Thanksgiving

From Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)

In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values, by Leonard C. Wood, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Edward L. Biller. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role:

A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Captain Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.

My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Tisquantum had demonstrated the proper maize-planting technique—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgirms to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds, a traditional native technique for producing a bountiful harvest. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving.
. . . .
The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.

Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival, contemporary scholars agree. . . . Just as my teacher said, Tisquantum told the colonists to bury several small fish in each maize hill, a procedure followed by European colonists for two centuries. Squanto’s teachings, [colonist Edward] Winslow concluded, led to “a good increase of Indian corn”—the difference between success and starvation.

Winslow didn’t know that fish fetilizer may not have been an age-old Indian custom, but a recent invention—if it was an Indian practice at all. So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked up the idea from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him seven years before. To return to the Americas, he in effect had to escape twice—once from Spain, where his captors initially sold him into slavery, and once from England, to which he was smuggled from Spain, and where he served as a kind of living conversation piece at a rich man’s house. In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.

Skipping over the complex course of Tisquantum’s life is understandable in a textbook with limited space. But the omission is symptomatic of the complete failure to understand Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives. The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off [their enemies] the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, for the alliance ensured the survival of Plymouth colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England. All of this was absent not only from my high school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.

From Penelope Lively’s Making It Up (2005)

Most Americans know who they are, to a greater or lesser degree. Moreover, they signal myriad identities; they define the nation. They are Greek-American or Italian-American or Latino or black, they propose China, Japan, the Philippines—they echo the globe. They are a walking, talking mnemonic system, remembering arrivals and survivals, the Atlantic passage, the trek west, settlement and dispersal, calamity and prosperity, whispering still of the other place that is hidden in each person—the shtetls of Russia, Poland, Lithuania, the fishing villages and the farms, the fetid slums of cities, the plantations and the slave quarters. She and Ben had a friend called Mary Dixon, as Anglo-Saxon a name as you could find, but Mary herself was a figure from Greek tragedy, she was Electra, she was Clytemnestra, she was dark, dark, with great Byzantine eyes and rich black hair. And yes, indeed, Mary’s great-grandfather arrived at Staten Island from Piraeus, with extended family and not a word of English, so that the recording clerk, defeated by the accent and the names, put down Mary’s father simply as Dick’s son, to have done with it. And Dixon the family became and remained, but Mary’s face said otherwise.

From Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998)

1979: X

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.

And, as we enter this Thanksgiving holiday, which I hope you all will enjoy with friends, family, and wonderful home-cooked food, one last note. It’s a bit of dialogue from Penelope Lively’s Making It Up; you’ll know immediately if you’re one of those who might be well-served by recalling it this weekend:

People are not responsible for their relatives.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

Ghosts, part 2

I wrote the preceding post when I was only a little way into Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Finishing it didn't force me to revise my opinion of the book—it continued to be enthralling—but it did force me to revise my opinion of the ghosts and presences that feature in it. When Mantel is nearly eight years old, she tells of seeing . . . something . . . in the backyard:

I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, a spot in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds, and bracken. I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; as if pinned to the moment. I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.

I pluck my eyes away. It is like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse.

Mantel never is able to explain the sighting, even to herself, beyond calling it a mistaken glimpse of a pure evil humans are not intended to see, the horror stays with her, is still with her. Her powers of description are so strong—“rinsed by nausea,” “a sick resonance”—that it’s not hard to believe.

By focusing on these poorly understood presences, I’m probably not being fair to Giving Up the Ghost overall—it’s about far more than that. It’s emotional and impressionistic, but it’s also deeply thoughtful and packed with interesting details about life in postwar England, an honest groping for the truth of Mantel’s life and the complicated interplay of illness, sexism, class, and personal choice that have made her who she is. Knowledge of it will infect—and inflect—all her novels, which I now feel compelled to read.

Oh, and a side note: Saturday was the one-year anniversary of this blog. 148 posts. Goodness. Thanks for reading.

Ghosts

From Macbeth, Act 3, Scene IV

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

English writers toss out references to ghosts with remarkable casualness; they seem to take the default position that they will be believed when they talk about hauntings—the opposite, I would argue, of the position Americans and American writers take. Ghosts are around, the body of literature seems to say; sometimes people see them. There's no controversy. I suppose that if your national history is one of knights and ladies and dank castles, ghosts come naturally—though I would also expect that if your national history included the largely ignored story of the extermination of the ten million people who were living in the land when your forebears arrived, you would have quite a few ghost stories, of an extremely unpleasant variety.

Yet it is England, not America, that is rich with ghosts. And, unlike the ghost of Banquo (which, understandably, greatly frightens Macbeth just by his appearance), most of the ghosts I've come across in English novels—and especially in English memoirs—are unthreatening, ordinary, even quotidian. Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, tells of Keats's ghost haunting the then-pastoral village of Hampstead when she was a girl, and in her novel The Bookshop (1978) a ghost troubles the heroine, though never in a particularly menacing way. Anthony Powell, in his memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1983), mentions a ghost that haunted one of his childhood homes; that ghost, transmuted like all the facts of his life, appears in his fiction as the driver of a particularly vivid domestic scene. Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows (1957), a thinly veiled retelling of her childhood, includes ghosts, poltergeists, and magic, invisible horses. Unexplained presences manifest themselves here and there in Iris Murdoch's writing, and—perils of being away from my bookshelves!—I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.

Halloween, of course, put me in mind of this topic, as I was reading ghost stories (of which the English are the masters (followed closely by the Japanese?)). And then I was thinking about William James (because of a new book on his paranormal researches), the first chapter of whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) includes several stories of ghostly encounters that James collected. But it was Hilary Mantel who really brought it to a head, with the opening pages of her enthralling memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003):

About eleven o'clock, I see a flickering on the staircase. The air is still; then it moves. I raise my head. The air is still again. I know it is my stepfather's ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I "know" it is my stepfather's ghost.

I am not perturbed. I am used to "seeing" things that aren't there. Or—to put it in a way more acceptable to me—I am used to seeing things that "aren't there." It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather, Jack, in the early months of 1995: alive, in his garments of human flesh. Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs.

She talks herself back from that certainty a bit, offering the reader a chance to believe her sightings are the result of migraines; but throughout the book, presences abound, flickering at the edge of consciousness like ideas too large and unwieldy for childhood apprehension. They aren't exactly benign, but Mantel gives the sense that their danger is more potential than actual, like the shadowy adult secrets that quietly define childhood.

Childhood is when I, too, reportedly saw a ghost. I have no memory of it, but I've been told by my parents, no wild-eyed new-agers they, that it happened when I was three or four, while our family was being given a tour of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. I turned to my mother and, pointing to the empty corner of a room and said, "Look, Mommy--there's a ghost." The guide blanched and told my parents that the house was rumored to be haunted.

From Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

One night, I hear my mother and Jack, discussing. I am lurking in the cold Glass Place, coming in from the lavatory. "Well," she says, "so? So what do you think it is?" Her voice rises, in an equal blend of challenge, fear, and scorn. "What do you think it is? Ghosts?"

R.I.P. Johnny Sain

This, the first ever cross-posting between my two blogs, is in honor of former major-league pitcher Johnny Sain, who died last week at the age of 89.

Sain was a member of the pennant-winnning 1948 Boston Braves, where his and teammate Warren Spahn's success relative to the rest of the pitching staff led to the well-known rhyme, "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain." (This past summer, some Cardinals fans altered the rhyme to read "Carp and Soup, the rest are poop.") Sain went 139-116 with a 3.49 E.R.A. for the Braves, Yankees, and Athletics in an eleven-year career.

This obituary appears on both my book and baseball blogs because Sain is one of the most memorable characters in Jim Bouton's wonderful Ball Four (1970). Much of the drama and fun of the book comes from the distrust with which Bouton is viewed by his teammates, coaches, and the baseball establishment. After all, the man reads books on the team flights--and on top of that, he's a knuckleballer. Throughout the book, Bouton clashes with his manager and pitching coaches. The biggest problem he encounters is resistance to the fact that, as a knuckleballer, he's sharper if he throws pretty much every day, while ordinary pitchers perform better on a schedule with days off. Most of the other players and coaches refuse to accept that Bouton knows what he's talking about; he's seen, variously as a malcontent and a moron.

