Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly

Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly - Jennifer Fleischner (faculty profile)

ISBN 0767902599

In the eyes of some historians and ACW buffs, Mary Lincoln has the image of a shopaholic so unstable that her son Robert had to commit her to an insane asylum.  Her modiste and confidant Elizabeth Keckly is known dimly as the author of the controversial memoir Behind the Scenes, which gives us a fascinating look into the Lincoln White House.

Jennifer Fleischner (Department of English, Adelphi University) writes a sympathetic if unsparing portrait of Mary Lincoln.  Mary did have an excitable and immoderate temperament. Plus, she was loosely educated, like many Southern women of the day, to play the piano and ride in carriages. Her compulsive shopping – she bought hundreds of pairs of gloves in one shopping trip - had roots in her sorrow and feelings of emptiness.

Her southern family cut off ties with her after the ACW began. She had two of her beloved children die. Lincoln did not love her and when he wasn’t aloof and distant, he acted with bemused and weary tolerance at her vagaries. Her husband was shot in the head with her right next to him. She later lost a third son when he was just a teenager. Her own health was fragile: she suffered migraines and anxiety and she may have been suffering from untreated diabetes (she died of a stroke). This lonely and anguished woman had plenty of trials that would dog anybody, even those better educated and more philosophically equipped than she was.

Mrs. Keckly, on the other hand, Fleischner portrays as a strong figure. Born in slavery, she was raped for four years by a white man. She was impregnated by him and bore his son.  She lost this son, who passed as white to join the US Army, when he was killed in his first battle of the ACW. Determined and talented with her needle, she worked as a seamstress (custom dressmaking was required before mass production of clothes). She was able to buy her and her son’s freedom.  She built her professional reputation to the point where extremely influential women, such as Varina Davis wife of Jefferson, recommended her to others. That was how Mary Lincoln came to hire her and dominate virtually all her time.

Theirs was a complicated relationship that Fleischner describes clearly and plausibly. Mary Lincoln grew up assuming people would do things for her and make things right when the going got rough. Keckly took on that role, out of true liking, pity, and gratitude because Mary’s husband was the Moses of her people. When Lincoln was assassinated, Mary sent for Mrs. Keckly, though that terrible night Mrs. Keckly was unable to get past the jumpy guards.

Mrs. Keckly was a remarkable woman. She learned to read, write and figure. She owned her own dressmaking business and employed seamstresses.  She founded the Contraband Relief Association in August 1862. Mrs. Keckly said that the CRA was formed “for the purpose, not only of relieving he wants of those destitute people, but also to sympathize with, and advise them.”  After the ACW, she maintained her relationship with Mary Lincoln and tried to help her with her money problems.  Mrs. Keckly wrote Behind the Scenes to defend Mary Lincoln, but due to criticism rooted in racism, sexism, and classism, the book was controversial and disappeared soon after it was published. The book is well worth reading before this one.

Fleischner, mercifully, writes for the general lay reader and avoids the grating jargon of Theory. Her writing style is pleasant to read. I highly recommend this book.

Mount TBR #41

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

French title: Le Cheval Blanc

Year Englished: 1980

The White Horse Inn – Georges Simenon

This 1938 novella opens with Maurice Arbelet, a petite bourgeoisie in Nevers (central France), out on a weekend walk with wife Germaine and two sons, Emile and Christian. At first, Simenon uses Emile to explore the subtleties of memory – when they are old, what will kids remember of their parents and why? – but Simenon’s focus changes  once the young family stops in Pouilly, near Neuilly, at the Hotel du Cheval Blanc of the title.

Maurice  (I pronounce this how the British do, Morris) is immediately attracted by the atmosphere of the hotel, struck at how very pleasant it seems. Indeed the first chapter is a little masterpiece, a fine example of Simenon’s ability to portray a milieu and its people.

And what people! Old Nine plumps her overweight body on a stool and preps vegetables for the restaurant all day without stirring. One maid, Theresa, is separated from her drunken husband and raising her young son Henri, who is a budding psychotic. The other maid, Rose, is only 16, happily living away from her drunken father though she must endure the wandering hands and more from her boss. The proprietor Jean Fernande fondles and beds Rose (in France the age of consent is 15) as Madame Fernande shuts her eyes to the situation. Protecting a young female does not even enter Madame Fernande’s mind, as she figures the affair does not mean anything and while banging a young girl may make her drunken father angry and violent, it may also ward off Jean’s periodic spells of rage at conventions and baffled despair that his life is never going to change. Basically, all the people at The White Horse Inn live the life of the inn’s dog, chained day and night to circumstances none of them can change.

