Back to the Classics #6

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic that's been on Your TBR List the Longest. I bought this book, probably for about $3.00, in the early 1990s, when her books were re-released by highbrow publishers, only to end up in the catalogs of remainder distributers like Hamilton and Daedalus. 

A Family and A Fortune – Ivy Compton-Burnett

This 1939 story of family conflict takes place in 1901. The setting is a beautiful country house in rural England.

The Gaveston family deals with its share of trials. In their dear but old house, the plaster is coming off the walls and the east wall is sinking. Oldest son Mark (28) is the heir and facing a disagreeable future of spending all their income on keeping a roof over their heads.

Middle son Clement (26) is an academic, so he’s smart, aloof, prone to fighting over crumbs and holding on to the few that he obtains. Born to a 45-year-old mother – surprise! - youngest son Aubrey is a smart dumb 15-year-old, like Tibby in Howards End. Aubrey is the butt of teasing and bullying from his older brothers. Protective but suffocating older sister Justine (30) unfailingly calls him “little boy.” By the end of the novel Aubrey is given to uttering pithy enigmatic comments on the action along the lines of a stage manager. Or a supernatural being viewing mortal lives from far above.

Mother Blanche (61) is kind and good but weak and vague so her family loves her without respecting her. Plain-spoken Justine calls her ironically “little mother.”

Mrs. Gaveston dealt with the coffee with small, pale, stiff hands, looking with querulous affection at her children and signing in a somewhat strained manner to the servant to take the cups. She had rather uncertain movements and made one or two mistakes, which she rectified with a sort of distracted precision. She lifted her face for her children's greetings with an air of forgetting the observance as each one passed, and of being reminded of it by the next. She was a rather tall, very pale woman of about sixty, who somehow gave the impression of being small, and whose spareness of build was without the wiriness supposed to accompany it. She had wavy, grey hair, a long, narrow chin, long, narrow, dark eyes in a stiff, narrow, handsome face, and a permanent air of being held from her normal interest by some passing strain or distraction.

Like the mother in Men and Wives, Blanche is an insomniac, which undermines her health. Father Edgar (57) thinks he loves his family but living in a fog of conceit and greed he is distant with his sons: he doesn’t even know how old Clement is, but at least feels that he should. Acting as father to the kids is Edgar’s brother Dudley, also wise and giving and though ethical to a fault, nobody’s fool.

Mr. and Mrs. Middleton are the principled outsiders in the novel, besides put-upon Miss Griffon. This is a change from ICB’s previous practice of numerous non-family members standing in for the reader and expressing shocked responses to the goings-on in the family. The Middletons give ICB the chance to poke fun at the universal relish of gossip (Sarah) and the blocks of writers (Thomas):

He had wanted to write and had been a schoolmaster, because of the periods of leisure, but had found that the demands of the other periods exhausted his energy. After his marriage to a woman of means he was still prevented though he did not give the reason, indeed did not know it.

Numerous characters have blind spots in this novel. I dislike spoilers so I won’t discuss them in a review.

The pot is stirred with the arrival of Blanche’s sister, Matty (Matilda) and their 87-year-old father Oliver. They’ve had to move into the lodge on Edgar’s grounds because their investments have gone south and by keeping up appearances Aunt Matty’s housekeeping has burned through their money. A venomous blend of self-pity, cruelty, and entitlement, disabled Aunt Matty is a tyrant, driving her companion Miss Griffon into a state of constant terror. Aunt Matty employs stings and goads in her conversation making her a trigger of fear and derision among the niece and nephews.

Another ruction occurs when a family member inherits a sweet bequest of tin for which everybody puts in dibs. ICB uses the fallout of the inheritance to examine the wellsprings of generosity and how the characters respond to gifts. Is it true generosity if there are stipulations on how the gift is to be used? Does it count as generosity if the source of the urge to give is the wish to be admired? Given true generosity depends on the spirit in which a gift is given, what of the goodwill of the receiver of the gift or benefit? How fragile and fleeting is gratitude? To what extent do the obligations incurred when one receives a gift depend on the character of the beneficiary?

But ICB plans a more eventful year for Family Gaveston. Then there’s a death (a great sickbed set-piece), then an engagement that gets broken and repaired, then a terrible illness (another great sickbed scene), then another death. It’s a busy year for a family that sees things through in their own fashion.

