Stoic Week #5

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Stoicism helped me through a health ordeal in January 2020. Stoically fine-tuning my habits and attitudes in January and February really prepared me for when the pandemic hit the fan in March. I had to manage the stress of learning to teach on Zoom. When the term ended I had to deal with the social and emotional fallout of the pandemic killing the program I used to teach in. Stoicism helped me deal with the loss of my profession, something I was really good at. It is within my power, my domain, to get benefit from every experience, good and bad.

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How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius - Donald J. Robertson

I’m not a born Stoic, so I need to work to keep its guidance in the front of my mind. This work involves about 10 to 15 minutes of journaling every morning, applying Stoical cognitive distancing during the workday and in social life, and reading longer articles and texts about Stoicism maybe once a season.

Texts like this one. The author of this book does not aim to give information about how Stoicism was developed by its ancient founders. Instead, he talks about how we can instrumentalize Stoicism as a practical orientation in our daily life, as Aurelius did in his job as Emperor of Rome. The most oft-repeated quote in the book, as I hinted above, is “It is not events that upset us, but our judgements about those events.”

Robertson provides many suggestions for cognitive distancing that enable us to calm the frick down and think rationally to respond to events with moderation, wisdom, and bravery.

·         Live in the present. Aurelius taught us “not to be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should.”

·         To break the cycle of worry and rumination take a time-out. Scarlett O’Hara rather overdid it but she was basically right by shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders with “I’ll think it about tomorrow.”

·         Talk to the thought. “Hey, thought, you just a haint, a hobgoblin, a feeling.” This is not running away from it but viewing it from a meta-cognitive perspective. I mean, lots of thoughts and feelings pop up and we just let them go – why not do the same for a worry about car repairs, tree damage, knuckle-walking neighbors, faithless friends, senility in the family history, winter and on and on about things that are out of our control anyway?

·         To prevent being carried off into worry or daydreaming, rub silk or moleskin or a stone. Notice other sensations, our facial expression, our sitting position, the weather.

·         Picture in your mind that you have put literal space between yourself and the daydream or temptation. How will I feel about this challenge, this hassle in a week or six months?

·         Dispute vehemently what ideas are making you feel upset. How logical or reasonable are these ideas? How likely is a bad outcome? How severe would a bad outcome be? Be vigorous in your arguments with yourself.

After reading this book, I find the orientation of Stoicism thorough and specific. Having goals, however modest, and values, however plain, will help. Slogans like Que Sera Sera or 仕方がない Shikata Ga Nai have their place too. Wabisabi 侘寂, baybee.

I think this book is a good guide to take more control of our emotions in a pressure-cooker age where the culture, the media, strangers and even friends and family on occasion seem to be going out of their way to make feel us nervous and sad. For young people with a propensity to be hot-headed or older people who feel they need to deal better with the jitters or the blues, this self-help book is as useful and well-written as we would wish, a modern-day addition to the originals. 

In a podcast, Robertson said it's easy to return to Seneca’s Letters, Epictetus’ Discourses and Aurelius’ Meditations because they are so well-written, while it is not as easy and enjoyable to re-read modern texts by, say, Albert Ellis. I agree the prose is pretty utilitarian in How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything  but I do re-read Ellis' books to remind myself and I could see myself re-reading this book too.

Stoic Week #4

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. My mother was a born Stoic, and so is my wife. Me, I was built half Stoic. Even when I was kid, I knew that greedy and out of control were not paths to happiness. I also knew I had to work on my hot-headed responses to problems if I wanted to think clearly, act wisely, worry less, and stay out of fussin' and fightin'. With age and Stoicism I’ve gotten better about self-control. But I still need to work on getting too irritated in traffic, letting work issues get to me, and worrying about the health of other people.