Sain, on the other hand, takes a minimalist coaching approach. He looks at each player and sees what works for him. You pitch better if you throw every day? Throw every day. You pitch better if you make sure to do your running? Do your running. Quiet but effective, Sain isn't suspicious of difference, nor is he at all controlling; he's just looking to make his pitchers better. Therefore, he stands in such stark contrast to nearly everyone else in the book that he appears a genius both of baseball and of life in general.

I've been told it was raining in Boston the day of Sain's death. I guess that means Spahn started the next day for the Heavenlys, with Sain up the day after. After all, though I usually come down on the side of there being no heaven, if there were to be one, it would be inconceivable without baseball.

Frequency

In the past eight days, I've been to four bars and to my local bookstore five times.

I leave you to guess which of those frequencies is unusual.

Veterans Day part two

From Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War, by Martha Hanna

Paul to Marie, 7 July 1917
I received your letter from the 3rd where you say that I sem to be happy. Listen my dear if I didn’t cherish in my heart the love of my wife and my child and my parents if I were all alone on this earth then yes I could count myself happy because when the weather is warm as it has been lately and I have everything that I need I cannot really say that I am unhappy especially since the Boches don’t ever fire on us. I am not happy because no one is happy in war I missm y home and those who are dear to me I also miss my freedom but in comparing my life to that of all my comrades then in comparison to them I really am happy.

From When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (2005), by Patricia O’Toole

Archie [Roosevelt] was also struggling to comprehend the brutality of what he had seen and done. In one French raid he had rushed a burly German and fired five shots into him at close range, he told [a friend].

The German fell forward. From my aim, and from his look, and from the way he fell, I knew I had done for him. But I felt I absolutely had to stamp on him. I brought my left heel down on his face, by the mouth, as hard as I could. It went right in, and my boot was splashed with blood up to the ankle. Then I ran on.

That was an absolutely primitive action. I was a man of the Stone Age at that moment, hating my enemy and wanting to humiliate him even after he was dead. If I had had more time, I should have spat in his face. As it was, I stamped on it. . . . . It is extraordinary how savage the men have become. They are absolutely ruthless. I think the fighting and the blood drives them mad, they will kill anything in sight, without asking questions, there’s no talk of guarter. But get them back of the lines with a prisoner and they are very decent. In peacetime, we used to be upset if we saw a man ill in the street. Now, I can see a friend shot right next to me, and I don’t care at all—it seems quite natural, and it’s somebody else’s turn next. I’ll give orders for his tin hat to be taken, or his boots to be taken off, and that’s all.

From Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984), E. B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), talks about his experience in the Pacific in World War II

There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. People tell me I don’t act like an ex-marine. How is an ex-marine supposed to act? They have some Hollywood stereotype in mind. No, I don’t look like John Wayne. We were in it to get it over with, so we could go back home and do what we wanted to do with our lives.

I was nineteen, a replacement in June of 1944. Eighty percent of the division in the Guadalcanal campaign was less than twenty-one years of age.
. . . .
It was raining like hell. We were knee-deep in mud. And I thought, What in the hell are we doin’ on this nasty, stinkin’ muddy ridge? What is this all about? You know what I mean? Wasted lives on a muddy slope.

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I’ve had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?

If I believed in an afterlife, I would believe that all those who choose war as a first resort, all those who lie a nation into war, all those who put young men and women into harm’s way without first having tried all other avenues, all those who put young men and women into harm’s way without adequately supplying and supporting them or planning for their mission, all those who see war as a tool for winning political victories, all those who see war as a chance to make money off the backs of soldiers, all those who speak religion but are cavalier about the taking of human life, all those who unquestioningly support leaders who would march our soldiers to senseless death, and all those who push and push and push for war, but for themselves set “other priorities than military service”—if I believed in an afterlife, I would believe that all those people would face hard questions when they reach it, questions that they would, I am confident, not be able to answer to the satisfaction of their judges.

But I do not believe an eternal judgment will be forthcoming, no matter how high humanity piles its sins. We are their only judges. We must be the ones forcing them to answer the hard questions. We must push, and push, and push until they are discredited and disempowered. We must heap public scorn and shame on their heads. We must, where possible, put them in jail for years on end. We must blacken their names completely, stain the pages of the history books where they appear a hideous, soul-sickening black.

Only by doing such things can we ever hope to stay the hand of their successors in the years to come—successors who are sure to be far more like them than we would ever wish. We must hold them to account.

Only then could we possibly be worthy of those who have given their lives in the name of our country.

Veterans' Day

From Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (2005)

The months with Quentin [Roosevelt] nearby had been happy ones for [his mother] Edith. Her anxiety about the dangers of flying abated each night with the sound of his footsteps on the veranda, and after he sailed, she was sometimes visited by the odd sensation that she had just heard the footsteps again. Sagamore [the Roosevelt family home] ached with emptiness. Edith felt that her life had broken off sharply; “it is like becoming blind or deaf—one just lives on, only in a different way.”

From a letter written by Lieutenant Arnold Schuette to his newborn daughter, collected in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (2001), edited by Andrew Carroll

December 21, 1943
My Dear Daughter, Anna Mary,
Some day I shall be able to tell you the conditions under which I write this letter to you.

You arrived in this world while I was several thousand miles from your mother’s side. There were many anxious moments then and since.

This message comes to you from somewhere in England. I pray God it will be given to you on or about your tenth birthday. I hope also to be present when that is done. It shalle be held in trust by your mother or someone equally concerned until that time.

Also I pray that the efforts of your daddy and his buddies will not have been in vain. That you will always be permitted to enjoy the great freedoms for which this war is being fought. It is not pleasant, but knowing that our efforts are to be for the good of our children makes it worth the hardships.

From a letter written by First Lieutenant Ed Luker to his wife, collected in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (2001), edited by Andrew Carroll

June 18, 1918
Dearest Girlie,
Do you smell gas also? We were all subjected to several different kinds of it today [in training], with and without masks, and as usual, I cannot rid my clothes of the odor. It is sure awful stuff, honey. Deadly and usually insures a slow horrible death. There is one kind which kills quickly, Chlorine, but I do not prefer any kind or brand myself. I’ll use the gas mask if possible, with all its discomforts and smell.

I had to have a photo taken today for another “Officer’s Identification Book” which every officer must carry. It provides for a small size bust without head-gear, so when I receive same, I will send you copies. I believe they take the book when your body is found and send the photo to the War Dept to be placed on the Honor Roll. Won’t you be proud to have your Hubby’s picture on a nice magazine page, all fringed with black? Ha! There’s no danger tho. You’ll have me back soon. The war cannot last forever, you know, and even if it does, I will return to you safe and sound eventually.

Unlike the majority of other boys, I am not over here to “die” for my country. I came over to live for it, and after I have helped make it possible for others to live in peace and happiness, I’ll be back to continue living for you. Then we’ll be happier than we would have been had you not sent me over.

From a letter written by Union Army soldier Charles E. Bingham to his wife, collected in War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (2001), edited by Andrew Carroll

August 9, 1863
Same old camp six miles from Rebbys
. . . .
well i must drop this and wind up i am well and doing well and god grant that this bad mess of scribbling may find you in good health the weather has been exceedingly hot for all i thought it was getting colder please write as often as i remain your kind and affectionate husband and shall till death give all the love that you can spare to them that kneeds it only keepe what you want.

Thank you to all who have served and to all who are serving.

