Henry James, For Once

Selected Short Stories - Henry James

Besides Daisy Miller, this ancient Penguin I bought in Japan near the end of the 20th century has  three other short stories:

The Last of the Valerii (1874) is about an international marriage. Martha is a stylish American who marries Count Macro Valerio and settles down in his country. During a make-over of his ancestral grounds, an ancient statue of Juno is dug up. The count has been rather an unconscious pagan since his dim-witted youth , without the power to comprehend the challenging belief system of Christianity. He begins worshiping the statue, which adds a heathenish supernatural turn to the story. He ignores his American spouse. James obliquely gets across the delicate fact that he has stopped sleeping with her. Naturally this situation can’t continue but how does Martha end it?

The Real Thing (1892) is story about the visual arts and its parallels with writing fiction, models, and their conflicts with real life. James gets in telling jabs against the deadly conventional British social system of the time. Social class has erected such impenetrable barriers that people from different backgrounds can’t begin to understand each other. A shabby genteel couple are so down at heels that they are begging for work and a tiny income, but the artist is so in awe of them that he can’t ask them to do chores that he has his Italian and Cockney models do. The artist is so discomfited by them that he cuts them loose, though they are desperate.

In The Lesson of the Master (1888) a long-married high literary figure, Henry St. George, advises an aspiring writer, Paul Overt, to give up the idea of marrying red-headed Marian Fancourt and instead to devote all his energy to writing. I mustn’t say any more lest I risk giving away the game, save it is a great story.

Back to the Classics #12

Classic with a Name in the Title. Starting with The Tale of Genji, novel writers have dearly loved naming novels with the name of the hero of the novel. For Trollope, see also Rachel Ray, Miss Mackenzie, Doctor Thorne, and Cousin Henry.

Phineas Finn: The Irish Member – Anthony Trollope

This engaging novel from 1869 tells the story of a young Irishman, the only son of a successful doctor in County Clare, who begins his adult life in London studying law in the odd way they study law in that part of the world. Young Phineas is blessed with luck, being born handsome and pleasant by disposition. Charming as he is, however, he’s no scholar.

So he is lucky again when he builds a useful friendship with Whig politician Barrington Erle who recommends that he run for an Irish seat for parliament. A child of fortune again, he wins in “just one of those flukes that occur once in a dozen elections,” causing his law mentor Mr. Low to warn darkly:

… Even if you are successful, what are you to become? You will be the creature of some minister, not his colleague. You are to make your way up the ladder by pretending to agree whenever agreement is demanded from you, and by voting whether you agree or do not. And what is to be your reward? Some few precarious hundreds a year, lasting just so long as a party may remain in power and you can retain a seat in Parliament! It is at the best slavery and degradation,—even if you are lucky enough to achieve the slavery.

Finn’s first speech in that august body is a fiasco and any reader that has blown an interview or presentation sky-high will connect with his experience. Finn also feels what we now call imposter syndrome, Trollope showing that feeling an outsider and a fraud and full of self-doubt has been around for a long time though we post-moderns love to think our new names name new things.

Trollope presents so many examples of Finn’s luck that such good fortune borders on the improbable. As he attempts to woo young heiresses, another character tells him “Upon my word, Phineas, my boy, you're the luckiest fellow I know. This is your first year, and you're asked to the two most difficult houses in England.”

Finn is also lucky enough to find himself in a position to rescue not one but two men. In the obligatory sporting scene for readers that like fox hunting (a bigger demographic in the Victorian era than in our staying-at-home times), he provides aid and comfort to injured Lord Childtern, the brother of his most earnest supporter, Lady Laura. Later he saves Robert Kennedy, the husband of the same lady, from being garroted by beating off the muggers. Kennedy’s feeling of obligation to Finn works itself out in both fortunate and unfortunate ways.

The Palliser novels are often called the political novels. Lots of us idealistic readers see politics as a set of beliefs about how the wealth of nations ought to be divided up, but a character in this novel sums up an attitude still with us today:

"Convictions! There is nothing on earth that I'm so much afraid of in a young member of Parliament as convictions. There are ever so many rocks against which men get broken. One man can't keep his temper. Another can't hold his tongue. A third can't say a word unless he has been priming himself half a session. A fourth is always thinking of himself, and wanting more than he can get. A fifth is idle, and won't be there when he's wanted. A sixth is always in the way. A seventh lies so that you never can trust him. I've had to do with them all, but a fellow with convictions is the worst of all."

It appears I have written 500 words about this novel without telling anything about the plot. I don’t think that Trollope especially cared about the story. Instead, he puts his energy and creativity into memorable characters.

Two men and three women especially stand out. Lord Chiltern aka Oswald Standish brings to mind the tumult and selfishness of George Vavasor but without the ambition that drove the latter to use people as mere objects. Chiltern is out of the place in the modern world because he is wild, impetuous, surly, brawling in the violent 18^th century manner. Nobody better to share a foxhole with, nobody worse to work or travel with. No wonder heiress Violet Effingham, as fun as Lady Glencora Palliser, is rather afraid that Chiltern will be a drinking, gaming, out of control husband.

Robert Kennedy is a control freak because, like most control freaks, he is weak and fears uncertainty. He thinks that religious zeal, inflexible schedules and rigid adherence to social duty will stave off change that he dreads he won’t be able to handle. His controlling ways drive his wife Lady Laura to distraction, as if she does not feel guilty enough marrying him out of ambition to make a difference in the world (see Alice Vavasor) after throwing over our hero Finn.

Another vibrant character is the widow of a Viennese banker, Madame Max Goesler. She’s another outsider who works hard to find a place in London society, so beautiful and charming that she becomes sought-after by the Duke of Omnium. This, naturally enough, alarms Lady Glencora who fears for the future of her son, the future duke if all goes as it should.

