Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Reading Those Classics #23

Classic 20th Century Novel: Faulkner’s third novel, the 600-page Flags in the Dust, was rejected by numerous publishers. Alfred Harcourt finally agreed to publish it with the stipulation that somebody – not named Faulkner – cut it down to size, maybe giving it some structure and unifying the plot. For a fee of $50.00 (about $900 today), Faulkner’s agent man nipped, snipped, clipped, and ripped. The shortened book was called Sartoris and released in 1929. In 1973, this restored version was released; as we’d expect, textual controversy among scholars simmers whether it was “what Faulkner intended.”

You should know that Sartoris is said “SAR-tris” or “SAR-dƏ-ris” because in unstressed syllables /t/ becomes /d/, like pretty, glitter, forgettable. It’s not “sa-TOR-is.” And “Bayard” is said “baird.”

Flags in the Dust – William Faulkner

No brass bands or parties for Bayard Sartoris when he comes home from World War I. He sneaks into his hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi and his grandfather Old Bayard and great-great-aunt Jenny have to hear of his return through the grapevine.

Young Bayard doesn’t want to see anybody because he’s a mess. He feels shame because he survived the war and his twin brother John did not. He feels guilty that he was unable to stop reckless John from taking one Sopwith Camel against a squadron of the Red Baron’s best students.  Young Bayard has trouble sleeping and concentrating. His anxiety makes him narrow-minded, only able to focus on his own pain and irritability, with frequent angry outbursts and aggressive behavior. Drinking too much, driving too fast, fussing and brawling, and breaking stallions on a whim, he hares after death with self-destructive behavior. Pride and fear of appearing weak have shut down Young Bayard's willingness to talk about his experiences so though people notice he’s feeling down-hearted, nobody can see any way to sympathize with him.

Meanwhile his grandfather Old Bayard runs the local bank and Miss Jenny runs the household, gardens, and goes joyriding with Young Bayard. They try to ease Young Bayard's re-entry into ordinary life but many factors besides PTSD fight them.

The genes of his grandfather John are visited upon his generations. Aunt Jenny makes caustic comments on the tendency of the Sartoris male to indulge in daredevilry. Nobody exerts control over their genetic heritage or the jaunty ways their male relatives have gloriously if foolishly checked out of our mundane world. Young Bayard feels he has let down the Southern tradition of honor and gallantry epitomized by the death of his great-great-uncle in The War.

But the Great War, as big wars always do, has ushered in social and economic changes with implications for big changes in the future. Yeoman whites are bettering their financial straits, buying cars, and moving from remote hamlets to towns. Partying with the Young Bayard, a car-owning salesman marvels that though they’ve known each other all their lives, it’s the first time they’ve had a drink together. However, others from the country are not dealing with culture shock in an ideal way.  Byron Snopes, a stereotypical foul owl on the prowl, breaks into Narcisa Benbow’s bedroom and lies on her empty bed, “writhing and making smothered, animal-like noises.”

Better read aloud, especially the set piece when young Bayard hides out at the MacCallums after the tragedy; I have re-read that sequence for the sheer reading pleasure of immersion, Faulkner having utter control of setting, characters, dialog and theme. I'm not up to saying whether a reader should read this, the fully-upholstered version, or the abridgment. I think comparisons are odious. I've read both and liked them both. I think well-worth reading are the novels he wrote in his hot period: this one, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).


Click on the title to go to the review.

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Tuesday, December 5, 2023

A Girlhood among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston released this combination of memoir and Chinese magical realism in 1975, when she was 35 years old. The writing feels like material that was simmering inside her for a long time before she finally got it out in the way she wanted to, in a way that could say something clear and real to a reader like mixed-race me, who grew up nowhere near Asian-American families of first- and second-generation immigrants.

The unnamed female narrator’s family owns not a restaurant but a laundry in which all members work in hot uncomfortable conditions.  Life for Chinese immigrants is confining, with the weight of unexplained traditions and family secrets and the restricted place of girls and women. Talk about mixed messages: her educated mother told her, “You can’t eat straight A’s.”

