Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #18

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

Classic Humor: Hardcore readers often mention The Diary of a Nobody in the same breath as Three Men in a Boat, which I didn’t find funny at all. So I was leery of this one. But I saw this recommendation in George Orwell’s column: “I have always wondered what on earth The Diary of a Nobody (1892) could be like in a Russian translation, and indeed I have faintly suspected that the Russians may have enjoyed it because when translated it was just like Chekhov.”

The Diary of a Nobody - George & Weedon Grossmith

Our diarist Charles Pooter* is quite an ordinary man, whose only step away from the conventions is that he does not see why his thoughts and jokes should be less worthy to be written down as those of anyone else in late Victorian England. English to the backbone (as E. F. Foster’s Aunt Juley Munt would say), Pooter is truthful, modest, mindful of hierarchy and distinctions. He respects the dignity of others and expects the same courtesy even though but he himself is too little aware of bourgeois mores and commits blunders that make him the butt.

It’s not enough that he is assailed by his wife Carrie and his friends Gowing and Cummings, but he is troubled by his immature son Lupin who comes home after being canned from his job for laziness. Pooter tries to buck up his son’s ambition and build a base to a stable future, but it is no easy task to compete with clubs, theaters, and drinking establishments. Among  his daily office life, dreary but satisfying, his wife's bosom friend who always tries to bring Carrie up to the latest fashions and fads, and Lupin's escapades, Pooter describes his joys and trials with humility and sincerity.

It’s comic even for those of middle-aged enough to tire easily of the light comedy of embarrassment. It also stands up with those well acquainted with the high standards of Lardner, Thurber and Perlman when it comes to stories starring the Modest Bumbling Every Man.

One hesitates to read too much into an amiable comic novel. But. Pooter personifies the staid Victorian papa of the 1880s in contrast to his Edwardian son who unfailingly advocates modernity and the unavoidable adaptation to it. Lupin, too, knows that time and tide are on his side. I for one was on Pooter Senior’s side, not having the same touching faith in technological advances as an Edwardian like H.G. Wells did.

George Orwell saw Don Quixote as the source of this character, saying, “Pooter is a high-minded, even adventurous man, constantly suffering disasters brought upon him by his own folly, and surrounded by a whole tribe of Sancho Panzas.” This is well put and reminds us in our own popular culture the put-upon hapless male has been a constant presence: Chester Riley, Ralph Kramden, Ozzie Nelson, Fred Sanford, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Ray Romano, and the doughy bearded bros, barely adult, in ice cream ads. 

*poot - British English child slang for a silent, airy fart.

Ah, well, words of that kind are words.

More Women than Men – Ivy Compton Burnett

This 1933 novel is set in the early Edwardian era. It certainly feels like it was written after World War I, which demonstrated to thinking people that complacent generalities about life were not true. Like other writers who explored the ironic disconnection between optimistic assumptions and brutal outcomes, ICB examines, usually in the context of unhappy families and their followers, pain, stress, scandal, cowardice, defeat and resignation, cruelty petty and not, fear and spite.

The upshot is, ICB studies tangled relationships, narrating in her peculiar style. The reader begins to see behind the cloak of convoluted grammar, the veil of simple words in intricate arrays. In surprises worthy of Miss Austen and Mr. Collins, these characters are shown to us as they really are. They doff the mask and we have to review their words and actions in a different light. When we read the novel a second time, we see that ICB told us crucial information, if obliquely, if we had only been alert enough to observe. My strategy, therefore, with ICB is to read it, get the characters straight, get over the jolts and shudders of the incidents, and then immediately read it again.

Anyway, the owner and operator of a girl’s school is Josephine Napier. Her husband Simon ostensibly co-runs the school, but in fact he is utterly browbeaten, sidelined, and probably clinically depressed. When young, Josephine stole Simon from her friend Elizabeth Giffard. Though Liz carries a grudge, she is hardly the blameless lamb since we get hints that back in the naughty old days her shilly-shallying wasn’t honest, designed as it was to keep men on a string.

Josephine has adopted her widowed brother’s son Gabriel Swift and sent him to Oxford. Josephine has complicated feelings about Gabriel, feeling more than a mother, more than a best friend.  Josephine is all benevolent generosity on the outside. But her goal, which she usually achieves, is to satisfy her own self-serving nature. Gabriel, manipulated and emotionally coerced since childhood, walks around with the hunted look, hungry to get out into the world, away from Josephine’s relentless giving.

