Reading Those Classics #22

Classic Set in a Place you Want to Visit. Borneo has reefs, rainforests, swamps, mangrove stands, and wildlife such as elephants, sun bears, clouded leopards, proboscis monkeys, orangutans, and pangolins, as well over 400 species of bird, including hornbills and mountain serpent eagles. The main draw is the relative humidity, always about 80%. High humidity feels good even euphoric but if prolonged can lead to dehydration, confusion, fatigue malaise lethargy and for heart patients, arrythmia .

You Want to Die, Johnny? – Gavin Black

In the 1960s, Gavin Black wrote more than a dozen spy-adventure thrillers featuring a series hero named Paul Harris. This one is set in one of the last British protectorates, the fictional Bintan on the northern coast of Borneo.

Canny Scotsman Paul Harris owns a company that manufactures and sells engines for marine craft. He has moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, where he has taken Malaysian citizenship.

The novel opens with Paul being on a plane returning to Bintan his old friend John, the British resident, and his 18-year-old daughter Lil.

Widowers can deal with hordes of communist infiltrators or a teenage daughter but not both at the same time. John has gone to California to rescue her from the clutches of a Cockney rock star named Boots. This gives the author a chance to deliver old-guy commentary on These Kids Today. Remember it was 1966, this was a chance not passed up by old-guy writers like Desmond Begley and Andrew Garve, who were old guys writing for other old guys.

The plane is wrecked upon landing because somebody took shots at it, putting out the tires. In the ensuing car chase, the three would-be assassins are killed in a wreck. Paul and John suspect that sinister forces, perhaps Communist in origin, are fomenting trouble for the oil-rich Bintanese family that run the place like the ex-pirates that they are.

They are also shaken when a bomb goes off in Paul’s rest house.

Convincing characterization and an authentic background make the 250 pages, longer than I like for a thriller, go by in just a couple of nights. Paul Harris has a background that makes him a tough, clever and resourceful action hero. During World War II he and his family were interned when the Japanese occupied Singapore. He had to become hardened and smart to deal with deprivation and violence in the camps. After the war, he and his brother started an import/export business that included capers on the edge of world of espionage.

Like William Haggard novels, this is James Bond for adults. Black is a much better writer than Ian Fleming who tended to stilted prose, baffling digressions, and a brazenly imperialist misogynist jerk for a hero. Granted, hero Paul Harris is rather an apologist for those topee-wearing days, but he doesn’t have any illusions about the constant moral dilemmas of the minions of imperialism (see Shooting an Elephant).

The real name of Gavin Black was Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998). He is most well-known for the excellent novel The Ginger Tree, a novel about a young English girl dealing with an unsettled personal life and turbulent times in China and Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. That novel was made into a Masterpiece Theater production in the late Eighties.

Wynd was familiar with Asia because he was born a missionary child in Tokyo. He was captured in the early days of WWII in Malaya and interned in a camp run by the Japanese. He has keen insight into the psychological effects of captivity, semi-starvation, torture, and prolonged stress have on its sufferers.

 

Click on the title to go to the review.

• Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
• Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner
• Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams
• Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
• Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara
• Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
• Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope
• Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell
• Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout
• Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil
• Abandoned Classic: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
• Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon
• Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie
• Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande: Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy
• Classic Set in Working Class England: Living - Henry Green
• Very Long Classic: Moment in Peking - Lin Yutang
• Classic Action Thriller: Landslide - Desmond Bagley
• Classic Conversation Novel: Elders and Betters - Ivy Compton-Burnett
• Classic Set in Tinsel Town:  The Birthday Murder – Lange Lewis

The Ides of Perry Mason 54

On the 15^th of every month, we run an article about a novel or original TV episode about Our Favorite Lawyer.

The Case of the Irate Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

The Gardner Fiction Factory (his own words) closed in 1970 with Gardner’s passing in March. This compilation of four novelettes was released in 1972 in paperback by a publisher naturally eager to slap on covers the author’s name and that of his famous series hero, Perry Mason.

The novelettes were first published in magazines between 1942 and 1953. The Case of the Irate Witness is one of only a handful of short stories featuring Mason. Something Like a Pelican is a story starring Lester Leith, a series hero that appeared only in pulp stories.

