Back to the Classics #8

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

Pre-1800 Classic. Cicero, I gather, was popular in the Victorian age, but he fell out of favor among scholars and the thinking public in the 20^th century. Because of a growing interest in Stoicism in the last ten years, however, thinking people with an interest in ancient philosophy have turned to reading Cicero, who borrowed many ideas from Socrates and the Stoics.

On Obligations – Cicero (44 B.C.)

This text was the last that Cicero wrote before he was murdered by killers hired by Mark Antony[1]. The book is addressed to his son whom Cicero suspected was spending his dough living the idle life of a student in Athens. Cicero discusses ideas that his easy-going son – and us if we find them useful - can apply in daily life in order to flourish.

Cicero claims that what defines us as human beings is our rationality and our gift of speech. All of us have rationality in common. Our reason assists us in restraining our emotions so that we can think through issues of ethics and sharpen our ability to identify our duties (obligations) in situations that daily confront us. As human beings with reason, we are responsible for managing our feelings and leading our way of life. We have a free choice among alternatives. We decide where and when we commit our time, energy, talent.

The above paragraph seems familiar, echoing self-help advice we’ve all read during this wretched pandemic but maybe even before, if we have been into self-help writing. It is material that we have internalized so deeply that we don’t even wonder whether it’s true. Of course people should do these things. Conduct should be orderly i.e. done in the right way and seasonable, i.e. done at the right time. Do what you need to do in the best way you can whenever you have to do it and do it that way every time. Sounds like Bobby Knight.

To repeat, this book has been so influential in western culture that its ideas seem as givens. Another example: we have to use our reason determine what is honorable, useful, or virtuous, and which of two virtuous courses is more virtuous. We need to live and work in the real world and gain experience in defining what is expedient (merely tactful or shrewd or self-serving) and how to judge between two expedient things; and what to do when the honorable and the expedient appear to clash. Cicero claims that they only seem to conflict; that we are not analyzing the situation clearly or properly if we don’t see that the honorable action is the expedient and vice-versa. The lodestars here are justice (be fair), courage (tell the truth), prudence (foresee consequences), and temperance (restrain craving and emotion).

The book is also a political philosophy that claims there is no higher calling than public service. For Cicero, the pursuit of glory and good reputation is motivated by inherent benefits to society and the desire to be useful to one’s fellow citizens. What Cicero considers to be the foundation of society is being able to enjoy one’s possessions in complete safety. A rich conservative, Cicero deplores the property tax and any legislation that would reduce income inequality. For all his talk about justice,  Cicero is mum on imperialism of any kind much less Roman imperialism. Nor does he say anything about chattel slavery, not even about its bad effect on free labor and the alienation of the lower classes (whom he calls “the mob”).

Cicero echoes “Know thyself,” and it's an encouraging point that we lose may lose sight of as we age and insensibly change in ways we never anticipated. We have the duty to know ourselves well enough to identify when we are getting older disgracefully, with slower reasoning, narrower thinking, more permeable filter between brain and tongue, shorter tempers, or more forgetful of how polite people act.

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[1] vain loud thuggish greedy stupid muddled ambitious shameless with an insatiable hunger for women and sex – strong men like Mark and Orange follow the same old patterns. 

Last Crossing

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania - Erik Larson

Larson’s forte is writing popular history that reads like adventure fiction with a lot of human interest. This book tells the story of the sinking of the luxury liner Lusitania by a torpedo from a German U-boat in May 1915. This incident is little-known today because the sinking of the Titanic overshadows other maritime disasters that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century.

Plus, the loss of the Lusitania tends to be subsumed in the history of the protracted and complex entry of the US into WWI. Larson points out that in fact the sinking of the Lusitania should not be compared to Pearl Harbor, because even after the sinking American public opinion was not in favor of joining the war. Look at the dates: the sinking was in 1915 and the US didn’t enter the war until 1917. The majority of the American people did not want the Lusitania to be the cause for entry into the war nor did President Wilson. He thought that Americans did not understand what total war would cost the US.

