Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

19^th Century Classic. I’ve been reading Thackeray since about 2017 but I read a fistful of his books - Barry Lyndon, Pendennis, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo - before I got around to the one everybody reads if they are going to read Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Because I didn’t want to approach Thackeray the way everybody else does – even, seemingly, hardcore readers who do reading challenges. Because I’m a snob.

The Book of Snobs – William Makepeace Thackeray

Snobbishness ranks among the many qualities nobody willingly admits to having. Few would ‘fess up to being a prude. Even the grouchiest cranks take umbrage at being accused of having no sense of humor. And the dumbest, least competent among us describe themselves as stable geniuses.

In this examination of the varieties of snobbish people, Thackeray takes aim not only those who pretend to exclusive circles of people. He also broadly satirizes people who are arrogant about their hangouts and the pets they keep. Doing so, he paints wonderful word pictures:

At six o'clock in the full season, when all the world is in St. James's Street, and the carriages are cutting in and out among the cabs on the stand, and the tufted dandies are showing their listless faces out of 'White's,' and you see respectable grey-headed gentlemen waggling their heads to each other through the plate-glass windows of 'Arthur's:' and the red-coats wish to be Briareian, so as to hold all the gentlemen's horses; and that wonderful red-coated royal porter is sunning himself before Marlborough House;—at the noon of London time, you see a light-yellow carriage with black horses, and a coachman in a tight floss-silk wig, and two footmen in powder and white and yellow liveries, and a large woman inside in shot-silk, a poodle, and a pink parasol, which drives up to the gate of the Conflagrative, and the page goes and says to Mr. Goldmore (who is perfectly aware of the fact, as he is looking out of the windows with about forty other 'Conflagrative' bucks), 'Your carriage, Sir.' G. wags his head. 'Remember, eight o'clock precisely,' says he to Mulligatawney, the other East India Director; and, ascending the carriage, plumps down by the side of Mrs. Goldmore for a drive in the Park, and then home to Portland Place. As the carriage whirls off, all the young bucks in the Club feel a secret elation. It is a part of their establishment, as it were. That carriage belongs to their Club, and their Club belongs to them. They follow the equipage with interest; they eye it knowingly as they see it in the Park. But halt! we are not come to the Club Snobs yet. O my brave Snobs, what a flurry there will be among you when those papers appear!

As in his other books, Thackeray’s intention is to get us to thinking so that reading will reveal something of ourselves to ourselves. So I wonder about snobbery in my own daily life. My back gets up when I encounter entitled narcissism so it’s lucky for me that I don’t often meet people who think their wealth and status provide paths that will bypass lonely graves. Nor do I rub shoulders with reverse snobs who think they are ready for the apocalypse because they can change an oil filter.

What I’m snobbish about is clear. I’m a reading snob. I pat myself on the back for reading books virtually nobody else reads.

The Ides of Perry Mason 10

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Long-legged Models – Erle Stanley Gardner

Mystery readers who like old-school police procedurals would probably enjoy Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. The reason is that Mason novels follow a structure that rarely varies and the swiftly unfolding action, like a bag of chips, can be savored to the very end.

The opening chapter finds a client describing a hornet’s nest to Mason. Stephanie Faulkner inherited majority stock in a little Vegas casino from her father Glen, who was murdered six months before. A shadowy company has pressure the other stockholders into selling but a man named George Casselman has bought off the other shaken stockholders and how wants her stock. Della Street, Mason’s legal secretary and office manager, gives her take on the client and the situation. Perry sics his PI Paul Drake to dig around.

The next couple of chapters detail a scheme on the margins of illegality or an outright criminal enterprise, the murder and the arrest of Mason’s client by the DA Hamilton Burger. Casselman end up with a bullet through  his pump. Steph is brought to trial. 

In the court room scene, usually the last third of the novel, Mason gets to the bottom of motives with a cross-examination eliciting a confession or a revelation of the fallibility of witness’ perceptions or wrinkles in time and logic.

Hard-headed and realistic, Gardner does not get into motivations beyond the Big Four of love, hate, greed, and lust. Gardner’s invention as a generator of stories holds our interest, however, especially whenever Mason juggles the evidence in order to stall or deceive the police. In this novel, Mason tells Della Street that hocus-pocus is an ethical way to defend a client:

It's my contention, Della, that an attorney doesn't have to sit back and wait until a witness gets on the stand and then test his recollection simply by asking him questions. If facts can be shuffled in such a way that it will confuse a witness who isn't absolutely certain of his story, and if the attorney doesn't suppress, conceal, or distort any of the actual evidence, I claim the attorney is within his rights.

