Back to the Classics 2021 #16

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

Children's Classic:  I read this forgotten classic because it was alluded to in E. Nesbit’s The Five Children and It. I found it pretty funny overall but be warned: the casual color prejudice of 1900 makes us wince and cringe nowadays.

The Brass Bottle - J. Anstey

A struggling London architect is sent on a mission by his prospective father-in-law, a professor of classics. He is to attend an auction of antiquities and bid on certain items, observing strict limits on expense. All the items on the wish list are bid out of range, but on his own shilling he purchases a brass bottle. Once home, through a series of mishaps that could happen to anybody, he frees a genie who has been imprisoned inside the brass bottle.

Though since childhood I have usually recognized a false image concocted by the West and inflicted on the East when I see one, I am still a card-carrying member of the last generation that can tolerate Charlie Chan. So, sadly unreconstructed, I found the spoof of “Oriental politeness” hilarious.

"I had a kinswoman, Bedeea-el-Jemal, who possessed incomparable beauty and manifold accomplishments. And seeing that, though a Jinneeyeh, she was of the believing Jinn, I despatched messengers to Suleyman the Great, the son of Daood, offering him her hand in marriage. But a certain Jarjarees, the son of Rejmoos, the son of Iblees—may he be for ever accursed!—looked with favour upon the maiden, and, going secretly unto Suleyman, persuaded him that I was preparing a crafty snare for the King's undoing."

"And, of course, you never thought of such a thing?" said Ventimore.

"By a venomous tongue the fairest motives may be rendered foul," was the somewhat evasive reply. "Thus it came to pass that Suleyman—on whom be peace!—listened unto the voice of Jarjarees and refused to receive the maiden. Moreover, he commanded that I should be seized and imprisoned in a bottle of brass and cast into the Sea of El-Karkar, there to abide the Day of Doom."

"Too bad—really too bad!" murmured Horace, in a tone that he could only hope was sufficiently sympathetic.

So the genie wants to express his gratitude for being freed. The problem is that the riches and opportunities he showers upon the poor architect lead to hilarious troubles, none of which I will spoil by relating them. For somebody like me who works at a university, however, richly satisfying is the situation in which an academic is transformed into a cranky quadruped.

Like many comic novels, it gets draggy near the end. But read it, making allowances for attitudes and assumptions that we reasonably deplore today.

A Square Deal All Around

The Republican Roosevelt – John Morton Blum

Blum was the associate editor of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. So after steeped in everything Teddy for literally years, he wrote this book, not exactly a biography but an essay that focuses on TR as a conservative in the sense of that time, as a professional politician, and as a leader of Congress. He brings up many interesting points, but as a general reader I have to observe that the author assumes an in-depth knowledge of the issues of the time. For example, Dingleyism seems to have riled Democrats up back in the day. Whatever that was 

Recently my state saw a governor go, one that hated the Left for its alienating visions like Defund the Police. Always there’s a strain between the principled and the practicable.  So, refreshingly, Blum focuses on Roosevelt's realistic concepts of the ends and means of political power. Blum makes a good argument that Roosevelt’s political philosophy was coherent and consistent throughout his career. He cites the example of the controversy over empowering the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates in 1906.

Roosevelt, Blum says, “concerned himself not with happiness but with hard work, duty, power, order.” TR was a strong individual, concentrated on extending executive power in order to implement his Square Deal, i.e. conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Due to the usual factors (conservatism, inertia, and events such as a major war), this kind of progressive activism was in suspension until about 1933, when another Roosevelt entered the White House.

Recommended to readers into the topic, though by no means is this popular history.

Will, We Hardly Knew Ye

Shakespeare: The World as Stage - Bill Bryson

Very little is actually known about the Bard of Avon, which is about what we would expect since we  know even less about Kit Marlowe or Ben Jonson. And if it weren’t for the First Folio we probably wouldn’t have the treasure trove of his plays either.

So Bill Bryson’s purpose in this slim biography for the general reader is to relate only the documented facts on the life of the writer. And the records have very little indeed. So little, in fact, that this book is more concerned with describing the historical, societal and cultural context in which Shakespeare evolved, while also relating much discussed theories on the life and work of the poet. There’s also a chapter on the flights of fancy that claim Shakespeare is not the author of his plays.

