Mount TBR #26

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters – Ring Lardner

This classic of American humor features our old pal, the unreliable narrator. Each chapter is a bundle of letters to the hometown friend Al, written by Jack Keefe, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox in the years just before the US entry into World War I.

FRIEND AL: Coming out of Amarillo last night I and Lord and Weaver was sitting at a table in the dining car with a old lady. None of us was talking to her but she looked me over pretty careful and seemed to kind of like my looks. Finally she says Are you boys with some football club? Lord nor Weaver didn't say nothing so I thought it was up to me and I says No mam this is the Chicago White Sox Ball Club. She says I knew you were athaletes. I says Yes I guess you could spot us for athaletes. She says Yes indeed and specially you. You certainly look healthy. I says You ought to see me stripped. I didn't see nothing funny about that but I thought Lord and Weaver would die laughing. Lord had to get up and leave the table and he told everybody what I said.

No, Jack, clueless as he is, wouldn’t see anything funny about that. He has skill as pitcher but is too lazy and arrogant to practice and learn. A shameless braggart, he inflates his accomplishments. He is the worst teammate in the world.

This should ought to of gave me a record of 16 wins and 0 defeats because the only games I lost was throwed away behind me but instead of that my record is 10 games win and 6 defeats and that don't include the games I finished up and helped the other boys win which is about 6 more alltogether but what do I care about my record Al? because I am not the kind of man that is allways thinking about there record and playing for there record while I am satisfied if I give the club the best I got and if I win all O.K. And if I lose who's fault is it. Not mine Al.

Jack has a pathetic need for admiration. So susceptible to flattery, he is easily suckered by owners, managers, and husband hunters who all soft-soap him in order to manipulate him. He is hypersensitive to criticism and envious to the bone. He uses chicanery, exploits others’ emotions and weaknesses, walks away from debts like a skinflint, and lacks any sense of business or ethics. Don’t forget gullible, as managers try to persuade him to go on a round the world exhibition trip.

While we was still in that there Medford yesterday Mcgraw and Callahan come up to me and says was they not no chance of me changeing my mind a bout makeing the hole trip. I says No they was not. Then Callahan says Well I dont know what we are going to do then and I says Why and he says Comiskey just got a letter from president Wilson the President of the united states and in the letter president Wilson says he had got an other letter from the king of Japan who says that they would not stand for the White Sox and giants comeing to Japan un less they brought all there stars a long and president Wilson says they would have to take there stars a long because he was a scared if they did not take there stars a long Japan would get mad at the united states and start a war and then where would we be at. So Comiskey wired a telegram to president Wilson and says Mathewson could not make the trip because he was so old but would everything be all O.K. if I was to go a long and president Wilson wired a telegram back and says Yes he had been talking to the priest from Japan and he says Yes it would be all O.K.

Indeed, Jack’s lack of character and competence reminds us post-moderns of somebody and our own wacky reality. The consummate American con-artist’s first mark is always his own self.  My vague impression is that the writer had more sympathy for team owners than players. So Lardner was inclined to paint baseball players in less than heroic colors and thus indirectly caution us fans from idolizing lugs and lummoxes, the ancestors of guys who take gas station boner pills.

Moral advice aside, the stories are very funny but we should read them spaced out over weeks just like the first readers read them as they were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post during the Golden Age of Weekly Magazine Fiction. As a classic epistolary story and American colloquial speech, this book can be found at Gutenberg and Libravox.

Paul Newman

On September 26, 2008, Paul Newman died at the age of 83 at home with his wife of 50 years, Joanne Woodward. Blessed with looks and acting ability, he made his name on stage and then in Hollywood. Many of his movies were based on novels and plays so a book review blog should take a look at them.

