Aaron Burr

 Note: It's an election year. It's only right and proper to pay a little attention to politics. A little.

Fallen Founder: The life of Aaron Burr - Nancy Eisenberg

John Adams said that he had never known in any country the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than in the instance of Colonel Burr. Aaron Burr in fact was a revolutionary, soldier, lawyer, US senator, a vice president and received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson in the election of 1800. But our image of Burr these days is that of a villain. This biography paints Burr in different lights to convince the reader to see Burr without being inordinately influenced by the conventional wisdom.

The positives of Eisenberg's biography are many. It is clearly written. She provides the background of politics in the state of New York in the 1790s and the “get it while you can” energy of westward expansion. She makes a solid case for Burr’s beliefs about equal rights for women and his admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist. She slams Alexander Hamilton and historians such as his hagiographer Ron Chernow for portraying Hamilton as a martyr. Like Yale historian Joanne Freeman, Eisenberg examines the use of gossip and invective in the early years of the Republic. Finally Eisenberg gives proper attention to the neglected figure of Albert Gallatin who was caught between his old friend Burr and his new ally Jefferson.

The weakness, to my mind, is that she does not make a strong enough case for the existence of Burr’s political principles to convince me that Burr had any such principles. I'll grant that he did have sympathies and leanings for the great unwashed that we would not expect any born aristocrat. Burr was more like us post-moderns: ambitious and ever ready to let expedience best virtue.

No wonder Alexander “Master of Lying Invective” Hamilton and Thomas “Red Fox” Jefferson couldn't stand Burr. Burr acted as a pragmatic politician who accepted spoils and patronage as natural parts of political life. Burr was hardly the impartial arbiter or disinterested elite that Hamilton and Jefferson thought a real leader should be. In the disputed election of 1800 Hamilton beat the character drum, never doubting that “upon every virtuous and prudent calculation” Jefferson was to be preferred to Burr. Burr had no character, Hamilton argued, and Jefferson at least had pretensions to character. Both feared for their own power against Burr’s gift for friendship, cultivation of allies and undoubted organizational skills.

Another problem is that I'm spoiled by narrative biographies that use the subject's own words and letters throughout the tome. For instance I'm a proud veteran of Henry Adams’ Life of Albert Gallatin which has about 200 pages of letters. After the killing of Hamilton, Burr leads a wandering and rackety life. His letters have been lost and scattered. He burned letters too (probably wisely) so there's not much in the way of documentary evidence in his own words. For instance little documents Burr’s schemes of empire building that formed the basis for his treason trial in 1807. Eisenberg explains the reason for the acquittal persuasively. However post-trial when he was living in Europe and hobnobbing with the great and grabby, one gets the feeling he was up to something with regard to carving out an independent country in what's now the southwestern USA.

This book is worth reading. Elites who pride themselves on knowing how the world really works will not relish Eisenberg's shots, thrusts, and jabs at Hamilton but us bloody-minded readers who scorn being firmly guided to right thinking will enjoy the conventional wisdom being turned over in this biography.

European Reading Challenge #11

I read Hilary Tamar #3 for the European Challenge 2024.

The Sirens Sang of Murder – Sarah Caudwell

Author Caudwelll loved to travel and set her mysteries in European locations. This story is set in Monte Carlo, London and the Channel Islands, the group of British dependency islands in the English Channel, off the coast of France. The largest, Jersey, is known among ordinary people for its beaches and cliff trails but among the rich and voluntarily obscure as a tax haven.

Attorney Caudwell brings her deep professional knowledge of “planning” taxes to this mystery in order to mystify the reader and satirize the tax-evasion industry. She quotes a fictitious travel zine passed hand to hand among tax-avoidance professionals that gives advice about lodging, dining, and sightseeing in tax havens such as the Channel Islands and Caymans. Indeed, she has one of her characters, a tax lawyer, in a faux naïve fashion, observe that when it comes to taxes, there are many people and their enablers who do not seem to know right from wrong.

