Mount TBR #17

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front - Constantine Pleshakov

When Hitler gave the orders to start the surprise invasion on the USSR in June 1941, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov asked the German Foreign Ministry, “What have we done to deserve this?” The thesis of this book is that Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union at the time, was an ineffective military leader and that his failure lead to the deaths of untold millions of lives in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Historians will argue on this point – it’s not documented - but the author’s conclusion is that Stalin assumed Hitler would eventually get around to attacking the USSR, but Stalin guessed wrong about the timing – he thought the invasion would occur in early 1942. Stalin himself, in fact, was planning a preemptive strike on German-occupied Poland and the Balkans.

This popular history is readable and well-sourced. The stories of the impact on ordinary people move the reader to wonder at the bravery and will to survive in human beings. Sometimes Pleshakov gets into the heads of the players and tell us how they feel, which is in fact unknowable and incredible, but this infrequent tendency aside, this is a good overview of one of the worst chapters in Russian history. 

It’s a problem with authoritarians of all stripes and the crony hacks they surround themselves with: not only are they brutal and without style, but they are erratic, incompetent, and not ever to be trusted with the lives of their people or the security of their country.

Mount TBR #16

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

They Thought They were Free: The Germans, 1933- 1945 – Milton Mayer

About 10 years after the end of WWII, journalist and college professor Mayer visited West Germany. Under the guise of German language lessons, he met and conversed with 10 Germans, mainly working class and minimally educated though one was a high school teacher. Not wanting to test prejudice, he didn’t disclose to them that he was Jewish or had access to information about them that they didn’t know he had. Mayer’s goal was to understand why Germans liked Hitler up until about 1943 when military reverses in the East spelled disaster for Germany.

During his conversations, much to his surprise, Mayer found that none of his ten Nazi friends took National Socialist racial theories seriously. They laughed about it. “That was nonsense,” said one of them, “something for the universities and the SS.” But despite their disagreement with Nazi racism, they were all anti-Semites. They did not hate the Jews because they believed that they belonged to a strange or inferior race; they hated the Jews for economic and political reasons. The Germans thought that everybody knew - "know" in the sense of "accepting something is true cuz everybody thinks so" - the Jews were always making money as middle-men and were thus the enemies of Germany. The concentration camps, the gas chambers? Fake news. “If it happened, it was wrong. But I do not think it happened,” one said, who spend three years in the joint for burning down a synagogue.

Mayer did not conduct his journalistic fieldwork with a sense of lofty righteousness. He seems to have been a lefty of the undogmatic sort. He didn’t defend Jim Crow in the United States and he freely admitted that federal and state government interned Americans of Japanese descent in camps. Brave of Mayer, given that the chairman of the state of Washington's Committee on Un-American Activities said in 1948 “If someone insists there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is inequality of wealth, there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.”

While he listened to his ten Nazis justify and whine about German bad luck, Mayer could not help but wonder how his fellow Americans would have behaved in comparable situations. With race-based chattel slavery, Jim Crow, land grabs, Red Scares, and internment camps all in fairly recent history, he found no morally reassuring answer.

The most provocative chapter in the book is printed here. To summarize, a German who had not been a Nazi told him that the means by which the regime had ruled had not been terror. It was rather the distraction. Every day, so much happened, that you did not think anymore. Gradually, the Germans got used to being ruled by surprises. Uncertainty grew over time. Meanwhile, the measures against the enemies of the regime intensified as in slow motion. “People said, 'It's not so bad’ - or, you just picture it – 'You're an alarmist.’”

Perpetual distraction - see Neil Postman.

Back to the Classics #18

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic from a Place You’ve Lived. When I lived in Japan (1986 – 1992), Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 was pictured on the often-used 1000-yen bill. His picture has since been replaced by not one but two bacteriologists. Still, Sōseki is revered in Japan to this day, with notables such as Haruki Murakami saying Sōseki is his favorite writer.

