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Fables in Slang, by George Ade

Excerpt

The Fable of the Caddy Who Hurt His Head While Thinking

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

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


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

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

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

His Father worked in a Lumber Yard.

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

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

MORAL: Don’t try to Account for Anything.

Comments

from Reader’s Delight, by Noel Perrin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

For More Information

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

Proud Destiny, by Lion Feuchtwanger

Excerpt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Locate a copy

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

Working with Roosevelt, by Samuel Rosenman

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

Excerpt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

• The New Yorker, 31 May 1952:

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

Locate a copy

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

Strange Conquest, by Alfred Neumann

Excerpt

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Print?

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

The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien

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

Excerpt

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

“Very true,” I said.

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

“What?”

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

“That is a hard question.”

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

“That is well-known,” I agreed.

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

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

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

Editor’s Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

” Up.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is it about a bicycle?” he asked.

Comments

Howard Moss, The New Yorker, 28 September 1968

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

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

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

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

Charles Foran in Lost Classics

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

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

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

The Lake, by George Moore

Excerpt

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Lake, by George Moore
First published 1905

Sweet Dreams, Michael Frayn

Excerpt

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

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

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frayn himself once remarked on the book,

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

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

Reviews

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

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

New Yorker, 14 January 1974

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

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Sweet Dreams, by Michael Frayn
London: Comstock, 1973

Frank Harris, by Hugh Kingsmill

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Excerpt

To keep the Fortnightly subdued and reassuring in tone was comparatively easy. But to lower himself to the temperature necessary to the comfort of his guests in Park Lane taxed Harris sorely. Yet, with a Royal Duke at his table, some measure of restraint was obligatory.

Once, he writes, he gave a lunch with the old Duke of Cambridge on his right and Russell Lowell, the American Ambassador, on his left; and the guests included Beerbohm Tree and Willie Grenfell (now Lord Desborough), John Burns, the firebrand agitator, the poet George Wyndham, and Alfred Russel Wallace–all listening spellbound to the humour and eloquence of Oscar Wilde.

The authenticity of this list of guests is corroborated by Sir Sidney Low, in an obituary notice in the Observer. Harris, Sir Sidney writes, had at this time a charming little house in Park Lane, where he entertained a great many of the people best worth knowing. Calling one afternoon on Mrs. Harris, Sir Sidney found a Royal Duke taking tea with her. “Peers, politicians, poets came to the Park Lane luncheons and dinner-parties. Oscar Wilde would toss up scintillating epigrams, countered by the host with fiery thrusts of savage criticism and biting satire.”

It looked just then, Sir Sidney Low says, as if Frank Harris were to be one of Fortune’s favourites. The Conservative party-managers had their eye on him, and people were saying that he might do anything.

But his old uneasiness ran strongly below the surface. He felt restless, out of the picture he had framed so expensively with his wife’s money. The unobtrusive self-assurance of his new acquaintances exasperated him; he noticed with surprise that among these gentle-folk the untitled were as sure of themselves as the titled. What was the secret of their complacency? It couldn’t be brains! He had more brains in his big toe that the lot of them in their united skulls. And what under the mask of polished manners, did they really think of him? If he was good enough to know now, why hadn’t he been good enough to know earlier? Or was it the husband of their own set, the editor of the Fortnightly, the coming man in politics?

Lunching in the house in Park Lane with the Duke of Cambridge, and a half dozen people of good position, taught him, he says, that he would always be an outside, alien to them in imagination and sympathy. And yet, he adds, in a sentence which perhaps throws more light on his handicaps as a social climber than on his assets, he had certain advantages: “I had had an English education and knew how to dress, my table manners, too, were English of the best.”

Editor’s Comments

If he hadn’t worked so strenuously on his own notoriety, culminating in his long-winded but often fascinating autobiography, My Life and Loves, Frank Harris would be long forgotten by now. And even the autobiography is more often remembered for its pornographic than its literary merits. So why bother reading an account of his life?

I had utterly no interest in Frank Harris before reading this book. Neither did I know anything about Hugh Kingsmill. I bought Frank Harris solely on the basis of its mention by Michael Holroyd. So I think I can fairly say that I approached this book with no preconceptions, asking only that it proves its own merits. Having devoured it in an afternoon, I will argue that these are considerable. This is one of the most striking examples of the art of biography I’ve ever read.

This is not a conventional life. Kingsmill first came to know Harris as a youthful admirer, remained in close contact with him as part of the London literary world of the early decades of the twentieth century. He lost that contact when Harris fled to France to avoid prosecution for bankruptcy and fraud, then visited him again years later, when Harris was in elegant but unmistakable decline on the French Riviera.

Although Kingsmill does recount the essential facts–which, in the case of a pathological liar like Harris, was no simple feat–of Harris’ life, what makes this book worth reading is its remarkable power as a study of a deeply flawed yet powerful character.

When Kingsmill first wrote the book, in the 1930s, Harris’ literary reputation still had a few remnants intact, and his notoriety as a pornographer was peaking. The scandal value of the book no doubt guaranteed healthy sales, and many of the literary figures whose careers Harris influenced in one way or another–including Shaw and H.G. Wells–were still active. Harris’ defenders could still be found, even if they were subdued in public fora.

What credibility Harris might have had at the time is calmly and completely destroyed by Kingsmill. His ammunition is simply Harris’ own words and deeds. As Kingsmill demonstrates so effectively, there was never any need to mount a vendetta against Harris–he was his own worst enemy. His accuracy derives from the clarity of a youthful admirer become middle-aged realist. For the first third of the book, Kingsmill shows how Harris haphazardly, but relentlessly, constructed a career as a man of letters–and politics, in aspiration at least–of materials of dubious origin.

Harris’ ascent is a striking illustration of the momentum a forceful personality can generate from the slightest of talents. On the strength of a few stories and articles and a great many boastful stories loudly related, Harris managed to gain the editorship of a series of weekly magazines. At a time when newpapers and weeklies were the predominant mass medium, this put him in a position of great influence, and he cultivated the aura of power and insight people naturally associated with an editor of an influential journal.

This aura was about the only thing Harris ever successfully cultivated. As Kingsmill shows, to call Harris a creative talent would be overstretching the truth. He was not so much a writer as a producer of words. His chief creative concern was the building–and propping up–of his own facade. For nearly everything else, his was a destructive energy.

He ran newspapers and magazines from solid reputation and financial standing into near-ruin. In the words of an old Bob and Ray routine, he firmly believed he could build himself up by knocking other people down. Although he supported rising talents, like Wells, he also attacked and denigrated others. What might at the time have seemed critical judgment seems more like random choice in retrospect. None of this kept Harris from maintaining a high opinion of his own talents: “I am, really, a great writer” he once remarked. “[M]y only difficulty is in finding great readers.”

If Harris genuinely deserves to remembered for anything of literary consequence today, it is for The Man Shakespeare, which, at the time, saved the Bard’s reputation from reverent mummification. “To many of the ‘professors,’ as Harris always calls his colleagues in Shakespearean criticism,” Kingsmill writes, “Shakespeare was a substitute for experience…. Harris, hastily scanning a play between an afternoon in the city and an evening with a girl, had none of this cloistered diffidence.” Despite the book’s undeniable vitality, however, Kingsmill finds it very much a reflection of its author:

To bring order into this chaos is impossible. It is the hasty impressionistic criticism of a man with no coherent outlook on like, who writes as the passing mood prompts, alternating without any uneasiness between envious depreciation and melting worship.

Nonetheless, The Man Shakespeare gave Harris some legitimate status as a critic, and he relished the band of young admirers–Kingsmill among them–attracted by his status and celebrity. “He talked always,” one of them later said, “as if he held the key to Life–with a big L. As if only with his help could one pass into the kingdom of experience.”

What delight Harris must have taken in holding court. Any listener–suitably in awe–would do. As Kingsmill recalls of his many strolls with Harris, “During these walks I seemed rather to be overhearing a soliloquoy than lending my attention to talk directly addressed to me.” Whether this was a reflection of Harris himself or of the image he wanted others to have of him is hard to tell. Harris believed “a deep bass voice and a ruthless disregard of everyone’s feelings” were “the two main attributes of a man of action.”

Eventually, Harris ran out of fools to underwrite his wrecking of magazines and fled–to France, then to America, then back to France. He managed to beg, borrow, charm, or steal sufficient funds to maintain a semblance of gentility. His final attempt to regain his audience and substantial profits, if not his respectability, with his long-winded and scandalous memoirs, was undermined by a proliferation of pirated editions.

Though he provides ample evidence to justify one, Kingsmill refuses, however, to make this book a hatchet job. Instead, this is first and foremost a study in character. If all Kingsmill did was to reveal the flimsiness of the props with which Harris bolstered his public facade, this book would be as forgettable as its subject. It is the sensitivity with which Kingsmill traces Harris’s personality that make this such a remarkable book. Harris’ energy may often have been misdirected, but the intensity of that energy is undeniable. Harris may had little reason for holding himself to be something more than he was, particularly after his flight from England, yet Kingsmill recognizes what tremendous willpower it must have taken Harris to maintain that facade when its artifice was so obvious.

Harris never did as much damage to others as he did to himself. In the end, Harris comes to seem rather like another minor figure Kingsmill mentions, “one of those men who owe their reputation among their contemporaries to what they might have achieved, and who would perhaps have had less reputation had they done more to earn one.” Yet, as Kingsmill shows so persuasively, it was also solely by his own efforts that Harris earned what reputation he had, and Harris kept up those efforts long after the point when lesser men would have crumbled.

Frank Harris deserves a prominent place, on an admittedly short shelf, alongside Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception and Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret as a classic portrait of the pathos and pathology of a constructed reputation. It wouldn’t be an entirely unjust ending if we came to remember Frank Harris because he happened to have been the subject of Hugh Kingsmill’s book.

Other Comments

Horace Gregory, Books, 18 September 1932

Mr. Kingsmill’s biography of Frank Harris is not the first, nor will it be the last, for the Frank Harris legend shows signs of growth and possibly immortality, yet I believe that he has written the perfect story of Harris’ life. Something of the fascination that Harris must have had is reproduced in Mr. Kingsmill’s version. From the very start one catches the excitement, the vicarious adventure of knowing Harris and knowing him a shade too well.

Joseph Wood Krutch, Nation, 2 November 1932

It is possible that more facts will be brought to light if anyone cares enough to search for them, but it is not likely that we shall get a more convincing portrait of the picturesque and exasperating scoundrel who remains strangely pathetic despite his manifold sins.

Alexander Armstrong’s review of Frank Harris from the Frank Harris page at www.oddbooks.com

The great virtue of this book is its consistent humanity, both towards Harris itself and those whose lives he touched. It is this quality, as well as its readability, that have made this one of my long-term favourite works; indeed it was this book more than any other that set me on the path which has led to the creation of these pages.

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Frank Harris, by Hugh Kingsmill
London: Jonathan Cape, 1932

Other Ranks, by W. V. Tilsley

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Excerpt


Close on now —must be. they’d be getting tea ready at home. Had they his field card yet? Fulshaw’s eyes were brilliant with excitement. The first birthday he’d missed at home. They’d send him some of the cake in his next parcel. Must stick near Jack. One up the spout … make sure his safety catch was off. What an uproar. Good job they didn’t know at home exactly what was happening.

The burden of shells lifted, the absence of racket stinging his ear-drums. He heard a whistle, a way off. Fulshaw swept his arm upwards, climbing the parapet. “Come on, lads!”

Bradshaw experienced a moment of indecision. Should he jump over the parapet first, risking getting marked down, or hesitate till the others climbed out? Jerry’s machine-guns would rake the parapet; many got pipped in the head in the act of climbing out. Like that film. He found himself on top, enormously magnified and exposed, and joined in the cramped forward walk of the irregularly formed line. Two others between him and Jack. Better leave it at that. When would that empty feeling in the stomach go? He felt afraid to look in front, and kept his eyes down. They saucered with wonder at seeing a sun-baked face peering up at him from one shell-hole. It smelt. He saw another; a green-white face pressed into the side of the hole, the remainder a limp, ragged bundle of khaki. Some other battalion had been over the same ground.