Larson reads voraciously between book projects so he likes to conduct research.  He read memoirs, letters, diaries, and court testimonies in order to capture the human dimension of the tragedy. By the end of this book we have enough knowledge of many of the passengers so that when they meet their various fates as the ship goes down we really feel sorrow for them. In an interview with Europa Press, Larson explained that one of the reasons that led him to narrate this story is the fact that it does not last in memory as “a simple geopolitical episode. …My goal was to bring this story to life so that readers could experience what the people of that time were experiencing.”

He does equally impressive study of the shipping company, the ship, capsule biographies of the most interesting principles, trade routes and the increasingly important role of German submarines during WWI. The historical account also covers political and economic background, the social and political life of the President Woodrow Wilson, Sea Lord Winston Churchill in the British admiralty and the captain of the U-20, the submarine that sank the liner.

Larson makes clear that like many events, from KAL 007 to 9/11, a variety of factors had to come together for the atrocity to occur. If they the ship had left New York a couple hours earlier, the sub would not have seen them in the spot where they were a perfect target. If the weather hadn’t been perfect, the sub would not have gotten off the shot. About 60% torpedoes failed for various reasons. But not this one. Factors meshed and the deaths of civilians just minding their own damn business had to happen.

Of Larson’s various books, I’ve only read Isaac’s Storm, the one about Galveston hurricane in 1900. I found Dead Wake to be as respectful of his subject and the victims and survivors as in Isaac’s Storm.

What Beckoning Ghost

What Beckoning Ghost - Douglas G. Browne

The shadow of World War II looms over this 1947 mystery. Excited by séances run by a Madame Varché, the mother of a submariner lost in the North Atlantic claims to have met and talked with the ghost of her son in London’s Hyde Park. Wally the Bum also sees this apparition and, seven years later, after he sees it again, Wally is found drowned.

Harvey Tuke, “the rudest man in the Department Of Public Prosecutions,” becomes involved after he witnesses the erratic behavior of re-married wife of the submariner at a dinner party he was dragged to by his own wife.  The excitable wife is later found drowned. Aiding Tuke’s informal investigation are his superior Sir Bruton Kames, a bull in a china shop, and Wray, the sly snippy Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of Scotland Yard. The exchanges among the trio are acerbic but never disagreeable.

As in his novel Too Many Cousins, Browne plots nimbly and delineates characters skillfully. The grandson of the Victorian illustrator Hablot K. Browne, better known as “Phiz,” Browne was trained as a painter before he turned to writing professionally. His descriptions are highly visual. This, on the sitting room of a respectable working class granny:

It was comfortable and scrupulously neat. What light there was filtered through the net curtain on to mahogany polished until it added a lustre of its own. Michaelmas daisies filled a vase on the table. Shelves of well-worn books, Goss china, photographs in plush or silver frames, a match-container resembling a pig and inscribed “Scratch Me”, a clock suspended in a model of the Eiffel Tower, an overmantel with an many pinnacles as St. Pancras station, oleograph and prints of “The Soul’sAwakening” and “Dignity and Impudence” – this handful from a host of ornaments recalled to Mr. Tuke the house in Albert Lane he has so recently left. … Parks and the late Victorian era seemed to be his portion just now.

Visual and historical details of London in the late 1940s make the story seem real. Often mentioned are the wrought-iron railings around Hyde Park that were removed and scrapped to provide metals for the war effort. Entire blocks of housing are bombed out, and set to be demolished but not cleared away, a common situation for 10 years in the city after the war. The climax narrates a thrilling subterranean chase in the storm drains under London.

Dover Publications reprinted this book and Too Many Cousins in the 1980s. They also released  wonderful mysteries such as Bodies in a Bookshop, Death Walks in Eastrepps, The PiccadillyMurder, and Death and the Pleasant Voices.

Dead Gestures of Dolls

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

In this southern gothic from 1930, each chapter unspools a gossamer thread of story, from the points of view of different characters.  It’s our readerly duty and pleasure to identify how these strands are woven into what Thomas C. Foster calls “only one story,” i.e., all works of literature are part of the same enormous, universal narrative.