I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, translated by Aiko Itō & Graeme Wilson

At the expense of the Meiji government, Sōseki studied abroad in the UK from 1901 to 1903 in order to obtain the graduate education that would enable him to teach at the university-level back in Japan and prepare students to contribute to the modernization of Japan. Though Sōseki was such a neurasthenic agoraphobe in the UK that his Japanese friends feared for his sanity, by reading constantly and voluminously he managed to get a good grounding in English literature. He returned and replaced Lafcadio Hearn as an English lit prof at the First National College, now Tokyo University, the most prestigious university in Japan. To augment his paltry civil servant salary, he wrote fiction and contributed to literary magazines. In 1905, he published the first section of I am a Cat, to critical acclaim and popular success.

The satire is narrated by a sardonic feline. He observes the family of a Japanese English professor. Very close, indeed, is the observation; modernists like Conrad and Sōseki want to make the reader really see:

Mrs. Sneaze is sitting so that her bottom presents itself before her husband’s face. You think that impolite? Speaking for myself I would not call it so. Both courtesy and discourtesy depend on one’s point of view.

My master is lying perfectly at ease with his cupped face in close proximity to his wife’s bottom: he is neither disturbed by its proximity nor concerned at his own conduct. His wife is equally composed to position her majestic bum bang in her husband’s face. There is neither the slightest hint nor intention of discourtesy. They are simply a much-married couple who, in less than a year of wedlock, sensibly disengaged themselves from the cramps of etiquette. Mrs. Sneaze seems to have taken advantage of the exceptionally fine weather to give her pitch-black hair a really thorough wash with a concoction made from raw eggs and some special kind of seaweed. Somewhat ostentatiously, she has let her long straight hair hang loose around her shoulders and all the way down her back, and sits, busy and silent, sewing a child’s sleeveless jacket. In point of fact, I believe it is purely because she wants to dry her hair that she’s brought both her sewing-box and a flattish cushion made from some all-woolen muslin out here. It is similarly to present her hair at the best angle to the sun that, deferentially, she presents her bottom to her spouse. That’s my belief, but it may, of course, be that my master moved to intrude his face where her bum already was

Professor Sneaze’s set of friends are posing, indecisive, lost, un-shut-upable intellectuals who are made amused, derisive, and desperate about Japanese changing their customs and ways in the face of Westernization. The cat takes aim at mindless aping of Western mores and attitudes, but he is not above delivering thrusts and jabs at traditions such as Japanese Zen, which has exasperated some Japanese intellectuals since the 15^th century.

Philistines such as he, creatures responsive only to the crudest material phenomena, cannot appreciate anything deeper than the surface appearances recorded by their five coarse senses. Unless one is rigged out in a navvy’s clobber and the sweat can be seen and smelt as it pours from one’s brow and armpits, such persons can’t conceive that one is working. I have heard there was a Zen priest called, I fancy, Bodhidharma, who remained so long immobilized in spiritual meditation that his legs just rotted away. That he made no move, even when ivies crept through the wall and their spreading suckers sealed his eyes and mouth, did not mean that the priest was sleeping or dead. On the contrary, his mind was very much alive. Legless in the bonds of dusty vegetation, Bodhidharma came to grasp such brilliantly stylish truths as the notion that, since Zen is of itself so vast and so illumining, there can be no appreciable distinction between saints and mediocrities. What’s more, I understand that the followers of Confucius also practice forms of meditation though not perhaps to the extent of self-immurement and of training their flesh to crippledom by idleness.

As this passage illustrates, the word-play is exuberant, learned, quaint, snippy, anecdotal, and appealing to bookish people who pat themselves on the back for getting some allusions and don’t beat themselves up for not getting them all.

As supercilious as he is, though, he is a Zen cat, accepting the here and now as it is, without letting preferences or aversions cloud his take on reality.

It’s a waste of effort to try and force those incapable of seeing more than outer forms to understand the inner brilliance of their own souls. It is like pressing a shaven priest to do his hair in a bun, like asking a tunny-fish to deliver a lecture, like urging a tram to abandon its rails, like advising my master to change his job, like telling Tatara to think no more about money. In short, it is exorbitant to expect men to be other than they are. Now the cat is a social animal and, as such, however highly he may rate his own true worth, he must contrive to remain, at least to some extent, in harmony with society as a whole. It is indeed a matter for regret that my master and his wife, even such creatures as O-san and Tatara, do not treat me with that degree of respect which I properly deserve, but nothing can be done about it. That’s the way things are, and it would be very much worse, indeed fatal, if in their ignorance they went so far as to kill me, flay me, serve up my butchered flesh at Tatara’s dinner table, and sell my emptied skin to a maker of cat banjos.