I think I made the right choice, or, It's hard to go wrong deciding to read about TR

TR was the right choice. In the first half of Patricia O’Toole’s splendid When Trumpets Call (2005), Roosevelt publicly breaks with his hand-picked successor, Taft, and the Republican Party to run a doomed campaign at the head of the newly formed Progressive Party. O’Toole presents a detailed picture of the rupture between Roosevelt and Taft, suffused with sadness and misunderstanding and driven in equal parts by Taft’s lack of self-assurance and Roosevelt’s lack of self-knowledge.

Taft’s hurt feelings are palpable; in his laments about Roosevelt’s mistreatment of him, he frequently sounds like a jilted lover, or a kid who’s been beaten up by his long-admired older brother. In 1910 when Roosevelt first began speaking out against the work of Taft’s administration, “He is unhappy without the power he wielded as president. I have been made to feel it. His treatment of me has left scars that will never heal.” As Roosevelt saw it, though, O’Toole explains,

After promising the country that he would “complete and perfect the machinery” built by Roosevelt, Taft had allowed it to be dismantled. Roosevelt had not foreseen the dangers of leaving his progressivism to a maintenance man. Progress requires motion, change, momentum. Taft was a creature of stasis.

Baffled by Roosevelt’s animosity, Taft said more than once in the summer of 1910 that if he knew what Roosevelt wanted, he would do it. “I am absolutely in the dark.”

Following a slashing anti-Roosevelt speech on the campaign trail, Taft was dicovered by a reporter alone, head in hands. “‘Roosevelt was my closest friend,’ he said. Then he wept.” Despite his somewhat muddled nature and his less-than-forceful personality (especially when set alongside TR), it’s extremely hard not to feel sorry for Taft throughout the whole miserable period. He did, however, get the last laugh, I suppose: he not only defeated Roosevelt for the Republican nomination, but he went on to outlive him and to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the job he had always wanted most of all.

Meanwhile, though Roosevelt's need for power was so starkly obvious that his blatant refusal to even acknowledge it must have required a supreme exercise of his vaunted will. When, with Taft out of town (Taft liked to travel in part because it got him away from his wife and her hectoring about his waistline.), he visited Washington, DC,

[Roosevelt] stopped by [the White House] to leave his card—it would have been discourteous not to—and when the servants seemed glad to see him, he lingered. He inquired about the kitchen’s cornbread, which he remembered fondly, and the staff brought him a piece. He ate it as he followed the chief usher on a tour, which included an inspection of the new tennis court and a stop in the executive office, where he sat at the president’s desk and said how natural it felt to be there.

Trying to imagine a contemporary ex-president doing such a thing boggles the mind. O’Toole’s book leaves no doubt that it would have been good for Roosevelt—as it has been, I would argue, for Bill Clinton—had the Twenty-second Amendment been in place to set an insuperable limit on both his ambitions and his sense of duty.

Adding yet another layer of political and emotional complexity to the conflict is TR’s daughter Alice’s marriage to Republican congressman Nick Longworth, who represented Taft’s home district in Cincinnati. Though Roosevelt privately urged him to support Taft, as was his duty as Taft’s home congressman, the tension within the Longworth family was almost unsupportable. Taft backers through and through, they all, aside from Nick himself, hated the Roosevelts, including (especially?) Alice, and they never hesitated to make their feelings clear. Alice, truly torn, and unable to appear to support either candidate too fervently in public, perhaps suffered more than anyone other than TR when he lost the election; her husband, possibly due to his undesired (and undesirable) association with Roosevelt, was defeated by 101 votes in 1912, meaning the couple had to leave their beloved DC and move back to what Alice dubbed “Cincinnasty.” Worse yet, they were forced to live in Nick’s mother’s house, where

“even [Alice's] nieces and nephews had been taught to despise her. One of the boys, down with the chickenpox, had been told by his mother to be sure to kiss Aunt Alice. The boy allegedly refused on the ground that she would infect him with something worse from her.”

In this, too, President Taft comes off better than most, able to retain legitimate affection for Alice despite the difficult situation.

These brief episodes alone should give you an idea of how full of fascinating detail, incident, and insight When Trumpets Call is. It’s the work of a historian who is able to fully flesh out characters, bringing tremendous empathy to bear without letting it cloud her critical judgment. If the last half of the book holds up, it will be one of the best history books I’ve ever read, right up there with the first volume of Edmund Morris’s two-volume life of Roosevelt (while making any third volume he may be considering writing utterly unnecessary).

And I haven’t even touched on the story of the assassin who shot Roosevelt in Milwaukee during the 1912 campaign. I’ll save that for a later post; for now I’ll just tell you that of course TR didn’t allow the shooting to prevent him from making his planned speech that night, and that the reason the assassin didn’t shoot him in Chicago was that “he did not want to spoil the city’s ‘decent, respectable reception.’”

Lincoln or TR?

On the eve of this splendid, historic Election Day, I faced a reading choice, one that seems to confront me every couple of years: Lincoln or TR? I find both endlessly fascinating, but it’s hard to imagine men of more different temperaments. So which president should accompany me through this election week? So far, I’ve dithered, reading bits of some books about each, unable to choose.

Reading about Roosevelt is, it seems, a lot like being with Roosevelt: fascinating and fun, but draining. He was exactly who he seemed to be, a big, boisterous, energetic, smart, willful, needy man who, in the words of his children, “longed to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” There are virtually no unplumbed depths there—as biographer Patricia O’Toole puts it, he “galloped away from introspection.” So the pleasures of reading about Roosevelt lie in a combination of the joys of reading about someone of such indomitable will and awe at the sheer number of his accomplishments, good and bad. O’Toole’s book, When Trumpets Call (2005), which is the one I have before me, promises to be of particular interest on both fronts, as it focuses on Roosevelt’s post-presidential years, when his will began to be thwarted and his own sense of accomplishment began to waver.

To read about Lincoln, on the other hand, is to yaw between shivering admiration (bordering, this life-long Illinoisan will admit, on reverence) and deeply felt sympathy for the obviously human, familiar man trying not to be crushed by the unimaginable pressures brought to bear on him in the last five years of his life. In his knowledge of himself, Lincoln seems to have been the opposite of Roosevelt. Doris Kearns Goodwin explains in her book about Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals (2005):

Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all. Time and again, he was the one who dispelled his colleagues’ anxiety and sustained their spirits with his gift for storytelling and his life-affirming sense of humor. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.

Yet he remains somewhat mysterious; as Richard Carwardine relates in Lincoln (2003),

Lincoln had dignity, considerable reserve, few real intimates, and a proper sense of the private; as John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, his White House secretaries [both quite young men, who would go on to write the first major biography of Lincoln], later remarked, in personal relations with him, “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.” But he was hardly aloof. He cultivated no airs and graces. In the words of a fellow lawyer, “in the ordinary walks of life [he] did not appear the ‘great man’ that he really was.”

Yet, like TR, Lincoln got people to do what he wanted and needed them to do—including his star-studded, fractious cabinet. And he was clearly a shrewd judge of character (a characteristic he definitely shared with General Grant, though, not, sadly, with President Grant). My interest in that aspect of Lincoln, of his deep understanding of personal relations and how to work with people, may tip the balance this week in his favor, and in favor of Team of Rivals.

But on the other hand, When Trumpets Call, because it treats TR’s post-presidential years, necessarily delves into the many failures of President Taft and the vexed relationship between Roosevelt and his hand-picked successor:

[Taft biographers] have wondered in exasperation how Roosevelt ever could have considered him fit for the presidency. Taft was indolent, irresolute, dependent, and undone by opposition and criticism—a dooming combination. But the Taft that Roosevelt knew had distinguished himself as governor-general of the Philippines, problem-solver in Cuba and Panama, and secretary of war. Under Roosevelt’s energetic leadership, Taft kept his lassitude in check, and his other shortcomings easily could have manifested themselves as virtues. A dependent man makes an excellent lieutenant, for he is happiest when carrying out the orders of others. And a man who shies away from conflict can be an exceptionally agreeable colleague. TR thought his friend Will had “the most loveable personality” of anyone he had ever known.

If that’s not a recipe for a fascinating book, what is?

