Showing posts sorted by relevance for query elders and betters. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query elders and betters. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Reading Those Classics #20

Classic Conversation Novel: A novel of conversation provides commentary on issues about gender, sex, class, status, and conflict, encrypted as dialogs. This 1944 novel has this discussion with father Benjamin and his three sons.

“It is a modest but pleasant house,” said Reuben’s voice, “and a home is where a family is gathered together.”

“That is what makes family problems,” said Bernard.

“We have none of those,” said Benjamin, in a tone that defied contradiction.

“None,” muttered Esmond. “Problems imply a solution.”

Compton-Burnett’s families are unhappy in their own over-the-top fashion - excessively, one wants to feel, since it seems unlikely the folks next door in what we laughingly refer to as the real world could be as monstrous to each other as the characters in her novels. One never knows, do one? If you’ve ever been in a conflict over family inheritance issues, you know that real kin can be as outrageous as characters in novels.

Elders and Betters - Ivy Compton-Burnett

The modernist author does not even tell the reader the time period in which the story set. No cars or phones, the large families, with plenty of servants, and wide class divisions imply the 1890s or 1900s.  She does not bother to describe weather, rooms, or clothes. None of that is essential to her austere and savage examination of family members, loving and not loving each other, under pressure but sotto voce, murmuring like Esmond above, saying so lightly as to be inaudible.

The author just drops the reader into a cauldron, where an upper-middle-class family of civilized intellectuals is already simmering. Aunt Sukey is tyrannizing one branch of the family, wielding her impending demise of heart disease like a cudgel. Her relations want her to be comfortable and comforted, but her nagging and grousing, spiced as it is with bitterness and anger, have worn her family down. Like the uncle in Cousin Henry, Aunt Sukey has multiple last wills and testaments – a situation bound to be ruthlessly exploited.

Another branch of the family has moved nearby to help out. Father Benjamin, Sukey’s brother, and his daughter, Anna, take over a bit of the care-giving. About 10 years before, Anna, at the time only 18 years old, became mistress of the house after her mother died. This responsibility made her disturbingly fond of laying down the law and people hopping to it made her spoiled. The story revolves around Anna, who is also determined and opportunistic. She is so callous that in a fine comic scene her vanity is pricked when she announces her engagement and her flummoxed relatives stammer their congratulations, unable to take in that anybody would marry Anna of the Hard Soul.

Anna commits three wicked acts, none of which I dare describe lest I spoil the surprises of the consequences of her felonies. Much suspense in conversation is stoked as unused to improvising or obfuscating, Anna risks exposure. Other action revolves around instances of cousin marriage and an oddly close relationship between father and daughter.

Comic relief is provided by two eloquent tweens, Dora and her older brother Julius. They are conversing about their benign but clueless and unreliable father. Their adult brother Terence is in the room, probably fearing the kids have read too much Bulwer-Lytton.

“He gives us food and clothes and has us taught.” said Dora in a dubious tone as if uncertain if mere fulfillment of duty should operate in her father’s favor

“The minimum that a man could do,” said Julius. “The least amount of expense and thought that would save him from the contempt of all mankind. Would you have him turn us out into the waste to starve? Would you have him cast us forth, as if no tie bound us?”

“As if we were not his kith and kin,” said Dora, falling into her brother’s tone. “As if we were penniless orphans, driven to seek a moment shelter within his doors. As if no sacred tie of blood bound us, hand and heart to heart.”  

“Let him take thought for the dark retribution that is gathering,” said Julius, with a deep frown. “Let him take counsel with himself. That is all I have to say.”

“The bread he has cast upon the waters will return after many days,” said Dora. “Then he will repent the grudging spirit that stayed his hand.”

 Terrence rose and left the room, disturbed by the activities of his brother and sister, whom he believed to be acting some kind of play, a view in which he was right.

In other comic scenes – much needed after Anna’s cool calculated hypocrisy – Dora and Julius pray to their God Chung: “… grant that we may live to a ripe old age. For it would not be worthwhile to suffer the trials of childhood if they were not to lead to fullness of days.”

