Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

(in Springfield, Illinois)

 

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,

Near the old court-house pacing up and down, 

 

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards

He lingers where his children used to play,

Or through the market on the well-worn stones

He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.

 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,

A famous high top-hat, and a plain worn shawl

Make him the quaint, great figure that men love,

The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

 

He cannot sleep upon his hill-side now.

He is among us:--as in times before!

And we who toss and lie awake for long

Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.

 

His head is bowed, he thinks on men and kings.

Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?

Too many peasants fight, they know not why,

Too many homesteads in black terror weep.

 

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.

He sees the dreadnoughts scouring every main.

He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now

The bitterness, the folly and the pain.

He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn

Shall come;--the shining hope of Europe free:

The league of sober folk, the Worker's Earth,

Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea.

 

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,

That all his hours of travail here for men

Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace

That he may sleep upon his hill again?

-Vachel Lindsay

 

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet who was born and died in Springfield. This is from his book The Congo and Other Poems of 1914. 

 

One wonders if he's walking again. 

 

The young Abraham Lincoln reading by firelight (at midnight?) is a pen-and-ink drawing by my grandfather. 

 

 

 

Nicholas Blake's The Worm of Death (#1961Club)

 

Dr. Piers Loudron is a successful and well-to-do doctor living in Greenwich, the eastern end of London. 

Nigel Strageways (our series detective) and his partner Clare Massinger have just moved to Greenwich. They're invited over to meet their new neighbours the Loudrons. Dr. Piers' wife has passed, but there are also his adult children, three sons (one adopted) and a daughter.

Dr. Piers disappears on a foggy night. The Loudron children approach Strangeways for advice. A week later his body is found floating in the Thames. Both wrists have been slashed.

Suicide? But the wrists are slashed in such a way that suicide is unlikely, and if it was suicide how did the body get into the river? (As the cover suggests, a slashed-wrist suicide often takes place in the bath.) And just in case you were inclined to the suicide theory, Dr. Piers' daughter-in-law is strangled halfway through the book.

All four of the children have plausible motives to murder their father as does as the daughter's boyfriend, whom Dr. Piers didn't approve of. Strangeways hints he knows who did it pretty early (and I kind of did, too) but Blake does a pretty successful job of keeping us on our toes. I've had mixed results with the Strangeways series, but I thought this one a pretty good entry.

It was fun as a 1961 book because it makes good use of the old East End of London, which, of course is all changed now:

     "When he [Strangeways] got home, Clare kissed him, 'My goodness you've been drinking port.'

     'Yes, with an old tart in the Isle of Dogs." 

The Isle of Dogs isn't the sort of place old tarts live anymore I think.

 

My original list of 1961 candidates is here. 

Nicholas Blake is a pen name for the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, probably better known now as the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1961). Dead body. 

Some Previous 1961 Reads

Two books from 1961 have made it on to the blog before, both by Erle Stanley Gardner. One was a Perry Mason story, The Case of the Spurious Spinster:

The other was a Cool and Lam tale, Shills Can't Cash Chips:

It being Gardner, those two weren't even all the books he wrote in 1961, but I thought both were pretty good entries in their series.

Also in the mystery department, but not on my blog, The Wycherly Woman is one of the best of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. 

I've seen lots of people remark how many great choices there were for 1961 and so, of course, some things will be neglected. But there were two I read before I started blogging that I felt were kind of masterpieces when I read them and they didn't seem to be on anybody's radar, so I thought I'd drag them in:

Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White (1912-1990) was the Australian novelist who won the Nobel in 1973. In his Riders in the Chariot--in spirit the chariot is that of Elijah--four otherwise unrelated individuals in suburban Sydney are marked by mystical experience as hidden saints in a world of prejudice and contempt. Can an Aboriginal artist, an evangelical washerwoman, a childlike heiress, and an Auschwitz survivor redeem this world? 

A clue: in the epigraph to the novel, White quotes William Blake's idea of Isaiah speaking, "...the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for the consequences, but wrote..."

