Back to the Classics 2021 #14

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

Classic by a Favorite Author: In the early 1920s, Aldous Huxley became a best-selling writer with satirical novels such as Antic Hay and Time Must Have a Stop. Though Elizabeth Bowen said in 1936 in Spectator magazine (as foul then as it is now) he’s “a stupid person’s idea of a clever person,” I like reading Huxley because he’s funny and provocative.  I’ve read not only Brave New World (the one everybody reads), but also a travel book  Jesting Pilate, a late career novelette  The Genius and the Goddess, the science fiction-like After Many a Summer, and a history The Devils of Loudon. Because I’m a reading snob, that’s why.

 The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

Huxley mentions William James’ The Variety of Religious Experience in Brave New World. James observes that seekers have used various intoxicants to induce mystical states.

Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by the Mexicans:

“When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God.”

Perhaps recalling this passage, in 1952 Huxley consented to volunteer for research on the psychological effects of mescaline, called by Meso-Americans peyote. He describes the above-mentioned feeling of “is-ness” as he gazes at a trio of flowers and furniture. He also gazes deeply into the folds and creases of his pants, drawing cool analogies to paintings of harlequins by Watteau.

Huxley speculates that the brain is a filter. For the sake of survival and passing on our genes, natural selection has taught our brains to pay attention to the African savanna to avoid predators and fit into the band to get enough to eat and drink. We can’t pay attention to the mystical realization that the universe is really full of stuff happening at the same time. Focusing on such huge truths, we can’t work to make mortgage payments and maintain our reputations.

Nobody I know would advocate a life dedicated to contemplating huge truths about alternative forms of consciousness. But it’s hard to disagree with Huxley when he says

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

On that infamous day November 22, 1963, a dying Huxley, unable to speak owing to stage 4 laryngeal cancer, wrote a note to his wife Laura: "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." She gave him the shot at 11:20 a.m. and another an hour later. Huxley passed away at 5:20 p.m. at the age of 69.

 

My Brother has the Best Sister in the World

Brothers and Sisters - Ivy Compton-Burnett

The novel opens with ancient Andrew Stace, family head and hypocrite, fading fast and thus discussing his will with his daughter, Sophia, and his adopted son, Christian.  Christian hints to his father that he and Sophia plan to marry, a notion old Andrew rebukes, arguing that they should find new people to settle down with.

That night Andrew writes a new will with the conditions that the would-be lovebirds are penniless if they marry. But the next morning he burns the will (it is noticed that he burnt something) and replaces it with a letter in the envelope, on which he addresses to Christian and writes, “To be opened upon my death.”

In the bustle and confusion of the arrangements, however, the letter is not found until 25 years go by, a period of time when Sophia and Christian get married and have kids and lead solid upright lives.

But before the letter is discovered and read – you knew already it had to be, right? – and all its consequences kick in, Compton-Burnett introduces us to numerous pairs of siblings: besides Sophia and Christian’s Andrew, Dinah, and Robin, we meet the Wakes, the Drydens, the Langs, and the Latimers. The well-off Wakes, Julian and Sarah, are renting a cottage, with the interior decoration and gardening and womanly touches all due to Julian, hint hint. The Drydens, Edward and Judith, are rather a moral center with him a pastor and her a bluestocking and so condemned to spinsterhood. The Langs, Gilbert and Caroline, live in a rented place with their widowed mother who is French. Cousins to the Staces, the Latimers, Tilly and Peter, are poor relations whose father Peter is a doctor who talks way too much.

The household of the Staces is dominated by their mother Sophia. She is a tyrant over the emotions of her children and their companion Miss Patmore. Sophia is forever posing, as if she felt deep love for her children. Yet after paragraphs of her relentless monologues  it is clear she doesn’t feel they are quite up to the mark set by her sterling example. Her kids are quite underwhelmed by all the theatricality and humbug. Andrew, Dinah, and Robin are sympathetic characters, however, as they are not totally ground down and can envision a future with Sophia firmly in the background. In their three unique ways, they can also protect themselves from Sophia’s emotional coercion.

Also sympathetic is unmarried and gay and cheery Julian Wake. ICB has Pastor Edward’s sister Judith ask Edward if he likes Julian. Rational and fair-minded Edwards replies, “Oh – well, Julian is the sort of man who is always thinking of the effect of what he says. But he is not a bad fellow. He is really a good-hearted man.” Julian is intelligent enough to imagine what the lives of other people are like and empathizes sincerely. Presenting an openly gay character in 1929, ICB displays none of the shaky nervousness of, say, E.F. Forster or Somerset Maugham (who, granted, saw with their own eyes what happened to Oscar Wilde).