Besides providing more authorial comment than in previous novels, ICB has her characters deliver less unconsoling food for thought in this one.  Justine says the hidden side of people is not always the weaker, less noble, side. Miss Griffon, though treated like dirt beneath Aunt Matty’s feet, observes that everybody is important. In an echo of Schopenhauer, her advocate Uncle Dudley says that life is such a sad affair that we had better be tender with and kind to each other. Though an ICB theme is “how should we then live,” mind, she herself offers no prescriptions. 

ICB’s most memorable characters, as is the case for many writers, are the heavies. But ICB’s villains are such paper tigers, better pitied than scorned. The nice people defend themselves – Justine is Aunt Matty’s niece, not her mother’s daughter - even while they coolly accept the heavies as unavoidable parts of life. Like houses that fall apart, like sickness and death, like snow that falls relentlessly when a middle-aged woman is thrown out of the house. 

Through lack of intelligence and ignorance –Aunt Matty just doesn’t know any better how to deal with her disability or her anger, Edgar isn’t wise or brave enough to care for himself - lots of human beings end up as adults that are just defenseless, coming up with no better response to trouble than anger and dismay. In their ignorant state, helpless Matty- and Edgar-types accept generosity and kindness thoughtlessly, mindlessly. And decent people keep up the fight by not becoming what they dislike in weak people like Aunt Matty and Edgar.

ICB is notorious as a difficult writer. But in this, her seventh novel, she concedes a little to wandering attention among readers, who in 1939 had on their minds anxiety about the coming war with Hitler's Germany. ICB delivers plot twists that are over-the-top but don’t go so far as shockers in her earlier novels. She provides a bit more authorial explanation concerning business and characterization than her first six novels. Be warned, however, she still kicks the third-person omniscient narrator to the curbside 

Most of the action is conveyed in dialogue. I must admit that on the first reading two scenes (chapters) had me reeling, unable to focus enough to do justice to the conversation. The novels of ICB must be read twice so readers can appreciate that ICB plays fair. The second reading will reveal clues that ICB shrewdly puckishly placed to hint at coming incidents.

Other Reviews of ICB Novels: click the title to go to the review

Pastors and Masters (1925)

Brothers and Sisters (1929)

Men and Wives (1931)

More Women Than Men (1933)

A House and Its Head (1935)

Daughters and Sons (1937)

A Family and a Fortune (1939)

The Edwardian Turn of Mind

The Edwardian Turn of Mind – Samuel Hynes

Like Philipp Blom, Hynes argues that the cultural revolution of the twentieth century took place in the Edwardian era (1901 to 1910), not during the First World War. To support his thesis, Hynes examines various writers and their audiences in a sequence of essays focusing on politics and the arts and sciences. His overview of the troubled relations between the sexes will give interesting background knowledge when we are reading novels like A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster.

So we don’t have to, Hynes has read everything. The primary sources were autobiographies, letters, manuscripts, and the newspapers and magazines of the day. He has even read obscure novels such as The Riddle of the Sands and the forgotten novels of H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy. He provides long quotations, judicially chosen for our delighted and/or disgusted inspection. Reading about the misunderstandings among the Fabians – i.e., the Webbs vs. Wells – is hilarious though Hynes points out these conflicts undermined their cause and made their beliefs into suspect and dreadful among the general public.

Hynes provides interesting information about names we have heard of but knew little about.  Hynes’ treatment of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis sheds much light on the role of these two pioneers in the study of human sexuality. Little known nowadays, Kipling and Baden-Powell were among those opinion leaders who were motivated by their anxiety about invasion and loss of power to maintain their country’s place in the imperial sun.

His discussion of the censorship of plays is interesting. The censor was an ex-bank manager who rarely read the plays he approved or disapproved the stage. His letters to playwrights defending – kind of – his decisions to prohibit their plays are masterpieces of vague self-approving jibber-jabber.  As a state employee and reader of bureaucratic gobbledygook, I can only doff my hat.

The first four chapters were informative. The last third or so book not so much, though the examination of the academicians versus the post-impressionists was a first for me. The art-buying Chantrey Trust bought, over twenty-six years, Hynes reports,

… no picture by Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, or Alfred Stevens . . . nor, among foreign painters who had worked in England and were therefore eligible, [anything by] Corot, Degas, Delacroix, Fan tin-La tour, Monet, Pisarro, Sisley, or Whistler. . . . Instead, the Council had bought paintings by Clark, Cockram, Dicksee, Draper, Gotch, Hacker, Hunter, MacWhirter, Rooke, Stark, Tucker, and Yeames (this is a random but entirely representative list).