The Case of the Irate Witness (1953). Ironically, the Mason story is the only unsatisfying story in the bunch. On vacation, Mason involves himself in the case in which we are not even given a glimpse of the wrongfully accused client. Though we’ve seen clients effectively effaced in Mason novels before, this omission in a short piece is so glaringly odd that the good courtroom scene doesn’t make up for it.

The Jeweled Butterfly (1952). Gardner, in maybe a first and only time, features a female protagonist. Peggy Castle writes up a house organ that has a not-mean gossip column. A note directs her to spy on hot Stella and handsome Don on a date. But the situation leads to robbery and murder and Peggy turning into a damsel in distress that must be rescued by a detective who is smitten with her looks – once she takes her glasses off, of course.

Something Like A Pelican (1942). Lester Leith was the gentleman detective, a 1930s stock character that was tired and stale by WWII. The goofy tone in this story strikes the readers almost as hard as a character bringing his shotgun into the office and nobody thinking twice about it.

A Man Is Missing (1946). Gardner sets this story in rural Idaho which gives him a chance to do the kind of nature writing he liked to do. He’s not Turgenev or Hudson when writing about camping, fishing, and hunting but it’s nice to read subjects about which the writer obviously cares deeply. The use of amnesia disturbs me, much like, say, time travel or magic or an Evil Twin. But in the end we keep our feet on the ground as the rural sheriff and packer-guide prove to a big city detective that local knowledge trumps big-city experience and so-called common sense. Gardner believed rationality could figure out nutty behavior and call bad guys to account.

Worth reading for hardcore readers into Gardner.

Reading Those Classics #21

Classic Mystery Set in Tinsel Town: Other whodunnits set in Hollywood are The Case of the Solid Key (Anthony Boucher, 1941) and The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler, 1953). The DA Calls It Murder (1937) is a rare example of a satirical mood overtaking Erle Stanley Gardner, as he parodies shop-worn tropes of movie melodramas.

The Birthday Murder - Lange Lewis

This 1945 mystery features the breezy wit of a confident writer. This is the second of five that starred series hero Lieutenant Richard Tuck of the LA Homicide Squad and his faithful assistant E. Byron “Duck Butt” Froody.

It is a cozy with elements of a police procedural, narrated from the third-person limited point of view of the chief suspect Victoria Hime, who writes novels, plays, and scripts. Circumstantial evidence points to her as the poisoner of her husband Albert Hime, a producer of B movies. It does not help Victoria that the kind of poison used was the same chemical used to kill a husband in one of her novels. Tuck and Froody, however, can identify no motive that would have driven Victoria to snuff her quiet easy-going husband. Plus, Victoria’s independence of mind and knowledge of people impress Tuck, who is a curious combination of hard-headed and soul-deep himself.

The persons of interest to be interviewed by Tuck are three. Bernice Saxe is Victoria’s childhood friend with a raft of marital problems of her own making. Plus, we know how complicated friendships, especially long-time ones, can be. Moira Hastings is an ambitious starlet, willing to slander Victoria as jealous and back-biting because Victoria said Moira was not old or good enough for a movie part. Sawn Hariss is Victoria’s first husband, showing up for the first time in ten years like a bad penny. His juvenile personality has failed to improve even after active participation in World War II, only glancingly referred to in the story. 

There is cringe-worthy content related to race, class, and gender but it takes up only a fraction of the novel and it is balanced by the excellent prose. This was included by Barzun and Taylor on their list of 50 great mysteries from 1900 to 1950. It was reprinted in paperback the early 1980s by Harper Perennial Mystery Library.

Click on the title to go to the review.

• Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
• Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner
• Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams
• Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
• Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara
• Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
• Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope
• Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell
• Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout
• Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil
• Abandoned Classic: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
• Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon
• Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie
• Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande: Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy
• Classic Set in Working Class England: Living - Henry Green
• Very Long Classic: Moment in Peking - Lin Yutang
• Classic Action Thriller: Landslide - Desmond Bagley
• Classic Conversation Novel: Elders and Betters - Ivy Compton-Burnett

Stoic Week #7

Note: This is the last post in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Yesterday's post was about Trollopian characters that were laughably unStoic. Today's post is about a less comic approach to wretchedness. Simenon's mid-20th century novels were cautionary tales. They typically star middle-aged men that find themselves in a crisis because they have been too busy pursuing the preferred indifferents. They have rejected responsibility to identify their own preferences and aversions and renounced living according to nature and reason. Simenon offers no prescriptions, but Stoic readers will have no trouble drawing their own conclusions.  

