Mount TBR #21

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Corpse in the Snowman – Nicholas Blake

Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym with which the illustrious English poet Cecil Day Lewis (among other things, the father of the actor Daniel, who played Lincoln and Chingachgook ) wrote a score of detective novels, perhaps for personal pleasure or probably for the steady source of income.

The fact is that, for whatever the reason they got written, his mystery novels are much appreciated by discerning readers who like a little heft with their whodunnits. That is, the readers of Michael Innes, John LeCarre, Dorothy B. Hughes, or Patricia Highsmith. Some argue that Blake’s best book is The Beast Must Die so you might want to start with the one reviewed here or A Question of Proof or The Dreadful Hollow or The Private Wound, on the assumption that the writer’s other novels will pale if you read the masterpiece first.

This novel is set in the dramatic winter of 1940-1941, the beginning of WWII. In the rural locale where the action takes place, the war is still a distant echo and daily life remains fairly ordinary if not for the unprecedented snowfall, and the gears of the familar world are grinding ominously.

The story begins when Nigel Strangeways, Blake’s series hero, is invited by a relative of his wife Georgia to investigate a case at the country mansion of the Restorick family, the quality of the place. The strange behavior of the family cat has necessitated the services of a detective. It seems the cat, during a séance, behaved in a way weird and unsettling even for a cat, attacking with ferocity something that was not there.

Strangeways is introduced into the Restorick mansion as a parapsychologist, but soon he is forced to resume his true identity as a private detective, after the beautiful, vain, shameless and deeply troubled Elizabeth Restorick, the younger sister of the host Hereward Restorick, is found hanged in her room, naked and pitiful. 

Strangeways wonders whether her apparent suicide is in fact premeditated murder. Teaming up with his usual sidekick Inspector Blount, he explores the possibilities with the suspects being a bland psychiatrist from London who has been treating Elizabeth, a novelist with a proletarian background and a jealous flighty friend. Blount is a real caution:

The inspector, when he arrived, was at his most genial. He smacked his lips over Nigel’s brandy, patted his bald head vigorously, warmed his ample bottom at the fire, and in general gave a lively representation of Father Christmas in mufti, which was, under the circumstances, a little sinister.

Vivid details to make us see, “Santa Claus in civvies,” a funny and menacing tap to end to the sentence – very good. Besides the British English and unusual words (e.g. fribble) that keep us on our toes, he has an interesting phrase or sentence about every other page, showing more control, imagination and style that we expect in a mystery.

Nigel Strangeways’ wife Georgia is an explorer, an unusual avocation for a woman in those days. They discuss the case in terms that Nick and Nora Charles would use if Nick and Nora Charles had had classical educations at Oxford. Another interesting character is Clarissa Cavendish, former don whose specialty was 18^th century England, who refers to the Georgian period as “my day.” Last but not least, we have among the characters two really nice and spontaneous children. The reader can tell that Day Lewis, both a parent and teacher, knew children and their ways.

Blake gazes at evil with an unblinking eye, putting this novel firmly out of the cozy category despite its remote country house, gothic atmosphere, landed gentry, bumbling constables, and bullish homicide detectives.

A Man Could Stand Up: A Classic that Scares You

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

Lots of us post-moderns connect with modernist writers because we share their mistrust of power in the hands of the fallible agents of government and religion and reject many traditional beliefs. But one baddish thing to do to anybody is take away their hope for a better future. The classic tetralogy Parade’s End scares me because modernist writers, especially those coming out of World War I like Ford, were so cynical and disillusioned that the reader’s hope gets cuffed around. I thought that re-reading the novels one after another (not the way I read them about 3 or 4 years ago) would steel me, get me beyond feeling mere anger and frustration with the same old gaga fools getting the younger generation into the suck for the same stupid reasons. Emotional outcome: mixed.