I rather wish he had put on his literary historian garb for examinations of Conrad, Forster and Ford Madox Ford (click here for that kind of thing; the piece on the Woolf/Bennett quarrel is good).

Samuel Hynes (1924 – 2019) was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton. Though a professor of literature, he turned his sights on cultural and intellectual history, like his counterpart at Rutgers and Penn Paul Fussell (The Great War andModern Memory). This book is the first of a trilogy of cultural history, which was followed by A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture and The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. To us non-scholarly readers, Hynes is probably best known for his memoir about his combat experience as a Marine pilot, Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator, which I read so long ago that I reviewed it for a paper zine (remember those?).

Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic by a Woman. I detest gardening. Hot, sweaty, dirty. Stings, scratches and cuts. Sprains and strains. Literally back-breaking, toting and heaving and digging and weeding. And for what? Flowers are pretty for about a minute before I want to look at something else. Pride? Sense of accomplishment? Good for my soul? Please. In Western New York summer after summer disappointment is caused by fickle combinations of drought or deluge, bugs and blight, vandal squirrels and thieving birds, voracious rabbits and pissing skunks. Though my experience with shovel and hoe has been taxing and bitter, I have read one gardening book, a collection of essays by Katherine White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, which gave me a sense of the kind of book the author below is parodying.   

Elizabeth and Her German Garden - Elizabeth von Arnim

Narrator Elizabeth sits in her garden she has planned and talks about this and that: her life, her husband, her three tot daughters, her neighbors and guests, and, above all, her garden. Living 15 miles from the shores of the Baltic in Pomerania (sandy soil, pine and heath), she loves nature as a Taoist does, which is the best thing about her. She endears herself to us condescending veterans by readily admitting she’s still green enough to make plenty of horticultural mistakes.

Elizabeth has a mind of her own, a quirky sense of humor, and she’s never boring. The reader can bask in the narrator’s primary concern, the joy she finds in her untidy garden and the company of her books in the utter seclusion of her remote country surroundings, where she is completely self-sufficient and any visitor is viewed as an intruder. 

Author von Arnim, however, invites other readers to see Narrator Elizabeth in a satirical light. A reader can reckon Elizabeth as a spoiled, arrogant and empty-headed dimbulb who has nothing else to do all day long than indulge her passion for gardening. After all, the narrator did marry a thoroughly dislikable man – opposites attract but they don’t marry each other - and she cheerfully teams up with her “friend” Irais to bully young foreign student Minora over Christmas.

Narrator Elizabeth lets us know that she’s unsocial and reclusive. She says,

The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.

Even the most introverted among us avid readers want to advise her to try living through a pandemic to test the benefits and risks of wanting to live a totally private life, willingly not seeing other people, and find out such a life is not fully to be human. Our narrator likes solitary stillness too much, I fear, to be healthy.

Narrator Elizabeth points unintentionally to the dark side of the Great Lady of the Estate role that she admits she’s not really up to when she admiringly writes of a neighbor:

She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the “mamsells,” as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat her.

That accidently sums up the pitfalls of the prerogatives of power, I think. Later Elizabeth’s husband opines that women in the laboring class accept beatings from their husbands “with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes.”

Narrator Elizabeth also makes inadvertent admissions in her views of marital and domestic bliss. “I don't think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have,” Elizabeth observes knowingly, as she refers to her husband never by name but always by the epithet Man of Wrath. Above we got a sense of his outrageously stupid opinions. 

And as for a mother’s duties to teach her children well, in fact, the religious education of moppets will pose challenges:

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings. The April baby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder and redder. I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the story—the other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming swords and announced that that was all, when she burst out, “Now I’ll tell about it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva, and they had plenty of clothes, and there was no snake, and lieber Gott wasn’t angry with them, and they could eat as many apples as they liked, and was happy for ever and ever—there now!”

She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”

“But these stories are true,” I said severely; “and it’s no use my telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled energy, all her silvery curls flying.

Finally, Elizabeth also unwittingly tells us that she’s autocratic, narrow-minded, and unimaginative. On the Russian farm laborers brought in to the work the fields:

They herd together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they would strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing. They are like little children or animals in their utter inability to grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot.

