Sunday, January 31, 2021

Back to the Classics 2021 #2

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic Play. For this category I just let fate toss a selection into my lap. So I read this script just because. I should have read Troilus and Cressida because that tragedy was the production directed by Guy Pringle in The Great Fortune, which I read recently for this challenge. Oh, well, T & C for the second round of this challenge, if that is how Destiny wants it to be.

Richard II – William Shakespeare

King Richard II is guilty of misrule. He has had noble relatives murdered and confiscated their estates, thus aggrieving their survivors and shocking those for whom it’s a religious tenet that a landed estate must go in orderly fashion to the next male heir. To fund foreign wars, he has taxed the chumps beyond endurance. He is arbitrary: for no clear reason, he settles a dispute by exiling one party for six years (Henry Bolingbroke) and the other (Thomas Mowbray) for life. Bolingbroke recruits enough support to depose Richard II. In a great scene with his queen and a couple of moving soliloquies, Richard examines what is to be a mere human being, in contrast to being a snide capricious king.

I gather critics regard this outing as a political play. Indeed, Shakespeare realistically illustrates how those vying for power use whatever ideology is handy to justify their actions. Mowbray says that he wants to fight Bolingbroke because he thinks B’s accusation of disloyalty has besmirched his honor, saying like any warrior in an honor-bound culture would say:

The purest treasure mortal times afford

Is spotless reputation; that away,

Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.

But Shakespeare deliberately keeps obscure the nature of the beef Bolingbroke and Mowbray have with each other. That their claims don’t convey specifics makes us think that a reasonable cause of their argument does not exist, that they manufacture excuses to fight and get a rival out of the way in the stampede for power. The motivation may be the primal fear of subjugation and submission in an “all against all” culture in which unless you show backbone and fight, you will be disrespected, picked on, imposed on, made to carry water for the more powerful.

It’s not like politicians using pretexts for their own dishonest reasons has gone away, given the self-serving lies about election fraud that lead up to the events of January 6.

Similarly, in this old play, it’s hard to know if Bolingbroke actually believes in the doctrine of the divine right of kings or whether he’s just using the doctrine as a cover to get the political results he wants. While we keep in mind the dictum that we should attend to what a fraud does not say, Bolingbroke speaks very little during the confrontation with Richard, in which the usurpers want him to sign a confession that will give them political cover among the chuds. Bolingbroke has the snotty brute Northumberland make the argument to pressure Richard into signing:

That, by confessing them, the souls of men

May deem that you are worthily depos'd.

Besides that, when the Bishop of Carlisle eloquently decries the deposition on religious grounds, Northumberland dismisses him and the argument with a curt

Well have you argued, sir; and, for your pains,

Of capital treason we arrest you here.

So much for words, lofty or low, when confronted with ruthless ambition backed with force.

But Shakespeare was a sage so he knew words are vital because it is with words that we make our judgements about the world; words are the only tools we have to seek true and objective beliefs, and avoid unnecessary value judgements. With rational beliefs to dispute our own batty notions and unruly emotions, we stave off anxiety and depression, the twin threats to a flourishing contented life.

Today’s business mentors urge us to go easy on our own nerves by describing as “painstaking and detailed-oriented” colleagues that are “slow perfectionists that impede my productivity.” Long before the self-help experts and life coaches taught us skeptics about “re-framing,” the Bard was cautioning us to be careful indeed about the words we select and respond to when we talk and listen to our selves and others.

For instance, the noble Gaunt assumes King Richard II has the mandate of heaven: England can have only one legitimate king at a time and that this king has the blessing of God. Gaunt knows that Richard has murdered Gaunt’s brother. But Gaunt counsels “patience” to himself, to wait like a forbearing Christian for the will of Heaven to “rain hot vengeance on the offenders’ heads.” But his brother’s widow, Duchess of Gloucester, wants Gaunt to avenge his brother’s death.

Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair:

In suffering thus thy brother to be slaughter'd,

Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life,

Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee:

That which in mean men we entitle patience

Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts. (Duchess of Gloucester)

She reframes “patience” as “despair” and claims that Gaunt’s state of mind lacks kinship for himself, her or his brother; that such depression makes him tolerant and passive, thus sending the clear message that he won’t defend himself when the King’s henchmen, with “shrewd steel” come after Gaunt himself. She weaponizes the argument by reframing “patience” as “cowardice” which is expected and desirable in a commoner but despicable in a samurai.