A Man Could Stand Up – Ford Madox Ford

This is the third volume in the tetralogy. After years of separation and uncertainty for the duration of hostilities, the army veteran Christopher Tietjens and his beloved Valentine Wannop see each other again on the day of the armistice. But tormented by images of the horrible war and the prolonged stress of combat, Tietjens is in a bad way with PTSD. He suffers from anxiety and obsessive guilt that he was responsible for a terrible wound sustained by his subaltern. Tietjens’ harpy of a wife Sylvia has sold all his furniture and he returns from the war to an empty house.

However, now that the war has ended, with the old world of Victorianism and feudal traditions tossed in the trash heap by independent-minded people, Tietjens has the desperate strength to escape the relentless malice and cruelty of his hateful wife and is ready to confess his love for Valentine. So far he had refused to do this for the conventional reason that a gentleman doesn’t divorce his wife. The theme Ford examines is that after the First World War, nothing is going to be same. Men will return from the war in pain:

Hitherto, [Valentine] had thought of the War as physical suffering only: now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds. That remained. Men might stand up on hill, but the mental torture could not be expelled.

From the nightmare of war and the chaos of a disoriented present, the lovers have the chance of a new beginning in a cottage with Tietjens selling old furniture to rich snooty Americans eager to snap up bargains. Tietjens and Valentine’s  goal is to lead a life together, where they no longer have to duck social censure, and to do what they respect each other for: to stand up a.k.a. be wise, brave, fair, and disciplined to do work that they think is important.

The cruelty of Sylvia and all power holders breaks the heart of the reader. Ford's ability to recognize and describe the effects of historical events on the souls of sensitive wise people makes him a great writer. It’s a good novel, if the reader is tough enough to manage heartbreak and roiling blood pressure and attentive enough to follow involved modernist "impressionistic realism."

Mount TBR #20

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Power House – William Haggard

With some action sequences, this is a political novel from 1966 written by a Tory Englishman. Haggard knew how large organizations worked because he served in the military and worked in government full-time and wrote thrillers part-time. Haggard was what people like William F. Buckley used to call “a man of the right” so he assumes in a democracy the mediocre mass must be ruled by an elite in both the public and private sectors in order to preserve the status quo, whatever that might be at the moment.

Haggard’s contempt for the left is palpable, but he has a grudging respect for the communists since they have among them leaders and administrators who are, like men of the right, hard-nosed and resolute realists. A character in this novel muses "The Time of the Left would come perhaps, but it wouldn't be … the intellectuals, the professional washed-out rebels, but ruthless and determined men" who made revolution, not wishy-washy democratic socialists.

Haggard’s series hero is Charles Russell, the head of a secret agency that minds matters of national security that fall between the cracks of domestic and international departments. Russell is approached by a rep of the PM with information that an MP, a member of the loony left due to character flaws, may defect to the Soviet Union. The PM wants to keep the affair quiet due to a looming election. Russell does not see the PM’s political imperatives as part of his domain. The PM is clearly based on Harold Wilson, a Labour politician, who constantly postured as a man of the people but had to keep the sullen progressive wing at bay, mollified, inveigled, distracted, fighting over crumbs, etc. Readers from New York and Germany will nod their heads in recognition at this portrait of a party leader.

The plot features twists and turns that will seem familiar, if a lot more exciting, to anybody who has worked in an information-ridden environment that is constantly in flux as to new rules, incidents and personalities. It’s very much in keeping with the old-timey conservative belief that ‘tis folly to expect human endeavor to be unaffected by the bland merciless workings of time and chance but irresponsible for an adult to depend on luck for happy outcomes. Do what you can with the tools you have, but be realistic about what is not up to you.

Other Haggard Novels

·       The High Wire

·       The Antagonists

·       The Arena

·       The Unquiet Sleep

·       The Hard Sell

No More Parades: A Classic that Scares You

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

The classic tetralogy Parade’s End a.k.a. the Tietjens Tetralogy scares me because frankly I have to work hard to keep track of the interweaving of the novel’s past (before WWI) and present (during WWI) and the thoughts of the characters as the acts and respond to change. I thought that re-reading the novel’s one after another (not the way I read them about 3 or 4 years ago) might help keep track of the order of events better.