So TR or Lincoln? Taft and TR or Lincoln and his cabinet? How to choose?

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to too many books, too little time?

We have always been at war with Eastasia

On this election eve, this post is intended as a reminder that, regardless of how often Christopher Hitchens misuses his name and work, George Orwell really did see it all coming.

We have always been at war with Eurasia.

You may not be able to cast your ballot against those lying bastards tomorrow, but you can at least cast it against any and all of their enablers. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Vinegar Joe.

Food

I have Sandy and Sarah to thank for pointing me to the best book I read during my baseball-induced blog hiatus. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, through the sometimes strained conceit of tracing four specific meals back to their source materials, is a fascinating exploration of the current state of our production of—and relationship to—food. Coming from a farm background, and being both a vegetarian and a subscriber to the produce of a nearby community-supported farm, I knew a little bit about the subject going into the book. I know that our contemporary food system is built on a willful blindness about the materials and methods that bring us our meals. I know that most American eat in ways that are bad for them and their planet, out of a combination of ignorance, busy-ness, complacency, and lack of opportunity. I know that, like many other aspects of our resource use as a culture, our current approach to food is likely to be unsustainable. And I know that I haven’t always had this knowledge, despite my background and the amount of cooking I’ve done since I became an adult; I distinctly remember being stopped cold by Wendell Berry’s reminder that we can never be any healthier than the land from which we draw our sustenance.

But despite that knowledge, Pollan’s relentless questioning, his dogged working backwards through link after link in the food supply chain, taught me a lot about aspects of our food culture that I knew little about. Take the huge fields of corn that blanket the Midwest. Pollan’s opening chapter clearly and carefully explains how, in part because of various subsidies and government programs, American agriculture after World War II began growing a tremendous surplus of corn every year. That corn has ended up in every part of our food system, with often terrible, unanticipated results. Corn syrup replaces sugar in soft drinks; because corn syrup is so cheap, the soft drinks get larger (rather than getting cheaper); people drink more calories of soft drinks; people get diabetes. That’s a simplified version, of course, leaving out many mitigating and complicating factors (which Pollan does not neglect), but when you see similarly malignant patterns in the realms of livestock, chemical fertilizers and herbicides, crop rotations, and more, the overall effect is powerful.

That chapter, and subsequent ones on large-scale organic farming (which has its own grave problems) are both fantastic. But the highlight of the book is when Pollan visits a small-scale farm in Virginia, where grasslands, chickens, hogs, and cattle interact in layers and loops of dizzying complexity to create an ecological system in careful balance, one requiring very, very few external inputs beyond sunlight, rainfall, and manual labor. The farmer, evangelical about his type of farming to the point where I think he’d probably be annoying as a relative or friend, is adamant that this is the way forward: producing and selling locally, keeping a close connection to the land and therefore (as Wendell Berry would certainly agree) fully understanding of the responsibility the farmer has to the land. At first, Pollan is confused that the farmer won’t fedex him a steak; by the end of his visit, he feels like a fool for having asked.

The closing section, on hunting (pigs) and gathering (fungi), isn’t t anywhere near as interesting. And while I love the process of cooking, I’m not actually that interested in reading about food itself, so the descriptions of meals that crop up here and there in The Omnivore’s Dilemma were mostly skippable. But it’s still a great book, and the one I’m most likely to buy as a Christmas gift for more than one person this year. It’s also the gift most likely to spark lively discussion. Pollan, after all, raises far more questions than he answers—he ‘s too smart not to acknowledge that every possible solution to our current situation has its own limitations and problems. But I’ll be very surprised if you can read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and keep it out of your thoughts the next time you sit down to a meal with the person you gave the book to, or the next time you go to the grocery store.

After all, asparagus in January? Apple cider in March? Twinkies, ever? Clearly there’s something wrong here, but how wrong, and how can we make it right? That’s a Thanksgiving dinner conversation if I’ve ever heard one!

Winter

From Diana Kappel-Smith's Wintering (1979)

It turns out that not many animals do truly hibernate, let go of that hard-won skill of keeping themselves warm from the inside out, beacuse like all risky private lettings-go it is not easy to find a place safe enough to do it in. Hibernators need a hidey-hole and the complex series of behaviors to find a good hole, or to make one. They need a place that is safe against frost and prdators. A tall order. So there are not many hibernators here, or anywhere, for that matter. Groundhogs, jumping mice, bats. That's all we have. Farther north where the frost runs deep in the ground there are no hibernators at all; Arctic mammals have to keep themselves warm, keep the inner fires burning. They have no choice. There is no safe place there to let go in.

Winter began this year late on the night of October 27th with an 0-2 curveball thrown by the Cardinals' Adam Wainwright past Detroit's Brandon Inge, followed by much rejoicing.

While I'm not by nature or temperament a true hibernator, my calendar does clear up a bit once winter arrives. Baseball is over, marathon training is over, my busiest time at work is over. We've set our clocks back, so there's no light after work to call me out of doors. Soon there will be no light in the morning before work, either. There's reading and cooking and sitting in the cool front room of our little house, watching the birds. And now it's time to write again.

Lovecraft and other scares

My worries about October's demands on my time have so far been borne out: between the last days of my marathon training and the first days of baseball playoffs, my writing has suffered. I'm such a creature of habit that, were I to continue writing this blog for the next forty years, October would probably always be a light month for those reasons.

My reading continues, though, if for no other reason than that my commute continues. And today I have for you a bit from Luc Sante's excellent article on H. P. Lovecraft in the October 19th New York Review of Books. Luc Sante is one of my favorite writers; Lovecraft, on the other hand, I find fascinating but can read only in very small doses. Sante has come to the rescue, though, and his article is a splendid example of the joys of letting another, better reader tell me about a writer I don't know well. That article alone is worth the price of the issue.

I’ll excerpt one passage for you. Relying on the Library of America edition of Lovecraft's stories and Michel Houellebecq's recent biography, Sante tells of Lovecraft's fears:

It is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list.

If you’re looking for something scary to read, since it’s that time of year, New York Review of Books Classics has a couple of good collections, one of which, The Colour out of Space, takes its title from a very good Lovecraft story. They also publish Edward Gorey's anthology of his favorite ghost stories, The Haunted Looking Glass. No Lovecraft in there, but it does close with a very scary M. R. James story.

Oxford's collection of M. R. James's ghost stories, Casting the Runes, is also very good, full of stories of cursed artifacts and dangerous scholarship (and the hardcover is great because it's so teeny, with a trim size of only about four by five, a true pocket book).

If you're more interested in repression than the horrors of antiquity, The Ghost Stories of Henry James will do; it's surprisingly creepy and effective. Edith Wharton's ghost stories are a bit staid--more so, even, than James's, but at least a few are extremely gripping.

John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights, which includes several stories that formed the basis for episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents relies for its chills less on the supernatural than on the all-too-natural: plain old human cruelty and evil. It's also published by the NYRB.

If you're just looking for variety and value, it's hard to do better than One Hundred Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, from Sterling Publishing. Not every story is a winner, but at approximately $.13 per story, it's hard to go wrong. And if you sit up all night reading those, you're in luck: Sterling also has volumes of Wicked Little Witch stories and Hair-Raising Little Horror stories.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Tartarus Press, a small publisher from the UK specializing in reprints of books by old masters of horror and the macabre. Stacey reads their journal, Wormwood, and while I have yet to buy any of their apparently beautifully produced volumes, now that October has returned I'm trolling their list once again. When we were last in London, we were told by a friend of a friend that there's a particular little bookshop that stocks a lot of Tartarus books. We didn't find it--and until we do, I'm going to assume that it's one of those stores that you might easily enter . . . but never be able to leave.

So what--other than Bush--is keeping you up at night?

Characters reading books, part 2

Part one is here.