Once a bewildered reader gets used to ICB's prose, this is a hypnotic novel. It is made up almost entirely of dialogue in a claustrophobic atmosphere, from which both are hard to break away. The little parties and close conversations are all marked by a consistent tone, by the same apparent glib tossing off of deep observations in everyday vocabulary woven in intricate grammar. Words and syntax mask what people think, posturing and attitudinizing obscure what one is or indeed if a character has a self.

The strength – and frank challenge - of the book lies in the reader’s perception ICB will seldom intrude to tell us anything. There are almost never comments or interpretations by the narrator. And when there are interventions, we readers don’t quite know what to make of them. I can’t in good conscience quote, for fear of giving anything away.

I don’t read many modernists or post-modernists so I don’t know how to compare ICB with any other 20th century writer. All I know is that the row she works is narrow – unhappy families, in not easily accessible prose – but she hoes perfectly.

Put on Your Thinking Deerstalker Hat

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes - Maria Konnikova

The book uses the Sherlock Holmes character only as a peg to hang basic concepts of neuropsychology that explain the way we think. Nobody with a pulse is as alert and imaginative as Holmes, just as nobody with an average amount of anxiety and sadness is going to become a stoic sage.

However, the foundations on which Holmes' abilities are based are scientifically plausible, and the sub-virtues of good calculation, good sense, and quick-wittedness can also be developed or enhanced. So much so that, although we will never rival Holmes and dazzle the Watsons around us, at least we will be able to manage information in a similar way to how he does. And thinking like Holmes, we will also be able to tackle ordinary problems in a more effective way.

I found it to be a very good synthesis of other works of cognitive psychology, neurology and decision-making. In fact, since it is not likely that we will hunt up the books cited, the explanations elucidate concepts that are probably too technical for most of us. Konnikova explicates the usual stumbles and pratfalls in our thinking when dealing with reality, i.e. that which does not go away even when we ignore it in the wan hope that it will go away.  

I have wondered about William James and his ghost-hunting so, I really liked how Konnikova deals with the infamous episode of Arthur Conan-Doyle's unshakable belief in fairies and spooks.

Worth reading for readers into pop psychology.

Ivy when young

Ivy when Young: The early life of I. Compton-Burnett, 1884-1919 - Hilary Spurling

This 1974 biography was later expanded into a full-length biography in 1984. ICB was not one to write letters and diaries, though Spurling mines insights from ICB’s marginal notes in her copy of  Samuel Butler’s Notebooks. To conduct research, Spurling read relevant texts and interviewed many of I CB’s living contemporaries. Spurling also has a knack for citing judicious quotations from her subject’s novels, which were usually about families, spectacularly unhappy in their own fashion.

Her father was a well-known and sought after doctor so he did not have much time for his family. He died suddenly which sent her mother into a grief from which she never emerged before she died. The ever-lasting mourning was not made better by her incessant angry bullying of her children. ICB became the head of the household and, with models like her mother, power went straight to her head, just as power corrupts her characters in the novels. She lost one brother to illness before World War I and then lost another brother at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Yet another catastrophe occurred when her two youngest sisters died in a suicide pact on Christmas Day, 1917.

ICB entered a period of lengthy depression, with symptoms such as apathy, social isolation, poor appetite, insomnia and physical and mental fatigue. Gradually, not until she was about 40 years of age, did she come out of it enough to write. Spurling points out that during her prostration ICB read a great deal of Wilkie Collins, which makes sense considering that ICB’s novels have certain over the top quality that we associate with sensational novels. Not the mention the theatrical emotions, hot buried passions, and things like funny business with wills and the past coming back to haunt the present.

I recommend this novel because Spurling provides much interesting background on late Victorian and Edwardian ideas and social customs. Some readers have little patience with details but I like it when Spurling tells us that somebody's dog was named Percy. Readers interested in writers like Pearl Buck who happen to be women or ICB’s unique novels such as a Pastors and Masters will get much out of this gracefully written book.

The Ides of Perry Mason 26

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 Deadly Toy – Erle Stanley Gardner

Horace Livermore Selkirk didn’t get to be a rich banker in San Francisco by being an agreeable fellow. Though granting he didn’t like the pickles his scapegrace son got into, he tells Perry Mason that he intends to avenge his son's murder. The cops have Perry’s client, the son’s ex-fiancé, in custody but Horace wants the killing pinned on the son’s ex-wife, because he wants custody of his son’s son, the only one carrying on the Selkirk name. Thus, this was first serialized in 1958 as The Case of the Deadly Grandpa in The Saturday Evening Post.

But the story does not feel 63 years old. Gardner brings in the scary practices of stalking and sending poison pen letters. Stalking has hardly gone away. And social media gives sad angry misfits world-wide reach to be cruel and unusual in writing.

