Reading Those Classics #24

Classic Science Writing. This 1973 book has vivid description of symptoms to assist the lay reader. To see how sick these patients were, check out a 1974 Yorkshire TV documentary by Duncan Dallas. It's grim, but also gives a sense that Sacks was what my mother would have called “a real character.”

Awakenings – Oliver Sacks

In the late 1960s, Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx housed around 80 patients who had been frozen in time - physically and mentally immobilized for decades. These individuals were survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic, which swept through the world from the end of World War I until about 1928. Unlike African sleeping sickness, this condition had no connection to tsetse flies. Victims typically fell into a coma-like state, lost the ability to swallow, became emaciated, and often died of starvation. Those who survived were left with post-encephalitic parkinsonian syndrome, marked by tremors, rigidity, catatonia, and a mask-like facial expression.

These patients, abandoned by families and society, were confined to hospitals and asylums. Their personalities had often changed dramatically - some became lewd or violent, others wisecracking or withdrawn. Psychologically, they ranged from serene acceptance of their fate to deep resentment over lost time. Many yearned not only for a cure but for restitution - a miraculous return to their youth and the life they had missed.

In 1966, British neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks began working at Beth Abraham. Around the same time, the drug levodopa (L-DOPA) emerged as a promising treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Sacks received FDA approval to test L-DOPA on these long-term encephalitis lethargica patients.

It’s important to note that this research began before the ethical standards of informed consent were widely adopted. The Tuskegee syphilis scandal (exposed in 1972) and the Belmont Report (1976) had not yet reshaped biomedical ethics in research with human subjects. In one troubling case, Sacks admitted to secretly administering L-DOPA to a patient who had refused treatment.

Sacks was cautious. He feared that these patients, long dormant, might erupt emotionally and psychologically if suddenly awakened. What would it mean to re-enter the world in 1969 after decades of isolation?

Despite his concerns, the deteriorating condition of the patients compelled him to begin treatment in the summer of 1969. The results were dramatic but inconsistent. One patient, Lola, responded instantly - leaping from her chair and walking for the first time in years. But by autumn, her condition fluctuated wildly between immobility and hyperactivity.

Sylvia’s case was especially poignant. Frozen for 35 years, she remained mentally anchored in the 1920s. Her speech, mannerisms, and references were all from the Jazz Age. Though she intellectually understood it was 1969, she emotionally felt it was still 1926. She struggled to connect with the modern world, finding it alien and unappealing. After ten days of lucidity, she slipped back into a trance-like state and never reawakened, despite further doses.

During the summer, the hospital transformed. Patients became more animated, and the atmosphere grew less institutional. But by fall, many began to regress. Nightmares, screaming, and emotional distress returned. Some patients declined severely, while others managed to adapt - physiologically, psychologically, and socially.

Sacks came to understand that awakening these patients was not enough. Their nervous systems were damaged, and symptoms inevitably resurfaced. True healing required more than medication - it demanded meaningful engagement with life. For some, this meant work, like cobbling shoes. For others, music, dancing, and singing became vital sources of connection and joy. Relationships and community were essential.

This extraordinary episode in medical history inspired a wide range of artistic interpretations, including a play, a documentary, a film starring Robin Williams, a ballet, and an opera.  

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
• Classic Set in a place you want to visit: You Want to Die, Johnny? – Gavin Black
• Classic 20th Century Novel: Flags in the Dust – William Faulkner

“Each one of us is alone in the world."

“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

The Moon and Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham

This 1919 novel stars an artist who exemplifies the disaffection and disgruntlement some people felt with the modern world even before World War I. It tells the story of middle-aged Charles Strickland, a prosperous English stockbroker who decides he must paint what he sees. So, to pursue his creative vision, he chucks his job and settles in a comfortless garret in Paris. Strickland leaves his wife to find her own financial security. He leaves the cost of educating his son at Oxford to his brother-in-law. He makes money for rent by showing English tourists the seamy side of Paris. He spends more on paint and canvas than on bread and milk. He doesn’t get high. He doesn’t care about comfort, friends, or women. He doesn’t even care about reputation or sales. As a genuine starving artist, he focuses on pursuing the vision, so much so that the quest takes him to Tahiti, about as far from Europe as you can go. He’s a grubby person, ruining lives thoughtlessly, but a great artist.

Maugham's brand of modernism-lite expressed itself not in his no-frills style. His flat prose is extremely readable, with a consistent mannered tone (rise superior to adversity/obstacles/distress; occasion despondency), though some word choices will pull us up short:

Strickland was just the man to rise superior to circumstances, when they were such as to occasion despondency in most; but whether this was due to equanimity of soul or to contradictoriness it would be difficult to say.