Here’s the quest: Five siblings must travel by wagon to a distant town in order to bury their mother. It’s a grueling journey, since in Mississippi in July the encoffined remains decompose like the bonds between the family members.

The siblings are sensible Cash, elusive Darl, outlaw Jewel, little bro Vardaman and the fragile Dewey Dell, the seventeen-year-old daughter. Their father Anse feels stolid and stubborn in the pursuit of his one great ambition in life, finding the money to buy false choppers and “get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should.”

Harrying himself and others with shoulds and musts and oughtas, Anse is also resigned, stupid, feeble, greedy, passive mostly but hypocritically active in justifying the low things he does to get his way. None of these qualities detract from his authority because the dominant patriarchal values are, after all, those of a peasant culture.

I be durn, if a man can’t keep the upper hand of his sons, he ought to run them away from home, no matter how big they are. And if he can’t do that, I be durn if he oughtn’t to leave himself. I be durn if I wouldn’t.

Anse, acting all helpless in his flagrant hangdog sad-sackitude, exerts a malign influence over kin and neighbors alike. It compels them to take Anse at his own self- estimation – the poor luckless, misfortunate man – that needs kindly Christian help. And Anse gets help, probably out of sheer habit that the countrymen are too traditionalist to even think about breaking. “I be durn if Anse don’t conjure a man, some way,” says neighbor Amisted. “I be durn if he ain’t a sight.” Not that Anse is totally wrong about misfortune following him - omnipresent buzzards circle in the sky, hinting to the reader star-crossed Anse may be on to something.

The only other one than Cash who has a broader vision is Darl. And he’s one gone cat: "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you." Seeing the eternal in the transient (hey, I am is, either), Darl tries to purify and resolve a grotesque situation with a grotesque solution. But he is spent, alone.

In this novel told not only from points of view of the family, we also get folksy voices like Dr. Peabody. Called by useless Anse to tend to his dying wife Addie, Peabody’s voice takes us back to the plainspoken codgers of yesteryear: Comic sarcastic fatalistic realism, the voice calls to mind the appalling stand-up of Jason Compson. And as for strangeness, Vardaman, surely the younger brother of Darl, realizes that his just died mother, like a big fish he caught earlier in the day, has gone to a another mode, another dimension of experience.

Faulkner's prose baffles me. “But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy court-house, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it’s one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.”

But his ability to create characters awes me.

The Ides of Perry Mason 35

On the 15th of every month, we publish something about Our Fave Lawyer. Next month is the third anniversary of doing this monthly piece. I don't know how much longer this can go on because I don't want to be the guy that has read all 82 novels and 4 short stories.

A Tribute to Victor Buono

Victor Buono was a heavy man when about only 10% of American adults were diagnosed as obese (nowadays the rate is about 40%). In an interview, he resigned himself to being typecast as the villain in the Sydney Greenstreet mode.

If you weigh more than 280 pounds, you better get out the black hat and forget about getting the girl at the end of the picture. I’ve been shot, stabbed, run over, and been pushed off of, out of, under and over more things than you can imagine. I never get the girl. In fact, I’m not even allowed to have a friend.

Besides his imposing six-foot-four presence, he brought to his acting skills a dollop of campy kookiness. In the early Sixties he was cast as off-kilter characters in A-movies such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964). He was all over TV in shows such as The Untouchables and 77 Sunset Strip. He appeared in Perry Mason four times.

The Case of the Twice-Told Twist (1966) … Ben Huggins

Bill Sikes - perhaps an allusion Oliver Twist? -  runs a gang of car strippers who look like members of the Young Engineers Club at Brentwood High School. In one of only three color episodes, the look is so shiny and glossy that the action and sets look cartoonish, which makes the weak script and meh acting impossible to take seriously.

The only bright spot is Buono as the rotten Big Boss of the ring. He’s camping around in a smoking jacket, keeping tabs on the boys in the gang and pronouncing words like "penchant" correctly for once, unlike an uncoached actress I once heard say the French writer’s name as “kaymus.” Buono is extreme in the role, putting him the Top 5 Most Blatantly Flamboyant Villains in the Perryverse.