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Stoic Role Models: The Japanese &William Faulkner

When I was working in an English department in Japan, I noticed with surprise Japanese scholars of American Lit had great interest in the twentieth-century writer William Faulkner. I thought his notorious difficulty would scare off non-native speakers. But after working in Japan a spell it dawned on me that some Japanese firmly believe that taking on challenges builds character.* That of course calls to mind Epictetus:

“What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?” 

Faulkner simply resonates with some Japanese readers. Like Japanese novelists from Murasaki Shikibu to Murakami Haruki, Faulkner always tells you what the weather is doing and is prone to provide detailed descriptions of plants and birds and insects and landscapes. Faulkner loves the moon and nighttime darkness, as the Stoics and Epicureans liked sunrises. See Old Man. 

Like Seneca, Faulkner has a strong sense of the shortness of life** that is widely shared by the Japanese. Mono no aware (物の哀れ)  – the pathos of things – is a feeling that phenomena like cherry blossom, the sound of frogs and crickets, youth, autumn are beautiful because their beauty is short-lived, that earthly existence ends in frailty, death, dissolution, melancholy. The bittersweet sense that change is incessant, life is transient, and death inevitable is all over Faulkner's stories, for example, Aunt Jenny's visit to the graveyard in Sartoris.

For Faulkner, nature reflects a divine order to which rational creatures – that would be us – have duty to follow. The God of Order helps them that help themselves – i.e. we’re on our own - and chaos in the form of sickness, accident, misfortune, and malice will threaten our work – always - but we human beings like the Stoic Cash in As I Lay Dying are capable of rising above our own greed, anger, and fear. Cash did his best, their quest ended up in shit; it's better to do your best anyway, like the Stoic Archer, and focus on the process, not outcomes.

The Japanese are ones for putting up a good front even when one feels lousy and gloomy. Faulkner too implies we had better be cheerful. Beware the grim example of Jason Compson in The Sound and The Fury.  As a Stoic gone wrong, Jason is the most amoral, materialistic, and ornery person in the novel. Jason is comically perverse in his Stoic pessimism. He sees himself as the sole person in town who is sane and logical. He expects the worst of people and nature to be directed against him. He assumes no good can come to him, because its occurrence would show that Jason does not have a properly gloomy bead on the situation, which in his rationality he has identified. In appalling standup routines, he manages some bitter private humor that the worst he can negatively visualize does not come about when opportunity arises, since the dumbbells he must deal with are not endowed with such imagination or intelligence or energy that they can manage to come up with the worst that they can do. It's hilarious. 

Don't be a sour Stoic like Jason Compson, kids. Be of good cheer, it prevents the mind from falling into "depths of sorrow."

Faulkner has a powerful sense of the ethos gaman (我慢) and ganbaru (頑張る, stand firm). Originating in Japanese Zen – what a surprise - gaman means “enduring the unbearable with patience and dignity.” Ganbaru is doing your best tenaciously as long as you can do it. But gaman is enduring when you don’t have any tenacity left. This is from Light in August:

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’

Faulkner died of a sudden heart attack at 64 in 1962, too young to experience what we often face nowadays - a feeble old age - but he understood the fortitude that refused to be downed by anxiety and depression about the prospect or reality of defeat and disability. The gaman sensibility is all over As I Lay Dying.

*Alan Watts rolled his eyes that some Japanese turned Zen meditation into mere body mortification. But some Japanese relish the self-torture of marathon training and standing under falls of freezing water. The pioneer reality show Takeshi’s Castle (1986 – 1990) was a monster hit when I was in Japan, and in fact, was the inspiration for Squid Game.

** “There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust – mortal - ” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Stoic Week #3

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. I suffered a health ordeal in early 2020 even though I had been eating sensibly, exercising daily, and regulating my emotions better. Suffice to say, genetics laid me low. Per the four cardinal virtues (a.k.a. psychological strengths), I knew that my recovery was in my control in terms of diet, movement, sleep, and 'capital S' Stoicism. And reading and thinking about the good sense (wisdom), resourcefulness (wisdom), fair dealing (justice), confidence (courage), and cheerfulness (temperance) of the Stoic role model created by author Erle Stanley Gardner.

