Thomas Paine's Birthday

Tom Paine and Revolutionary America – Eric Foner

Not a biography, this book explains the political and intellectual contexts that influenced the author of the influential pamphlet Common Sense. Although not a long book, it covers a lot of ground: the complex political atmosphere of Philadelphia just before the war and then in the early national era, new and amended political ideas, religion and  conflicting economic interests fought in the stale arguments we hear still today.

Like thinkers such as John Adams and James Madison, Paine disliked the idea of political parties, believing that The People’s interests were complementary, i.e., what was economically good for bankers would be good for bakers. He believed in the high-minded revolutionary ideal that envisioned a harmonious social order ruled by the impartial pursuit of the common good.

Foner says that Paine appealed to famers, merchants, and artisans due to his use of direct "language of common speech:"

Paine's invention of a new political language and his creation of one of the first designs of an iron bridge went hand in hand; they symbolize the twofold nature of the revolution to which he was committed and the modern world which he helped to usher in.

Foner also discusses the fall-out caused by the pamphlet The Age of Reason, a blistering attack on Christianity. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote to him, "He who spits in the wind spits in his own face…if men are wicked with religion, what would they be without it?" Whatever its merits, the charge of atheism is one reason we Americans then and now do not consider Paine a founder.

Not wanting to be associated with a so-called atheist, Paine’s friends broke off relations. His end at aged 72 in 1809 was sad indeed. In his biography of Albert Gallatin, Henry Adams writes that Paine was very fond of Kitty Nicholson, who became Mrs. Few. Paine’s anti-Christianity views estranged them, leading to this sad deathbed scene:

When confined to his bed with his last illness he [Paine] sent for Mrs. Few, who came to see him, and when they parted she spoke some words of comfort and religious hope. Poor Paine only turned his face to the wall, and kept silence.

Paine died poor and alone and probably ravaged by alcohol. He requested to be buried in a Quaker cemetery. They refused for fear of the grave becoming a tourist attraction. He was buried on his New Rochelle, NY farm, but two years later his remains were disinterred to be taken back to England for a memorial service and burial. After this plan failed, the bones were put in a trunk on somebody’s farm. Then the remains disappeared.

Well-written, the edition 0195021827 has black and white reproductions of broadsides and title-pages that give the book an unexpected visual appeal, at least for those of us readers who think printing design and typography went downhill during the nineteenth century.

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse - Erle Stanley Gardner

Pretty Gwynn Elston tells Perry Mason an odd story. Selling kid’s books, she visited the Frankline Gillett residence. Seeing the customer’s son, she was struck by the boy’s resemblance to Felting Grimes, husband of her best friend, Nell.  A snapshot of Gillett, Senior also looked like Grimes.  This concerned Gwynn since she lives with Felting and Nell Grimes. 

Her concern turned to suspicion when, once home, Felting started probing her with questions about her rounds and later Gwynn detected a bitter taste in the drink Felting gave her. Perry tells Gwynn what she should do to protect herself.

But stuff happens. 

Felting Grimes ends up with a bullet in his chest. Lt. Tragg and DA Burger line up Gwynn in their sights as the obvious perp. Perry gives his usual warning to his client to say nothing to the cops because talking never helps a suspect. But she caves when, using a trick they still use today, the cops lie to her, telling she can go home after she talks and they confirm the truth of her story.

In his tradition of creating sturdy female characters, Gardner has Nell Grimes attack Perry in a car by turning in her seat and letting him have it with high heels. Crikey, a guy could lose an eye, fer the luvva Pete. Gardner also paints Gwynn as savvy city woman, and able to take care of herself as both a no-nonsense working woman and fender off of wolves and mashers. 

During the investigation Perry and Della Street visit a mountain village. Gardner stretches out a bit and builds two interesting characters, the town undertaker and the local poacher, who as a confirmed bachelor, is shy with “right pert” Della. In a couple of lines, Gardner creates a nice moment when Della feels her devotion to Perry. 

This was the 65th of 86 Perry Mason novels and was released in 1961. Although Gardner handles time in his usual skillful way, one begins to feel qualms. After all these cases since the late Thirties, shouldn’t Lt. Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger trust Perry a little more when it comes his clients’ innocence? After so many well-publicized losses and humiliations, how is it Burger keeps his job? 

Still and all, I’m not sorry I read this mystery – I’m proud to be in the dwindling number of Gardner fans among the quick – but non-fans might spend a better three or four hours with a better Perry Mason novel such as The Case of the Counterfeit Eye or The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe or The Case of the Fiery Fingers.

European RC #2

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

Call it Treason – George Howe

Sometimes a guy needs a break from westerns and mysteries, so what better than a spy novel with heft? This 1949 thriller starts in February 1945 as operatives of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recruit German POWs to serve as secret agents back inside Germany in order to collect information on military capacities and activities. Author Howe touches on the question “Why does a spy risk his life? For what compulsion, and for what torment in his life? The gunpoint never forced a man to loyalty, and still less to treason, whose rewards at best are slim and distant. If the spy wins he is ignored, if he loses, he is hanged.”