Sadly, none of the Perry Mason episodes involving juvenile delinquents are worth watching. It’s funny the writers get them so wrong because when the show did topics ripped from the headlines – the space race, the organization man, industrial espionage, civic corruption -  they usually were persuasive.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1965) … Nathon Fallon

One of the oddest episodes ever. Perry is bossy and short with Della, which must be a first and only. Perry is then curt and dismissive of deal offered by a blabby fawning Buono, playing a personal assistant so transparently untrustworthy you can’t believe any hard-headed business executive would hire him as a rep. Then, to clear a housekeeper (Lurene Tuttle, a fine character actress) of slander, Perry and Paul find a fistful of jewelry in a big vase, put there by the various non-human primates gamboling about a rich miser’s mansion.

Buono has some excellent scenes with the scenery-chewing Gavin MacLeod. Mason fandom, however, is split on this episode. Some fans miss the courtroom scene. Others are heteronormatively disturbed by the implied “relationship” between the Buono and MacLeod characters. Many more detest the guy running around in a gorilla suit. Me, though there are some plot-holes you could drive an ATV through, I dig this pulpy episode because of the over-the-top quality of the overall situation.

The Case of the Simple Simon (1964) … John Sylvester Fossette

A young man approaches actress Ramona Carver, and claims to be her long-lost son. But in the university town where Ramona’s troupe have landed, Ogden Kramer, a former theater critic turned Theatre professor of UC Santa Barbara, is murdered. The police think hot-tempered ego maniac Ramona did the deed out of pique at his nasty reviews in the past.

Buono plays the manager of the troupe. He is persuasive as a man who must be part-artist and part-businessman and logistics expert. He also radiates an aura of humbug that makes you assume he is up to no good, not telling everything he knows. In contrast to the vivacious Virginia Field as Ramona (one of her six appearances in the Perryverse), Buono is refreshingly restrained in this part, reminding the viewer that he was a commanding stage performer and that Hollywood is a waster of talent.

The Case of the Absent Artist (1962) … Alexander Glovatski

Any opening scene where characters are splitting a doobie is alright with me. Buono shares a joint with another artist as they discuss the bad old world the squares made. Pretentious Buono has a dismissive line he often uses, “I repudiate him.” In the excellent courtroom scene when he is being grilled and skewered by Perry, caught in perjury, he says, “Very well. I repudiate myself!” Hee-hee, scratch a beatnik, find a hypocrite. Funny that the writers got JD’s so wrong but beatniks so right.

The writing is pretty good in this episode. The settings are unusual. One is an artist’s colony in a fish-oily town that reminds us of Robert Altman’s Popeye’s Sweethaven Village. The other is the business of the syndication of comic strips. And the many dubious characters are topped off with Arlene Martel, who plays a beat chick with blasé sensuousness.

Victor Buono died of sudden heart attack in his California house on New Year’s Day, 1982. He was only 43 years old. In the last line of his obituary, the New York Times signaled reality in the way media did back then, noting that he was not married. Like Montgomery Clift and Raymond Burr, Buono was one of the gay actors that pushed back against the idea of marrying women to conceal their true sexual identity.

Back to the Classics #7

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

Classic Mystery. When I was young and foolish, I thought Chandler tended to over-writing and left too many obscurities (who killed the Sternwood chauffeur in The Big Sleep?). Nowadays more tolerant, I don’t blame Chandler for the silly metaphors and strained similes lesser writers of noir, drunken under his influence, threw at us in Fawcett Crest paperbacks in the Sixties. “She gave me the cool hard look a cat gives a mouse under a well-manicured paw.” In fact, Chandler is one of the few mystery writers that are worth re-reading.

The Lady in the Lake – Raymond Chandler

This story features Chandler's series protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe. It takes place in California in 1942, so it has references to retro stuff like smoking stands, cheese glasses, and color combos like green and ivory. The US entry into the Second World War also plays a walk-on, though key, role in the climax.