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Perry Mason as Stoic Role Model

On the NPR show Fresh Air, TV critic David Bainculli described fictional lawyer Perry Mason as “stern, stoic and unflappable.” Bainculli uses “stoic” in the popular sense of “unemotional.” However, it’s worth examining the character of Perry Mason in the wider sense of “Stoic.” A 'capital S' Stoic has an orientation toward life and resilience based on ancient conceptions of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

One of the many facets of wisdom is the ability to employ logic in order to collect and examine evidence and come up with objective interpretations and creative solutions. Mason exercises reason as he questions persons of interest and analyzes data gathered in crime scenes and technical tests.

It's a question of doing justice to a client. Once you become convinced your client is guilty, you interpret all of the evidence in a false light and weigh it by false standards. When you once get the correct master pattern, every single event fits into that pattern. It dovetails with every other event which impinges upon it. When you get a master pattern which seems to accommodate all of the events except one, and you can't make that event fit in, it's pretty apt to mean that your master pattern is wrong. (TCOT Drowning Duck 

We've been talking quite a bit about becoming hypnotized by circumstantial evidence. After a person once gets a fixed belief, he interprets everything which happens in the light of that belief. It's a dangerous habit to get into and I'm afraid I haven't been entirely innocent, myself. (TCOT Perjured Parrot)

But Perry also possesses common sense and good calculation. He assumes that people in trouble with the law have made poor decisions based on the incomplete information they had at the time crazy shit was going down.

You don't need to see a man, look in his face, shake his hand, and hear him talk, in order to know him. You can watch the things he does. You can see him through the eyes of others. You make allowances for [ ] prejudice when you know the others. You can then judge the extent of their distortion. That's the only way you can solve cases, Della. You must learn to know the characters involved. You must learn to see things through their eyes, and that means you must have sympathy and tolerance for crime. (TCOT Silent Partner)

Be realistic without being callous and cynical. Mason expects people to make mistakes and commit crimes out of greed, lust, hatred, and love.

People have their strong points and their weak points. The true philosopher sees them as they are, and is never disappointed, because he doesn’t expect too much. The cynic is one who starts out with a false pattern and becomes disappointed because people don’t conform to that pattern. Most of the little chiseling practices come from trying to cope with our economic conventions. When it comes right down to fundamentals, people are fairly dependable. The neighbor who would cheat you out of a pound of sugar would risk her life to save you from drowning. (TCOT  Shoplifter’s Shoe)

Fairness, or the virtue called justice, is cutting yourself, other people, and the world slack. Perry Mason believes that everybody in trouble deep with the authorities deserves a good defense because the criminal justice system is stacked against us, The Little Guy. A lawyer can’t decide she will defend only parties she regards as innocent because that would be setting herself up as the jury, which deprives the defendant of a fair trial.

What right have I got to sit back with that 'holier than thou' attitude and expect [clients] to come clean with a total stranger? They come here when they're in trouble. They're worried and frightened. They come to me for consultations. I'm a total stranger to them. They need help. Poor fools, you can't blame them for resorting to subterfuges. (TCOT Curious Bride)

This conception of fairness is closely related to wisdom above in that it takes imagination to envision how and why another person came to a decision.

… I think imaginative people sympathize with the sufferings of others because they're able to visualize those sufferings more keenly in their own minds. An unimaginative person, on the other hand, can't visualize himself in the shoes of another. Therefore, he sees life only from his own selfish angle. Killers are frequently cunning, but they're rarely original. They're selfish, and usually determined. Of course, I'm not talking now about a murder which is the results of some sudden overpowering emotion. (TCOT Lame Canary)

Mason is dealing with ordinary people in the deepest legal trouble they could possibly face. Mason frequently has to urge them to stand firm to beat back the anxiety and despondency that clients are liable to slip into. Courage will fuel optimism or help us steel ourselves for the ordeal to come.