Do not be fooled by the apparent thinness of the book (about 200 pages), it has a lot of stimulating information. If you're interested in the Elizabethan era, the history of theater, and the development of the English language, this essay is sure to please you. If you are an expert in the Shakespearean field this essay will probably tell you little or nothing that you don't already know; but if you want to get a respectable acquaintance with the Bard without tackling academic tomes or essays such as “Exploring Misgendered Diagnoses Through the Lens of Coriolanus,” this is the book for you.

If this book sounds  a little thin, try The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl.

You Can't Choose Your Family

Men and Wives – Ivy Compton-Burnett

This novel from 1931 is set in the late 1880s. Lord and Lady Haslam have three sons and one daughter, all grown. Harriet Haslam’s untreated sleeplessness is having the usual consequences of long-term insomnia: depression, anxiety, low motivation, difficulty dealing with minor irritations, and worst of all, decreased ability to enjoy or foster family and social relationships. In short, she is wearing down the patience and love of her family

I am a torment to you all, and a burden on your hours that you never escape! But I am as much of a burden on my own, ten thousand times more of a burden. Griselda, my darling, don’t look distressed; don’t waste a thought on your harrowing old mother. Don’t think of me. Be happy.

Though she gives a lot of lip-service to serving God and carrying out His Will, she is convinced that her plans for her husband and children are just and sensible so she is determined that they bend to her will. Ironically, she really does know better than they do. She reasonably urges one son to hang out more with people his age, not a coterie of middle-aged women. Predicting their plans will blow over, she wisely counsels her oldest son to hold off marrying a flighty materialist. She controls the finances in the family because her husband, with the sense of a frog in a well, would be conned out of his estate in about a minute. In their inexperience and insensitivity they laugh at her.

Harriet has a nervous breakdown and has go live in seclusion in a sanitarium. To her shock on her return home, she discovers that her family members have thrived in her absence. Her wise friend Lady Rachel Hardisty puts down some home truths:

I have come home to find they can live with me away.

Of course they can. You must not force people to do things, and then complain of their doing them. People don't feel as much as you want them to.

The characters are the draw in this novel. Lord Godfrey Haslam is, as another character observes, a father right out of Miss Austen. The allusion goes right over the head of the dithering, neglectful, pathetic father who expresses his self-regard and self-delusion in a never-ending torrent of words words words. By never shutting up, he accordingly drives everybody else quietly nuts. Like the children in Brothers and Sisters, the Haslam offspring are witty about their parents, themselves and their ordeals.

Rector Bellamy is a posing pastor who frankly admits his weakness and helplessness are such that he must marry a strong woman. His ex-wife Camilla is happily corrupt, and sets her cap on three different men in the course of the novel. As seen above, Lady Rachel, old and wise, is past getting upset at the inveterate stupidity and hypocrisy of the people she has to rub elbows with.

Lawyer Spong loses his wife and becomes a theatrically sad widower. Instead of living a genuine social and emotional life of his own, he contents himself with witnessing all the doings of the dreadfully eventful Haslam family. The youngest, gayish Haslam son spends way too much time with a middle-aged household of widowed and unmarried sisters. Finally, the deadpan butler Buttermere gives everybody the creeps but it never enters anybody’s head to run him off the property.

ICB took a degree in Classics from Holloway College. Hilary Spurling says ICB didn’t read the classics in her adult life, but the reader will feel the influence of tragedy. The stories are serious, as Aristotle says tragedies must be, but they are shot through with modernist irony and dry English wit. At the center of the story is the tragic hero, whose tragic flaw is intemperance (lack of restraint); Harriet frankly admits, "I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt in them to go further, and driven on to the worse." The other characters comment on the fallout of the flaw through the templates of virtues like wisdom or vices like jealousy and malice that come out of untamed irrational passions.

ICB the artist couldn’t care less about moralistic stands or virtue ethics, however. She wants to examine familiar human beings in their primary group, the family. The elaborate conversation, depending on amazingly intricate grammar providing the framework for mannered vocabulary, gives an overall effect that’s hypnotic, difficult to grasp but strangely satisfying. Comparisons are odious, as a character observes (probably quoting), but reading ICB’s handling of words as she describes, kind of, motive and mood is like listening to challenging music. Every character, every conversation, and every incident all fit together so tightly that it requires alert reading, the first time to track the unfolding of the story (to take in the excruciating events), and the second reading to appreciate the artistic choices made.

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 27

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. 

Note. This is yet another tribute to the actresses of Perry Mason. Previous entries covered Patricia Barry; Lisa Gaye; Anna Navarro & Arlene Martel; and Elaine Devry & Karen Steele.