He raised his eyes slowly over the dry pot-holed surface of No Man’s Land; saw in front what might have been an indistinct row of heads and shoulders, some distance away. Impossible to go straight. Some holes had things to avoid in them. They plodded blindly over the innumerable gougings towards the crackling machine-guns and rifle-fire. The impetuous Fulshaw fell first, in Bradshaw’s path. The little private bent down on one knee, forgetting the order that nobody had to stop with wounded. His officer waved him on, groaning; other hand to groin. Bradshaw had a desire to stay.

“Shall I get the stretcher-bearers, sir?”

The officer’s face grew drawn with pain.

“No, no! Carry on!”

Bradshaw looked round and espied a dud shell. He pulled it up, surprised by its weight, and set it upright on its base near the officer.

“Just to mark the spot, sir. I’ll tell the stretcher-bearers where you are as soon as I see them.”

He passed on, a dozen yards behind the thin, extended line. They looked pathetically ineffective. As he caught up, the back of Corporal Dawkins’ head fell out; upraised arms sagged to earth. Bradshaw slipped in beside Driver without a word. Dawkins killed. He was post corporal at Bouzincourt–handed Bradshaw his mail.

They were men in front there. Germans. Patches of green further behind; unshelled fields. Sergeant Todd called out,

“Don’t bunch up, there …”

Bradshaw saw a wide gap on his right, moved right to lessen it. The next man closed towards him, the unaccountably dropped flat. He crouched lower, an attitude that gave a false impression of grimness and determination — men ready to strike. They were merely trying to minimise their bodily targets.

The spasmodic crackling rippled, then sharply cracked in its sweeping arc. Above it Bradshaw head a choking sob. Somebody fell. The sergeant staggered but kept on. Another sob. Wounds … exhaustion? He didn’t know. But he no longer wondered why men walked to attack, even in broad daylight. The ground was abominably loose and uneven. No real surface. A series of craters and holes, with nothing to walk on but the loose rims.

The line thinned mysteriously; became little bunches of twos and threes. They stumbled on exhaustingly, throats dry. He looked up again. No mistaking them this time; less than a hundred yards away. He prayed for something to happen before he got that far. Chick was right, then? The Germans were safe in their dugouts whilst the ground was writhing under our barrage; ready to nip up when it lifted and catch us coming across?

No shells came to aid them now. They were targets. Sweating gunners would be saying:

“Well, if the bloody infantry don’t do something after that lot, that God we’ve got a Navy!”

The last seventy-five yards might well have been seventy-five miles. They would never get there. Every decent-sized shell-hole clung to Bradshaw’s feet, saying, “Get down to it, you fool. Get down to it! Pretend you’re wounded!” Driver was still there, to the left and slightly ahead. He wanted to draw nearer, but felt that, closer, one or the other would be hit. He knew that the slightest swerve or stumble could put him either in the direct track of a bullet or out of its line of flight. To the end of his days the picture of those stumbling men would remain with him; floundering into shell-holes; climbing out. Faltering, dropping, reeling on. Bent figures stumbling forward with distressful gasps; falling, often remaining down.

Fifty yards from the German trench the struggling remnant expended its last ounces of diminishing energy. It gathered, too scattered and demoralised to go farther, into two huge craters, like the sheep that soldiers are.

Their first attack, a washout.

Comments


I first stumbled across Other Ranks while taking Prof. Don Emerson’s course on the First World War at the University of Washington. I was in the habit of roaming the stacks of Suzzallo Library, particularly the long aisles of old fiction that sat in a neglected corner of the fifth floor. As a break from studying, I would browse the shelves, inspecting titles that seemed interesting. Even then, I hoped to find lost treasures among those forgotten books.

I recognized the title phrase, used to described the enlisted men in the British Army, from the course, but I didn’t recognize Tilsley’s name. I did, however, know Edmund Blunden, who’d written the Introduction. Blunden’s Undertones of War was one of the memoirs on our reading list. His name suggested this might be something worth reading, so I checked Other Ranks out and read it over the next weekend.

I had already become fascinated by the breakdown in class structures that resulted from the meatgrinder of trench warfare, but I found Other Ranks unique among the remarkable British memoirs of the Western Front. Blunden’s own book, along with Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, Siegfried Sasson’s trilogy, and other well-regarded first-hand accounts, were all from the perspective of educated, upper-class officers. Until oral histories of ordinary soldiers began to be published in the 1960s, hardly any corresponding accounts could be found to speak for them.

For that alone, Other Ranks would be worth remembering. But this is more than just an authentic memoir of the life and deaths of men in the front line: it is a powerful piece of prose. Tilsley’s style is careful, economical. Nothing is overstated. His sentences are often short, almost telegraphic. The poetry is between the lines.

Although written as a novel, Other Ranks opens with a brief disclaimer: “None of the characters in this chronicle is fictitious.” We can assume, then, that Dick Bradshaw, from whose viewpoint the story is told, represents Tilsley. If so, then Other Ranks is all the more remarkable for its success in portraying the evolution of Bradshaw’s outlook from naive draftee to seasoned veteran.

In the very first paragraph, Bradshaw imagines “an inspection, when some great general would stand before him and say: ‘Fight for England–you? Run away, boy, and come back when you’re a man!” Still too young to shave, Bradshaw is a quiet, respectful lad, probably from the family of a clerk or shopkeeper. He and his buddy, Jack, watch guardedly as the older men in their company of Lancastershire draftees indulge their vices: drinking, gambling, smoking, whoring–and, most of all, boasting. Both fear being shown up as unfit to be soldiers.

The book opens as Bradshaw’s “C” Company leaves the depot at Etaples and heads for their first engagement at the front: a late and futile attack in the Battle of the Somme. The excerpt above describes climactic moment of going over the top, the infantry assault across No Man’s Land, a tactic that claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties in the course of the war and almost never succeeded.

Over the next fourteen months, “C” Company carries on, alternating between stints in the front line and carrying out tedious chores at bases “down the line.” As Tilsley writes, “down the line,” “up the line,” and “in the trenches” “were elastic phrases. To the infantry, Poperinghe [ten miles from the front] was down the line; to non-combatant units, up.”

The unit experiences the miserable and perilous lot of what was known as the P.B.I.: the Poor Bloody Infantry. A wounded Highlander Bradshaw encounters near the end sums up their unenviable lot:

And of all the lousy jobs in this bloodstained war is anybody so mucked about as the P.B.I.? You exist like a pig for weeks on end, grovelling and nosing and snivelling for rations. Your constitution is steadily undermined month after month by insufficient grub. Your body is lousy and dirty, and covered with disgusting sores. The hair on you is a nesting and breeding-place for chats and crabs, and has to be shaved off. You’re unclean; degraded. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry from the R.E.s [Royal Engineers] can muck you about. You have the most dangerous, tedious, monotonous, and thankless job of all, and you get less pay than anybody else.

Though he proves a worthy soldier and earns promotions to corporal and sergeant, Bradshaw loses any illusions he had about the war and his leaders. He goes from thinking of “great generals” who will size him up to referring to virtually everyone above the rank of subaltern as “The older men who use, and misuse, us….” As he writes in his diary at the close of the book,

So now, after nearly two years in the army and fourteen months overseas, I am returning as a wounded Tommy who has done his bit. The irony of it! I came here with a duty before me–to kill Germans. For months I received instructions on how to drive home into my adversaries’ bodies the long pointed blade of steel recently discarded. There has never been blood upon its surface; only a little mud and dust. Hardly more potent has been my rifle–and both have been carried many wearisome miles. My service has been a washout; undistinguished. Yet I have seen many dead men and boys–so many that the sight ceased to shock. Not normal dead, but cruel mutilations that were never on God’s earth meant to be.

Published in 1931, Other Ranks was late and lost in the wave of war memoirs and novels. The Times Literary Supplement gave it a brief, polite review. Never released in the U.S., it soon vanished. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory missed it, as did other studies of war literature by Bernard Bergonzi and Samuel Hynes. Aside from a rare copy that pops up now and again for hundreds of dollars, it sits collecting dust on the shelves of scholarly libraries like the one where I found it. If I could choose only one book from this site to be reissued and rediscovered, this would be it. Not only in recognition of its exceptional balance of honesty and discretion, but in tribute to the sacrifice of a generation of Other Ranks.

Other Comments

· Times Literary Supplement, 16 April 1931

Mr. Blunden remarks that Mr. Tilsley “misses nothing.” He has, indeed, a very keen eye. Like most “other ranks” who have written of their experiences in the War, he had had an upbringing and an education superior to that of his fellows. He was one of those who believed that the Army could not make soldiers of his kind, and admits that when he saw a German raiding party approaching he forgot in his excitement to take off his safety-catch. Perhaps for this reason he displays at times a pessimism regarding the respective qualities of British and German troops which is at war with his pride in the 55th Division…. Mr. Tisley’s description of an attack on the Somme is as vivid as anything of the sort that has been written.

Locate a copy

Other Ranks, by W.V. Tilsley
London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931

Dust jacket image courtesy of Great War Dust Jackets: http://www.greatwardustjackets.co.uk/.

Moorish Girl’s Unappreciated Books Archive

Moorish Girl’s Unappreciated Books Archive

Since late 2004, Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, has been “asking readers, writers, editors, critics, librarians, or booksellers to weigh in on a book they loved, but which has remained underappreciated.” Almost every week, contributors ranging from veteran best-sellers (Scott Turow) to simple reading enthusiasts recommend and comment upon one of their favorite neglected books.

Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney

Excerpt

I soon learned that variety is not the spice, but the very stuff of life. We need the constant ebb and flow of wavelets of sensation, thought, perception, action, and emotion, lapping on the shore of our consciousness, now here, now there, keeping even our isolation in the ocean of reality, so that we neither encroach nor are encroached upon. If our minds are thus like islands, they are of many shapes, some long and straight, others narrow and bent, impervious to the sea and belching from deep unapproachable cones the unversial warmth which lies beneath us all. We are narrow men, twisted men, smooth and nicely rounded men, and poets; but whatever we are, we have our shape, and we preserve it best in the experience of many things.

If the reach of experience is suddenly confined, and we are left with only a little food for thought and feeling, we are apt to take the few objects that offer themselves and ask a whole catalogue of often absurd questions about them. Does it work? How? What made it and of what? And, in parallel, when and where did I last see something like it and what else does it remind me of? Andif we are dissatisfied at the time, we repeat the series in the optative mood, making each imperfection in what we have to had evoke a wish or an ideal. So we set in train a wonderful flow of combinations and associations in our minds, the length and complexity of which soon obscure its humble starting point.

The objects in my cell were few and bare; I have enumerated them all in the last chapter, except the gamelle, or mess-tin, and spoon with which we ate our soup. There was neither comfort nor company in any of them, but they served a brief term of slavery to the orgy of speculation to which confinement drove me. My bed, for example, could be measured and roughly classified with school beds or army beds, according to appearance and excepting the peculiarity of its being hinged to the wall. Yet it was a bed with a pronounced difference from any other. The broad lattice-work of iron laths, which took the place of springs, was unique and almost supernatural in its torment. If I lay on my back, at least one vertebra was wedged in a sharp corner; if I lay on my side, a hip or shoulder-blade or elbow found itself pressed against an edge; and if I lay on my stomach, my nostrils were filled with straw-dust. Yet this bed retained a quality of bedness which summoned all my associations with all the beds I had ever known. In it my fears, joys, sorrows and relief were those of bed, not to be found in haystacks or ditches or on the floor, but common to every bed from canopy to canvas.

When I had done with the bed, which was too simple to intrigue me long, I felt the blankets, estimated their warmth, examined the precise mechanics of the window, the discomfort of the toilet (perversely, for its very presence was an unexpected luxury), computed the length and breadth, the orientation and elevation of the cell.

There was also some decoration to be seen, for my predecessors had evidently been better equipped than I. There were smears of oilpaint on the walls and a great deal of pencil work, raning from signatures and salutations to lewd sketches derived from interrupted love-lives. Some had also counted the days, but the longest line of pencil marks was fifty-six, so either their patience or their imprisonment had been short. The first case would have been natural and the second desirable, for it the physical nature of this cell was only to be described by understatement, its spirit or atmosphere defied all words.