My experience has always been that these things look much worse than they actually are. In fact, I tell my clients that nine times out of ten they can say to themselves, 'Things are never as bad as they seem.' I admit things look black, but we're going to keep fighting, and don't you get discouraged. (TCOT Beautiful Beggar)

Related to courage, the virtue of moderation (temperance) means that a person has self-command. Irrational emotions like anger, contempt, defiance, spite, and impatience don’t influence them when making decisions. Like Buddhists and cognitive behavioral therapists, Mason urges worried clients to be here, now:

Make up your mind to one thing, Mrs. Warren. After water has run downstream and over the dam, you can't find any way on earth of getting it back upstream and over the dam a second time. Take things as they come. Concentrate on the present, forget the past. (TCOT Phantom Fortune)

Being brave also involves taking risks. We have no control over what other people are going to do. But we do have control over our thoughts and actions. Focus on what you can do, what is in your power. Know your limitations but give yourself credit for your strengths too.

Whoever got anything in life by being careful? Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow's going to do, you unconsciously figure what you'd do in his place. The result is that you're not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don't worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking. (TCOT Baited Hook)

As he weaves his way through convoluted plots, Perry Mason uses the capital skills to exonerate people who say the cozily familiar phrase, “Please, Mr. Mason, you gotta believe me. He was dead when I got there!” For readers who sniff at black and white morality and virtue ethics, Gardner wrote Cool and Lam novels such as The Bigger They Come, about a PI partnership that was not averse to lying to the cops and their clients or removing evidence from a crime scene.

For most of the quotations, I leaned on a great article by Kirk Woodward

Stoic week #2

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015 and have kept a Stoic journal since then. I write for about 10 minutes about a Stoic quotation like If you face hurdles, keep advancing to the best of your ability. Stick to what seems just and right. [Marcus Aurelius, M10.12]. Clearly sometimes the Stoics are just common sense or hoary chestnuts, but slogans are nice to have handy when unruly emotions stir. Be fair. Respect people. You Mr. Irrational Response are but an impression, You M. Feeling Overwhelmed a hobgoblin, You Miz Phantasy a haint. Ain't Nothing To Me.

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Self-control and how to secure it - Paul Dubois

This book by a Bernese neurologist was ably translated from the French by Harry Hutcheson Boyd and released in the USA in 1909. The writing is stunning in its lucidity, a paragon of plain prose. I heard about it from Donald Robertson in a podcast. A copy is available at Internet Archive.

Dr. Dubois theorized that neurasthenia (i.e. anger, anxiety, and depression that make us miserable but don't take us out of action) developed because we are influenced by “our natural and hereditary defects, to our badly directed education, to the vicious influences which act upon us during our entire physical and mental development.” Our mental debility is the result of being too easily influenced by suggestions from the people around us and our unquestioning belief in unhelpful thoughts about ourselves, our actions, our feelings and those of other people.

He’s nothing if not blunt about what his experience doctoring has taught him about people that see themselves as really smart:

He who every day is called upon to interview the mentally diseased who have so-called healthy relatives experiences painful surprises in finding how warped are the minds of individuals who are proud of their intelligence, and belong to recognised social and what are called governing classes.

So much for our leaders and betters but we have to bear and forbear. Dubois was a determinist in the sense that he believed we have to accept the terms and conditions of life on this planet. He advises that we seek education in logic and critical thinking because “… judgment is just what we need in life - a clear view of things, enabling us to foresee the immediate and the future consequences of our acts.” 

Besides following the law, he advised readers to identify and clarify their own values so that they could reach their own conclusions and live authentically, true to their own core values. Similar to thinkers among the Stoics, Buddhists, and Vedantists, he claims appetite, fear, pleasure and distress are the four white-boned demon-passions we have to fight.