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

The Accomplices - Georges Simenon 

Simenon tells the same story in his many psychological thrillers but it is always riveting to read tales of ordinary successful people that think they got a really good bead on things. Then they realize that they have been sleepwalking through life. 

In this short novel from 1955, after a horrendous traffic accident, a hit and run driver spends the next couple of days contemplating his previously unexamined life. He finds guilt and bad faith in his whole manner of living. It is not so much that he simply gives in to the empty materialism and mindless consumerism of society. Cynically, he has adopted false values as a mask and disowns his innate freedom to use his rationality to live as an unhindered human being.

As a child, he tapped into the inner joy that runs like a river in us. But as he grew older he just lost sight of our default settings of joy and rationality. He became a lout, coward, and sneak. With no close connections, he has no sense of belonging and feels adrift in the world. His wife refuses to sleep with him after he goes around with sex workers. His friends get nervous about his belligerence and hostility whenever he drinks. He forces an affair on his secretary and they barely exchange a word. 

He is, in short, a typical Simenon protagonist. Simenon's romans durs (hard novels) sometimes begin or end with a crime but are not mysteries. They more often begin with an ordinary change, like a new lodger, a death, a family crisis, a demolition, a move, a poor decision. They are concise novellas, clinical examinations of human beings who've become the polar opposites of the Stoic Sage.

In the 1980s, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich released a boatload of romans durs in English. But USA culture was into moonwalking, Magnum PI, neon, Chariots of Fire, big hair, designer drugs, Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go), to name only a few. In the Eighties sleepwalking through life seemed a sound strategy because the Seventies were so nuts (trust me: I was there). Simenon's novels were quickly remaindered, ending up in discount stores like Edward R. Hamilton (where I bought them at prices a poor grad student could afford). Now that we are all post-pandemic veterans, with more experience contemplating the ends of our tethers, maybe we are more prepared for the romans durs. 

"A person is smart," said K in Men in Black. "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals. And you know it." It's really easy, even fun, to be dumb and panicky and thank heaven it takes more energy than most people have to be dangerous. But Stoics are willing to do the work that becoming a smart person demands.

Stoic Week #6

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope wrote a biography of Cicero so I think it is safe to assume that Trollope had some familiarity with the Stoic orientation. At least, as a conservative and a moralist, Trollope thinks self-control is a key psychological strength and rationality a cognitive strength. So Stoic-leaning readers will find much food for thought in Trollope's Palliser novels (1864-76), which are like cushy plushy sofas, fun to cuddle into for 30 or 40 or 50 pages at a time, comfortably challenging with laughably unStoic characters.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Phineas Redux  – Anthony Trollope

Plot is not Trollope’s main concern. Instead, he focuses on the mysteries of his characters’ psychologies. For instance, married Laura Kennedy confesses her love for single Phineas Finn in a conversation with the wife of roughneck Lord Chiltern, Violet, who argues for Stoic discretion, even with one's self.

“...If a woman,—a married woman,—be oppressed by such a feeling, she should lay it down at the bottom of her heart, out of sight, never mentioning it, even to herself."

"You talk of the heart as though we could control it."

"The heart will follow the thoughts, and they may be controlled. I am not passionate, perhaps, as you are, and I think I can control my heart...."

For Trollope, thoughts and emotions are interdependent. We depend on our emotions to assist our rationality in defining to ourselves our own values, preferences, and aversions. Knowing what we control, we thus become our own people, not the tools and fools of louts who find it fun and useful to push us around. We are also responsible to use our innate rationality to control our excessive emotions. We had better think judiciously, lucidly in order to take the edge off envy, anxiety, contempt, pride, and despair and keep them from influencing us to the point where we make silly judgments and hare-brained decisions. Trollope gives us examples of characters who have failed to rein in their emotions and allowed passions to carry them into misery or transgression.