The adjectives which sprang to mind were those which might properly be used of stagnant pools, although the place was dry and not obscure; there was an obscenity in this calculated degradation of a human dwelling-place which chilled the heart as no fungoid squalor could. There was no filth, generally no vermin: only the diabolic essence of perversion and the smugly spruce technology of a stockyard.

Comments

Solitary Confinement is Christopher Burney’s account of the 526 days he spent in Fresnes prison, outside Paris, after being captured by the Germans as a suspected spy in 1942. Contrary to what you might expect, though, this is not a Wooden Horse/Escape from Colditz book of British derring-do and ingenuity. Escape was never a serious consideration for Burney, something he chides himself for rather late in the narrative.

Instead, he fully expected something worse than solitary confinement, and even pictured the firing squad he’d face if his real identity as a spy were found out. What makes Solitary Confinement stand out among war and prison memoirs is that Burney focuses, to the exclusion of almost all extraneous details, on the mental and emotional experience of his long stretch in solitary.

With no distraction but a mid-day serving of watery soup and a chunk of bread, and with only a small patch of sky to see through the high window in his cell, Burney had to devise ways to fill the hours between waking and sleeping. He slowly ran through old memories, recalling walks taken and meals eaten. He rehearsed and perfected alibis to tell his interrogators–that he was an escaped prisoner of war, that he was a special operations officer–that could avoid implicating the French members of his support network.

And he spent a great deal of time remembering bits of the Bible and other religious teachings from his youth, and puzzling over their meaning. The notions of the two extremes of good and evil, in particular, troubled him, for he found it difficult to resolve the notion that evil opposed good, that evil resulted from the sins committed by men, with his immediate experience. Had the information he gave in his interrogations led to the arrest and execution of members of the French resistance, they would, through no fault of their own, come to suffer for his sin of confessing.

At the same time, he also struggled to understand what it meant if God is love:

I did not hate my enemies. I would do what I could to furstrate their schemes against me, but I would not be savage with them. If the Toad [one of the more brutal prison guards] would go back to Germany and leave my door open, he could go in peace; I would try to neutralize his unpleasantness, but I would not harry him to hell. But the Toad and love seemed to be incompatible terms. It would be easy enough to couple them in church, especially in the general proposition, an exhortation given in peculiarly suitable circumstances where outright refutation or even doubt would be unlikely. For in those peaceable surroundings the vision of enmity recedes. But does the vision of love advance? Do we know what we are talking about?

Left to explore these thoughts, Burney eventually comes to decide that he must “replace this old polar system of value–the good of every kind faced with its evil opposite–by a scale which would all be positive degrees of good”:

There is no critical mark to the right of which is Good and to the left Evil,” he decides. “Life is not a gloomy and impossible grey, as moralists would have it, to be sorted into black and white: all its aspects form a spectrum, of which the greater part is hidden to a single pair of eyes, but all which originates from a single source. To suppose that there are contrary principles of light and darkness, or good and evil, is as presumptuous as to deny the existence of infrared light on the grounds of its invisibility.

When it becomes clear that he will be moved to collective confinement in a camp in Germany, Burney admits that, “I was reluctant to leave.” His time in solitary has, in a way, been an opportunity:

I knew that so many months of solitude, though I had allowed them to torment me at times, had been in a sense an exercise in liberty. For, by absolving me from the need either to consider practical problems of living or to maintain the many unquestioned assumptions which cannot conveniently be abandoned in social life, I had been free to drop the spectables of the near-sighted and to scan the horizon of existence. And I believed that I had seen something there. But it was only a glimpse, a remote and tenuous apprehension of what lay behind the variety and activity of life, and I was afraid toturn my attention back to my immediate surroundings.

To go from abrupt capture and interrogation by the Gestapo to this revelation is a remarkable journey. Frank Kermode was moved to write of Burney, “The courage and the intellectual integrity of this writer are far beyond what most of us would expect of ourselves….” The author’s interior journey, as it were, comes to overshadow even the drama of his physical adventures. And his sensitive, thoughtful, yet always self-deprecating account makes Solitary Confinement a truly exceptional book. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan called it “certainly of classic quality. . . . a wonderful little book,” and it’s among the most memorable I’ve come across in the course of editing this site.

Reviews

This is a beautiful, simple, and moving book. To my mind it deals with a question more important than even the war and intrigue, which are its setting–how a man may find and build his own self.

Rollo May, New York Times, 1 March 1953

This is a story of great courage and steadfastness, and it is all the more impressive as proof that men of integrity can stand on their own under the greatest pressures without creeping to the shelter of superstitions and orthodoxies. It is as powerful a justification of intellectual freedom and of the intellectual as one could wish to have.

Anthony West, New Yorker, 11 April 1953

Locate a copy

Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney
London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1952

View of Dawn in the Tropics, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Excerpt

The comandante gave him a story to read. In it a man would go into the bathroom and spend hours locked inside it. The wife worried about what her husband was doing in the bathroom for such a long time. One day she decided to find out. She climbed out the window and walked along the narrow ledge that went around the house. She slid up to the bathroom window and looked in. What she saw stunned her: her husband was sitting on the toilet and had a revolver in his hand with the barrel in his mouth. From time to time he took the barrel of the gun out of his mouth to lick it slowly like a lollipop.

He read the story and gave it back to its author without further comment or perhaps with an offhand comment. What makes the story particularly moving is the fact that its author, the comandante, committed suicide seven years later by shooting himself in the head. So as not to wake his wife, he wrapped the gun in a towel.

Comments

Best known for his masterpiece, Three Trapped Tigers, Cabrera Infante described View of Dawn in the Tropics as “a personal statement of the strategies of history.” This short book, barely 140 pages long, comprises approximately 100 vignettes drawn from the history of Cuba. Cabrera Infante’s approach is similar to Eduardo Galeano’s magnum opus Memory of Fire, but distilled to a piercing intensity.

The theme of virtually all of the vignettes is violence. The violence of the first Spanish masters against the natives, the violence of slave rebellions, the violence of colonial wars, the violence of coups and counter-coups, the violence of Castro’s revolution, and the violence of its repressions. Many of the vignettes end in death.

Violence, Cabrera Infante seems to suggest, is endemic to the presence of humans on the island. Whether repressive or liberating, the violence continues, in contrast to the qualities of the island itself:

And it will always be there. As someone once said, that long, sad, unfortunate island will be there after the last Indian and after the last Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and after the last of the Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed over by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.

Writing from his chosen exile in London, Cabrera Infante seems to draw some hope from this perspective. If violence is the legacy of humans on Cuba, it’s a legacy that will last only as long as there is human memory. As he writes in one vignette (quoted in entirety): “In what other country of the world is there a province named Matanzas, meaning, ‘Slaughter’?”

Locate a copy

View of Dawn in the Tropics, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978
First published in Spain in 1974 as Vista del Amanecer en el Tropico

The Wet Flanders Plain, by Henry Williamson

Excerpt

The Salient Now — and Then
Flatness of green fields, no tall trees anywhere, clusters of red-tield, red-bricked farms and houses, and a dim village-line on the far horizon, only very slightly higher, it seems, than the green flatness everywhere–that is the Salient to-day. Yet for years these few square miles were shapeless as the ingredients of a Christmas pudding while being stirred. Not even worms were left after the bombardments–all blasted to shreds, with the bricks of ruins, stumps of trees, and metalling of roads. We used to say it could never be reclaimed: that in fifty years it would be the same dreadful morass.

Mankind suffered over a million casualties within the dish, double-rimmed with inner and outer “ridges,” of the Salient. It had the outline of a skull, the teeth trying to crack Ypres–so the Germans, with grim humour, drew it during the War. A fit man can easily walk round the skull’s outline in a day; but in ’17, could he have walked without human interference, he would ahve dropped, exhausted, before he had floundered a hundredth part of the way, and been drowned with his face under the thin top mud. The bombardments broke the bekes, or brooks, draining this land, which was once covered by the sea; and the pudding became porridge, a-swim with icy water.

The only way over the morass was by the wooden tracks that serpentined over the mud–baulks of teak and beech laid side by side, looking like the sloughs, cast by monsters of the primeval slime. Always at night the tracks glowed and glared with fire and smoke and dreadful crashes; sections would rise splintered into the air, wagons, horses, mules with them; the mud bordering the tracks was piled with old broken and swelled things. The young German gunner cadets were trained in night-firing on these tracks, which were visible along their ribbed and winding lengths by day. Now if you would recall 1917 to your memory, you must stay away from this fine agricultural district.

The Genius of the Salient
Near St. Julien, opposite Triangle Farm, at a place called Vancouver, stands the most beautiful thing in the Salient. People call it the Canadian Memorial, but for me it is the memorial for all the soliders in the War. It faces towards Ypres, not towards a vanquiched enemy, as do so many of the war memorials to be seen in France to-day, such as the Gallic cock crowing triumphantly on a broken cannon at Roclincourt, or the caribou roaring eastwards from Beaumont Hamel, or the defiant artisan-soldier standing firm and fierce at Lens.

Do the dead feel cock-crowing triumph over the dead? The crowing is for the industrial magnates, the Lens or the Ruhr mine-owners, not for the poor unknowing working-men who fell in the Great Horror, and became part of it.

No; the colossal head and shoulders of the soldier with reversed arms emerging from the tall stone column has the gravity and strength of grief coming from full knowledge of old wrongs done to men by men. It mourns; but it mourns for all mankind. We are silent before it, as we are before the stone figures of the Greeks. The thoughtless one-sided babble about national righteousness or wrongess, the cliches of jingo patriotism, the abstract virtues parasitic on the human spirit, fade before the colossal figure of the common soldier by the warside.

The genius of Man rises out of the stone, and our tears fall before it.

Comments

The Wet Flanders Plain is truly an exceptional book. Of the many–and good–books written about the First World War, this is the only one I know of in which a soldier returns to the scene of his battles–or at least, until Michael Kernan’s The Violet Dots came along over fifty years later. Considering the enormous number of men who served on the Western Front between 1914-1918, and the depth to which the experience shocked and wounded many of them, it seems odd that there aren’t more like it.

But after reading The Wet Flanders Plain, the absence becomes understandable. Returning to the scene of their worst traumas is hardly something that would have been undertaken lightly. Williamson returns to the area of the Western Front in hopes of ridding himself of what he calls his “wraiths”: the memories of the many young men he served with and killed or saw killed in his time at the Front. As he describes in the moving introduction, “Apologia Pro Mea Vita,” these wraiths haunt him even ten years after the War, and drive him to seek refuge in the belfry of his village church, where only the deafening tolling of the bells can drown out the rush and noise of his memories and nightmares.

The fact that Williamson survived the War is in itself miraculous. Arriving in France in the fall of 1914 with the first wave of volunteers that followed the Regulars, he served on the Ypres Salient and the Somme throughout much of the next four years. The numbers of fellow soldiers he saw killed and wounded would certainly have left any with at least a few “wraiths” to haunt his dreams and memories.

In 1928, Williamson and another unnamed veteran journeyed back to Flanders and Northern France to revisit the places they served. Much of The Wet Flanders Plain comes from the diary he kept during the trip. They travelled on the cheap, staying in estaminets and eating at workers’ cafes, and expenses are a constant concern throughout the book.

As the excerpt above describes, they find, to their surprise, that the land has been quick to recover the calm and order it knew before the War. The sodden battlefields are all productive farmland, and birdsong–unknown during the War–can be heard everywhere. Williamson–best known as a nature writer–notes a dozen different types of song birds, and remarks on the similarities between the natural environment here and at home in England.

What remains from the War are the man-made scars: mostly German machine gun emplacements, so well-built and extensive that now sledgehammers are having to do the work millions of British shells failed at. And there are new scars as well: the many orderly cemeteries for the War dead. Even for the German dead, although these, he observes, are given cast-off bits of land, out of sight and begrudged.

The local people show little nostalgia for the soldiers who overwhelmed their land for four years. The money the battlefield tourists bring is accepted, but not as recompense for their losses. Instead, their interest seems in restoring the way life was before the war, when small matters of money, property, and neighborhood jealousies were the main concerns of everyday life.

In summary, what Williamson finds is that energies of both nature and man are devoted to recovery, not carrying on the conflict.