We’ve all heard intelligent charming people blandly express stupid opinions like this. In regard to some Disliked Feared Other, lots of people, rich poor and middling, are apt to express stupid views. I know my feeling annoyed does no good but I still feel this stupidity is outrageous. Putting aside whether people who say these things really believe them, marvel at the stubborn reluctance ever to imagine what other people are experiencing.

I conclude that Author von Arnim is a writer to be reckoned with. I seem to remember in one of his books of literary criticism Somerset Maugham (The Vagrant Mood? Points of View?) telling a story about Elizabeth von Arnim. It went that von Arnim read aloud a story that featured a shattering depiction of her husband, who was lying sick in bed. He was so mortified that he turned his face to the wall and died. “He was very sick,” she later said, “and was going to die anyway.” 

If you think this anecdote as funny as I do, you’ll like this book. Or, not. Readers can feel free to take this unique wonderful book  as light literary fare that inspires bent but never broken gardeners to dig into the seed catalogs. 

Japanese Literature Challenge #5

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年  - 2013

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

This coming of age story stars a male Japanese boomer in Tokyo in the middle 1980s. He learns about dealing with the unfairness of the world

The protagonist Tazaki suffered shunning by high school friends. The ostracism, which was never explained at the time, sent him into a six-month trough of depression and anxiety 

All around him, for as far as he could see, lay a rough land strewn with rocks, with not a drop of water, nor a blade of grass. Colorless, with no light to speak of. No sun, no moon or stars. No sense of direction, either. At a set time, a mysterious twilight and a bottomless darkness merely exchanged places. A remote border on the edges of consciousness. At the same time, it was a place of strange abundance. At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in the gaps in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.

Oo-ee-oo. Small wonder this period has haunted him for 15 years. As if this experience were not trying enough, a close friend in college also left him, perhaps doing away with himself.

Tazaki has held a good job, gets along with people at work and had love affairs, but he’s afraid to get close to anybody for fear that they will desert him too, when they find out he is a nowhere man. “I can understand how painful it is to be rejected,” author Murakami said in a 2013 interview. “When you get hurt, you may build an emotional wall around your heart. But after a while you can stand up and move on. That’s the kind of story I wanted to write.”

Tazaki is sleepwalking through life, but Sara Kimoto, a woman he is dating, tells him their relationship can't move forward unless he discovers the truth behind the ostracism. Through the miracle of social media and face to face interviews with the principals, he uncovers a painful story. The roots of the injustice done to him by his friends turn out to be deep and dense because each individual had understandable reasons for acting one way or another without necessarily thinking about the consequences. I mean, who does at 18 years old, especially in intricate situations?

Some readers may feel that the story is dragged out unnecessarily with too many moods and too much backtracking. Perhaps lead astray by the whydunnit aspect and the interviews with persons of interest that call to mind a mystery thriller, other readers are put out at the untidy resolution-free ending. Still others may rail, “Ugh, another male late thirties with a stunted personality like Norwegian Wood? Again with females that are little more than sex objects?” And while there’s some surrealism –  see above quotation –  there's only a dab of magical realism - which, to my mind, is a mercy but many readers will disagree.

For my money, however, I’m always up for a quest, as coming of age stories often are. This story is indeed a pilgrimage (as the title implies), a journey to the truth, or at least, as much of the truth as those among the quick can provide. As for literal trips: a story within the story is set at a hot spring in rustic Oita prefecture and our hero goes over the top on a Narita-Helsinki flight to interview one of the high school friends who is now a potter in the Finnish capital. Murakami effectively conveys places, both physical and mental. Well-rendered are the scenes of Tazaki in the Finnish pizzeria and in Shinjuku station watching the trains leave on overnights to Matsumoto. Also very well done was the creepy Nagoya office of his turncoat-friend who became a New Age Business Swami.

Murakami also has a didactic purpose. He wants the reader to sympathize with the characters, to identify their nuances and be tolerant of their decisions, and then to extend this skill into real life, to understand where friends, family and colleagues are coming from. He also discourages getting into ruts, just going through the motions of work, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep. His message is be fair, be brave, build your confidence by taking risks, get out of your comfort zone. This advice is nothing new but no less effective just because eternally true.

