Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #20

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

Classic by a Woman: This is the last novel in the Balkan Trilogy. For this challenge, I read the first two, The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City.

Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning

Our main characters Guy and Harriet Pringle have been forced to flee Bucharest for Athens in October 1940. Doing so, they catch up with acquaintances like the sponger Prince Yakimov, a brilliant comic character. They also meet again Lord Pinkrose, Toby Lush and Dubedat, all main chancers who talk smack about Guy to everyone they meet. Guy is too high-minded to defend himself. He hangs out with users like Ben Phipps and produces big revues to entertain the troops. Keeping constantly busy with other people is Guy’s way of distracting himself from introspection and anxiety.

Extroverted, giving, and talkative, Guy deals with people by moving toward them. People think he is wonderful, a saint. Unloved child Harriet is introverted, envious of Guy’s winning ways with people, but needing his attention very badly, hurt and angry that she's the only person he doesn't try to charm. Harriet’s default with people is moving away from them and when her or Guy’s interests are threatened she moves against them. Both have the self-centeredness of youth – she is only 21 and he only a bit older. But Harriet, on her own too much while energetic Guy gives all he’s got to others, gets infuriated by obtuse Guy’s selfishness and socializing and contemplates an affair with an English officer, also very young.

One can’t help taking sides so through most of the book, through gritted teeth we readers are urging Harriet to dump the chump but we know full-well that they belong to the generation that believes marriage is for the duration – till death do us part. It’s true that without becoming the trailing spouse, she never would have had the expatriate experience. But who expects food shortages, stress, uncertainty and the threat of invasion as part of the overseas experience? Isn’t marriage tough enough when you’re just starting out - in a foreign country, no less - than to have to be reminded that you and scores of others might be vaporized in an air raid?

It’s worth reading on various levels. As social history, it chronicles expatriate life in a troubled place and time: Athens in the months before the invasion of Allied Greece by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in April 1941. As fictionalized memoir, the novel examines a discontented couple who married too young and their damaged friends, all living under the pressures of a stressed culture and rumors of war.

As cultural critique, the books asks how does a culture produce messed-up people such as Clarence Lawson, Charles Warden and toadies Toby Lush and Dubedat. Imagine how damaged children would be, raised by the self-centered Soames Forsyte or pitiless Charles Wilcox.

Dan Fortune born Fortunowski

The Silent Scream – Michael Collins

The hard-boiled mystery from 1973 is the sixth appearance of the series hero Dan Fortune, one-armed Polish-Lithuanian private eye. Fortune is hired by an young but imperious Mia Morgan to identify a pretty woman in a snapshot she hands him on their first meeting.

Fortune identifies the woman easily.

And then finds himself in a situation involving multiple murders, an Israeli commando, New England aristocrats, and Mafia bigwigs and hoods. The economical characterization is well-done. The convincing settings include Chelsea in New York City and working class Somerville in Jersey, in the gritty old days before US manufacturers realized the Japanese had to be dealt with. 

Like Ross Macdonald did in the Lew Archer novels, Collins deals with adult themes such as troubled families, the risks of power for the power-seeking, and the pitfalls of making wealth and status higher priorities than self-respect and kindness. Like the whodunnits of the 1930s, surprisingly, one killing is of the closed-room variety, featuring an elaborate means of murder on the part of the culprit.

Though there’s lots of smoking – it is 1973, after all -  Collins never preaches, the language is clean, and there’s no panting or throbbing. Nor is it too long. I highly recommend this excellent example of hard-boiled detective fiction.

Michael Collins was the pen-name of Dennis Lynds. Under various other names, Lynds wrote 80 novels and a couple hundred short stories. His first novel Combat Soldier (published under his own name) was a fictionalized memoir of his own WWII experience as an infantry rifleman.

The Luzhin Defense

"He continued to be silent, and she was silent too and began to rummage in the bag, painfully looking for a topic of conversation in it and finding only a broken comb."

The Defense – Vladimir Nabokov

This is the third novel written by Nabokov after he had emigrated to Berlin. It was published in 1930 but not Englished until 1964 by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.

The books open with Luzhin (rhymes with ‘illusion’) in childhood. He lands somewhere in mental illness, not because he sees the world in an inchoate way (that’s what kids do) but because he is able to identify other people only as vague entities with which interesting interaction is not possible or desirable. Given to withdrawing and OCD rituals, little Luzhin is locked in a restless search for patterns and order in order to alleviate his anxiety about living unmoored, lost in chaos, dreading the inevitability and unpredictability of change.

Unaided by parents who have problems of their own - infidelity - he discovers chess and obsesses about it an attempt to bring order to life. At 13 years of age, he becomes famous as a chess prodigy. An acquaintance of his father – the cloyingly named Valentinov - becomes his agent, or chess father.