Marlowe is hired by Derace Kingsley to find his wife. A cosmetics executive, Kingsley is well-off but precarious. Scandal would get him fired. Community property is a non-issue since his wife’s money – from bubbling crude in Texas - is hers alone. She’s been missing for a month, with the only trace of her a bizarre telegram sent from El Paso asking for a divorce. Kingsley needs reassurance that she’s okay because he’s edgy about her getting busted due to her drunk and disorderly behavior and thrill-seeking pursuit of shoplifting. Their love burned out some time ago.

With his realism and irony, Marlowe interviews a variety of curious characters: a womanizer boiling with violence, a drunk with esteem issues, a fluttery landlady, and a slow-talking small-town sheriff right out of the pulps, to name only a few. The cops are portrayed as so vicious and corrupt that one wonders if the police unions of the time complained to Chandler’s publishers. A dedicated cop muses that like politics, law enforcement needs men of the highest character but sometimes attracts and rewards the lowest.

In this book the reader will find the writing that made Chandler as respected and influential as the founder of the hard-boiled manner Dashiell Hammett: well-wrought sentences, evocative descriptions, funny turns of phrase, smooth but exciting rhythm, the seamless unfolding incidents, and crime situations  as a way to examine the human condition. The hard-boiled epigrams aren’t too corny or contrived. Chandler does not indulge in the pessimism that assumes the world is more foul and evil, mean and dangerous, than it actually is. “Mean world syndrome,” incidentally, is common among people who listen to too many true crime podcasts and read too many dark noir thrillers.

This novel is firmly the classic mystery genre, with all the action pointing to a stunning reveal that leaves the reader gaping. I just didn't expect such a brilliant resolution.

Other books by Raymond Chandler: Click on the title to go to the review.

·         Playback

·         The Long Goodbye

·         The High Window

·         Trouble is my Business

·         The Simple Art of Murder

 

The Epidemic of Yellow Jack

Note: As this 2014 review proves, I was into infectious disease books before the pandemic. But who am I kidding? I’m hardly the only plague buff around, hardcore readers are always diving into The Plague (Albert Camus) or The Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe).

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History - Molly Caldwell Crosby

The first third of this book describes the loss of life and economic impact of the Yellow Fever (YF) epidemic in the US in 1878. The remaining part of the book tells about the heroic efforts of scientists and research volunteers to discover the cause of YF and develop a safe and effective vaccine.

Crosby reports that the YF epidemic in the summer of 1878 devastated two major cities on the Mississippi River. In what was surely an undercount, authorities in New Orleans reported "not less than 4,600" dead. Noting the raging epidemic, about 25,000 residents that could afford it fled Memphis in late July. Between August and October of 1878, the disease killed more than 5,000 people in that city. Historians and epidemiologists estimate as many as 20,000 people died in the Mississippi River Valley. Crosby relates grisly details of YF’s symptoms and course (20 to 50% of infected persons who develop severe disease will die). She also tells inspiring tales of the heroism of caregivers.

The reputation of Memphis suffered so much that it never recovered economically so that is why Atlanta is the financial capital of the South today. In the aftermath, John Woodworth, the federal surgeon general, said “Yellow fever should be dealt with as an enemy which imperils life and cripples commerce and industry. To no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America.”

In a time when the federal government provided neither disaster relief nor research funding, President Hayes authorized the Army to fund research to discover the vector of YF and the cure. The Yellow Fever Commission headed by Dr. Walter Reed determined the vector. Scientists worked out a viable vaccine shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Again Crosby relates stories of the heroism of the scientists, many of whom died in their search to determine the vector. Crosby also tells of human subjects, some of whom granted their informed consent, for the first time in history and decades before obtaining it was required of researchers. The story of Clara Maass, who gave her life to extend knowledge, was new to me.

Crosby gives some attention to racial disparities during the epidemic. She is more informative on the partisan divides about lockdowns/quarantines that will seem bitterly familiar to us post-moderns. The book ends on a scary note, as if, in 2022, a virus that we already have a vaccine for could frighten us more than our mask-slacking, anti-vaks neighbors. 

As if. 

All in all, I think this is worth-while book for readers into popular history about plagues.