Lastly, as usual, Murakami is always into music. So to prime yourself for reading this novel, these two pieces: Round Midnight and Franz Liszt's Le mal du pays.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor) I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro The Gate - Natsume Soseki Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima The Tale of Genji

A History of Japan: to 1334 – Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – Sir George Sansom The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 34

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 Gilded Lily – Erle Stanley Gardner

The typical Perry Mason mystery kicks off in his office with a damsel in distress describing her vulnerable position. But Gardner starts this entry from 1956 with a long set-up. A rich but honest business executive is blackmailed because his trophy wife has a felony arrest on her record. Perry Mason is not called in until the blackmailer has been ushered to his eternal deserts, which hopefully involve pressure parboiling.

The other unusual aspect is that Mason does not do much interviewing of his own. He leaves it to PI Paul Drake and others to investigate. Mason also seems to go off the ethical rails to the extent that even his loyal secretary Della Street, who’s always willing to accept risk, gets alarmed about his falsifying evidence. DA Hamilton Burger does not see Mason coming, however, is flummoxed as usual. Mason relies on his super power of being able to sniff when witnesses are being economical with the truth.

I think Gardner’s decision to have Mason arrive later dampens the compulsion his eager fans usually feel to keep turning the pages. This is still worth reading because Gardner respects his reader’s intelligence enough to expect them to follow an intricate flim-flam by Mason. It’s a neat maneuver with fingerprints that makes us reader almost – that’s almost – feel sorry for DA Hamilton Burger.

I recommend this distinctive Mason novel.

Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Wild Card Classic. I’ve only read a couple of Wodehouse’s novels, when I taught English in Saudi Arabia and needed all the chuckles, chortles, and snickers I could get. I seem to remember concluding that a little Wodehouse goes a long way. Flash forward 35 years to a recent used book sale where I got the book reviewed below. I figure if a wild card is a person or thing whose qualities are uncertain, then a non-fiction book by a writer who is most famous for fiction must be a wild card.

America, I Like You – P.G. Wodehouse

Widely hailed as the finest comic writer of the twentieth century, Wodehouse looks back at his own life with the keen sense of humor that defined his famous writings about Blandings Castle and the Jeeves-Wooster ménage. After the chapters originally appeared as pieces in the humor magazine Punch, they were collected and published in 1956 under the title above and reprinted as Over Seventy in 2015.

Wodehouse ties the chapters together with a slender thread – he is responding to preliminary questions from a potential interviewer.  In mock-autobiographical fashion, he recounts his beginnings as a writer in the early 1900s and his visits to the United States when such visits were rare for young journalists. But he goes off on various funny tangents full of absurdities and various ridiculous observations.

I laughed out loud throughout reading this book and when I wasn’t laughing I was somehow with a smile on my face, wondering what mad simile or metaphor he was going to pull out of his hat next. Wodehouse has an effortless ability to uncork punch lines. Such incredible timing, such simple vocabulary arrayed in perfect sentences. Wodehouse had a uncommon feeling for language, able to take everyday words, hyperbole, inversion. garbled quotations, etc. and build amazing phrases and sentences. Wodehouse must have read widely in English literature and especially Shakespeare, since his parodies are brilliant. 

Sure, the sense that the writing feels formulaic will creep up awares so just don’t read much in one sitting lest the formula pale. I read only a chapter a day for about three weeks. I had a great time, even if the mood sometimes did not last long, overtaken by the chance intake of news like “As we merrily doff our masks, in what is surely an undercount because our leaders and their minions have lost the ability to count anymore, as many as 1500 souls passed away yesterday from omicron, when at least 1,000 people have been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months.” 

In days like these we need all the chuckles, chortles, and snickers we can get from writers like Wodehouse. If I see any Wodehouse novels at used book sales, I’ll snap them up, cautioning myself that wolfing down too many “musical comedies without music” will feel like eating one too many homemade chocolate chip cookies.

The First Ben Casey

Note: The show was not syndicated (not enough episodes) so it does not loom large in popular memory like Perry Mason. But some episodes are posted to You Tube, by some miracle without commercials. If your schedule is anything like mine, it’s hard to find 50 minutes, but try it, you might like it if a dark medical drama for grown-ups is your cup of tea.

To the Pure - Ben Casey (Season 1, Episode 1)

I was five when this premier episode aired in October, 1961. Of course I don’t remember this particular episode, but I do remember as a little kid I thought as cool beyond belief the show’s opening  of the hand drawing the symbols ♂, ♀, ✳, †, ∞ on a blackboard, as cast member Sam Jaffe recited, “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.” I still think it’s beyond cool, so beware -  some of my critical stances are those of a five-year-old.

