Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born (#CCSpin)

"What's good about it?, Vicky thought. He's in love with you and you're in love with somebody who's in love with somebody else--oh, splendid. Perfectly ducky, in fact."

It's that sort of comedy where one generally expects all of those mismatched loves to be resolved in the end. Is that true of this one? Hmm, maybe. The novel a bit leaves us hanging. If you've read it, did you think things were going to work out?

Ethel Carey, Amanda Keeler, and Vicky Havens were three friends at a private girls' school in Ohio. Vicky was the youngest and the pet of the older two. Now Vicky's heart has been broken when her fiancé runs off with her business partner in their small real-estate firm. Can Vicky bear to continue working with the actual Mrs. Turner when she'd hoped to be Mrs. Turner? Everybody in Lakeville is sniggering behind Vicky's back.

So Ethel, born the wealthiest of the three, goes off to New York City to see her friend Amanda, who's made good. Can Amanda do something for Vicky? 

Since school, Amanda wrote a novel, which got boosted into success when she married Julius Evans, a very wealthy New York publisher. Now she's working on the sequel, writing for Julius' magazines, and since the year is 1941, helping with refugees. Amanda's run far away from Ohio; she'd prefer to forget it. But if Amanda sets up Vicky with a studio apartment, she can use it during the day as a love-nest. She's bored with her husband and thinking about her used-to-be.

Will the US get into the war? Seems likely. It's a serious time.

But the novel is funny: 

"But Lakeville was not hometown to Amanda, it was childhood, and childhood was something to be forgotten, like a long sentence in prison."

"She was so accustomed to only go to those places she was known that this anonymity was a new experience for her. She didn't like it."

[After a family squabble.] "Yet their public manners were charming, even to each other, and probably kept in all the finer condition by not being wasted in private."

[Vicky has been crying.] "...she blew her nose so many times you would have thought she had test the instrument thoroughly before permitting it to leave the factory."

Powell says in her diary she started the novel in January of 1941; on May 18th of 1942, she writes:

"Finished novel at 4:30--p. 402."

She sends it off the next day. But a couple of weeks before on April 25th, she wrote:

"I grow dissatisfied with novel--which is not like me. But it is the longest, most expansive book I've ever attempted and I'm afraid I'll not have the actual capacity for handling this big a theme. I still like it and feel cheated that I can't linger more over it and make it richer, which is what it needs. The title ought to be changed to a more provocative one--'Almond Tree Shall Blossom'--not so bad."

I suspect all writers go through such a phase with whatever they're working on and it doesn't necessarily mean much. It doesn't in this case. It's the third Powell novel I've read, and while I liked the other two well enough, this one amazed me.

Wikipedia tells me Amanda is loosely based on Claire Boothe Luce (Luce-ly?) which would make Julius Evans a stand in for Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life.

My Classics Club spin novel this time, and a rousing success.

 

  

 

 

Ossi di Seppia (#HYH25)

Eugenio Montale in his office at the Corriere della Sera

The Agave on the Reef: Sirocco

O rabid sirocco

gale that burns

the parched land's yellowgreen;

and in the sky alive

with pale lights

a few cloud columns pass

and are lost.

Worried hours, vibrations

of a life that flees

like water through the fingers;

unsnared events,

light-shadows, shakings

of the wobbling things of earth;

oh arid wings of air

today I am

the agave that takes root

in the crevice of the rock

and in the algae's arms escapes the sea

that opens its huge jaws and mouths the boulders;

and in the ferment

of every essence, with my furled-up buds

that no longer explode, today I feel

my rootedness as torment.

 

-Eugenio Montale (tr. Jonathan Galassi)

 

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa, Liguria, Italy in 1896 to a well-to-do family, and died in Milan in 1981. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975.

 

His first book of poems was titled Ossi di Seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones") and came out in 1925. Since cuttlefish are a marine invertebrate, a relative to squid and octopus, you might not think they have bones, but what they have is an internal shell, called a cuttlebone in English, osso di seppia in Italian, which they use to control buoyancy. After the cuttlefish dies, these cuttlebones wash up on shore. Montale called his poems ossi, 'bones' suggesting that they were things he found on the Ligurian coast.

 

'The Agave on the Reef' is the first in a series of three poems (I've only typed the one) about winds of the region. The sirocco is the hot wind from Africa; the second poem names the tramontane, the cold wind that blows down over the Alps; the third is the mistral (maestrale in Italian) from the northwest that blows in all that wonderful sunny weather on to the French and Italian riviera. 

 

Montale wrote many more books of poetry, some published abroad during the Fascist era, translations from English, French, and Spanish, and after the war was a regular columnist for the venerable Milan paper Corriere della Sera.

 

I read it in the bilingual edition from Farrar, Strauss that came out in 1998 with translations and notes by Jonathan Galassi:

The Italian:

 

L'agave su lo scoglio

 

Scirocco

 

O rabido ventare di scirocco

che l'arsiccio terreno gialloverde

bruci;

e su nel cielo pieno

di smorte luci

trapassa qualche biocco

di nuvola, e si perde.

Ore prepesse, brividi

d'una vita che fugge

come acqua tra le dita;

inafferrati eventi,

luci-ombre, commovimenti

delle cose malferme della terra;

oh alide ali dell'aria

ora son io

l'agave che s'abbarbica al crepaccio

dello scoglio

e sfugge al mare da le braccia d'alghe

che spalanca ampie gola e abbranca rocce;

e nel fermento

d'ogni essenza, coi miei racchiusi bocci

che non sanno più esplodere oggi sento

la mia immobilità come un tormento.

 

-Eugenio Montale

 

Galassi reproduces the alliteration of the Italian in 'alide ali dell'aria' but doesn't do much with Montale's rhymes. It's easier to rhyme Italian than English, so maybe it would feel less significant in Italian than in English, but I do feel it's a loss: the Italian ends on a rhymed couplet which adds a weight that's not quite there in English. 