As the 30-year-old teenager Brick Pollitt, Newman puts in a restrained but memorable performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, Tennessee Williams). The scene in which Newman and Burl Ives go at it about mendacity stands as one of my favorite scenes in a movie. Restraint on Newman’s part was a good strategy in contrast to the larger than life performances by the imposing Ives and the sometimes too earnest Elizabeth Taylor. While we’re on the topic of the great cast, Jack Carson and Madeleine Sherwood did fine jobs as did Judith Anderson as Big Mama. Yeah, I know the movie version punks out on the examination of the relationship between Brick and his dead friend Skipper.

The best seller by John O’Hara From the Terrace was a portrait of a medium-sized town like Scranton, PA in the first part of the 20th century. The movie with Newman and Joanne Woodward follows the theme of the emptiness at the core of an American success, but like the movie version of Sometimes a GreatNotion, it’s a noble failure, not capturing the richness of the novel. I read the novel when I was overseas in the late 1980s; I had bought all of O’Hara’s novels in used bookstores before we left the US.

Newman plays Fast Eddie in 1961 movie version of Walter Tevis’ The Hustler. A must-see movie from a must-read novel for those into existential works concerning an ordinary man’s struggle with himself in world that could care less if he lives or dies. I read this as a teenager  - about the same time as I read Hud and the baddest sports novel ever Fat City by Leonard Gardner.

Hud (1963) was a good movie, though admittedly it wussed out on the black-white conflicts in the novel. Based on Larry McMurtry’s debut novel Horseman Pass By, the movie touches on the theme of the Passing of the West (a genre on its own) in that we have moved from hard-working cowboys to the callous thugs, as personified in Newman’s character Hud.

In the revisionist western mold of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger, Newman plays the title role in the version of Elmore Leonard’s fine short novel Hombre. Though it is hard to get one’s head around the idea of the blue-eyed Newman playing an Indian, he does a good job. He doesn’t talk but lets his actions speak for him.

Newman directed Never Give a Inch (1971) which is based on the incredible novel by Ken Kesey Sometimes a Great Notion. It’s about a family in the logging business that keeps cutting despite the union’s strike against big companies. An okay movie from The Great American Novel about big themes: individualism vs. collectivism, jock vs. hippie, men vs. women, old vs. young.

WUSA (1970). Newman served as co-producer of this adaptation of Robert Stone’s kick-ass but now neglected novel A Hall of Mirrors, which I read in the early Seventies in college when I should have been studying. Rheinhardt is a nihilistic crap that has thrown away every chance that came his way. A seedy Laurence Harvey (is that redundant?) gets him job as on-air gabber for a radio station that broadcasts hatred and stupidity to validate the racism of its chump listenership. Yeh, still relevant today.

I never read the novels for these movies and don’t plan to but they are worth a mention to balance out the blather about Butch, just a buddy movie.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) is the powerful story of the conflict of the two great forces in our scheming world: Mindless Authority versus Mindless Resistance. Newman was nominated for Best Actor in this one but lost to Steiger’s performance in In the Heat of the Night.

Slap Shot (1977) is the best sports movie ever made, after Raging Bull. Newman plays a coach on two missions: win back his wife, who has discovered lesbianism, and turn his hapless semi-pro hockey team into a winner. Hilarious, with salty enough language to shock us even today: “They brought their f*****g TOYS with 'em!”

Being a guy and all, I remember the incandescent Lolita Davidovich in the title role of Blaze (1989). Nobody who’s seen it would forget the scenes when the dude yells out “Good Gawd Amighy” or when the title character eats watermelon. But Newman excellently plays Gov. of Louisiana Earl K. Long as a flamboyant scamp. Great to look at for its 1950s Big Easy mise-en-scene too. A movie for adults, for romantics, because the stripper and the gov really seem crazy about each other.

Mount TBR #25

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Dead Men Don’t Ski – Patricia Moyes

In the first Inspector Henry Tibbett Mystery published in 1959, Henry and his wife Emmy take a vacation at a ski resort in the Italian Alps near the Austrian border. It’s in fact working vacation because his superiors in Scotland Yard have asked Henry to be on the lookout for drug-smugglers.