The author and her brother and sister are caught at the meeting point of clashes between the Chinese family way of doing things and American daily life at school and in stores, the different meanings of silence at home and abroad, the clashes with Chinese fresh off the boat and traumatized Japanese-Americans just released from concentration camps, and the unknowing perceptions that oblivious Euro-Americans have of anybody that’s different. And then there are the “Who Am I” questions readers of mixed races will connect with:

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

How to separate, indeed? Trust me, these are questions to make your chest tighten with frustration. It is exhausting to wrestle with these questions and natural to set them aside, wondering if they are unanswerable, too complex, with too much information just missing or liable to be charged with too much emotion to come up with a rational answer. 

The writing is powerful. The first chapter starts very intense, about rape, suicide and family abandonment. The following chapters deal have sad episodes and painful themes. The author makes no claim the book is how to find your own place in the midst of all this heritage, all this obscure tradition, murky “national characteristics versus your own life.

I enjoyed reading this, but it was not always easy. The story is mixed with old tales from Chinese culture and uses odd and unexpected metaphors that bring depth to the story. Critics will complain she is appropriating tales from Chinese traditional culture or getting facts wrong. Facts, schmax, I think artists can extract whatever nuggets they want from whatever mines they have the guts to take a pick to.

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Thursday, November 30, 2023

Reading Those Classics #22

Classic Set in a Place you Want to Visit. Borneo has reefs, rainforests, swamps, mangrove stands, and wildlife such as elephants, sun bears, clouded leopards, proboscis monkeys, orangutans, and pangolins, as well over 400 species of bird, including hornbills and mountain serpent eagles. The main draw is the relative humidity, always about 80%. High humidity feels good even euphoric but if prolonged can lead to dehydration, confusion, fatigue malaise lethargy and for heart patients, arrythmia .

You Want to Die, Johnny? – Gavin Black

In the 1960s, Gavin Black wrote more than a dozen spy-adventure thrillers featuring a series hero named Paul Harris. This one is set in one of the last British protectorates, the fictional Bintan on the northern coast of Borneo.

Canny Scotsman Paul Harris owns a company that manufactures and sells engines for marine craft. He has moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, where he has taken Malaysian citizenship.

The novel opens with Paul being on a plane returning to Bintan his old friend John, the British resident, and his 18-year-old daughter Lil.

Widowers can deal with hordes of communist infiltrators or a teenage daughter but not both at the same time. John has gone to California to rescue her from the clutches of a Cockney rock star named Boots. This gives the author a chance to deliver old-guy commentary on These Kids Today. Remember it was 1966, this was a chance not passed up by old-guy writers like Desmond Begley and Andrew Garve, who were old guys writing for other old guys.

The plane is wrecked upon landing because somebody took shots at it, putting out the tires. In the ensuing car chase, the three would-be assassins are killed in a wreck. Paul and John suspect that sinister forces, perhaps Communist in origin, are fomenting trouble for the oil-rich Bintanese family that run the place like the ex-pirates that they are.

They are also shaken when a bomb goes off in Paul’s rest house.

Convincing characterization and an authentic background make the 250 pages, longer than I like for a thriller, go by in just a couple of nights. Paul Harris has a background that makes him a tough, clever and resourceful action hero. During World War II he and his family were interned when the Japanese occupied Singapore. He had to become hardened and smart to deal with deprivation and violence in the camps. After the war, he and his brother started an import/export business that included capers on the edge of world of espionage.

Like William Haggard novels, this is James Bond for adults. Black is a much better writer than Ian Fleming who tended to stilted prose, baffling digressions, and a brazenly imperialist misogynist jerk for a hero. Granted, hero Paul Harris is rather an apologist for those topee-wearing days, but he doesn’t have any illusions about the constant moral dilemmas of the minions of imperialism (see Shooting an Elephant).