The Children’s Book

Note: This long novel would be enjoyed by people who liked the multi-layered historical novel Possession (1990) by the same author. I read Hynes’ The Edwardian Turn of Mind in preparation for this novel, which I approached with respect. So I had moorings when Byatt referred to Emmaline Pankhurst, Edward Carpenter, Beerbohm Tree. Another book to get ready would be Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914.

The Children’s Book – A.S. Byatt

This saga of the Wellwood family is set in England in the late Victorian era (1890s) through the Edwardian era (1901 – 1910) to 1919, the aftermath of the Great War. It is both a sobering examination of how hazardous the world is for women and children and a look at the era’s decorative arts, puppetry, children’s literature, and movements such as theosophy, Fabianism, anarchism, vegetarianism, feminism, nudism, free love, and the love that dare not speak its name.

It is 1895. Philip Warren has fled to London from the pottery factories in the north of England. Instead of living rough in the dangerous East End, he is hiding away in the basement of the South Kensington Museum. This mission of this unique repository: display a variety of objects to give crafters, artisans, and artists of all classes inspiration for their own personal creativity, works of art or commercial projects. Philip is creative and artistic through his mother who painted pottery until she died of lead poisoning from the paint. Philip sketches inspired renderings of artifacts, which catch the eye of the director of the museum Prosper Cain.

Cain uses his connections to get Philip an apprenticeship with a famous if reclusive potter Benedict Fludd. Like more than a few genius artists, Fludd has no sense for minding the practical details of life and making a living so the family is distressed with economic insecurity. Worse, Fludd is plagued with cyclical bipolar disorder. His manic highs and lows and their terrible consequences have caused his wife and daughters grief and worry to the point they have checked out emotionally and socially. Teen daughter Pomona is so anxious that she sleepwalks. Son Geraint, content not being creative at all and longing for a normal family, wants nothing more than to get out of the madhouse and become a banker, make money, and be comfortable. Philip’s sister Elsie escapes the north too and ends up keeping house in the hapless Fludd household.

Philip has friendly relations with the family of Olive and Humphry Wellwood. Olive is a successful writer of popular fiction for children and Humphrey has been a well-off banker but has turned to social activist journalism. Their strained finances demand Olive write like mad and she always feels fear of losing the country house in Kent. At the start of the novel, their children are Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, and Florian.

Since artists don’t see to new shoes and meals and dishes and cleaning, Olive’s sister Violet runs the household and does mothering duty for the kids. The Wellwood's hippie-type milieu is, as mentioned above, is as George Orwell summed up “…that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Pal George is thinking of bearded Edward Carpenter, who made his own sandals, had a working-class male partner, and unwittingly fed the image of socialist as utopian crank to the general public.

With so many people pursuing so many goals, this is a novel that interweaves numerous stories, mainly concerned with the failure of parents to pay enough attention to their children and treat them as living individuals, not “the children” or worse “your children.” It’s also a tendency of the middle-class characters to see the working-class characters as personifications of social ills instead of living individuals.

Byatt also explores themes such as the artist as parent and the artist as moral agent and guide. She reminds us that it is often surprising and sad to find out about the lives of artists, to discover they live their lives as messily as anybody else. Byatt makes the point that we are not really meant to meet authors and other artists.

Byatt also uses not only realism in easy-to-follow prose but also delivers brilliant pastiches of E. Nesbit’s children’s literature. Byatt captures Nesbit’s intertwining of love and grief, scary and safe, phantasy and hard knocks. However, inspired by the decorative arts of the era, Byatt also describes rooms and clothes and artifacts to an elaborate degree that rivals Edith Wharton.

The description of pots, jewelry, clothes, rooms, scenery, exhibitions, etc. is what bulks up the novel to about 900 pages. The New Yorker moaned, “At times, an excess of detail threatens to overwhelm the plot: no aquamarine glaze goes undescribed, no psychological process unmentioned.” But I reveled in the details since I’ve been on a steady diet of Ivy Compton-Burnett who doesn’t describe much beyond faces and body language. Like David Copperfield, this long novel is engrossing enough never to feel long, especially for hardcore readers like us who like rich ambitious novels of family drama mixed with social, cultural and art history.