Elizabeth - widowed, down on her luck, jealous that hers live lean while others live fat -   is employed by Josephine as a housekeeper at the school. Her daughter Ruth and Gabriel hit it off enough to plan nuptials, to Josephine’s jealousy and opposition. Her condescension in her remonstrance to the young couple reaches the astonishing. Josephine doesn’t see herself as an “ogress” – do they ever? -- but she is, rather

Josephine’s brother, Jonathan Swift (sic), is a former Anglican clergyman and struggling writer ahead of his time. He has carried on a liaison with drawing master Felix Bacon for 23 years, since Felix was 18 and Jon was 47. Influenced by turning 40, Felix feels change in the air. Besides feeling every minute of his 70 years, Jon harries himself with the notion that Felix has cocked his eye in the direction of Gabriel.

Hey, I never said ICB was for everybody, certainly not readers in search of a genial author or likeable characters. Always remember - we’re World War One away from Lily Dale eating her heart out over Crosbie in the sewing room. ICB challenges us to identify just what the hell she is doing, reconstructing values out of the ethical wreckage of World War I or denying there is any meaning at all to be had. Or talking about clothes so much that a character querulously asks, "Can we stop talking about clothes." Or putting in the good word for middle-aged unmarried women who surprise Felix by not fawning over him.

These attachments go through relentless change in the course of the novel. Readers and critics who claim nothing happens in her novels must have radically different conceptions of flux and unrest than I do. When Ruth clutched her hands in response to Josephine’s mad manipulative behavior, I clenched my teeth. When another character made a horrendous confession, as he pantomimed playing a piano, I held my breath.

Nothing happens! As the course of this novel plays out, there are two mysterious deaths, one death of natural causes and two marriages and a birth that provoke drastic change. Oddly enough, this story winds up with a happy ending, I mean, given, of course, no heteronormative prejudices make us squirm. It’s not me to go all meta but when I read ICB, I’m aware that she’s playing me. It starts simply enough – a straightforward examination of ordinarily dramatic situations starring over-civilized people -- but from about page 3 insensibly things change. Jabs become more ferocious. Spontaneous chances are ruthlessly exploited. And though one expects the surprises, they’re still shocking as hell.

Get played by reading:

·         Pastors and Masters

·         Brothers and Sisters

·         Men and Wives

Might vs. Wit

The Monkey and The Tiger - Robert van Gulik

This is Book #6 of the 17 historical mysteries starring Judge Dee. The unique stories are set in different Chinese provinces from about 663 to 681.

This volume contains two particularly charming and interesting stories whose titles are based on the Chinese zodiac and, in particular, on the characteristic differences of the Yang forces of the Tiger (might, nerve, luck) and the Monkey (cleverness, wit, creativity).

Both stories have a rapid development of the plot and details about everyday life in China during one of its golden ages, the T’ang era. The beginning of the first story (The Monkey) is atmospheric in that the author sets the tale in a tropical forest, like a fairy tale, while in the second story (The Tiger) Judge Dee finds himself in fortress besieged, like a feudal adventure story.

Without deep psychological descriptions, van Gulik still creates vibrant characters with human interest. In The Monkey is a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis. He falls for a young beautiful bandit girl and gets the notion to walk away from his humdrum life to join a band of highwaymen. In The Tiger, by observing the portrait and belongings of the deceased, Judge Dee gets insight into a personality and identifies the great obsession – the yearning for freedom - that had dominated a life.

Both short stories have their own attractions. In The Monkey, there are lessons on how to approach cases that Judge Dee imparts to his assistant Tao Gan. Although he is cunning and slick on the streets, ex-con man Tao Gan lacks the experience of his boss and inevitably inflicts his biases on the evidence. In The Tiger, the author successfully describes the aftermath of a flood of the Yellow River and the melancholy mood of Judge Dee.

In other stories, Judge Dee is always surrounded by powerful assistants to provide muscle, sometimes beating and torturing information out of people of interest. In the situation of The Tiger, however, he faces a dangerous situation in an isolated country manor, in a position of weakness and loneliness, his authority as a high-ranking official having no meaning against a band of brigands called The Flying Tigers. The time frame of this story is only one night, so he does not have much time to conjure up a plan to save himself and other innocents from a catastrophic end. Professor van Gulik also slips in a warning about keeping love and desire firmly apart, since no man – not the smart, not the powerful, not the capable – is exempt from the proverb, “It's not the beauty of a woman that blinds the man, the man blinds himself.”