 

Embarrassingly enough, I started reading Ossi di Seppia in October for the 1925 Club, but only finished it now. Well, I did try to read the Italian first. Fortunately there's still Neeru's Hundred Years Hence challenge, running until the end of the year, which I will squeak in on:

 

 

 

Twilight

Twilight

Looking across 

The water we are

Startled by a star--

It is not dark yet

The sun has just set

 

Looking across 

The water we are

Alone as that star

That startled us,

And as far

 

-Samuel Menashe

 

Samuel Menashe was an American poet born in New York in 1925 who died in 2011. He was the first recipient of the Poetry magazine's Neglected Masters award, and this Library of America volume was the result.

 

Twilight comes early this time of year and it's a little cold to go down by the lake without a good reason... 

Charlie Chan (plus a November wrapup)

Not Pictured: Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan

As threatened in my NonFicNovember post, I did carry on. When I first read the Charlie Chan mysteries about 25 years ago, I read them out of order as I happened to find the books. This time I read them in order. Not essential, but it does add something. Each one refers back to the events of the previous novel or even further back.

The first one has less of Charlie, but he was the most popular character, and fans wanted more of him in the books. Biggers supplied. There's not that much Hawaii, though, which I hadn't really thought about--only two and about a half of the books are set there. In the second, The Chinese Parrot of 1926, Charlie Chan has agreed to carry some pearls to the mainland for a friend; there's murder done in the valley near Bakersfield. In Behind That Curtain (1928) he's gotten as far as San Francisco on his way home when he's lured into another mystery. It's the former head of Scotland Yard who's murdered in this. Finally he's back home, when the movie star Shelagh Fane comes to Honolulu only to get murdered in The Black Camel (1929). A tour group is circling the world in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and a first murder occurs in London--"murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one"--there's four dead (including another Scotland Yard man) by the time the tour group arrives in Honolulu. Charlie boards the ship with the tour group as it departs and has solved it by the time they reach San Francisco.

Biggers did live in California at the time, and only got to Hawaii a couple of times before his early death. 

I just finished today the last one The Keeper of the Keys (1932), which is set in Truckee, California, on Lake Tahoe. Just across the border from Reno, Nevada, land of quickie divorces, which is an important plot element.

I'm not sure how much read the Charlie Chan mysteries are these days. There's plenty of casual racism (alas!) in Golden Age mysteries, anti-Semitism, anti-Black, etc., but it's an astonishingly a-historical reading to think these books are anti-Chinese. Prejudice exists in them; Chan confronts it when he sees it. Biggers was by his lights trying to improve the situation. In Keeper of the Keys, a number of Anglos are ready to dedicate a statue for benefits of Chinese immigration to California. Major Yammerton suspects and I would agree that the anti-Charlie Chan feeling is due more to the movies than the books, but Huang thought even the movies were defensible (and clearly liked them himself). Are they? I haven't see a Charlie Chan movie since I was eight and they came on after the Saturday morning cartoons. But thanks to the Major, I'm now aware they can be found at YouTube.

Novellas in November

I read two: Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires and Machado de Assis' The Alienist. Blogged about them here. 

Pynchon

I reread Gravity's Rainbow and have subsequently finished rereading Vineland. Shadow Ticket is on the stack. Pynchon post coming soon? Well there is the Doorstoppers in December challenge going on:

Literary Criticism

I read Robert Boyers' memoir Maestros and Monsters about his relationship with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Boyers is the founding editor of the little magazine Salmagundi and knew both Sontag and Steiner for years in that context. It's a defense of literary criticism for a readerly, but non-specialist audience (me) as well as being amusingly gossipy about both of them, who could be quite difficult in person. I've read or reread most of Sontag pretty recently. It made me want to go read those Steiner books I haven't read.

MARM 

I also reread Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin for Buried in Print's Margaret Atwood Reading Month, though I didn't finish it until this month (so it didn't make the picture). It would be another doorstopper, though...

That was my month of reading. Did you take part in any of the November challenges? For December, in addition to any doorstoppers, there's also Dean Street Decmber, which I hope to read something for.

Searching For It

Searching For It In A Guadalajara Dance Hall

You go in from the cobbled back street.

Into an empty, concrete one-room building

where prim youngish women sit in a line

of straight chairs. The women are wearing

tea dresses thrown away by rich Texan

women two generations ago. The men are

peasants, awkward in a line of chairs opposite.

Nothing is sexual. There are proprieties.

No rubbing against anyone. No touching

at all. When the music starts, the men

go stiffly over to the women. It isn't

clear whether they say anything. The dance is

a slow, solemn fox trot. When it stops,

they stand still while the men

find a coin. The women stow it and all

of them go back to the chairs to wait for

the music and another partner. This is

not for love. The men can get love

for two coins at a shack in the next field.

They know about that. And that they will

never be married, because it is impossible

to own even a little land. They are

groping for something else, but don't know what.

 

-Jack Gilbert

 

Jack Gilbert was an American poet. He was born in 1925 in Pittsburgh, and died in 2012 in Berkeley, California. He lived in various places in between, but a good deal of it in Europe. He wasn't especially prolific, publishing a half-dozen books over his long life. This is from The Dance Most of All, his last book, which came out in 2010. He was featured on the blog once before.

Pavese and Machado de Assis (#NovNov)

Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires

The 'Eel'--we never learn his actual name--left Italy's Piedmont early in the Fascist era for America. He was an orphan, raised by a poor family for few lire the state handed over and the free labor he could provide. He didn't have much to hope for at home. He lives rough in the US, working as a milkman, in a diner, but eventually makes good running some sort of agricultural supply company in California. Twenty years later, 1950 or so, he returns to his native ground. Has he come to stay?

The locals certainly hope so: he could marry! He could buy a farm! But really he just wants to look at the old places and see some old acquaintances. Maybe the person he most wants to see is Nuto, and he does; Nuto came from a better set-up family, and is now, by the standards of rural post-war Italy, well-off. The 'Eel' looked up to the older Nuto before he left. Nuto worked with the Communist resistance during the war, and retains his Communist sympathies; that doesn't earn him any friends in rural Piedmont in 1950. 