Another example of Shakespeare’s wisdom about word choices has become proverbial. Gaunt’s son Bolingbroke is broken up about being exiled for six years so Gaunt offers this advice:

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

Teach thy necessity to reason thus;

There is no virtue like necessity. (Gaunt)

It is our judgement of things that disturb us, not the things themselves, said the philosopher Epictetus. We had better teach our necessity – our sense of duty, I think - to identify and accept natural occurrences that are subject to no influence by our human will. Like a pandemic. When we find ourselves in unfortunate situations that come as part of the ordinary terms and conditions of life – accident, illness, affliction, chronic pain, deprivation, loss of senses, strength and stamina, disability, disfigurement, death - there is nothing left but to make the best of it. By giving us the words to live wisely and die bravely, Creation has given us the power to choose the words that make a situation tolerable, bearable. Love your fate.

So, yeah, I think Shakespeare still has a lot to say and is well worth reading. And watching the plays, for sure. The plays were written to be performed, not read.

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Counterstroke

Counterstroke – Andrew Garve

We mystery fans remember writers who create a series hero. Conan Doyle for Holmes. Christie for Poirot. Sayers for Lord Peter Lamesey. We consign to obscurity writers of stand-alone thrillers. Fight this tendency by not neglecting Andrew Garve. He built his reputation in the Sixties and Seventies the old fashioned way, one stand-alone at a time.

In his last novel in 1978, terrorists kidnap the wife of a member of Parliament. The terrorists threaten that if authorities don’t release their fellow murderer from prison by their deadline, they will slowly torture her to death.

Robert Farran, a “resting” actor, takes to the police his plan to impersonate the terrorist and be exchanged for the unhappy victim. The process of preparing for the exchange takes surprising turns.

The climax and ending may feel abrupt to us post-moderns who expect thrillers to sprawl. Persuasive is the portrait of the cold and heartless terrorists. Paul Winterton was the real name of Andrew Garve and Roger Bax. Winterton was a journalist so he knew how to write concise clear prose.

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Gold Comes in Bricks

Gold Comes in Bricks – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair

1940 saw publication of the third of 29 novels starring PI’s Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. Like Laurel and Hardy, the partnership features the shrimpy one and the stout one.

This mystery opens with the slight Lam taking lessons in the martial arts at the behest of his employer Cool, who likes her tobacco, liquor, and comfort. She thinks he needs some toughening up in order to avoid getting beaten up on the job.

The client Henry Ashbury, concerned about his independent-minded daughter’s burning through his money, hires Cool and Lam to look into the girl’s financial dealings iffy associates. So that the daughter will not wonder why Lam is in the house he is to pose as Ashbury’s personal trainer.

It’s a dumb plan, but miser Cool sees only the bucks to be earned by Lam. Dubious but really shaking the tree, Lam uncovers a complex but not too bewildering trail involving fraud, blackmail, and murder. As is usual in the Cool and Lam books, they make the situation worse until they grift the grifters and narrowly escape being arrested just for being pains in the neck.

The strain between thinking machine Lam and bull in the china shop Cool is as funny as Cool’s smarmy concern over Lam’s love life. Women inevitably fall in love with Lam for his gentlemanly respect and willingness to listen. So Cool is concerned that Lam will end up in romantically deep waters and lose his focus working for her. It’s a hoot.

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

The Worm of Death

The Worm of Death – Nicholas Blake

Cecil Day-Lewis, classics prof and poet laureate, didn’t take seriously the 20 or so detective novels he wrote as Nicholas Blake. This does not mean they deserve their neglected status nowadays. In fact, this novel is dark enough to appeal to post-modern readers who like dark mysteries.

This 1961 story, the 14th featuring PI Nigel Strangeways, opens with Strangeways and his artist wife Clare Massinger having dinner with an awkward family. Father Piers, a doctor, is sarcastic and tyrannical. Daughter Rebecca longs to be free to marry her artist BF whom he father dislikes. His son James, also a doctor, fears making a misstep that will hurt his reputation. His other son Harold is a flash businessman and his trophy wife Sharon is as flirty as we’d expect. The favorite son, Graham, is seen as an ‘old lag’ (ex-con) by Strangeways.

The setting of docks, alleys, barges, and the Isle of Dogs is the main attraction here. Greenwich was a shabby part of London at the time. We readers walk in the February chill and fog along the banks of the River Thames. It’s the perfect backdrop for Father Piers Louden to go missing and then turn up dead in Thames clad only in a tweed coat. Son James hires Strangeways to investigate which he does with the help of Inspector Wright. They narrow the circle of suspects down to the unhappy family.

Blake’s dark realism is decidedly not cozy. The reveal chills us readers with its plausibility. The Perp is consumed with envy and bent and revenge. Blake asserts that WWII claimed victims after the cessation of hostilities in 1945.