Maurice and Jermaine pull up short when they recognize her Uncle Félix Drouin, the porter, handyman, and night watchman. When he lived in the colonies, he was traumatized. Memories of the trauma have given him PTSD. Plus, he is subject to recurrences of malaria. Their  petite bourgeoisie concern for appearances pinched, Maurice and Germaine fear that somebody else will recognize him so they want him to go farther away from Nevers than Pouilly.

Indeed, a pleasant spot, seemingly placid, is filled with desperate people just as unable to communicate with each other as the rest of humanity. They are the kind of people who figure not talking is better so as not to reveal disagreeable things that are a lot harder to live with than silence.

A little time passes. One afternoon Maurice returns alone to the inn. He’s hoping to flirt with Rose and persuade Uncle Felix to enter a kind of nursing home run by monks. Felix ‘s reaction to the proposal is an illustration of alienated, apathetic rage. Provoked by the conversation, Felix gets a revolver, bent on fulfilling the promise to himself to kill somebody. Maurice is injured in a fight to which he was only an innocent bystander.

So, given plenty of incident told in Simenon’s terse laconic style, yet without plot, a discerning reader may find the novel somewhat diffuse, without coherence, even if some sections are remarkable, especially those that delineate the daily grind of The White Horse Inn.

Other Non-Maiget Psychological-Existential Thrillers

Talatala

The Family Lie

Aunt Jeanne

The Man on the Bench in the Barn

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Burial of M. Bouvet

Uncle Charles has Locked Himself In

The Survivors

A New Lease of Life

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

Mount TBR #40

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti – Dr. Milton Rokeach

This report tells of three paranoid schizophrenics who believed they were God or Jesus or The Holy Ghost or all three. In the late 1950s, the author put the three together to see if their delusion would be shaken by their fundamental belief that it was impossible for two or three people to have the same identity. 

Working with each other and their various caregivers in the Ypsilanti (Michigan) State Hospital, the three subjects just assumed the other two were crazy and denied that they were deluded about being a supernatural being. In fact, the three stopped arguing and fighting over identity and came to get along peacefully. More or less, considering that they were still paranoid schizophrenics, i.e. people that don’t even treat themselves nicely. 

The sensitive reader will have qualms about ethics. The three subjects were not informed that they were involved in research. The researcher used iffy interventions such as placebos and letters purporting to come from a wife and the superintendent of the facility. One has to grant the possibility that the argument could be correct that participation in the research probably would not make them worse off, since their prognosis was so poor anyway. After about two years, however, the researcher’s ethical qualms were such that he brought the experiment to a close. 

This is a valuable book for readers interested in research in the pre-Institutional Review Board world not to mention a glimpse into institutions where our society housed the mentally ill before we stored them in prisons or on city streets, like we do now. It also raises provocative  questions about why we believe in our identity and why we believe what we believe.

Veteran's Day

Today is Veteran's Day - The armistice ending WWI was signed today in 1918.

The First World War - John Keegan

The sheer magnitude of World War I exerts a morbid attraction: soldiers mobilized, casualties, ship tonnage sunk, shells fired all number in the millions. Plus, the fates of thousands of infantry going over the top, resigned to terrible losses, moves us with their devotion and the mourning undergone by their families and societies. Because the war caused such loss and basically imploded European civilization, we wonder if one-volume history can begin to explain the war.

But I think Keegan, perhaps the most famous military historian still alive and working, writes about the war clearly and accurately in only about 400 pages. The book is written concisely, with clear chronological organization. He covers the different places the war was fought, even Africa. He judiciously quotes from diaries and letters the experience of foot-soldier, provides insight into the generals’ way of thinking, and gives a succinct valuation of politician PM David Lloyd-George. He gives about the right amount of information on tactics and strategy, but fans of, say, Stephen Ambrose or Ken Burns may end up a little numbed by the pesky Roman numerals of this troop and that troop. Naturally, he emphasizes the British experience, but his treatment of the Russian Revolution is as detailed a summary as a general reader needs for such a big subject.