The novella is rather slow-burning--surprising in a novella?--and it takes a while before we get to the dramatic plot elements, which happened during the war and are reported by Nuto. But it's mostly an atmospheric work, I thought. I was most touched by the Eel's relationship to young Cinto, a near orphan, whom the Eel sees in himself at that age.

The moon and the bonfires are representative of local superstition:

"What is this valley for a family that comes from the sea, who nothing about the moon and the bonfires?"

I was amused that the Eel lived near El Cerrito in the East Bay ("the Cerrito road") when he was in California, where I also lived in the first half of the 90s.

Pavese never went to America, and instead was in internal exile during the Fascist era, but was known for his translations from American literature (Moby-Dick, Gertrude Stein). He committed suicide shortly after this novella came out in 1950.

152p, plus an introduction by Mark Rudman, translated by R. W. Flint

Machado de Assis' The Alienist

"Dr. Simão Bacamarte, a son of the gentry, and the greatest doctor in Brazil, Portugal, and the Spains," has returned to Brazil. "'Science,' he said to His Majesty, 'is my sole employment; Itaguaí is my universe.'" There's no keeping him in Lisbon.

The story is serialized in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper from October of 1881 to March of 1882. But the events, we're told, took place 'long ago.'  

Bacamarte is interested in a scientific study of insanity. (Alienist is a nineteenth century term what we would call a psychologist.) He convinces the town to allow him to set up an insane asylum. Well-to-do patients will be paid for by their families; the indigent will be treated at a low cost borne by the city. Bacamarte can make discoveries. Such a great and dignified scientist! The city is thrilled at first.

But Bacamarte starts finding a lot of insanity. A lot. He is accused of doing it for the money; he repudiates the payments and does his work pro bono. A rebellion is started by a barber, which gets a groundswell of support, but not quite enough, and rebellion is a form of insanity, isn't it?

But Bacamarte is sincere in his studies, and he eventually realizes that if everybody's insane, then nobody is. What to do? He veers in different directions, finally coming to what might have been the only sensible solution all along. (Think Chekhov's 'Ward No. 6'). But while Chekhov can be funny, there's a real zaniness in Machado de Assis not present in Chekhov. (And anyway this story is a decade earlier than Chekhov's.) 

Is this a political allegory? I dunno. Probably. One chapter in my translation is called 'The Terror'. Funny and thought-provoking.

90p. in my Pushkin Press edition, with other stories. Translated in 2022 by Daniel Hahn. Marcie at Buried in Print also read it this month but in a different translation. 

I finished both of these a week or two ago, but I suddenly realized I'd better get going if I was going to squeeze them in for Novellas in November this year. Thanks to our hosts!

A Note from Wisława Szymborska

 

A Note

Life is the only way

to get covered in leaves,

catch your breath on the sand,

rise on wings;

 

to be a dog,

or stroke its warm fur;

 

to tell pain

from everything it's not;

 

to squeeze inside events,

dawdle in views,

to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

 

An extraordinary chance

to remember for a moment

a conversation held

with the lamp switched off;

 

and if only once

to stumble on a stone,

end up drenched in one downpour or another;

 

mislay your keys in the grass,

and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

 

and to keep on not knowing

something important.

 

-Wisława Szymborska

(tr. Claire Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak)

 

This is from Wisława Szymborska's book Moment of 2002. Szymborska was born in 1923, died in 2012, and won the Nobel Prize in 1996. It's not her only poem titled simply, 'A Note'. She's an old favorite of mine--sharp observers might notice I've used the photo before--and I didn't search that hard. But I got both my Covid booster and flu shot this morning and I'm feeling a bit done in. 

 

 

A Charlie Chan Pairup (#NonFicNov)

 

Week 3 (10-16 November) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like! Hosted by Liz.

I reread the first Charlie Chan mystery The House Without a Key a couple of weeks ago for the #1925Club. It reminded me there was a book I had wanted to read since I first heard of it:

 

It was really good! 

Huang first tells the story of Chang Apana, the Honolulu detective, who inspired the character of Charlie Chan. Apana was born in Hawaii to Chinese immigrant parents who went back to China when he was young. But Apana returned to Hawaii with an uncle, and then stayed. He worked as a cowboy, a house servant, the enforcer for the newly enacted statute against animal cruelty; then when the Honolulu police force was officially constituted, he became the only Chinese detective on the force. He seemed to have been good at all his jobs.

Huang then tells the story of Earl Derr Biggers. Biggers had grown up in Ohio to a middle class family. He worked as a journalist and had already become a successful author. But when in 1925 he published the first Charlie Chan novel, those earlier successes could no longer compare. Biggers wrote six Charlie Chan mysteries but died young of a heart attack.

Then there were the movies: there were three early movies, which went nowhere. In all of them Chan was played by a Japanese actor; it was only when Warner Oland (a Swede!) took on the role, they became a success. That's his picture on the cover lower right. (And Chang Apana in the upper left.) Oland's Chan was a huge success even in China, where he was mobbed when he made a publicity trip. And the Chinese were perfectly capable of scorning series they didn't like, such as those around Fu Manchu.

And Huang goes on to talk about the reception of the Charlie Chan character, and that was in some ways the most fascinating. Biggers admired the actual Chang Apana; they met a few times and their respect was mutual, and he intended Charlie Chan to be an antidote to all the Yellow Peril arguments of the time. But Chan talks in that pidgin: how can he be an admirable figure? Well, Huang demonstrates how it could be a whole lot worse. And Chan in the novels is competent and willing to stand up to prejudice when he sees it. Still in the 80s and 90s Chan was viewed as a stereotyped Asian whiz kid, or worse a yellow Uncle Tom, and nothing but cultural appropriation to boot.

Is that all he is? Of course, he is, partly. But Huang reminds us that much of American art comes about from a collision with somebody else's half-understood culture. This is perhaps most obvious in music (though not Huang's topic) and he rightly notes we'd have to give up a lot to achieve that sort of purity of the past.