The Hard Case Crime novel I read Sunday was Pete Hamill’s The Guns of Heaven (1983), featured its share of books, too. The main character, journalist Sam Briscoe, who half-accidentally gets himself tangled up in a gun-running operation for the IRA, has a daughter who’s wrapped up in Dostoevsky, and he knocks out a musclebound stooge who’s reading a history of the IRA to study up on the enemy. No book plays anywhere near such a central role as The History of the Conquest of Peru does in Plunder of the Sun, but they're still an important part of the background of the novel.

And The Guns of Heaven is a crime novel whose background is its most important asset. It’s a Pete Hamill book, so it’s crammed with jazz, drinks, sports, and everything New York, new and old. As with his Why Sinatra Matters (2003) (which until someone writes the definitive critical biography we need will stand as the best explanation of Sinatra as man and cultural totem), the book reminds us that Hamill has spent a lifetime steeping himself in New York, and now, through his stand-in, Briscoe, we get to drink deep. We learn all about the nooks and crannies of the city, all about the basement telegraph room of the Plaza Hotel, the Irish dive bars of Queens, and that sax player Paul Desmond was a wonderful four a.m. conversationalist.

Anyone who loves a city has to learn to turn a dislike of change into a love of loss, and Hamill funnels all that sense of loss into The Guns of Heaven, from lost illusions to lost friends to lost watering holes. On a beautiful morning in Harlem, Briscoe thinks of the past:

I saw a heavyset black man washing the windows of his grocery store, and kids starting a crap game, and three beautiful young girls walking in a sassy way past the shuttered doors of the old Apollo Theater. I had probably sat with their mothers in that theater, when Basie was on stage with the greatest of all bands, or while Little Willie John did one final gig before going to prison, or Dinah Washington sang “Unforgettable” while the balconies throbbed and roared. Redd Fox played there, too, before television tamed him, and the great musicians and the rock ’n‘ rollers, too. Dexter Gordon told me once that the musicians all stayed in the hotel behind the theater on One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Street and fought for windowed rooms because they overlooked the dressing rooms where the chorus girls changed. When I was a kid reporter, it was still possible to go up to the Apollo on a Friday night and eat dinner at Frank’s and maybe stroll down to Minton’s for bebop or over to Sugar Ray’s for some talk and a sight of the greatest of all champions. The last time Sugar Ray was in New York I told him I’d meet him uptown; Frank’s was closed, and so was the Apollo, and there were no beboppers at Minton’s and Sugar Ray’s had fallen to the taxmen. He met me on the corner of One Hundred and Twenty-fifth and Lenox. I looked at Ray, and he looked at me and said: “Where the fuck’d everybody go?”

A good crime novel is suffused with the knowledge that at best we’re fighting a holding action, preserving some little bit of the good while all else collapses around us. Loss is inevitable, weariness and cynicism the cost of the battle. Hamill, who gives the impression of having been born old and watched the city catch up to him, understands that as well as anyone, and The Guns of Heaven is a reminder that a good crime novel also is built around the knowledge that not only should one keep fighting, but that there's really no other option

Characters reading books, part 1

Something that’s always struck me as strange is how rarely authors of novels spend any time telling us about what their characters are reading. Assuming that authors read a lot themselves, and therefore know how important books are to people, how what you’re reading can color you whole day, it surprises me that characters aren’t more often thinking or talking about what they’re reading. It’s also an easy way—though with a danger of becoming too obvious—to give some signals about a character’s inner life or about larger themes the author wants to develop.

I bring this up because the two most recent Hard Case Crime novels I’ve read both featured characters reading book. David Dodge’s Plunder of the Sun (1949) follows an adventurer, Al Colby, who reminds me a bit of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. He’s willing to work in the shadowier corners of the law, and he perpetually balances a definite tendency towards knight-errancy with a desire to get his share of whatever loot is legitimately on offer. In Plunder of the Sun, when a job couriering an unidentified parcel quickly gets him embroiled in a dangerous search for lost Incan treasure in Peru, Colby turns to William H. Prescott’s 1847 History of the Conquest of Peru to learn just what it is he’s fighting for. Prescott’s book, which, though of course quite dated, is still in print and regarded as a good introduction, and it plays a big part in Plunder of the Sun. From it, Colby learns not only of the treasure itself, but of the origins of Peru’s racial strife and exploitative class system; that knowledge ultimately leads him to stick his neck out on behalf of a couple of members of that exploited class.

Plunder of the Sun is exactly what I look for in a crime book: it pretty much skips the preamble and jumps right into the story, features vividly drawn locations and characters, and has good amounts of action and surprise. I mentioned that Colby reminds me of Travis McGee; he also reminds me a little of Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer. As with Archer, we don’t ever learn all that much about Colby or his background—the author gives us just enough to know, unquestioningly, that we want this man on our side.

I’ll write about the second Hard Case Crime novel tomorrow.

Austen

From Anthony Lane’s “An Englishman Abroad,” in the May 22, 2006 issue of The New Yorker

“My abiding memory of Patrick Leigh Fermor comes from Crete, eight years ago. We had spent time there, and I wanted to know how he would be retuning to the mainland: a flight to Athens, presumably, followed by a taxi to the Mani. On the contrary, he said; he would board the overnight ferry. I offered at least to book him a cabin, since the night could be cold. He smiled and replied that he would prefer a chair on deck, adding, “My dear boy, I have a bottle of red wine and a copy of Persuasion. What more could I possibly need?”

That does sound like a pleasant way to spend an evening, though at some point about midway through the bottle, I’d likely realize that I’d been reading the same page for the past fifteen minutes and decide it was time to watch the suddenly blurry waves.

If I had my choice, though—or my beautifully designed Jane Austen omnibus edition—I’d probably choose Pride and Prejudice (1813) instead. Not that Persuasion (1817) isn’t a pleasant, at times lovely book, full of the perceptiveness, humor, and irony that are the reason I read Jane Austen—but in Persuasion, the characters are a little less interesting, the plot a little slower and less intricate, even the narration a bit less lively.

The main reason that Persuasion suffers in the comparison, though, is because it has far less dialogue than Pride and Prejudice. Dialogue is Austen’s greatest strength, because that’s where she can best demonstrate both her understanding of character and her willingness to trust her reader to see past her characters’ statements to the intentions and evasions beyond them. She also mines that disjunction for much of her gentle humor; she works with the ironies of conversation with the same skill that Wodehouse works with its absurdities. Having less dialogue in Persuasion necessarily leaves it less wryly funny than Pride and Prejudice

To be fair to Austen, I should point out that Persuasion was written in the last years of her brief life, when she was ill; doubtless it would be far more polished had she lived longer. Even unpolished, Persuasion contains such gems as this exchange among Ann, the heroine, her superficial sister, and her sister’s kind-hearted but non-intellectual husband:

”I think Lady Russell would like him. I think she would be so much pleased with his mind, that she would very soon see no deficiency in his manner.”

“So do I, Anne,” said Charles. “I am sure Lady Russell would like him. He is just Lady Russell’s sort. Give him a book, and he will read all day long.”

“Yes, that he will!” exclaimed Mary, tauntingly. “He will sit poring over his book, and not know when a person speaks to him, or when one drops one’s scissors, or any thing that happens. Do you think Lady Russell would like that?”

I suppose that complaining that one Jane Austen novel isn’t as much fun as another is a lot like complaining about having the wrong flavor of ice cream. After all, there is no bad ice cream. I imagine Patrick Leigh Fermor would agree with me.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

It’s satisfying to read a book with a great reputation and have it live up to it completely. Over the weekend I read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and it was a creepy, compelling, and tense as I’d always heard. Earlier this week I complained that Scott Smith’s The Ruins provided only nothing beyond thrills; The Talented Mr. Ripley is the perfect example of a novel that does both. There are scenes as tense as anything in Hitchcock, but the heart of the book, and the reason it’s going to stay with me, is the title character, who by turns is odd, creepy, confused, sad, needy, even sometimes deeply sympathetic. Without diminishing him as a character—and without being obvious about it—Highsmith reveals the complicated mix of emotions that drive Tom Ripley while simultaneously showing us that he doesn’t quite understand them himself. He deludes himself—though always for brief periods—so well that we, too, become deluded, our sympathies engaged. That level of psychological reality is only possible when an author knows a character thoroughly; I get the feeling that, while Tom Ripley could surprise himself, there’s no way he could ever surprise Patricia Highsmith.