Lord Fawn gives the police such an inaccurate description that the wrong man is charged with murder and put on trial. And on the witness stand Lord Fawn’s testimony is so garbled that the innocent man is almost convicted. Lord Fawn is shaken over his part in nearly causing an injustice to occur. Though he has no evidence that people are scandalizing his name, he fears his reputation is in tatters. He hides himself and then quits London.

Robert Kennedy feels that wives must be obedient to their husbands’ wills and ways. A control freak due to insecurity, he is so demanding that that he drives his wife Lady Laura out of the house. In his loneliness and despair, he becomes obsessed with the delusion that Phineas Finn has broken up his marriage. The obsession drives him off his dot, as poor Louis Trevelyan’s did in He Knew He Was Right. Talk about a guy that needed moderation and self-control.

In the comic romcom subplot, country gentleman Mr. Spooner is refused by Adelaide Palliser. He clings to the irrational idea that is crazy for her to choose poverty with Gerard Maule, the poor aristo she loves, over wealth, ease, and comfort with Spooner’s prosperity. Spooner is so upended by her refusal that he predicts to wise Violet, with whom he’s had a heart-to-heart:

"I'd give half I've got in all the world," said the wretched man, "just to get it out of my head. I know what it will come to." Though he paused, Lady Chiltern could ask no question respecting Mr. Spooner's future prospects. "It'll be two bottles of champagne at dinner, and two bottles of claret afterwards, every day. I only hope she'll know that she did it. Good-bye, Lady Chiltern. I thought that perhaps you'd have helped me."

The funny pathetic line “I only hope she'll know that she did it,” calls to mind the Del Shannon song, "She hurt me so much inside. Now I hope she's satisfied." Talk about taking responsibility for one’s own feelings and after-dinner drinking habits. Blaming people for not helping him more, here's another guy that needs to work on techniques for cognitive distancing to reduce obsession.

Trollope implies counsel that if life plays a dirty trick on us and a loving family life, respect and esteem, wealth and worldly comfort elude our grasp – especially if the joys of romantic love are not ours to be had – we had better not throw our lives away in despondency but cultivate the courage and wisdom to carry on. Stiff upper lip, eh, what? Many certainties and pieties were overturned by the Great War, but Keep Calm | Carry On was still the byword during WWII and “mend it, fix it, make do, or do without” helped people during the austerity years that followed the war. Some would argue that Victorian stoicism lasted until the death of the princess (see controversial Granta piece).

Anyway, life – and, as we learned, times like pandemics - are long. It is in our own best interest to develop self-control and integrity to persist and resist, to work hard to be a creative critical thinker and live unhindered by nutty feelings.

Stoic Week #5

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Stoicism helped me through a health ordeal in January 2020. Stoically fine-tuning my habits and attitudes in January and February really prepared me for when the pandemic hit the fan in March. I had to manage the stress of learning to teach on Zoom. When the term ended I had to deal with the social and emotional fallout of the pandemic killing the program I used to teach in. Stoicism helped me deal with the loss of my profession, something I was really good at. It is within my power, my domain, to get benefit from every experience, good and bad.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius - Donald J. Robertson

I’m not a born Stoic, so I need to work to keep its guidance in the front of my mind. This work involves about 10 to 15 minutes of journaling every morning, applying Stoical cognitive distancing during the workday and in social life, and reading longer articles and texts about Stoicism maybe once a season.

Texts like this one. The author of this book does not aim to give information about how Stoicism was developed by its ancient founders. Instead, he talks about how we can instrumentalize Stoicism as a practical orientation in our daily life, as Aurelius did in his job as Emperor of Rome. The most oft-repeated quote in the book, as I hinted above, is “It is not events that upset us, but our judgements about those events.”

Robertson provides many suggestions for cognitive distancing that enable us to calm the frick down and think rationally to respond to events with moderation, wisdom, and bravery.

·         Live in the present. Aurelius taught us “not to be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should.”

·         To break the cycle of worry and rumination take a time-out. Scarlett O’Hara rather overdid it but she was basically right by shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders with “I’ll think it about tomorrow.”