Huang's includes a little of his own biography, which is fascinating. He was a student, majoring in English, at Peking University in 1989, and went to camp out in Tiananmen Square. But before the tanks rolled in, his parents lured him home by sending a telegram that his mother was dying. (She wasn't.)  Nevertheless he decided to emigrate, worked in lowly jobs in the US, until he decided to go back to school where he got a Ph.D. in English. As of the writing of the book (2010), he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Huang clearly enjoys the Chan mystery series himself; he ends the book with a two page list of Charlie Chan aphorisms. Can't resist a few:

Hasty deduction, like ancient egg, look good from the outside. 

Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.

Murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one.

Some heads, like hard nuts, much better if well cracked.

Mind, like parachute, only function when open. 

I felt like it really added something to my earlier reread of the first Charlie Chan mystery. Does that mean I'm about to go reread them all? Careful examination reveal clue: bookmark in second volume of series!

If you have access to the New York Review of Books, the original review which caught my attention is here. 

 

A Displaced Person's Song

 

Chuck says, I just love the names in this: Pointsman, Slothrop, Borgesius

If you see a train this evening,

Far away against the sky,

Lay down in your wooden blanket, (*)

Sleep, and let the train go by.

 

Trains have called us, every midnight,

From a thousand miles away,

Trains that pass through empty cities,

Trains that have no place to stay.

 

No one drives the locomotive,

No one tends the staring light,

Trains have never needed riders,

Trains belong to bitter night.

 

Railway stations stand deserted,

Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,

What we left them, trains inherit,

Trains go on, and we grow old.

 

Let them cry like cheated lovers,

Let their cries find only wind.

Trains are meant for night and ruin

We are meant for song, and sin.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Another song from Gravity's Rainbow. In the novel, it's the time after V-E Day, but before the zones decided on at the Potsdam Conference (17 July - 2 August) have been implemented, and there's just one Zone. (Though for Tyrone Slothrop there's really only ever just one Zone.) People are trying to get home--either their old home, or whatever the new one they might be forced to will be.

"It is a Displaced Person's song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations." (p. 283)

I finished my rereading a couple of days ago. I won't actually try to say anything about the novel, I guess, but I did think about the poetry in the book a bit more this time.

 

(*) My edition, the second printing of the original paperback edition, really does say wooden, but woolen seems more likely...though maybe it's wood from the sides of the boxcars? But the observer is presumably not in a boxcar. A 'wooden blanket' also suggests a coffin, but maybe that's just me?

 

Patricia Moyes' Death on the Agenda

"Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard, to give him his full title. A deceptively insignificant man in early middle age, with sandy hair and a mild manner, with a flair for intuitive deduction which he described, with some embarrassment, as 'my nose.'"

Henry is in Geneva at the Palais des Nations for a conference of police officers of different countries dealing with international drug smuggling. His wife Emmy has come along for a bit of vacation. It looks like a simple junket at first, but then the American delegate tells Henry there's a leak from their committee, and what are they going to do? It has to come from one of the committee members or staff.

Then John Trapp, one of the simultaneous translators, is killed in the committee rooms. Because the work of the committee is about secret countermeasures to the drug trade, there's a door warden who takes names and notes the time when everyone comes in. The only possible suspects are the six police officers on the committee, the two other simultaneous translators, and the verbatim reporter. And, of course, one of those possible suspects is Henry Tibbett himself, for quite a while the primary suspect. The murder weapon, a knife, comes from the Geneva home of a rich American.

Was Trapp the leaker? Or did he know who the leaker was? Or was he killed for some entirely different reason? (His romantic life is pretty complicated.) All three possibilities are given a reasonable airing.

Of course, Henry figures it out in the end, less as a result of his nose then from sensible insights. (How many words a minute can a good typist manage?) I thought it was a good enough entry in the Henry Tibbett series, but not my favorite. Henry behaves in a way that might be OK in a different kind of mystery series, but seemed inappropriate here.

One of the those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes

Love never goes away,

Never completely dies,

Always some souvenir

Takes us by sad surprise.

 

You went away from me,

One rose was left behind--

Pressed in my Book of Hours,

That is the rose I find....

 

Though it's another year,

Though it's another me,

Under the rose is a drying tear,

Under my linden tree....

 

Love never goes away,

Not if it's really true,

It can return, by night, by day,

Tender and green and new

As the leaves from the linden tree, love,

  That I left with you.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Pynchon is famous for the songs he embeds in his novels. Like a stage musical, people break into song at all times, sometimes motivated, but not always. Here apprentice witch Geli Tripping is accompanying herself on a balalaika when our hero (?) Tyrone Slothrop first meets her. (p.289 in my edition.) A lot of the poems/songs are contextual--whenever Major Marvy's Mothers, an American military detachment chasing Slothrop appears, they approach singing obscene limericks--but this one felt like it could stand on its own. It reminds me a bit of Heine.

 

Pynchon's a bit in the air these days and I'm rereading Gravity's Rainbow. I saw One Battle After Another, the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, last night--quite good, I thought--based on Pynchon's novel Vineland. And the old wizard has a new novel out this fall, Shadow Ticket, but I haven't read it yet. How much of the old Pynchon am I going to reread before I get that? I'm not sure, but clearly some.

 

The post title comes from the introduction of the poem: "...Slothrop heard a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4..." 

Rain

Rain

Rain I remember; I remember how we 

slept under sounds of rain. The glory

of heaven, unfortunately, won't contain

what we have everywhere in spring: the rain.

 

I can remember how it lashed our windows,

and what a happy dream my sleep would kindle;

how deeply I would sleep--and on my arm

you dozed, light as a sparrow in the dark.

 

And how it ran and splashed along the gutter;

how beautifully, how lightly, we lived together!

Laughter-loving rain, sobbing out in gulps

--the Great Flood didn't scare us with its gulf.

 

So who's to blame that sterner times have fallen?

