The Great War and Modern Memory

The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell

This literary study examines how young, impressionable, highly literate Britons described their experience in the trenches of Flanders and Picardy during the First World War.

Fussell explicates the work of soldier-poets and memoirists such as Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. A combat veteran himself, Fussell has insight into war from the infantry soldier’s point of view and examines the effect of prolonged combat on a man’s sense of dignity, individuality, privacy, and meaning in situation where he must accept his death as inevitable, probably in the next week.

In essay-like chapters, Fussell covers themes such as lofty diction (“peril” for “danger”), irony as the hallmark of the modern sensibility, and the complexity of remembering. Fussell also mentions writers we associate with the Second World War, such as Norman Mailer. James Jones, Keith Douglas, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. Doing so, he illustrates the ways in which the rhetoric, imagery, and myth obtained from the First World War have permeated subsequent literary and popular culture.

This 1975 book was an early example of how critics and historians examine the idea that how we remember history is often as, or even more, important than what events we remember. Other books along these lines are  The War Complex: WWII in Our Time – Marianna Torgovnick; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory - David W. Blight;  The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution - Alfred F. Young and  Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America  - Sarah J. Purcell

Back to the Classics #15

I read this book for my round two of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

A Genre Classic. To battle that old shut-in feeling caused by staying and working at home, I’ve been reading books set in places far away in place and time. For instance, I’ve been reading mysteries set in England in the Fifties, France in the Sixties, Egypt in the early 1900s, and now France again in the late Sixties. This novel was finished by Simenon in 1969 and published as Maigret et le marchand de vin in 1970. It was translated by Eileen Ellenbogen and published in Anglophonia in 1970 too.

Maigret and the Wine Merchant – Georges Simenon

Woe to the detestable guy with regular habits. Anybody plotting revenge could determine that every Wednesday evening rich wine merchant Oscar Chabut took his skinny secretary, The Grasshopper, to a love hotel for a couple hours of sexually exploiting the very young help. So it was easy for an avenger to just wait for Chabut to leave in order to put two rounds in his stomach, one his shoulder, and one in his chest, which the autopsy proves to be, as the French say, the coup de grâce.

Investigating the murder, series hero Chief Inspector Maigret scrutinizes the background and personality of the victim. Starting at the bottom as a door-to-door salesman, Chabut, through hard work and ruthless determination, succeeded in creating and managing a flourishing business enterprise with a wine-like product at which genuine wine lovers turn up their noses.

And what a glorious child of Heaven Chabut turned out to be. Despite his success, he still felt an imposter among the old-rich crowd he found himself hanging out with. So in order to bolster his confidence, he lived in fancy digs with opulent furnishings, hung out the best places, and drove the flashiest cars. He hired only non-entities and yes-men he could despise and dominate. He relentlessly bullied and stiffed suppliers and contractors. To make himself feel like a man, he crushed clients and competitors and humiliated people incautious enough to ask for loans or favors. As for the endless parade of mistresses, he cynically bedded women – employees and other men’s wives - debasing them without remorse.

Sound like any Sadistic Narcissist we know? Frickin’ uncanny, but as Ezra Pound said, Literature is news that stays news

The investigation therefore must focus on two targets: jealous husbands and business rivals who wanted revenge. Maigret soon realizes, however, that since the beginning of his investigation, somebody is following him, anticipating his actions, sometimes even guessing his destination, without Maigret or his team being able to lay hands on him. This man - whom Maigret guesses is the killer - goes so far as to telephone him and write to him to denounce Chabut as “a lousy swine.”

This 1970 outing was a late career Maigret - Simenon ended the series in 1972. The mystery side of the story seems not to be the writer’s main interest. What fascinates him is the momentum that pushes a fairly ordinary guy to kill somebody. A lot of darkness and despair is the impetus to an impulsive, irrevocable act - and in the center of the story is our stolid hero, wondering what he’ll eat for lunch, having a drink and a smoke, suffering from the flu or quinsy, the object of Madam Maigret’s concern, a figure inspiring awe and loyalty from his subordinates Janvier and Lucas.