The dug-outs of Y ravine had subsided, the dry-rotted timbers broke with a touch; the pistons and mainshaft and cylinders of the aeroplane rusted in the grasses–I remembered the charred framework on the ridge above Station Road–with rifle barrels and holed helmets and burst minenwerfer cases. Those dreaded oil-drums of the minnies! Rust and mildew and long tangled grass and frogs. The Ancre flowed in its chalky bed, swift and cold as before, gathering its green duckweed into a heaving coat as of mail, and drowning the white flowers of water crow’s-foot. Only one thing of all our work remained–the wooden military bridge over Mill Causeway. “Out work?” a voice seemed to say, a voice of the wan star. “What you seek is lost for ever in ancient sunlight, which arises again as Truth.” The voice wandered thinner than memory, and was gone with the star under the horizon.

With the exception of the Canadian memorial described above, the cemeteries and statues seem more designed to reassure the living than to commemorate the dead. The memories of Williamson and other veterans are the truest memorials. In the end, Williamson finds “the wraiths were fled,” and himself “filled with longing for my home.” His journey has allowed him to move forward, at last, to “the new part of myself, overlaying the wraith of that lost for ever.”

Reviews

Herschel Brickell, New York Herald Tribune, 1 December 1929

One of the best written of all the books on the war. It is slight in size and unpretentious, but worth putting aside to read again when the next storm threatens.

Frances Bartlett, Boston Transcript, 30 November 1929

Among the books of today marking the recrudescence of a general interest in stories of the Great War–also the growth of an abhorrence of all wars, and the determination to avoid them by every honorable means–Mr. Williamson’s is uniquely notable. It is epic in prose; elegaic for the most part, yet in certain of its nuances possessing a delicately lovely pastoral quality.

F.L. Robbins, Outlook, 27 November 1929

Unheralded by fanfare of advertisement, The Wet Flanders Plain emerges from the mass of War books as the most beautiful and the most terrible. Henry Williamson, the English prose writer and nature mystic, had revisited the scenes of his War years, and in a diary weaves the past and present into a series of scenes, pure and strange and deeply stirring.

Harold King, Saturday Review of Literature, 21 December 1929

The book is a series of vignettes, done with that delicate skill of which Mr. Williamson is master. It is deep and tender and moving, and will probably rank with the few really great books of the war.

Locate a copy

The Wet Flanders Plain, by Henry Williamson
London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1929

Dust jacket image courtesy of Great War Dust Jackets: http://www.greatwardustjackets.co.uk/.

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

Excerpt

David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.

High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.

The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofya Levinson want to turn and see what he was looking at.

Her eyes–which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul–her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.

She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there–mute, blind, her eyes still open.

The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thing stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice–he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet–this world still preoccupied him.

All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn’t feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he longer existed.

Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had falled behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the bird and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

“I’ve become a mother,” she thought.

That was her last thought.

Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofya Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her life a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.

Comments

If War and Peace had never been written, it might have been easier for Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate to win an audience. To compare Life with War is so obvious and instinctive it’s almost an autonomic reflex. They’re both big, thick novels about Russia at war with enormous casts of characters, real and fictional.

The comparison does Life and Fate a disservice on two counts. First, any reader put off by the bulk or subject of War and Peace would hardly think twice of giving Life and Fate a try. And second, although Life is a superb novel, it is not quite on the level of what is arguably one of the pinnacles of the novel as an art form.

Still, the comparison is inescapable. Like War and Peace, Life and Fate is a tapestry, with numerous narrative threads, many of them dealing with members of an extended family: Alexandra Shaposhnikova, her three daughters–Lyudmila, Yevgenia, and Marusya–and her son Dmitry. There is Viktor Shtrum, Lyudmila’s second husband, is an ambitious physicist who encounters an early version the post-war campaign against Jewish intellecturals but is saved by Stalin’s deus ex machina intervention. Yevgenia struggles with the deprivations of home front life, falls in love with a maverick Army officer who leads a crucial tank assault at Stalingrad, and puts herself at risk by sending a parcel to her ex-husband, a commissar fallen from favor, in Lyubyanka Prison. Dmitry’s son Seryozha fights in the ruins of Stalingrad, part of a small group of soldiers isolated and holding out in house 6/1.

But the cast ranges far wider than just the Shaposhnikovs. Stalin, General Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad, and Adolf Eichmann all make appearances. Robert Chandler’s excellent English translation provides a seven-page list of characters at the end of the book. The categories alone give an indication of the scope and diversity of Life and Fate:

  • The Shaposhnikov Family and Their Circle
  • Viktor’s colleagues
  • Viktor’s circle in Kazan
  • In the German concentration camp
  • In the Russian labour camp
  • On the journey to the gas chamber
  • In the Lubyanka prison
  • In Kuibyshev
  • At Stalingrad power station
  • Getmanov’s circle in Ufa
  • Members of a Fighter Squadron of the Russian Air Force
  • Novikov’s Tank corps
  • Officers of the Soviet Army in Stalingrad
  • Soldiers in House 6/1
  • In the Kalmyk Steppe
  • Officers of the German Army in Stalingrad

Despite this scale, the action in this novel is on a small, intimate level. A young girl fantasizes about her lover. The tank commander, Novikov, removed from his post for diverting ever so slightly from the official plan, waits in a room to be questioned and probably beaten. Viktor Shtrum bickers with his wife and agonises over minor incidents of office politics. Lyudmila fights to make her way by tram to see her wounded son. Krymov, the commissar, listens to his interrogator chat on the phone about cottage cheese and a dinner invitation “as though the creature sitting next to the investigator were not a man, but some quadruped.”

Grossman’s capacity for getting inside the minds of his characters is not limited to the Russians:

… The brain of the forty-year-old accountant, Naum Rozenberg, was still engaged in its usual work. He was walking down the road and counting: 110 the day before yesterday, 61 today, 612 during the five days before–altogether that made 783 … A pity he hadn’t kept separate totals for men, women and children … Women burn more easily. An experienced brenner arranges the bodies so that the bony old men who make a lot of ash are lying next to the women. Any minute now they’d be ordered to turn off the road; these people–the people they’d been digging up from pits and dragging out with great hooks on the end of ropes–had received the same order only a year ago. An experienced brenner could look at a mound and immediately estimate how many bodies there were inside–50, 100, 200, 600, 1000 … Scharfuhrer Elf insisted that the bodies should be referred to as items–100 items, 200 items–but Rozenberg called them people: a man who had been killed, a child who had been put to death, an old man who had been put to death. He used these words only to himself–otherwise the Scharfuhrer would have emptied nine grams of metal into him….

One of the most moving of these small stories is that of Anna Semyonova, Viktor’s mother, who, like Grossman’s own mother, is trapped in the town of Berdichev with thousands of other Jews when the Germans sweep through the Ukraine. Grossman’s mother was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the town. After months of captivity in a ghetto, Anna is packed onto a cattle car and transported to Auschwitz. Along the way, she befriends an orphaned boy, David, and, in the excerpt above, they are herded into the chambers and gassed.

Before leaving the ghetto, however, she composes a letter to Viktor, knowing she will never see him again:

They say that children are our own future, but how can one say that of these children? They aren’t going to become musicians, cobblers or tailors. Last night I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of bearded, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers who bak honey-cakes and goose-necks–this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings and Sabbaths will disappear forever under the earth. After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won’t be here, we will have vanished–just as the Aztecs once vanished.

This letter is easily one of the finest works in the literature of the Holocaust. The filmmaker Frederic Wiseman was so affected by this chapter that he adapted it into a play, “Last Letter,” which he filmed in 2003.

Life and Fate also reflects Grossman’s own development, his disillusionment with the Soviet state and his acceptance of his Jewish roots. Born in Berdichev in 1905, Grossman was raised as a secular Russian. Educated as a chemist, he started writing while still attending Moscow State University. After working for a few years in the Donbass mining region, he switched professions.

By the time Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman was a member of the Writer’s Union and a popular journalist. He spent much of the war as a frontline reporter for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, including during the battle for Stalingrad, which forms the centerpiece of Life and Fate. He also witnessed the liberation of Treblinka and other concentration camps, and wrote some of the earliest coverage of the extermination of the Jews to be published anywhere.

The strength of Life and Fate’s depiction of combat, destruction, and its effects on soldiers and civilians stems directly from his wartime reporting, which has been collected and published in A Writer at War. The collection was edited by Luba Vinogradova and Anthony Beevor, who openly acknowledges his debt to Grossman for much of the descriptive power of his own account of the battle, Stalingrad.

During the war, Grossman wrote a great deal of propagandist material proclaiming the victory of the liberating Soviet state over the fascist Germans. In the novel The People Immortal, a realistic account of the demoralisation and panic of Soviet troops before the onslaught of the Wermacht in 1941 turns into a socialist fantasy in which a heroic commissar organises a successful counter-attack that routs the enemy. The Germans, “accustomed to victory for seven hundred days, could not and would not understand that on this seven hundred and first day defeat had come to them.” The soldiers celebrate not only their victory, but also the courage and leadership of their commissar: “The Commissar was in front, the Commissar was with us!”

In fact, Grossman’s loss of idealism began before that, starting with the mistaken arrest of his wife, Olga Guber, during the purges of 1937-1938. In Life and Fate, the war is portrayed as a contest between two equally ruthless states, two forms of totalitarianism differing only in ideology and technique. What heroism there was to be found was only as isolated, individual acts.

In the latter stages of the war, Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg, and others compiled documentation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews–and instances of Jewish resistance–in The Black Book. The Soviet authorities refused to publish it, however, and Grossman watched Stalin turn to persecuting Jews himself in the late 1940s.

Grossman condensed many of these experiences into Life and Fate, which he worked on through much of the 1950s. The purges, the persecution of Jewish scientists and engineers, the Holocaust, the battles, Stalin’s manipulation of all aspects of Soviet life all come to play in the novel. It developed into a very unfavorable and unapologetic account of the state’s power and corruption. It was all too realistic to pass as socialist realism. When Grossman submitted the novel for publication, a Politburo member told him it was unpublishable and would remain so for the next 200 years. As Vladimir Voinovich later pointed out, the most telling part of that remark was the certainty that the book’s merit would easily survive that long.

Grossman died without seeing Life and Fate in print–believing, in fact, that every copy in existence had been confiscated. Fortunately, his friend, the poet Semyon Lipkin, was able to photograph the manuscript, and passed a copy to Andrei Sakharov, who in turn provided it to Voinovich, who smuggled it to Switzerland in 1980.

Although the book was highly praised when first released, its bulk and grim subject put most potential readers off, and it soon passed out of print. Harvill Press reissued it in 1985 and 2003, and New York Review Books announced it would be released as part of its Classics series in May 2006.

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Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler
New York: Harper and Row, 1980

David Hume, by J. Y. T. Greig

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Excerpt


His duties as Librarian cannot have been very onerous. He did the necessary jobs, or some of them: he ordered new books, and now and then took a turn behind the issue desk. But he probably considered that a salary of £40 a year measured the services he ought to render; and after less than three years, having fallen foul of the Curators, he declined to pocket even the £40, handing the whole sum over to the blind poet, Blacklock, and installing him, despite his blindness, as assistant.

He already had at least one assistant, Watty Goodall, whom he had taken over from the previous Librarian. What precisely Watty did, and who paid him for it, are alike mysteries I cannot solve. The Faculty allowed him £5 a year. But that would scarcely buy his drinks. For Watty, so the legend goes, could seldom be discovered sober. Nevertheless he wrote the first defence of Mary Stuart, and so started that interminable controversy on the question of the Casket Letters and the murder at the Kirk o’ Field.

One day David came upon the drunken Watty in the library, fast asleep, his head resting on his table; and he crept up to him and shouted in his ear: “Queen Mary was a whore.”

Watty started up, half awake (or whole drunk), seized David by the throat and nearly throttled him, shouting: “Ye’re a bawdy Presbyterian minister, wha’s come to murder the reputation o’ a sainted queen. Ye’re a’ the same, you Presbyterians. Your predecessors told a wheen lies aboot her to that bitch Elizabeth, and helped to murder her; and noo …”

David, before he died, was called many names; but this, one fancies, was the only time that “Presbyterian” and “minister” were hurled at him.