Freeman Wills Crofts took the “locked room” about as far as it could go. Gardner’s specialty was pairs of guns. In this late Fifties mystery, a pair of guns is shuffled until we readers come to the point of crying, “Uncle! This is too complicated!” That’s why I have not discussed the plot – to avoid the risk of spoiling the book for readers who just want to be swept along by Gardner’s supernatural power of narrative. Once you start a Perry Mason novel, it is impossible to put down.

Hollywood

Hollywood: A Novel of the America in the 1920s - Gore Vidal

In fact, about half the book is set in 1917-18. This finely written novel features historical figures such as Woodrow Wilson and megalomaniac William Randolf Hearst and fictional ones like Caroline and Blaise Stanford, who entertained in the previous novel Empire (1987).

The history covers the material never dealt with in school and handled with kid gloves in teevee documentaries: the unpopularity of WWI in the US and its corrosive aftershocks on social and political attitudes, the bitterness between Wilson and TR, the poor health of Wilson, AG Palmer’s crackdown on leftists and “hyphenated Americans,” the corruption under Harding, etc. The book also examines the development of Hollywood as an economic and propaganda force.

One reviewer says that Vidal is good at putting words in other people’s mouths so it’s worth this lengthy quotation:

''I was three years old,'' [Woodrow Wilson] said at last, ''when Lincoln was elected and the Civil War began. My father was a clergyman in Staunton - then, later, we moved to Augusta, Georgia. I was eight years old when the war ended and Mr. Lincoln was killed. In Augusta my father's church was a . . . was used as a hospital for our troops. I remember all that. I remember Jefferson Davis being led a captive through the town. I remember how he. . . . My family suffered very little. But what we saw around us, the bitterness of the losers in the war and the brutality of the winners . . . well, none of this was lost on me. I am not,'' a wintry close-lipped smile divided for an instant the rude stone face, ''an enthusiast of war like Colonel Roosevelt, whose mentality is that of child of six and whose imagination must be nonexistent. You see, I can imagine what this war will do to us. I pray I'm wrong. But I am deathly afraid that once you lead this people - and I know them well - into war, they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. Because to fight to win, you must be brutal and ruthless, and that spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life. You - Congress - will be infected by it, too, and the police, and the average citizen. The whole lot. Then we shall win. But what shall we win?”

The Fruit Palace

The Fruit Palace - Charles Nicholl

This 1986 narrative is an example of the great travel writing released in the late 1980s, like O’Hanlon’s book about Borneo and Chatwin’s about Patagonia. It is an account of his trip to Colombia on a magazine assignment to write ”'The Great Cocaine Story.” He gives superb descriptions of street scenes and bars, far-flung jungle villages, waterfronts, and even a slaughterhouse. To get the story, he becomes part of the story by posing as a coke buyer. Unlike O’Hanlon and Chatwin, though, I get the feeling that Nicholl is telling the truth with no embroidering. Well worth reading for those into adventure stories, Colombia and its gifted people, or books about dope.

Movie: The Sphinx

The Sphinx

1933 / 64 minutes

A strangler is ushering stockbrokers out of this vale of tears. In this Depression-era movie, the hard-boiled  detective tells the cynical reporter that only about half the population has a grudge against stockbrokers. But suspicion falls on a philanthropist, mainly because eyewitnesses place him at the scene of the murders. The problem is that the suspect can neither hear nor speak.  Since the person of interest is taking an interest in the reporter’s girl friend, the reporter is certain where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In this production by low-rent studio Monogram Pictures, the sets are huge. Cavernous are the offices of the newspaper, the courtroom, and the philanthropist’s creepy old mansion. The script is better than average, with more wit than we expect and antique Americanisms such as ‘You’re a pal,” “Make it snappy,” and “a good swift kick.” Lionel Atwill plays the philanthropist convincingly but Jack Burton as the reporter delivers his lines too fast. Instead of being one-dimensional characters, they have one and half dimensions.  Certainly, the story has its fair share of silliness but at barely more than a hour this is passable entertainment.

Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

20^th Century Classic. My sense of “classic” for Simenon’s non-Maigret novels is that they are remarkably and instructively typical of post-WWII existential novels. The philosophy – or orientation – of existentialism enjoyed a heyday after WWII. Understandably, given that war’s destruction and horrors. Simenon, though he is not as explicit about it as Camus, assumes that we are responsible for the directions our lives take (we make the choices) and that we are responsible to find ways to explain the world to ourselves and not sleepwalk through life depending on other people, customs, or authority  to guide us.

The Girl with a Squint - Georges Simenon (1951)

Rochefort, France, 1922. To flee the go-nowhere poverty of their natal town, two young girls get summer temp jobs as maids-of-all-work in a small hotel-restaurant in Fourras, Les Ondines, on the edge of a beach near La Rochelle.

Marie Gladel (eighteen) and Sylvie Danel (seventeen) are childhood friends. They have in common their desire to escape poverty and live in  Paris. However, many things separate them. Sylvie is beautiful enough to stop men in their tracks. She has a taste for the good things in life, though she has never experienced them and she’s as lazy as a toad. Demanding and selfish, she is relentless and manipulative in reaching her goals. She manages to get her fingers on what she covets, even if she has to debase herself and others to do so. The important thing is to have it and tuff luck on others.

Marie does not have the same assets. She’s cross-eyed, short, and scrawny. Not confident because of her lack of looks, she is both humble and reserved, envious and sneaky. But always straightforward and courageous; like most people, she assumes all her ways are clean, more moral than others. Still affectionate though. Marie despises and adores Sylvie, feels jealous and hates her. But she cannot do without her.

Summer does not end without Sylvie in a peck of trouble. Through her thoughtlessly provocative behavior, she eggs on to suicide a cognitively disabled young man employed in the same hotel-restaurant. She also yields to the advances of his boss, the rude and cruel Mr. Clément.

In second half of the book Simenon shifts the setting in time and place. Telling would constitute a spoiler. Simenon then show us how both Sylvie and Marie end up a life together that would have made them shudder when they were young. This plain-spoken novel explores people enabling each other in less than ideal mental health and in efforts to avoid living life as a responsible adult.

Back to the Classics #3

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Abandoned Classic. Some years ago I bailed out this 1962 survey when I realized that Wilson was not going to cover Frederick Douglass despite the power of Douglass' post-war speeches and  My Bondage and My Freedom. Older now, I think ideally a writer can write about what they wish without having always to be inclusive. I’m down with it if James Baldwin wants to write about white guys named David and Giovanni or William Styron wants to write about a slave named Nat. Sorry my examples date me; I do hear that Twittter regularly explodes with outraged people telling writers what subjects they can and cannot write about.,

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War – Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was a critic for various high-prestige periodicals from the Thirties to the Seventies. This book is a collection of long pieces he wrote for The New Yorker. He comments upon a broad array of writings by such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Frederick Law Olmsted, Colonel Wentworth Higginson, Mary Chestnut, Robert E. Lee, and Hinton Helper. He also examines Southern apologists such as George Fitzhugh and Alexander Stephens. Perhaps as an indicator of how forgotten figures such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown were at the time, absent are pieces by the slave, the escaped slave, and the free Negro.

Another thing I rather despised about the book is Wilson’s sympathy for the Old South. Honor, good manners, style. Yadda Yadda Yadda. Ole Massa and Missy and dere minority culture victimized by dat tyrant Linkum and hiz guldang fedral gubmint. It was those triggered Abolitionists, those  ur-SJW’s, that carried the ideological water for the North’s greedy drive for expansion.

Wilson has the problem of many journalists and critics: he bases sweeping generalizations on what the reader suspects is not much evidence. One is often nagged by wondering what other critics have opined on the subject and whether Wilson is not citing sources that he ought to be. I work at a university so maybe I'm sensitive to niceties like giving credit.

On the other hand, I don’t where else I would have read about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband Calvin who wrote her mean letters that have to be read to be believed. In the context of another marriage, Wilson tells the story of the conflict Sherman had with his wife Ellen when their son became a Jesuit priest. He blamed the son’s decision on Ellen, who said, “You knew when you married me that I was a Catholic”, to which Sherman replied, “Of course I did, but I didn’t know you would get worse every year.”

To wrap up, I would recommend this collection of essays to people interested in American Literature, intellectual history, and of course the American Civil War. Wilson short biographies and overviews of the writers’ work are concise and interesting.

Note: David Blight's brilliant review of this is here.