The Ides of Perry Mason 35

On the 15th of every month, we publish something about Our Fave Lawyer. Next month is the third anniversary of doing this monthly piece. I don't know how much longer this can go on because I don't want to be the guy that has read all 82 novels and 4 short stories.

A Tribute to Victor Buono

Victor Buono was a heavy man when about only 10% of American adults were diagnosed as obese (nowadays the rate is about 40%). In an interview, he resigned himself to being typecast as the villain in the Sydney Greenstreet mode.

If you weigh more than 280 pounds, you better get out the black hat and forget about getting the girl at the end of the picture. I’ve been shot, stabbed, run over, and been pushed off of, out of, under and over more things than you can imagine. I never get the girl. In fact, I’m not even allowed to have a friend.

Besides his imposing six-foot-four presence, he brought to his acting skills a dollop of campy kookiness. In the early Sixties he was cast as off-kilter characters in A-movies such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964). He was all over TV in shows such as The Untouchables and 77 Sunset Strip. He appeared in Perry Mason four times.

The Case of the Twice-Told Twist (1966) … Ben Huggins

Bill Sikes - perhaps an allusion Oliver Twist? -  runs a gang of car strippers who look like members of the Young Engineers Club at Brentwood High School. In one of only three color episodes, the look is so shiny and glossy that the action and sets look cartoonish, which makes the weak script and meh acting impossible to take seriously.

The only bright spot is Buono as the rotten Big Boss of the ring. He’s camping around in a smoking jacket, keeping tabs on the boys in the gang and pronouncing words like "penchant" correctly for once, unlike an uncoached actress I once heard say the French writer’s name as “kaymus.” Buono is extreme in the role, putting him the Top 5 Most Blatantly Flamboyant Villains in the Perryverse.

Sadly, none of the Perry Mason episodes involving juvenile delinquents are worth watching. It’s funny the writers get them so wrong because when the show did topics ripped from the headlines – the space race, the organization man, industrial espionage, civic corruption -  they usually were persuasive.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1965) … Nathon Fallon

One of the oddest episodes ever. Perry is bossy and short with Della, which must be a first and only. Perry is then curt and dismissive of deal offered by a blabby fawning Buono, playing a personal assistant so transparently untrustworthy you can’t believe any hard-headed business executive would hire him as a rep. Then, to clear a housekeeper (Lurene Tuttle, a fine character actress) of slander, Perry and Paul find a fistful of jewelry in a big vase, put there by the various non-human primates gamboling about a rich miser’s mansion.

Buono has some excellent scenes with the scenery-chewing Gavin MacLeod. Mason fandom, however, is split on this episode. Some fans miss the courtroom scene. Others are heteronormatively disturbed by the implied “relationship” between the Buono and MacLeod characters. Many more detest the guy running around in a gorilla suit. Me, though there are some plot-holes you could drive an ATV through, I dig this pulpy episode because of the over-the-top quality of the overall situation.

The Case of the Simple Simon (1964) … John Sylvester Fossette

A young man approaches actress Ramona Carver, and claims to be her long-lost son. But in the university town where Ramona’s troupe have landed, Ogden Kramer, a former theater critic turned Theatre professor of UC Santa Barbara, is murdered. The police think hot-tempered ego maniac Ramona did the deed out of pique at his nasty reviews in the past.

Buono plays the manager of the troupe. He is persuasive as a man who must be part-artist and part-businessman and logistics expert. He also radiates an aura of humbug that makes you assume he is up to no good, not telling everything he knows. In contrast to the vivacious Virginia Field as Ramona (one of her six appearances in the Perryverse), Buono is refreshingly restrained in this part, reminding the viewer that he was a commanding stage performer and that Hollywood is a waster of talent.

The Case of the Absent Artist (1962) … Alexander Glovatski

Any opening scene where characters are splitting a doobie is alright with me. Buono shares a joint with another artist as they discuss the bad old world the squares made. Pretentious Buono has a dismissive line he often uses, “I repudiate him.” In the excellent courtroom scene when he is being grilled and skewered by Perry, caught in perjury, he says, “Very well. I repudiate myself!” Hee-hee, scratch a beatnik, find a hypocrite. Funny that the writers got JD’s so wrong but beatniks so right.

