Back to the Classics 2021 #12

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic by a new-to-you author. What made me want to read this book is the fact that I’m getting to the age at which it’s embarrassing to admit that I’ve not read novels as respected as The Forsyte Saga. I think what always put me off this one in particular is I assumed because it has been adapted for the screen for every generation that comes down the pike, it must be merely higher level soap opera. Again, with age, however, I find my tolerance for soap opera stand-bys increasing. The emphasis on family life in comfy domestic interiors, troubled personal relationships, sexual dramas, emotional and ethical conflicts – bring Dream of the Red Chamber on, baby!

The Forsyte Saga – John Galsworthy

This book is composed of three novels and two interludes. Set in the prosperous eras of Victoria and Edward in London, Galsworthy packs the Forsyte’s material world full of stuff. Like in novels by Edith Wharton, there are many descriptions of the living rooms and other interiors of this closely-knit family of backbiters. They like wealthy bourgeois stuff like Boucher and Dresden figurines. Each of the numerous important Forsytes is described in a fashion as detailed as possible as to their clothing and finishing touches.

The skulls of the family members are full of upper-middle-class stuff too. Galsworthy examines the bourgeois mentality, not sympathetically but not as if he expected it to ever change. That is, wealth in real estate, chattels, and the different types of money, station and professions, and honor and prestige all underpin self-respect and contentment. In the spirit and prevailing conventions of the era, they fear scandal like peasants fear sorcery. 

Regarding the uncomplicated unfolding of the story, it take a little time to get moving because all the puppets had to be put their places. Like the family in Dream of the Red Chamber, the Forsytes do their utmost to ignore problems, looking through fingers at the possibility of scandal, and saving the family's good name at all cost.

The first novel is an ironic satire on heartless bourgeois ways and in the next two novels the saga turns into what I rather feared for 30 years - soap opera. The melodrama is readable and diverting; the saga won Galsworthy the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 so who the heck am I to sneer? Even at this late date in 2021, my inner teenager is still outraged by the hypocrisy of the oppressors, the cult of money and possession, keeping up appearances and the petty fretting over reputation. But when I recall that I better be my age, I figure it’s not like people are going to change their human nature that was forged in millions of years of living in honor-bound and gossip-ridden cultures fearful of being shunned by the group, a sure ticket to not surviving on the savanna and not passing one's genes on the the next generations

Empress of the Blues

 

Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues – Chris Albertson

Chris Albertson studies the life, times and blues of Bessie Smith (1894 - 1937). In the 1920s, she was the most celebrated singer in blues because of her powerful, emotive voice and the decision of Columbia Records to market records on Okeh label to black people. Bessie Smith influenced jazz, gospel, and rock singers such as Billie Holiday, MahaliaJackson, and Janis Joplin.

Albertson was on the production team that assembled the influential set of Smith’s recordings in the early 1970s. For that reason, he is uniquely qualified to discuss her art. He also examined the roles and influence of gifted musicians such as Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman and Louis Armstrong. Smith’s interpretation of St.Louis Blues with Armstrong is considered by most critics to be one of finest recordings of the 1920s. One benefit of our digital age is that her recordings sound so clean, though some critics complain that the nuances of her voice are made too mellow. Decide for yourself – check out Put It Right Here for the sonics, the cool pictures, and her fundamental philosophy of life.

The author interviewed Ruby Walker, Bessie's niece, confidant, touring companion, and sometime punching bag. She tells a lot of blunt stories about Bessie Smith’s vibrant ways. Bessie Smith was a true artist in that she was a great entertainer, but she also had an artist’s rough “conventions be damned” approach to life that her fans admired, respected, and feared.  

In our era, we can picture divas being mean to the help but we can’t see them throwing piano stools at back-up singers or taking pistol shots at errant husbands like Bessie Smith did.  It’s a pity she died young at only 43, in a car accident. Smith’s grave near Philadelphia was unmarked until 1970, when Janis Joplin paid for a headstone (according to here).