Cussedness? Contrariness would have been more homely and more Biblical at the same time, yes? “Her laughter was the most catching I ever heard;” Contagious, yes; infectious, yes; catching makes us wonder, “Did he mean fetching?” “Age and obesity had made her inapt for love” Unsuitable for falling in love? Clumsy at making love? Unlikely to attract a lover?

Maugham’s first language was French so we find sometimes sentences like:

He recognises in himself an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles him; but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons.

Which a little startles him? Curiosity in? And that’s not the only unidiomatic preposition either.  I quibble, since I raised my hand, recognizing my patronage when Edmund Wilson damned Maugham as “a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing.”

Irony is a familiar marker of literary modernity. Maugham uses two narrators, paradoxically the same guy. The first is a young aspiring writer, unsure how to make his way among so-called adults in supposedly grown-up messes. The second is the same writer, but viewing his younger self ironically, finding his world-weary tone immature and pretentious but endearing. It’s jaded and melancholy in a self-conscious way:

… I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

I think the narrator is Maugham himself (as in The Razor’s Edge). He was raised by his austere Uncle Henry, vicar of Whitstable in Kent. Our young narrator says, “I adopted the tone used by my Uncle Henry, a clergyman, when he was asking one of his relatives for a subscription to the Additional Curates Society.”

Experimenting – a little – with modernist narrative technique, Maugham has Strickland leave Paris for Tahiti. Then the narrator has to interview witnesses to get secondhand stories about the artist. So we get the dubious multiple points of view modernism is known for.

In fact, the narrator fesses up to his own unreliability. Even as he delivers his first-person participant account of Strickland’s life, he concedes that he is fallible, confused, and his information incomplete, his analysis faulty. When he says, “I do not know how to express precisely the impression he made upon me,” we cut him slack, experiencing the familiar feeling of struggling for words to describe our own thoughts and feelings about ourselves to ourselves and others. As for figuring out other people, the narrator asks, “How did I know what were the thoughts and emotions behind that placid brow and those cool gray eyes?” Indeed, how the hell do we know?

And what’s more modernist than identifying the ambiguities and having doubts about the conventional wisdom? Our narrator tosses out the old adages: “The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.” Not to mention the blameless getting burned. And we work in vain if we think we can dig down deep enough to find ultimate meaning. “There is no last word,” the narrator says. No one really knew Strickland, who didn’t talk clearly about his motives anyway. Instead of reducing the complexity of a life to “Rosebud,” better to enjoy life and art, in a light spirit of satire without giving in to cynicism, bitterness or cruelty, especially to one’s self.

“Nature, sometimes so cruel,” intones the narrator, “is sometimes merciful.” Funny, both writers would go pale when mentioned in the same sentence but it calls to mind a really different novel also released in 1919 in which a character says “I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say, Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.” Nature a.k.a. Providence a.k.a. Fate – in a universe where a random exposure to galactic cosmic rays can devastate a cell’s nucleus and cause mutations that can result in cancer, whaddaya gonna do?

Anyway, this novel seems to be one by Maugham that is less frequently read nowadays though its “explore your possibilities, follow your heart, pursue your passion, believe in yourself, never give up” message is totally consistent with popular self-help and inspiration like The Alchemist.  I think if a reader liked Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge or Ashenden, they’d probably like this one. Maugham was more comfortable with realist techniques like John Galsworthy, but as an artist he was intrigued enough by some modernist techniques to use them in his own work and as a professional writer he knew using them was necessary to get some critical respect and goose sales among hard-core readers like us, people who read for pleasure, with some pretentions to taste – our own taste, which we reserve the right not to defend.

The Ides of Perry Mason 55

Note: On the 15^th of every month we take a trip to Perryverse. Reviewed below per a theme are episodes of the greatest legal drama TV series in the history of Creation. While in hospital in 2020, I was watching an episode on MeTV in the morning and in response to Burr's eyes boring into a hapless culprit on the edge of spilling all on the stand, a young nurse said, “I love Perry Mason.” I said, “Dramatic stories, good acting, nice clothes and cool cars.”