In case you’re one of the small number of readers who doesn’t know Ripley as a character, I won’t say more. I do, however, have a question. If you were to come to this book with no knowledge of it or Ripley, how would he strike you in the early pages? How much would you see through? How much would you anticipate? I think of this as the Casblanca problem: if you didn’t already know that Rick doesn’t leave, would you be sure it was coming? I think you probably would, in both cases, get an idea of what lies ahead, but I'll never get to know for myself.

Oh, and a second question: I’ve got the next two Ripley novels in this omnibus volume. Anyone read them? Should I?

And, finally, a warning: October is always my busiest month both at work and at home. I’m finishing up marathon training, and the start of the baseball playoffs means hosting lots of baseball chili parties. I fear that my blog is going to suffer; you should probably expect light posting through October. But never fear: winter is on the way, and there sure ain’t much to do in Chicago in the winter but read.

Don't go into the jungle

Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) could almost make me a believer in multiple universes. I can clearly imagine two versions of myself, each reacting differently to it.

It’s the story of six young people—four Americans just out of college and a Greek and a German they run into in Mexico—who strike out into the jungle on what they think is a day trip in search of the German’s brother, who has followed a female archaeologist with whom he has fallen in love. But things very quickly begin to go wrong, and the kids find themselves trapped in the jungle, ill-prepared and with, for various reasons that I’ll leave unexplained, little hope of getting back to civilization. Over the course of a few days, the situation deteriorates with astonishing rapidity, and we watch, closely, as the six utterly fall apart, mentally and physically

The me who lives in some other (more critical?) universe would say that Smith’s characters aren’t very well-developed (despite a lot of time and effort), the opening is simultaneously dull and overly portentous, his attempts at interior monologue are occasionally ham-handed, the book’s action is somewhat repetitive, the central threat that holds the characters in the jungle is a borderline joke, and the seemingly inevitable conclusion is far too long in coming.

The me who lives in this universe would, to one degree or another, agree with all those points. But I just don’t care: they’re inconsequential in the face of the alternately terrifying and horrifying thrill ride that Smith sent me on. The Ruins may be the scariest book I’ve ever read—and that’s an achievement even more impressive given that, after the book’s midpoint, there are few surprises. The few that Smith does pull out, though, are classic up-the-ante moves, raising the horror to unexpected new heights. I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t put it down.

Like the characters, I kept hoping that there was a solution to their dilemma. They rest their hopes in a hazy combination of belief in the overall benevolence of the universe and the unspoken plaint, “We’re Americans—this can’t be happening to us!” (The deep pessimist in me, by the way, fears that historians might look back at the twenty-first century and view that as America’s overriding thought.) Meanwhile, I put my faith in the author himself. Surely he’ll help these people? Surely he’s going to flinch? Things just kept getting worse and worse, and the number of pages beneath my right thumb kept diminishing.

Like it did with the multiple mes, The Ruins seems to have split readers and critics, too. People either love it, getting totally wrapped up and terrified, or they hate it to the point of not seeing why anyone would praise it. The negative reviews on Amazon—which for any book are much more informative than the positive ones—are telling. They rehearse the complaints I made above, but a large number also focus their annoyance on the weakness, stupidity, and incompetence of the characters themselves. Why do they fall apart so quickly? Why do they not come up with better plans?

They’re right. The characters do fall apart quickly. They don’t make good plans. But Smith’s point, even if overplayed, is one that I’m in sympathy with: very few of us would cope well with disaster. Throughout, The Ruins has you asking, “How would I deal with this?” If we’re being ruthlessly honest, most of us won’t like the answer. It’s the best thing about the book.

That’s also a sign of the weakness of The Ruins, though, and of why it’s ultimately just a thrill ride. As much as Smith seems to think he’s created well-rounded, interesting characters, there’s never a point in the book where I was worried about them as individuals. Instead, I was worried about them—even at times terrified for them—only as proxies for me. When I finally closed the book, looked up, and remembered that I wasn't in the Mexican jungle, there was nothing left.

But it seems a bit churlish to complain about The Ruins not being full of great characters or deep insights. I opened the book hoping to be scared, and for several hours it kept me that way, so regardless of what the parallel universe me might think, I'm satisfied.

A word of advice for the writers I've not yet read

One way to dramatically decrease the chances that, after I pick up your acclaimed novel in the bookstore, I actually purchase it is to let your publisher's marketing department include the words “Pynchon” or "DeLillo" or “postmodern” in the jacket or cover copy.

One way to dramatically increase the chances that, after I pick up your acclaimed novel in the bookstores, I actually purchase it is to feature an epigraph from Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room.

Claire Messud, you’re now on my stack. David Mitchell, despite the raves of a couple of friends, you’re not. At least for now.

[Sub-note: This advice is only intended for those authors interested primarily in maximizing their potential sales to me. Those authors interested primarily in maximizing their sales to the non-me public should probably ignore this advice, as the non-me public seems to like Pynchon and DeLillo and postmodern fiction. It's simply a matter of setting priorities, authors.]

Empire Falls, part three

Part one is here. Part two is here.

For about three hundred and fifty pages, Empire Falls is composed of scenes that conversation between Miles and his father: a series of back-and-forth dealings within a large cast of well-drawn characters. Some characters are more convincing than others, some more fully imagined, but taken as a whole, they’re believable and interesting. Four-fifths of the way through the book, however, Russo makes a big mistake, as a plot that he’s been slowly building in the background erupts.

I won’t say anything specific about it, because it’s at least somewhat surprising, but it completely derails the book. I’m sure if I talked with Russo about it, he’d say that was his point—the unexpected happens in people’s lives, and he’s trying to show that. But I think he’s made a bad decision in this case: in order to make his point, he sacrifices everything he’s built up to that moment. Interesting characters with their own stories are left by the wayside; open questions about some of the people we’ve come to know are not only left unanswered (which would be fine with me, because in life we don’t always get answers) but are, it seems, forgotten in the rush of events. And after the dust clears, the resolutions of the few stories that are left seem almost perfunctory, as if all Russo’s energy was used up in those few moments that turned the book around.

All that is an even bigger letdown because one of the things that most impressed me about his best novel, Nobody’s Fool (1993) was the sense it communicated of being a true, nearly random slice of its characters’ lives. We were looking at a representative sample of their existences, and the choice of beginning and end points wasn’t being driven by the need to follow events to their conclusion. To tell a story that is captivating, while retaining that sense of ordinariness, is a tremendous achievement—and I can think of very few writers, Penelope Fitzgerald being one, who are capable of it. So to see Empire Falls be essentially crushed by the weight of its plot was extremely disappointing.

The failed ending doesn’t make Empire Falls worthless, though Russo’s characters are too interesting, his writing too perceptive for that. If you’ve enjoyed the two scenes I’ve presented here, you’ll probably enjoy Russo, and Empire Falls. But start with Nobody’s Fool. You won’t be disappointed.

Oh, and before I end this post, I have a question: does anyone have suggestions for me about other people who are currently writing about contemporary American life with Russo’s understanding, intricacy of character, and sympathy? In particular, are there any women writers you’d recommend? In writing this blog, I’ve realized that most of the female writers I read are long dead. I fear that I’ve fallen victim to the marketing of contemporary American women’s writing—but in reverse: I see covers clearly designed to appeal to the two-thirds of the novel-buying public that are women, and I pass right over them, assuming they’re a meld of romance, Oprah-style self-discovery, and soap operas. And that’s silly and unfair; I’m sure there’s some good fiction I’m missing through my knee-jerk response. If anyone has any suggestions of where I should start, I’d love to hear them.

Empire Falls, part two

Part one is here.