The writing is pretty good in this episode. The settings are unusual. One is an artist’s colony in a fish-oily town that reminds us of Robert Altman’s Popeye’s Sweethaven Village. The other is the business of the syndication of comic strips. And the many dubious characters are topped off with Arlene Martel, who plays a beat chick with blasé sensuousness.

Victor Buono died of sudden heart attack in his California house on New Year’s Day, 1982. He was only 43 years old. In the last line of his obituary, the New York Times signaled reality in the way media did back then, noting that he was not married. Like Montgomery Clift and Raymond Burr, Buono was one of the gay actors that pushed back against the idea of marrying women to conceal their true sexual identity.

Back to the Classics #7

I read this book for reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Mystery. When I was young and foolish, I thought Chandler tended to over-writing and left too many obscurities (who killed the Sternwood chauffeur in The Big Sleep?). Nowadays more tolerant, I don’t blame Chandler for the silly metaphors and strained similes lesser writers of noir, drunken under his influence, threw at us in Fawcett Crest paperbacks in the Sixties. “She gave me the cool hard look a cat gives a mouse under a well-manicured paw.” In fact, Chandler is one of the few mystery writers that are worth re-reading.

The Lady in the Lake – Raymond Chandler

This story features Chandler's series protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe. It takes place in California in 1942, so it has references to retro stuff like smoking stands, cheese glasses, and color combos like green and ivory. The US entry into the Second World War also plays a walk-on, though key, role in the climax.

Marlowe is hired by Derace Kingsley to find his wife. A cosmetics executive, Kingsley is well-off but precarious. Scandal would get him fired. Community property is a non-issue since his wife’s money – from bubbling crude in Texas - is hers alone. She’s been missing for a month, with the only trace of her a bizarre telegram sent from El Paso asking for a divorce. Kingsley needs reassurance that she’s okay because he’s edgy about her getting busted due to her drunk and disorderly behavior and thrill-seeking pursuit of shoplifting. Their love burned out some time ago.

With his realism and irony, Marlowe interviews a variety of curious characters: a womanizer boiling with violence, a drunk with esteem issues, a fluttery landlady, and a slow-talking small-town sheriff right out of the pulps, to name only a few. The cops are portrayed as so vicious and corrupt that one wonders if the police unions of the time complained to Chandler’s publishers. A dedicated cop muses that like politics, law enforcement needs men of the highest character but sometimes attracts and rewards the lowest.

In this book the reader will find the writing that made Chandler as respected and influential as the founder of the hard-boiled manner Dashiell Hammett: well-wrought sentences, evocative descriptions, funny turns of phrase, smooth but exciting rhythm, the seamless unfolding incidents, and crime situations  as a way to examine the human condition. The hard-boiled epigrams aren’t too corny or contrived. Chandler does not indulge in the pessimism that assumes the world is more foul and evil, mean and dangerous, than it actually is. “Mean world syndrome,” incidentally, is common among people who listen to too many true crime podcasts and read too many dark noir thrillers.

This novel is firmly the classic mystery genre, with all the action pointing to a stunning reveal that leaves the reader gaping. I just didn't expect such a brilliant resolution.

Other books by Raymond Chandler: Click on the title to go to the review.

·         Playback

·         The Long Goodbye

·         The High Window

·         Trouble is my Business

·         The Simple Art of Murder

 

The Epidemic of Yellow Jack

Note: As this 2014 review proves, I was into infectious disease books before the pandemic. But who am I kidding? I’m hardly the only plague buff around, hardcore readers are always diving into The Plague (Albert Camus) or The Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe).

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History - Molly Caldwell Crosby

The first third of this book describes the loss of life and economic impact of the Yellow Fever (YF) epidemic in the US in 1878. The remaining part of the book tells about the heroic efforts of scientists and research volunteers to discover the cause of YF and develop a safe and effective vaccine.