Dr. van Gulik was not blessed with a long life (he died at the age of 57 in 1967), but being Dutch, he was a demon for work. On top of his day job in diplomacy, he wrote the 17 Judge Dee novels. And he managed to produce scholarly items on such curious topics as the role of the lute and the gibbon in traditional Chinese arts. 

When he recommended the Judge Dee stories to the class, my Sunwui-born professor of Chinese history said that van Gulick wrote Sexual Life in Ancient China but that he never read it because the social role of concubinage and prostitution was out of his field. The class rather slumped at hearing that despite the exciting title, the book did not deal with the deep subject of Chinese sexual lore.

Rediscovering the New World

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America - Tony Horwitz

 This nonfiction work blends popular history with travel narrative.

 Horwitz realizes that he does not know anything about the French, Spanish and Portuguese exploring the New World in the 16^th century. So, to his credit, he reads a stack of books about their experience and travels to spots like Dominican Republic and the Deep South of the United States. Horwitz generally keeps things light, which is an achievement in light of the grim abuse of indigenous people at the hands of the Europeans: epidemic disease, genocidal violence, enslavement, mass rape and sexual slavery, etc.  

 Horwitz is a skilled writer, able to distill much information is lucid prose, as he showed in Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Recommended to people looking for popular history and the ‘in their footsteps’ type of travel writing that had a vogue in  the 1990s and 2000s.

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 28

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 Shoplifter’s Shoe - Erle Stanley Gardner

The 13^th Mason novel from 1938 is an amazingly good mystery. In a department store restaurant (remember those?), a little old lady (LOL) is accused of shoplifting. With ample justification, too. However, lawyer Perry Mason, who witnessed the incident with his secretary Della Street, turns the situation on its head. He thus rescues the guilty-as-hell LOL from the too eager grip of the floor walker, who should’ve made the bust after she left the store.

Later the LOL falls victim to a hit and run during which, according to eyewitnesses, a pistol flies out of her handbag onto the road. Soon, a body is found, and the LOL is accused of murder. A complex chain of events begins, including another murder, leading to such a clever solution that even the astute reader will have to read it twice to get it.

In the Perry Mason novels of the 1930s, the lawyer comes off like a tough private eye in the pulp magazines. An overbearing Mason, for example, treats PI Paul Drake more like a wimpy gofer than a trusted sidekick. Mason also applies well-timed punches to the noses of uncooperative thugs. Calling Della, when the phone rings a long time before she picks up, Perry says, “Having a heavy date, Della?”  She tosses it back, “If this was a heavy date, I wouldn't have even heard the phone.”

And later tipsy Della and workaholic Perry converse:

“You should know, Chief, that you mustn't be so serious on my birthday. The trouble with you is you're cold sober.”

Mason glanced surreptitiously at his wrist watch. “Well” he said, “it's not an incurable disease.”

Della Street surveyed him with exaggerated gravity. “Yes,” she said, “it is. You're working. You might hoist a drink or two, but it would run off your back like water off a duck's stomach.”

In a philosophical passage unusual for Gardner, Mason respects his LOL client for her hard-boiled acceptance of the first-degree murder charge and the prospect of being checked out of this vale of tears via the gas chamber. But I guess the stoic acceptance of a stern reality isn’t so unexpected in a Depression Era novel whose setting is a dog-eat-dog world.

Nowadays, of course, we trust our post-pandemic world will be just the opposite.

Back to the Classics 2021 #17

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

19^th Century Classic: My general theme for this challenge was to read classics that I’ve been hearing about virtually my entire adult life - like Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) - but never found time to read. Until this wretched pandemic. So there are always silver linings. Always.

The Red and the Black – Stendhal

In the university town of Grenoble in the 1820s, failed seminarian Antoine Berthet, son of a poor artisan, was hired as a tutor in the service of a bourgeois family. He seduced his employer's wife. Stressed out after various failures, he bought a gun and shot his mistress in the middle of mass. Berthet was condemned to the guillotine.

Chop.

Ho-hum, we ordinary people think, as we listen to the news not attentively and wonder how stupid work is going to be today. But when an artist like Stendhal stumbles across an everyday news item, look what happens - one of the major novels of the 19th century in France and in translation, in the world.

Our anti-hero is young Julien Sorel, a version of unfortunate Antoine Berthet. Sorel is a scoundrel. Too handsome for female types to keep their heads when they’re around him, he’s also too young to know how to keep his own posing in bounds. His hero is Bonaparte so he’s full of excessive ambition to make something new in the world. So nobody is all one thing, we’re a mix of the admirable and the deplorable - he’s idealistic and romantic but still a scoundrel.