This one is longer than previous novels, as if ICB wanted to explore manipulation in conversation at greater length. The sharp focus on only one character is also a departure for ICB. A point similar to the families in previous novels is that the two branches of the family are too much together, they have become sordid and live in a sinister atmosphere that comes to feel natural to them. Disquieting at the end is the prospect of cousins marrying, thus preventing new people from influencing the seamy milieu for the better. One feels the sooner these people get away from each other, the better for themselves and other people.

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

Click on the title to go to the review.

 

 

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Sunday, June 30, 2024

Undisputed Classic 12

Classic on Your TBR Longest. I bought a stack of her novels in the 1990s in used bookstores (remember those?). Only in the last couple of years have I gotten around to reading them. As the Albanian peasant expression goes, “Slowly, slowly. Little by little.”

Manservant and Maidservant – Ivy Compton-Burnett

This story was published in 1947 and is set in the 1890s. The elements of a late Victorian novel are rural setting, big English family, comic miser, in a large house with servants and chasms between the classes. Modern is the author's focus on words and their dreadful power.

Tyrant Horace Lamb bludgeons his household with words. He nitpicks about vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. The result is both family members and servants have learned to keep silent or speak only in the most precise and literal way possible. When poor relation Mortimer Lamb teases the butler Bullivant for causing the fireplace to smoke by jamming a dead jackdaw in the chimney, Bullivant replies, “So far am I, sir, from being connected with the presence of the fowl, that I was not confident, when I took matters into my own hands, of any outcome. I merely hoped that my intervention might lead to some result.”

Horace is such a monster of a skinflint that he enforces economies that literally torture his children. When his elder daughter complains the room was too cold to sit in, Horace hectors her with “Why need you sit? Why did you not stand, walk, run? How often have I told you that exercise is the thing when the blood is congealed or sluggish? You can surely get up and move about? Had anyone tied you to a chair?” 

It's no wonder the children feel embattled and guilty for being burdens. Eleven-year-old Marcus rebukes Horace with home truths:

We are afraid of you. You know we are.... Your being different for a little while has not altered all that went before. Nothing can alter it. You did not let us have anything; you would not let us be ourselves. If it had not been for Mother, we would rather have been dead. It was feeling like that so often, that made us think dying an ordinary thing. We had often wished to die ourselves....

Hey, this is how kids talk in ICB novels. Like the Barbie movie comments on the experience of girls and women in odd dialogue and too-bright colors, ICB creates a highly artificial world to give her take on dysfunctional family life in what we tentatively and laughingly call reality. She knows that despite her lack of exposition, convoluted grammar, and epigrammatic campy dialogue, the hardcore reader will figure her method out. ICB does not want readers to identify easy points of reference in her novels and complacently predict what’s coming. She wants us off balance and alert. She doesn’t want us to distract ourselves by identifying with the characters. Though she likes aphorisms that tell it like it is, she eschews lessons, trusting that we are already enlightened enough to have a bead on ‘ought to’s’ like “Know thyself so as not to become a tyrant.” 

No prescriptions, just descriptions of how members of unhappy families will drive each other crazy. Mortimer wonders if they are all tied to Horace because he is his own worst enemy, especially pitying the pathological thrift. Horace’s wife Charlotte answers that his state of mind makes him the enemy of everybody. They are both right. Miser Horace’s egotism damages everybody and prevents him from finding peace of mind. 

ICB’s uncanny ability to make Horace’s lack of freedom and authenticity funny may well have been one of the reasons why this novel was the only best-seller of her numerous novels in both the UK and USA. Unaware of his own rigidity of thought and action, insufferable Horace is a hilarious figure. An inflexible paper-tiger. Dragged along on the ropes and pulleys, wires and belts of his own narrow thinking habits. Cranks are funny. 

But they do damage.