Crosby reports that the YF epidemic in the summer of 1878 devastated two major cities on the Mississippi River. In what was surely an undercount, authorities in New Orleans reported "not less than 4,600" dead. Noting the raging epidemic, about 25,000 residents that could afford it fled Memphis in late July. Between August and October of 1878, the disease killed more than 5,000 people in that city. Historians and epidemiologists estimate as many as 20,000 people died in the Mississippi River Valley. Crosby relates grisly details of YF’s symptoms and course (20 to 50% of infected persons who develop severe disease will die). She also tells inspiring tales of the heroism of caregivers.

The reputation of Memphis suffered so much that it never recovered economically so that is why Atlanta is the financial capital of the South today. In the aftermath, John Woodworth, the federal surgeon general, said “Yellow fever should be dealt with as an enemy which imperils life and cripples commerce and industry. To no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America.”

In a time when the federal government provided neither disaster relief nor research funding, President Hayes authorized the Army to fund research to discover the vector of YF and the cure. The Yellow Fever Commission headed by Dr. Walter Reed determined the vector. Scientists worked out a viable vaccine shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Again Crosby relates stories of the heroism of the scientists, many of whom died in their search to determine the vector. Crosby also tells of human subjects, some of whom granted their informed consent, for the first time in history and decades before obtaining it was required of researchers. The story of Clara Maass, who gave her life to extend knowledge, was new to me.

Crosby gives some attention to racial disparities during the epidemic. She is more informative on the partisan divides about lockdowns/quarantines that will seem bitterly familiar to us post-moderns. The book ends on a scary note, as if, in 2022, a virus that we already have a vaccine for could frighten us more than our mask-slacking, anti-vaks neighbors. 

As if. 

All in all, I think this is worth-while book for readers into popular history about plagues.

The Children’s Book

Note: This long novel would be enjoyed by people who liked the multi-layered historical novel Possession (1990) by the same author. I read Hynes’ The Edwardian Turn of Mind in preparation for this novel, which I approached with respect. So I had moorings when Byatt referred to Emmaline Pankhurst, Edward Carpenter, Beerbohm Tree. Another book to get ready would be Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914.

The Children’s Book – A.S. Byatt

This saga of the Wellwood family is set in England in the late Victorian era (1890s) through the Edwardian era (1901 – 1910) to 1919, the aftermath of the Great War. It is both a sobering examination of how hazardous the world is for women and children and a look at the era’s decorative arts, puppetry, children’s literature, and movements such as theosophy, Fabianism, anarchism, vegetarianism, feminism, nudism, free love, and the love that dare not speak its name.

It is 1895. Philip Warren has fled to London from the pottery factories in the north of England. Instead of living rough in the dangerous East End, he is hiding away in the basement of the South Kensington Museum. This mission of this unique repository: display a variety of objects to give crafters, artisans, and artists of all classes inspiration for their own personal creativity, works of art or commercial projects. Philip is creative and artistic through his mother who painted pottery until she died of lead poisoning from the paint. Philip sketches inspired renderings of artifacts, which catch the eye of the director of the museum Prosper Cain.

Cain uses his connections to get Philip an apprenticeship with a famous if reclusive potter Benedict Fludd. Like more than a few genius artists, Fludd has no sense for minding the practical details of life and making a living so the family is distressed with economic insecurity. Worse, Fludd is plagued with cyclical bipolar disorder. His manic highs and lows and their terrible consequences have caused his wife and daughters grief and worry to the point they have checked out emotionally and socially. Teen daughter Pomona is so anxious that she sleepwalks. Son Geraint, content not being creative at all and longing for a normal family, wants nothing more than to get out of the madhouse and become a banker, make money, and be comfortable. Philip’s sister Elsie escapes the north too and ends up keeping house in the hapless Fludd household.

Philip has friendly relations with the family of Olive and Humphry Wellwood. Olive is a successful writer of popular fiction for children and Humphrey has been a well-off banker but has turned to social activist journalism. Their strained finances demand Olive write like mad and she always feels fear of losing the country house in Kent. At the start of the novel, their children are Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, and Florian.