As in the second novel starring Tibbet, Down among the Dead Men, a seemingly accidental death has already occurred before the novel actually gets started. That is, one of the ski instructors ended up in a crevasse because of too much risk-taking.

But another hotel guest, detested by about everybody who had contact with him, is discovered shot dead on the ski lift. Henry joins a local copper and greenhorn Spezzi to investigate the murder.

Moyes likes to set her mysteries in different locations, such as Geneva (Death on the Agenda) and a London movie set (Falling Star). Like a cozy writer usually does , she employs stock  characters: the bright young thing, the good guy with the dodgy past, the Lord Peter type, the mysterious woman, the emotional foreigner, the dumb colonel, the hideous Hun, etc. Henry and Emmy are reassuringly normal – no existential angst on them and Henry’s preternatural intuition (his “nose”) isn’t weird.

Moyes also has a Simenonion sense of the closed community, such as the locals versus the tourists and the local commercial fishers versus the weekend boaters (again Down among the Dead Men). Finally, though I’m not astute when it comes to puzzles, she unfolds the incidents smoothly with only a couple of too obvious techniques “to make ‘em wait,” as Wilkie Collins urged. This one, unexpectedly, did not have draggy spots although it goes almost 300 pages, long for a mystery in my book.

All in all, a strong effort for a first novel and well worth reading.

Mount TBR #24

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Widow’s Cruise - Nicholas Blake

Set on a ship's cruise to the Greek islands, this 1959 mystery stars series PI Nigel Strangeways and his live-in GF Clare Massinger, a sculptress like Judith Appleby. They witness an odd situation involving a classics mistress recovering from a breakdown; her rich flashy widowed sister; a loosely educated classicist who is a popularizer and thus a scourge to the scholarly classicist; a flighty selfish school-girl who used to be taught by classicist; her twin brother; a sleazy busybody Brit; a know-all little girl, and a macho-man Greek tour guide who speaks American English.

The set-up is a bit long but things move faster with the disappearance and death of a merry widow's ugly-duckling sister the classicist and the grisly killing of the know-all. Aside from the killing of a child, another challenging piece of the book is the 17-year-old schoolgirl wanting “experience” from the popularizer who is twice her age. These bold aspects do not a cozy make. This outing is not as scary as The Corpse in the Snowman or The Beast Must Die; more on the level of The Dreadful Hollow or the first one A Question of Proof.

Nicholas Blake was the penname of Cecil Day-Lewis, classics professor and the Poet Laureate of the UK from 1968 until his death in 1972. Obviously, the vocabulary is literate, carefully chosen, and engaging for us jaded readers that expect the prose in mysteries to be flat and workmanlike at best. Blake/Day-Lewis creates convincing characters, all with attitudes and motivations that are consistent, plausible and sometimes unsettling. He is especially acute depicting children and youths, probably because he was a teacher for a time. The background scenes of the cruise on the Med are well-done, so this appeals to readers who are a little tired of the country houses or mean streets of the usual golden-age mystery. Strangeways takes it all the way to the twisted and surprising ending.

The Ides of Perry Mason 4

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 Lucky Loser – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1957 mystery starts with a troubled young woman hiring super-lawyer Perry Mason to attend a court case and give her an informed opinion as to how a witness to a hit-and-run comes off while on the stand. His lawyer's intuition says the witness is lying.

Coincidentally enough, the very next day the defendant's aunt-in-law contacts Mason. The plot becomes spectacularly tangled, as complex a puzzle as a Mason novel ever provides.

This novel provides an excellent example of Gardner's uncanny ability to keep us turning the pages to see what happens next, even when we have given up trying to comprehend the twists.