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)
·        Parents and Children (1941)
·        Elders and Betters (1944)

 

 

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Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Reading Those Classics #23

Classic 20th Century Novel: Faulkner’s third novel, the 600-page Flags in the Dust, was rejected by numerous publishers. Alfred Harcourt finally agreed to publish it with the stipulation that somebody – not named Faulkner – cut it down to size, maybe giving it some structure and unifying the plot. For a fee of $50.00 (about $900 today), Faulkner’s agent man nipped, snipped, clipped, and ripped. The shortened book was called Sartoris and released in 1929. In 1973, this restored version was released; as we’d expect, textual controversy among scholars simmers whether it was “what Faulkner intended.”

You should know that Sartoris is said “SAR-tris” or “SAR-dƏ-ris” because in unstressed syllables /t/ becomes /d/, like pretty, glitter, forgettable. It’s not “sa-TOR-is.” And “Bayard” is said “baird.”

Flags in the Dust – William Faulkner

No brass bands or parties for Bayard Sartoris when he comes home from World War I. He sneaks into his hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi and his grandfather Old Bayard and great-great-aunt Jenny have to hear of his return through the grapevine.

Young Bayard doesn’t want to see anybody because he’s a mess. He feels shame because he survived the war and his twin brother John did not. He feels guilty that he was unable to stop reckless John from taking one Sopwith Camel against a squadron of the Red Baron’s best students.  Young Bayard has trouble sleeping and concentrating. His anxiety makes him narrow-minded, only able to focus on his own pain and irritability, with frequent angry outbursts and aggressive behavior. Drinking too much, driving too fast, fussing and brawling, and breaking stallions on a whim, he hares after death with self-destructive behavior. Pride and fear of appearing weak have shut down Young Bayard's willingness to talk about his experiences so though people notice he’s feeling down-hearted, nobody can see any way to sympathize with him.

Meanwhile his grandfather Old Bayard runs the local bank and Miss Jenny runs the household, gardens, and goes joyriding with Young Bayard. They try to ease Young Bayard's re-entry into ordinary life but many factors besides PTSD fight them.

The genes of his grandfather John are visited upon his generations. Aunt Jenny makes caustic comments on the tendency of the Sartoris male to indulge in daredevilry. Nobody exerts control over their genetic heritage or the jaunty ways their male relatives have gloriously if foolishly checked out of our mundane world. Young Bayard feels he has let down the Southern tradition of honor and gallantry epitomized by the death of his great-great-uncle in The War.

But the Great War, as big wars always do, has ushered in social and economic changes with implications for big changes in the future. Yeoman whites are bettering their financial straits, buying cars, and moving from remote hamlets to towns. Partying with the Young Bayard, a car-owning salesman marvels that though they’ve known each other all their lives, it’s the first time they’ve had a drink together. However, others from the country are not dealing with culture shock in an ideal way.  Byron Snopes, a stereotypical foul owl on the prowl, breaks into Narcisa Benbow’s bedroom and lies on her empty bed, “writhing and making smothered, animal-like noises.”

Better read aloud, especially the set piece when young Bayard hides out at the MacCallums after the tragedy; I have re-read that sequence for the sheer reading pleasure of immersion, Faulkner having utter control of setting, characters, dialog and theme. I'm not up to saying whether a reader should read this, the fully-upholstered version, or the abridgment. I think comparisons are odious. I've read both and liked them both. I think well-worth reading are the novels he wrote in his hot period: this one, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).


Click on the title to go to the review.

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Sunday, December 31, 2023

Reading Those Classics #24

Classic Science Writing. This 1973 book has vivid description of symptoms to assist the lay reader. To see how sick these patients were, check out a 1974 Yorkshire TV documentary by Duncan Dallas. It's grim, but also gives a sense that Sacks was what my mother would have called “a real character.”