No Courtroom Scene 

The Case of the Silent Partner (1957) 

All the B-movie tropes crowd out the courtroom scene in the sixth of 270 shows. Too good for this sinful vale of tears, the hard-pressed owner of a flower shop not only deals with an alcoholic husband with a gambling jones but is also pressured by a gangster who wants her shop. Noir standbys also include poisoned chocolates, an arson fire, and a hard-boiled female with a heart of gold. A decent if dumb person is naïve enough to think a bad guy can be reasoned with and so makes a date to see him, as usual in the evening. In this case our innocent heroine finds the criminal as dead as a mackerel, shot in the chest with her husband's gun. Or course, she breaks the Prime Directive: When you find a corpus, don’t pick up the gun. It has the oft-heard line so familiar that it makes us sigh with content, “He was dead when I got there. You gotta believe me, Mr. Mason.” The noir look of this one is compelling, because the director, Christian Nyby, edited To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.

The Case of the Baited Hook (1957)

Three unique scenes push aside the courtroom climax. A man, who doesn’t identify himself, arrives at Mason’s apartment with a veiled woman in tow. As a retainer, he gives Perry a $10,000 bill, torn in half. In a somber scene in the office, Abigail Leeds, excellently portrayed by Geraldine Wall, wants Perry to protect her ward Carol from the crook who mismanages her trust fund, Albert Tydings. In her middle age, Geraldine Wall often played a no-nonsense female, frank to the point of hard-boiled; she would have been a good Bertha Cool in her thirties and forties. Finally, this episode has what I call the “door ajar” scene. Frequently in the evening Paul and Perry visit a residence, find the front door ajar, stroll in and find a corpus. In this episode, they open a closet door and the corpus falls out, in a scene as funny as it is startling. As one fan born in the Fifties points out, it's like seeing Emil Sitka fall out of the closet in a Three Stooges short.

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1963)

The courtroom scene is replaced by an interrogation scene in which Perry breaks down his lying client, the mendacious Eva Belter. When Eva realizes that Perry has lied to her in order to trick the truth out of her, she slaps Mason, then goes down slowly on her knees, a desperate sobbing mess. It’s a scene about three miles beyond the usual breakdown on the stand.

Patricia Barry plays Eva, a femme fatale that Mason's office manager Della Street can’t stand on sight, shrewdly sensing Eva to be a gold digger that has slid by on velvet and claws without working a day in her life. Barbara Hale's Della has few lines in this episode but her cold glares and eye rolls speak volumes while the tale-spinning Eva draws Perry into a plan to pay off a blackmailer, a strategy Perry never approves of.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1965)

The courtroom sequence isn't missed due to visually interesting scenes taken out of the Hitchcockian sketch book. The first scene is pure suspense as the camera follows a cat doing peak cat, sinuously gliding through knick-knacks high on top of a china cabinet as the viewer grows more tensely certain the cat is going to knock one or two over out of sheer feline devilry. In a disreputable hotel, with his high scratchy voice, Percy Helton plays a seedy desk clerk. Answering an insistently ringing phone with creepy aplomb is Hedley Mattingly, playing what the ubiquitous Allan Melvin calls a “spooky Limey butler.” Other scenes in this busy episode show a body found, the cat poisoned, a human poisoned, and a guy shot and wounded.

The acting is exceptional too. In 1964, impressed by seeing her on TV, Alfred Hitchcock cast Louise Latham as Tippi Hedren’s mother in Marnie. Latham is incredible as dusty flinty Aunt Matilda Shore, whose husband Franklin disappeared with his secretary. Still angry as hell, Aunt Matilda refuses to probate the will, much to the chagrin of her indigent brother-in-law, played as nervous as a cat by Lloyd Corrigan, and her niece, played by talented Julie Sommars, later J.J. in the too-smart-to-last sitcom The Governor and J.J. In a cute if bizarre wardrobe choice, Sommars wears a sailor outfit that will call to mind a Japanese junior high school girl. The Siamese named Monkey is pretty cute though a little fiend.

Reading Those Classics #23

Classic 20th Century Novel: Faulkner’s third novel, the 600-page Flags in the Dust, was rejected by numerous publishers. Alfred Harcourt finally agreed to publish it with the stipulation that somebody – not named Faulkner – cut it down to size, maybe giving it some structure and unifying the plot. For a fee of $50.00 (about $900 today), Faulkner’s agent man nipped, snipped, clipped, and ripped. The shortened book was called Sartoris and released in 1929. In 1973, this restored version was released; as we’d expect, textual controversy among scholars simmers whether it was “what Faulkner intended.”

You should know that Sartoris is said “SAR-tris” or “SAR-dƏ-ris” because in unstressed syllables /t/ becomes /d/, like pretty, glitter, forgettable. It’s not “sa-TOR-is.” And “Bayard” is said “baird.”

