childhood, and their descent into alcoholism. Newlove’s prose is robust, full of great riffs, swinging between euphoria and nihilism. It’s a fantastic book that at times will reach into your chest, rip out your heart, and leave it in tatters. I first read it twenty-some years ago, and I kick myself for having utterly forgotten it until I went on this search.Cover of first US edition of 'Under Gemini'

It would be tough to find a book less like Sweet Adversity than Under Gemini Isabel Bolton’s slender, elegaic 1966 memoir of her early life with her identical twin sister, Grace. It’s short, poetically succinct, and restrained. Yet it has an emotional power greater even than that of Newlove’s tour de force.

Two tragedies punctual the decade or so spanned by story in Under Gemini. In 1887, just two weeks after the girls’ fourth birthday, their mother and father died of pneumonia on the same day. Then, ten summers later, as she watched, helplessly, Bolton’s sister drowned when their rowboat was carried away from them in the currents of Long Island Sound.

In between, the two girls–Mary (Bolton’s real name was Mary Britton Miller) and Grace–and their two older brothers and older sister were looked after in a fairly haphazard way. Their aging grandmother showed the greatest concern for them, offering as much comfort and protection as her diminishing strength could muster:

The double weight of sensibility, the impact of living moments–the smell of bread rising from the kitchen, of gingerbread just taken from the oven, the sound of squirrels surrying on the veranda roof, shadows of leaves on the bedroom wall, flames in the open fireplaces, the all-pervading smell of burning logs, the sense of unseen presences–all combined to make use feel so safe, so sheltered in this comfortable home our grandmother had given us.

Sadly, though, she died less than a year after the parents. Their custody was left to their Uncle James (James A. Rumrill, a railroad executive) and Aunt Anna, who saw to their material needs in a begrudging manner, hiring a spinster in her sixties to run their home and raise them.

Mary and Grace Miller, age 3, around 1886As Bolton portrays her, Miss Rogers had the best of intentions and cared deeply for the children, but she was utterly unequipped to take charge of herself, let alone five willful children, each dealing less rather than more ably with the loss of their parents and grandmother. Philip, one of the boys, threw a glass of water in her face. She brought in a hired man to help with the house and yard. He clearly adored Miss Rogers, but he also clearly spent much of his time half drunk or half asleep. Each Sunday Aunt Anna and Uncle James came to inspect the situation and each week they left unsatisfied. Eventually, Miss Rogers is let go and arrangements are made for the children to be farmed out to boarding schools for much of the year. Grace drowns not long before she and Mary are to be packed off. “My darling Mary, how I love you” are her last words to her twin sister.

Isabel Bolton, 1966Although she published a number of books of poetry under her own name, Miller came to the novel very late, publishing In the Days of Thy Youth in 1943, at the age of sixty, and then, as Isabel Bolton, the three novels for which she has achieved lasting critical recognition: Do I Wake or Sleep (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952). These were reissued in 1997 as one volume, New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach. At the time of their first publications, the books received the highest possible acclaim. Edmund Wilson judged her style “exquisitely perfect in accent.” Diana Trilling called her “The most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years.” Wilson is reputed to have fallen in love with his vision of Bolton as a bright and beautiful young thing, only to have find she was actually an elderly woman of upper class manners and discretion.

She came even later to dealing with her own experience. One reviewer wrote that Under Gemini reflected enormous strength of character in the moderation and perspective with which Bolton describes what must have been a near-over-whelming experience. “That business in which we are all perpetually engaged–the making of an individual soul–is an enterprise of memory,” she writes at the end of the book. “In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.”

What most distinguishes Under Gemini is how effectively Bolton conveys the unique sensation of encountering the world as two:

When I evoke those hours of childhood to live in them once more, it is not myself I see before me–it is she, the living image of myself, and there I stand revealed in all the sharp intensity of what the moment brought of pain or joy or curiosity or wonder or decision. I see my own face, my own dark eyes and hair, I hear my voice, my intonations and tricks of speech. The words that issue from her tongue are mine. Her expressions mantle, as I remember it, my countenance. Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of use happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind.

It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins–I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.