Keegan also argues against the “general as donkey” point of view. He asserts that they did not have benefit of radio communication that generals enjoyed during WWII. They could do little more than sit back and wait until they heard how their plans were working out. Generals simply did not know during Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele how messed up things were on the ground. This made planning inflexible with subordinates having no choice but to follow the plan, even while realities changed on the battlefield by the half-hour.

Keegan, however, also wonders why people tolerated it. After the disaster of the Somme, people within and without the military seemed to adopt the attitude to “See It Through” so that those who died would not have died in vain. Keegan does not address the sociological and psychological sides of the war, but I think readers who want a comprehensive overview of the military side of the war won’t go wrong with this clear and accurate book.

VFW Day

Today the VFW was established in 1899.

 

A Passionate Prodigality - Guy Chapman

This memoir of the First World War was first published in 1933. Frank and fluently written by a sensitive Oxford-educated lawyer, it exclusively focuses on Chapman’s war experience. He arrived in France in 1915 and served in the Army of Occupation in Germany four years later

He tells more than a couple stories of the sheer exhaustion of war and the decisions weariness made:

"Do you remember a corporal with the Messina medal?"

"Oh, yes; a dark stocky man."

"He went off with an officer we'd caught. Presently I found him back in the trench. I knew he couldn't have got down to the cage and back; so I asked him what had happened. "Well, sir," he said, "it's a very hot day. We sat down in a shell hole and he gave me his watch and his field-glasses and his money. It's very hot day and a long way down. So I shot him."

"What did you do?"

"There wasn't any need to do anything," said Vaughan with a curl of his thin lips; "he was killed that afternoon."

As Chapman witnessed men's feelings and behavior in war, he came to realize that war is such an overwhelming emotional experience that it takes on a momentum and allure all its own:

There grew a compelling fascination. I do not think I exaggerate: for in that fascination lies War's power. Once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other mistress. You may loathe, you may execrate, but you cannot deny her .... Every writer of imagination who has set down in honesty his experience has confessed it. Even those who hate her most are prisoners to her spell.

Like Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapman argues that comrades make the war worth fighting because one does want to let down those that are depending on one’s actions.

"Looking back at those firm ranks as they marched into billets, to the Fusiliers' march, I found that the body of men had become so much a part of me that its disintegration would tear away something I cared for more dearly than I could have believed. I was it; it was I.

My love is of a birth as rare

As 'tis for object strange and high:

It was begotten by Despair

Upon Impossibility.

   

War Challenge #23

I read this for the 2014 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations

The World at Night – Alan Furst

Faced with the brutal occupation of his country, Jean-Claude Casson figures he will somehow carry on producing action and gangster movies. But as time passes he realizes that Nazi counter-intelligence is watching him. His phone makes strange noises. His letters are fooled with. He is bullied to really help them. Rather than collaborate, he contemplates escape and helping the British. But he must contrive a way to take his lover Citrine with him.

This novel has a measure of espionage but mainly describes the dark atmosphere of the first year of the Nazi occupation of Paris. As for plot, in fact, Casson goes over a script by the hunted Jewish writer Fischfang and thinks:

Yet, a mystery. Hotel Dorado was luminous. Not in the plot -- somewhere in deepest Fischfang-land there was no real belief in plot. Life wasn't this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn't work that way. Life was this, and then something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere....

That judgment rather echoes a reader like me who likes more than a minimum of story. At least, what action does occur is consistent with character, which is a plus. The climax and ending fall short. As somebody who has read much Simenon, I goggled at the reference that The Nightclub (1933) was a Maigret story when really it is a stand-alone roman durs. Nitpicking about plot and goofs aside, I thought this novel was more enjoyable than the slow-moving The Polish Officer (too much of a story in that case), but not up to the high standards of characterization and incident of Dark Star and Night Soldiers.

This could be me, however, not leaving a longer time between Furst’s novels. I read Furst’s Night Soldiers in July, only five months ago. And I read Simenon’s novel about Nazi occupation Dirty Snow only about a month ago. Maybe I was unconsciously comparing….

War Challenge #22

I read this for the 2014 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations

Dirty Snow – Georges Simenon

The original title is La Neige était sale and was published in 1948. It’s a masterpiece. But it’s not fun.

The setting is during WWII a German-occupied country, perhaps France, perhaps Austria. Simenon symbolizes occupation with dirty snow. Occupation by an enemy brings a sort of filth. Nothing is pure, nothing is straightforward, nothing compares to the whiteness of the snow. The occupation brings just dirty snow, all that pure snow that becomes foul and tainted, covered in black and debris.