Background To Uncommon Danger

Background To Danger - Eric Ambler

Also known as Uncommon Danger, this 1937 novel was a turning point for the spy story. In the Twenties, Somerset Maugham wrote the darkly realistic Ashenden stories and John Buchan wrote adventures like The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the Thirties, Ambler combined Maugham’s realism and Buchan’s fast-paced action with well-drawn characterization, political smarts and good but not flowery prose. Voila – James Bond for adults a la John LeCarre and Alan Furst.

The novel opens in London with a meeting of the board of directors of an oil company. Its detestable chairman, Joseph Balterghen, hints at regime change as the most direct method of grabbing up oil concessions in Bessarabia, which we post-moderns know as Moldova. Balterghen coerces approval from the board to hire fixers such as Saridza a.k.a. Col. Robinson to stir up trouble among the USSR, Hitler’s Germany, and a Romania that is going fascist.

Our hero Kenton doesn’t know this plot. He is a penniless journalist who feels compelled to smuggle an envelope stuffed with papers for a man he meets on train in Nuremberg.  The man ends up stabbed to death, the cops want Kenton, and Kenton is forced to make a run for it. He is alternately helped and hindered by two soviet spies, the brother and sister team of Andreas and Tamara Zaleschoff.

Tamara is not there simply to provoke romantic thoughts in Kenton. She schemes with her brother and drives the getaway car like Danica Patrick. Andreas is partly stage Russian, with large gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, booming voice, and frankly insincere conversation. He is also a shrewd spy, though prone to jump to conclusions. Practical Tamara reins Andreas in and so does Kenton. Happily for the reader, Andreas and Tamara re-appear in Ambler’s 1939 thriller Cause for Alarm.

Saridza is a sinister character. In the 1943 movie version of this novel, Saridza was played by Sydney Greenstreet – the rotund Gutmann in The Maltese Falcon – so Hollywood casting got it right for once.  But his bully boy Captain Mailler is odious. Ambler, who was a bit of a lefty at that time, gives Mailler a resume worthy of a fascist beast. Mailler was a Black and Tan, a paramilitary unit that suppressed Irish revolutionaries by burning property of IRA men and their suspected sympathizers. Mailler is wanted in New Orleans for murder of a black woman. In a dig at John Buchan’s goody-goody heroes like Richard Hannay, Mailler was the “only professional strikebreaker in the United States that was educated at an English public school.”

In the Thirties, Ambler also produced Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear. All of them are worth reading. During World War II, Ambler served in artillery with thriller writer Victor Canning (The Rainbird Pattern) for a short time.

The Ides of Perry Mason 25

On the 15th of every month, we publish something about of Our Fave Lawyer

A Tribute to Gavin MacLeod

Passing away at the age of 90 on May 29 of this year was this actor best known for his membership in ensembles that made hit shows of Mary Tyler Moore and The Love Boat in the 1970s. But he did a lot of TV in the 1960s, including three episodes on Perry Mason.

In The Case of the Grumbling Grandfather (5/27/61), he plays a couple of scenes as an accountant who is lead astray by the designing Patricia Barry. We unfortunately do not get much backstory as to why a quiet numbers guy would lose his head and end up facing ugly time for getting involved in a felony that causes a homicide. For this character, so bald by only age 30 might have undermined his confidence and made him vulnerable to tests of his integrity presented by a femme fatale . I rank it as one of the better ones because of Patricia Barry, but Otto Kruger as the grandfather has a lively irascibility couple with high standards for male behavior (basically, “only a dummy loses his head to a designing woman”) but enough humility to admit, “That's the first time in my life I was ever right about a woman..”