·         Talk to the thought. “Hey, thought, you just a haint, a hobgoblin, a feeling.” This is not running away from it but viewing it from a meta-cognitive perspective. I mean, lots of thoughts and feelings pop up and we just let them go – why not do the same for a worry about car repairs, tree damage, knuckle-walking neighbors, faithless friends, senility in the family history, winter and on and on about things that are out of our control anyway?

·         To prevent being carried off into worry or daydreaming, rub silk or moleskin or a stone. Notice other sensations, our facial expression, our sitting position, the weather.

·         Picture in your mind that you have put literal space between yourself and the daydream or temptation. How will I feel about this challenge, this hassle in a week or six months?

·         Dispute vehemently what ideas are making you feel upset. How logical or reasonable are these ideas? How likely is a bad outcome? How severe would a bad outcome be? Be vigorous in your arguments with yourself.

After reading this book, I find the orientation of Stoicism thorough and specific. Having goals, however modest, and values, however plain, will help. Slogans like Que Sera Sera or 仕方がない Shikata Ga Nai have their place too. Wabisabi 侘寂, baybee.

I think this book is a good guide to take more control of our emotions in a pressure-cooker age where the culture, the media, strangers and even friends and family on occasion seem to be going out of their way to make feel us nervous and sad. For young people with a propensity to be hot-headed or older people who feel they need to deal better with the jitters or the blues, this self-help book is as useful and well-written as we would wish, a modern-day addition to the originals. 

In a podcast, Robertson said it's easy to return to Seneca’s Letters, Epictetus’ Discourses and Aurelius’ Meditations because they are so well-written, while it is not as easy and enjoyable to re-read modern texts by, say, Albert Ellis. I agree the prose is pretty utilitarian in How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything  but I do re-read Ellis' books to remind myself and I could see myself re-reading this book too.

Stoic Week #4

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. My mother was a born Stoic, and so is my wife. Me, I was built half Stoic. Even when I was kid, I knew that greedy and out of control were not paths to happiness. I also knew I had to work on my hot-headed responses to problems if I wanted to think clearly, act wisely, worry less, and stay out of fussin' and fightin'. With age and Stoicism I’ve gotten better about self-control. But I still need to work on getting too irritated in traffic, letting work issues get to me, and worrying about the health of other people.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Stoic Role Models: The Japanese &William Faulkner

When I was working in an English department in Japan, I noticed with surprise Japanese scholars of American Lit had great interest in the twentieth-century writer William Faulkner. I thought his notorious difficulty would scare off non-native speakers. But after working in Japan a spell it dawned on me that some Japanese firmly believe that taking on challenges builds character.* That of course calls to mind Epictetus:

“What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?” 

Faulkner simply resonates with some Japanese readers. Like Japanese novelists from Murasaki Shikibu to Murakami Haruki, Faulkner always tells you what the weather is doing and is prone to provide detailed descriptions of plants and birds and insects and landscapes. Faulkner loves the moon and nighttime darkness, as the Stoics and Epicureans liked sunrises. See Old Man. 

Like Seneca, Faulkner has a strong sense of the shortness of life** that is widely shared by the Japanese. Mono no aware (物の哀れ)  – the pathos of things – is a feeling that phenomena like cherry blossom, the sound of frogs and crickets, youth, autumn are beautiful because their beauty is short-lived, that earthly existence ends in frailty, death, dissolution, melancholy. The bittersweet sense that change is incessant, life is transient, and death inevitable is all over Faulkner's stories, for example, Aunt Jenny's visit to the graveyard in Sartoris.

For Faulkner, nature reflects a divine order to which rational creatures – that would be us – have duty to follow. The God of Order helps them that help themselves – i.e. we’re on our own - and chaos in the form of sickness, accident, misfortune, and malice will threaten our work – always - but we human beings like the Stoic Cash in As I Lay Dying are capable of rising above our own greed, anger, and fear. Cash did his best, their quest ended up in shit; it's better to do your best anyway, like the Stoic Archer, and focus on the process, not outcomes.