Awakenings – Oliver Sacks

In the late 1960s, Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx housed around 80 patients who had been frozen in time - physically and mentally immobilized for decades. These individuals were survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic, which swept through the world from the end of World War I until about 1928. Unlike African sleeping sickness, this condition had no connection to tsetse flies. Victims typically fell into a coma-like state, lost the ability to swallow, became emaciated, and often died of starvation. Those who survived were left with post-encephalitic parkinsonian syndrome, marked by tremors, rigidity, catatonia, and a mask-like facial expression.

These patients, abandoned by families and society, were confined to hospitals and asylums. Their personalities had often changed dramatically - some became lewd or violent, others wisecracking or withdrawn. Psychologically, they ranged from serene acceptance of their fate to deep resentment over lost time. Many yearned not only for a cure but for restitution - a miraculous return to their youth and the life they had missed.

In 1966, British neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks began working at Beth Abraham. Around the same time, the drug levodopa (L-DOPA) emerged as a promising treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Sacks received FDA approval to test L-DOPA on these long-term encephalitis lethargica patients.

It’s important to note that this research began before the ethical standards of informed consent were widely adopted. The Tuskegee syphilis scandal (exposed in 1972) and the Belmont Report (1976) had not yet reshaped biomedical ethics in research with human subjects. In one troubling case, Sacks admitted to secretly administering L-DOPA to a patient who had refused treatment.

Sacks was cautious. He feared that these patients, long dormant, might erupt emotionally and psychologically if suddenly awakened. What would it mean to re-enter the world in 1969 after decades of isolation?

Despite his concerns, the deteriorating condition of the patients compelled him to begin treatment in the summer of 1969. The results were dramatic but inconsistent. One patient, Lola, responded instantly - leaping from her chair and walking for the first time in years. But by autumn, her condition fluctuated wildly between immobility and hyperactivity.

Sylvia’s case was especially poignant. Frozen for 35 years, she remained mentally anchored in the 1920s. Her speech, mannerisms, and references were all from the Jazz Age. Though she intellectually understood it was 1969, she emotionally felt it was still 1926. She struggled to connect with the modern world, finding it alien and unappealing. After ten days of lucidity, she slipped back into a trance-like state and never reawakened, despite further doses.

During the summer, the hospital transformed. Patients became more animated, and the atmosphere grew less institutional. But by fall, many began to regress. Nightmares, screaming, and emotional distress returned. Some patients declined severely, while others managed to adapt - physiologically, psychologically, and socially.

Sacks came to understand that awakening these patients was not enough. Their nervous systems were damaged, and symptoms inevitably resurfaced. True healing required more than medication - it demanded meaningful engagement with life. For some, this meant work, like cobbling shoes. For others, music, dancing, and singing became vital sources of connection and joy. Relationships and community were essential.

This extraordinary episode in medical history inspired a wide range of artistic interpretations, including a play, a documentary, a film starring Robin Williams, a ballet, and an opera.  


Click on the title to go to the review.

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Thursday, November 30, 2023

Reading Those Classics #22

Classic Set in a Place you Want to Visit. Borneo has reefs, rainforests, swamps, mangrove stands, and wildlife such as elephants, sun bears, clouded leopards, proboscis monkeys, orangutans, and pangolins, as well over 400 species of bird, including hornbills and mountain serpent eagles. The main draw is the relative humidity, always about 80%. High humidity feels good even euphoric but if prolonged can lead to dehydration, confusion, fatigue malaise lethargy and for heart patients, arrythmia .

You Want to Die, Johnny? – Gavin Black

In the 1960s, Gavin Black wrote more than a dozen spy-adventure thrillers featuring a series hero named Paul Harris. This one is set in one of the last British protectorates, the fictional Bintan on the northern coast of Borneo.

Canny Scotsman Paul Harris owns a company that manufactures and sells engines for marine craft. He has moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, where he has taken Malaysian citizenship.

The novel opens with Paul being on a plane returning to Bintan his old friend John, the British resident, and his 18-year-old daughter Lil.