The Case of the Runaway Racer (11/14/65), he plays a small role as corrupt sports reporter. He plays it convincingly sleazy, snapping his gum and talking with bravado as a cover-up to a guilty conscience. What really makes him memorable, though, is the baggy suit, loud bow tie, and alpine hat. A man wearing an alpine hat, we learn from watching Perry Mason, is up to no good. Made in the final season, this is an episode with a simple story but many characters that does not have much going for it except the cars (Paul Drake drives a nice Stingray covertible). It is not helped by Michael Constantine popping off like loud slob Jack Klugman at every opportunity.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (4/29/65) is a wacky episode with much silliness going down, so it’s one of my favorites. MacLeod plays a business manager to a miser that keeps a gorilla in the house. Mason fandom deplores MacLeod’s chewing up the scenery, but I like his scenes with character actor Victor Buono. Buono steals the show with some fine scenes of him deploying sarcasms to get under Mason’s skin.

Mason fandom is split on this episode, made in the next to the last season, when the writers were getting a bit weary. Lots of fans can’t get past the guy in an ape suit to liven things up, but I think the scene where Lurene Tuttle and Burr are on the floor, unthreateningly trying not to look the gorilla in the eye, is a hoot. Burr has a dubious look on his face like, “Here we go again!” Was he having distressing flashbacks of his 1951 outing Bride of the Gorilla? Or his turn with Warren Stevens, Lee Marvin (!), Lee J. Cobb (!!), Anne Bancroft (!!!), in 1954’s Gorilla at Large?

Back to the Classics 2021 #11

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

A 19^th Century Classic. I like literary criticism written by novelists. For instance, I always liked George Orwell better as a critic than a novelist. On his advice, I’ve read Smollet, Shaw (here and here), and Ernest Bramah. See the classic essay Good Bad Books. Also, I read The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley and Gone to Earth by Mary Webb because they were mentioned in Roald Dahl's Matilda.

The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century - William Makepeace Thackeray

This collects six lectures on 1) Swift; 2) Congreve and Addison; 3) Steele; 4) Prior, Gay, and Pope; 5) Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding; and 6) Sterne and Goldsmith. Thackeray respects his forbearers. It’s clear he did his homework while preparing for these talks. He read the works of the subjects, old newspapers and magazines, memoirs and collections of anecdotes.

Thackeray excels in the judicious quotation from the works. From Addison in the Spectator:

I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of the mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest transports of mirth who are subject to the greatest depression of melancholy: on the contrary, cheerfulness, though it does not give the mind such an exquisite gladness, prevents it from falling into any depths of sorrow. Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

Marvelous that cheerfulness can be as dauntless as courage. What a great way to look at cheerfulness, as a virtue perhaps not up there wisdom and endurance but a good things to cultivate ue nevertheless like sympathy and relish of life.

Even some footnotes are hilarious:

Besides these famous books of Scott's and Johnson's, there is a copious Life by Thomas Sheridan (Dr. Johnson's “Sherry”), father of Richard Brinsley, and son of that good-natured, clever, Irish Doctor, Thomas Sheridan, Swift's intimate, who lost his chaplaincy by so unluckily choosing for a text on the king's birthday, “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!”

As for his criticism, he doesn’t have a theory and sometimes he’s didactic. But he does have an orientation that values ethics and literary taste.

when Mr. Punch, that godless old rebel, breaks every law and laughs at it with odious triumph, outwits his lawyer, bullies the beadle, knocks his wife about the head, and hangs the hangman—don't you see in the comedy, in the song, in the dance, in the ragged little Punch's puppet-show—the Pagan protest? Doesn't it seem as if Life puts in its plea and sings its comment? Look how the lovers walk and hold each other's hands and whisper! Sings the chorus—“There is nothing like love, there is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty of your spring-time. Look! how old age tries to meddle with merry sport! Beat him with his own crutch, the wrinkled old dotard! There is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty, there is nothing like strength. Strength and valour win beauty and youth. Be brave and conquer. Be young and happy. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Would you know the segreto per esser felice (it’s better to laugh than be sighing)? Here it is, in a smiling mistress and a cup of Falernian.” As the boy tosses the cup and sings his song—hark! what is that chaunt coming nearer and nearer? What is that dirge which will disturb us? The lights of the festival burn dim—the cheeks turn pale—the voice quavers—and the cup drops on the floor. Who's there? Death and Fate are at the gate, and they will come in.