It’s a gem, one worth suggesting to novices who wonder what might be a good Maigret to read.

Back to the Classics #14

I read this book for my round two of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Abandoned Classic. I enjoyed Smollett’s first novel Roderick Random, so in early 2018 I started Humphry Clinker, an epistolary novel. Early on, this, from a wiseacre college boy, Jery Medford to his Oxford chum:

… I hope Mansel and I shall always be good friends. I cannot, however, approve of his drowning my poor dog Ponto, on purpose to convert Ovid’s pleonasm into a punning epitaph,—deerant quoque Littora Ponto: for, that he threw him into the Isis, when it was so high and impetuous, with no other view than to kill the fleas, is an excuse that will not hold water—But I leave poor Ponto to his fate, and hope Providence will take care to accommodate Mansel with a drier death.

Not having a classical education, I was intimidated by “Ovid’s pleonasm” – using more words than are necessary to convey meaning – in the tag for “all things were sea and the sea lacked shores.” And I wasn’t in the mood for rough 18^th century humor. Poor doggie. So, tender-hearted, I bailed out.

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett

But hell, feeling rough and rugged due to this pandemic shitshow, I got back into this 1771 novel of letters. Mainly for the sake of getting out of the stern reality of July 2020, back to the Northern England and Scotland of the late 18^th century, a time of change insensible yet relentless. The modern world was coming, but the world still smelled medieval. This explanation of a fainting fit is from our hero Matthew Bramble, successful farmer but middle-aged and gouty, on the resort city of Bath:

It was, indeed, a compound of villainous smells, in which the most violent stinks, and the most powerful perfumes, contended for the mastery. Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, ointments, and embrocations, hungary-water, spirit of lavender, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; besides a thousand frowzy steams, which I could not analyse.

I do like a novel with smells. Nothing like the “impression of fetid effluvia” to appeal to the senses of the reader, especially in a heat wave.

Our hero Matt is traveling with his sister Tabitha, nephew Jery Medford, niece Lydia Medford, and their maid Winifred Jenkins. They are the letter-writers describing their adventures on this trip to Yorkshire and Scotland. Jery has a typically touchy notion of honor and is always ready to fight for his family but is overall a genial guy. Jery is not far wrong to describe his aunt Tabitha as “a maiden of forty-five, exceedingly starched, vain, and ridiculous.” His sister Lydia, a giddy 17-year-old, is lovesick over a stroller (tramp actor), hardly a match to excite the family. Winifred Jenkins is good-hearted but credulous:

I was shewn an ould vitch, called Elspath Ringavey, with a red petticoat, bleared eyes, and a mould of grey bristles on her sin.—That she mought do me no harm, I crossed her hand with a taster, and bid her tell my fortune; and she told me such things descriving Mr Clinker to a hair—but it shall ne’er be said, that I minchioned a word of the matter.—As I was troubled with fits, she advised me to bathe in the loff, which was holy water; and so I went in the morning to a private place along with the house-maid, and we bathed in our birth-day soot, after the fashion of the country; and behold whilst we dabbled in the loff, sir George Coon started up with a gun; but we clapt our hands to our faces, and passed by him to the place where we had left our smocks—A civil gentleman would have turned his head another way.—My comfit is, he knew not which was which; and, as the saying is, all cats in the dark are grey…

The Clinker of the title is a shadowy figure in the novel. He is a jack of all trades that rescues the family with his mechanical abilities. He is also a Methodist preacher of no uncommon skill. But he is also rather dull-witted and highly emotional. Skeptical readers take Clinker with a grain of salt the size of a brick, agreeing with Lismahago, Tabitha’s sour boyfriend, who said “… he should have a much better opinion of [Clinker’s] honesty, if he did not whine and cant so abominably; but that [Lismahago] had always observed those weeping and praying fellows were hypocrites at bottom.” Clinker's origins are revealed in a surprise at the end.