Since artists don’t see to new shoes and meals and dishes and cleaning, Olive’s sister Violet runs the household and does mothering duty for the kids. The Wellwood's hippie-type milieu is, as mentioned above, is as George Orwell summed up “…that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Pal George is thinking of bearded Edward Carpenter, who made his own sandals, had a working-class male partner, and unwittingly fed the image of socialist as utopian crank to the general public.

With so many people pursuing so many goals, this is a novel that interweaves numerous stories, mainly concerned with the failure of parents to pay enough attention to their children and treat them as living individuals, not “the children” or worse “your children.” It’s also a tendency of the middle-class characters to see the working-class characters as personifications of social ills instead of living individuals.

Byatt also explores themes such as the artist as parent and the artist as moral agent and guide. She reminds us that it is often surprising and sad to find out about the lives of artists, to discover they live their lives as messily as anybody else. Byatt makes the point that we are not really meant to meet authors and other artists.

Byatt also uses not only realism in easy-to-follow prose but also delivers brilliant pastiches of E. Nesbit’s children’s literature. Byatt captures Nesbit’s intertwining of love and grief, scary and safe, phantasy and hard knocks. However, inspired by the decorative arts of the era, Byatt also describes rooms and clothes and artifacts to an elaborate degree that rivals Edith Wharton.

The description of pots, jewelry, clothes, rooms, scenery, exhibitions, etc. is what bulks up the novel to about 900 pages. The New Yorker moaned, “At times, an excess of detail threatens to overwhelm the plot: no aquamarine glaze goes undescribed, no psychological process unmentioned.” But I reveled in the details since I’ve been on a steady diet of Ivy Compton-Burnett who doesn’t describe much beyond faces and body language. Like David Copperfield, this long novel is engrossing enough never to feel long, especially for hardcore readers like us who like rich ambitious novels of family drama mixed with social, cultural and art history.

Back to the Classics #6

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic that's been on Your TBR List the Longest. I bought this book, probably for about $3.00, in the early 1990s, when her books were re-released by highbrow publishers, only to end up in the catalogs of remainder distributers like Hamilton and Daedalus. 

A Family and A Fortune – Ivy Compton-Burnett

This 1939 story of family conflict takes place in 1901. The setting is a beautiful country house in rural England.

The Gaveston family deals with its share of trials. In their dear but old house, the plaster is coming off the walls and the east wall is sinking. Oldest son Mark (28) is the heir and facing a disagreeable future of spending all their income on keeping a roof over their heads.

Middle son Clement (26) is an academic, so he’s smart, aloof, prone to fighting over crumbs and holding on to the few that he obtains. Born to a 45-year-old mother – surprise! - youngest son Aubrey is a smart dumb 15-year-old, like Tibby in Howards End. Aubrey is the butt of teasing and bullying from his older brothers. Protective but suffocating older sister Justine (30) unfailingly calls him “little boy.” By the end of the novel Aubrey is given to uttering pithy enigmatic comments on the action along the lines of a stage manager. Or a supernatural being viewing mortal lives from far above.

Mother Blanche (61) is kind and good but weak and vague so her family loves her without respecting her. Plain-spoken Justine calls her ironically “little mother.”

Mrs. Gaveston dealt with the coffee with small, pale, stiff hands, looking with querulous affection at her children and signing in a somewhat strained manner to the servant to take the cups. She had rather uncertain movements and made one or two mistakes, which she rectified with a sort of distracted precision. She lifted her face for her children's greetings with an air of forgetting the observance as each one passed, and of being reminded of it by the next. She was a rather tall, very pale woman of about sixty, who somehow gave the impression of being small, and whose spareness of build was without the wiriness supposed to accompany it. She had wavy, grey hair, a long, narrow chin, long, narrow, dark eyes in a stiff, narrow, handsome face, and a permanent air of being held from her normal interest by some passing strain or distraction.