The scene between Tick and Mr. Meyer demonstrates several of Russo’s skills at their best. By slowing down fairly ordinary conversations and reminding us of all the thoughts behind each utterance, he renders them complex and interesting, so that even comedic banter comfortably serves a dual purpose in his novels. He’s also good at making use of the physical, but not in a blunt metaphorical way: here, Tick reminds us that high schoolers are attuned, maybe above all else, to physical difference, as her discomfort in Mr. Meyer’s presence leads her to focus on how he swallows his lies. That perceptiveness, too, is a Russo strength—he’s willing to let his characters see one another with the kind of intensity that marks real human relationships; he's also good at portraying their occasional willed blindness. He knows that, in the right circumstances, a teenager can understand as much about human behavior as an adult, but he also knows that much will always go unseen. In Mr. Meyer’s case, it’s only later, when we see him talking to Miles, who was his childhood friend, that we understand that he's essentially a good man, living with his compromises and trying to do a difficult job.

Russo’s understanding of relationships helps him avoid sentimentality: though it's always a threat in any novel so suffused with love and sympathy, Russo almost always manages to avoid it simply by being too clear-eyed about people to succumb. And that blunt, realistic understanding of family and friendship also leads to some of his funniest scenes, which vibrate with a lived familiarity. Take this one, between Miles and his aged, ne’er-do-well father, Max:

“I’ve been lucky lately,” Max said, as if there was no reason he shouldn’t be, given the general tenor of his life to this point. “I tell you I won the lottery down there in Florida?”

This was the kind of question Max loved to ask, one for which the answer was obvious to both parties, and one it was best just to ignore—a trick Miles had never mastered. “No, Dad. We haven’t spoken in six months. You didn’t know where I was. So, how could you have told me?”

“Oh, I knew where you were,” Max assured him. “Just because I’m sempty doesn’t mean I’m senile. Old men got brains too, you know.”

Mile rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “You’re telling me you actually won the lottery?”

“Not the big one,” Max admitted. “Not all six numbers. Five out of six. Pretty good payoff, though. Over thirty thousand.”

“Dollars?”

“No, paper napkins,” Max said, holding one up. “Of course dollars, dummy.”

“You won thirty thousand dollars.”

“More. Almost thirty-two.”

“You won thirty-two thousand dollars.”

Max nodded.

“You personally won thirty-two thousand dollars.”

Max nodded, and Miles considered whether there might be yet another way to ask the same question. Usually, with Max, phraseology was crucial.

“Me and nine other guys from Captain Tony’s.” Max clarified after a healthy silence.

“You each won thirty-two thousand dollars.”

“No, we each won three thousands. Ten guys go in on a ticket, and you have to divvy up the winnings.”

Now, it was Miles’s turn to nod. Wheedling the truth out of his father was one of the few pleasures of their relationship, and Max took equal pleasure in withholding it. “How much do you have left?”

Max took out his wallet and peered inside, as if genuinely curious himself. “I got enough to buy lunch. I’m not cheap, like some people. I’m not afraid to spend money when I got it.”

Final part tomorrow.

Empire Falls, part one

Richard Russo is an extremely good writer, good enough that I’m not sure there’s any novelist who’s next book I’m more looking forward to. He writes about small, dying New England towns and the people who are stuck there, with a perceptiveness and clear-eyed sympathy that are breathtaking. His main characters tend to be middle-aged men who have, through a combination of bad luck and their own weakness, wound up in a dead-end job, surrounded by one poorly resolved relationship (with, say, an ex-wife) after another (with, say, a brother or father). But these men haven’t been beaten down by circumstance—instead, they and those around them are vibrantly alive, channeling their frustrations into hard work, some drinking, and pointless (but frequently very funny) banter.

Whereas Raymond Carver portrayed the lives of the lower socio-economic classes with an arid, bleak despair that I frequently find falls somewhere between false and condescending, Russo understands what was always apparent to me growing up in a small town: a lot of people in all situations take life as it comes—some of them with biting humor, others by being pricks, some by dreaming impossible dreams, others by constantly reminding themselves to be satisfied with what they’ve got. And self-awareness is found at all levels of education and income, just like self-absorbedness. That variety of character and response, allied to a deep understanding of how people relate to friends, relatives, and rivals, is what makes Russo’s books compelling.

Last week I read his most recent novel, Empire Falls (2001), and to give you an idea of how Russo gets into the heads of his characters—as they, frequently, are attempting to do the same to other characters—I’m going to quote at greater length than usual. In this scene, Tick, the teenage daughter of Miles, the book’s protagonist, is talking with her high school principal. Due to a scheduling problem, she’s for a few months been lunching alone in the cafeteria at an off period, which, because she’s shy and not that popular, has suited her fine.

“I’ve found someone to have lunch with you,” Mr. Meyer reports once the door is safely shut between them. Tick can’t help but stare at him. The fundamental dishonesty of adults never fails to amaze her, their assumption that you’ll believe whatever they say just because they’re grown-ups and you’re a kid. As if the history of adults’ dealings with adolescents were one long, unbroken continuum of truth-telling. As if no kid was ever given a reason to distrust anyone over the age of twenty-five. In this instance Mr. Meyer would apparently have Tick believe that in the two weeks since allowing this solitary lunch privilege, he’s been thinking of nothing except finding her a companion. Whereas Tick doubts that she’s crossed his mind until provoked by the larger problem of what to do with this wretched boy, who by virtue of being friendless, voiceless and graceless has become the target of lunchroom bullies who consider it fine sport to hit him in the back of the head with empty milk containers, broken pencils, thumb-shot rubber bands and any other handy missile, launching these objects from all the way across the cafeteria for maximum impact.

Tick’s strategy for dealing with lying adults is to say nothing and watch the lies swell and constrict in their throats. When this happens, the lie takes on a physical life of its own and must be either expelled or swallowed. Most adults prefer to expel untruths with little burplike coughs behind their hands, while others chuckle or snort or make barking sounds. When Mr. Meyer’s Adam’s apple bob once, Tick sees that he’s a swallower, and that this particular lie has gone south down his esophagus and into his stomach. According to her father, who’s an old friend of Mr. Meyer’s, the man suffers from bleeding ulcers. Tick can see why. She imagines all the lies a man in his position would have to tell, how they must just churn away down there in his intestines like chunks of undigestible food awaiting elimination. By their very nature, Tick suspects, lies seek open air. They don’t like being confined in dark, cramped places. Still, she likes Mr. Meyer better for being a swallower. Her father, who neither lies often nor well, at least by adult standards, is also a swallower, and she approves that his lies go down so painfully. . . .

“John has the same scheduling difficulty you had because of a class,” Mr. Meyer continues, studying her to see how this second lie will play, his Adam’s apple bobbing again. John Voss has no such scheduling difficulty, Tick knows. Except for computer studies, at which the boy is reportedly brilliant, he in all low-track classes, and art fits this program like a glove.

When Tick remains silent, Mr. Meyer breaks into a nervous sweat. What is this—two comatose kids? If coming to the aid of floundering liars weren’t against Tick’s religion, she’d be tempted to toss him a rope. . . .

“Actually, I have a favor to ask you, Christina,” Mr. Meyer continues, his Adam’s apple stationary now, so this part of it must be true. He nods at the door. “John Voss is a very unhappy boy. More unhappy than anyone suspects, I fear.”

He’s lowered his voice another notch, perhaps worried that the unhappy boy might find out about his unhappiness and be unhappier still. “There is an element in our school that finds in this unfortunate young man an excellent candidate for ridicule and even worse forms of cruelty.”

He pauses to study Tick here, hoping maybe that she’ll contradict him by testifying that no such element exists. About this, he would very much like to be wrong. “We have a good school here,” he quickly adds, as if fearful that his criticism has gone too far. “But not everyone . . . ” As his voice trails off, his Adam’s apple starts bobbing again, confirming Tick’s belief that omissions, too, can be lies, perhaps the most dangerous ones.

More tomorrow.