Editor’s Comments

When I started assembling the initial set of lists for this site, I googled a number of phrases such as “lost masterpiece,” “forgotten classic,” and “neglected work” in hopes of finding a few relevant needles in the Internet’s haystack. The last phrase led me to Adam Potkay’s selected bibliography on David Hume, which had the following to say about J.Y.T. Greig’s biography of Hume: “A literate, witty, and unjustly neglected work. As an instructive contrast to Mossner’s serene and saintly Hume, Greig offers us a more feisty and pugnacious character.” “Literate, witty, and unjustly neglected”–it sounded like a perfect candidate.

A little more searching revealed that the book won the 1931 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. That cinched it. I located a copy on AddAll and ordered it.

From the very first page, it’s quite apparent that this is a style of biography no longer written. Today, it is taken for granted that a serious biography demands the writer don an impersonal, objective voice. The word “I” shall not appear outside of quoted material. Greig, on the other hand, often inserts himself into the text. He does so out of candor, not vanity.

At times, it is to admit gaps in his own research or knowledge: “But why February, not September or October, as the date for signing [the Matriculation Book of Edinburgh College, which Hume attended]? I have no idea.” In other cases, it’s to mark his opinions with an honest copyright:

A noisy, primitive, confused and very casual mode of education, we should deem it now. It had little system and still less equipment. The teacher kept is going by a deal of flogging, cruelty and hard driving of his often half-starved and shivering pupils; he assumed, as his religion taught him, that a boy is naturally wicked and must therefore be dragooned to virtue. But with all its faults of theory and practice it had certain admirable qualities: it was homely, human, un-mechanical; it treated boys as persons, not as units in a system. I cannot lay my hand upon my heart and swear I think our present methods overwhelmingly superior.

Greig also recognizes that his readership might include both serious students of philosophy and amateurs simply interested in a good tale of a noteworthy life. Thus, he advises at the very start: “Readers who do not take an interest in philosophy as such will be well advised to skip the first chapter. The biography of David Hume opens with the second.”

Indeed, Greig manages to craft an account that is just as full and diverse as Hume’s life itself. As Hume spent much of his life jousting with the conservative side of the Scottish Kirk (church), Greig takes care to help the reader understand the church, “its discipline, its forms of worship, and its doctrines” in a remarkable set-piece early in the book. He describes a typical Sunday for the Hume family in precise detail, concluding,

So ends the holy Sabbath. It has been a day devoid of beauty, liberty and joy. The kirk, twice visited, was bare, ugly, mean, dirty and dilapidated; no instrument of music has been heard in it; the singing has been half-hearted and lugubrious; no liturgy, composed with loving care by men sensitive to the cadences of speech, has charmed the ear; the unwritten sermons and extempore addresses to the Deity have lacked every grace except vigour. Every moment of the day had been controlled, every free movement of the children’s minds and bodies checked and thwarted: to run, hop, whistle, sing, laugh, throw a stone, cut a stick, or even walk a hundred years except to kirk and back again–these have been repressed as sins…. Need we wonder at the bitterness with which David Hume afterwards assailed Puritan and Presbyterian “enthusiasts?”

Greig gives the church a healthy number of knocks for its strident practices and positions, but he acknowledges its suitability for the majority of its followers. Reviewing the reformist trends that began to emerge in the mid-1700s, he writes,

The Moderates of the XVIIIth century, like their successors, the would-be Moderates of the XXth, offered a religion that was cool, respectable and decked out to look extremely rational. But it did not give the Scotsman what he wanted. In Scotland, those who want religion want it hot, and those who do not want it hot do not want religion. The absurd but quite effective compromises of the English are abhorrent to the Scottish mind.

By now, it should be clear that Greig’s opinions offer some of the finest fare in the book. Hume turned Scotland on its ear with his hearty disbelief, and confounded many with his affectionate embrace of the outcast. In much the same way, Greig injects a measure of humor into his accounts of many of the controversies of the time:

… the Select Society, momentarily off its head, published a scheme to suppress the Scots dialect and accent, and to teach Scotsmen how to speak like Cockneys or like Oxford dons. Happily the Scots people overwhelmed the whole affair with ridicule.
   As Hume’s biographer, I am happy to report that he escaped participating in this folly, being in London at the time. Otherwise he might, I fear, have shown himself as crazy as his friends.

Greig is also willing to take Hume himself to task on occasion. His harshest criticism deals with Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. In his original manuscript, Hume deftly dispenses with those who would personify God:

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause. It is an inconsistency to believe that, since the Deity has this human passion, he has not others also; and, in particular a disregard to the opinions of creatures so much inferior.

After talking it over with his friends Adam Smith and Gilbert Elliott, though, Hume had second thoughts and altered the text to end, in Greig’s words, “on a note of sham piety.” “That, at least,” he continues, “is my conjecture; and if I am right, it represents the weakest action of his whole career.”

Hume’s composure in the face of his imminent death (apparently from cancer of the colon) has been written of eloquently by James Boswell and Adam Smith. Boswell was so unsettled by Hume’s calm declaration of his disbelief in immortality that he had to console himself with a wench afterward. Greig, however, offers an interesting psychological take on Hume’s attitude towards his death:

The equanimity and fortitude with which David Hume faced death, when he saw it imminent, is worthy of all praise. But the supposition that his philosophical indifference was attained suddenly, and with private struggles, is improbable and needless. David may have been a brave man–as I think he was–but was not more exempt than Dr Johnson from instinctive fears common to the whole human race. He conquered his instinctive fear of death. All honour to him. But he did not do it in a week or month; and the symptoms of his quiet struggles with himself in the few years before 1776 is that he attempted to persuade himself that nothing was amiss with him.

Greig edited the first comprehensive edition of Hume’s letters, and his text is speckled with excerpts of these and those of many of Hume’s contemporaries. It’s a mark of Greig’s accomplishment, though, that even these nuggets from the greatest of all letter-writing centuries often come as unwelcome interruptions from the flow of his own lively and irreverent prose. Rarely have a subject and a biographer complemented each other so well.

Other Comments

Wallace Brockway, Bookman, November 1932

Hume’s present biographer, who obviously admits humanity as a sufficient reason for the reconciliation of such disparate qualities and attributes, leaves a splendid, all-dimensional portrait of the great materialist.

The Christian Science Monitor, 24 December 1932

Mr. Greig’s work is excellent in almost every respect; it is learned without ostentation, and lively without being facetious.

Percy Hutchinson, New York Times, 8 January 1933

An excellent life…. The Scotsman, Hume, is vividly set forth in his many sturdy qualities; and as the biographer has the keenest appreciation of Hume’s dry, frequently mordant Scotch wit, the biography is at times also lively in the extreme.

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David Hume, by J.Y.T. Greig
London: Jonathan Cape, 1931

High Water, by Richard Bissell

Excerpt


When you are out on the boats you think a lot about things that are over on the land, things you never bother to think about at all when you are there. The girl problem, for one thing, becomes something you live with, and think about, and talk about. Oh man, the millions of hours that have been spent since the Egyptians or somebody invented boats, by men and boys sitting around on deck and in messrooms and bunkrooms and engine rooms talking about girls. There are a lot of topics covered but it will come around to girls almost every time, especially amongst the deck hands and wipers and other younger generation; a whole lot of your older men have had enough of the subject and some to spare, and would a whole lot rather talk about squirrel hunting.

We were sitting around the messroom in all that water up above Cape au Gris someplace. It was midnight. The boys going off watch were setting there thinking about whether to peel an orange or go to bed. The boys coming on watch were yawning and stretching and pouring coffee and blowing on it.

On the After Watch, which works twelve to six, and which I now had since Casey made the changeover, for deck hands I had Zero and Arkansaw and Swede. Zero was nothing. He was just a guy someplace between twenty-five and fifty in a pair of dirty pants and a denim jacket. He ate and slept and got up and followed the boys around and did his work all right but hardly ever said a word. He probably had less personality, so to speak, than any deck hand on the whole upper river. I don’t know what he looked like.

Arkansaw on the other hand was a boy with plenty of noise. He had opinions, facts, stories, jokes, reminiscences, and when he run out of any of these just to freak the silence he would whistle or play the harmonica to raise the dead. He used to tell funny stories about Arkansaw, but we will spare the reader by not listing any of them here. Frankly I can’t get too much humor out of these hillbilly comics, but some people simply dote on it. Arkansaw wore bib overalls and a railroad engineer’s style shop cap of blue with large white polka dots on it. He would kind of lose some of the worst of his accent after forty or fifty days on the boat; then he would come back from ten-day vacation down home and it would be so thick again you couldn’t understand him at all for two or three days until it had wore off a little. He was the type that calls his wife “waaf” and an egg an “aig” and all that crap. To us Northern boys he sounded like he had been listening to too damn many hillbilly radio programs and was just putting it on. I still think Southern people could talk like normal human beings if they wanted to, but they think it is cute to talk like that. Arkansaw also had a clasp knife with a spring blade that he was supposed to of killed somebody with down in Helena. All I can say is, I’ve been to Helena quite a bit on the oil tows, and he could kill two or three dozen in that town and it couldn’t help but be an improvement.

The other one on my watch was the Swede. He was what the name indicates–a Swede. You no doubt know the rest. He came from the outskirts of Two Harbors Minnesota and all his folks were Great Lakes people. He was a Great Lakeser too and went out on the ore boats when he was only a kid, but to get him to tell about it was an honest chore as he had about as much gift of gab as the average telephone pole and conversation was like drawing teeth with a pair of pliers. The Swede was a big lunkhead like all Swedes in other words, and also like all Swedes he had boats and the water built into him alongside of his blood vessels. And although a lunkhead, he was a good old lunkhead, “loyal and true,” and he would work until he dropped. He was always wanting me to come up to Two Harbors. He was going to take me deer hunting and all that and I had a notion I would go sometime.

Well, that was my watch–Zero, Arkansaw, and the Swede.

Comments–by Elmore Leonard from Rediscoveries II:

I told Bob Nally at lunch in Cape Girardeau that Richard Bissell had influenced my style more than any other writer with the exception of Ernest Hemingway. It’s a fact that I learned to write studying Hemingway, inspired and encouraged by a style that appeared easy to imitate….

About the time I realized Hemingway’s views of life in general and mine weren’t compatible I discovered Richard Bissell and heaved a great sigh of relief. Look–his work said–you can keep it simple, be specific, sound authentic, even ungrammatical if you want, and not act as though your words are cut in stone.

But I discussed Bissell in Cape Girardeau from some gray memory that his work had changed my thinking about writing, giving the idea that I could adapt his style to my sound and within a million words or so have a style of my own.

It wasn’t until I got home and began rereading Bissell that I realized what a profound effect his work has had on mine: not in themes or settings but in the development of the attitude we seem to share about people’ the idea of the author getting down in there with his people, because he likes them, and letting them tell the story. Bissell showed me you could write a book without it looking as if it was written.

… Bissell’s skill in bringing the reader onto that towboat and into the messroom and out on the barges is the book’s strength. But it’s also a good story that builds with the rising water, dangers faced and Duke falling in love with a girl they rescue from the rook of a flooded fishing camp. It’s high adventure told low-key, not the least bit plotty, with Bissell maintaining his riverman’s tone throughout. High Water was published more than fifty years ago but I swear it holds up. A few of the odd expressions might be dated, but for the most part the sound is regional rather than recently archaic.

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High Water, by Richard Bissell
Boston: Little, Brown, 1954

Guard of Honor, by James Gould Cozzens

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Excerpt


Colonel Ross did not have the facts on whatever other troubles Colonel Woodman had or thought he had; but he knew all about this episode of the AT-7–perhaps more than Woody thought. It was really all you needed to know. A routine order had gone from Washington to Fort Worth and from Fort Worth to Sellers Field; give an AT-7 to General Beal. Understandably, Colonel Woodman didn’t like giving away planes; but anyone not obsessed with a persecution complex need only look at a map to figure it out. The finger was put on Sellers Field because it was the point nearest Ocanara to which AT-7’s were then being delivered. Moreover, Sellers Field, as Woody so loudly protested, was not scheduled to be, and was not, ready to use all its planes. Still, standard operating procedure would be to query the order. Fort Worth grasped, at least as well as Colonel Woodman did, that basic principle of military management: always have on hand more of everything than you can ever conceivably need. If Colonel Woodman in the normal way queried Fort Worth, Fort Worth could be counted on to query Washington.