For those wondering what "cat banjos" might be, think of the three-stringed samisen that  traditionally used cat, dog, or snake skin to cover the body of the instrument.

I am sure readers who are into people and things Japanese would like this chatty story, especially those who liked Sōseki’s hit novel Botchan or his later sad novels such as The Gate.

Happy Birthday Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner, July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970

Few readers – fewer critics -- would claim the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner, was a gifted writer or talented stylist. Gardner himself admitted that he had no aptitude for writing and improved simply by writing all the time for practice and taking criticism seriously.

Gardner had the limitations of other popular mystery writers like Agatha Christie. His vocabulary cries for expansion. His two adverbs are “abruptly” and “evidently.” Eyes always “twinkle” and a face is inevitably “like a mask.” His rhythm-free prose sparks zilch aesthetic thrill. Instead of developing the essential ingredients to a classic mystery - characterization and atmosphere – Gardner focuses on the puzzle, piling up clues, red herrings, and incidents in a perplexing fashion. He creates one-dimensional stock characters that have more mannerisms than personality. Perry Mason is forever pushing his thumbs into the armholes of his vest when pacing and thinking.  PI Paul Drake always puts both legs over one arm of an easy chair. As for settings, LA is the main location but the city never genuinely comes alive to influence the plot one way or the other, as place does in Simenon’s Paris, Earl Derr Biggers’ Hawaii or Ross Macdonald’s Southern California.

Gardner has been little reprinted in the last 20 years because the books have become quaint.  Readers in 2019 don’t grok cuspidors, carbon paper, hat closets, folding boats, jump seats in taxi cabs, and poor access to telephones. Old-fashioned idioms, artifacts and jobs provoke smiles and incomprehension. These, from just one of the novels, The Case of the Rolling Bones:

• four bits: a half-dollar, since two bits was a quarter
• pulchritude: beauty , especially feminine comeliness.
• to pull a boner: to blunder.
• Gladstone bag: a small portmanteau suitcase built over a rigid frame which could separate into two equal sections.
• to get down to brass tacks: begin to talk about important things
• glad rags: a fancy or expensive item of clothing
• taxi dancer: a girl or woman employed, as by a dance hall, to dance with patrons who pay a fee for each dance or for a set period of time.
• plunger: a person who bets, gambles, or speculates, especially rashly or recklessly.
• to foozle: to bungle, to do clumsily
• pard: partner
• to be trimmed: be upstaged
• as right as a rivet: sane, reliable, sound
• to hang crepe: be pessimistic, especially if pessimism is not warranted. In the early 20th century, a piece of black material, aka crepe, was placed over the door to indicate a death in the family. A crepe hanger is a person who is pessimistic, even when the situation doesn’t call for it.

The character names are so retro that we seldom meet people with such first names anymore. From The Case of the Daring Decoy: Gifford, Rosalind, Mildred, Evangeline, Norton, and Ruth. We may wonder if, say in The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece, Myrna Duchene is said Merna or Meerna. Call me narrow-minded but it’s easier for me to imagine a Phyllis as a formidable aunt than a femme fatale.

Why then do I read Perry Mason and Lam & Cool novels, if Gardner as a writer has so many negatives?

Some people read fantasy with orcs, I read fantastic stories about lawyers in a vanished world. Perry Mason personifies my ideal image of a lawyer as an expert and fighter that will defend clients hard up against The Law and its relentless partners, judges, DA’s and police. Other lawyers may let the chips fall where they may but Mason will drop everything to help people who are missing the breaks in a criminal justice system monstrously unfair to the poor and working class. Mason is also the lone individual fighting the legal impunity of the rich, corruption among the powerful, and mean-minded contempt for constitutional rights among the cops. 

Mason’s gumption and fight make me feel nostalgic. I remember Americans when I was a kid in the 1960s: argumentative, defiant, and ornery instead of today’s ideal of attentive listeners who are tolerant, sensitive, flexible, and resilient, all code words for docile with incompetent supervisors, meek with capricious bosses, and obedient to any pompous blowhard in a uniform.