Widowers can deal with hordes of communist infiltrators or a teenage daughter but not both at the same time. John has gone to California to rescue her from the clutches of a Cockney rock star named Boots. This gives the author a chance to deliver old-guy commentary on These Kids Today. Remember it was 1966, this was a chance not passed up by old-guy writers like Desmond Begley and Andrew Garve, who were old guys writing for other old guys.

The plane is wrecked upon landing because somebody took shots at it, putting out the tires. In the ensuing car chase, the three would-be assassins are killed in a wreck. Paul and John suspect that sinister forces, perhaps Communist in origin, are fomenting trouble for the oil-rich Bintanese family that run the place like the ex-pirates that they are.

They are also shaken when a bomb goes off in Paul’s rest house.

Convincing characterization and an authentic background make the 250 pages, longer than I like for a thriller, go by in just a couple of nights. Paul Harris has a background that makes him a tough, clever and resourceful action hero. During World War II he and his family were interned when the Japanese occupied Singapore. He had to become hardened and smart to deal with deprivation and violence in the camps. After the war, he and his brother started an import/export business that included capers on the edge of world of espionage.

Like William Haggard novels, this is James Bond for adults. Black is a much better writer than Ian Fleming who tended to stilted prose, baffling digressions, and a brazenly imperialist misogynist jerk for a hero. Granted, hero Paul Harris is rather an apologist for those topee-wearing days, but he doesn’t have any illusions about the constant moral dilemmas of the minions of imperialism (see Shooting an Elephant).

The real name of Gavin Black was Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998). He is most well-known for the excellent novel The Ginger Tree, a novel about a young English girl dealing with an unsettled personal life and turbulent times in China and Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. That novel was made into a Masterpiece Theater production in the late Eighties.

Wynd was familiar with Asia because he was born a missionary child in Tokyo. He was captured in the early days of WWII in Malaya and interned in a camp run by the Japanese. He has keen insight into the psychological effects of captivity, semi-starvation, torture, and prolonged stress have on its sufferers.

 

Click on the title to go to the review.

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Monday, November 13, 2023

Reading Those Classics #21

Classic Mystery Set in Tinsel Town: Other whodunnits set in Hollywood are The Case of the Solid Key (Anthony Boucher, 1941) and The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler, 1953). The DA Calls It Murder (1937) is a rare example of a satirical mood overtaking Erle Stanley Gardner, as he parodies shop-worn tropes of movie melodramas.

The Birthday Murder - Lange Lewis

This 1945 mystery features the breezy wit of a confident writer. This is the second of five that starred series hero Lieutenant Richard Tuck of the LA Homicide Squad and his faithful assistant E. Byron “Duck Butt” Froody.

It is a cozy with elements of a police procedural, narrated from the third-person limited point of view of the chief suspect Victoria Hime, who writes novels, plays, and scripts. Circumstantial evidence points to her as the poisoner of her husband Albert Hime, a producer of B movies. It does not help Victoria that the kind of poison used was the same chemical used to kill a husband in one of her novels. Tuck and Froody, however, can identify no motive that would have driven Victoria to snuff her quiet easy-going husband. Plus, Victoria’s independence of mind and knowledge of people impress Tuck, who is a curious combination of hard-headed and soul-deep himself.

The persons of interest to be interviewed by Tuck are three. Bernice Saxe is Victoria’s childhood friend with a raft of marital problems of her own making. Plus, we know how complicated friendships, especially long-time ones, can be. Moira Hastings is an ambitious starlet, willing to slander Victoria as jealous and back-biting because Victoria said Moira was not old or good enough for a movie part. Sawn Hariss is Victoria’s first husband, showing up for the first time in ten years like a bad penny. His juvenile personality has failed to improve even after active participation in World War II, only glancingly referred to in the story. 

There is cringe-worthy content related to race, class, and gender but it takes up only a fraction of the novel and it is balanced by the excellent prose. This was included by Barzun and Taylor on their list of 50 great mysteries from 1900 to 1950. It was reprinted in paperback the early 1980s by Harper Perennial Mystery Library.


Click on the title to go to the review.

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