The Japanese are ones for putting up a good front even when one feels lousy and gloomy. Faulkner too implies we had better be cheerful. Beware the grim example of Jason Compson in The Sound and The Fury.  As a Stoic gone wrong, Jason is the most amoral, materialistic, and ornery person in the novel. Jason is comically perverse in his Stoic pessimism. He sees himself as the sole person in town who is sane and logical. He expects the worst of people and nature to be directed against him. He assumes no good can come to him, because its occurrence would show that Jason does not have a properly gloomy bead on the situation, which in his rationality he has identified. In appalling standup routines, he manages some bitter private humor that the worst he can negatively visualize does not come about when opportunity arises, since the dumbbells he must deal with are not endowed with such imagination or intelligence or energy that they can manage to come up with the worst that they can do. It's hilarious. 

Don't be a sour Stoic like Jason Compson, kids. Be of good cheer, it prevents the mind from falling into "depths of sorrow."

Faulkner has a powerful sense of the ethos gaman (我慢) and ganbaru (頑張る, stand firm). Originating in Japanese Zen – what a surprise - gaman means “enduring the unbearable with patience and dignity.” Ganbaru is doing your best tenaciously as long as you can do it. But gaman is enduring when you don’t have any tenacity left. This is from Light in August:

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’

Faulkner died of a sudden heart attack at 64 in 1962, too young to experience what we often face nowadays - a feeble old age - but he understood the fortitude that refused to be downed by anxiety and depression about the prospect or reality of defeat and disability. The gaman sensibility is all over As I Lay Dying.

*Alan Watts rolled his eyes that some Japanese turned Zen meditation into mere body mortification. But some Japanese relish the self-torture of marathon training and standing under falls of freezing water. The pioneer reality show Takeshi’s Castle (1986 – 1990) was a monster hit when I was in Japan, and in fact, was the inspiration for Squid Game.

** “There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust – mortal - ” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Stoic Week #3

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. I suffered a health ordeal in early 2020 even though I had been eating sensibly, exercising daily, and regulating my emotions better. Suffice to say, genetics laid me low. Per the four cardinal virtues (a.k.a. psychological strengths), I knew that my recovery was in my control in terms of diet, movement, sleep, and 'capital S' Stoicism. And reading and thinking about the good sense (wisdom), resourcefulness (wisdom), fair dealing (justice), confidence (courage), and cheerfulness (temperance) of the Stoic role model created by author Erle Stanley Gardner.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Perry Mason as Stoic Role Model

On the NPR show Fresh Air, TV critic David Bainculli described fictional lawyer Perry Mason as “stern, stoic and unflappable.” Bainculli uses “stoic” in the popular sense of “unemotional.” However, it’s worth examining the character of Perry Mason in the wider sense of “Stoic.” A 'capital S' Stoic has an orientation toward life and resilience based on ancient conceptions of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

One of the many facets of wisdom is the ability to employ logic in order to collect and examine evidence and come up with objective interpretations and creative solutions. Mason exercises reason as he questions persons of interest and analyzes data gathered in crime scenes and technical tests.

It's a question of doing justice to a client. Once you become convinced your client is guilty, you interpret all of the evidence in a false light and weigh it by false standards. When you once get the correct master pattern, every single event fits into that pattern. It dovetails with every other event which impinges upon it. When you get a master pattern which seems to accommodate all of the events except one, and you can't make that event fit in, it's pretty apt to mean that your master pattern is wrong. (TCOT Drowning Duck 

We've been talking quite a bit about becoming hypnotized by circumstantial evidence. After a person once gets a fixed belief, he interprets everything which happens in the light of that belief. It's a dangerous habit to get into and I'm afraid I haven't been entirely innocent, myself. (TCOT Perjured Parrot)

But Perry also possesses common sense and good calculation. He assumes that people in trouble with the law have made poor decisions based on the incomplete information they had at the time crazy shit was going down.

You don't need to see a man, look in his face, shake his hand, and hear him talk, in order to know him. You can watch the things he does. You can see him through the eyes of others. You make allowances for [ ] prejudice when you know the others. You can then judge the extent of their distortion. That's the only way you can solve cases, Della. You must learn to know the characters involved. You must learn to see things through their eyes, and that means you must have sympathy and tolerance for crime. (TCOT Silent Partner)

Be realistic without being callous and cynical. Mason expects people to make mistakes and commit crimes out of greed, lust, hatred, and love.