Where’s my shawl, dammit?

Anyway, I grant that Gardner's plots hinge on murder, blackmail, and other grubby crimes, but violence and sadism rarely impinge. Greed, loathing, and lust, often enough, but nihilistic moral squalor, never. Like P.D. James and Sara Paretsky, Gardner worked in the real world a long time and in his stories used his knowledge not only of law and lawyering but also of how, for instance, the extractive business of mining and oil drilling used to work. His professional background lends the verisimilitude of a world as tough as taxes then, as dead as a doornail now.

Like many pulp writers, Gardner’s strongest point was his plotting, with the non-stop action that climaxed in courtroom fireworks. As with other writers we are embarrassed to admit we like – Kipling, Maugham, Simenon, Ian Fleming - he wrote excellent escape fiction. 

In conclusion, given the plot holes, pretentious diction, and excessive length of his novels, I’m leery of Raymond Chandler getting the last word, but for what’s worth let’s finish with an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Gardner:

That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea. ... It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. ... Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius.

The Ides of Perry Mason 2

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Waylaid Wolf – Erle Stanley Gardner

In his father’s company, rich and spoiled playboy Loring Lamont keeps an eye peeled for young, attractive female employees. He tricks stenographer Arlene Ferris into coming to his father’s cabin hideaway. They cozily cook ham and eggs together. Lamont moves in. Arlene, however, is decidedly not, as they used to say in the Fifties, “a broad-minded girl with a tolerant view of life.” His moves change from an unwanted advance into a violent attempted date rape. Arlene flees the cabin, but the wolf pursues the pretty lamb through the woods. Shrewdly running an end-around, she “borrows” his car in order to get back to town, though in a sardonic touch she does end up parking it outside his apartment by a fire hydrant. 

The next morning Arlene visits lawyer Perry Mason to discuss filing charges against the lothario. Set in the late 1950s, this book is post-Miranda but pre-rape shield laws. In the bad old days, with impunity defenders of accused rapists would relentlessly drag the reputations of rape complainants through the mud. Mason points out the rich Lamont family would sic detectives on her private life.  Arlene, a fighter, retains Mason to pursue the case because she wants Lamont’s predatory behavior stopped. If she can save just one woman the anguish of her experience with Lamont, the risks of a suit would be worth it.  

As it turns out, though, Arlene faces legal trouble because after her departure from the cabin, somebody stabbed Lamont to death with a butcher knife. Typically unconcerned with the truth, homicide detective Lt. Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger are cynically certain unlucky Arlene lead Lamont on and stabbed him for the thrill of it.

Gardner dedicates this book to Park Street, a Texas attorney who worked on the Court of Last Resort, an organization that advocated for innocent people wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. Wrongful convictions often come out of witness misidentification. In Chapter Five, then, Gardner gives an example of how police procedures made witness misidentifications a natural outcome.  Police would first prime witnesses with mug shots of the suspect and then present the suspect in a line-up, with the idea that the vic would identify a familiar face as the perp. Gardner is mercilessly persuasive on the unreliability of memory.

This is the 100th book in Gardner’s long successful career. So Gardner confidently and deftly gets all his ducks in a row. For instance, Gardner likes to fog things up with pairs. Two cars confuse a police officer. Two skirts confuse Lt. Tragg. Looking similar enough to confuse hopelessly a record store owner are Arlene and her friend Madge (the retro names are always fun in Gardner). Also, Gardner tests Perry Mason's prime directive "Always trust your client" because the evidence against Arlene indicates she’s being economical with the truth. Finally, Gardner’s realism is matter-of-fact, the product of a lifetime of asking questions, listening, reading, and writing about our system of criminal justice, police procedures and inclinations, and the fallibility and waywardness of us ordinary people.

Back to the Classics #17

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

Classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. The book reviewed here covers WWII when the author fought in Syria, Iraq and Iran. In Burma, he commanded a Chindit (i.e. special ops) brigade and fought with the 19th Indian Division at Mandalay. I feel a travel book or a translation of a novel by an African or Asian would be more appropriate to the category but the book below has been on the shelf for years so it fits my self-imposed imperative for this summer “Read books you got.”