Gardner examines the influence of TV watching on the anti-social behavior of kids. While interviewing persons of interest, Mason pries out of a babysitter that on a whim she allowed her seven-year-old charge to play with a .22 with the shells removed. Under the influence of “pistol performances” on TV, the boy, she admits, might have gotten hold of the gun and loaded it with a shell.

Mason gets a witness on the stand to admit that she was coached by the police to make her identification, having been allowed to observe the defendant surrounded by police before the witness identified her in a line up. Still with us are miscarriages of justice due to police-generated witness testimony.

This 1959 outing is not one of the best Mason novels I’ve read. But the subtext about when and how children should be allowed to handle weapons was interesting to me, since this is another issue that has hardly gone away in the 60 years since this mystery was published.

Back to the Classics 2021 #13

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

20th Century Classic: My theme for this challenge has been to read well-known classics that I’ve been hearing about my entire adult lifetime. William James’ classic works still survive among hardcore readers and intellectuals. He is the subject of more academic papers than any other American philosopher. Plus, perhaps because of his interest in scientifically studying the afterlife, he appears to more psychics than anybody except Elvis.

The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James

This early modern work of psychology from 1902 focuses on the individual experience of religion and the fruits of religion in a person’s life. This is a study of subjectivity and individuality, not organized religion, whose hash he settles thusly.

A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to “organize” themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word “religion” nowadays, we think inevitably of some “church” or other; and to some persons the word “church” suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are “down” on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.

James defines the intrinsic nature of religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.”  James quotes a believer, on the personal feeling:

Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a conflagration of glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph in my heart because the Lord is there.

That James relies on testimony is the strongest attraction of this book. For example, in the lectures that define the religion of “healthy-mindedness” and the “sick soul,” James analyzes reports of a wide variety of witnesses Some, constitutionally optimistic, cheerily ignore the reality of evil and angst in the world. God loves them, they love God, they know they are forgiven when they screw up, they be rockin' in the tree tops all day long, hoppin' and a-boppin' and a-singin’ their song.

For the sick souls, they are overwhelmed by a sense of sin, feel inner conflict and need to be redeemed by some dramatic personal experience from the outside (conversion). Gosh, I wonder what category hardcore readers fall into. For case studies of sick souls, see the short existential thrillers of Simenon. 

James’ searching analysis of Tolstoy’s years-long depression and the intense guilt and self-doubt of John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan shows examples of the “divided self.” In this chapter, he also touches on the stoic ideas that were to influence Dr. Albert Ellis in the development of cognitive behavior therapy:

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

In other lectures, James covers the process of conversion and the nature and role of saintliness. Mercifully, he does not detail the more fantastic rigors some saints subjected themselves to, but the stories he does tell and testimonies he does summarize will cause us to set the book down and go take a walk.

The lectures on mystical experiences cover number of incredible people such as George Fox, Saint Teresa and the German mystic Suso.  To my mind, this report of a gifted woman about her ether dream is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read:

A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should probably have died.

James summarizes from that great mass of amazing stories what is common to all, what truly defines a religious / mystical experience, as it is felt and what are the practical effects on the lives of the people who feel them.

The material becomes very hard near the end when James explores the technical aspects of Newman’s rationalist theology and Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy. I work at a university by moving papers around and humbly teaching ESL but I’m not an academic. My sense from working with academics, however, is that James is attempting to establish a scholarly territory. He’s arguing that it is academically valid to be speaking about subjecting personal experience to rational analysis. He trying to distinguish psychology from philosophy by staking out concepts such as “emotions” and “subconscious.” He is making an argument that his field, psychology, is really a field worthy of study, writing, publishing, conventions, professional standards, grad students, and heated offices in habitable buildings.

Anyway, the book is a keeper, something to return to when one feels like re-reading something with heft. I mean, I like the first-hand stories from eyewitnesses that remind me of myself.

A Study of Family Life

Pastors and Masters – Ivy Compton-Burnett

I don’t think I’ve read as many family novels so close together as I have in the last six months or so: The Newcomes, The  Mahé Circle, Dream of the Red Chamber and The Forsyte Saga. Those families have selfish small-minded members but none of them are deep studies of family tyrants like this novel.