What Woody did was compose and immediately fire off a TWX message to the Chief of Air Staff. Naturally, he had known and flown with this officer back in his comical bastard days. Woody now said that every AT-7 he had or could lay his hands on was absolutely indispensable to the Sellers Field program. Giving one to General Beal was quite out of the question. He made an oblique but unmistakable reference to those fancies of his about his superiors at Fort Worth. He made another, incoherent but no doubt intelligible enough, to the duplication of effort, waste, and working at cross-purposes bound to result when exempt organizations under the Chief of Air Staff, like AFORAD, supposed to do God Knows What, were given the inside track on everything.

At the Headquarters of the Army Air Forces the second summer of the war was a nervous time. They still put up those signs about doing the difficult at once and requiring only a little longer to do the impossible. Nearly every day they were forced to make momentous decisions. On their minds they had thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of men and billions of dollars. Their gigantic machine, which, as they kept saying, had to run while it was being built, gave them frightening moments and bad thoughts to lie awake at night with.

Now, then, toward the end of the usual exhausting day, came a long and stupid message which, if it were going anywhere, should have gone to Fort Worth. It fretted them about one training plane. It lectured them on what was indispensable to Sellers Field (the AAF had so many fields that you could not find one man who knew all the names). It informed them that the Training Command was not run properly and that the project at Ocanara was a poort idea.

Enemies of Woody’s, a “hostile clique” trying to do-him-in, would have asked nothing better than a chance to make these attitudes and opinions of Colonel Woodman’s known at AAF Headquarters. Woody made them known himself, in black and white, over his signature. Colonel Ross could not help thinking that the evidence showed, if anything, that there were “certain parties” at Headquarters who were still ready, for old times’ sake, to cover for Woody, to try and keep him out of trouble. An angry man (so Colonel Woodman thought a little wire-pulling could determine Air Staff decisions, did he?) might have walked across the hall, laid the message before the CG/AAF and watched the roof blow off. Even a mildly annoyed man might have supplied Fort Worth with an information copy and left Woody to explain. Instead Woody got a personal reply at Sellers Field. He was peremptorily ordered to make available at once one of the first ten subject articles delivered to him. He was curtly reminded that direct communication between Headquarters Sellers Field and Headquarters Army Air Forces was under no repeat no circumstances authorized.

Of course, Colonel Woodman had done irreparable damage to any remaining chances he might have had for advancement, or an important command. Still, there was such a thing as the good of the service; and Woody, making it certain that he had no future, might be promoting that.

Comments

from A Reader’s Delight, by Noel Perrin:

Any generation is apt to know two classes of books: the current one favored by the Establishment and the classics selected by professors.

Guard of Honor is a classic (I think) but it is a hard one to put into an American literature course. Why? Because Cozzens was not a romantic. Most American writers, from Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne onward, have been, and nearly all the novels in our canon are romances. This has advantages for teachers and students both. It’s handy for teachers, because there is usually more to say in class about something rich in symbols and hung with cloudy portent. It is wonderful for students, because practically everyone is–and should be–a romantic at eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Clear-eyed realism comes later….

Either way, it is hard to assign books to twenty-year-olds that there is little chance they can really appreciate until they are about thirty-five, and that is another reason Guard of Honor doesnot occupy its rightful place. Hardly anyone read it in college.

Its rightful place is as one of the greatest social novels ever written in American. It’s not just a slice of life, but a whole rounded pie. The action takes place at Ocanara Army Air Field in Florida over a three-day period in 1943. There are about twenty thousand men and women stationed at Ocanara and its satellite bases, and Cozzens seems to understand every single one of them. He has the kind of authority as author that supposedly went out with Balzac and George Eliot….

… Guard of Honor is more than an account of the complex workings of a large air force base–and, by extension, of a country at war. It is two other things as well. For the reader, it is a living one’s way into the military mind. The two characters through whose eyes we most often look have both fairly recently been civilians, and with them we encounter the blundering idiocy of career officers, the well-known absurdity of army regulations. But from here (which is a point at which Catch-22 stops) we go on to understand and even to accept. Not that the military mind is right, but that there are right things about it–and more important, that there are comprehensible reasons why it is as it is.

The second thing is closely related to the first. Guard of Honor makes a continuing judgement of all its characters in terms of their maturity, or capacity for achieving it. That is, the characters are divided into children and adults–a division in which Cozzens can take advantage of the military slang of that period: a commanding officer being the Old Man, a pilot a fly-boy, and so on. Some of the children are gray haired, notably Colonel Mowbray, second in command at Ocanara. Some of the adults, such as Stanley Willis, are barely out of their teens. At first the two main observers think that all the career military people are children, and one of the book’s movements is toward their discovery that there are adults who went to West Point, or have been twenty years a noncom.

Editor’s Comments

Years ago, I read a profile of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the Stanford University alumni magazine. In it, a fellow alumnus recalled something Christopher said to him when the two were serving on a corporate board of directors. The board was considering an ambitious but risky move for the company, and during a break, the alumnus asked Christopher his opinion of it. “The little boy in me really wants to do this,” Christopher replied.

At the time I first read that, it sounded pretty silly. Christopher had always struck me as a bit of a dandy. Only much later did I come to understand Christopher’s meaning: the move in question was tempting, exciting, immediately gratifying–and utterly impractical. This is the kind of sense that Perrin identifies as one of the signal merits of Guard of Honor. Colonel Woodman’s teletype message to Washington is the act of child. Cozzens’ shift from Woodman’s indignant passion to the wider perspective of the headquarters in the heat of war-making is the sense of an adult: the ability to look upon a situation from other angles and grasp the complexities that prevent most decisions in life from being simple.

I first read Guard of Honor soon after receiving my commission in the Air Force, and then read it again months before retiring with twenty-five years’ service. I can vouch for the truth in Perrin’s comment about books we can’t appreciate until we’re thirty-five or older. The first time I read Guard of Honor, I thought it was a good story, if a bit lead-footed. But then, I was young and full of ideas and confidence and sure that I would fix some things that were seriously wrong with this stodgy service I was joining.

I did, I think, though far fewer than I expected. Almost nothing, I soon discovered, and more slowly, came to understand, was as simple and straight-forward as it seemed on the surface. That was not, as I first expected, because this was a bureaucratic monstrosity that thrived on inertia, but because the very nature of a large organization is complex. The quick and clear decisions of a child almost never achieved their intended effects.

This was not because the system tended to inaction, but because genuinely successful action required two apparently contradictory qualities: the ability to make clear and quick decisions and the dedication to follow them up through all the tedious and conflicting secondary, tertiary, and unexpected effects. The decisions were often the easiest part, and I saw more than a few instances where officers made the childish mistake of confusing the act of making a decision with the task of carrying it out. No two people in any organization are precisely aligned in motivation, perspective, and ability. Getting hundreds or thousands to achieve some coherent result involves so many interactions and moments of conflict or cooperation that no simplistic account could ever come close to capturing its reality. Twenty-five years later, when I reread Guard of Honor, I found Cozzens’ insight into the nature of a large organization so subtle and complete that at some points, I wanted to break into applause.

There are plenty of novels about love and family passions and adventure, but there are very, very few worthwhile novels about the world in which many of us spent much of our adult lives: the world of work in organizations. Not labor or business or power, all of which have been treated, often in simplistic ways, in more than a few books, but the multi-dimensional world of work where we are one of hundreds or thousands, each with our own responsibilities, pressures, motivations, constraints, and prejudices.

It might seem odd, at first, that something that has occupied such a large place in so many lives in the last century has been so rarely been the subject for a novelist. But writers are often in a bad position to take on such a subject. Novel-writing is usually a solitary task. A full-time job with some measure of management responsibility allows little time for it. Louis Auchincloss, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Ives are among the rare cases of the active man of business with time and energy left over to create.

Cozzens had the advantage of being brought into the Army Air Force’s headquarters by its commander, General Henry A. “Hap” Arnold, in the midst of World War Two. Although he spent his time of various publicity projects that never went anywhere, he had the chance to travel around the service and to see it in all its scale and complexity.

While his contributions to the Army Air Force’s mission were negligible, Cozzens had the rare opportunity to survey this organization of over a million men and women with a novelist’s eye. As Matthew Bruccoli writes in the introduction to A Time of War, a collection of Cozzens’ diaries and memos from his time in the Air Force, he was “a highly intelligent, keenly observant, civilian-in-uniform granted temporary access to the highest command levels.”

This experience enabled Cozzens to step beyond the one-dimensional view typically taken by novelists depicting military life. In a letter written after the war, Cozzens remarked,

… I know that any writer, caught by the mil. ser. is expected, as soon as he gets shut of it to fearlessly expose the corruption and inefficiency, and not to shrink from getting square with any high placed lugs who had him at temporary disadvantage. It is awkward to have to say that, after seeing about all there was to see in the AAF, I am for, rather than against, the mil. ser.

This could be sheer ignorance; but of course I don’t think so. During many months in Washington one of my jobs, sordid but interesting, was to prepare a daily burn-this-report diesting information supplied me confidentially by all the AC/AS offices on what was going wrong. I think it was unlikely that any one person in the Air Force was more fully and regularly advised of the scandals, misadventures, and dirty deals which here and there enlivened the record. On reflection, none of it seems to me important compared to the remarkable work of a remarkable number of able and devoted men.

In Guard of Honor, he took this raw material and shaped it into a masterpiece. Perrin’s essay refers to it as “the Best American Novel about World War Two” (as has biographer Edmund Morris). I think it’s even better than that. I would argue that Guard of Honor is the best novel written so far about life and work in an organization. And for that, it deserves much greater recognition.

Reviews

· Time magazine, 25 October 1948

Most so-called serious novelists have an ax to grind, a true bill to find, a point of view that they want to uphold regardless of how many opposing points of view they may have to howl down or ignore in the process. James Gould Cozzens is like his fellows in this respect–with one admirable difference. The point he insists on making is that the world if far too wrapped up in different points of view for any one of them to be entirely true, that “the Nature of Things abhors a drawn line and loves a hodgepodge.”

… In Guard of Honor he not only shows again his fine descriptive talents but boldly tangles with two of the toughest subjects of his day–the nature of war, and racial intolerance. Guard of Honor is a big, fat book–much bigger than Sinclair Lewis’ Kingsblood Royal or Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement–bigger, and far better.

· New Yorker, 9 October 1948 (review by Brendan Gill)

Despite its size, then, Guard of Honor is compact and stringently disciplined, with Cozzens hitting his stride in the first sentence of the first chapter (“Through the late afternoon they flew southeast, going home to Ocanara at about two hundred miles an hour”), and ending, without a word too many, as neatly and pregnantly as a sonnet. A war novel courageously concerned not with the field of battle but with a segment of the Zone of Interior–a sprawling, newly activated Army Air Force installation in central Florida–it provides, in that formidably unsympathetic setting, the conventional “everything” that a big novel is expected to provide, from reflections on the metaphysical bases of right conduct to the question, teasingly unresolved until near the end of the book, of whether the virtuous Captain Nathaniel Hicks and the no less virtuous WAC Lieutenant Amanda Turck are finally to go to bed together…. The dramatis personae who move across the hot, bleak setting of Florida cheapness and Florida sand range from privates to general officers, and each of them not only is distinguished as an individual but strikes the reader as being impossible to do without, for there is nowhere that blurring of focus and pitch in the midst of so many faces, that a less practiced writer might have been unable to avoid.