People have their strong points and their weak points. The true philosopher sees them as they are, and is never disappointed, because he doesn’t expect too much. The cynic is one who starts out with a false pattern and becomes disappointed because people don’t conform to that pattern. Most of the little chiseling practices come from trying to cope with our economic conventions. When it comes right down to fundamentals, people are fairly dependable. The neighbor who would cheat you out of a pound of sugar would risk her life to save you from drowning. (TCOT  Shoplifter’s Shoe)

Fairness, or the virtue called justice, is cutting yourself, other people, and the world slack. Perry Mason believes that everybody in trouble deep with the authorities deserves a good defense because the criminal justice system is stacked against us, The Little Guy. A lawyer can’t decide she will defend only parties she regards as innocent because that would be setting herself up as the jury, which deprives the defendant of a fair trial.

What right have I got to sit back with that 'holier than thou' attitude and expect [clients] to come clean with a total stranger? They come here when they're in trouble. They're worried and frightened. They come to me for consultations. I'm a total stranger to them. They need help. Poor fools, you can't blame them for resorting to subterfuges. (TCOT Curious Bride)

This conception of fairness is closely related to wisdom above in that it takes imagination to envision how and why another person came to a decision.

… I think imaginative people sympathize with the sufferings of others because they're able to visualize those sufferings more keenly in their own minds. An unimaginative person, on the other hand, can't visualize himself in the shoes of another. Therefore, he sees life only from his own selfish angle. Killers are frequently cunning, but they're rarely original. They're selfish, and usually determined. Of course, I'm not talking now about a murder which is the results of some sudden overpowering emotion. (TCOT Lame Canary)

Mason is dealing with ordinary people in the deepest legal trouble they could possibly face. Mason frequently has to urge them to stand firm to beat back the anxiety and despondency that clients are liable to slip into. Courage will fuel optimism or help us steel ourselves for the ordeal to come.

My experience has always been that these things look much worse than they actually are. In fact, I tell my clients that nine times out of ten they can say to themselves, 'Things are never as bad as they seem.' I admit things look black, but we're going to keep fighting, and don't you get discouraged. (TCOT Beautiful Beggar)

Related to courage, the virtue of moderation (temperance) means that a person has self-command. Irrational emotions like anger, contempt, defiance, spite, and impatience don’t influence them when making decisions. Like Buddhists and cognitive behavioral therapists, Mason urges worried clients to be here, now:

Make up your mind to one thing, Mrs. Warren. After water has run downstream and over the dam, you can't find any way on earth of getting it back upstream and over the dam a second time. Take things as they come. Concentrate on the present, forget the past. (TCOT Phantom Fortune)

Being brave also involves taking risks. We have no control over what other people are going to do. But we do have control over our thoughts and actions. Focus on what you can do, what is in your power. Know your limitations but give yourself credit for your strengths too.

Whoever got anything in life by being careful? Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow's going to do, you unconsciously figure what you'd do in his place. The result is that you're not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don't worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking. (TCOT Baited Hook)

As he weaves his way through convoluted plots, Perry Mason uses the capital skills to exonerate people who say the cozily familiar phrase, “Please, Mr. Mason, you gotta believe me. He was dead when I got there!” For readers who sniff at black and white morality and virtue ethics, Gardner wrote Cool and Lam novels such as The Bigger They Come, about a PI partnership that was not averse to lying to the cops and their clients or removing evidence from a crime scene.

For most of the quotations, I leaned on a great article by Kirk Woodward

Stoic week #2

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015 and have kept a Stoic journal since then. I write for about 10 minutes about a Stoic quotation like If you face hurdles, keep advancing to the best of your ability. Stick to what seems just and right. [Marcus Aurelius, M10.12]. Clearly sometimes the Stoics are just common sense or hoary chestnuts, but slogans are nice to have handy when unruly emotions stir. Be fair. Respect people. You Mr. Irrational Response are but an impression, You M. Feeling Overwhelmed a hobgoblin, You Miz Phantasy a haint. Ain't Nothing To Me.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Self-control and how to secure it - Paul Dubois

This book by a Bernese neurologist was ably translated from the French by Harry Hutcheson Boyd and released in the USA in 1909. The writing is stunning in its lucidity, a paragon of plain prose. I heard about it from Donald Robertson in a podcast. A copy is available at Internet Archive.