Mount TBR #23

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: Le Déménagement

Year: 1967

Year Englished: 1968, tr. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson

The Move a.k.a. The Neighbours - Georges Simenon

Emile Jovis uproots his family from a funky old apartment in Paris, only to implant them in plastic box in a housing development situated in the not quite suburbs, not quite country. In a bedroom painted not quite ivory, not quite white, Emile tries to sleep but through the thin walls of the cheapjack construction he hears the dirty words and rough sex of his neighbors. They talk about a club, the Carillon Doré, and its strippers Irene and Alexa.

His eavesdropping makes Emile realize his discontent over not only the move but his whole unlived life. His father, a mean atheist, rigidly inculcated in Emile the religion of taking pains to fulfill social duty. Be a good boy. Or else. Emile became a model employee and a paragon of husband and father. He manages the Champs-Élysées branch of a travel agency where he “sells holidays.”

But despite the outward success, eavesdropper Emile realizes he is stuck in life, rah-rahing himself to be happy, that his wife and son should be overjoyed – though he feels guilty that he has taken them away from their friends at church and school. He feels the normal stress of a move but his snooping has made plain to him that he has missed vast regions of life, that he has never had contact with unimaginable people, living undreamed of lives.

Feeling the urge to get out of his rut and for once experiencing life, our exemplar of the ordinary and mediocre seeks out the Carillon Doré. He drinks too much. He feels invincible because he’s not used to hard liquor. He talks too much, too out of character. He arouses the suspicion of the petty gangsters that run and haunt the place. Unlike other Simenonian anti-heroes, Emile never has a chance to find out that dropouts, crooks, artists and others living on the margins are just human beings like himself, with the similar petty desires and aversions.

The nightmare is vivid in parts but because Simenon is a little too economical with the terse prose and cinematic treatment, the story goes too fast and neither Emile nor his adversaries feel quite real. This novelette is about 40 pages shorter than Simenon’s usual novelette. The story and tone are familiar enough, given the reader has read a couple of Simenon’s existential thrillers.

Back to the Classics RC Wrap-Up

I read these books for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

Click on the date to go to the review.

Category	Round One	Round Two
Very Long Classic:	The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope (1875) Posted:  January 17	The American Senator – Anthony Trollope (1876) Posted: June 28
19th Century Classic:	The Private Journal of William Reynolds Posted: February 2	Pendennis – W.M. Thackeray (1850) Posted: September 9
Classic Comic Novel:	Independent Witness – Henry Cecil  Posted: March 14	The Asking Price – Henry Cecil (1966) Posted: August 1
Classic by a Woman Author:	Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie Posted: March 22	Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen (1803) Posted: September 5
Classic Tragic Novel:	The Old Man Dies – Georges Simenon (1966) Posted: March 26	An Eye for an Eye – Anthony Trollope Posted: June 24
Classic Novella:	The Nightclub – Georges Simenon (1933) Posted: April 2	Cousin Henry – Anthony Trollope (1879) Posted: August 5
Classic From Africa, Asia, or Oceania:	Six Months in the Sandwich Islands – Isabella Bird (1871) Posted: April 14	The Road Past Mandalay – John Masters (1961) Posted: July 13
Classic From the Americas:	The Lawless Roads – Graham Greene (1939) Posted: April 26	Mornings in Mexico – D.H. Lawrence (1927) Posted: July 1
20th Century Classic:	Delilah – Marcus Goodrich (1941) Posted: May 1	The Lodger – Georges Simenon (1934) Posted: August 18
Classic in Translation:	The Widower – Georges Simenon (1959) Posted: June 9	The Delivery – Georges Simenon (1941) Posted: August 25
Classic From a Place You've Lived:	This Scheming World – Saikaku Ihara (1692) Posted: June 12	I am a Cat II – Natsume Soseki (1906) Posted: July 21
Classic Play:	The Devil's Disciple - Bernard Shaw (1897) Posted: June 18	Arms and The Man - Bernard Shaw (1894) Posted: July 9

Mount TBR #22

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: La guinguette à deux sous

Year: 1932

Englished: 2014, David Watson

The Two-Penny Bar - Georges Simenon

On "a radiant end of the afternoon" in a Paris June, Maigret, our favorite police inspector, visits convicted murderer Lenoir on the last evening before the state chops the killer’s head off. Without coughing up the name, Lenoir claims one also richly deserving of the guillotine is a man who committed a murder six years before and is a regular at The Two-Penny Bar, an obscure tavern on the Seine.