Flags in the Dust – William Faulkner

No brass bands or parties for Bayard Sartoris when he comes home from World War I. He sneaks into his hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi and his grandfather Old Bayard and great-great-aunt Jenny have to hear of his return through the grapevine.

Young Bayard doesn’t want to see anybody because he’s a mess. He feels shame because he survived the war and his twin brother John did not. He feels guilty that he was unable to stop reckless John from taking one Sopwith Camel against a squadron of the Red Baron’s best students.  Young Bayard has trouble sleeping and concentrating. His anxiety makes him narrow-minded, only able to focus on his own pain and irritability, with frequent angry outbursts and aggressive behavior. Drinking too much, driving too fast, fussing and brawling, and breaking stallions on a whim, he hares after death with self-destructive behavior. Pride and fear of appearing weak have shut down Young Bayard's willingness to talk about his experiences so though people notice he’s feeling down-hearted, nobody can see any way to sympathize with him.

Meanwhile his grandfather Old Bayard runs the local bank and Miss Jenny runs the household, gardens, and goes joyriding with Young Bayard. They try to ease Young Bayard's re-entry into ordinary life but many factors besides PTSD fight them.

The genes of his grandfather John are visited upon his generations. Aunt Jenny makes caustic comments on the tendency of the Sartoris male to indulge in daredevilry. Nobody exerts control over their genetic heritage or the jaunty ways their male relatives have gloriously if foolishly checked out of our mundane world. Young Bayard feels he has let down the Southern tradition of honor and gallantry epitomized by the death of his great-great-uncle in The War.

But the Great War, as big wars always do, has ushered in social and economic changes with implications for big changes in the future. Yeoman whites are bettering their financial straits, buying cars, and moving from remote hamlets to towns. Partying with the Young Bayard, a car-owning salesman marvels that though they’ve known each other all their lives, it’s the first time they’ve had a drink together. However, others from the country are not dealing with culture shock in an ideal way.  Byron Snopes, a stereotypical foul owl on the prowl, breaks into Narcisa Benbow’s bedroom and lies on her empty bed, “writhing and making smothered, animal-like noises.”

Better read aloud, especially the set piece when young Bayard hides out at the MacCallums after the tragedy; I have re-read that sequence for the sheer reading pleasure of immersion, Faulkner having utter control of setting, characters, dialog and theme. I'm not up to saying whether a reader should read this, the fully-upholstered version, or the abridgment. I think comparisons are odious. I've read both and liked them both. I think well-worth reading are the novels he wrote in his hot period: this one, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).

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
• Classic Set in a place you want to visit: You Want to Die, Johnny? – Gavin Black

A Girlhood among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston released this combination of memoir and Chinese magical realism in 1975, when she was 35 years old. The writing feels like material that was simmering inside her for a long time before she finally got it out in the way she wanted to, in a way that could say something clear and real to a reader like mixed-race me, who grew up nowhere near Asian-American families of first- and second-generation immigrants.

The unnamed female narrator’s family owns not a restaurant but a laundry in which all members work in hot uncomfortable conditions.  Life for Chinese immigrants is confining, with the weight of unexplained traditions and family secrets and the restricted place of girls and women. Talk about mixed messages: her educated mother told her, “You can’t eat straight A’s.”

The author and her brother and sister are caught at the meeting point of clashes between the Chinese family way of doing things and American daily life at school and in stores, the different meanings of silence at home and abroad, the clashes with Chinese fresh off the boat and traumatized Japanese-Americans just released from concentration camps, and the unknowing perceptions that oblivious Euro-Americans have of anybody that’s different. And then there are the “Who Am I” questions readers of mixed races will connect with:

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

How to separate, indeed? Trust me, these are questions to make your chest tighten with frustration. It is exhausting to wrestle with these questions and natural to set them aside, wondering if they are unanswerable, too complex, with too much information just missing or liable to be charged with too much emotion to come up with a rational answer. 

The writing is powerful. The first chapter starts very intense, about rape, suicide and family abandonment. The following chapters deal have sad episodes and painful themes. The author makes no claim the book is how to find your own place in the midst of all this heritage, all this obscure tradition, murky “national characteristics versus your own life.

I enjoyed reading this, but it was not always easy. The story is mixed with old tales from Chinese culture and uses odd and unexpected metaphors that bring depth to the story. Critics will complain she is appropriating tales from Chinese traditional culture or getting facts wrong. Facts, schmax, I think artists can extract whatever nuggets they want from whatever mines they have the guts to take a pick to.