About travel, Smollett argues through Lydia this:

Besides it is impossible to travel such a length of way, without being exposed to inconveniencies, dangers, and disagreeable accidents, which prove very grievous to a poor creature of weak nerves like me, and make me pay very dear for the gratification of my curiosity.

But Smollett also asserts, through Jery, for thinking people travel is salutary:

Without all doubt, the greatest advantage acquired in travelling and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candour and precision.

Smollett was a Scotsman so he uses the travel narrative about Scotland to argue against the stupid, uninformed prejudices the English had (have?) about Scotland.  It’s interesting to read the claim that union with England was mainly to the advantage of (surprise!) the English. Smollett also gives scenes from unhappy marriages – “she hung about his neck like a mill-stone (no bad emblem of matrimony)” -  that give male types – clearly the target audience of this novel - to think about avoiding matrimony altogether or without fail marrying an amiable woman.

Of Smollett, George Orwell wrote, “Inevitably a great deal that he wrote is no longer worth reading, even including, perhaps, his most-praised book, Humphrey Clinker, which is written in the form of letters and was considered comparatively respectable in the nineteenth century, because most of its obscenities are hidden under puns.” It’s true that Clinker is much more tame than Random, but it has a few very funny scenes that I’m glad I read. Plus, it took me away from the pandemic shitshow, which is what I wanted it to do.

The Ides of Perry Mason 14

Every generation gets the Perry Mason it likes. When Americans liked screwball comedies in the Thirties, they got a drunken bon-vivant Perry Mason in a couple of bad movies. In the Fifties, when Americans felt confident and aggressive and strong, they got the solid unflappable Raymond Burr as our lawyer hero.

And in our days of pandemic HBO has given us post-moderns a Perry Mason origin story with details so bleak that what can we shut-ins do but blame the gory details on the wish to be distracted from loneliness, boredom, and the nagging dread that something bad is right around corner? The costume drama look of the series delivers the shabby glamour of the Thirties but not for the squeamish are the usual grisly HBO touches like torture by branding, arterial blood gushing to form pools on floors, and dead babies with their eyes sewn shut.

Erle Stanley Gardner, in the traditions of the pulp hero of obscure beginnings, was utterly mum on Perry Mason’s origins, leaving it to readers to conjure their own.

Challenge accepted. Here’s the proposal to get script writers going.

The first Perry Mason mystery (The Case of the Velvet Claws) was released in 1933. Say Perry was 35 in that story so he was born in 1898. Helping his mother take care of Baby Perry was amah Fei Hong, called Faye by the family. She speaks Cantonese to him and Perry grows up playing with her kids so Perry speaks Cantonese like a native speaker. He also speaks Spanish because he also hangs out with Spanish-speaking kids.

Need scenes to establish his power over words in three languages; leadership abilities; helping people get out of jams; what the pulps called the natural aristocrat. Perry does some Encyclopedia Brown-type adventures with his pals.

Perry was born in half-rural, half-city California, in a market town where the main industries were mining and agriculture. Mason’s father was an affluent (not rich) landowner, ambitious for his oldest son, Perry, to become a lawyer for the family business interests in farming, ranching and mining. His mother wants him to be successful at whatever he wants to do. She has a social conscience and instills that in Perry.

In high school, he does everything: football to glee. All the girls have their eyes on him. Della Street does too but she doesn’t take him seriously, because she has plans to make a life of her own anyway. Perry and Della help some vulnerable people out of jams: girl wrongly accused of stealing, boy misidentified as wrong-doer, teachers accused unjustly, etc.