Like the characters in the Barchester novels, the characters in this novel struggle to reconcile their own preferences with the expectations of the world. The world hectors Chiltern to settle down. It chides Finn that entering Parliament is a misstep. All the women are told love is most important and that they should live only for others. Reading Trollope reminds us that we readers still struggle to resolve our own heart’s desire for freedom with what a silly fickle world tells us to want - money, a soul mate, property, reputation, position, awards, making a difference, good health – all desires that enslave us because they are out of our control, not up to us.

Doorways in the Sand

Doorways in the Sand - Roger Zelazny

After Lord of Light, Doorways in the Sand (1976) is probably  Zelazny’s best-liked science fiction novel.

The inventive plot involves a frozen uncle, realistic bad guys, and undercover alien cops. It has wacky inventions: dog suit so alien coppers won’t be conspicuous on Earth; the Rhennius machine for reversing one’s self and others; and a star stone, the function of which must not be revealed in a review.

The likeable hero Fred Cassidy is an eternal student (a wise-acre polymath, similarly to other Zelaznian protagonists) and a parkour artist before parkour was cool.

Zelazny’s ideas were copious and odd, but, in the context of the universes in the stories, also consistent and reasonable.

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina - Andrei Makine

In this saga of suffering, an ex-princess and her hemophiliac son live among other Russian émigrés in rural France after WWII. She ekes out a living working in a library, enduring memories of exploitation by every man she has ever encountered. The plot and incident are simple, the language amazingly poetic. The high points are the descriptions of nature and the change of seasons. The low points – this is, after all, a Russian novel – are tragic.

Not for the faint of heart, trust me.

Flaubert in Egypt

Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

By the author of Madame Bovary. Flaubert's journal entries are too much like notes to give the reader a clear idea of his response to the sights. 

Trying to our post-modern sensibilities are his stories of dallying with Egyptian prostitutes. The lewdness dismays but worse is the contempt he expresses “The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee— such is the circle of occupations...” 

He hitched a boat ride with an Arab slave trader and of the enslaved women he says, “All these faces are calm, nothing irritated in their expression – brutes take these things as a matter of course.” Yeah, he’s excused, being an artist and all. 

Right. 

The footnotes by translator Steegmuller are informative and not obtrusive.

Goodbye to All That

Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves

Depending on one’s point of view, this is most famous or notorious of memoirs coming out of the First World War. Graves lets himself write about as pissed off a book as we will ever see a civilized, well-read Englishman of his generation write. No Ford Madox Ford-like melancholy. Little Remarque or Chapman-like praises of camaraderie.

The initial chapters are about being bullied at school are unsentimental about those good old days, pits of snootiness, raillery, and incompetent teaching. Most of the book relates his experiences as a lieutenant and captain in the war. Snubbed at officers’ mess, an enraged and hurt Graves mutters that he will outlive every one of the arrogant snots. When much later he finds out that all of them got killed in the war, it’s shocking and ironic, in an angry, dismaying way.

His tone is, in fact, is so blunt that we wonder how accurate a story like this is: “Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival, who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.” 

He was also disgusted with jingoistic, bloodthirsty attitudes that he found on the home front since they were based on willful ignorance of conditions in the trenches. Graves gives his take on the controversy engendered when friend Siegfried Sassoon made incautious public statements about pacifism. Graves also describes his post-war PTSD in the form of insomnia, nightmares and hallucinations ("Strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed"). 

This eminently readable book is a must-read classic of the cynical postwar generation. 

The Ides of Perry Mason 12

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 Singing Skirt – Erle Stanley Gardner

Ellen Robb doubles as the cigarette girl and chanteuse at The Big Barn, a cabaret and gambling joint that props up the sluggish economy of the sleepy burg of Rowena.  Ellen’s employer, George Anclitas, has the chief of police and city attorney in his pocket. Used to getting his own way and dumb like a crook, Anclitas recklessly cans Ellen when she refuses to help him fleece the sucker Halman Ellis, who has not only lost heavily at poker but has the hots for Ellen. Both his gambling losses ($10K in 1959 is $75K now) and his infatuation with the young beauty have enraged his wife Nadine.

When Ellen brings her wrongful termination complaint to lawyer Perry Mason, his secretary Della Street smells a rat. But Perry follows his instinct to help a client who’s not getting any breaks. Later Ellen brings a gun to Perry’s office. She claims that Anclitas had the gun planted in her luggage. Perry switches Ellen’s piece with one he has in his office safe, just in case muddying the waters for the authorities may turn out a useful thing to do. When Ellen is accused of the murder of Nadine Ellis, Perry ends up defending her. The ending tests the already strained relationship between Perry and DA Hamilton Burger.

Author Erle Stanley Gardner always kept up on developments in the law though he spent large parts of his work day dictating his mysteries. For example, when the Miranda decision came down, he was quick to incorporate in his novels the changes it ushered in. This novel revolves around two surprising points of law, one of which I won’t get into as it’s a spoiler. But the other involves Mrs. Ellis’ rage over her husband’s gambling debts. Perry tells her about new application of California divorce law in that certain debts, such as gambling debts, are the separate property of the acquiring spouse, even though they are incurred during the marriage. Thus, in case of a divorce, the gambling debt is not a part of community property, but an obligation to be the separate debt of the gambling spouse. This piece of divorce law still stands in the Golden State.

Anyway, this is a solid investigation and courtroom mystery. “The Case of the Singing Skirt,” wrote well-respected critic  Anthony Boucher in The New York Times Book Review at the time, “is one of the most elaborate problems of Perry Mason's career...This is as chastely classic a detective story as you're apt to find in these degenerate days.”