Bolton was 83 when she published Under Gemini. Though she had abundant family connections with New York society, she lived most of her life in Greenwich Village, volunteering as a social worker and writing an occasional book of light poetry. She never married and lived on her own for nearly eight decades after losing Grace. That she was able to achieve at least critical success as a novelist so late in life is remarkable, but I suspect that what’s more telling is the fact that, at the age of 83, she could still summon so easily the sense of life as part of a larger being that was the two sisters together–and perhaps that she was never able to find another to replace the void left by Grace’s death.

Under Gemini was reissued by the Steerforth Press in 1999, but it’s no longer backlisted by them and is once again out of print.

Under Gemini: A Memoir, by Isabel Bolton (Mary Britton Miller)
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966

Theodor Fontane

One of the more noteworthy recent reissues in the wonderful New York Review Books Classics series is Theodor Fontane’s 1891 novel, Irretrievable. Fontane is considered by many of those familiar with his work as “clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,” in the words of Gordon A. Craig, yet there are few of the truly major European writers of the nineteenth century–aside perhaps of Benito Pérez Galdós–who have suffered greater neglect among English-reading audiences.

Theodor FontaneIn part he suffers a common fate with other German novelists. His works, as much as those of his contemporaries such as Adalbert Stifter and Theodor Storm, have a tendency to pop up in English translations, usually from academic presses, and then vanish out of print just as quickly.

The loss is ours. German writers get a bum rap, a reputation for ponderousness than is only partly deserved–and wholly undeserved in Fontane’s case. “There is also in Fontane,” writes Phillip Lopate in his Afterword to Irretrievable (Unwiederbringlich), “a Montaigne-like equipoise, a sunny melancholy, an investment in domestic family life that steadfastly avoids the demonic and apocalyptic….” Perhaps this is due to the fact that Fontane came to fiction very late: his first novel was published when he was sixty years old. Throughout his work, you find a sense of perspective, humor, and tolerance very few writers possess before middle age.

The other thing most English readers encountering Fontane’s work for the first time note is how modern his themes are. The problems of marriage–particularly from the wife’s perspective–are one of his most frequent topics, as are its most common responses: divorce, adultery, and simple unhappiness. Take, for example, Lopate’s setting on the story in Irretrievable:

Irretrievable is the story of a marriage that has worn thin. The partners have been together for some twenty-three years, are raising two teenage children, and for the most part have enjoyed a happy marriage. Still, they have reached a point where they no longer are
charmed but are irritated by the limitations each sees in the other.

His women are fully-drawn individuals capable of living outside their husbands’ shadows, and his men–like most of us still–are more often well-intentioned but clueless than autocratic and evil. In fact, Lopate suggests the lack of a radical sense of evil might be one of the reasons Fontane’s work has had a hard time winning popular and critical readers in English.

Fortunately, though, there’s never been a better time to discover Fontane in English. In large part this is thanks to Antony Wood, whose small press, Angel Classics has reissued four of his novels–including an alternate translation of Unwiederbringlich, No Way Back, translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

In addition to No Way Back/Irretrievable, Fontane books currently available in English translation include On Tangled Paths, translated by by Peter James Bowman. The tale of a romance between a cavalry officer and a seamstress. The officer intends for the relationship to be something of a place-holder until a wealthier and more socially acceptable wife can be found, but then the situation gets more complicated when they end up falling in love.

This novel is also available in not one but two alternate translations: Trials and Tribulations, translated by Katharine Royce, from Mondial Books, and in a volume from Continuum’s fine “The German Library” series, Delusions, Confusions, paired with another novella, “The Poggenpuhl Family.” Finally, there is Cecile, translated by Stanley Radcliffe, also from Angel Classics–also a story of adultery–in this case, initiated by the woman.

However, at least as many other English translations of Fontane’s works have disappeared within a few years of appearing in print:

• Effi Briest

This is easily Fontane’s best-known work, often compared to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary for its depiction of adultery. Thomas Mann once wrote that if one had to reduce one’s library to six novels, Effi Briest would have to be one of them. Although Angel Classics’ website shows their edition, also translated by Rorrison and Chambers, as being in print, Amazon shows that both theirs (issued as a Penguin Classic in the US in 2001) and the 1976 Douglas Parmee translation (also a Penguin Classic) as out of print.