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Guard of Honor, James Gould Cozzens
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948

The Eighth Day, by Thornton Wilder

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Comments
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Excerpt


From the first, Lansing admired John Ashley and imitated him, stumbingly. He went so far as to pretend that he, too, was a happily married man. Society would have got nowhere without those imitations of order and decorum that pass under the names of snobbery and hypocrisy. Ashley converted his Rainy Day House into a laboratory for experiment and invention. Lansing built a Rainy Day House behind “St. Kitts” and revived his interest in “snake oils.” Perhaps it was the influence of the Debevoises, perhaps the example of the Ashleys, that enabled Eustacia to bear a child that lived, and then another, then a third. The Lansings were older the the Ashleys, but their children were closely of an age: Felicite Marjolaine Dupuy Lansing (she was born on St. Felix’s Day; the Iowa Lansing names had been carried to Heaven by the dead infants) and Lily Scolastica Ashley; George Sims Lansing and Roger Berwyn Ashley; then Sophia alone; then Anne Lansing and Constance Ashley. Eustacia Lansing carried well her torch of hypocrisy or whatever it was. In public–at the Mayor’s picnic, on the front bench at the Memorial Day exercises–she played the proud and devoted wife. Creole beauty is short lived. By the time the Ashleys arrived in Coaltown Eustacia’s tea-colored complexion had turned a less delicate hue. her features had lost much of their doelike softness; she was decidedly plump. Nevertheless, everyone in Coaltown, from Dr. Gillies to the boy who shined shoes at the Tavern, knew that the town could boast to handsome and unusual women. Mrs. Ashley was tall and fair; Mrs. Mansing was short and dark. Mrs. Ashley–child of the ear as a German–had no talent for dress, but a magical speaking voice, and she moved like a queen; Mrs. Lansing–child of the eye as a Latin–was mistress of color and design, though her voice cut like a parrot’s and her gait lacked grace. Mrs. Ashley was serene and slow to speak; Mrs. Lansing was abrupt and voluble. Mrs. Ashley had little humor and less wit; Mrs. Lansing ransacked two languages and a dialect for brilliant and pungent mots and was a devastating mimic. For almost twenty years these ladies were in and out of one another’s house, as were their children. They got on well together without one vibration of sympathy. Beata Ashley lacked the imagination or freedom of attention to penetrate the older woman’s misery. (John Ashley was well aware of it but did not speak.) One art they shared in common: both were incomparable cooks; one condition: both were far removed from the environment that had shaped their early lives.

For these two families the first ten years went by without remarkable event: pregnancies, diapers, and croup; measles and falling out of trees; birthday parties, dolls, stamp collections, and whooping cough. George was caught stealing Roger’s three-sen stamp; Roger had his mouth washed out with soap and water for saying “hell.” Felicite, who aspired to be a nun, was discovered sleeping on the floor in emulation of some saint; Constance refused to speak to her best friend Anne for a week. You know all that.

Editor’s Comments

Is it fair to include a failure as a neglected book? Not that The Eighth Day was a failure in a commercial sense: it sold over 70,000 copies in hardback, was picked up by the Book of the Month Club as a featured title, and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for half a year. Nor was it a complete critical failure. Edmund Wilson called it Wilder’s best work ever, and it received the National Book Award for fiction.

Other reviewers were far less enthusiastic. Stanley Kauffmann, writing for The New Republic, called it “a book that means nothing.” Josh Greenfield in Newsweek assessed Wilder’s message in the novel “a worthless bauble.” In The New Yorker, Edith Oliver judged that “none of the characters, major or minor, rings credible to the reader.”


A large paperback run was issued by the Popular Library to follow the hardback’s success. In the UK, Penguin issued it as part of its “Modern Classics” series within a year of its publication. But, other than a paperback reissue by Avon in the mid-1970s, for most of the last forty years, it’s been out of print. It became one of those books you often saw in thrift stores, and then it largely disappeared. It was forgotten by readers and ignored by critics.

If these were its just deserts, we’d be right to let The Eighth Day pass into obscurity. But if it’s fair to call The Eighth Day a failure, that’s not the same thing as calling it worthless. If The Eighth Day fails, it’s in part due the scale of Wilder’s perspective, which could easily be mistaken for his ambition.

“Is it possible that there will someday be a ‘spiritualization’ of the human animal?” asks the narrator early in The Eighth Day. As a group of the main characters celebrate the start of the 20th century near the start of the book, the town’s doctor is asked to predict what the new century will be like. It would be easy to read the answer to the narrator’s question in his reply:

Nature never sleeps. The process of life never stands still. The creation has not come to an end. The Bible says that God created man on the sixth day and rested, but each of those days was many millions of years long. That day of rest must have been a short one. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are the children of the eighth day.

Wilder certainly offers us suggestions that a new spiritual man may be emerging. The book centers upon John Ashley, an engineer working in the near-exhausted mines of Coaltown, who’s tried and convicted of killing the mines’ superintendent, Breckenridge Lansing. On his way to the peninentiary, Ashley is freed by a group of men wearing disguises. Ashley’s flight, which eventually leads him to the copper mines of Chile, and the fate of his wife and children, as well as those of Lansing, forms one parenthesis around the murder. The other is formed by the histories of Ashley and Lansing and their wives up to that moment. In six parts of unequal length, Wilder takes us forward and back in time, attempting to explore the meaning of their stories, and the life of the spirit remains a constant subject throughout.

Ashley is the most obviously saintly character. Devoid of ego or concern for social successful, his life before and after the killing is punctuated by acts of selflessness, whether it’s lobbying for a rise in the miners’ pay or building a church for the Indian copper miners. He is not alone, however. His son Roger becomes a reporter whose occasional pieces celebrate the minorities, underdogs, and lost causes of a booming Chicago. His wife and Lansing’s both demonstrate almost superhuman strength of character in their respective sufferings. His daughter Sophia outdoes Horatio Alger’s heroes in rescuing her family from removal to the poor farm.

But Wilder is no Ayn Rand. For all the efforts of these saints, he also recognizes that human progress is more often illusion than ideal. As the doctor speaks of the possibility of a new man emerging, Wilder lets us in on a secret:

Dr. Gillies was lying for all he was worth. He had no doubt that the coming century would be too direful to contemplate–that is to say, like all the other centuries.

Wilder’s view of man’s spirituality is more devious than mere Christianity. “The Bible is the story of a Messiah-bearing family, but it is only one Bible. There are many such families whose Bibles have not been written.” Elsewhere, a fellow orderly in the hospital where Roger works soon after running away to Chicago tells him, “We must wait until all the men on all the stars have purified themselves. No man can wish to be happy until everyone else in the universe is happy.”

But Roger just stares at him, “uncomprehendingly. His family had been happy at ‘The Elms’ [the Ashley home in Coaltown].” A few rise out of the muck of human existence. Perhaps they are elected, in the Puritan’s sense. Perhaps it is their own effort. Wilder leaves us to decide for ourselves:

There is much talk of a design in the arras [tapestry]. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some

And so ends the book.

I think this may be why The Eighth Day has failed to keep the attention of a large reading audience or a solid critical reputation. That there is more to life than “birth, feeding, excreting, propagation, and death” is clearly Wilder’s message here. That it clearly makes a difference in the end, however, is not. Nevertheless, we do have to decide for ourselves if it does, or else we are no better than “a fly that lives and lays its eggs and dies–all in one day–and is gone forever.”

By not offering a simple answer, Wilder forfeited many of his potential readers after the first wave of best-sellerdom ebbed. By suggesting at the same time that there might be something to those staid old-fashioned notions of charity and piety, he also ran counter to prevailing prejudices among the academics and critics who might otherwise have kept his name in circulation.

Though out of print, The Eighth Day has moved at least a dozen readers to leave their own comments on Amazon.com: “A Must-Read”; “An undiscovered treasure”; “a great and sadly neglected book”; and, “one of the books that has moved me more than any.”

What’s particularly interesting is what one of the National Book Award judges, John Updike, had to say upon reading the book again after thirty-five years. In his essay, “Chasing After Providence,” describes Wilder’s struggles to resist his own tendency to allow drink, socializing, and endless intellectual distractions to pull his attention away from the novel.

For the original National Book Award citation, Updike wrote:

Through the lens of a turn-of-the-century murder mystery, Mr. Wilder surveys a world that is both vanished and coming to birth; in a clean gay prose sharp with aphoristic wit and the sense and scent of Midwestern America and Andean Chile, he takes us on a chase of Providence and delivers us, exhilarated and edified, into the care of an ambiguous conclusion.

From the perspective of thirty-five years, Updike moderates some of these judgments. Still, he remains in awe of Wilder’s easy handling of countless small and specific details of time, place, and custom that manages to coexist with a conception of “globe-spanning nimbleness and cosmic lift-off….”:

The Eighth Day — his one real novel, he more than once said, and much his longest — opens itself to the digression, the sermonette, the stray inspiration that might capture the simultaneous largeness and smallness of the human adventure. Untidily, self-delightingly, it brims with wonder and wisdom, and aspires to prophecy. We marvel at a novel of such spiritual ambition and benign flamboyance.

Ironically, this is much the same conclusion Denis Donoghue reached when reviewing the novel in the NYRB in 1967:

The Eighth Day is one of those old-fashioned things called novels, stories with truth in them…. A big novel, then, impressive in its scale, The Eighth Day is touching in its regard for truth, that great lost cause. It is grand to know that there are still writers who believe that the world is a real garden with real toads in it.

Comments

Time Magazine, 31 March 1967

By leaving that last word adangle, Wilder presses home his conviction that man’s story is unending and that come what may, man will prevail. The thought is unarguable, but its demonstration leaves the reader with characters who are merely symbols and a story that is an abstraction. After visiting Coaltown, readers may want to hop a fast freight to Grover’s Corners, the setting of Our Town, whose scale was smaller but whose philosophy seemed almost as tangible as its strawberry sodas.

“Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day,” from “20th-Century American Bestsellers”, a research course at Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In all of this, the readers are reminded, by Wilder’s style of historical review from a timeless position as God would have, through these families that the characters’ lives are only a “hand’s-breadth” of the tapestry, which is important on a much grander scale. To appreciate Wilder’s novel for the way it characteristically points out these particulars in representative lives implies by his last words that the reader must live its meaning and aim to fulfill his/her part of the design. Wilder’s fans came back to his novel for his style, seen in his earlier best-selling novels and plays. They got what they asked for and more.

“The Eighth Day as a Christian Work”, By Paul Simon, Student

Indeed, Christianity is not only part of the novel, it is essential to the novel. It adds a sense of vastness to novel that could not be done by solely secular means. To think that Jesus was only one messiah, only “a hand’s-breadth” of the tapestry of history, adds an immensity to the work that mere geographical allusions such as “range upon range,” could not.

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The Eighth Day, by Thornton Wilder
New York: Harper & Row, 1967

De Vriendt Goes Home, by Arnold Zweig

Excerpt

Irmin, who the fateful news had at least reached, looked at towering figure in that low-roofed room, throwing a doubled shadow on the floor and walls. His eyes rested for a long while on the dead man. “I should like to have a model taken of that face,” he said huskily; ‘in plaster or something of the kind.”

Gluskinos shook his round head. “Impossible, quite forbidden by Jewish custom.”

Confound your customs, thought Irmin angrily. What appeared in that face ought to be preserved. What was it?–just the face of a man gone home. He looked like one redeemed, like the prodigal son, to whom all things were forgiven–his wanderings, his defiance, his humiliation, and companionship with swine. What exaltation in those closed eyes and on those cheekbones, what peace in those lightly parted lips. It was Dr. de Vriendt’s real face. Irmin breathed quite calmly as he held the dead man’s head in his–this cold hand of a corpse, already stiff. A tune was hammering in his head, to the rhythm of his breathing, as always happened when he was deeply stirred, this time the cavalry signal “Stand to!” though its forceful clarity seemed hardly suited to this moment. His was a quite unsentimental mood, grave and stern. A man lived, and then he lived no longer; too much was made of the change. It was far easier to understand the indifference of the Orient at the contemplation of the teeming life upon the earth, than the attitude of the West. Irmin had been too deeply stamped with the lofty indifference of Jerusalem to birth, sickness, disaster, and death, for the shock, received through the little polished telephone, to have lasted very long. This face must not be allowed to perish. Next day he would come and photograph the dead man. For the rest, the only task that now awaited him was the obvious one of catching the murderer and hanging him.

Three shots, sideways from behind, and from very close at hand; quite a modern weapon, of small calibre. At the post-mortem next morning two of the bullets would be discovered in the body, so the doctor predicted. It was a pity, it was a damned pity that another of the most amusing people in the city had been taken.

Comments

The story in De Vriendt Goes Home is quite striking for a forgotten novel from the early 1930s. The title character is a Dutch-Jewish intellectual who has emigrated to British-administered Palestine. In private a poet with a strong sensual style, in public he is a law professor and a somewhat controversial figure in Jewish politics for his accomodating stance toward the Arabs.