With his free time lost in studying problems and issues in chess, Luzhin skims the surface of the adult world in tournaments held in all the European capitals. Valentinov undoubtedly contributes to the formation of the chess career of his ward, but does not care at all about ‘Luzhin the Person.’ The teenaged person grows up, but remains a child, lost in obsession, crushed by genius, unable to connect with other people. Valentinov, having squeezed everything out of him and realizing the public grows bored when prodigies grow up, switches to a new career, as a producer of motion pictures. Fitting.

Luzhin’s luck turns when a young Russian woman is moved to compassion by his helplessness. She is sure that his genius can be channeled in more productive directions after he is weaned from chess. She does not love him, but only feels pity; she does not fully understand him as a man or husband or somebody with a mental illness. She becomes a caring mother for him. But the fatal changes in Luzhin's mind are inevitable – he has an untreated mental illness – his commotion of thought seeks a pattern as powerful and clear as the moves of chess pieces. He prepares the only possible final move.

Since, in many respects, Nabokov's stories are more about style and sense impressions than stories or characters, the way I read a Nabokov novel is to immerse myself in the rich and powerful language. Lose myself in its sounds and rhythms even in a translation (at least N. had a hand in this one), revel in the detailed descriptions and the images.

What incredible things happen in this family!

A House and it Head – Ivy Compton-Burnett

Duncan is the head, or better, the despot of the Edgeworth family. Weak, rash, obtuse, and grumpy, spoiled by too many years of barking orders and getting his way, Duncan is the touchy volcano god all the cringing villagers seek to propitiate.

The novel opens on Christmas Day. Duncan not only burns nephew Grant’s copy of The Origin of Species (“inimical to the faith of the day”), but he treats his wife Ellen abominably.

“So the children are not down yet?” said Ellen Edgeworth.

Her husband gave her a glance, and turned his eyes towards the window.

“So the children are not down yet?” she said on a note of question.

Mr. Edgeworth put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.

“So you are down first, Duncan?” said his wife, as though putting her observation in a more acceptable form.

Duncan returned his hand to his collar with a frown.

…

“So you are down first of all, Duncan,” said Ellen, employing a note of propitiation, as if it would serve its purpose.

Her husband implied by lifting his shoulders that he could hardly deny it.

“The children are late, are they not?” said Ellen, to whom speech clearly ranked above silence.

ICB sets this Victorian family story either late in the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century; it’s hard to tell for sure because near the beginning she mentions “1885” and near the end she has a character refer to “the Victorians.”

With her usual masterful attention to dialogue, ICB narrates the saga in demanding and pungent interchanges between the members of the Edgeworth family themselves and between themselves and friends. ICB provides no imagery, blocking, or business to assist us, beyond a few lines of physical description of room or age, face, build, and manner. When she describes clothes, pay especial attention; when a character is verbose and fluent, your bushwah detector should flash yellow. Reading ICB’s conversations is like being a time traveler suddenly whisked into the past and dropped into an unfamiliar culture where we can but listen and learn, depending on what little we know and suspect about the speakers and knowing they use words to blur meaning.

Family life flows almost entirely within the country house, with the exception of the mandatory attendance to Sunday church. It is precisely on this occasion that the events of the family are the subject of comment by all the members of the village. Like a Greek chorus in a tragedy, they express all their judgments in more or less explicit allusions and snippy dialogues, in which opinions mingle and merge giving life to a spontaneous chatter that calls the mind the overlapping dialogue of Robert Altman.

Dulcia, Beatrice, Gretchen, and every other character are differentiated based on their way of deploying words to present a persona and their propensity to thrust themselves into the life and events of the Edgeworth family. Each of them seems to find an exquisite pleasure in gossip, although each then tries to hide their insatiable curiosity and essential maliciousness behind a mask of selfless interest and sincere closeness. The unspeakable Dulcia, however, immensely enjoys the discomfiture of other people and gets kicks by laughingly confronting people “You really do hate me, don’t you.”

In the life of the Edgeworth family, as in every family, there are marriages, births, and deaths, but, in all circumstances, the only feelings that matter are those of the head of the family. The responses of the two daughters, Nance and Sybil, and of the nephew, Grant, are always overshadowed by what Duncan thinks. As usual in an ICB novel, there’s the sense that the more things change, the more life just goes on in the old familiar grooves. Because human nature doesn’t change. People play their little power games. People gossip. People blackmail. People commit murder. And people shrug and move on.

I should mention here that this is the fifth novel by ICB I’ve read since summer 2021. I’ve found that ICB’s obscure, idiosyncratic style is difficult at first, but as an ICB character wisely if bleakly observes, “People can get used to anything.” I quit worrying about plumbing the depths of the more opaque lines and passages. I think ICB herself was assuming that nobody, even if they read her novels in the Downward Facing Tree Pose with a head full of mescaline, would get to the bottom of some of the conversations.