• Before the Storm, translated by R. J. Hollingdale

This was Fontane’s first major work, about the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the Prussian gentry and peasants. It was issued as an Oxford World Classic in paperback in 1985, but used copies now go for $25 and up. It’s compared by some to War and Peace, but aside from sharing a historical period, the two books have little in common. Although both novels portray wars from the viewpoints of the people they crash over like tsunamis, there is very little drama and quite a lot of conversation in Fontane’s book. It does cause one to wonder, though, what Fontane might have produced if he’d tackled this subject when he was twenty or thirty years younger.

• Under the Pear Tree

Although a minor work, Under the Pear Tree is the closest Fontane ever came to a novel of incident (if not action). Hradschek, a village innkeeper, murders a man who comes to collect a gambling debt … only to wind up dead himself soon after.

• The Stechlin, translated by William Zwiebel

“At the end an old man dies and two young people get married—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages” was Fontane’s own summation of this book. The Stechlin was Fontane’s last major work. It’s been called, “probably the finest chronicle of the life style of the German upper classes in the late nineteenth century.” Camden House published William L. Zwiebel’s first-ever translation into English in 1995.

Douglas Parmée’s introductory essay to Irretrievable is now available on the NYRB webpage for the book, along with Lopate’s Afterword. The New Yorker also published a long essay, “Heroine Addict,” by Daniel Mendelsohn, in its 7 March 2011 issue.

The Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach, by Albert Halper

I had big hopes for Albert Halper’s 1966 novel, The Fourth Horseman Of Miami Beach. Even if the story turned out to be a dud, I figured the atmosphere would make it worth the ride.

Cover of first U.S. edition of "The Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach"And it does, at least at first. Leo Roth, president of the Dilly Dally Dress Company, a girlswear firm in Manhattan’s Garment District, heads to Miami on the trail of his cousin, Bernie Flugman, a ladies’ man and habitual gambler who’s stolen over fifteen thousand from the company. To kill time between his nights of cruising Miami’s hotels in search of Bernie, Leo lounges on the sun deck of the Bel Haven Hotel, where he meets up with “the three horsemen of Miami Beach”–Moe Stein, Hy Bronson, and Jerry Ryan, retired fifty-somethings who spend their time sunning, joking, and flirting with the fifty-something women regulars.

But before that, the three horsemen have to say goodbye to Eli Fensterberg, the late fourth. As Halper sketches the scene, it’s pure early 1960s Miami Beach:

Moe saw the two cabana boys from the Bel Haven move up to the casket and peer down at the lifeless face. He recognized a clerk from a Surfside delicatessen standing in line; the dead man had been a heavy buyer of anchovies, olives, and other tid-bits for his table. Behind the delicatessen clerk, who looked a little strange without his long white apron, stood Mr. Lipsky the tailor who had recently made two suits for the deceased. In the gloom Moe spotted Eli’s barber, then his eyes picked out the tall, corpulent owner of the Surfside Liquor Store. When you’re dead, Moe mused, you find out who your true friends are, only it’s too late.

Suddenly Moe stiffened. In the back of the chapel, sitting a few rows apart, were two tall, stunning blondes. They were the call girls Eli used to phone every couple of weeks, or whenever he felt like seeing one of them…. A feeling of envy came over him. What was the secret of Eli’s success with people? He had been an irascible little man, yet when he died the cabana boys, his delicatessen clerk, his liquor supplier, his motel manageress, his tailor, and even his call girls came to his funeral.

While there are plenty more scenes–in nightclubs, motels, swank neighborboods and low rent dives–that provide Halper a chance to paint word pictures, his renditions aren’t much better than the prose equivalent of motel/hotel art.

Nor does he develop any of his characters in any significant way. Leo Roth is quickly seduced by the comfortable life among the early retirees, he eventually decides that fifty-two is too early to call it quits, and he returns to New York. Bernie the gambler spends most of the book hiding in cheap hotels and hitting nightly poker games, desperately trying to win back what he owes Leo and others, he’s finally caught by a couple of thugs working for a Mafioso holding most of his markers. They beat him into unconsciousness, and when he finally comes to again in a hospital … well, nothing, really. He says he’s off gambling for good. Has he undergone some kind of transformative experience? Based on what Halper gives us, the only thing that seems to have been transformed are his nose and jaw.