The real name of Gavin Black was Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998). He is most well-known for the excellent novel The Ginger Tree, a novel about a young English girl dealing with an unsettled personal life and turbulent times in China and Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. That novel was made into a Masterpiece Theater production in the late Eighties.

Wynd was familiar with Asia because he was born a missionary child in Tokyo. He was captured in the early days of WWII in Malaya and interned in a camp run by the Japanese. He has keen insight into the psychological effects of captivity, semi-starvation, torture, and prolonged stress have on its sufferers.

 

Click on the title to go to the review.

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Wednesday, November 15, 2023

The Ides of Perry Mason 54

On the 15th of every month, we run an article about a novel or original TV episode about Our Favorite Lawyer.

The Case of the Irate Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

The Gardner Fiction Factory (his own words) closed in 1970 with Gardner’s passing in March. This compilation of four novelettes was released in 1972 in paperback by a publisher naturally eager to slap on covers the author’s name and that of his famous series hero, Perry Mason.

The novelettes were first published in magazines between 1942 and 1953. The Case of the Irate Witness is one of only a handful of short stories featuring Mason. Something Like a Pelican is a story starring Lester Leith, a series hero that appeared only in pulp stories.

The Case of the Irate Witness (1953). Ironically, the Mason story is the only unsatisfying story in the bunch. On vacation, Mason involves himself in the case in which we are not even given a glimpse of the wrongfully accused client. Though we’ve seen clients effectively effaced in Mason novels before, this omission in a short piece is so glaringly odd that the good courtroom scene doesn’t make up for it.

The Jeweled Butterfly (1952). Gardner, in maybe a first and only time, features a female protagonist. Peggy Castle writes up a house organ that has a not-mean gossip column. A note directs her to spy on hot Stella and handsome Don on a date. But the situation leads to robbery and murder and Peggy turning into a damsel in distress that must be rescued by a detective who is smitten with her looks – once she takes her glasses off, of course.

Something Like A Pelican (1942). Lester Leith was the gentleman detective, a 1930s stock character that was tired and stale by WWII. The goofy tone in this story strikes the readers almost as hard as a character bringing his shotgun into the office and nobody thinking twice about it.

A Man Is Missing (1946). Gardner sets this story in rural Idaho which gives him a chance to do the kind of nature writing he liked to do. He’s not Turgenev or Hudson when writing about camping, fishing, and hunting but it’s nice to read subjects about which the writer obviously cares deeply. The use of amnesia disturbs me, much like, say, time travel or magic or an Evil Twin. But in the end we keep our feet on the ground as the rural sheriff and packer-guide prove to a big city detective that local knowledge trumps big-city experience and so-called common sense. Gardner believed rationality could figure out nutty behavior and call bad guys to account.

Worth reading for hardcore readers into Gardner.

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Monday, November 13, 2023

Reading Those Classics #21

Classic Mystery Set in Tinsel Town: Other whodunnits set in Hollywood are The Case of the Solid Key (Anthony Boucher, 1941) and The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler, 1953). The DA Calls It Murder (1937) is a rare example of a satirical mood overtaking Erle Stanley Gardner, as he parodies shop-worn tropes of movie melodramas.

The Birthday Murder - Lange Lewis

This 1945 mystery features the breezy wit of a confident writer. This is the second of five that starred series hero Lieutenant Richard Tuck of the LA Homicide Squad and his faithful assistant E. Byron “Duck Butt” Froody.

It is a cozy with elements of a police procedural, narrated from the third-person limited point of view of the chief suspect Victoria Hime, who writes novels, plays, and scripts. Circumstantial evidence points to her as the poisoner of her husband Albert Hime, a producer of B movies. It does not help Victoria that the kind of poison used was the same chemical used to kill a husband in one of her novels. Tuck and Froody, however, can identify no motive that would have driven Victoria to snuff her quiet easy-going husband. Plus, Victoria’s independence of mind and knowledge of people impress Tuck, who is a curious combination of hard-headed and soul-deep himself.