The Road Past Mandalay: A Personal Narrative - John Masters

Born to British parents in India in a family dedicated to military service, John Masters was educated at Sandhurst, an important UK military academy. His return to India in 1934 as an officer in the 4th Prince of Wales’ Own Gurkha Rifles is told in the excellent autobiography  Bugles and A Tiger.  In early 1942, he attended the Indian Army's Staff College at Quetta. He was dinged informally for not being careful enough in his dress, not attending closely enough to using correct acronyms in orders, and not being deferential enough in expressing his opinions to superiors. He had the right stuff for an officer: a strong, forceful personality and concern for his men.

This war memoir works on all levels because Masters is a good story teller and not just of war stories. For example, he and his later wife Barbara were hiking high in the Himalayas when they met some shepherds:

…Marmots whistled at us from every stone, and we came upon two shepherds, with their flock, living in a stone shelter which they willingly shared with our porters. Their dogs were Tibetan sheep dogs, huge beasts of the chow family, their coats so thick and matted that even a leopard would have a hard time sinking his fangs through them; and they wore collars made of solid steel, with triple rows of spikes, hand-beaten and sharpened, six inches long.

The shepherds told us that these two dogs had killed a leopard down the valley only a month earlier. The dogs eyed us coldly, slow growls rumbling in their deep chests, as ready to kill us as any leopard, if we had come to harm the sheep. When we patted them they looked very puzzled. One tried to wag his tail but he really didn’t really know how to, and almost threw himself over. Affection was something they had never known, or had forgotten. They were guardians. But they came back for more, and I pulled the thick coats and pushed the heavy heads this way and that in a flood of sympathy. I had something to tell them about our common lot, if only I could speak to be understood….

“Our common lot” indeed. It’s not outlandish to wonder if this is an allusion to Zeno's metaphor about the dog leashed to the cart. If the dog has no choice in the matter, then it is better for her to trot along with the cart than be dragged and strangled by it. Same with soldiers, same with adults: making the best of a situation that can’t be helped is better than yapping and yipping about it the whole bloody way.

In another instance of making the best of a bad situation, Masters tells of the Chindit brigade's withdrawal from an over-run redoubt and the last request of a dying member of the Scottish Rifles is a light machine gun:

Men trudged on in a thickening stream down the muddy, slippery path past my command post. Shells and mortar bombs continued to burst all around…. A Cameronian lay near the ridge top, near death from many wounds. “Gi' me a Bren”, he whispered to his lieutenant. “Leave me. I'll take a dozen wi' me.”

The reader wonders where the infantry finds such courage, endurance, and self-sacrifice. Masters the professional shares observations of his superior Field Marshall “Bill” Slim:

In the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. Each soldier feels himself to be alone. Discipline may have got him to the place where he is, and discipline may hold him there—for a time. Co-operation with other men in the same situation can help him to move forward. Self-preservation will make him defend himself to the death, if there is no other way. But what makes him go on, alone, determined to break the will of the enemy opposite him, is morale. Pride in himself as an independent thinking man, who knows why he’s there, and what he’s doing. Absolute confidence that the best has been done for him, and that his fate is now in his own hands. The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen, and morale, only morale, individual morale as a foundation under training and discipline will bring victory.  

As a writer, Masters sets his goal for accuracy and realism. He underlines the savage fighting and the destruction of historical places, cultural treasures, and the environment.

A gruesome campaign of extermination began, among the temples of one of the most sacred places of the Buddhist faith. Sikh machine-gunners sat all day on the flat roofs. Their guns aimed down the hill on either side of the covered stairway. Every now and then a Japanese put out his head and fired a quick upward shot. A Sikh got a bullet through the brain five yards from me. Our engineers brought up beehive charges, blew holes through the concrete, poured in petrol, and fired a Verey light down the holes. Sullen explosions rocked the buildings and Japanese rolled out into the open, on fire, but firing. Our machine-gunners pressed their thumb-pieces. The Japanese fell, burning. We blew in huge steel doors with PIATs (bazookas), rolled in kegs of petrol or oil, and set them on fire with tracer bullets. Our infantry fought into the tunnels behind a hail of grenades, and licking sheets of fire from the flame-throwers. Grimly, under the stench of burning bodies and the growing pall of decay, past the equally repellent Buddhist statuary (showing famine, pestilence, men eaten alive by vultures) the battalions fought their way down the ridge to the southern foot - to face the moat and thirty-foot-thick walls of Fort Dufferin.