Friday, January 15, 2021

The Ides of Perry Mason 20

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Spurious Spinster – Erle Stanley Gardner

The Perry Mason novels written in the late Fifties and early Sixties are sometimes organized like the vintage TV episodes featuring the super-lawyer. That is, the action opens with a plucky working girl just trying to do her best - what anybody would do - in a set of circumstances full of unpredictable factors. The situation deteriorates to the point where the shrewd but scared protagonist is driven to consult Perry Mason, who suspects a scam has put his client in a legally vulnerable position.

In this one, a modest secretary, Susan Fisher, suspects her boss of funny business when the boss’ young son comes into the office with a shoebox full of benjamins. Also, the owner of the company – the kind of blunt astute business woman Gardner respected – disappears along with accounting evidence that somebody has been peculating the profits.  Seeing herself in legal jeopardy, Susan consults Perry Mason.

So, the first chapter of this 1961 mystery is one of the longest set-ups in the Gardner canon of 80-some Perry Mason novels.  Usually I would feel impatient with this (I like a vic right away in a mystery), but Gardner, employing narrative magic  in a story of thievery, kidnapping,  and subterfuge, builds suspense by getting us veteran fans wondering when the heck the murder is coming off and who is going to be the vic. When Perry and Della finally come upon a grisly corpse, the tension is almost unbearable. 

The trial sequence is thus delayed and seems a tad rushed. Though dour Detective Tragg and Perry have some fine exchanges, DA Hamilton Burger does not get a chance to make his usual exasperated outburst.

Other exceptional scenes: Della uses her femininity to open up a crusty prospector and Paul flatly predicts, “The evidence points so unerringly and so damningly that there isn’t a ghost of a chance she’s innocent. And what’s more, I’m betting that within twenty-four hours Amelia Corning’s body will be discovered somewhere and you’ll find your client charged with another murder.” Boy, you’d think after 60-some novels (this was published in 1961), Paul would have as much faith in Perry as Della does.

As we fans do….

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Back to the Classics 2021 #1

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

A 20th century classic. A modern novel with the backdrop of the most destructive war in history seemed the ticket to read for this category. About this time last year friends gave me The Balkan Trilogy for a get-well present when I was recovering from getting my chest sawn open.

The Great Fortune - Olivia Manning

This is the first book in The Balkan Trilogy, a fictionalized autobiography which brilliantly captures the expatriate community in a European capital city haunted by the harsh reality of war in 1939-40. I enjoyed the novel a great deal, though Balkan critics sniff that since neither Manning nor her fictional stand-in, Harriet Pringle, spoke or read Romanian with advanced proficiency, their view of the country was superficial, with plenty of scenes in pricey eateries, snug coffee houses, buggy rides and parties hosted by embassies.

As an ex-superficial expatriate myself,  I confidently attest that this novel tells how expatriate life feels for working adults, their spouses and their colleagues and rivals. In the late 1930s Romanians and non-Romanians (English, Germans, Jewish people, Romany) feel the same uneasy uncertain insecurity about the imminence of WWII. In the middle 1990s, Latvia had a bank panic that, believe me, gave everybody a case of full-blown heebie-jeebies. Along with the local people at the school (who could ill-afford financial loss however slight), I had feelings of alarm I didn’t have again until the panic shopping of March 2020. This is an example involving large ructions, but Manning represents day to day expat life and its rhythms and trials really well too.

Also feeling genuine is the sense that main characters Harriet and Guy Pringle were too young to get married in the first place, much less be newly married in another culture. Though they don’t really know what they’re getting into (which is probably just as well), young people have inner resources and distractions, trivial and not, that make them draw closer. For instance, the climax of this novel involves a student production of Troilus and Cressida. Poor Harriet is really tested when Guy casts his Romanian Ex in the title part, but she comes to see another side of him and admires him for being such a great director.

The female protagonist Harriet is only 22 years old, from a loveless family background. She’s just getting to know her new husband Guy, who is 23 years old, a combination of cluelessness and exuberance. You can tell he’s young even for his age when he tells Harriet, “I expect from you only what I expect from myself.” Guy is often irritating and unpleasant especially when he carelessly puts Harriet in a bad position, ignoring her, not taking her opinions into account, and making her look stupid, especially when Guy’s Ex, a local named Sophie, is involved.

Introverted Harriet, who has had little experience accepting people as they are, has trouble with friendships. She ends up hanging out with Bella, an Englishwoman she never would have befriended in England, but who ends up being a woman of great resource and if not wisdom, then sense. Guy forces Harriet into a lot of acquaintanceships and unwanted house-mates, especially the marvelous comic character, Prince Yakimov, a dim bulb and scrounger and glutton.