The persons of interest to be interviewed by Tuck are three. Bernice Saxe is Victoria’s childhood friend with a raft of marital problems of her own making. Plus, we know how complicated friendships, especially long-time ones, can be. Moira Hastings is an ambitious starlet, willing to slander Victoria as jealous and back-biting because Victoria said Moira was not old or good enough for a movie part. Sawn Hariss is Victoria’s first husband, showing up for the first time in ten years like a bad penny. His juvenile personality has failed to improve even after active participation in World War II, only glancingly referred to in the story. 

There is cringe-worthy content related to race, class, and gender but it takes up only a fraction of the novel and it is balanced by the excellent prose. This was included by Barzun and Taylor on their list of 50 great mysteries from 1900 to 1950. It was reprinted in paperback the early 1980s by Harper Perennial Mystery Library.


Click on the title to go to the review.

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Sunday, November 12, 2023

Stoic Week #7

Note: This is the last post in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Yesterday's post was about Trollopian characters that were laughably unStoic. Today's post is about a less comic approach to wretchedness. Simenon's mid-20th century novels were cautionary tales. They typically star middle-aged men that find themselves in a crisis because they have been too busy pursuing the preferred indifferents. They have rejected responsibility to identify their own preferences and aversions and renounced living according to nature and reason. Simenon offers no prescriptions, but Stoic readers will have no trouble drawing their own conclusions.  

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

The Accomplices - Georges Simenon 

Simenon tells the same story in his many psychological thrillers but it is always riveting to read tales of ordinary successful people that think they got a really good bead on things. Then they realize that they have been sleepwalking through life. 

In this short novel from 1955, after a horrendous traffic accident, a hit and run driver spends the next couple of days contemplating his previously unexamined life. He finds guilt and bad faith in his whole manner of living. It is not so much that he simply gives in to the empty materialism and mindless consumerism of society. Cynically, he has adopted false values as a mask and disowns his innate freedom to use his rationality to live as an unhindered human being.

As a child, he tapped into the inner joy that runs like a river in us. But as he grew older he just lost sight of our default settings of joy and rationality. He became a lout, coward, and sneak. With no close connections, he has no sense of belonging and feels adrift in the world. His wife refuses to sleep with him after he goes around with sex workers. His friends get nervous about his belligerence and hostility whenever he drinks. He forces an affair on his secretary and they barely exchange a word. 

He is, in short, a typical Simenon protagonist. Simenon's romans durs (hard novels) sometimes begin or end with a crime but are not mysteries. They more often begin with an ordinary change, like a new lodger, a death, a family crisis, a demolition, a move, a poor decision. They are concise novellas, clinical examinations of human beings who've become the polar opposites of the Stoic Sage.

In the 1980s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich released a boatload of romans durs in English. But USA culture was into moonwalking, Magnum PI, neon, Chariots of Fire, big hair, designer drugs, Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go), to name only a few. In the Eighties sleepwalking through life seemed a sound strategy because the Seventies were so nuts (trust me: I was there). Simenon's novels were quickly remaindered, ending up in discount stores like Edward R. Hamilton (where I bought them at prices a poor grad student could afford). Now that we are all post-pandemic veterans, with more experience contemplating the ends of our tethers, maybe we are more prepared for the romans durs. 

"A person is smart," said K in Men in Black. "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals. And you know it." It's really easy, even fun, to be dumb and panicky and thank heaven it takes more energy than most people have to be dangerous. But Stoics are willing to do the work that becoming a smart person demands.

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Saturday, November 11, 2023

Stoic Week #6

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope wrote a biography of Cicero so I think it is safe to assume that Trollope had some familiarity with the Stoic orientation. At least, as a conservative and a moralist, Trollope thinks self-control is a key psychological strength and rationality a cognitive strength. So Stoic-leaning readers will find much food for thought in Trollope's Palliser novels (1864-76), which are like cushy plushy sofas, fun to cuddle into for 30 or 40 or 50 pages at a time, comfortably challenging with laughably unStoic characters.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Phineas Redux  – Anthony Trollope

Plot is not Trollope’s main concern. Instead, he focuses on the mysteries of his characters’ psychologies. For instance, married Laura Kennedy confesses her love for single Phineas Finn in a conversation with the wife of roughneck Lord Chiltern, Violet, who argues for Stoic discretion, even with one's self.