Caudwell’s recurring characters are middle-aged Oxford don Hilary Tamar and four young London barristers:  Cantrip, Selena, Ragwort, and Julia. Julia is a wonderful comic creation who starred in The Shortest Way to Hades. In this one Julia takes a backseat to Cantrip, a handsome guy, who finds himself in trouble deep in the Channel Islands and Monte Carlo.  Cantrip’s uncle, Colonel Cantrip, shows up in London and his ruffian ways will call to mind eccentric Uncle Mathew in The Pursuit of Love.

Another funny aside is Caudwell’s satire on sentimental novels. Julia and Cantrip are collaborating on a romantic thriller.  “...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.” The samples from this proposed novel are hilarious.

The four Hilary Tamar mysteries were so delightful and clever that the reader thinks it a great pity that their author passed away in the year 2000 when she was only 60 years of age.

Reading Those Classics #12

Classic Short Stories set in The Wasteland. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, The Wilderness, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

The stories in the section called The Wasteland are all war stories. I am for artists writing about whatever they want so I have no patience with critics who complain, for example, about Stephen Crane, who never saw combat, writing war stories. Faulkner was trained as a pilot in Canada but WWI ended before he could be deployed.

Ad Astra. In this story, despite their romantic image as daredevils, WWI pilots get stupid mean drunk in French bar near the end of hostilities. Just like the soldiers near the end of Dos Passos' novel 1919, they don't have the foggiest notion of their future in a peaceful world. They are unaccustomed to thinking of their own lives because for the last three years they have been giving their attention to fighting the war and staying alive. The only characters that talk any sense or have any hope are outsiders, a subadar in a turban and a German wearing a bandage on his head. Rejecting their culture's traditions and patriarchy, they point out that defeat has a silver lining and victory has its snags and crags. Bayard Sartoris puts in a cameo in a part without any lines, but we do get some backstory as to what he did after his twin John was killed in action.

Victory. This ironically titled story is profoundly sad. Alec Gray leaves to fight for the King in WWI. But along the way to becoming a hero and an officer, he ends up rejecting the attitudes of his Scottish family of shipwrights. His father frankly warns him that as a Scottish shipwright he must not, in pride and vainglory, aspire to become and officer and gentleman, both statuses temporary, contingent on the duration of the war. Alec Gray rejects this advice and having no “people” ends up an impoverished homeless veteran, so baffled that he’s driven half-mad and in London where the poor have been treated like trash for centuries. The only anchor he clings to is shaving and moustache grooming. Though the characters are not American Southerners, the theme is Southern respect for one’s raising. Faulkner seems to be saying rejecting family ties and traditional values of your native culture will have unfortunate consequences. With humility, we have to stay true to our roots and in fact endure them even after experience teaches us to examine them more objectively.

Crevasse. Lead by Capt. Alec Gray, about two dozen kind of lost soldiers fall into a crevasse. After the men get out of the cave of corpses, they listen to a Bible reading. But conventional religion seems to give them no solace, given the background of injury, disability, confusion and terror. This is an effective ‘horrors of war’ story, as unemotional as that other famous American writer from WWI, but it’s so terse that it is not like the copious and elaborate and obscure Faulkner we would like to meet even in short stories.

Turnabout. This much-needed funny war story captures the rivalry and disdain on both sides of the wartime Anglo-American relationship. The American pilots ridicule a young English Midshipman and his ilk for their drunken ways and the staccato delivery of their flashy undergrad talk. The Americans don't even know what the English guys do to contribute to the war effort but they are all judgy anyway. The young Englishman is impressed when the American pilots take him on a bombing mission and offers to take a pilot out on their torpedo boat on one of their missions, turnabout being fair play. They modestly disparage their own mission, which turns out, against all the American’s expectations, to be a harrowing brush with combat death, all treated with the English dash and grace under pressure so admired by you-know-who. Look how wrong you can be!

All the Dead Pilots. The unnamed narrator is a British officer who censors the letters of the pilots, thus giving him to know tidbits that we wouldn't expect a typical unnamed narrator to know. The narrator also knows from gossip that there is a rivalry between the American pilot John Sartoris and the English CO Spoomer for the attentions of the same French sex worker. The CO assigns Johnny to duties outside his province so the CO can visit the sex worker. Johnny seeks revenge, as any anybody from Mississippi would, by raising hell and trying to do in the CO's big dog. Faulkner provides the backstory of Johnny heedlessly and unheroically not surviving the war, an event of key importance to his twin brother Bayard in Flags in the Dust. The gritty realistic writing is recognizably Faulkner but still accessible so I can’t imagine why five magazines rejected it (it didn’t see release until Faulkner confidently included it in the collection called These 13).