Bonnie Jones

Bonnie Jones made her first appearance in The Case of the Frustrated Folksinger (1965) as Amy Jo Jennings who wants to make a splash on the folk and country scene. In efforts to put youth wise to the wily ways of the world, this outing gives a typically acerbic view of the cut-throat practices of the entertainment business. 

But the script is weak with a particularly unsatisfactory ending. Ms. Jones, born in central New York, is given a hokey southern accent and so is Mark Goddard (Don in Lost in Space). Mason fandom is really down on her performance, unfairly, to my mind. To me, her manner - so full of youth and joy and healthy ambition - makes up for the not believable premise that her character would so easily be conned. I thought that rich people were rich because it's so frickin' hard to get money out of them, to even get them to pay their bills. At any rate, it is a given that by Season 8 of the series, the writers were starting to flail, rather.

In another example of the writers struggling for ideas, Season 9's The Case of the Impetuous Imp (1965) is the remake of Season 1's The Case of the Negligent Nymph. We brace ourselves for a unconvincing recycled episode. 

At first we are ruefully amused to see in the first scene, one of the Rin Tin Tins was lured out of retirement, since The Adventures of ended in 1959. This scene is memorable for dog fanciers because the canine paddles back to shore with a ball in her mouth. Later the dog blows a scene in which she is supposed to be vicious and snapping but she barks happily and wags her tail when a dog handler lassos her. Canine actors can’t all be as great at acting as the original Rinty or King in Sgt. Preston.

However, putting the failings of four-legged actresses aside, we are pleasantly surprised that in her second Perry Impetuous Imp, as Diana Carter, Bonnie Jones is one of the brightest luminaries in the Perryverse. In her first scene, Perry and Paul fish her out after she’s been swimming frantically while being chased by the fine Alsatian. 

On Perry’s fishing boat, she’s so appealingly focused and sincere describing her problem that she doesn’t care how soaked she is. Or she’s confident her looks aren’t harmed even when soaked. Or she knows being soaked makes her as striking as, in Hesiod’s phrase, “neat-ankled daughters of Ocean.” But I babble. Such is her effect. 

Turns out she’s a writer of romance novels. In the scene of her at her typewriter, she’s impossibly cute wearing horn-rimmed glasses. You’d think she was anticipating the horn-rims craze among East Asian college girls, but this was the stock photographer’s convention in the Sixties and Seventies: woman at typewriter must wear glasses. But her writing outfit is a hoot. She has a massive bow in her hair. She‘s wearing baby doll pajamas. Between the horn rims, the bow, and the baby dolls, she’s the goddess of adorable that somehow isn’t sick-making.

Unfortunately, she must become the typical Mason defendant, sitting silent at the defense's table looking concerned. At least she is wearing the horn rims. It’s too bad she didn’t get a chance to show off more of her acting chops. After all, she studied with Wynn Handman and Lee Strasberg. Handman taught Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, and Richard Gere. Famous for Method Acting, Lee Strasberg taught Sally Field, Laura Dern, Marilyn Monroe, and many others. 

Bonnie Jones went on to have a respectable career in TV. She lives back home, in Central New York.

Happy Birthday Charles Williams

Born this day in 1909, Williams was an American author of the finest suspense novels of the 1950s and 1960s.  

A Touch of Death – Charles Williams

An knee injury kept college football star Lee Scarborough from going pro. At the beginning of this superb noir mystery, he’s on his uppers and ripe for trouble. It finds him in the guise of two beauties. 

Diana James recruits him to break and enter the house of Madelon Butler who may or may not be sitting on $120,000 that her missing husband embezzled from his employer. Outstanding is the scene in which Lee breaks into the darkened house only to find an utterly plastered Madelon. When she wakes up the next day, Lee finds out she one of the toughest, shrewdest babes a reader has ever met in noir fiction.

Pulp expert Woody Haut calls Williams the "foremost practitioner" of hard-boiled suspense that sold in the thousands from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s: "So prolific and accomplished a writer was Charles Williams that he single-handedly made many subsequent pulp culture novels seem like little more than parodies." 

Williams was from Texas so he was at home with the down-home metaphor: “I drove as if the car was held together with paper clips.” Another fantastic set piece is when Lee and Madelon are trapped in a hunting cabin by unseen sniper skulking in the woods. Williams weaves narrative magic when Lee and Madelon are fleeing the bad guys and the cops, while driving on Florida back-country roads.