Basically, this book goes on the shelf with the other classic war memoirs Memoirs of An Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon; Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean; Goodbye to All That  by Robert Graves and With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene B. Sledge.

Back to the Classcs #16

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Play. George Orwell once said The Devil’s Disciple and the play discussed below were Shaw’s best. So that was recommendation enough for me since Orwell pointed me to Smollett too. Anyway, the script is at this link and a 1989 TV production with the distractingly beautiful and talented Helena Bonham Carter is at this link.

Arms and the Man (1896) – Bernard Shaw

Set in 1885, in Bulgaria during war with Serbia, a Swiss mercenary finds refuge in a Bulgarian rich girl’s bedroom. It turns out that she is the fiancée of a Bulgarian who led a mad charge that forced the Swiss merc and his men to flee the field. Raina is filled with poetic notions of war, the romance of battle, the savagery of the foeman. But  Bluntschli disabuses her of the nobility of war and sacrifice.

Bluntschli: You never saw a cavalry charge, did you?

Raina: How could I?

Bluntschli: Ah, perhaps not - of course not. Well, it's a funny sight. It's like slinging a handful of peas against a window pane: first one comes, then two or three close behind him and then all the rest in a lump.

Raina: [in rapture] Yes, the first one! - the bravest of the brave!

Bluntschli: Hm! you should see the poor devil pulling at his horse.

Raina: Why should he pull at his horse?

Bluntschli: [impatient of such a silly question] It's running away with him, of course! Do you suppose the fellow wants to get there before the others and be killed?

When we read these old plays, we may feel that they are going over old ground, about issues and notions we post-moderns don’t have to mind much anymore. Chivalry. Nationalistic romanticism. Inequality &injustice as expressions of the natural order as ordained by Heaven.

But Shaw makes an even more basic point that still resonates these days: that people court damaging their own self-respect when they are so idealistic that they can’t possibly live up to their own lofty ideals. Perfectionism and lack of discernment of their own abilities and preferences make them flail around, never decisive about their aspirations. Shaw also implies shallow knowingness, tacky worldliness, and cold-blooded cynicism will undermine courage and fortitude.

Know thyself. The romantic warrior Sergius sees how ridiculous his posturing is but only up to a point while Bluntschli doesn’t the time or energy or interest to put him wise:

Sergius: Bluntschli, I have allowed you to call me a blockhead. You may now call me a coward as well. I refuse to fight you. Do you know why?

Bluntschli: No, but it doesn't matter. I didn't ask the reason when you cried on and I don't ask the reason now that you cry off. I'm a professional soldier. I fight when I have to and am very glad to get out of it when I haven't to. You're only an amateur; you think fighting's an amusement.

Sergius: You shall hear the reason all the same, my professional. The reason is that it takes two men - real men - men of heart, blood and honor - to make a genuine combat. I could no more fight with you than I could make love to an ugly woman. You've no magnetism: you're not a man, you're a machine.

Bluntschli: [apologetically] Quite true, quite true. I always was that sort of chap. I'm very sorry.

You will feel insulted if you think you’ve been insulted. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, said that troubled Danish prince, way out of step with his honor-ridden culture.

Sergius. This is either the finest heroism or the most crawling baseness. Which is it, Bluntschli?

Bluntschli. Never mind whether it's heroism or baseness. Nicola's the ablest man I've met in Bulgaria. I'll make him manager of a hotel if he can speak French and German.

Be practical. Be reasonable. Don’t be attached to judging all the time. It’s a lot easier on the stomach.

I don't know enough about Shaw to know if he was indeed trying to make such points. But these points are pretty much where I am as yet another birthday grows more distant in the rear-view mirror.