No More Parades – Ford Madox Ford

The second novel in the Parades’ End tetralogy is set in the transit camp at Rouen. The first section of the novel details the efforts of the hero Christopher Tietjens to move Canadian troops to the front. The endless bureaucratic muddle exhausts both the hero and the reader. When frustration reaches these heights for protracted stretches of time, it is no wonder that officers lose their minds, as the mad subordinate McKechnie shows. But the pessimism discourages deeply:

Heavy depression settled down more heavily upon him. The distrust of the home Cabinet, felt by then by the greater part of that army, became like physical pain. These immense sacrifices, this ocean of mental sufferings, were all undergone to further the private vanities of men who amidst these hugenesses of landscapes and forces appeared pygmies! It was the worries of all these wet millions in mud-brown that worried him. They could die, they could be massacred, by the quarter million, in shambles. But that they should be massacred without jauntiness, without confidence, with depressed brows: without parade...

The second part of the novel is the story of Sylvia Tietjens and why she treats her husband Christopher so monstrously. She glories in fantasies in which she behaves in ways that will make him wince. She feels satisfied when she carries these fantasies out and when she does terrible things just on a whim. She also feels a sexual longing for Christopher that passes her own understanding. She loves him, but she's has a troubled soul.

Christopher had spoilt her for the other man. It was the most damnable of his qualities that to hear any other man talk of any subject--any, any subject--from stable form to the balance of power, or from the voice of a given opera singer to the recurrence of a comet--to have to pass a week-end with any other man and hear his talk after having spent the inside of the week with Christopher, hate his ideas how you might, was the difference between listening to a grown man and, with an intense boredom, trying to entertain an inarticulate schoolboy. As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up...

Wondering if any guy anywhere has been That Guy to any woman anywhere calls into doubt whether Chris is a believable character.  Chris' compassionate conservatism is as hard to believe as Sylvia's baddishness. But Sylvia is totally believable as the kind of of passionate person who can love to no end - but can hate and damage to no end too when they think, rightly or wrongly, they've been messed with. 

Tietjens can find no peace: While he trying to organize a replacement battalion for an important mission, he receives the news that his wife is on his way to the French war zone. As Sylvia arrives at the front camp, which is overcrowded by wounded, freezing and emaciated soldiers, she assails her husband with a barrage of slander and insinuations. Tietjen's superior can prevent a scandal oly by sending him back to the front lines where life expectancy is about six weeks.

Thus the third part is taken by the narrative of Tietjens having it out with his superior, General Campion. The general doesn’t like brilliant people because their explanations point out where he is wrong. This makes him feel inadequate. Campion is also amazed when Chris lays this on him:

"You generally find the things I say come true, sir. Could we get this over? Ruggles told my father what he did because it is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to have taken one's public-school's ethical system seriously. I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That's an eighteenth-century product. What with the love of truth that—God help me!—they rammed into me at Clifton and the belief Arnold forced upon Rugby that the vilest of sins—the vilest of all sins—is to peach to the head master! That's me, sir. Other men get over their schooling. I never have. I remain adolescent. These things are obsessions with me. Complexes, sir!"

The first third of this novel was extremely hard going because of the stream of consciousness. But Sylvia is such a compelling character, exhilarating in her bad ways that the reader marvels, Will she stop at nothing? This makes the novel hard to put down.

Mount TBR #17

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Bats Fly at Dusk – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair

This story from 1942 kicks off when a blind man hires aggressive PI Bertha Cool in a complex case. It involves a hit and run on a young secretary, her employer that met an untimely demise, the division of the inheritance of his estate among his staff and a venal nephew, nervous insurance companies, and an impersonation by a cruel roommate.

Bertha's nitty-gritty concern with her age-old question “How much moolah is in it for me” distracts her from identifying the pith of the case. Though her canny realism is the best thing about her, she clearly misses the intuition of her partner Donald Lam (serving away in the Navy) and his ability to home in on the essential. Her police force nemesis, Sgt. Sellars, puts in a worthy turn in which he is not as astute as Perry Mason’s worthy antagonist Lt. Tragg but not nearly as dumb as Sgt. Holcomb.