Finally, it’s not just action. Williams has Lee oh-so-gradually go off the rails, from a struggling guy to a thug that beats cops over the head. And for what, as Frances McDormands’ character asked in Fargo, “For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know."

Back to the Classics 2021 #15

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

Travel Classic: I’ve been reading and re-reading George Orwell since about 1980. On his recommendation I’ve read Tobias Smollett (here and here), Bernard Shaw (here and here), and Ernest Bramah. For readers and other seekers, his caution is always worth remembering: “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell

In 1936 the Left Book Club commissioned George Orwell to write long journalism about conditions in the coal areas of the north of England. This book is about unemployment, housing, hygiene, monotonous diets, and other economic realities in the wake of the devastation wrought by the Great Depression of 1929. The book provides excellent background to unjustly neglected novels such as South Riding by Winifred Holtby and The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley.

For me, really impressive and memorable is chapter two’s description of the life of miners and conditions in coal mines. I had always pictured miners working not far from the elevators but in fact they have to walk, often bent over, for 90 unpaid minutes to get to where coal is worked. It’s shockingly hard yakka.

A reason this book of period journalism has survived is that Orwell brings his novelist’s eye for great scenes like this:

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the-embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her--understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

The second half of the book argues that socialism can remedy the appalling conditions described in the first half. Because Orwell was an honest man, he makes a good faith effort to examine why the people who would benefit from socialism seem so turned off by socialism. One reason, Orwell asserts, is that the advocates of socialism are so off-putting to the people they are trying to persuade.

Middle-class socialists valorize the working class and thus turn off members of the working class who know damn well he is a fool that glorifies the working class. Middle-class socialists assume technology will solve all our problems while Orwell and members of the working class distrust technology as a job-killing beast. Orwell also points out that lots of middle-class socialists come off as plain weird to members of the working class or condescending when they use turgid literary or technocratic language. Orwell finally points out that socialists seem to care more for ideological consistency and esoteric debates than making clear their argument for socialism.

Certainly the book, especially part two, still has something to say to us readers who live in a country where nobody trusts members of the other side, not believing anymore that Those People believe in the values we pledge allegiance to.

Note: I moderate comments to blog and will happily delete nonsense, bilge, rubbish, and hatred. I promise. 

Inspector Reg Wexford #7

Murder Once Being Done – Ruth Rendell

A cemetery caretaker finds the body of the young woman in a vault, lying slumped between two stone sarcophagi. The corpse of a strangled girl is a grisly discovery, even for a neglected graveyard in a part of London that has seen much better days.

Countryman Reg Wexford, also a police inspector, finds himself convalescing in London after a health scare. Back in 1972, it seems, there was not a lot specialists could do for a thrombosis (clot) in the eye beyond prescribing rest and a punishing regimen of lo-cal food and – horrors – no alcohol.

So Reg and his wife Dora are staying with Reg’s nephew Howard Fortune, a homicide detective assigned to investigate the killing of the young woman. The nephew is over-cautious about Reg’s rest and doesn’t mention the case while Reg is annoyed and insecure by the zealous caregiving and condescension with which he is treated due to his health. Anybody who has gone through a health crisis will be able to connect with the discouragement that Reg has to bring his powers of resilience to resist.

Rendell’s mysteries hold their attractions for their blend of the timeless and the nostalgic. We have the broken families and lost youth we expect to find in classics. But these elements are clothed in mod 1960s garb, with the older generation all in a twist over the muddled, footloose lives the younger generation lead.

Rendell is never cynical or callous but she has an unflinching realism about unchanging human nature. More than most mystery writers, she fleshes out the background and behavior of the victim in order to give a strong sense of why-dunnint. Her characters are excellently drawn. She examines the harmless obsession of the antiquary Dearborn and the cluelessness about the world of someone raised in a narrow milieu. And, bravely for 1972, she has the openly gay character Ivan Teal deploy unkind sarcasms against Reg the Cop over the treatment of gays at the hands of the Metro Police.

And what a strange, sinister affair the story turns out to be! Reg and his London colleagues find no way to get any information about the victim. To all appearances, she had no friends, no money, no family, living in a crummy apartment under an assumed name. Nothing tangible to start the investigation. As if the stranger from the vault was just a ghost.

Written in 1972, this was the seventh mystery starring Inspector Wexford. There were to be 16 more, all solid sellers and many adapted into TV episodes.