Psychopaths, mercifully, are rare. But it’s unfortunate when they find each other, deprave and pervert political parties, hurl their countries into insane wars and occupy neighbors just minding their own business.

But human nature being what it is –What’s In It For Me? – not at all rare are opportunists and collaborators seizing the whip hand in as frightful an occupation as the Nazis imposed. As a result, ordinary people live chaotic and disorderly lives in sickening abjection. In the absence of rule of law, in a society dominated by envy and treachery, distressed people want to keep a low profile.The occupation reduces normal modest living to a daily struggle for coal, warm clothes, shoes, and food. 

…he felt the need to cling to something stable, familiar. The crowds in the streets always frightened him a little. You saw, in the light of shop windows and streetlamps, faces that were too pale, with features too drawn and eyes that had a fierce, vacant look. Most were a mystery. But worst of all were the dead eyes. As time went by, you saw more and more people with eyes that were dead.

The main character is an ordinary psychopath with the usual anti-social tendencies and lack of remorse and empathy. At only 19 years old, Frank Friedmaier is a thug, pimp, burglar, and killer. Precise as a surgeon, Simenon uses his scalpel to probe the most remote recesses of Frank’s criminal brain. Frank doesn’t feel anything. He is a being disconnected from his environment, as if he were in a dream or were a fierce animal foraging in a drought. He scares people when he looks at them because his set face is like a mask. His psychological kinks come out of growing up fatherless and neglected by his mother, a whore with an endless line-up of boyfriends.

Frank and his mother run a brothel for Nazi officers. Frank trolls the city for desperate country girls. His mother, the madam Lotte, breaks them into The Life. Frank and Lotte make money hand over fist. Their business and affluence make them targets of hatred and envy in their apartment house. But they are protected by the authorities from the denunciations of their neighbors.

Frank lives the idle life of a crook, hanging out with other shits who are applying to the occupation the premise, What’s In It For Me. On a whim, Frank stabs to death an officer of the army of occupation and steals a revolver he coveted. Frank already has interposed a wall between his emotions and his surroundings so this murder and his subsequent crimes do not add or subtract to in his coldness and cynicism.

I don’t do spoilers in these reviews. But I will say that we should sit up and pay close attention whenever Simenon uses a flashback. In this case Frank recalls an injured cat taking refuge in a tree where no one could reach him. It’s a kernel of humanity that is as much a part of human nature as What’s In It For Me.

No, Simenon is not dealing in fun. You want to look at the bright side, read The Little Saint.

War Challenge #20

Read for the War Challenge with a Twist 2014 at War Through the Generations

The Execution of Private Slovik - William Bradford Huie,1954

As a young officer in 1945, Nicholas Gozik witnessed the execution of the only soldier shot for desertion, PVT Eddie Slovik. Gozik felt then and now that the execution was unfair. “They picked this young kid Eddie Slovik because they had to show the rest of the soldiers in that area you don’t desert and you have to pay the price,” Gozik told the Daily Beast. “Why did they pick him out of all those thousands who deserted?”

Why, indeed, of the thousands of deserters, was Slovik the only American soldier to be executed for desertion from the Civil War to the Korean War? This book narrates Slovik’s sad story. It raises questions about the individual’s responsibilities in facing up to the sacrifices required by the government in a time of war.  

Some argue that Slovik’s fellow soldiers could have been killed, injured, disabled, disfigured, or captured because Slovik rejected his duty. Slovik’s cowardly example could’ve become contagious and threatened our victory and existence as a country. Some would argue what if military didn’t execute Slovik and many soldiers did what Slovik did, then where would the military, the country be? “How would the Eddie Sloviks of the world have liked it” one Amazon patriot wants to know, “if they saw Japanese and German soldiers waving at each other across the Mississippi?” The catchall argument is given any abuse by the state is right, reasonable, and warranted once somebody has committed a crime, he is a fool who gets himself in bad with authority and doesn’t keep his nose clean. Finally, the argument always goes it is inevitable that mistakes will be made, when lots of people do lots of things shit happens and life ain’t fair.