Howe presents three characters that are motivated by three drives: hankering for money and the goodies that go with it; love of risk and adventure; and the idealistic sense of duty to make a better world. The documentary start is full of interest, telling how agents were recruited from the Sarrebourg stockade in Lorraine. The OSS HQ was located in a castle near Lyon. Recruits were trained by the OSS team in a tiny inn hidden in a forest near Birkenwald village. There was time only for the ABCs of espionage training hurriedly given in the dining room, around a large oak table surrounded by heavy wooden chairs. Agents parachuted into remote areas away from towns to evade observation and allow agents time to bury their chutes.

Howe’s depiction of a police state in action in every nook and cranny of the country is harrowing and utterly believable. Happy, the 18-year-old who feels the duty to fight for freedom, sees the bodies of people hanged for the capital crime of defeatism, denounced by neighbors for uttering pessimistic ideas about the looming end of the war. Innkeepers and other ordinary people are scared to death of attracting the attention of the police. Hemmed in by so many anti-hoarding and other regulations, they know they are guilty of something, some crime that the authorities will find if they only look and trump up.

Written by OSS operative George Howe, this novel was made into a movie Decision before Dawn in 1951. He brings his WWII espionage experience in providing documentation (forging probably) and cover stories to this novel. Educated at Harvard, Howe has a respect for language and a storyteller’s gift for keeping the tale moving. I recommend this fictionalized memoir to fans of WWII novels such as The Cruel Sea.

National Freedom Day

National Freedom Day commemorates the date this day in 1865 when Abraham Lincoln, who was the nation's president at the time, signed a joint resolution that proposed the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment was made to outlaw slavery and was ratified on December 18, 1865.

When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection - Norman R. Yetman (Editor)

In the late 1930s, the federal government hired jobless researchers and writers for Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). One mission was to interview elderly ex-slaves and record their experience in bondage, during Reconstruction and, as if those two periods didn’t boil with trouble and hardship enough for three lifetimes, in the Depression Era. The short collection When I Was a Slave contains a selection of 34 of the more than 2,300 narratives. 

The stories these ex-slaves tell provide insights into the social structure of the slave community, the monotonous and unhealthy diet of slaves, the superstition-ridden medical care, and unspeakable white nationalist terrorism during Reconstruction. They also tell stories about resistance ranging from insolence and defiance to secretly practicing their religion and learning to read and write. They maintained their humanity - such resilience seems super-human - but it’s not a wonder when the elderly people sometimes observe that they take pleasure contemplating that Mean Misses or Cruel Overseer are burning in torment in Hell.

Despite the fact the book is only 150 pages long, it is impossible to read this short book in couple of days.  Reading it slowly over the course of a week or two, I suggest, is a strategy that would reveal insights into the slavery system and, frankly, be kinder on the nervous system and blood pressure. Since this book came out of a federal project, the feds have posted a Slave Narrative project archive on the Library of Congress web site. It’s here.

Back to the Classics #1

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life - George Eliot

Eliot and her novels have intimidated me to the extent that over the 40 years of my adulthood I’ve never read one until now. Her reputation for long, solemn, intellectual, erudite novels daunted my inner slacker, ever resistant to being improved. But reading this remarkable novel convinced me that with focus and effort, I could come to grips with Eliot’s comprehensive view of life.

I expected this to be a novel of ideas like Aldous Huxley wrote. That is, as if essays were presented as clever dialogues, pages would be taken up with characters discussing heavy thoughts in earnest conversations. In fact, she gradually introduces us to a set of characters who live in the provincial town of the title in the late 1820s. The issues they grapple with exemplify the ordinary problems generations must deal with – work, career, love, reputation, station, and success. The main characters – Dorothea, Lydgate, Bulstrode – are true philosophers in that they don’t leave ideas about how to live ethically and morally between the covers of books. Instead, they are determined to go beyond “doing no harm” to doing practical good in the real world.

But another stern reality in life – marriage – derails the hopes of Dorothea and Lydgate. Dorothea marries a withered up scholar of myths decades her senior, out of her own immaturity and stupidity – Eliot is blunt enough to point out – but also with the backdrop of a society that was just fine with dry frail geezers with a foot in the grave marrying inexperienced healthy young women.

Lydgate’s goal as a doctor and researcher is reforming the treatment of cholera, then a devastating disease. He has a bright future but his advantages are undermined by his marriage to the village beauty Rosamund, whose narcissism feels strangely postmodern and familiar. Again, though, Eliot does not let Lydgate off the hook for being an educated fool. He’s bright in his profession but, incautious and unwary, he figures money will somehow take care of itself and it would be nice for the practice if he gave expensive dinner parties with a very presentable wife. Pity to see such stupidity in a smart guy.