Today is Marine Day

海の日 Umi no Hi. Although Japan has benefitted from the sea since the mists of antiquity, it was only in 1995 that this national holiday was proclaimed as day to feel gratitude for the blessings of the oceans. Although in our present day it is observed on the Third Monday of July, I am a bitter-ender traditionalist that observes this holiday on its original date of July 20. Let’s celebrate by reading some non-fiction about Japan.

The Culture of the Meiji Period - Irokawa Daikichi

Irokawa Daikichi calls to mind Howard Zinn – a historian who in the Sixties wrote about ordinary people, their daily life, their political consciousness, and how the influential forces in government and business do their damnedest to ensure stability with an oligarchic grip on authoritarian power.

This history contains a wealth of information about the Meiji period in chapters that feel like essays. Irokawa’s thesis is that though the early years of the era saw much interest in democracy among ordinary people, the suppression of democratic movements, indoctrination in the schools and constant ultranationalist bilge in the mass media induced a spiritual malaise that turned vital citizens interested in grass-roots constitutions and national assemblies into apathetic, bored and fearful subjects. Of course, the victorious wars over China and Russia made nuanced views about imperialism unpatriotic and dissenters vulnerable to harassment, arrest, torture, and imprisonment.

The Emperor as God-like Figure in state Shinto ideology was a major factor in this process. Irokawa and his students scoured the countryside looking for storehouses with old primary documents and they also used poetry, letters, dairies and songs to support their claims. I can’t blame Irokawa for falling into the ‘unique Japan,’ ‘peculiar Japan’ schtick sometimes because where else would it be possible to unearth such precious and exceptional documentation but in literate, verbal, passionate, respond-to-events-in-writing Japan?

This is a fascinating blend of sociology, intellectual history, and literary criticism – now we know the political  and social reasons why Ōgai Mori and Natsume Sōseki were so troubled about Japan's future. For readers seriously into Japan and its busy 20th century, this would be an excellent example of accessible history.

The Ides of Perry Mason 62

Intro: On the 15th of every month, I post a review of a Perry Mason-related mystery or episode from the original TV series. In 1939 the productive Gardner Fiction Factory (his words) churned out product for an American public nervous about turmoil in Europe. It released two Cool and Lam mysteries, The Bigger They Come and The Knife Slipped; one Doug Selby mystery The DA Draws a Circle; and two starring Our Favorite Lawyer, this one and The Case of the Rolling Bones. Recall that Gardner kept writing and selling novelettes to the pulps. When did the man sleep? Did his secretaries ever consider organizing?

The Case of the Perjured Parrot – Erle Stanley Gardner

The fourteenth Perry Mason mystery opens with office manager Della Street teasing Our Favorite Lawyer for getting behind in paperwork. But Charles W. Sabin, the son of murder victim Fremont C. Sabin, gets Mason off the hook. He asks that Mason look into his father’s killing and keep the avaricious widow from taking control of the estate.

Gardner gives more backstory than usual in order to give victim Fremont’s bizarre actions more plausibility. Fremont, it seems, believed in American can-do-ism: “The privilege of struggling for achievement was the privilege of living, and to take away that right to struggle was equivalent to taking away life itself.” You would think that such a rugged individualist would not bother his head over public opinion. But Sabin's aversion to publicity compels him to make strange and unfortunate choices.

Fremont ends up shot dead with a 40-caliber derringer in his mountain cabin where his parrot Casanova is squawking “Helen, put down that gun … don’t shoot! … you’ve shot me!” Charles W. Sabin, the son, however, tells Mason that in fact the parrot is not Casanova. Fremont's greedy widow is named Mrs. Helen Watkins Sabin and Fremont’s most recent wife is named Helen Monteith. Which Helen is the parrot talking about? Why would somebody, presumably the killer, have switched parrots?