My approach to ICB’s novels is to read the story once in order to get the characters straight, identify everybody’s strengths and weaknesses.  I need to get a bead on the lost characters and the harm they do. I get over the shivers and shudders that any normal reader feels when encountering depravity. ICB’s incidents are over the top but never unbelievable in the context of the internal and external pressures her characters have to deal with.  Then, I read it again immediately to see clearly what I previously missed, in terms of clues to the motivation of thoughts, emotions and deeds, horrid and otherwise.

ICB is an engaging writer – as long as one is not looking for normally dysfunctional families as in Matilda by Roald Dahl or Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth or The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I pull for characters that maintain even a little integrity  against ICB’s tyrants but I don’t like them for their capitulation and ignoble patience. Though ICB is very funny in a dry ironic way, after I finish an ICB novel, a part of me wants to escape to Rebecca West's Aubrey family having fun with Mr. Morpurgo’s name.

Cheaper by the Dozen, here I come.

Reviews of novels by ICB

·         Pastors and Masters

·         Brothers and Sisters

·         Men and Wives

·         More Women than Men

The Ides of Perry Mason 29

On the 15th of every month, we publish something about of Our Fave Lawyer

Tribute to James Coburn

James Coburn is remembered for his tough-guy turns in action movies such as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963) as well as the quirky The President’s Analyst (1968). During the period when I went to movies all the time – O Seventies, Pre-Reagan, Pre-AIDS! - I fondly remember him in two Sam Peckinpah outings, the revisionist western Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and a war movie that combat veterans say is the real deal Cross of Iron (1977).

But Coburn was a worker so he made more than 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, including two Perry Mason episodes: The Case of the Envious Editor (1961) and The Case of the Angry Astronaut (1962).

Let’s discuss the second one first. The Angry Astronaut is the test pilot Mitch Heller. He has high anxiety that is controlled only by shots of placebo injected by Dr. Linda Carey (played by the under-rated Jeanne Bal). His stress - partly caused by overwork but also self-induced -  is making him to be late and absent, so much so that the million-dollar space project he works on is six weeks behind schedule. General Addison Brand is brought in to get things on track. Coburn screws up his face into a visage of dynamism and purpose. His general is a man determined do his duty by using the tools he's given to get the job done. If fulfilling that duty involves kicking ass and treading on sensitivities, that’s the way it is going to be. 

As the general, Coburn is completely persuasive as he barks orders and tells subordinates how it is going to be. When they we both in uniform, Heller and Brand had quarreled over Heller’s ability to perform his job, with Heller being messily terminated in the end. With his hectoring voice, Brand all but labels Heller an effeminate weakling in a convincing argument.

It is a refreshing contrast to the usual Mason victim, usually a despicable scamp doing crimes for base motives, so detestable that we figure he needs killing. Coburn’s general is the boss from hell, but his motives are commendable. 

Unfortunately, Coburn is in only two scenes before the good General is murdered with a .45 caliber slug from an Army pistol. It’s too bad because the episode falls flat once Coburn exits.

The Case of the Envious Editor (1961) is the better of the two because Coburn is in more scenes. He plays the part of the publishing mogul who is changing money-losing weekly magazines into exciting, sexy trash that will fly off the shelves. The opening scene in which he telling the staid board that he is going to publish a “magazine about sex from the woman’s point of view” is hilarious. One gets the feeling that the mogul doesn’t care so much about making money as making the prudes and complaint-wienies feel consternation. Holding dirt on everybody he does business with, the mogul also likes blackmailing people into doing his will.

This is an excellent episode, certainly in my Top 5 Favorites. Paul Lambert plays a poet and all round literary pro who recites "Richard Cory" by Edward Arlington Robinson to the former owner of the money losing magazines. The former owner is played by Philip Abbott, who is perfect as the decadent Philadelphia aristo easily shoved aside by the Coburn upstart. And what can we say about Sara Shane, playing the wife of the aristo and accused of sending Coburn’s bad guy to his just deserts? She’s great as the woman who does low things out of the fear of poverty, having been scarred as a teenage girl fending for herself in China in the Thirties, in other words, about the most vicious place in the world to have to do that.

Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #19

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

Classic by a New-to-You Author: The 1992 movie adaptation of Howards End made it to an art house in Riga, Latvia in 1994, where I was teaching English at a university. My wife and I went to see it. We waved to my local – mainly female – colleagues in the theater since everybody in English-interested circles went to see it. In the office the Monday after, Ilze, Ieva, and Vineta expressed outrage over Mr. Wilcox’s indiscretion. Couple days later, feeling mischievous, I casually asked Ilze “Is that new German teacher married,” and Ilze, with forehead cutely furrowed , said, “Gee, I don’t know…” – then the penny dropped and she hollered, “Hey! Why do you want to know?”