The Death and Life of Great American Cities 

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a writer and activist on urban issues. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her major work. It's full of surprising and brilliant insights: she's a theorist of urban planning who quite often thinks too much planning is bad for cities. I have a couple of pages from an old New Yorker tucked in my copy and in it she says of the city, "...a place full of hope and expectation, and this is has nothing to do with architecture. Those are the emotions that draw us to cities, and they depend on things being a bit messy." Her book isn't Theory with a capital T. It's often said she had a novelist's eye, and it's true: the book is wonderfully readable.

Jacobs cut her teeth as an activist saving Washington Square in New York City from an expressway. She moved to Toronto in 1968, and did the same for us here by helping to squelch the Spadina expressway. The last thirty-five years of her life she lived in a house shown on her Wikipedia page:

  

And the last four years of her life, she was my neighbour. (We live on the opposite side of the street about eight houses up.) In any halfway decent sort of weather I used to see her sitting on the porch--"Eyes on the street" was an important concept for her--but I never had the nerve to introduce myself.

What other 1961 books would you have liked to see?

 Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

Symptoms of Love (#1961Club)

 

Symptoms of Love

Love is a universal migraine.

A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason.

 

Symptoms of true love

Are leanness, jealousy,

Laggard dawns;

 

Are omens and nightmares--

Listening for a knock,

Waiting for a sign:

 

For a touch of her fingers

In a darkened room,

For a searching look.

 

Take courage, lover!

Could you endure such grief

At any hand but hers?

 

-Robert Graves

 

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was an English poet who conveniently wrote a short book called More Poems 1961. What could be better for a year club poetry post, I ask you?  😉

 

 

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I don't actually have that first edition shown above, of course. Allow Gumby to introduce the beat-up paperback I do have:

 

 

John Hawkes' The Lime Twig (#1961Club)

 "And in gloom, with the bells stroking and the wipers establishing the uncomfortable rhythm of the hour, the two wet men withdrew to the cars and in slow procession quit the sooty stables in Highland Green, drove separately through vacant city streets to uncover the particulars of this crime."

In Aldington, there's a horse race, the Golden Bowl. William Hencher lures his landlords, Michael and Margaret Banks, into a scheme to run a dodgy horse. It doesn't work out. Two detectives have just been led to Hencher's body in a stable, seemingly kicked to death by the horse. Things ended no better for Michael and Margaret Banks. 

It's a crime story, but what I've quoted above is the very end of the novel. We have no particular reason to believe that the detectives will solve the crime.

The novel is divided into eight sections plus a prologue; each is prefaced by excerpts from the column of (fictional) sports writer Sidney Slyter. The prologue takes place during World War II when Hencher's house in London is bombed and his mother killed; later after the Banks have bought the restored house, Hencher takes one of the flats and starts the scheme.

The American John Hawkes (1925-1998) is usually labeled an experimental novelist. But as you can see from above the prose isn't Joycean-level difficult. It's not plotless. There are characters that feel real enough, even if they're generally objectionable--half of them gangsters, and the other half would-be crooks. The Lime Twig was his fourth novel, and was his breakout.

It's a violent story, though if you read Andrew Vachss or the Jack Reacher novels of today, it may not seem all that violent. But sometimes that's the way: something that seemed outrageous in 1961 comes to seem middle of the road later on. But I'd read another Hawkes before another Vachss or Child.

Hawkes seems to have been the anti-Hemingway: he wrote his rather violent novels, but in this interview aired on PBS, he says, "I like the idea of the author as an ordinary person." No need to hunt lions or go to war for him.

He taught writing at Brown for most of his professional career. He and his wife and kids would go every three years or so to the South of France where he'd write a new novel. He seems rather a nice guy for such a violent story... 😉

It's 1961 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting. 

My original list of candidates is here.
 

Peter de Vries' The Blood of the Lamb (#1961Club)

"as I saw myself, a sort of reverse Pilgrim trying to make some progress away from the City of God."

Don Wanderhope is born to a Calvinist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago before World War I. Both his parents were born in Holland. His uncle is a minister, but his father Ben's faith in God is shaky. Ben Wanderhope delivers ice; later when that's no longer a viable job, he switches to picking up garbage. Don Wanderhope intends to achieve a different sort of life.