I still recall rain, spring rain in the poplar

and maple, sticky rains that briefly fix

a gilded pattern and, for us, a bliss.

 

Rain, blessed rain; hell, unfortunately,

will not have rain--wherever we're fated

to go at death, we will find winter, these

and all sounds canceled, stilled by total peace,

 

covered forever in black snow, in burning.

I remember rain, its coloratura,

high, million-stringed, incessant, moist,

long-suffering and magnanimous.

 

-Aleksandr Kushner (tr. Paul Graves and Carol Ueland)

 

It's been a rainy day here, though not spring. 

 

Aleksandr Kushner was born in 1936, in what was then Leningrad and is now St. Petersburg. His volume of Selected Poems came out in 1991 with Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. This poem is from the 1980-1987 section.

 

Is it fair to give this a political reading? I suppose so: for him and for us, "sterner times have fallen." 

Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without A Key (#1925Club)

"Amos!" cried Miss Minerva, "That man--why he--"

"Charlie Chan," Amos explained. "I'm glad they brought him. He's the best detective on the force."

 

1925 saw the first of the six Charlie Chan mystery novels. (And I don't know how many movies, etc...)

John Quincy Winterslip has left Boston to come to Honolulu to see what his Aunt Minerva is still doing there. Proper Bostonians don't go gallivanting off to the tropics and even though she's there to see her  cousins Dan and Amos Winterslip, it's time she come home.

But when John Quincy gets off the ship he learns Dan was murdered the night before. He also discovers that while Dan has been living an upright life for a while, he was a black sheep back in the 1880s, and there's still more than one person who would be happy to see him dead.

John Quincy's initial instinct is to pack up his Aunt Minerva and head back to Boston at once, but the Winterslip honour is at stake.

And anyway there's a girl, actually two girls, his distant cousin and Dan's daughter Barbara Winterslip, but more importantly Carlota Maria Egan, beautiful and also the daughter of a suspect.

It's a fun one in the Golden Age mystery tradition, more American than British, not an amateur detective, a few more chase scenes and a bit more violence. (A fist fight! An abduction with an escape!) John Quincy hangs out with Charlie Chan and comes to the correct solution, just a bit later than Chan and Chan has to rescue him. The romance is completely satisfactory.

In fact, really the only downside is that, though I last read it twenty-five years ago, I remembered the murderer and the solution. But I'm quite sure I didn't guess it the first time.

Biggers, already a professional writer, created Charlie Chan because he was impressed by an actual detective of Chinese ancestry on the Honolulu police force Chang Apana and disliked the whole idea of the Yellow Peril.

It's the 1925 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I see Fanda also read the novel and enjoyed it this week. 

 

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (#1925Club)

"And Christopher was as obstinate as a hog. For that Mark did not blame him. It was a Tietjens job to be obstinate as a hog." [800]

The protagonist of Parade's End is Christopher Tietjens and indeed he's pretty obstinate. That's Mark, his older brother, musing above, and maybe it takes one to know one, both as a Tietjens and as an obstinate hog... 

Parade's End is a series of four novels that takes place from 1912 until some point after the end of World War I. Christopher Tietjens comes from a wealthy family from the North of England--he's one of the Tietjens of Groby--and in 1912 he's a highly valued analyst in a department of statistics. But he's married Sylvia Tietjens (neé Satterthwaite) and she's a bad 'un.

She'd set her cap at him because she thought she might be pregnant by Colonel Drake and needed a father; she's beautiful; Tietjens falls; he's never quite sure the son she bears is his. (Nor is anyone else: Sylvia herself, various other Tietjens, the reader.) At the beginning of the first novel Some Do Not Sylvia is on the continent, and has just left a subsequent lover Perowne, and intends to ask Tietjens to take her back, which he does.

In the meantime, though, Tietjens, in a meet-cute episode, has discovered Valentine Wannop, a suffragette. He's golfing; she's disrupting the golf course as a protest, and Tietjens rescues her from arrest. He ends up driving her home in the middle of the night and they start to fall in love. Nothing happens at that time.

And nothing happens for quite a while. Tietjens gets himself into the army; we next see Tietjens in 1917 and he's back in England; a shell had exploded near him in France and he'd woken up in hospital not even knowing his name. He meets Valentine again in London, but nevertheless he's determined to get back to France.

"The gods to each describe a different lot:

Some enter at the portal. Some do not!" [24]

This couplet is first quoted in the context of the landed Tietjens' relation to his poor Scottish friend MacMaster. But just before Tietjens' return to France, which both he and Valentine assume is a death sentence, he asks her to sleep with him, and she thinks, that while she's not that sort of girl, "Some do!"

 

But, in fact, they do not. 

 

The second novel No More Parades is set in France. Tietjens is a very capable officer in Transport. New levies appear and need to be moved to the front; there's a grimly comic bit about trying to move Canadian troops into position to go over the top, presumably largely to be killed. Tietjens' position isn't on the very front, but it's dangerous enough; his messenger Morgan dies in his arms, killed by a German shell. 

 

At the same time Sylvia (and aspirants to Sylvia's favours) are out to drag down Tietjens. It's widely believed that Valentine is Tietjens' mistress, and Sylvia contributes to the rumours which get back to, and are believed, by Tietjens' commanding officer General Campion, his older brother Mark, even by his father, so much so that his father commits suicide. (Or does he?) One of those aspirants, working for a bank, delays deposits to his account and hastens check processing so Tietjens' checks bounce, a court-martialable offence at the time.

 

What makes Sylvia so miserable to her husband? She perceives that Tietjens has fallen out of love with her, though he's too honourable to ask for a divorce, or even to sleep with the girl he loves (at least for a long while), and she's still half in love with him. She also just craves excitement:

"And then there is the boredom. I know it; one is bored...bored...bored!" [41]

A sentiment she repeats several times.  She gets to the battle lines in France, where she's not suppose to be and gets Tietjens to spend the night with her in a hotel, but leaves the door open so Perowne can come in.