“...If a woman,—a married woman,—be oppressed by such a feeling, she should lay it down at the bottom of her heart, out of sight, never mentioning it, even to herself."

"You talk of the heart as though we could control it."

"The heart will follow the thoughts, and they may be controlled. I am not passionate, perhaps, as you are, and I think I can control my heart...."

For Trollope, thoughts and emotions are interdependent. We depend on our emotions to assist our rationality in defining to ourselves our own values, preferences, and aversions. Knowing what we control, we thus become our own people, not the tools and fools of louts who find it fun and useful to push us around. We are also responsible to use our innate rationality to control our excessive emotions. We had better think judiciously, lucidly in order to take the edge off envy, anxiety, contempt, pride, and despair and keep them from influencing us to the point where we make silly judgments and hare-brained decisions. Trollope gives us examples of characters who have failed to rein in their emotions and allowed passions to carry them into misery or transgression.

Lord Fawn gives the police such an inaccurate description that the wrong man is charged with murder and put on trial. And on the witness stand Lord Fawn’s testimony is so garbled that the innocent man is almost convicted. Lord Fawn is shaken over his part in nearly causing an injustice to occur. Though he has no evidence that people are scandalizing his name, he fears his reputation is in tatters. He hides himself and then quits London.

Robert Kennedy feels that wives must be obedient to their husbands’ wills and ways. A control freak due to insecurity, he is so demanding that that he drives his wife Lady Laura out of the house. In his loneliness and despair, he becomes obsessed with the delusion that Phineas Finn has broken up his marriage. The obsession drives him off his dot, as poor Louis Trevelyan’s did in He Knew He Was Right. Talk about a guy that needed moderation and self-control.

In the comic romcom subplot, country gentleman Mr. Spooner is refused by Adelaide Palliser. He clings to the irrational idea that is crazy for her to choose poverty with Gerard Maule, the poor aristo she loves, over wealth, ease, and comfort with Spooner’s prosperity. Spooner is so upended by her refusal that he predicts to wise Violet, with whom he’s had a heart-to-heart:

"I'd give half I've got in all the world," said the wretched man, "just to get it out of my head. I know what it will come to." Though he paused, Lady Chiltern could ask no question respecting Mr. Spooner's future prospects. "It'll be two bottles of champagne at dinner, and two bottles of claret afterwards, every day. I only hope she'll know that she did it. Good-bye, Lady Chiltern. I thought that perhaps you'd have helped me."

The funny pathetic line “I only hope she'll know that she did it,” calls to mind the Del Shannon song, "She hurt me so much inside. Now I hope she's satisfied." Talk about taking responsibility for one’s own feelings and after-dinner drinking habits. Blaming people for not helping him more, here's another guy that needs to work on techniques for cognitive distancing to reduce obsession.

Trollope implies counsel that if life plays a dirty trick on us and a loving family life, respect and esteem, wealth and worldly comfort elude our grasp – especially if the joys of romantic love are not ours to be had – we had better not throw our lives away in despondency but cultivate the courage and wisdom to carry on. Stiff upper lip, eh, what? Many certainties and pieties were overturned by the Great War, but Keep Calm | Carry On was still the byword during WWII and “mend it, fix it, make do, or do without” helped people during the austerity years that followed the war. Some would argue that Victorian stoicism lasted until the death of the princess (see controversial Granta piece).

Anyway, life – and, as we learned, times like pandemics - are long. It is in our own best interest to develop self-control and integrity to persist and resist, to work hard to be a creative critical thinker and live unhindered by nutty feelings.

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