Near the middle of his forties, he finds himself falling in love with Saud, a young Arab boy he tutors as a volunteer. He hides the situation from all his acquaintances in recognition of its double risk of rejection: by prevailing morality as a homosexual, and by Zionists for taking his friendly attitude toward the Arabs to a personal level. But he throws his emotions fully into the infatuation, somewhat amazed to find such passion in what has to now been largely a life of the mind.

Before the situation has a chance to develop, however, De Vriendt is murdered as he walks through Jerusalem. The murder sets off divides throughout the complex mix of cultures and politics in Palestine. Most Jews assume the killer is an Arab–but many are quietly pleased to see this difficult man taken off the scene. Some Arabs suspect others on their side; some see it as a Jewish conspiracy to incite animosity towards them. The British administration simply finds the situation tedious, as it interferes with their work and results in additional unplanned expenses at a time when the Foreign Office would rather see Palestine fade away as an issue.

As usual with Zweig, a simple story provides the basis for excursions into every corner of a society–or, in this case, three societies: Jew, Arab, and British. Irmin, an officer in the British security service who investigates the murder, does eventually track down the killer–a hot-headed Jew just off the boat from eastern Europe. But he finds that, like Palestine itself, the whole matter has become too complicated to subject to a simple judgment and execution, and decides to allow fate to pass judgment. By this point, the reader, too, has long stopped being concerned about the outcome of Irmin’s pursuit. Instead, like Irmin, he comes to appreciate the difficult of passing moral judgments against any party in a situation where each believes so fervently in its own case.

Zweig based the story on the life and murder of Jacob Israel de Haan, a Dutch Jew murdered by the Haganah in 1924. Like De Vriendt, de Haan was a moderate Zionist, in favor of negotiation over conflict, as well as a homosexual whose liaisons with young Arabs was the subject of his own poetry and the gossip of others. In de Haan’s case, as has been demonstrated by Schlomo Nakdimon and Mayzlish Shaul in their 1985 book (in Hebrew only), De Haan: The first political assassination in Palestine, the murder was organised and political. However, as with De Vriendt, the initial speculations about motive were fed by suspicions about sexuality and racism as well as politics.

Although shorter than most of Zweig’s novels, De Vriendt shares their common features of a kaleidoscopic tour through the personalities and forces at play in a situation. Zweig shows us the world through dozens of perspectives in the course of a little over 300 pages. In some ways, the shorter length forces him to distill his themes, thereby increasing their strength. I found it a remarkable book that definitely deserves to be rediscovered as a insightful yet entertaining story, one not without relevance for the current states of Israel and Palestine.

Reviews

Time, December 4, 1933

Though Author Arnold Zweig is writing a tetralogy of War and Peace (already published: The Case of Sergeant Grischa, Young Woman of 1914), De Vriendt Goes Home is not a part of it. Based on the Palestine disturbance of 1929, this book is no brief for or against Zionism, the Arabs or the British mandate. Author Zweig, a Jew, writes not as a Zionist or an Agudist. His chief characters are of different races, different creeds. A good novelist, he never takes sides, and there is no villain in the book. Scene of De Vriendt Goes Home is narrower than The Case of Sergeant Grischa’s, but its theme is as wide: tolerance.

Dr. De Vriendt, able Dutch Jew, settled in Jerusalem, was a tower of strength to the Agudist party–orthodox, devout, antipolitical Jews, friendlier then to the devout Arabs than to the freethinking, politically-minded Zionists. But De Vriendt had two secret weaknesses: one was writing agnostic verse, the other was an Arab boy. He thought no one knew about either, but when the boy’s family found out and his life was threatened, his friend Irmin of the British Secret Service discovered one of De-Vriendt’s frailties. Knowing the perilous political situation in Jerusalem and fearing the consequences of what would look like a political murder, Irmin tried to get De Vriendt to leave town. On the eve of his departure he was shot. Immediately riots popped. The Agudists made a martyr of him; the Zionists and the Arabs each accused the other of his murder. Irmin began a relentless search for the killer. Meanwhile De Vriendt’s followers had learned the shocking truth about him. Soon he was deliberately forgotten by nearly everybody. But Irmin remembered him so well that when he finally ran down De Vriendt’s murderer he let him go.

F.T. Marsh, Books, 10 December 1933

Enthusiasts of all parties will not like the novel, neither English nor Arab, nor those among the hosts of Zion. It will be attacked in Israel. But it will be read. … To the observer bemused by conflicting propaganda about a bitter struggle which is still waging, the book is a great document. But primarily it remains a strong and distinguished novel relating the immediate to the universal. That is the meaning of literature.

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De Vriendt Goes Home, by Arnold Zweig
New York: The Viking Press, 1933

Delilah, by Marcus Goodrich

Excerpt

1

She was very slim and light. She was always tense, often atremble, and never failed to give the impression of almost terrible power wrapped in a thin fragile blue-grey skin. The materials that went into the making of her complete being were more curious and varied that those that went to compose her creator, Man–for Man, himself, formed part of her bowels, heart, and nerve centres. She ate great quantities of hunked black food, and vented streams of great debris. Through her coiled veins pumped vaporous, superheated blood at terrific pressure. She inhaled noisily and violently through four huge nostrils, sent her hot breath pouring through four handsome mouths and sweated delicate, evanescent, white mist. Her function in existence was to carry blasting destruction at high speed to floating islands of men; a her intended destiny, at the opposite pole from that of the male bee, was to die in this act of impregnating her enemy with death. It was, perhaps, for this reason that she carried her distinctly feminine bow, which was high and very sharp, with graceful arrogance and some slight vindictiveness, after the manner of a perfectly controlled martyr selected for spectacular and aristocratic sacrifice. Her name was Delilah.

2

The suave, glistening Sulu Sea parted before Delilah’s sharp bow and slid under her flat stern with great but smooth rapidity. It was only in her wake, where there was left a white commotion, that there was betrayed the adequate evidence of the effort of her progress. A few feet above the cause of this foaming propulsion–two whirling typhoons of metal–an old Irish monk sat on the edge of a camp cot and gazed intently forward along the destroyer’s narrow steel deck at what was taking place amidships. He seemed unmindful of the sweat that exuded from his tonsure and leaked down the white fringes of his hair and over his big hands, in which he was resting his head. He seemed unmindful of the very sun, itself, which so fiercely inflamed the universe with white glare that it was difficult to look at the opal circle of the sea and impossible to look for long into the sky. Yet he was sitting in the full blaze of it, because even the quarter-deck awnings had been furled as possible hindrances to the attainment of maximum speed.

The ship, too, seen from one of the small islands she occasionally passed, must have appeared insensible to the limitless conflagration, a compact creature skimming easily along the water, naked to the sun and docile bearer of the few visible people ensconced along her thin length.

Deep inside of her, however, the Engineer Officer, who was also the Executive Officer, was thinking that she was a skidding shelf of hell.

Comments

Niven Busch in Rediscoveries:

“… Delilah got good reviews too, and some the kind an author dreams of, particularly an author who has in him the quality of genius but has been forced to follow lowly trades while he bought time–“Ha!”–to do his work….

Delilah charged onto the best-seller lists, where it held a place for all too short a time. But it had made readers, and these readers, like the critics who had sensed in the book the emergence of a major talent, waited for Delilah‘s sequel–or if not another sea story, then at least a new novel of comparable stature. None came. We are left with this one work.

Rereading it after a lapse of almost thirty years, I was as much impressed as at first contact by its drive and dimension, its memorable, incisive prose, and the queer subtle spell through which Goodrich, defying the ukase that a sea story must have plot, enmeshes us in his own love for Delilah. Through his love he delivers us to the bony morality that knits up men at sea, binding them in a skeleton made up in part of hate, suspicion, fear, and boredom, but viable nevertheless, strong where it must be strong, bestowing enlargement. Through this love we become as familiar with Delilah as with the pulse, the tread, the perfume, and the proportions of a woman we have loved; we can move about her decks and use her weapons, energies, conveniences, and quarters as we would move around in our own house. Goodrich has seduced us. He has demanded and enforced our surrender, even against our conscious resistance (had we time to develop such resistance) to the codes of Navy tradition. The ship, a tiny furrow opening behind her, moves through a circular immensity of sea and sky, her furnaces blazing, her thin steel skin far too fragile for the tests she must endure, for victory or death….

… One leaves Delilah with regret–not only that her journey is over, but that there has been no other book since from Goodrich, and none to match from anyone else.

… Someone–it could have been I!–introduced him to Olivia de Havilland, then coming to the peak of her career as a serious dramatic actress. They fell in love. Mark disappeared for a war stint, which he described in his stick for Who’s Who: “commanded Naval Detachment working with Chinese guerillas behind Japanese lines.” Regardless of the interference of this apocryphal duty and its hazards, he came back to marry Olivia. They had one son, Benjamin. For a time the marriage seemed very successful, even though a person alert to such situations could detect in its outline a time-honored disaster pattern…. Presently Olivia went on tour and the marriage went up the spout.

If that is what stopped the second book (and when you saw Mark, he always said he had been working, though it took time, ha! it went slowly), I am sorry. Ten years ago, giving a party to celebrate some luck with a book of my own, I had undercover agents looking for him all over New York City–his native habitat when not at sea–to no avail.”

Editor’s Note

Delilah was reissued in the 1960s as one of the titles in the Time Reading Program and in the 1970s as one of the titles in the Lost American Fiction series. It was reissued in 2000 in paperback from Lyons Press.

Marcus Goodrich was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1897. He ran away from home at 16 to join the Navy. He left the Navy after World War One and attended Columbia University, graduating in 1923. He worked in New York and Philadelphia as an advertising copywriter, then moved to Hollywood. He served in the Navy again in World War Two. He and Olivia de Havilland married in 1946 and divorced in 1952. Although he worked as a screenwriter before and after the marriage, he is incorrectly credited with writing the original treatment for the Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” (the credit goes to Francis Goodrich). He retired to Richmond, Virginia, in 1963. He died there in a nursing home, of heart failure, in 1991. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Reviews

· Time, 24 February 1941

By any standards, it is a top-notch yarn. But what frames the story, gives it symbolic sense, restrains the turbulent narrative from getting too diffuse, clarifies each character, even makes amends for the faulty structure of the plot, is the bony morality of the sea.

The story of Delilah begins a few months before the U. S. entry into World War I. She moves feverishly around the south Pacific, her obsolete engines incredibly overtaxed. She carries a Catholic monk to an island of rebellious Morros, noses through the southern Philippines searching for caches of firearms, finally docks while her old body is torn apart and filled with new organs. The human action is a series of bloody brawls, the friendships and conflicts of men too close together for too long a time. Included in the novel’s 496-page sweep are three brilliant novelle: Ensign Woodbridge’s encounter with the hypocritical missionaries, the story of the Irish monk and the satanic trader, Parker, and Seaman O’Connell on a berserk rampage. Included also is many a burst of virtuoso prose, in which Author Goodrich compares the ship to a walled town, to the Tower of Constance, to the Alamo, to anything that represents man’s constant war against an unfriendly world.

Marcus Goodrich was famous in New York literary circles ten years ago for his golden tongue. He used to talk this book in evenings of inspired storytelling. In it he put his experience on a destroyer in the last war, heightened by his study of Melville’s towering symbolism, Conrad’s profuse style, and James’s snakelike character analyses. While he talked his book, Goodrich earned his living from advertising and the movies. Now that he has got it on paper, he is a full-fledged, first-rate novelist.

· Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker, 1 February 1941

I don’t know whether the book is worth the decade its composition has required–that’s entirely the author’s affair–but I am certain it is a remarkable work of art. Its defects are the defects of excessive vigor and of an overleaping imagination, which are perhaps preferable to the anemic virtues of caution. If 1941 gives us a better first novel by an American, it will be a year of wonders….

… there is one set piece–the story of the monk and the fiendish Mr. Parker, whom nothing but music could subdue–which has, I fear, nothing at all to do with the novel but which Conrad or Melville would have given a finger or so to have written.

… This is, all things considered, a mature work of imagination on a subject ordinarily left to writers of adventure yarns. It cannot fail to make its author’s reputation.

Find a copy

Delilah, by Marcus Goodrich
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941