Maigret asks around but nobody has heard of the joint. A surprising chance a few weeks later, however, puts Maigret on the trail. His informal investigation joins the six-year-old murder to a recent tragedy; a junk dealer and loan shark; a band of middle-class friends; a coal merchant and his a femme fatale of a mistress; a pernod-loving Englishman in a loveless marriage; and a Maigret suffering from the absence of his wife vacationing in Alsace.

The exact and terse phrasing of Simenon sketches in a few words a character, an atmosphere. “He felt he had never experienced such dark despair. Not even dark. It was a dull, grey despair. A despair with no words of lament, no grimaces of pain.”

Like many of Simenon’s novels, this is long on atmosphere, which buffs of the Thirties will like. Plus, it is not nearly as sad as other Great Depression-era Maigret mysteries such as The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, The Grand Banks Café, Maigret Goes Home, or Night at the Crossroads.

Back to the Classics #23

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

Classic by a Woman. I was going to read Persuasion for this category, but decided to hold off. I want to put off having read all six of Jane Austen’s novels. Like a kid doesn’t want to open the last present under the tree because once done, Christmas will be over. I tell myself not to be silly, re-reading always offers pleasures. I remain irrationally resentful about knowing what’s going to happen, something Austen would not like. She believed in reason, not illogical procrastination, based on anxiety about what cannot be helped. I completely get why certain readers are crazy – literally, zealous and crazy -  about Jane Austen though she herself would have rolled her eyes about such unbridled enthusiasm.

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

I approached this one with trepidation. I assumed a first-novel wouldn’t be as sparkling as Pride and Prejudice, as shrewd as Sense and Sensibility, as thoughtful as Emma, or as profound as Mansfield Park.

But I was wrong to be concerned this novel might be light-weight. A 17-year-old travels and by having adventures she grows. She learns that the people who prattle about propriety and civility are the ones that likely have the ethics of alley cats. She learns that being socially agreeable is one thing, but surrendering your values to get along with others won’t do. She learns it’s okay to feel ashamed of your irrationalities and silly assumptions, but you need to move on without fussing. Austen thinks living a flourishing life is important and identifying our own values helps us deal with troubles, without which we would become slack, lazy, soft, and fragile.

I was also concerned about liking this novel because I had heard it was a parody of gothic novels, a genre in which I’m not deeply read (only Uncle Silas comes to mind). I was afraid of not recognizing the “had she but knownisms” that were being burlesqued.

In fact, I realized we all know gothic conventions even if we’ve never read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Austen includes these touchstones as familiar to us as orange and black for Halloween: set in a remote castle or country house or abbey; the damsel in distress; old papers in hidden desk drawers; a male under the burden of stress or guilt or a secret; and that old stand-by, stormy weather.

I think this message of this novel is to keep reading novels. Austen subverts the gothic conventions to encourage the reader to come off it and get real, get something more substantial out of reading than mere surprise, wonder, fear, and foreboding. She has her characters use the word “amazement” and “amazingly” to show what noodles they are, reading novels just to get sensational feelings.

She lived at a time when many otherwise smart people thought novels were trash. She had to advocate for novel reading to prove novels could be works of art, worthy of serious-minded attention. She has our hero say, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

Austen wasn’t a Victorian – she used the vigorous blunt language of Fielding and Smollet – and she means novel-haters are choosing to be stupid, arrogantly assuming they already have a real good bead on life. The powerful and influential have got everything covered - just look at the world they made.