Finally, after setting up the premise and bringing Leo and Bernie to Miami, the narrative wanders into a variety of cul-de-sacs, including a tedious subplot involving Rosita and Manuel, a pair of Cuban dance instructors. Aside from being in the same town at the same time, Leo and Bernie might as well have nothing to do with each other. Halper even fails to derive any climactic benefit from a passing hurricane.

The Fourth Horseman Of Miami Beach seems more like a first and very rough draft than a finished work. Something promising might have come from further work–tightening up the narrative, jettisoning the endless hand-wringing rounds of Leo and Rosita, and bringing the stories of Leo and Bernie to collision instead of stringing them on in infinite parallel. The Fourth Horseman Of Miami Beach was Halper’s last published novel, and it betrays more than a few signs of a writer losing steam and creative inspiration.

The Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach, by Albert Halper
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966

Overlooked, by Maurice Baring

I need to catch up with a post on some of my recent reads, most of which have turned out to be among their authors’ lesser efforts, unfortunately.

Cover of House of Stratus reissue of "Overlooked"Of the lot, by far the most interesting and, within its limited range, successful was Maurice Baring’s slim 1922 novel Overlooked. Had the term been in use back then, Overlooked would have been called an experimental novel. For what Baring undertook was truly an experiment in fiction.

The first half of the book is titled, “The Papers of Anthony Kay.” A blind man sent by his doctor for two month’s rest at a seaside resort called Hareville, a fictional stand-in for Deauville or a similar society retreat of the early 20th century. There he encounters a sampling of international society–a scandalous Italian/French widow; a French/Russian princess; an ambiguously Slavic intellectual; an upright but neer-do-well English lady, Mrs. Lennox, and her beautiful niece, Miss Jean Brandon; and an English novelist named James Rudd.

Kay contemplates writing a novel as a way of relaxing, and he and Rudd fall into discussing Miss Brandon. Kay quickly gives up on his idea, but she inspires Rudd to begin sketching out his own story based on his imaginative speculations about her life:

“She talks, but she cannot express herself. Or rather, she has nothing to express. At least, I think she has nothing to express : or what she has got to express is not what we think it is. I imagine a story like Pygmalion and Galatea. Somebody waking her to life and then finding her quite different from what the stone image seemed to promise, from what it did promise.”

While Rudd sequesters himself to work on his book, Kay befriends a cross-section of his hotel’s residents. With each of them, the conversation eventually gets around to the topic of Miss Brandon–her belligerent late father, her apparently broken engagement with an heir dispatched to India, her beauty and air of mystery. Each conversation is a mix of fact, gossip, and rumor, and each creates, in effect, a portrait of her from a different perspective.

Late in this first section, Miss Brandon’s erstwhile fiancé arrives in Hareville, but he seems to spurn her for the attentions of one of the scandalous widows du jour. Miss Brandon turns for solace to the mysterious Slav, and for a moment, they become secretly engaged. Kay departs before learning the outcome of the story.

Much of the second half of the book is devoted to the text of Rudd’s long short story, “Overlooked,” which he published in a private edition of 500, sending a copy to Kay. In “Overlooked,” Miss Brandon has become “Kathleen Farrel,” and Hareville “Saint-Yves-les-Bains.” All the main characters Kay encountered reappear with different names and slightly altered back stories.

As promised, Rudd provides a fairy tale to explain Brandon/Farrell’s sense of evanescence:

Once, when she was a little girl, she had gone to pick flowers in the great dark wood near her home, where the trees had huge fantastic trunks, and gnarled boles, and where in the spring-time the blue-bells stretched beneath them like an unbroken blue sea. After she had been picking blue-bells for nearly an hour, she had felt sleepy. She lay down under the trunk of a tree. A gipsy passed her and asked to tell her fortune. She had waved her away, as she had no sympathy with gipsies. The gipsy had said that she would give her a piece of good advice unasked, and that was, not to go to sleep in the forest on the Eve of St. John, for if she did she would never wake. She paid no attention to this, and she dozed off to sleep and slept for about half-an-hour. She was an obstinate child, and not at all superstitious. When she got home, she asked the housekeeper when was the Eve of St. John. It happened to fall on that very day. She said to herself that this proved what nonsense the gipsies talked, as she had slept, woken up, come back to the house, and had high tea in the schoolroom as usual. She never gave the incident another thought ; but the housekeeper, who was superstitious, told one of the maids that Miss Kathleen had been overlooked by the fairy-folk and would never be quite the same again. When she was asked for further explanations, she would not give any. But to all outward appearances Kathleen was the same, and nobody noticed any difference in her, nor did she feel that she had suffered any change.