Dr. Dubois theorized that neurasthenia (i.e. anger, anxiety, and depression that make us miserable but don't take us out of action) developed because we are influenced by “our natural and hereditary defects, to our badly directed education, to the vicious influences which act upon us during our entire physical and mental development.” Our mental debility is the result of being too easily influenced by suggestions from the people around us and our unquestioning belief in unhelpful thoughts about ourselves, our actions, our feelings and those of other people.

He’s nothing if not blunt about what his experience doctoring has taught him about people that see themselves as really smart:

He who every day is called upon to interview the mentally diseased who have so-called healthy relatives experiences painful surprises in finding how warped are the minds of individuals who are proud of their intelligence, and belong to recognised social and what are called governing classes.

So much for our leaders and betters but we have to bear and forbear. Dubois was a determinist in the sense that he believed we have to accept the terms and conditions of life on this planet. He advises that we seek education in logic and critical thinking because “… judgment is just what we need in life - a clear view of things, enabling us to foresee the immediate and the future consequences of our acts.” 

Besides following the law, he advised readers to identify and clarify their own values so that they could reach their own conclusions and live authentically, true to their own core values. Similar to thinkers among the Stoics, Buddhists, and Vedantists, he claims appetite, fear, pleasure and distress are the four white-boned demon-passions we have to fight.

The sole liberty that man enjoys is the power to react under the influence of an idea, the ability to obey either the motives of feeling, that is to say, of his passions - or the motives of reason. This obedience is willing, and that is why we call it free, but this willingness depends upon our innate and acquired mentality. To struggle against the temptation of the passions, we require not liberty but a uniformity of moral views that would make the mental balance lean to the right side.

Dr. Dubois frankly admits that at first his patients don’t take kindly to this "forgive the world for being what it is" determinism but using the Socratic method he comes to persuade them. His brand of therapy is called “rational persuasion therapy” because it appealed to the client’s reason. Dr. Dubois also assigned his clients to read Seneca and must have laid down no-nonsense disputation a la Albert Ellis.

Many of my patients whose chief trouble is emotional come to me saying, “My feelings form a group apart, and my reason exists beside them; between these two compartments there are air- tight partitions which do not allow my reason to introduce order into my feelings.” I answer them, “You deceive yourselves; there are no primary feelings; they are all bound to a mental representation of intellectual order, accessible to the criticism of reason. So also is there a logic of feelings. They should only penetrate our soul and remain there when they have received the permission of our reason. Your tendency to separate these two fields equals the saying, so commonplace and so foolish, ‘It is stronger than I.’ This is not the spirit that leads to victory.

Though I am uncoachable, I like it when coaches talk about victory. I somehow suspect that therapists don’t talk about victory nowadays though cognitive behavioral therapists are into Dr. Dubois’ cognitive model of emotion (our emotions are cognitive in nature so clarify values and dispute distorted beliefs).

Therapists nowadays, like Dr. Dubois but with a lighter touch, try to educate clients to a less inaccurate view of emotions. Many people see their reason and emotions in separate bins. Or they might think emotions are forced on them from world, “Traffic makes me crazy” and “I wouldn’t hit you if you didn’t make me so mad.” Generally speaking, people need to be less naïve about their ability to control their emotions and smarten up about reason and emotions being interconnected.

At least, I do! 

Who knows why some scholarly items die and others do not? Though Dr. Dubois’ books were translated into incredibly clear English, he was not widely read in the UK or the USA. Donald Robertson, CBT therapist, points out that Dr. Dubois did not write a book about perversions nor did he lecture at American universities on sensational topics like penis envy and castration anxiety like you-know-who. Dubois urged us to think more seriously about common sense topics like courage, patience, and tolerance and was forgotten in the West. Ironically he stayed in good repute in the USSR, where Freudianism was regarded as pseudo-scientific rubbish, one of the few things the commissars got right.

Anyway, even for a moralistically vain palooka like me, sometimes Dubois’ moral exhortations feel earnest and over the top. But I’m glad I read this. I believe that my tranquil resilient old age will be closely connected to my taking responsibility for attitudes I adopt in response to the emotional shoals and challenges of aging. Does this response help me or hurt me? Does this response square with the facts? Does this response seem logical and reasonable?