They both enter USC Davis in 1916, she into accounting, he into business/pre-law. They break up a scam in which corrupted university admission officers are bribed by rich people to get their idiotic progeny into college over more worthy middle-class class. The bagman of the scam is murdered, either by a corrupt admissions officer fearing disclosure, a distraught parent fearing embarrassment, or a depraved teenager who shot somebody just to watch him die.

After a year at USC, in 1917, Perry goes into the Navy when the US enters WWI. Scenes to show how ambivalent Americans were about entering that war: Della and mother are proud of him but he is arguing with father who does not see the point of his throwing his life away in a war in wicked old Europe.

The Navy realizes it can do something with a smart guy that speaks three languages. Perry is assigned to counter-intelligence in San Francisco. Working with Paul Drake, he breaks up a spy/sabotage ring. The enemy can be either Germans or Japanese or both; if budget allows, blow up some ship yards or warehouses or defense plants.

In 1919 Perry returns to university, gets through law school. We need to research the career path here – could people enter law school after just a couple years of undergrad? The year 1927 was the first year California had a bar exam, Perry could be in the first group to pass. As for Della, she becomes a forensic accountant.

Possible plot line based on real life event in Florida in 1930s: A popular LGBT serving nightclub is stormed by a group of 100 armed men, patrons are ordered to leave and the nightclub is torched. We should resist HBO suggestions to burn the patrons alive. Perry and Della investigate and find out the storming was conducted by a hate group. If we have the budget, we can do a homage to White Heat "Top of the World, Ma" when the white supremacists' headquarters goes up in flames during the shootout. We should resist HBO suggestions to burn the haters alive.

In the period 1927-1932 Perry and Della form a partnership. He divides his time, working for family businesses and for local people having usual legal problems. Establishes reputation for fighting for Latin and Chinese families who are being screwed by the system or the victims of human trafficking. Can also get into how organized crime corrupted city officials with vice rackets.

Character notes: Work in Tragg and Burger in the law school era to show they are long time rivals of PM. The animosity of the novels should be evident, not the buddy-buddy stuff of the TV series. Tragg should be Mason's age, they should see each other as worthy adversaries; no evil or corruption in Tragg, but he's rather narrow-minded. Burger's uncontrollable temper should be clear, especially how it undermines his rationality.

Della is his business partner. And enough of the platonic relationship between PM and Della. He proposes to her sometimes and she always turns him down, claiming she wants to work, that she wants to make a difference by getting the Capones of the world with accounting..

Paul Drake must never be the Nigel Bruce Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes - the TV series gave in to the temptation to make Drake the comic relief and it's not right for this update. Maybe Paul could have PTSD from the San Francisco days - stress from being undercover turned his hair white.

Back to the Classics #13

I read this book for my round two of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic with Nature in the Title. This 1873 novel is the third of the six novels in the Palliser series, supposedly Trollope’s “political novels.” Mercifully, unlike Can You Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn, there’s not much politics in this one though it is mainly about lies, damned lies, and liars..

The Eustace Diamonds – Anthony Trollope

The heroine of this story plays the part of the anti-heroine on the lines of Becky Sharp. Trollope primes us innocent readers with this introduction: “We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her.” Uh-oh.

Lizzie filches a family heirloom, the gems referred to in the title, after her titled husband dies of a broken heart due to her duplicities about debts. Lizzie filching the diamonds prompts the family lawyer Mr. Camperdown to observe of her: “a dishonest, lying, evil-minded harpy.” Lizzie the widow sets her marital sights on a poor Irish peer who holds a minor government post, prompting the lord’s sister to say of her: “a nasty, low, scheming, ill-conducted, dishonest little wretch.” We readers have grown to like the blunt aunts that populate Victorian novels so we listen closely and believe when Lizzie’s aunt Lady Linlithgow asserts Lizzie is “about as bad as anybody ever was. She's false, dishonest, heartless, cruel, irreligious, ungrateful, mean, ignorant, greedy, and vile! ... She's all that, and a great deal worse.”