Rudd plays out his version, including the return of the fiance and the secret engagement, which is broken off as the two lovers realize the arrangement could only work in a fantasy world free of the constraints of class, money and prejudices.

The book then returns to the “Papers of Anthony Kay.” Kay describes his reaction to “Overlooked” and discusses the book and the story of the real-life Miss Brandon with several people he knew from his time at Hareville. Kay and his friend Doctor Sabran conclude that Rudd got it wrong … but aren’t sure what “right” is:

“I am convinced of one thing only, and that is that the novelist drew false deductions from facts which were perhaps sometimes correctly observed.” [Sabran]

I said I agreed with him. Rudd’s deductions were wrong ; his facts were probably right in some cases; Sabran’s deductions were right, I thought, as far as they went; but we either had not enough facts or not enough intuition to arrive at a solution of the problem.

To another acquaintance, Kay argues that, “Rudd had started with a theory about Miss Brandon, that she was such and such person, and he distorted the facts till they fitted with his theory. At least, that was what I imagined to have been the case.”

In the end, Miss Brandon is reunited with her fiancé, who appears never to have any other objective in mind, and the pair enjoy the most conventional of marriages. Kay, Rudd, and almost everyone else in the book(s), it seems, were all guilty of reading far more into her situation than ever existed.

Characterization is not Baring’s forté in Overlooked. Kay, Rudd, and the rest are sketched just as superficially as Miss Brandon. But for Baring’s purposes, little more than stick figures are needed. Years before it got its name, Baring was experimenting with the Rashomon effect. Rudd applies a fantastic interpretation on Miss Brandon’s story, but his is just the most overt form of fiction in the book. Every one puts his or her spin on her story, influenced by all sorts of factors–from the English sense of propriety to the Italian love of the game of romance. Baring puts the final seal on the artificiality and impermanence of the social affairs of Hareville by noting the date of his departure from the town: June 27, 1914.

Overlooked was Baring’s second novel, published soon after Passing By, which is also something of a play on the nature of a work of fiction. Although the books received warm if not enthusiastic reviews, neither sold well. His next novel, C, was far more conventional in approach–a Bildungsroman set in Edwardian England–and weighed in at a whopping 700-plus pages. C is in print from Faber Finds.

Overlooked was reissued about ten years ago by the House of Stratus, which appears to be a hybrid between a legitimate reissue house and one of the many print-on-demand open source publishers. Stratus reissued a good chunk of Baring’s better work, each with a relatively attractive cover, between 2001 and 2003, but none of these appears to be in print now and Stratus no longer lists Baring among their authors. And the quality of their cover art–and editing–seems to have dropped dramatically, if the Caustic Cover Critic’s example of their version of Brain Aldis(s)’ Dracula Unbound is any indication. But save your money and download a free copy from the Internet Archive: Overlooked, by Maurice Baring.

Overlooked, by Maurice Baring
London: William Heinemann

From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives, by David Wooldridge

Charles Ives has been one of my heroes ever since I read about his reaction to a man who started hissing at a performance of Carl Ruggles’ piece, “Men and Mountains,” in the early 1930s. Ives turned around and hissed back, “When you hear strong masculine music like this, sit up and USE YOUR EARS LIKE A MAN!”

It’s good advice for anyone who wants to open themselves up to new forms and styles of music. And applied to other senses, it’s good advice for learning to appreciate any form of art or experience that doesn’t wrap itself up in a gentle blanket of pleasantness.

Cover of first U.S. edition of "From the Steeples and the Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives"David Wooldridge’s From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives (first published in the U.K. under the title, Charles Ives: A Portrait) appeared in 1974, marking the centenary of Ives’ birth. Although Ives had by then won a sure place in musical history as the first important, and perhaps greatest, American composer, his work hadn’t–and may never–gain the level of popular recognition and appreciation as that of Copland, Gershwin, or Bernstein. A hundred years after he wrote most of it, his music still requires most listeners to sit up and put some effort into their listening.

Wooldridge’s own approach to Ives pretty much guaranteed that his book would receive the same scant acceptance that Ives’ music did with its first listeners. Although the U.K. edition of the book appears from its sedate cover to be a conventional biography, it’s hardly the sort of account that would sit well with the average fan of classical music.