Our protagonist is a gifted neurosurgeon at County General Hospital. Dr. Ben Casey is also the colleague from hell. In an intense opening scene of a failed resuscitation, he chews out a fellow doctor for losing an elderly patient: “You probably didn’t kill him but you didn’t do anything to keep him alive.” His mentor Dr. Zorba scolds him for bawling out x-ray technicians and for bullying badly needed nurses so badly that they resign. Casey’s fighting with higher ups on whether to proceed with a risky surgery on a nine-year-old boy with bad blood vessels in his brain.

For 1961, the show is diverse way beyond our post-modern expectations. The nine-year-old patient and his mother are Spanish-speakers named Salazar. Casey has a Japanese-American friend and colleague played by Aki Aleong. The elegant and intelligent Bettye Ackerman plays a female doctor. Sam Jaffe as Dr. Zorba indicates origin with lines like “Maybe I stand on my head and speak to them in Greek” but a Yiddish lilt (especially the high notes) makes clear the character was meant to be Jewish.

The five-minute conversation when old Dr. Zorba upbraids young Dr. Casey is so well-written and well-played that one wonders if the two actors brought a real-life discomfort with each other to the scene. Zorba’s harsh line “Now get out of here, you make me sick to look at you” sounds like it comes straight from his heart.

Which brings us to prickly Vince Edwards. In the anti-hero tradition of the late Fifties and early Sixties, he’s difficult to like but a force of nature like Marlon Brando’s Kowalski or Paul Newman’s Hud. His dark Italian look* contrasts with the hospital whites such that he pops on the monochrome screen, compelling our attention. He gives the part intelligence, skill, dedication and a confident tough strength. Mrs. Salazar says, “You don’t talk like a friend but I trust you.” The kid asks him, “Doctor, how come you never smile? You don’t like me?” The scene with Dr. Maggie (Bettye Ackerman) is totally in character. After awkward silences on their date, his sweet talk:  “Whenever I hold a woman, I take her pulse” and “You’re fairly attractive but you talk too much.”

The black and white makes the action look starkly realistic. The failed resuscitation of the geezer was probably not so wrenching as real life but it was convincing enough to me (identifying with the geezer and all). In a grisly scene of a lumbar puncture, a young girl with rabies jerks around during the procedure and exposes Casey to the virus. Casey is not a candidate to take any vaccine because of allergies. The 30-day waiting and watching for the emergence of symptoms like fever, headache, anxiety, confusion, and agitation is marked the old-fashioned way, x’ing out days on a wall calendar.

Anybody who's watched a lot of noir knows its look is more than light coming through venetian blinds. It’s impressive how director Moser employs black, white, and grey and lighting to provide contrast and fascination to the settings. The contrasts are emphasized by odd points of view, such as seeing the ceiling go by while lying supine on a gurney (hey, I’ve done that). Such as the disorienting shot of queasily looking down into the operating theater. Such as the black microscope in the foreground with Casey in white in the background. Settings are spellbinding: the nightmarish tunnel connecting the hospitals, Casey’s spartan hospital quarters, the night club where Casey and Maggie dance, Casey’s distorted vision of contracting rabies.

Finally, the setting of the hospital stokes our natural curiosity and jitters about hospitals, medical procedures and caregivers. Casey observes, “Most doctors are like most people – you ask them to trade an old idea for a new one and they jump out of their underwear.” This still feels true. To the ordinary person, instruments and devices still look shiny, delicate, mysterious, and vaguely menacing. To our post-modern eyes, the 60-year-old tech seems coldly metallic and somehow stately. Huge wall units with five-spoke hand wheels, rectangular indicators, and huge dials seem imposing and alien. Not at all like our portable, plastic, touchy electronic devices nowadays. Plus, Casey’s hospital is a lot quieter than our hospitals are now with their continuous beeping, chiming, dinging, droning, humming and buzzing

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* I remember in the Sixties adults complaining that Casey’s hair was too long. This, of course, made me determined to let my hair get long as soon as I could though how long hair would be consistent with my general policy "pursue my own agenda while keeping a low profile" I didn't reconcile.

Japanese Literature Challenge #4

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること 2007

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir - Haruki Murakami

Marathon runner and triathlete Murakami talks about his great passion, aside from writing novels, long distance running. He discusses his determination to overcome his limits in running events in respectable times, but also his ability to get over disappointing physical breakdowns and times that were longer than his optimistic expectations.