Mount TBR #15

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Down Among the Dead Men aka The Sunken Sailor – Patricia Moyes

This 1961 mystery was the second novel starring series hero Henry Tibbett, a Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard and his wife Emmy. By chance they meet a couple whose hobby is sailing so they go on a short vacation with them on England’s East Coast. The hamlet is rather haunted by a recent death and a jewel robbery from the local baronet’s mansion. Two additional killings occur, thus causing Henry to forget his vacation and put on his deer-stalking hat.

When I read stories in which things nautical loom large, I rather bleep over the maritime mumbo-jumbo of tides and sails. Moyes needs the reader to understand a few technicalities of sailing to understand the unfolding of the plot. So at the beginning careful attention to new terminology and concepts on the part of the reader will pay rewards. But patience, more than usual for a mystery, is called for. Moyes later was more effective – i.e., less demanding of the reader - in setting her Tibbett stories in specialized settings such as the world of fashion, a movie set, and an old air base as substitute for a country house,.

The various characters  are smart, articulate, and amusing. Moyes was a cozy-writing traditionalist so she is careful with little details that add up to big reveals. Motive is usually love or money or avoidance of shame and embarrassment.  She is rather retro in attitude. For example, Henry confidently asserts that no woman keeps a secret indefinitely, with no spirited opposition from any of his female listeners or caveats about how gossipy men can be. This is worth reading for true fans of Moyes, but for novices the later ones, such as the late career Night Ferry to Death, are better.

Back to the Classics #15

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Set in the Americas. With Mexico so much in the news, I wanted to read about it and my favorite genre of nonfiction is travel narratives, especially from between the wars (see my review of Greene's The Lawless Roads). However, the attraction was mainly Lawrence, whom I've not read for a long time.

Mornings in Mexico – D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is known as a novelist, but he is also the author of travel narratives such as Twilight in Italy and Other Essays and Sea and Sardinia. Travel writing was so hot between the wars all major writers like E.M. Foster and Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh went somewhere and churned one or two out. Plus, Lawrence and his wife Frieda were sick of Europe, needing freer air to breathe and having doors closed in their faces because of how they got together.

Lawrence chose rugged terrain such as the Umbria region in Italy, the states of Jalisco and Oaxaca in Mexico, and Arizona and New Mexico in the US. I think the idea was that these climates would be good or at least not bad for his health, which was never robust. Not to mention, it was cheap living in those places once they arrived and they had to watch the pounds and pence.

This collection has eight essays about the Mixtec, Koshare and Hopi Indians. The nature writing is brilliant. A nature lover from childhood and a poet, Lawrence observed plants and animals closely, perhaps assuming he wasn’t going to enjoy them for many years in this world. Furthermore, one can see why beats and hippies saw Lawrence as hero railing against the deadening tendencies of industrialization and mass consumption and mindless nationalism and urging us to keep it real, get in touch with our sensations and emotions, and build a more humane society.

However – there’s always a “however” with Lawrence. He liked to generalize too much. His generalizations about Mexican Indians – that they are all sad, stupid, and empty in mind – are based on, well, hours and hours of examination of the local culture. Where does one start with observations on the order of “Among the Indians it is not becoming to know anything, not even one's own name . . The Americans would call him to dumb-bell.” Plus, there’s the stuff about the Race Ghost that makes me hope that Lawrence wasn’t a racist in our sense but his Jungianesque notions – like the indigenous psyche and only the white man having a consciousness of time - would probably give food for what they mistake as thought to our racists today.

Middle-aged myself, and growing closer to the end than the beginning as each day passes, I wonder how close Lawrence felt to the end of his life. He wrote this narrative in 1923-25 and he was to die in 1930 at 44 years of age. As the other old coots would say, “Only 44! Just a kid.”  

Anthony Burgess’ biography of Lawrence is called Flame into Being. I wonder if Lawrence had lived longer and felt in better health, he would have gotten past that fire, burning, blaze metaphor to which he seemed so attached. Living every day on fire and air is one thing before 50, but after 50 the attractions of water and earth become more obvious. And soothing, to be honest. Alluring. Maybe if Lawrence had had more time and read in the Tao, he would have seen that other thinkers wrestled with the idea of God as a kind of living heat or seed from which things grow (a belief that Lawrence ascribed to Mexican Indians, without the benefit, I think, of interviewing them about it).