A clue to Wooldridge’s literary inspirations comes from the book’s prologue, which opens with a quote from Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, his influential 1947 celebration of the work of Herman Melville. “Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives.”

“Ives mounted,” Wooldridge writes. “His music rides on such space. The man, his life, the whole pattern of his thinking are witness to it. A sense of space, a use of space, an understanding of space that transcended metered time.” Like Melville–using Olson’s words, Ives had “a comprehension of PAST, his marriage of spirit to source”–and “a confirmation of FUTURE.”

Ives’ past, as Wooldridge shows, went back almost as far back in American history as any white man’s could. Captain William Ives landed in Massachussetts in 1635, and his family lines crossed paths with the Puritans, George Washington, Emerson, and Thoreau. His father George once helped a drunken Stephen Foster home from a Manhattan bar and led the band of the First Connecticut Heavy Artillery that paraded past Lincoln and Grant after the surrender of Richmond.

George passed along to Charles a unique mixture of popular American and classical European music. He led bands that played at camp meetings and holiday celebrations in Charles’ home town of Danbury, Connecticut. He also encouraged his son to study the piano and organ and shared what formal training he’d had in composition. By the age of 18, Charles was working for pay as the organist of St. Thomas’ Church in New Haven, where he later attended Yale University.

At Yale, his primary teacher was a stalwart figure of the American musical establishment, one Horatio William Parker. As his Wikipedia entry puts it, “During his lifetime he was considered to be the finest composer in the United States, a superior craftsman writing in the most advanced style.” He didn’t think much of Ives’ student work and couldn’t even remember him years later, in a letter to Wooldridge’s father. Although Wooldridge acknowledges, “Who all remembers the names of the great composers’ teachers?,” he can’t resist the chance to give Parker his posthumous come-uppance:

Why pick on Parker?

FOR ONE REASON ONLY. Parker was a fluent, competent, intelligent musician who ought to have been able to recognize a NEW VOICE when he heard it. No one asked him to acknowledge Ives as America’s musical Messiah–though he’d have enjoyed that privilege. He didn’t have to like what he heard. He even could have hated it. And he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening.

And I mean REALLY listening–not just letting the ears lie back on a bubble-bath of agreeable, ready-made sound. Musicians, precisely the fluent ones, make the poorest listeners, because they get bemused by the sound of their own voices–singers, players, composers–cannot understand there is anything more to it than fluency of sound, accuracy of sound, opulence of sound, refinement of sound. And sound has so little to do with music–nice, agreeable, chromium-plate sound.

This passage provides ample evidence of Wooldridge at his most idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. Elsewhere in the book he launches into a rant about THE SYSTEM that brings one right back to the spirit of 1960s student protests. I imagine Wooldridge saw himself “sticking it to the Man” in writing this book.

Which was certainly one reason the book dropped into obscurity moments after being published. I doubt this kind of writing held much appeal for many of Wooldridge’s most likely buyers. Nor does it age well. Fortunately, such passages are rare.

The more striking and interesting aspect of From the Steeples and Mountains is Wooldridge’s approach to the narrative of Ives’ life and work. I may be going too far out on a limb with this, but I think there’s an important clue behind his use of the Charles Olson quote about Melville, and that clue leads to the work of Paul Metcalf–Melville’s great-grandson and a student of Olson’s.

As his Wikipedia entry puts it, Metcalf’s “work generally defies classification.” Best known–for those who knew his work at all–for his 1965 novel, Genoa, Metcalf relies extensively on the use of original texts, weaving slender threads of his own narration to create a unifying theme. As with Metcalf’s books, there is barely a page in From the Steeples and Mountains comprised solely of Wooldridge’s own words. And like Metcalf, Wooldridge uses quoted text for visual as well as narrative effect. He tosses in snatches and bursts of texts from letters, newspaper articles, songs, poems, concert programs and advertisement like Ives tosses musical quotations into his own pieces, very deliberately creating the semblance–but only the semblance–of a “slam-bang racket.”