Murakami claims that the occupation of writing is not so different from the training for running daunting distances. Writing requires talent of course but it requires the discipline to focus on the writing process and endure siting and thinking for hours at a time. He makes the point that after he changed his job, which required him to be on his feet all the time, to the more sedentary one of literary man, circumstances therefore forced him to move more to keep fit.

But he found the discipline of running and training benefitted his writing process. Running with dedication also kept him away from tobacco, alcohol, over-eating, and late night partying, none of which do writers much good. I think Murakami is on to something with regard to the discipline of running:

Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you're going to wile away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as whole.

The importance of not living in a fog or sleepwalking through life is a commonplace kind of wisdom. But avoiding muddle and living the examined life constitute an eternal verity that certainly resonates with me. It’s why I read so much and why I sleep well, eat well, don’t drink or smoke, and exercise five days a week. It also helped to stir my interest that Murakami didn’t start to run until he was in his early thirties, which was true for me too. I didn’t start to jog until I lived in Okinawa, whose subtropical climate (Taipei, Corpus Christi) makes it ideal for a guy like me who likes humidity for warming up quickly.

Murakami said he trained with serious runners in Okinawa in the Eighties so I wondered if he had ever trained when I was jogging there from 1986 to 1992. In Naha, from Sobe, I’d cross the 221 Bridge, make a right through Onoyama Park, another right across the Tsubogawa bridge and back to Sobe. In Nishihara, I’d just jog around the university and its track. I’d also visit the gym and shoot baskets. The solitary pleasure of shooting baskets in an empty gym is ineffable, not to mention conducive to thinking or, more often, fantasizing about taking passes from Kareem or Magic or Worthy and scoring buzzer beaters to send the Celtics home in defeat.

Murakami is clearly a literary figure who’s a power of the publishing scene, able to publish non-fiction and see it sell in magazines and bookstores. It would be interesting to read his literary criticism or travel narratives.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki, Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories  - Nagai Kafu Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata The Tale of Genji Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro The Gate - Natsume Soseki

A History of Japan: to 1334 – Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sansom A History of Japan: 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveler to Lifer at Mitusbishi - Niall Murtagh Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo - J.E. de Becker This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko – Isabella Bird Kokoro – Lafcadio Hearn The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady - Evelyn Kaye The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – Sir George Sansom Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police – Robert Twigger

 

 

 

The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Did the ancients describe cancer? What early cancer treatments gave hope that cancer could be beaten? Is “war” the best metaphor when the adversary is cancer? What do cancer patients want to know?

These are the questions that Mukherjee tries to answer in this long chronicle of research and treatment defeats, dead-ends, and progress against this relentless disease. It can also be read as the story of women who were injured, disabled, disfigured, and killed by not only cancer itself but by aggressive treatments  against it by doctors, surgeons, and chemotherapists. The main thing that I took away from this book is that a memorial should be erected to the women that died during treatment and in clinical trials that compared treatments for cancer. A plaque in a garden would be the least we could do in order to commemorate their courage and patience in the face of unimaginable suffering.

But Mukherjee tells stories about selfless researchers, too. For example, in 1984 Dr. Barry Marshall experimented on himself to convince skeptics that H. pylori was the cause of gastritis and peptic ulcers. No animal study had proved the point and Institutional Review Boards would never have approved the study be conducted on living human beings (I know: I've worked on such a board for 10 years).

Marshall decided to establish the disease in his own body.  He reduced his stomach acid with an alkaline cocktail, drank a bacterial culture, and fasted for the rest of the day. He developed bloating, nausea and vomiting with night sweats and halitosis after three days. The subsequent biopsy clearly and indisputably established the bacterial presence on stains and cultures. After 14 days, his own immune response successfully fought the symptoms. Marshall had fulfilled the standards for identifying the causative agent of a disease and proven that the bacterium was a cause of gastric inflammation. And this is only one hero discussed in this book.

Mukherjee also narrates tales of victories, goals and courage among doctors, researchers, and patients in the wards of the children's hospitals, university laboratories and even basement labs, where great scientific revolutions sometimes take place. So, this is a serious book, sometimes frightening and sometimes demanding on the non-expert reader. But the style is very readable with clear terminology, explanations and digressions that makes it generally accessible to the lay audience.

This book won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. It should be read by any reader who wants to understand why, after billions of dollars and five decades of (mostly) well-designed research, there is still no single cure for all forms of cancer and why, even while increasing the effectiveness of the treatments, more and more people will continue to get sick in the years to come.