The marriage of Fremont and the quiet librarian Helen Monteith seems unlikely on the face of it. But Gardner has her explain enough to Mason so that both their choices make sense, especially hers in the context of being single in her thirties, in a small town, during the Depression. Gardner didn’t refer to current events because he thought dated books wouldn’t sell. But he refers indirectly to the effects of long-term unemployment such as chronic feelings of demoralization and self-hatred which were eating away at people, especially men, in the late 1930s.

Finally, in a characteristic digression, Gardner has Mason explain at length the importance of that element of wisdom the Stoics called “good calculation:”

I’ve mentioned before, when people get fixed beliefs, they interpret everything in the light of those beliefs. Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don’t see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance so that they supported erroneous political beliefs. The same is true of things which are happening at present. A few years from now we’ll look back in wonder that people failed to see the deadly significance of signs on the political horizon. Twenty years from now even the most stupid high school student can appreciate the importance of those signs and the results which must inevitably have followed. But right now we have some twenty million voters who think one way, and some twenty-five million voters who think another. And both sides believe they’re correctly interpreting the facts.

From 1911 to 1918 Gardner worked as a lawyer in Oxnard, California, representing Chinese and Mexican immigrants living in poverty.  The fact Gardner was on the side of the angels makes the reader fairly sure “erroneous political beliefs” is a poke at the nativism and fundamentalism of the 1920s. And the reader is pretty sure in 1939 “signs on the political horizon” meant the inevitability of WWII and millions of isolationist America Firsters that were breezily confident they could do business with Hitler.

Gardner, as usual, makes the plot move with a briskness that borders on hectic. He works in legal technicalities about wills. Whether the wealthy Sabin did or did not divorce his wife Mrs. Helen Watkins Sabin before his killing will determine who the executor of the estate will be, the money-hungry wife or the loyal son. Gardner, by the way, must have liked coming up with the character of the hard-charging middle-aged woman because they have sharp elbows in his novels. Mrs. Helen Watkins Sabin brings energy to her fusses and tantrums and assault and battery. Taking people as they are, Mason never loses his cool. Mason respects a fighter.

In the last quarter of the book, instead of the usual preliminary hearing at the end, a folksy coroner and sheriff run an inquest. They are assisted by ominous bully Sgt. Holcomb. He hates Mason with a passion that can’t be good for his gastro-intestinal functioning or cardio-vascular health.  The end features a fine reveal and a surprise.

I highly recommend this classic Mason mystery.

Reading Those Classics #11

Classic Fictionalized Expatriate Memoir. Elliot Paul was an American fiction writer and journalist. In 1925 he joined the expat literary community in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris. He was co-editor of the experimental literary journal, transition. He knew both James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, who fought.

In the place St. André des Arts I found myself staring with awe into a taxidermist’s window. Like all the other citizens of France, the taxidermists of France were individualists. Even French mothballs seemed to have slight differences, one from the other. The taxidermist in the place St. André des Arts made a specialty of stuffing pet dogs and cats with which their owners could not bear to part. Monsieur Noël, the tall stuffer of birds and animals, whom I learned to know very well in later days, made them look, if not lifelike, decidedly unique … Noël pointed out to me that men and women, like gods, choose pets in their own image. My friend took sly delight in accentuating these resemblances.

A Narrow Street aka The Last Time I Saw Paris - Elliot Paul

Elliot Paul, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and New York Herald, first lived on the Rue de la Huchette in the 5th arrondissement in the summer of 1923. On the narrow street not more than 300 yards long, in the heart of Paris, parallel with the quay from the Boulevard St Michel towards Notre Dame, Paul lived, on and off, for 18 years.

Fluent in French, Paul lived as a member of the community, joining in the pleasures of a quiet drink and gossip and the usual feuds and miseries of his neighbors. He was there in the 1930s as derangement over politics undermined graciousness and tolerance, as the French establishment, to the surprise and consternation of right and left alike, betrayed France through sheer unseriousness. The original sin of the lightweight conception of politics is that lightweights don't think of politics as a thing you do in order to do government; lightweights think of government as a thing you do in order to do politics.