Metcalf’s work is very much a meditation upon history, particularly American history, and particularly American history of the 19th century. And like Metcalf, Wooldridge is constantly drawing links between Ives and figures such as Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, highlighting the uniquely American nature of their voices and world views. He draws heavily on Ives’ own writing, including Essays Before a Sonata (1921) and the extensive marginalia in Ives’ compositions, which include such gems as the following, from a score-sketch of The Fourth of July:

Mr. Price: Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have–I want it that way …

As Wooldridge tells the story, Ives’ creative energies were worn down by a combination of ill-health and distress at the development of American politics and the entry into World War One. A prolonged recovery after a series of heart attacks in 1918 led to his eventual abandonment of composing entirely. His wife found him in his studio one morning in 1925 “with tears in his eyes, saying he couldn’t seem to compose any more–nothing went well–nothing sounded right.”

Ives’ failure, to Wooldridge, is America’s failure:

. . . . . Ives the composer remains, still in largely silent reproach of a nation’s music-making, its way of life, the way of life of music-making as a whole. Still largely silent, because few have ventured his music to be properly heard, or, being properly heard, accorded proper attention. But the world cannot wait while America gets it together, and now the sound, impatient, is gone out into other lands. Charles Ives is the FERMATA. Full stop/half circle. End and beginning.

I’m not sure David Wooldridge succeeded in accomplishing what he set out to do in writing From the Steeples and Mountains. If he intended to use the story of Charles Ives to send a message to America about the need to look past the “establishment sop we use to salve our consciences in, 99%, lip service,” America clearly took less note of Wooldridge’s message than it did of Ives’ own work.

In the process, however, he did create a portrait that does a remarkably effective job of setting Ives’ life and work into a cultural context and in conveying a sense of his character and his musical sensibility that irresistibly leads the reader to becoming the listener. I defy anyone to read From the Steeples and Mountains and not find oneself soon downloading and enjoying Ives’ music. And I also expect to dig out my copies of Paul Metcalf’s books and immerse myself again into the sounds of another uniquely American voice.

From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives, by David Wooldridge
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974

The Coin of Carthage, by Bryher

Cover of UK edition of "The Coin of Carthage"History with a capital “H” is happening throughout the twenty-some years spanned in the course of Bryher’s 1964 novel The Coin of Carthage–the Second Punic War, to be specific, during which Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants, conquered much of the Italian peninsula, and then was forced to retreat and was defeated by Scipio Africanus at the Battle of Zama.

But Bryher’s subject is history writ small–the history that happens on the margins of capital “H” history. Her story starts with the Greek trader Zonas waking in a stable after being robbed and beaten by a couple of bandits and winds its way through a half-dozen other main characters–a fellow trader named Dasius; Karus and Orbius, two Roman soldiers and friends; Karus’ mother, Domina Sybilla; a slave named Verna and a Carthaginian ship captain named Mago. Each, in his or her own way, is a victim of war, even though none of them dies in battle and only Karus is actually wounded. Their losses are psychological less than physical, but for Bryher, they’re more profound and lasting.

The two great losses in the book, in fact, are friendships. Karus develops an intense attachment to Orbius, a platonic bond with strong homosexual undertones, that is broken when Karus is wounded and Orbius is taken prisoner in a minor skirmish with a Carthaginian reconnaissance party. When they are reunited years later, Karus finds that years of captivity has turned Orbius’ spark of life into a smouldering anger and thirst for revenge. Mago befriends Dasius and the two live together on Mago’s farm near Neapolis for several years until they are separated in an early Roman assault on Carthage. When, several years after, Dasius manages to return in search of his friend, he learns that Mago had killed himself in despair for the loss of all he valued–his farm, his ship, his hopes for his own country and people. Though handsomely rewarded for services to Rome, Dasius is left to spend out his days in mourning.

I have to confess that I didn’t really appreciate the book or what Bryher was doing until the final chapters. The story seems to wander along, the focus shifting from character to character, with no dramatic peaks. In terms of action, there are only two moments of real narrative tension–when Zonas runs into the midst of a Carthaginian parade to save his mule and accidentally meets Hannibal, and when Dasius helps Orbius escape from his prison–and neither is significant in its affect on any of the characters involved. Much of the book is devoted to casual conversations–over a fire, over a table at an inn, over a cup of bad wine, sitting in a courtyard as the suns goes down.