Spoiled twit Rosamund, for whom money to buy more stuff is supposed to just appear, is no help. Neither one of them deals with debt and belt tightening superlatively. She blithely ignores his pleas on how to proceed against this problem. The chapter where he realizes he has zero influence over her is intense, a dazzling piece of literature. His fate is so interesting we read to the end to find out what happens to him.

Eliot casts many characters and shows their relationships with each other. I sometimes lose track of who is who but never in this novel since Eliot’s pace and repetition prevent this from happening. The recapitulation is subtle but effective. She makes clear how their social backgrounds and personal characters have influenced the characters in daily life, work, and love. Like all great novelist do, Eliot creates Middlemarch, a world of its own, as various and diverse as our world. The people are complicated, subject to emotions that cloud their reasoning faculties just as surely as the assumptions of their culture influence them too. People are naturally self-centered, unconscious of the fact they see themselves as the pivot upon the world spins. Having little or loose education, they are prejudiced  – her detailing of small town exclusivity, suspicion and distrust of strangers and new-fangled things fascinates us readers, leading us to marvel that humans make any progress at all. But she’s not satirical or cold or condescending about doing so.

I can’t possibly in a short review go over all the reasons why this novel, which will take a month even for hardcore readers like us, is worth reading. The themes, to name only a few, include the desperate risks of marriage, the pitfalls of doing good and having expectations, the dead hand of mean last wills, acceptance of the world as it is, and the comparison of the visual arts with literature. Eliot’s grammar and vocabulary and long sentences take some getting used to. Google is needed for quick studies of the Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act of 1830.

European RC #1

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

The Spies of Warsaw – Alan Furst

Pre-World War II Warsaw becomes an arena of intense international rivalry. In almost every embassy an intelligence cell operates, spies of Western and Eastern powers feverishly collect information about preparations for war, both those carried out by opponents and by allies. Warsaw is full of secret agents who create a colorful society, operating under the guise of the embassies of their countries. Poles, French, Germans, Russians - everyone knows that in the war is coming and that you have to prepare for it or be destroyed. Everyone believes that by their intelligence activities they will save their countrymen from being lost or that they will ensure victory for the homeland.

Our hero Jean-François Mercier, the French military attaché, also knows that armed conflict is inevitable. At 46, he has already participated the Great War and the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920. He has performed long and dedicated service, and he would like to leave for a well-deserved retirement, but a sense of responsibility for the fate of millions keeps him on post. He skillfully navigates in a narrow diplomatic world, but does not avoid a direct, even painful clash, with an opponent, worthy or not. His strength is certainly increased by the warm feeling of a beautiful French-Polish woman working for the League of Nations that she met at a boring official reception. Mercier discovers that first of all he is not so old, and secondly - that he is not only ready for retirement, he is ready to go to extremes.

The book details Mercier’s activities in episodes. He runs agents and even saves one from being kidnapped and forcibly repatriated to a certain death in Germany. He sneaks into Germany to observe tank exercises. On his travels, in hotels and restaurants, a foreboding sometimes comes over him, “What is going to happen to these people after war comes.” He meets ordinary people who are fighting the forces of evil – literally – because it is the right thing to do.

The settings all have evocative details of Silesia and the countryside of Poland (think rural New Jersey). Furst is also effective at getting across the mundane details of regular people doing their best in trying circumstances. We readers need the romantic angle as a break from the suspenseful intrigue and tension of Nazi cruelty. We readers also know what the characters do not: Poland is doomed to Nazi occupation and will be the most damaged country staggering out of World War II.

Monster Movie

The Monster Walks
63 minutes / B & W / 1932

Upon the death of her father, Ruth must return to the old homestead for the reading of the will. She brings her fiancée, a doctor, to meet her uncle, who is confined to a wheelchair. We soon understand why she fears returning home. Her father died of no apparent causes. Although the housekeeper is nice if morose as she sneaks around the house, her son gives off an unstable vibe. Worst of all, kept in the basement is an ape (in fact, it’s a chimp – it’s a low budget movie) that detests Ruth out of jealousy. The ape, it seems, was the subject in medical research experiments conducted by the late father.

They are driven to the creepy manse by the comic relief Exodus, whose real name per the credits is Sleep N Eat (sic) who was black comedian Willie Best. In one scene, Exodus reports a resemblance between his relative and the movie’s chimpanzee. How sensibilities change!

The prejudice mars what’s otherwise a tolerable movie for such a shoestring budget. Mischa Auer plays the son in a myriad of creepy ways. Thousand yard stare. Odd teeth. Lumbering gait. Furious, vengeance-filled vibes. Big hands. Playing on the violin out of tune lullabyes. He's much better than the rest of the movie. The other actors deliver the dialogue in a stiff, mock portentous way that brings to mind the stage – the high school play stage. At only an hour long, it was just as entertaining as a couple of installments of One Step Beyond.