Gardner turns stereotypes on their head, making Lam the intuitive and sympathetic one while Bertha is the hard-charging one getting down to brass tacks. We can criticize this novel on the basis that though Bertha does all the legwork, she is bested by the absent Donald Lam who solves the case through brainpower alone. She is also snookered by Sgt. Sellars who gives her an unwanted kiss.

Gardner makes a point, however: Bertha Cool is decidedly not the gruff softie that hides her goodness under a cross shell. Bertha is in fact obnoxious, profane, and greedy. Her impulses must be anticipated by secretary Elsie Brand so she can warn Bertha to dial it down. Her partiality for going to strong-arm tactics from the get-go has to be countered by Donald Lam, who knows that compassion and tact with witnesses will get Cool and Lam closer to the solution sooner.

Most readers may miss the real detective Donald Lam. I argue discerning readers will miss the interplay of the two “Cool without Lam” novels too (the other is Cats Prowl at Night). Bertha and Donald are apt to egg each on in conflict with each other, clients, and the cops.

One can’t help but wonder when Gardner slept. The Cool and Lam mysteries started in 1939 and he wrote this seventh in the series in 1942. His stories nearly never indicate when they are taking place, but in this production he mentions exact dates in 1942. Giving a feel for the wartime era in California, Gardner also points out how dim-out regulations forced people to use blue flashlights, which gave off weird light, and made drivers drive as slow as 15 mph to decrease the risks of night driving with dimmed headlights. No wonder blackouts caused so many accidents, increased crime, and lowered home front morale.

Some Do Not: A Classic that Scares You

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

The classic tetralogy Parade’s End scares me because frankly I have to work hard to keep track of the interweaving of the novel’s past (before and during WWI) and present (just after WWI) and the thoughts of the characters as they act and respond to change. The modernist treatment of Wes Civ being blown up is magisterial and majesty is not easy on the first reading.

Some Do Not – Ford Madox Ford

This is the first book in the Parade’s End tetralogy in which poet W.H. Auden says the author “makes it quite clear that World War I was a retribution visited upon Western Europe for the sins and omissions of its ruling class, for which not only they, but also the innocent conscripted millions on both sides must suffer.”

The sins and omissions are many and various. The protagonist Christopher Tietjens uses his prodigious memory and math ability to serve government bureaucracy with honor and responsibility. But because Tietjens thinks fudging figures is dishonorable, the Department of Statistics heaps honors on its more biddable members like Tietjens’ friend Vincent Macmaster. A banker wants to steal Tietjens’ difficult wife Sylvia so he abuses his power at the bank to bring Tietjens’ name into disrepute and break up his marriage. A general is so conceited about his ability to drive that he scoffs at hiring a driver and thus becomes a menace to himself and others on the road.

People of wealth and power put on a façade of grace, character and respectability but they act in irresponsible, dishonest and vindictive ways. Violent and savage too. Upset that their golf game has been disrupted by demonstrating Suffragettes, businessmen from the city chase a woman, shouting insanely, “'Strip the bitch naked!...Ugh...Strip the bitch stark naked!”

In their social lives, members of the ruling classes never act any better than they should. Sylvia has used a pregnancy to trick Tietjens into marriage. Though her mother likes Tietjens and feels deceit is a low trick, she covers for her daughter’s lies and chicanery. Sylvia - vain, idle, overdressed besides bored, angry, and sad - runs away with another man, returns without remorse, and tortures Tietjens with her tetchy moods and cruel words. She also throws food at him. 

Edith Ethel Duchemin, her lofty mind on the high art of the Pre-Raphaelites, hates Tietjens because her husband Macmaster owes him thousands of pounds which she sees no reason to pay back. Highly moral on the work but not right, the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti is summed up by Tietjens:

I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.

Gurgling with high moral purpose and malice, society is willing to believe lies told about Tietjens, who is an English gentleman, a Tory type that went extinct in the 18th century, a make of man reduced to obsolescence by socio-economic brutes. 