Indeed, the worst thing about Lizzie is her lying. Contra the dictum, “I don’t lie unless it’s necessary,” Lizzie tells needless lies to herself and others. In genuine drama queen fashion, her cockeyed vision of romance and passion leads her to flagrant disregard for the truth and the extravagant acting out of romantic parts. Despite her consummate acting ability (which, the reader feels, Trollope admires, as if in wonder anybody could be so bold and rash), her lies, however, land her in a peck  of trouble when she perjures herself twice during an investigation of the robbery of the Eustace diamonds. Her lying also causes much trouble in her marital plans aimed at her cousin Frank Greystock and the Irish peer Lord Fawn (who plays the part of Bambi to Lizzie’s Hunter).

Trollope’s larger point, though, touches on society’s tolerance of lying. In this novel, people accept Lizzie’s lies by politely not calling them lies. Even Lord Fawn’s sister who hates like Lizzie like poison doesn’t use the word: “If she has told you falsehoods, of course you can break it off.” Frank Greystock’s intended, goody-goody Lucy Morris, thinks “That Lizzie Eustace was a little liar had been acknowledged between herself and the Fawn girls very often,—but to have told Lady Eustace that any word spoken by her was a lie, would have been a worse crime than the lie itself.”

Along with tolerance of lies and liars, among us walk lots of folks who like liars for their audacity. Frank Greystock: “He knew that his cousin Lizzie was a little liar,—that she was, as Lucy had said, a pretty animal that would turn and bite;—and yet he liked his cousin Lizzie. He did not want women to be perfect, …” Frank has his good points but I feel he should be in the ranks of unreliable males such as thus joins the line-up of wobbly Trollopian  males like Charlie Tudor, Johnny Eames and Louis Trevelyan.

The usual sub-plot in a Trollope novel is a comic romcom. Not in this one. Positively alarming is the courting and engagement of Lucinda Roanoake, a young American beautiful and brash, and Sir Griffin Tewett, a swinish aristocrat.

"I don't like anybody or anything," said Lucinda.

"Yes, you do;—you like horses to ride, and dresses to wear."

"No, I don't. I like hunting because, perhaps, some day I may break my neck. It's no use your looking like that, Aunt Jane. I know what it all means. If I could break my neck it would be the best thing for me."

"You'll break my heart, Lucinda."

"Mine's broken long ago."

Poor Lucinda! A fine example of Trollope the psychologist looking at the dark side. Why people say Trollope is so comfy cozy is beyond me.

Round Two: Back to the Classics 2020

I will read these books for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

1.       Classic with Nature in the Title. The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope (1873)

2.       Classic Adaptation. La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (The Truth About Bebe Donge) – George Simenon (1942)

3.       Classic with a Person's Name in the Title. Phineas Redux - Anthony Trollope (1874)

4.       Classic in Translation. Big Bob - Georges Simenon (1954)

5.       Classic by a Person of Color. The Heroic Slave - Frederick Douglass (1852)

6.       19th Century Classic. The Prime Minister - Anthony Trollope (1876)

7.       A Genre Classic. Maigret and the Wine Merchant - Georges Simenon (1970)

8.       Classic About a Family. The Duke’s Children - Anthony Trollope (1879)

9.       20th Century Classic. Sunday - Georges Simenon (1959)

10.   Classic by a Woman Author. Persuasion – Jane Austen (1818)

11.   Classic with a Place in the Title. The House on Quai Notre Dame - Georges Simenon (1962)

12.   Abandoned Classic. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett (1771)

Yeh, I know, not a lot of variety but with the cancellation of at least a half-dozen book sales, I have to read the books I’ve got.

Independence Day

Note: During the Civil War, nearly 400,000 New Yorkers joined the Union Army, more than 53,000 New York soldiers died in service, or roughly 1 of every 7 who served. This is only one of the many reasons why I gotta wonder about That Guy from Queens, New York, that seems to have such deep emotional connexions to the stars and bars and other confederate symbols.