But this is, I think, what Bryher tried to show in The Coin of Carthage. The lives of her characters are not marked by milestones or major events but by what happens in between them. Orbius isn’t wounded in battle but by years of degradation, squalor, and neglect as a prisoner. The material comforts Dasius gains by the book’s end do little to compensate for the many pleasant days he spent working with Mago in the fields and orchards. War–the big “H” history–is a great wave that scoops up little pebbles and scatters them over a beach, barely taking notice of them in process.

This sense of the insignificance of ordinary lives is heightened by something I found Bryher conveyed better than any other author writing about pre-Christian times, which is the perspective of a world where the only real divine power is Fate. Characters–particularly Zonas–make offerings to the gods in hopes of appeasing Fate, but Fate is clearly an enormous and impersonal force whose reasons are never expected to be understandable to mortals–rather like war. What with Fate and war lined up against them, no wonder Zonas and Bryher’s other characters focus on smaller and more intimate matters.

I read The Coin of Carthage as the first few days of news from the devastation of Japan’s recent earthquakes and tsunami was filling the airwaves, and I kept thinking of Bryher’s characters. I don’t suppose the fact that friends and family members died in a once-a-century event provides the slightest comfort to any of the survivors. Only journalists and historians have a good reason to distinguish between big-H history and little-h history.

The Coin of Carthage, by Bryher
London: Collins, 1964

Death and the Good Life, by Richard Hugo

Sometimes my instincts for the neglected fail me. I picked a battered copy of the poet Richard Hugo’s 1980 murder mystery, Death and the Good Life out a discard pile in a thrift shop recently, and was so certain it was long out of print that I read the whole thing before bothering to check. Turns out that it’s been reissued twice–by the small Montana press, the Clark City Press, in 1991 and by the University of Idaho Press in 2003–and is still in print.Cover of first U.S. paperback edition of "Death and the Good Life" by Richard Hugo

Oh, well, it made for an entertaining evening in any case. Hugo’s sleuth, an ex-Seattle cop named Al Barnes now working as a deputy sheriff in Sanders County, Montana, investigates two cases where the victims both died from multiple axe blows to the head. They soon prove quite unrelated. One he manages to solve in just a few days–the other ultimately takes the better part of a year, and winds up involving cowboy-sized helpings of Freudian psychology–sexual jealousy, twins, incest, and sadism, just to name a few.

I’m not a big mystery fan, so I can’t speak with authority on this point, but it seems to me that there are only a couple of things that make a mystery worth reading: good characterization, good atmosphere, and intriguing twists–and in that order. By that standard, Hugo scores 66%. Al Barnes is an entertaining narrator. He’s an experienced cop but quite a softy at the core–he earned the nickname “Mush-Heart” for his tendency to let off speeders for the slimmest excuse. He’s living with Arlene, a local bartender and single mom, but his eyes haven’t stopped wandering: “What a nice world it is when you get old enough to see how attractive women are at all ages,” he comments at one point.

Hugo moved to Missoula, Montana in the mid-1960s and taught creative writing at the University of Montana for most of the rest of his life (he died of leukemia in 1982). Although Missoula is a decent-sized town of almost 70,000 people (probably closer to 50,000 back when Hugo lived there), it’s surrounded in all directions by lots and lots of sparsely populated forests, mountains, and high prairies. It’s a good place to get away from things, but being a good day’s drive from any big city, it can also seem like a prison. From what I’ve read of Hugo’s life, it took him a while to get the feeling that he had to be someplace else out of his system.

Al Barnes has certainly got the feeling out of his system: “I was sure it was smooth sailing from here on out. I put on twenty pounds in fourteen months or so in Plains and settled back into a life of peace and quiet.”

Until one–then two–people wind up with axe-holes in their skulls. Tapping into Barnes’ big-city detective experience, the sheriff appoints him chief investigator. He spends much of the rest of the book outside of Plains–first in Idaho and then in Portland, Oregon. I won’t attempt to summarize the plot, since it struck me as no better than anyone else’s convoluted puzzle of motives and long-hidden secrets.

What raises the book to the slightly-better-than-average murder mystery level is Barnes’ narrative voice, which manages to be both world-weary and naive at the same time. Hugo definitely managed to capture that special laconic tone of a true man of the West: “Yellow Bear and I sat in mutual depression and silence for half an hour. We said a lot to each other in that half hour, and we didn’t break the silence once.”

Death and the Good Life, by Richard Hugo
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981