The sole liberty that man enjoys is the power to react under the influence of an idea, the ability to obey either the motives of feeling, that is to say, of his passions - or the motives of reason. This obedience is willing, and that is why we call it free, but this willingness depends upon our innate and acquired mentality. To struggle against the temptation of the passions, we require not liberty but a uniformity of moral views that would make the mental balance lean to the right side.

Dr. Dubois frankly admits that at first his patients don’t take kindly to this "forgive the world for being what it is" determinism but using the Socratic method he comes to persuade them. His brand of therapy is called “rational persuasion therapy” because it appealed to the client’s reason. Dr. Dubois also assigned his clients to read Seneca and must have laid down no-nonsense disputation a la Albert Ellis.

Many of my patients whose chief trouble is emotional come to me saying, “My feelings form a group apart, and my reason exists beside them; between these two compartments there are air- tight partitions which do not allow my reason to introduce order into my feelings.” I answer them, “You deceive yourselves; there are no primary feelings; they are all bound to a mental representation of intellectual order, accessible to the criticism of reason. So also is there a logic of feelings. They should only penetrate our soul and remain there when they have received the permission of our reason. Your tendency to separate these two fields equals the saying, so commonplace and so foolish, ‘It is stronger than I.’ This is not the spirit that leads to victory.

Though I am uncoachable, I like it when coaches talk about victory. I somehow suspect that therapists don’t talk about victory nowadays though cognitive behavioral therapists are into Dr. Dubois’ cognitive model of emotion (our emotions are cognitive in nature so clarify values and dispute distorted beliefs).

Therapists nowadays, like Dr. Dubois but with a lighter touch, try to educate clients to a less inaccurate view of emotions. Many people see their reason and emotions in separate bins. Or they might think emotions are forced on them from world, “Traffic makes me crazy” and “I wouldn’t hit you if you didn’t make me so mad.” Generally speaking, people need to be less naïve about their ability to control their emotions and smarten up about reason and emotions being interconnected.

At least, I do! 

Who knows why some scholarly items die and others do not? Though Dr. Dubois’ books were translated into incredibly clear English, he was not widely read in the UK or the USA. Donald Robertson, CBT therapist, points out that Dr. Dubois did not write a book about perversions nor did he lecture at American universities on sensational topics like penis envy and castration anxiety like you-know-who. Dubois urged us to think more seriously about common sense topics like courage, patience, and tolerance and was forgotten in the West. Ironically he stayed in good repute in the USSR, where Freudianism was regarded as pseudo-scientific rubbish, one of the few things the commissars got right.

Anyway, even for a moralistically vain palooka like me, sometimes Dubois’ moral exhortations feel earnest and over the top. But I’m glad I read this. I believe that my tranquil resilient old age will be closely connected to my taking responsibility for attitudes I adopt in response to the emotional shoals and challenges of aging. Does this response help me or hurt me? Does this response square with the facts? Does this response seem logical and reasonable?

Stoic Week #1

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. I’ve been keeping a Stoic journal since then, but I thought I would formally join in 2023 to re-tool. Reading the self-introductions from Stoics all over the world, I feel more cosmopolitan already. Anyway, though it smacks of using Stoicism as a mere mind hack, which will hack off Stoics more serious than me, I'm hack enough to turn to works of Stoic inspiration when winter looms in my Northern place. 

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Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In the early days of trans-oceanic flight the writer worked as pilot delivering mail and passengers over the Andes or across the Sahara. He flew in a primitive plane, literally flying by the seat of his pants, navigating by constellations or peering out the side windows for landmarks like The River Nile. So much sacrifice and dedication to deliver bank statements, pay or quit notices, and dear john kiss-offs. Sure, one part of me wants to roll my eyes at the writer's purple prose. But another part of me - the child of two postal workers - is moved at the nobility of getting the job done despite snow, rain, heat and gloom of night.

I see an aspect of Stoic cosmopolitanism is getting the job done because it's my duty to my community of fellow human beings. I show respect to my colleagues, clients, students, taxpayers, and customers when I do what I ought to do, as well as I can, on time. At work, I have my roles in creating something new and maintaining what is established. This writer claims that these are lasting obligations I have to discharge:

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.