The tyrants in this novel are adult males. They seek to dominate everybody around them with a variety of techniques. Petty and mean-minded, they make it rough on followers who are disobedient, mainly with mock hurt and relentless harassment. Their invincible ignorance lowers everybody's expectations that the tyrant would be above any meanness, any cruelty, any callousness. Their obtuseness shields them from irony and passive resistance like silence. Their stupidity makes them impervious to reason and logic. They nag. They hector. They play the martyr. They use hyperbole: nobody sacrifices like they do, nobody is more thankless than the ingrates upon whom their sacrifices are lavished.  Reverend Bentley brings his son to tears with this harangue:

You see, John, it is not always an easy thing to bring people to see what is right when one is at the head of a household where people are fond of going their own way, whether it is the right way or not. It cannot be done, my boy, without much of what must seem to people who do not understand - and my family are people who do not understand, I’m sorry to say - to be needless and even trying.  But you will look back upon what your father did, when I am no longer with you, and see that was not done easily.

The followers see that the tyrants, like all bullies and narcissists, have stamina but no strength. Some followers are women who can’t just walk away from tyrants since they would end up as governesses, in the workhouse, or on the streets. The women are more intelligent than the tyrants. They are thus able to call on their bravery, steadfastness, sense, resourcefulness, and comfort to help the tyrant through storms caused by the tyrant. Since the tyrants could not organize a birthday party on their own, the followers manage the household and ensure social obligations are met. 

Other followers are children who are as defenseless and vulnerable as slaves. Keep in mind 19^th century middle-class parents had little contact with their kids, didn’t kiss or hug their kids, and beat them for small infractions. They dressed kids in heavy uncomfortable clothes that restricted playing. Parents badgered kids with exacting warrior values, threats of ever-lasting hellfire and told their kids thunder was God's expression of anger over childish crimes. Parents sent them to boarding schools as soon as possible, putting them in the hands of idiotic mistresses and masters and brutal peers. 

Under such harsh treatment, some kids would be hurt more than others, some less, but nobody could grow up being the target of such harsh treatment without being damaged. Lessons learned? They echo Homer Simpson's code of the schoolyard: don't tattle, always make fun of those different from you, never say anything unless you're sure everyone feel exactly the same way you do.

This novel, like many of I CB’s novels (I gather), is short. So my strategy was to read it through to get a sense of what happens and to get the characters straight. There are numerous pairs of tyrant/followers and an old couple that serve as the stable moral center, stoic and resigned after the robbery of an inheritance and the death of their two sons in the war. Then I read it again, to get what I missed the first time.

I may as well confess that though I’ve read only other I CB novel, Manservant and Maidservant, and that was a long time ago, I knew what I was getting into. For instance, I CB is funny, though I readily grant it’s a comedy that only certain kinds of people will enjoy.

"And I don't think it is incumbent upon a man to keep nothing of his secret doings to himself."

 "Neither do I," said Emily. "We should be afraid of having anybody talk to us."

Nobody talks like this, except for I CB's own family. Her exposition is so spare it amounts to ‘exit – with a bear’ and to keep a bead on who’s talking demands alert concentration. Every incident means something and every utterance carries weight so she demands the same focus and thought as a writer of haiku. I CB only occasionally uses odd words (erraticism) but every aside is charged with meaning that is profoundly English in its understatement and dryness. Her intricate grammar requires patience for paradox and sympathy for devilish double-negatives.

Reading her, even the hardest of hardcore readers will be driven to morbid introspection, “Who am I, that I am reading a story so inaccessible in style, so obviously written by a writer who didn’t give a damn about the response of the reader? What's in me that stays my throwing arm from tossing this novel out the window” 

Well, even if I could explain what combination of life and reading experience leads me to place I CB up there with Miss Austen – and I can’t -  I think a sense of decorum makes it socially necessary for us to keep our secrets to ourselves. Otherwise, people would be afraid to talk to us (See how easy I am to influence? And I can paraphrase with the best of them!).

But I will go far as to say that I respect I CB as an artist that pursued her aesthetic goals in the way she thought was best for her in order to express a bleak message about family life in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras.

Happy Birthday, Anthony Berkeley

Born this day in 1893, Anthony Berkeley Cox wrote under several pen-names, including Francis Iles, Anthony Berkeley and A. Monmouth Platts.

The Piccadilly Murder - Anthony Berkeley

Published in 1929, this is a lighthearted mystery that we can still enjoy today. The plotting is almost too clever since the average reader of mysteries will be able to figure whodunit about two-thirds into the novel. 

Still worth reading because the central character, mild-mannered and ever so nice Mr. Ambrose Chitterwick, is astute and after some hiccoughs of the brain ensures that an innocent man does not hang. Chitterwick is bullied so severely by his autocratic aunt that we can’t help but pull for him. The conversations and nonverbal interactions between nephew and aunt made me laugh. 

Berkeley has a dab hand at the witty aside too: “To us who frequent it the Piccadilly Palace is what Monte Carlo is to Europe’s new rich, our pride, our Mecca, our rendezvous.”