Maybe it’s the pandemic talking, but I find the run-up to that last sentence superb. Yes, they will come in.

Besides readers like me who habitually mine all the books they read lately for nuggets to deal with everything that’s going on now, who will read Thackeray’s appreciations of his – and Dickens’ and Trollope’s - forebears? Hardcore readers who are seriously into the 18^th century will deeply enjoy this. Though a sensitive Victorian in most ways, Thackeray had a nostalgia for the rough, gamy 18^th century. He brings to life everyday life in Queen Anne’s time – travel, banquets, fast noblemen. Wonderful stuff to take us away from virus, distancing, N95, diagnostics, stay at home, zoom, PPE, community spread, mask slackers and the vaccine ignorant.

OK James M. Cain

Love’s Lovely Counterfeit -  James M. Cain 

James M. Cain started his novel-writing career with three bangs: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Serenade (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1941). A falling off was Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942) because some characters have all the life of cardboard cutouts and the ending is pure melodrama. Even the background of weasels doing corruption as business as usual in city politics seems half-baked. Still, as a hard-guy mystery, it might be worth reading for its surprises and lurid moments, if you’re trapped on a trans-Pacific flight and have run out of other goodies to read.

But back to lurid. After not getting it on with Big Sister, the anti-hero gets close to Man-Crazy Little Sister by getting her to realize that they are both bad to the bone. They fall for each other, boy do they:

Obviously, they had got to a point where the word love, if either of them had uttered it, would have been somewhat inadequate. Insanity would have been better, and there was some suggestion of it as she raised her face to his.

The period touches and slang are cool.  Cain must have liked describing people because he’s damn skillful at it, in a hard case kind of way. This about some bank robbers: “four wild kids, anywhere from eighteen to twenty, scared so bad the slobber is running out of their mouths, couple of them coked to the ears, their suspenders stretched double from the gats they got in their pants.”

After LLC, in 1943, the uneven Cain wrote the immortal Double Indemnity. In 1956 Hollywood based Slightly Scarlet on LLC, with eye-popping Arlene Dahl and good-gawd-awmighty Rhonda Fleming playing the sisters.

Readers that like Jim Thompson would probably like Cain. But novices should start with the three big bangs mentioned at the start of this review.

The First Lew Archer

The Moving Target - Ross Macdonald

This is the first Archer mystery. MacDonald named him after Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon. Published in 1949, WWII hangs heavy over the story.

A distraught wife hires private detective Lew Archer to search for her missing husband. It seems an easy enough case, a job that lands in Archer’s lap every day. Nothing indicates crimes against persons and morality are involved until we get into kidnapping and human trafficking in a case that will cost six lives.

Ross Macdonald is mentioned nowadays in the same breath as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He is considered by fans and critics one of the greats of 20th century American crime fiction. He took the classic hardboiled thriller to a different level by exploring the question of the social and psychological “why.”

For instance, in this one, echoing Simenon’s view that given the right combination of interior and exterior pressures, anybody is capable of anything, Archer explains that war’s undermining of certainties, greed for social status, opportunity or its lack, bad luck, and the wrong crowd cause good but lost people to make mistakes that attract the attention of the law. For others who are just bad to the bone, “Money is just a peg people hang their evil on.”

The first Archer mystery was Macdonald’s fifth novel, and so there are flaws. Some spots are slow. Other parts are over-written, which made Raymond Chandler mock the writing as pretentious (said the guy who invented hokey hardboiled patter). Macdonald learned to restrain the “fine writing” and he produced a body of work that can stand with Chandler, Cain, and Hammet.