The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac  Joshua Chamberlain

In the last 20 years, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain has become one of the most famous soldiers of the American Civil War.  For his actions on Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg against a Rebel general who has a military base in Texas (surprise!) named after him, he was a heroic character in Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels. He was also featured in Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War.

The Passing of the Armies is a Civil War memoir describing Chamberlain's experiences in the last couple of weeks in the war at Petersburg, White Oak Road, Five Forks, and Appomattox. This book is not a collection of easy to read war stories, but highly detailed account of driving the Army of Northern Virginia to surrender. He was a Rhetoric Professor at Bowdoin College so his allusions derive from the classics, he employs a wide vocabulary, and he constructs coherent if sometimes flowery prose.

Written in his eighties and in the spirit of reconciliation, Chamberlain often expresses his respect for the soldiers and officers the Confederacy. He has nothing – not one word - to say of race-based chattel slavery. He doesn’t come close to the causes of the war or what Sherman called “that political nonsense of slave rights, states' rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press and such other trash as have deluded the southern people.”

To my mind the strong points were the two essays that bookended the chapters on the battles. He includes blunt score settling with Sheridan and a mix of praise and criticism of Grant. On the high cost of Northerner’s lives, he observes, “The hammering business had been hard on the hammer.” However, he also says:

Grant was necessary to bring the war to a close... his positive qualities, his power to wield force to the bitter end, much entitle him to rank high as a commanding general. His concentration of energies, inflexible purpose, imperturbable long-suffering, his masterly reticence, ignoring either advice or criticism, his magnanimity in all relations, but more than all his infinite trust in the final triumph of his cause, set him apart and alone above all others. With these attributes we could not call him less than great.

Like other war memoir writers, he argues for the ennobling effects of combat. Here he answers the question, In battle aren’t soldiers affected by fear:

But, as a rule, men stand up from one motive  or another — simple manhood, force of discipline,  pride, love, or bond of comradeship — "Here is  Bill; I will go or stay where he does." And an officer is so absorbed by the sense of responsibility for his men, for his cause, or for the fight that  the thought of personal peril has no place what - ever in governing his actions. The instinct to seek safety is overcome by the instinct of honor.

The memoir is worth reading for serious students of the American Civil War; for people who want an somewhat skeptical view of Grant and Sheridan; and for readers who like the idea of college professors also being born soldiers.

Just so you know: I moderate comments to this blog and trash without remorse nonsense, bilge, mocking, and hatred.

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route - Saidiya Hartman

African-American professor of English and Comparative Literature at Colombia, Saidiya Hartman traveled to Ghana to view sites of the transatlantic slave trade. Hartman went to Salaga, the most active nineteenth-century slave market in Ghana,  and Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, two slave dungeons where African men and women were “warehoused” by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British before being transported to the New World to become slaves on plantations.  Hartman blends history, travel narrative, and personal memoir into a fascinating, if painful, book.

She explains, “[T]he Afro-European trade in slaves did not begin in Ghana as it did elsewhere with Africans selling slaves and Europeans buying them. It began with Europeans selling slaves and Africans buying them.” She says that African elites in empires captured commoners and strangers, Muslims enslaved animists. The strong and powerful  warriors converted vulnerable farmers and nomads into commodities. They exchanged them for "[g]old dust, copper basins, brass bracelets, bars, and pots, colored textiles, linen and Indian cloth, barrel-shaped coral beads, strings of glass beads, red beads fashioned from bones, enamel beads, felt caps, and horse tails. “ The hunger for Cowrie shells and other luxury items caused unimaginable suffering and contributed zilch to long-term prosperity.

In addition to this painful history, Hartman examines how the commerce in human beings has remained a festering wound even in the present day. She goes over problems such as the sense of belonging and not belonging, the irreparable sense of loss of a home, and the sense that one is unwanted in one’s own country. Hartman makes her sense of grief and disappointment palpable.