This novel recounts the social and amatory adventures of this character. In part one, as the tutor to the children of M. de Rênal, mayor of the fictional village of Verrières, he seduces the lady of the house Madame de Rénal. After an unfortunate (but excellently rendered) stint at the seminary, he goes to Paris, hobnobs with the aristocracy and embarks on a new romantic interlude with Mathilde, the dangerously attractive daughter of his employer, the Marquis de La Mole.

The lovers are young. So the novel has plenty of love’s nocturnal encounters, love’s ladders under the window, love’s transports, love’s rumors and insecurities, love’s scruples and love’s pride, love’s tiffs and  rejections, love’s passionate indiscreet letters, love’s jealousies and love’s duplicities games and scenes.

But society doesn’t make patient allowances for love’s youthful indiscretions. The end is not happy.

It’s not only a novel – it’s a world, as the subtitle points out: “a chronicle of the 19th century.” As a satire, it paints brilliant characters: the Abbé Pirard, the Chevalier de Beauvoisis, the Prince Korasoff, the singer Geronimo, Amanda (memorably seductive in a too short scene, like Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep).

I recommend this novel highly, especially the first part. Granted, the writer devotes many chapters at parties in the salons of the Marquis De La Mole. Yet another lavish ball feels endless at times, like yet another Welsh wingding in How Green was My Valley. Beautiful writing, timeless psychological analysis of pride and ambition, social satire – the story has plenty enough to balance an old-fashioned story of love’s nocturnal encounters, love’s ladders under the window, etc. etc.

Happy Birthday Henry Wade

Born this day in 1887, Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet KStJ CVO DSO was Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1954 to 1961. He was also one of the leading authors during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The Hanging Captain – Henry Wade

In this classic English detective story from 1932, an unlikable captain is found hanging in his library. The Chief Constable dubs it suicide in order to make the affair go away. But a professorial outsider proves the captain was murdered. The two local detectives brought in on the case are the impetuous veteran Detective-Inspector Herbert Lott and his rival to the promotion of Chief Inspector, the logical plodding Poole. 

There are numerous suspects, as becomes a Golden Age mystery. Thus, a grist of alibies must be checked, intricate time tables constructed, and lor’ love a duck, there’s even a floor plan of the country house. What distinguishes this from the comfy atmosphere of Sayers and Christie is the possible motives for the murder are quite bold, enough that I can’t in good conscience give them away in a review. Unlike most Golden Age writers, Wade assumes we can handle motives without clutching our pearls, looking for the fainting couch, and sending the maid to fetch the sal volatile.

Wade wrote as many as 22 detective novels or story collections between 1926 and 1957. This one and Mist on the Saltings were published by Harper Perennial in a series of great re-issues in the Eighties. 

In their reference book Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor said about Wade: “Though insufficiently known in the US, Wade is one of the great figures of the classical period. He was not only very productive bit also varied in genre. His plots, characters, situations, and means rank with the best, while his prose has elegance and force.”

Happy Birthday Cyril Hare

Cyril Hare, the creator of lawyer sleuth Francis Pettigrew, was born today in Mickleham, UK, in 1900.

An English Murder - Cyril Hare

Although written in 1951, An English Murder (also published as The Christmas Murder) has the elements of a cozy mystery that was written in the Thirties. It takes place in an English country house. The familiar characters play out a ripping yarn with lots of twists. Intelligent themes and literate prose engage the little grey cells. Yet another attraction is that it takes places at Christmas, though the murder does put a damper on celebrating.

The first half covers the background. Unusually for a cozy, Hare includes political differences as a factor that strains the relationships among the characters. The cousin of an impoverished peer is a socialist Minister of Parliament.  The obnoxious wife of a rising man in the MP’s treasury is ambitious for her hubby and accordingly into expediency. The son of the peer has gone black sheep by becoming involved in a neo-fascist group called The League of Freedom and Dignity. The loyal butler’s daughter is determined not to let her working class background hold her back. Observing all this with a tolerant eye is Dr. Bottwink, a Hungarian Jewish university professor, who is going over the family’s papers as part of his research on 18th century English politics. Dr. Bottwink tells the loyal butler that the English have been lucky to live a country where politics can be safely ignored, even in the 20th century.

Be assured that this is not a political novel disguised as a mystery or thriller, however.  Hare never lets politics interfere with the unfolding of his ingenious plot. Hare was a judge in the civil courts before he turned to writing full time. So like that other lawyer-writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, his plots turn on elaborate motives and intricate schemes.