Somehow, to my mind, the usual arguments don’t satisfy when applied to a little guy like Eddie Slovik, weak as dishwater, afraid to make anybody mad, jumpy at loud noises, hated guns, never should’ve been in the military much less near combat, or if in the army assigned to “shoveling shit in Louisiana,” as that overrated general played by George Scott said in that movie. It’s really hard to imagine assigning Slovik to endless KP or janitorial work would have hurt the war effort.

Huie explains that after a little more than a year of a marriage that saved him personally and professionally, Slovik was reclassified by the draft board from 4F to 1A and inducted into the army in January 1944. He had been 4F not because he was physically unfit but because of mental or moral standards – Slovik was an ex-con. But by late 1944 the Army needed more infantrymen for mass infantry attacks. Remember the invasion of Japan was expected to produce a million casualties. 

So the government bureaucracy decided to change the draft standards. They drafted men that otherwise would not have called. These replacements were individual soldiers sent to depleted infantry companies. Though they had finished basic training, they were not trained to fight in infantry companies. One can guess the outcomes of this policy (half-trained, dangerous to self and causing risk to others, leading to needless loss of life); even Stephen Ambrose called this policy wasteful and inefficient in Citizen Soldiers.

Slovik wrote this mentor in Ionia, “They broke their word, they took me after they said they didn’t want me, 4F they said, no use to the army, then all of a sudden I was 1A.” In his cell, Slovik later cursed himself for not avoiding the whole Army experience in the first place by violating his parole and going back to the Michigan Reformatory at Ionia for six months.

Speaking of Michigan, I want to insert that I am from near Dearborn, where Slovik landed on his feet after he was released from prison. I know the streets where he worked and lived his brief happy life married to his beloved wife. Slovik was born three years before my father so they were age-cohorts. A counselor at Ionia said that three out of four boys born in poor neighborhoods in industrial cities from 1920 to 1923 were likely to go bad to some degree because of the devastation wrought on families by the Depression. Reading this, I was thankful my father turned out okay though his circumstances were almost as unpromising as Slovik’s. Suffice to say, the local interest in this book was very strong for me.

Slovik came under mortar attack once in France. In October 1944 he deliberately deserted because of, as he himself said, "scared nerves and trembling." He holed up with Canadian MPs for weeks. While Slovik was refusing to fight, 6,000 members of his regiment (Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry) died in the fierce Battle of Hürtgen Forest. After he turned himself in, in November, he was court-martialed and sentenced to death. Slovik refused a deal under which the court-martial action would be dropped if he would go back to his unit.

On Jan. 31, 1945, upon orders from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Slovik was tied to a post and shot to death by a firing squad of his own regiment. He had been consoled by the Roman Catholic chaplain, who asked Slovik to put in a good word for him when he arrived up there. Slovik said he would. And died more bravely than he had ever acted as a soldier.

About 2,800 men were tried for desertion, 29 condemned to death, one executed. We don’t know why 28 were not executed. Strangely, given Slovik was executed so as to serve as an example of what happens when military duty is shirked, the army kept this sorry lesson under wraps until Huie persuaded them to open up the files in the early Fifties. We don’t know why the execution was not publicized widely before the Battle of the Bulge. You would think that of the army wants to use a miscreant’s fate as a deterrent, the army would have to tell the target audience the unhappy fate of the miscreant.

The Army didn’t tell his widow Antoinette Slovik what happened, only that her husband died in the European Theater and that her claims to his life insurance (which all soldiers carried during WWII) were denied. She learned the truth only in 1954 when Huie interviewed her for this book. In the late 1970s, an Army review board looked at Slovik's case, to determine if allowing benefits to the aging, poor, and sick widow were in order. The board ruled against any change. Suffering a history of polio and epilepsy, Antoinette Slovik died at only 64 years of age in 1979.

Slovik was buried under a numbered headstone in the criminal section of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. The army did allow his remains to be returned to the United States in 1987. As a part of the bureaucratic callous fuckups that punctuated Slovik’s life, his remains were accidentally routed to San Francisco.  Luckily they were found and sent to the right place, Woodmere Cemetery, on West Fort Street, about 10 minutes’ drive from my mother’s house.  

At least husband and wife are buried next to each other, Eddie in Ferndale, block 22, grave 257 and Antoinette in grave 258. May they rest in peace.

Update: The website Find a Grave allows people to leave a note about the deceased. This feature has been turned off in Slovik's case, as the feature was "misused." I guess we can assume this case still arouses strong opinions. Comments to this site are moderated by me and if you leave any hateful shit I will delete it.