"If what's distressing you is having to tell me that you believe Major Perowne came with my wife's permission I know it's true. It's also true my wife expected me to be there. She wanted some fun; not adultery." [498]

Not my idea of fun, but that's who Sylvia is. Tietjens not unreasonably attacks this intruder, but it's Tietjens who gets in trouble for it.

Tietjens, on the other hand, is often irritating in a priggish way:

"His private ambition had always been for saintliness...a saint of the Anglican variety..." [200] 

Tietjens' reputation is so compromised by the end of the second novel that Campion can do nothing but promote him into a position that actually is the front lines.

The third novel A Man Could Stand Up-- starts with Valentine on Armistice Day 1918. Noisy celebrations are starting; Valentine, who's teaching at a girls' school, can't control her students, when she learns (along with a lot of misinformation) that Tietjens has survived the war and is in London. She goes to see him, but does he want to see her? 

In fact he does, and once again they think about sleeping together, but rescuing Valentine's drunk brother gets in the way. 

The novel then moves back in time to early 1918 on the Western front; the British army is close to collapse and nobody quite recognizes that the German army is equally close to collapse. (The Russians have collapsed, which just might give a second wind to the Germans.) 

Tietjens on the front is more concerned with his personal issues: what to do about his family? His son (if the son is his)? Valentine? His brother Mark and his father were too ready to believe the slanders about Tietjens and he can't forgive them (see the quote at the top) and Tietjens who would inherit the family estate because Mark has no children decides to refuse it and make his own way.

The fourth novel The Last Post resolves most of the issues but I won't tell you how they're resolved... When Graham Greene caused the series to be reprinted as one volume in 1963, he said The Last Post was a 'disaster' and simply left it out. That's a little strong, but I did think it was the weakest.

The novel is often quite funny, despite the darkness of its themes, both political and personal. It's also stylistically interesting, with a lot of it in stream of consciousness, an early, though hardly the first, example of the technique. There was a BBC adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch as Tietjens, which I haven't seen but now want to. Cumberbatch could do a good Tietjens, I think, both pompous and appealing; after all he was Sherlock Holmes.

It's the 1925 Club! 

Actually only the second novel No More Parades is from 1925; the whole was issued from 1924-1928. Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting!

 

 

Spinwinner!

...which for me is Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born. I've liked the two novels of hers I've read previously and apparently this is sometimes considered her best. Looking forward to it!

 

Napoo finny! or How our phones really are making us stupid

I've been reading Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and enjoying it. The second volume No More Parades in the tetralogy came out in 1925 so it's suitable for next week's group reading project. The four volumes are set from just before World War I through to shortly after it ends.

The protagonist Christopher Tietjens says, "Napoo finny," and then later Valentine Wannop also uses the phrase. What the heck? Napoo finny?

Turns out 'Napoo finny' is World War I British soldier slang; it's a comic mispronunciation of the French phrase "[Il] n'y [en] a plus; fini," roughly "No more of that; finished." Valentine says it of her chastity, though in point of fact she remains chaste. It's the same sort of instinct that led British soldiers to turn the Belgian battlefield town of Ypres into Wipers.

Where do you go when you want to know something like that? These days it's Internet search, of course; Google in my first attempt. I was on a train and had my phone with, so I searched with that. Google's AI response, which took up the whole of the phone screen was this:

 

 

I could tell this was nuts. 'Finny' is a child's term for excrement? In what world? Clearly the AI was still on the poo part. I scrolled down and got a better answer from a blog post. But the AI overview was so bad it was almost funny. Why not just giggle at a good poo joke? But they keep saying this is the AI that's about to take over the world.

 

But what was even stranger was that when I just now checked this out on my desktop computer, the Google AI overview was much more sensible:

 

 

Now the AI understood that 'finny' came from 'fini', and the strange bit about 'napoo' also meaning 'to kill' had disappeared. Had Google AI learned something in the couple of days between? They say AI is learning all the time.

 

Alas, no, because my phone still produced the same result above. The Google AI result on the phone is different--and wronger--than the one on my computer. What is Google trying to do to us? And only if we depend on our phones?

 

In general I feel like Internet search, whether Google, or what I more often use, DuckDuckGo (Bing) has just gotten worse in the past five years or so. The AI has not been a help. Does anybody else feel this?

 

Well, somebody else does. Eventually my library will deliver the new Cory Doctorow--Enshittification--and maybe then I'll know why...

Classics Club Spin #42

It's time for a spin, and it's time for me to do a spin, since I was haven't managed to sign up for the last couple. The organizing post for spin #42 is here, but you probably know all that so let's go straight to the list of books:

1.) Apollonius Rhodius/Argonautica (3rd century BC)

2.) Lucan/On the Civil War (Pharsalia) (65 AD)

3.) Luiz Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads (1572)

4.) Alexandre Dumas/The Black Tulip (1850)

5.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last (1860)

6.) Charles Darwin/The Voyage of the Beagle (1860)

7.) Robert Louis Stevenson/An Inland Voyage (1878)

8.) Wilkie Collins/The Fallen Leaves (1879)

9.) Gottfried Keller/Green Henry (1879) 

10.) Machado de Assis/Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881)

11.) Knut Hamsun/Hunger (1890)

12.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg (1922)

13.) Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog (1925)

14.) Theodore Dreiser/An American Tragedy (1925) 

15.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry (1927) 

16.) Katharine Anne Porter/Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) 

17.) Dawn Powell/A Time to be Born (1942)

18.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding (1946)

19.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings (1966) 

20.) Robert Pirsig/Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

 

It's been since last year I signed up for a spin, and even then, though I read the book--Statius' Thebaid--I never managed to blog about it.

 

There's a couple of scary chunky numbers on this list: The Voyage of the Beagle, An American Tragedy, Green Henry, but there's two months so that should be OK. I'm particularly keen to read An American Tragedy this year for its hundredth birthday; there are a couple of 1925 challenges on. But it also feels like a political moment in history, and Unto This Last or Elmer Gantry would be fitting.