Living according to nature means understanding our human nature, living rationally and tapping the joy that runs in us. Stoic justice and wisdom call for respecting all people and being mindful of the labor that has gone into, for example, the production of a morning cup of java:

An old peasant woman finds her God only through a painted image, or a primitive medallion, or her rosary; we too must hear a simple language if we are to hear truly. And so the joy of being alive was gathered in that aromatic and burning first taste, in that blend of milk, coffee and wheat which brings communion with peaceful pastures, with exotic plantation and with harvests, communion with all the earth.

This, on welcoming adversity to practice embracing emotional and physical discomfort and coming back from setbacks:

The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us. Self-discovery comes when man measures himself against an obstacle. 

Paraphrasing Epictetus, Hercules would have been a slugabed if he hadn't had all those labors. Damp, cold, grey, disoriented due to time change insomnia - hey, it's winter, after all. Wintry mix will pass, but the courage and moderation cultivated in fighting the winter blahs will persist.

The writer de Saint-Exupéry provides charms, or slogans, that the Stoics suggest I have ready to hand when bogies loom:

Sometimes the storms and the fog and the snow will get you down. But think of all those who have been through it before you, and just tell yourself: “They did it, so it can be done again.

We get only one life, so we’d better pay attention. Slow down. Look at people, places and things with care, with respect. We don’t have to fly over the Andes to get plugged into the universe. We can get that view from above in our own yard:

I used to love that ironic grass in Paraguay, pushing its nose up between the cobblestones of the capital to see, on behalf of the invisible yet always present virgin forest, whether men still hold the city, whether perhaps the hour has come to shove all these stones aside. I loved that form of dilapidation which expresses merely an excess of wealth. But here I was overcome with wonder.

Enough quoting of that sense of wonder. In winter, savor how beautiful the snow is on the trees just before dawn, how still everything is before the world wakes up and starts driving as if there was no such thing as black ice.

Our writer also tells cool adventure stories of survival after crashes, almost dying of thirst, and flying in an Andean cyclone, which are the prime reasons we readers who are kids at heart read flying memoirs. I’ve not read The Little Prince but I have read its descendant in the inspiration genre The Alchemist so for when self-help you can’t help but despise at least a little bit is the only reading that will fit the bill (given the prospect of winter in a Northern place), this is it.

Stoic Week 2023

I'm doing Stoic Week 2023! It's a free e-learning course, run by Modern Stoicism, where you can "Live like a Stoic for a Week". I did it in 2015. I found it interesting and helpful and thought I would do it again to re-tool.

Just 15 minutes a day for a week can make a real difference, though you can do Stoic week however it fits your schedule and inclinations. Only a week! See what takes.

To sign up, visit

https://learn.modernstoicism.com/p/stoicweek2023

To find out more, watch this short video

Tim LeBon introduces Stoic Week 2023

or visit

https://modernstoicism.com/stoic-week-2023-6-12-no...

Reading Those Classics #20

Classic Conversation Novel: A novel of conversation provides commentary on issues about gender, sex, class, status, and conflict, encrypted as dialogs. This 1944 novel has this discussion with father Benjamin and his three sons.

“It is a modest but pleasant house,” said Reuben’s voice, “and a home is where a family is gathered together.”

“That is what makes family problems,” said Bernard.

“We have none of those,” said Benjamin, in a tone that defied contradiction.

“None,” muttered Esmond. “Problems imply a solution.”

Compton-Burnett’s families are unhappy in their own over-the-top fashion - excessively, one wants to feel, since it seems unlikely the folks next door in what we laughingly refer to as the real world could be as monstrous to each other as the characters in her novels. One never knows, do one? If you’ve ever been in a conflict over family inheritance issues, you know that real kin can be as outrageous as characters in novels.