The novel works on both the social and personal level so, I’m looking forward to the next two books in the trilogy. Readers who are into Europe between the wars will enjoy this novel, calling to mind work by Rebecca West, Victor Serge, Alan Furst, and Eric Ambler.

Saturday, January 9, 2021

Be He Live

Or Be He Dead – James Byrom

A best-selling writer in the true crime genre, Raymond Kennington is telling his story in the 1950s about his adventures in the 1930s when we wrote about a famous trial in the 1890s.

In a London made tense by the coming of WWII, Kennington alleges in his new book that Claude Neville Millington-Forsett was probably guilty of a killing that he was acquitted of in a famous trial of 1894. Millington-Forsett was a nasty throwback to the ethics-free Regency bucks and blades.

Kennington’s publishers are nervous about libel suits since Millington-Forsett won punishing damages for libel in the past. They send Kennington to Paris with his secretary, comely Josephine Canning, to confirm that Millington-Forsett has in fact shucked off this mortal coil and gone to his eternal deserts, which, the reader hopes, involve slow roasting. Once in Paris Kennington and Josephine kick over numerous rocks and generally get in the face of bad people dangerous to know.

The premise is original, the adventures are engaging, and the romance tolerable though it provides fantasy fodder for middle-aged male readers who hold fast the delusion that women half their age will be attracted to them. The far-fetched plot twists that the reader is supposed to buy are balanced by the highly literate writing, which is clearly the product of an author who is well-read and a professional writer. The settings feel more sordid than we usually find in a classic whodunit, but count this as another point that makes this mystery unique. Put this writer in the ranks with Nicholas Blake, Andrew Garve, Cyril Hare, and Michael Innes.

How do the English do the entertaining mystery so well and make it look so easy?

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Love Without Wings

Love Without Wings - Louis Auchincloss

This book of short readable essays describes the friendships of 16 pairs famous in literature and politics. As we’d expect in a close observer of people, an avid reader, and a figure in society who has hob-knobbed with people who knew the subjects, Auchincloss passes on interesting tidbits about Hawthorne & Melville (exuberant Herm exhausted private and reticent Nat) and Fitzgerald & Hemingway (Zelda pained Scott when she described his new friend Ernest as “a pansy with hair on his chest”).  

Also interesting are Boswell & Johnson, Henry Adams & John Hay (great for readers who like Vidal’s Empire), Byron & Shelley, Tennyson & Arthur “In Memoriam” Hallam, Roosevelt & Hopkins, Emerson & Thoreau. Less interesting, because the subjects feel grey and faraway to me, are Edith Wharton & Margaret Chanler and Woodrow Wilson & Colonel House. 

Light bedside reading or for when a reader is not up to more substantial challenging fare. 

Friday, January 1, 2021

Sign Up: Back to the Classics Challenge 2021

Round #2: I will read these books for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.
  1. 20th Century Classic: The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James 
  2. Classic by a Favorite Author: The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley
  3. Travel or Adventure Classic: The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell
  4. Children's Classic: The Brass Bottle - J. Anstey
  5. Classic Humor or Satire: Diary of a Nobody - George & Weedon Grossmith
  6. 19th Century Classic: The Red and the Black - Stendhal
  7. Classic by a New-to-You Author: Howards End - E.F. Foster
  8. Classic by a Woman: Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
  9. Classic Play: Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus
  10. Classic in Translation: Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living - tr. by Eva Wong  
  11. Classic with Animal in the Title: The Case of the Mythical Monkeys - Erle Stanley Gardner
  12. Classic by a BIPOC Author: Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin in 4 volumes
Updated June 30: I have read these books for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021. Click on the title to go to the review

1. A 19th century classic: The EnglishHumorists of the Eighteenth Century - W.M.Thackeray (1853)

2. A 20th century classic: The Great Fortune - Olivia Manning (1960)

3. A classic by a woman author: The Spoilt City  - Olivia Manning (1962)

4. A classic in translation: The  Mahé Circle - Le cercle des Mahé - Georges Simenon (1968)

5. A classic by BIPOC author: Dream of the RedChamber -  Cao Xueqin (1791) Abridgement

6. A classic by a new-to-you author: The Forsyte Saga -  John Galsworthy (1922)

7. New-to-you classic by a favorite author: The Newcomes - W.M. Thackeray (1855)

8. A classic about an animal, or with an animal in the title: Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley (1948)

9. A children's classic: The Five Children and It - E. Nesbit (1902)

10. A humorous or satirical classic: Much in Evidence - Henry Decil (1957)

11. A travel or adventure classic: A Record of BuddhisticKingdoms circa A.D. 399-414 - Fa-Hsien

 12. A classic play: Richard II - William Shakespeare (Gielgud or All-female cast)