Like the mother in Men and Wives, Blanche is an insomniac, which undermines her health. Father Edgar (57) thinks he loves his family but living in a fog of conceit and greed he is distant with his sons: he doesn’t even know how old Clement is, but at least feels that he should. Acting as father to the kids is Edgar’s brother Dudley, also wise and giving and though ethical to a fault, nobody’s fool.

Mr. and Mrs. Middleton are the principled outsiders in the novel, besides put-upon Miss Griffon. This is a change from ICB’s previous practice of numerous non-family members standing in for the reader and expressing shocked responses to the goings-on in the family. The Middletons give ICB the chance to poke fun at the universal relish of gossip (Sarah) and the blocks of writers (Thomas):

He had wanted to write and had been a schoolmaster, because of the periods of leisure, but had found that the demands of the other periods exhausted his energy. After his marriage to a woman of means he was still prevented though he did not give the reason, indeed did not know it.

Numerous characters have blind spots in this novel. I dislike spoilers so I won’t discuss them in a review.

The pot is stirred with the arrival of Blanche’s sister, Matty (Matilda) and their 87-year-old father Oliver. They’ve had to move into the lodge on Edgar’s grounds because their investments have gone south and by keeping up appearances Aunt Matty’s housekeeping has burned through their money. A venomous blend of self-pity, cruelty, and entitlement, disabled Aunt Matty is a tyrant, driving her companion Miss Griffon into a state of constant terror. Aunt Matty employs stings and goads in her conversation making her a trigger of fear and derision among the niece and nephews.

Another ruction occurs when a family member inherits a sweet bequest of tin for which everybody puts in dibs. ICB uses the fallout of the inheritance to examine the wellsprings of generosity and how the characters respond to gifts. Is it true generosity if there are stipulations on how the gift is to be used? Does it count as generosity if the source of the urge to give is the wish to be admired? Given true generosity depends on the spirit in which a gift is given, what of the goodwill of the receiver of the gift or benefit? How fragile and fleeting is gratitude? To what extent do the obligations incurred when one receives a gift depend on the character of the beneficiary?

But ICB plans a more eventful year for Family Gaveston. Then there’s a death (a great sickbed set-piece), then an engagement that gets broken and repaired, then a terrible illness (another great sickbed scene), then another death. It’s a busy year for a family that sees things through in their own fashion.

Besides providing more authorial comment than in previous novels, ICB has her characters deliver less unconsoling food for thought in this one.  Justine says the hidden side of people is not always the weaker, less noble, side. Miss Griffon, though treated like dirt beneath Aunt Matty’s feet, observes that everybody is important. In an echo of Schopenhauer, her advocate Uncle Dudley says that life is such a sad affair that we had better be tender with and kind to each other. Though an ICB theme is “how should we then live,” mind, she herself offers no prescriptions. 

ICB’s most memorable characters, as is the case for many writers, are the heavies. But ICB’s villains are such paper tigers, better pitied than scorned. The nice people defend themselves – Justine is Aunt Matty’s niece, not her mother’s daughter - even while they coolly accept the heavies as unavoidable parts of life. Like houses that fall apart, like sickness and death, like snow that falls relentlessly when a middle-aged woman is thrown out of the house. 

Through lack of intelligence and ignorance –Aunt Matty just doesn’t know any better how to deal with her disability or her anger, Edgar isn’t wise or brave enough to care for himself - lots of human beings end up as adults that are just defenseless, coming up with no better response to trouble than anger and dismay. In their ignorant state, helpless Matty- and Edgar-types accept generosity and kindness thoughtlessly, mindlessly. And decent people keep up the fight by not becoming what they dislike in weak people like Aunt Matty and Edgar.

ICB is notorious as a difficult writer. But in this, her seventh novel, she concedes a little to wandering attention among readers, who in 1939 had on their minds anxiety about the coming war with Hitler's Germany. ICB delivers plot twists that are over-the-top but don’t go so far as shockers in her earlier novels. She provides a bit more authorial explanation concerning business and characterization than her first six novels. Be warned, however, she still kicks the third-person omniscient narrator to the curbside 

Most of the action is conveyed in dialogue. I must admit that on the first reading two scenes (chapters) had me reeling, unable to focus enough to do justice to the conversation. The novels of ICB must be read twice so readers can appreciate that ICB plays fair. The second reading will reveal clues that ICB shrewdly puckishly placed to hint at coming incidents.