On brotherhood, duty, and death

From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books (1800-06)

When he goes to church and reads his Bible the ordinary man confuses the means with the end. N.B. a very common error.

From Plato’s Socrates’ Defense (Apology)

You, too, gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence, and fix your minds on this one belief, which is certain—that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods. This present experience of mine has not come about mechanically. I am quite clear that the time had come when it was better for me to die and be released from my distractions. That is why my sign never turned me back. For my own part I bear no grudge at all against those who condemned me and accused me, although it was not with this kind intention that they did so, but because they thought that they were hurting me; and that is culpable of them. However, I ask them to grant me one favor. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think that they are putting money or anything else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I plagued you; and if they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking that they are good for something when they are good for nothing. If you do this, I shall have had justice at your hands, both I myself and my children.

Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

And now, being invulnerable since there was nothing left for them to hurt, he had been quite sure that these men meant nothing to him. What he had forgotten, of course, was that these men were men and, being men, could not help but mean something to him, who was also a man. . . . What he had forgotten entirely was that though he had matched them for his faith in comradeship and understanding and had lost, he still had his faith in men kicking around somewhere, and that this was where they could still reach him. It did not take the hurt long in getting started.

From Mesa Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish (1966)

I am forty years old, an ugly age: one is still young enough to have dreams, but already too old to fulfill them. This is the age when the restlessness in everyone subsides so he can become strong by habit and by the certainty he has acquired of the infirmity to come. But I am merely doing what should have been done long ago, during the stormy flowering of my youth, when all the countless paths seemed good, all errors as useful as the truth. What a pity that I am not ten years older, then old age would protect me from rebellion; or ten years younger, since then nothing would matter. For thirty is youth that fears nothing, not even itself. At least that is what I think now that thirty has moved irretrievably into the past.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

Here is your Army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell Them, here is your strength, that You have made strong by trying to break, and that You will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether You like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it may hurt Your pride. . . . Thank your various Gods for your prisons, You America. Pray to Them hard, to not teach you how to get along without them—until They have first taught you how to get along without your wars.

From Halldor Laxness’s Independent People (1946)

They stood with bowed heads, all except Bjartur, who would never dream of bowing his head for an unrhymed prayer. Then they lifted the coffin out. They lifted it on to the horse and tied it across the saddle, then laid a hand on each end to steady it.

“Has the horse been spoken to?” asked the old man; and as it had not yet been done, he took an ear in each hand and whispered to it, according to ancient custom, for horses understand these things:

“You carry a coffin today. You carry a coffin today.”

Then the funeral procession moved off.

Alan Furst's Dark Star

A post about Alan Furst’s The World at Night (1996) was this blog’s first, last November. I mentioned that I had been left a bit cold by a Furst novel I’d read earlier, The Polish Officer (1995) and, while I praised The World at Night, I didn’t rave about it.

Today I come to rave. But for the opening rave I’ll turn to Brad DeLong, whose recommendation made me pick up Dark Star (1991) in the first place:

When I talk to practically any of my undergraduates these days, I have a nearly impossible task to do when I try to convince them that the twentieth century has, after all, ended much better than it might have been. The half-full undergraduates talk of how wonderful and advanced our industrial civilization is, and how human progress to this point was nearly inevitable. The half-empty undergraduates talk about poverty in the developing world, inequality, and injustice, and seem deaf to the idea that the world we live in is much better than the world that we seemed headed for during the second quarter of this century. The Great Depression. Stalin's purges. World War II. Hitler's genocides--they have read about these, but they are not *real*, and the idea that for decades people thought that the forces headed by Stalin or by Hitler were the wave of the future (or the last chance to stop an even greater evil) does not penetrate below the surface.

So the next time I teach a course on the entire politico-economic history of the twentieth century, I think I may assign Alan Furst's novel Dark Star, for it does a better job than anything else I have read to catch the atmosphere of the days when Josef Stalin seemed to be the lesser of two evils--and it is a very fine novel besides.

DeLong continues in this vein, and it’s worth reading his whole post (or watching the videocast). But in those introductory paragraphs, he lays out Furst’s greatest achievement: to put the reader back into the utter uncertainty of mid-century, mid-war Europe, where the only things you know for sure are that danger is ahead, things are definitely going to get worse, and you shouldn’t waste your time on long-term plans. In Dark Star, Szara, a Russian journalist of Polish descent find himself being pulled deeper and deeper into work for Stalin’s intelligence arm, the NKVD, despite his grave misgivings about Stalin’s purges. Every day, it seems, brings a new choice between two evils, a new balancing between what he must do to survive and what he can’t do and still live with himself. And as despairing as Szara is, we know things are about to get worse: when he discovers that German generals and NKVD figures are meeting secretly, we know that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact lurks on the horizon.

DeLong compares reading Dark Star to seeing Casablanca for the first time. I wouldn’t go quite that far—Dark Star isn’t as glamorous and romantically captivating as Casablanca (in fact, the actual romances that feature in it are, like those in all the Furst novels I’ve read, the weakest part). It’s never going to stay in my head and heart the way that movie does. But that’s now really what Furst is after anyway: for all the excitement and adventure of the novel, he’s painting a more serious picture, both broader and deeper, that ranges comfortably all over Europe and the late 1930s, revealing, in big and small ways, how people cope with looming catastrophe.

I do, however, think Dark Star has something fascinating and important in common with Casablanca—but in the negative. Casablanca, despite being made in 1942, when the outcome of World War II was still very much in the air, exudes confidence. It’s pervaded with a sense that the Allies are going to win, and that confidence seems very real. It’s a movie to remember, and treasure, should the world ever happen to fall into similarly dark times.

Dark Star, despite being written forty-five years after the end of the war, manages the opposite. No one knows who’s going to win—if anything, it seems clear that the Nazis have the upper hand—and the Allies may just decide to fold. When Russia and Germany sign the non-aggression pact and begin dividing up Poland, it feels like the world is ending. World War II truly was an existential crisis for Western civilization, and as pundits and politicians invoke that time to justify their short-sighted anti-terror plans, it’s important that we remember that essential difference between then and now. If a novel—a page-turner of an espionage novel—helps us do that, all the better.

A Marriage

From Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1651)

Stratocles the Physitian, upon his wedding day, when he was at dinner . . . could not eate his meat for kissing of the bride, &c. First a word, and then a kisse, then some other complement, and then a kisse, then an idle question, then a kisse, and when he hath pumped his wittes dry, can say no more, kissing and colling are never out of season, . . ’tis never at an end, another kisse, and then another, another, & another, &c.

My friends Sandy and Sarah were married yesterday. The ceremony featured
the reading of Genesis 2:18-24:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

I know this passage has been used through the years by those whose primary interest in religion is as a justification for placing women under the control of men. But regardless of how the Bible’s authors present the creation of Woman, the moment of recognition, down through the millennia, rings true: none of the others the Lord shows Adam is right, but when he sees Woman, he knows, “This is bone of my bone.”

It doesn’t happen for everyone—and the skeptic in me warns that sometimes when it does happen, it can’t entirely be trusted—but love at first sight can be real and glorious. I don’t know if Sandy and Sarah really knew the moment they met, but yesterday we heard again and again from friends and family who did see it, clear and beautiful, when they first saw the couple together.

Though the historical resonance and familiarity of the King James version of the Bible usually leads me to prefer it to any other, in this case I actually like Robert Alter’s recent translation a bit better, especially once he gets to that moment of recognition:

And the Lord God said, “It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him.” And the Lord God fashioned from the soil each beast of the fields and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name. And the human called names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the heavens and to all the beast s of the field, but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. And the Lord God cast a deep slumber on the human, and he slept, and He took one of his ribs and closed over the flesh where it had been, and the Lord God built the rib He had taken from the human into a woman and He brought her to the human. And the human said:

“This one at last, bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh,
This one shall be called Woman,
for from man was this one taken.”

Therefore does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh.

This one at last.

Congratulations, Sandy and Sarah. The years are ahead of you; be each the other’s sustainer.