 

This Sunday will reveal all. Which look good to you? 

Paired poems

 

Sometimes when my lady sits by me

  My rapture's so great, that I tear

My mind from the thought that she's nigh me,

  And strive to forget that she's there.

And sometimes when she is away,

  Her absence so sorely does try me,

That I shut to my eyes, and assay

  To think she is there sitting by me.

 

-Robert Bridges

 

I've been dawdling my way through Robert Bridges lately, and when I read this one, it immediately made me think of a Hilaire Belloc poem with a similar twist:

 

How did the party go in Portman Square?

I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.

And how did Lady Gaster's party go?

Juliet was next me and I do not know.

-Hilaire Belloc

 

Did Belloc (1870-1953) know the Robert Bridges (1844-1930) poem? Seems possible. The Bridges came out in a volume of 1890; the Belloc in a privately printed volume of 1920. All of Belloc's Juliet poems date from after the death of his wife in 1914, when he had a flirtation with a woman actually named Juliet.

 

I thought about titling this post The Second Time as Farce, but the first one is pretty witty, too. (And certainly not tragic.)

Tim Blanning's Augustus the Strong

"...Augustus bobbed about helplessly like a plastic duck, often submerged but never quite sunk."

-p.2 

Augustus II the Strong was the hereditary Elector of Saxony. Born in 1670 he had a brother older by a year and a half who is Elector before him, but John George IV had always been sickly and smallpox carried him off after two and a half years in office. So Augustus becomes Elector at the age of 24. 

He's young, healthy, ambitious; he's strong not because of his rule, but because he breaks horseshoes with his bare hands. He does the European grand tour, including an interview with King Louis the Sun King at Versailles, who and which impressed him mightily; he goes to war because he can, not because he has to, fighting first in Flanders, then becoming a general of the Hapsburg forces defending Vienna against the Turks. And in 1697 he decides to get himself elected king of Poland.

Poland was a declining power at the time, though maybe that wasn't yet obvious. The electors were limited to Polish nobility, who were happy to vote for whoever showed up with the most in bribes. Not exactly a free and fair election. There was a poor Polish candidate whom nobody liked, a French count supported by Louis the XIVth who wasn't issued enough money, and Augustus, supported by the Hapsburgs, but also willing to spend (and spend and spend) his own money. But Saxony was rich (says Blanning) with mineral wealth and a decent manufacturing base for the time.

War still seemed to Augustus like the way to fame, so as king of Poland he ginned up a war against Sweden, allying himself with Frederick the IVth of Denmark, and Peter the Great of Russia. This became the Great Northern War of 1700-1721, and seemed like a good idea, except Charles the XIIth had just inherited the Swedish throne, and he turned out to be one of the great military tactical geniuses of all time. (Though maybe not so good at the larger picture.) Charles knocked the Danes out of the war in the first year, defeated Peter the Great at Narva, so much so Peter ran away in terror, and then concentrated on Augustus, for whom Charles had a particular hatred. Was this because Charles was a staunch Lutheran, and Augustus had converted to Catholicism to acquire the Polish throne? (Augustus wasn't particularly religious and, maybe, Warsaw was worth a mass...) Or was it, Blanning speculates, because Augustus and Charles were first cousins on their mothers' side, and Charles felt he had something to prove vis-a-vis his older cousin? Augustus was willing to make peace, Charles would not relent until he'd taken Dresden and forced Augustus to abdicate the Polish crown, during which time Peter the Great recouped and learned how to fight a war.  Augustus ended up on the winning side eventually, but that was no fault of his own.

"Yet, for all his apparent failures, Augustus did qualify to be ranked among the great European rulers, not by the successful application of hard power, but by his transformation of Dresden and its region into one of the finest cultural complexes in Europe."

-p. 63 

Most of the book was about the war in Poland--well, all across the Baltic region--Peter the Great and Charles the XIIth are especially large figures, but there was enough about Dresden to satisfy me. Augustus was interested in art and architecture: the great Dresden art museum is based on Augustus' collection, and he took a particular interest in building; drawing proposals by Augustus still survive. There's the Zwinger:

as well as Augustus' hunting lodge at Moritzburg (near Dresden): 

both of which, according to Blanning, Augustus was deeply involved with, not just as the customer, but also in design work.

He's also responsible for the introduction of the Meissen pottery works:

I think there will be plenty to see... 

Tim Blanning was a professor at the University of Cambridge until his retirement in 2009. This book came out last year. The biography was pretty fascinating and engagingly written.

 

Goethe

"...he is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world."

-A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life

 

The owl stands tall.

Is that true? It might be! But I've been trying to do my part.

 

Biography 

 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (not yet von Goethe) was born to a upper middle class family in Frankfurt in 1749; he went to Weimar in 1775 for what was supposed to be a visit to the duke, Karl August; it became his permanent residence until he died.

 

Karl August invited him because at 26 Goethe was already celebrated. His first play, Götz von Berlichingen, was a hit in Germany, but his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774, made him famous across Europe. Napoleon, in the middle of his wars, stopped to meet Goethe, and claimed to have read Werther six times.

 

When Goethe shows up in Weimar, Karl August has just turned eighteen and taken over after his mother's regency. He's still a bit of a wild child, and Goethe's first role in Weimar is to provide amusements for the young duke. The most innocent of these is Goethe teaching Karl August how to ice skate; how un-innocent these get is still argued about, but Karl August was pretty much the whole of his life a notorious womanizer. Nevertheless, Karl August's formerly reigning mother, Anna Amalia, is also fond of Goethe, so much so that it was sometimes rumored that Goethe had an affair with Anna Amalia, though neither of those biographies shown above believed it true.

 

In time both Goethe and Karl August steady down, and Goethe becomes a useful privy councillor to the Weimar duchy. The finances there are appalling--Goethe improves them: he regularizes taxation and reforms (shrinks) the army; his attempts to revive an abandoned silver mine in the territory are less successful. He serves on a commission to improve the roads, which is supposed to help the economy as well.