Other Reviews of ICB Novels: click the title to go to the review

Pastors and Masters (1925)

Brothers and Sisters (1929)

Men and Wives (1931)

More Women Than Men (1933)

A House and Its Head (1935)

Daughters and Sons (1937)

A Family and a Fortune (1939)

The Edwardian Turn of Mind

The Edwardian Turn of Mind – Samuel Hynes

Like Philipp Blom, Hynes argues that the cultural revolution of the twentieth century took place in the Edwardian era (1901 to 1910), not during the First World War. To support his thesis, Hynes examines various writers and their audiences in a sequence of essays focusing on politics and the arts and sciences. His overview of the troubled relations between the sexes will give interesting background knowledge when we are reading novels like A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster.

So we don’t have to, Hynes has read everything. The primary sources were autobiographies, letters, manuscripts, and the newspapers and magazines of the day. He has even read obscure novels such as The Riddle of the Sands and the forgotten novels of H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy. He provides long quotations, judicially chosen for our delighted and/or disgusted inspection. Reading about the misunderstandings among the Fabians – i.e., the Webbs vs. Wells – is hilarious though Hynes points out these conflicts undermined their cause and made their beliefs into suspect and dreadful among the general public.

Hynes provides interesting information about names we have heard of but knew little about.  Hynes’ treatment of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis sheds much light on the role of these two pioneers in the study of human sexuality. Little known nowadays, Kipling and Baden-Powell were among those opinion leaders who were motivated by their anxiety about invasion and loss of power to maintain their country’s place in the imperial sun.

His discussion of the censorship of plays is interesting. The censor was an ex-bank manager who rarely read the plays he approved or disapproved the stage. His letters to playwrights defending – kind of – his decisions to prohibit their plays are masterpieces of vague self-approving jibber-jabber.  As a state employee and reader of bureaucratic gobbledygook, I can only doff my hat.

The first four chapters were informative. The last third or so book not so much, though the examination of the academicians versus the post-impressionists was a first for me. The art-buying Chantrey Trust bought, over twenty-six years, Hynes reports,

… no picture by Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, or Alfred Stevens . . . nor, among foreign painters who had worked in England and were therefore eligible, [anything by] Corot, Degas, Delacroix, Fan tin-La tour, Monet, Pisarro, Sisley, or Whistler. . . . Instead, the Council had bought paintings by Clark, Cockram, Dicksee, Draper, Gotch, Hacker, Hunter, MacWhirter, Rooke, Stark, Tucker, and Yeames (this is a random but entirely representative list).

I rather wish he had put on his literary historian garb for examinations of Conrad, Forster and Ford Madox Ford (click here for that kind of thing; the piece on the Woolf/Bennett quarrel is good).

Samuel Hynes (1924 – 2019) was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton. Though a professor of literature, he turned his sights on cultural and intellectual history, like his counterpart at Rutgers and Penn Paul Fussell (The Great War andModern Memory). This book is the first of a trilogy of cultural history, which was followed by A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture and The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. To us non-scholarly readers, Hynes is probably best known for his memoir about his combat experience as a Marine pilot, Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator, which I read so long ago that I reviewed it for a paper zine (remember those?).

Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic by a Woman. I detest gardening. Hot, sweaty, dirty. Stings, scratches and cuts. Sprains and strains. Literally back-breaking, toting and heaving and digging and weeding. And for what? Flowers are pretty for about a minute before I want to look at something else. Pride? Sense of accomplishment? Good for my soul? Please. In Western New York summer after summer disappointment is caused by fickle combinations of drought or deluge, bugs and blight, vandal squirrels and thieving birds, voracious rabbits and pissing skunks. Though my experience with shovel and hoe has been taxing and bitter, I have read one gardening book, a collection of essays by Katherine White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, which gave me a sense of the kind of book the author below is parodying.   