I read this in a 1942 Penguin whose orange cover indicates fiction (blue for biography, green for mysteries up to 1945). But if this is fiction, then this hybrid is novelized memoir or fictionalized ethnography. The preface helpfully provides a list of the 70 or so characters in the book. The Juilliards who run the hotel. The postman George. Mme. Absalom who one day decided to give her legs a permanent vacation and retired to bed for the rest of her life. The goldfish man. The loud chestnut vendor. The butcher. The hardware dealer. The bum who slept on the sidewalk.

One would think it would be hard to keep track of all these picturesque people and their dramatic lives, but strangely we remember them as we read and feel that they lived their lives as vividly as we do our own.  We get a candid overview of the hard conditions under which poor and working class people lived in Paris at the time.

Paul’s description of the fraying of civil society as war’s destruction and chaos loom is heartbreaking because he’s so good at bringing to life the essential decency of shopkeepers, workers, prostitutes, students, businessman, radicals, right wingers, priests, wives, and growing children and teenagers like the precocious Hyacinthe. Smart and talented, woman-child Hyacinthe is forced to take an interest in politics as the threat of invasion and war becomes more imminent. At only seventeen years of age, she realizes that her life is going to be completely derailed.

The uncertainty and dashing of hope make you ache for her and all young people who had to put their plans on hold.  Paul makes us readers feel for quiet, heroic people whose dreams and expectations are being wrecked, now that a big war is going to change everything, as big wars always do.

Sure, some parts are sordid. Some anecdotes are too good to be plausible – journalists are notorious at coming up with tales that make the point they want to make. And French people probably won’t like the junky old stereotypes of foul-smelling Paris where there’s a cathouse on every corner. And we should naturally if amiably suspect a foreigner, even a journalist who speaks the language, who has the audacity to comment on social and political affairs of the host country.

But persuasive is Paul’s narration of how it gradually dawned on ordinary French people that their leaders were not up to the political, economic, and diplomatic hazards of the 1930s and 1940s and catastrophe was going to result.

Movie: The Wasp Woman

The Wasp Woman (1960): Directed by Roger Corman

Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) is disturbed. The cosmetics company she founded 18 years before earns lower and lower profit as the quarters go because its once loyal customer base is turned off that the face of the company – Starlin herself – is growing visibly older. Starlin rejects re-framing vanity as a deadly sin, looking in her early 40s, aging gracefully, and hiring 16-year-old models like any other cosmetics company would.

Desperate to save her company and her appearance, Starlin hires an out of work researcher Dr. Zinthrop who specializes in the rejuvenation of skin. Calling to mind Dr. Doolittle, he talks to the wasps as he develops a dermatological serum derived from their royal jelly. Also as evidence of his oddness, he is not interested in the profits to be had from a Fountain of Youth drug. He just wants fame.

Driven by vanity and desperation, Starlin volunteers to be the experimental subject and driven by desire for celebrity, Zinthrop recklessly injects her with the waspy extract.  However, after this initial administration, he is attacked by one of his experimental animals. He realizes the drug may make its taker violent and aggressive, like a wasp. In a preoccupied fugue-like state mulling over how to minimize the risks, he wanders into traffic, is hit by a truck, and is hospitalized with various injuries, one of which is a traumatic brain injury. He can’t remember that he must warn Starlin not to inject any more of the drug. 

Starlin, perhaps because the extract is clouding her judgment, rashly continues to dose herself with the wonder drug. She experiences ugly adverse events that affect both her appearance and behavior. The usual monster movie mayhem ensues.

Susan Cabot gives Starlin a persuasive anguish. She’s harassed by success-seeking and tormented at the prospect of losing her looks, both understandable motivations. Thankfully, Michael Mark’s Dr. Zinthrop, for all his absent-mindedness and hunger for fame, is not the stereotypical mad scientist. He simply needs more training in Phase 1 of clinical trials, which examines the safety, not the efficacy, of a new drug and the best method of its administration. Maybe the drug in a topical cream would have been safer than an injection.

And the therimin music is perfect. In those far-off pre-vuvuzela days, what better instrument to produce the sound of a swarm of wasps?