 

But of course he's Goethe, and anyway Anna Amalia was interested in making the duchy a cultural center. Goethe takes over the official court theater, writing plays, directing, acting, but also bringing in other talent, mostly notably Friedrich Schiller in 1787. Goethe and Schiller, though not immediately, become great friends, deeply influential on each others' work, until Schiller's death from tuberculosis in 1805.

There had long been a university at Jena, fifteen or so miles from Weimar, but still in the duchy. It's Goethe who brings in the scholars that make it one of the great German universities. Not just Schiller, but also Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel. I read a book about that a couple of years ago.

 

Goethe travels--but not much really. Switzerland, back home to Frankfurt (though not often). Most famously to Italy, twice: it's the first trip (1786-1788) that is the most important; he spends a long period in Rome, living somewhat incognito, though he also gets to Naples, where he meets William and Emma Hamilton.  He goes a second time to Venice to escort Anna Amalia back to Weimar after her own Grand Tour.

 

After his first trip to Rome he meets Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of impoverished pastor who comes to him seeking help for her brother. She's not the sort of woman somebody like Goethe should marry, but they start living together. She bears him several children, though only the eldest, named August in honor of the duke, survives to adulthood. The court is horrified (well, not the duke himself, who only suggests Goethe keep Christiane out of sight) but not, as it turns out, Goethe's mother, who though she scarcely meets Christiane, likes her. After the battle between Napoleon and Prussia on the outskirts of Jena in 1806, Christiane famously defends Goethe's house from the victorious marauding French troops, and Goethe decides, propriety be damned, I'm marrying that woman. And does.

 

He writes, you know, some famous works. Not just Werther and Faust, both of which I've read, though not recently, but also The Roman Elegies, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is his autobiography until his move to Weimar,  and a collection of poetry, West-Eastern Divan.

 

Goethe is ennobled, becoming von Goethe, and dies in 1832 at the good age of 82. But this is after his duke, his great friend Schiller, his wife, and his son August, the only child of his to survive until adulthood have all died. (His daughter-in-law and his grandchildren were alive at his death.)

 

Biographies

OK, you may not really need to read three biographies of Goethe, but that's what I did. The first one I finished was by A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life. Wilson is British, a prolific man of letters, who admirably makes his way by writing--with panache--serious books for adults. This was a good biography of Goethe. Wilson was occasionally perverse. Was Goethe a drunk? Hmm, possibly. No doubt he drank more than was good for him. Was Goethe bisexual? Nobody else seems to think so, and the one poem from the Venetian Epigrams which Wilson quotes and might suggest it, is pretty clearly written in imitation of ancient models. The amusing thing about Wilson's biography is the emphasis he puts on how Goethe would have been a nobody had he not wrapped everything up at the end of of his life. Maybe not entirely true? There was already Werther and the first part of Faust. It is true the second part of Faust, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and the ending of Wilhelm Meister were only completed in the last years of his life, but this did feel a bit like Wilson (now 74) writing more about himself than Goethe.

 

Still, I'd cheerfully recommend this biography of Wilson's--it's recent, 2024, it's punchy, it's got the facts--except there's a better choice. So unless you're reading three...

 

The second one I finished was Goethe's autobiography. I've been calling it by its German title, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is usually translated as Poetry and Truth, but I read it in a 1897 translation by John Oxenford which titled it Truth and Fiction. (You can find it on Project Gutenberg.) It covers the years from Goethe's birth until his move to Weimar at age 26. It's pretty fascinating. Goethe is interested in education--Rousseau was in the air, as weird as he is, Julie and Emile, and gets a discussion in Dichtung und Wahrheit--and the book is about Goethe's education, not just in schools, but in life. Was he going to be a lawyer? Or was he going to be a poet? I thought Oxenford's translation of the prose was good; when Goethe was trying to convey something that depended on a particular German word, Oxenford handled it with particular sensitivity. But Goethe is also a poet, and has a habit of embedding poetry in his prose narratives, and, let us just say, it may have been as well Oxenford did not use the word Poetry in his title of the book. A fascinating work, covering a bit over a quarter of Goethe's life, but I would hope there's a better translation out there.

 

The last one I finished is the great one. Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art was celebrated when it came out in Germany in 2013, and was translated into English by David Dollenmeyer in 2017. Dollenmeyer's translation strikes me as superb and he has no need to avoid the word Poetry: 

Wanderer's Night-Song

Peace lies over

All the peaks.

In all the trees

You sense

Hardly a breath;

The little forest birds fall silent.

Wait, and soon

You too will rest.

 

-Goethe (tr. David Dollenmeyer)

 

I featured this in a couple of other translations a few weeks ago after finishing Wilson's biography. I now think I like Dollenmeyer's version best. 

 

Safranski, too, has a thesis; it's suggested by his subtitle, Life as a Work of Art. He writes, "Goethe returns from Italy with the idea of being a sovereign human being," as if what made Goethe important was his self-actualization, reaching the top of the Maslow pyramid. He probably did reach the top of the pyramid. Still I more think what makes Goethe interesting is that he wrote a bunch of great books. (See above.)

One amusing thing I learned is that Goethe thought the portrait of him by Angelica Kaufmann was too flattering and didn't really look like him. Too bad. I speculated in my post on Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship that Wilhelm's adventures were helped because he looked the Goethe of this portrait. Maybe even Goethe didn't look like the Goethe of this portrait...

 

Anyhoo... Safranski's is the biography of Goethe to read at the moment as far as I can tell, and in Dollenmeyer's translation for those of us who aren't up to reading it in German.

 

This post is now in serious tl;dr territory and I didn't even get to those two books of poetry. Maybe I'll come back to Roman Elegies at some point. So why all this Goethe?  (And the other German things on the blog this year: Heinrich Heine, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig.) We've got a trip planned to Germany at the end of September--Yay!--and we're concentrating on the southeast, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden. 

 

Do you like immerse yourself in a place in advance by reading?