The only bright spot in Tietjens’ life is Valentine Wannop, a Suffragette of intelligence and deep feelings. In a scene rendered with commitment to Conrad’s ideal of making us readers see, Ford has them fall in love as they drive a horse drawn carriage at night in the fog. They get lost and are out all night, which as any listener of Wake Up Little Susie will know, becomes the basis of talk. Ever practical, Valentine realizes becoming the mistress of Tietjens is not happening – they are not the kind of people to have affairs -  but she thinks incessantly about him. Valentine and her mother are merely different, which causes of mob of war-frenzied yokels to drive them from a village cottage to a shabby apartment in London.

During the Battle of the Somme in 1916 Ford was shell-shocked. His personal experience must have informed Tietjens’ description of memory loss and the sensation of “numbness” of his brain. Sylvia urges Tietjens to talk about it, not because she believes in the healing power of talking it out, but to torment him. He says, “The point about it is that I don’t know what happened and I don’t remember what I did. There are three weeks of my life that are dead… What I remember is waking up in C.S.S. and not being able to remember my own name.”

Ford’s modernist prose and technique are difficult even on re-reading. He uses paradox, time shifts, and, quoting the writer himself, “the intricate tangle of references and cross-references.” His fiction rewards attentive readers who re-read and approach serious fiction with respect. Other writers like Siegfried Sasson seemed to mourn that The First World War exploded traditional social and cultural truths of Europe but Ford’s thesis is that the war was the inevitable outcome of social tensions, abuse of power, madness, cruelty, greed, anger and anxiety. Ford truly was what he thought a serious novelist should be, a historian of his time.

Back to the Classics #12

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

Shakespeare - Mark Van Doren

This collection of short essays on Shakespeare's poems and plays was released in 1939. Mark Van Doren as a critic was new to me, since I only knew him as a disappointed father due to the trouble his son Charles walked into during the infamous quiz show scandal.

Mark Van Doren was a literature professor at Columbia from 1920 to 1959. He was a poet too, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his verse in 1940. This book in fact starts with an examination of the Bard’s poetry. Poets are as tough on each other as artists are tough on each other when they are not discreet or coy. He says, "The poems of Shakespeare are seldom perfect. The songs that shoot like stars across his plays are brightest at the beginning, and often burn out before the end." This too is interesting:

"Shakespeare's poetry is idiot-pure …. Seldom is it being written for its own sake, as if poetry were the most precious thing in the world. To Shakespeare it was apparently not that. The world was still more precious - the great one he never forgot, and the little one in which he knew how to imprison its voice and body. What he dealt in was existence."

Van Doren goes over the plays in their chronological order. I’m not a Shakespeare expert so who I am to take issue with his takes on plays? Here are some quotations so the reader can decide for herself whether this book is right.

Re The Merchant of Venice

"Shylock is so alien to the atmosphere of the whole, so hostile and in his hostility so forceful, that he threatens to rend the web of magic happiness woven for the others to inhabit. But the web holds, and he is cast out. If the world of the play has not all along been beautiful enough to suggest its own natural safety from such a foe, it becomes so in a fifth act whose felicity of sound permits no memory of … long knives whetted on the heel."

Re little appreciated Coriolanius

“The movement of Coriolanus is rhetorical …. Shakespeare is interested in the character and the situation, but he is conscious of being interested…. The writing has a steady, dogged strength which the judicial critic may admire; but it has its limits, and there are clearly defined a list of the things Shakespeare has taken out in talk…. Coriolanus is a tragic hero whom we listen to and learn about entirely in his public aspect…. His character is of that clear kind which calls for statement; but in poetry and drama statement is one of the obscurer mediums…. Coriolanus remains - a strange thing for Shakespeare - cold, and its hero continues until his death to be a public man whom we are not.”

Van Doren probably wrote this book for college students, not other scholars, because the writing style is vigorous and pleasant to read even for us non-experts. So getting something out of this book would be readers who looking for appreciations of Shakespeare on the order of Anthony Burgess’ affectionate if fanciful biography Shakespeare.