Elizabeth and Her German Garden - Elizabeth von Arnim

Narrator Elizabeth sits in her garden she has planned and talks about this and that: her life, her husband, her three tot daughters, her neighbors and guests, and, above all, her garden. Living 15 miles from the shores of the Baltic in Pomerania (sandy soil, pine and heath), she loves nature as a Taoist does, which is the best thing about her. She endears herself to us condescending veterans by readily admitting she’s still green enough to make plenty of horticultural mistakes.

Elizabeth has a mind of her own, a quirky sense of humor, and she’s never boring. The reader can bask in the narrator’s primary concern, the joy she finds in her untidy garden and the company of her books in the utter seclusion of her remote country surroundings, where she is completely self-sufficient and any visitor is viewed as an intruder. 

Author von Arnim, however, invites other readers to see Narrator Elizabeth in a satirical light. A reader can reckon Elizabeth as a spoiled, arrogant and empty-headed dimbulb who has nothing else to do all day long than indulge her passion for gardening. After all, the narrator did marry a thoroughly dislikable man – opposites attract but they don’t marry each other - and she cheerfully teams up with her “friend” Irais to bully young foreign student Minora over Christmas.

Narrator Elizabeth lets us know that she’s unsocial and reclusive. She says,

The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.

Even the most introverted among us avid readers want to advise her to try living through a pandemic to test the benefits and risks of wanting to live a totally private life, willingly not seeing other people, and find out such a life is not fully to be human. Our narrator likes solitary stillness too much, I fear, to be healthy.

Narrator Elizabeth points unintentionally to the dark side of the Great Lady of the Estate role that she admits she’s not really up to when she admiringly writes of a neighbor:

She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the “mamsells,” as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat her.

That accidently sums up the pitfalls of the prerogatives of power, I think. Later Elizabeth’s husband opines that women in the laboring class accept beatings from their husbands “with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes.”

Narrator Elizabeth also makes inadvertent admissions in her views of marital and domestic bliss. “I don't think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have,” Elizabeth observes knowingly, as she refers to her husband never by name but always by the epithet Man of Wrath. Above we got a sense of his outrageously stupid opinions. 

And as for a mother’s duties to teach her children well, in fact, the religious education of moppets will pose challenges:

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings. The April baby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder and redder. I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the story—the other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming swords and announced that that was all, when she burst out, “Now I’ll tell about it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva, and they had plenty of clothes, and there was no snake, and lieber Gott wasn’t angry with them, and they could eat as many apples as they liked, and was happy for ever and ever—there now!”

She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”

“But these stories are true,” I said severely; “and it’s no use my telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled energy, all her silvery curls flying.

Finally, Elizabeth also unwittingly tells us that she’s autocratic, narrow-minded, and unimaginative. On the Russian farm laborers brought in to the work the fields:

They herd together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they would strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing. They are like little children or animals in their utter inability to grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot.

We’ve all heard intelligent charming people blandly express stupid opinions like this. In regard to some Disliked Feared Other, lots of people, rich poor and middling, are apt to express stupid views. I know my feeling annoyed does no good but I still feel this stupidity is outrageous. Putting aside whether people who say these things really believe them, marvel at the stubborn reluctance ever to imagine what other people are experiencing.

I conclude that Author von Arnim is a writer to be reckoned with. I seem to remember in one of his books of literary criticism Somerset Maugham (The Vagrant Mood? Points of View?) telling a story about Elizabeth von Arnim. It went that von Arnim read aloud a story that featured a shattering depiction of her husband, who was lying sick in bed. He was so mortified that he turned his face to the wall and died. “He was very sick,” she later said, “and was going to die anyway.” 

If you think this anecdote as funny as I do, you’ll like this book. Or, not. Readers can feel free to take this unique wonderful book  as light literary fare that inspires bent but never broken gardeners to dig into the seed catalogs.