Howards End - E.F. Forster

First published in 1910, this novel tells the story of three English families during the leisured reign of fashionable Edward VII. Modernity is beating impatiently on the door but generally speaking the culture is still conservative. It’s a stodgy unsympathetic England in which for a man to go hatless on the street is inviting insult:

   He discovered that he was going bareheaded down Regent Street.  London came back with a rush.  Few were about at this hour, but all whom he passed looked at him with a hostility that was the more impressive because it was unconscious.  He put his hat on.  It was too big; his head disappeared like a pudding into a basin, the ears bending outwards at the touch of the curly brim.  He wore it a little backwards, and its effect was greatly to elongate the face and to bring out the distance between the eyes and the moustache.  Thus equipped, he escaped criticism.  

Forster introduces us to three families. The middle class Schlegel family is made up of two sisters, Margaret and Helen, and brother Tibby. There is the upper middle class Wilcox family, made up of a father, mother and three children (two boys and one girl). The third family are the Basts, a newly married couple, of the lower middle class, so only an accident or illness or job loss away from the abyss.

The Schlegels, an Anglo-German family, are affluent, cultured, progressive, cosmopolitan, dedicated to an intellectual and independent-minded life. The Wilcoxes are wealthy, pragmatic, anchored to the conventions of English society of the early twentieth century. They are a family with a narrow dull mentality and a hypocritical personality, dehumanized by imperialism and economic power, assuming everybody is on the make, proving to be united only when the possibility of accumulating more money and property is at stake. Forster presents two kinds of culture, with two different orientations to life and asks and what does their country, their England, mean to them:

For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?  Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

The Schlegels can easily see that the Wilcoxes are nihilists, with nothing but “panic and emptiness” to guide them through troubles. The Schlegels also like the adventurous but bookish Leonard Bast and want to help him get over his confusion (“[writers] are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the destination”).

But good intentions, as usual, are not enough. Life is full of risks and twists that we can’t foretell

Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians.  Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere.  With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.  The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.  On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.

Lots of hardcore readers into reading challenges and critics like Virginia Woolf say this novel lacks focus, that Forster tries to juggle too many dichotomies. Progress: Chum or Bogey? Empire: Noble Enterprise or History of Grab? Ideal: The City or Suburbia? The Motor Car: Threat or Menace? Howards End as Novel: Victorian or Edwardian or Experimentally Modern? Howards End as House: Love It or List It? More Potent Phallic Symbol: Umbrellas or Swords?

I read this novel, after putting it off for more than 25 years. I couldn’t get my arms around it. I let it bark and whine in the dingy kennel of my mind for a couple of months. And then I read it again.

Forster advises:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Ambiguous enough so that the veteran seeker and seasoned mystic will have to bring her own thinking to it. A lot. There’s also sentences like:

Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe.  It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.  It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

Don’t look at me, I’ve got all I can handle fighting off the dangers that morality has had me believe. Plus, I’m too agreeable to snipe at poor old romantic beauty, who’s taken a helluva beating in the last century from meaner sonsabitches than me. I think life’s essence is making the best use of what is in my power, my scope, what’s up to me, and taking the rest as it happens. But that’s me, who gets short of breath in rarefied air.

Not often up to the big ideas, I, however, found Howards End a compelling read, albeit vague at times. Both times I thought Forster unfolded the story in an absorbing way. Woolf said Forster had “a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own.” It’s true. The novel is worth reading for secondary characters who are their own people. Sweet caring annoying Aunt Juley Munt; formidable Mrs. Avery; dippy Dolly and her godawful baby talk; terrible sportsgirl Evie (“staring fiercely at nothing after the fashion of athletic women”); hungry-eyed Jacky Bast; brother Tibby probably an Aspie; and the odious snot Charles Wilcox, haunting the margins of this novel like an imp in the gloom of hell.

The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There: Tales from the Edge of the Self - Anil Ananthaswamy

 This book of popular science is toward the harder end of the spectrum, in contrast to ‘gosh wow [long pause] let’s change [longer pause] the world’ TED talks. In this book Ananthaswamy studies how pathological conditions point to how the brain works.

For example, some patients feel that a limb is not “really” a part of their body and they arrange off the books amputations with a surgeon in another country. Some lose the sense of agency over their own actions. Alzheimer’s patients may lose their sense of self and say to their caregivers, probably the painful statement we would hear from an elderly relative “I don’t know who I am.” Other patients may feel they have died, other may feel depersonalized (outside of their bodies). The personal stories illustrating these catastrophic situations will call to mind Oliver Sacks’ way of explaining neuroscience.

In fact, the neuroscience is hard material, not easily comprehended though the cases are always presented with clear theories and research about what is going on with the brain, which makes the book rich and challenging.