Elders and Betters - Ivy Compton-Burnett

The modernist author does not even tell the reader the time period in which the story set. No cars or phones, the large families, with plenty of servants, and wide class divisions imply the 1890s or 1900s.  She does not bother to describe weather, rooms, or clothes. None of that is essential to her austere and savage examination of family members, loving and not loving each other, under pressure but sotto voce, murmuring like Esmond above, saying so lightly as to be inaudible.

The author just drops the reader into a cauldron, where an upper-middle-class family of civilized intellectuals is already simmering. Aunt Sukey is tyrannizing one branch of the family, wielding her impending demise of heart disease like a cudgel. Her relations want her to be comfortable and comforted, but her nagging and grousing, spiced as it is with bitterness and anger, have worn her family down. Like the uncle in Cousin Henry, Aunt Sukey has multiple last wills and testaments – a situation bound to be ruthlessly exploited.

Another branch of the family has moved nearby to help out. Father Benjamin, Sukey’s brother, and his daughter, Anna, take over a bit of the care-giving. About 10 years before, Anna, at the time only 18 years old, became mistress of the house after her mother died. This responsibility made her disturbingly fond of laying down the law and people hopping to it made her spoiled. The story revolves around Anna, who is also determined and opportunistic. She is so callous that in a fine comic scene her vanity is pricked when she announces her engagement and her flummoxed relatives stammer their congratulations, unable to take in that anybody would marry Anna of the Hard Soul.

Anna commits three wicked acts, none of which I dare describe lest I spoil the surprises of the consequences of her felonies. Much suspense in conversation is stoked as unused to improvising or obfuscating, Anna risks exposure. Other action revolves around instances of cousin marriage and an oddly close relationship between father and daughter.

Comic relief is provided by two eloquent tweens, Dora and her older brother Julius. They are conversing about their benign but clueless and unreliable father. Their adult brother Terence is in the room, probably fearing the kids have read too much Bulwer-Lytton.

“He gives us food and clothes and has us taught.” said Dora in a dubious tone as if uncertain if mere fulfillment of duty should operate in her father’s favor

“The minimum that a man could do,” said Julius. “The least amount of expense and thought that would save him from the contempt of all mankind. Would you have him turn us out into the waste to starve? Would you have him cast us forth, as if no tie bound us?”

“As if we were not his kith and kin,” said Dora, falling into her brother’s tone. “As if we were penniless orphans, driven to seek a moment shelter within his doors. As if no sacred tie of blood bound us, hand and heart to heart.”  

“Let him take thought for the dark retribution that is gathering,” said Julius, with a deep frown. “Let him take counsel with himself. That is all I have to say.”

“The bread he has cast upon the waters will return after many days,” said Dora. “Then he will repent the grudging spirit that stayed his hand.”

 Terrence rose and left the room, disturbed by the activities of his brother and sister, whom he believed to be acting some kind of play, a view in which he was right.

In other comic scenes – much needed after Anna’s cool calculated hypocrisy – Dora and Julius pray to their God Chung: “… grant that we may live to a ripe old age. For it would not be worthwhile to suffer the trials of childhood if they were not to lead to fullness of days.”

This one is longer than previous novels, as if ICB wanted to explore manipulation in conversation at greater length. The sharp focus on only one character is also a departure for ICB. A point similar to the families in previous novels is that the two branches of the family are too much together, they have become sordid and live in a sinister atmosphere that comes to feel natural to them. Disquieting at the end is the prospect of cousins marrying, thus preventing new people from influencing the seamy milieu for the better. One feels the sooner these people get away from each other, the better for themselves and other people.

Other Reviews of ICB Novels: click the title to go to the review

• ·         Pastors and Masters (1925)
• ·         Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• ·         Men and Wives (1931)
• ·         More Women Than Men (1933)
• ·         A House and Its Head (1935)
• ·         Daughters and Sons (1937)
• ·         A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• ·         Parents and Children (1941)
• ·         Elders and Betters (1944)

Click on the title to go to the review.

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