Don's beloved older brother Louie is a student at the University of Chicago. Though the UofC was founded as a Baptist institution, it's already a hotbed of free-thinking, and Louie's faith has gone well beyond shaky to outright disbelief. But then Louie gets a severe flu, and the family gathers round to pray. His mother asks:

"You have no doubts, have you, Louie?"

"No doubts on my part."

Those were Louie's last words. You will see the ambiguity in that statement. Mrs. Wanderhope takes it one way; young Don Wanderhope in exactly the opposite way. Even dying, wise-cracking Louie probably meant the ambiguity.

 

It's the first of several out of sequence deaths, often having to do with lungs, in Don Wanderhope's life. The last is that of his daughter Carol from leukemia. What is faith in the presence of such blows? How can one accept God or even this world?

Peter De Vries, (1910-1993) like Don Westerhope, was born in Chicago to family of Dutch Reformed immigrants. He went on to become editor of Poetry magazine for a stretch and then after World War II, a staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote twenty-plus comic novels, a couple of which were made into Hollywood movies. This novel, too, is funny--one chapter is a parody of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain:

"Thus were banished my visions of a sanitarium as a place were one sat on benches philosophizing in the sun in the manner of The Magic Mountain, or contracted imprudent passions in the music room."

But then the sanatarium does have two old men philosophizing, and a notorious libertine, who unlike Mynheer Peeperkorn, isn't Dutch. And Wanderhope does contract an imprudent passion.

So the novel is funny--just not in a guffawing way. I've read other novels by de Vries, though a long time ago, and I remember them funnier. But this is a dark subject, and it was inspired by the death from leukemia of de Vries' own daughter in 1960. So: moving and thoughtful, and not without humour.

It's the week of the 1961 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. Thanks to them for hosting!

 My original list of candidates is here.

 

 

1961 Club Candidates

 

Monday begins the week of Kaggsy and Simon's year club, and this spring the year is 1961. I piled up some candidates, because who doesn't like to look at a pile of books? (Right? You do agree, don't you?) In case the picture is hard to make out that's:

Nicholas Blake/The Worm of Death (Mystery)

Peter de Vries/The Blood of the Lamb (Comic, Chicago)

John Hawkes/The Lime Twig (Experimental) 

Iris Murdoch/A Severed Head (British, Literary)

Freya Stark/Dust in the Lion's Paw (Autobiography, Travel)

Constantin Stanislavski/Creating a Role (Acting manual)

Frantz Fanon/The Wretched of the Earth (Political)

Charles Olson/The Maximus Poems (Poetry)

 

Naturally...I won't read them all over the next week, though I have already finished two (and will have posts early next week). I hope to get through one or two more.

 

Alas, the Olson is probably aspirational: I've been reading that for a year, and I'm about a hundred pages in... 

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jane Welsh Carlyle

 

 

Jenny Kiss'd Me

Jenny kissed me when we met

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

  Say health and wealth have missed me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

 

-Leigh Hunt

 

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is better known as an essayist, but also wrote poetry. The story goes that in 1838, Hunt, just recovered from a bad illness, visited Thomas and Jane Carlyle at their home, and Jane Carlyle was so happy to see him recovered, she kissed him. That portrait doesn't make Jane Carlyle look like the jumping up and kissing type, but I guess you never know...

 

I pulled Virginia Woolf's The Second Common Reader off the shelf for its essay on George Gissing, and one of the other essays is about Jane Carlyle and how she is one of the great letter writers in English. That got me to thinking about the only other thing I know abot Jane Carlyle, which was this poem.

 

Hunt called the poem a rondeau, though if so it's a simplified one. It starts with a refrain that's half the first line, and ends with that refrain occupying only a half-line. But a writer of the true French rondeau would have 'Jenny kissed me' as a half-line at least once more in the middle of the poem.

 

Not that it has much relevance to all that above, but I can't resist, while I have the Virginia Woolf off the shelf, quoting the final words of the last essay, 'How Should One Read a Book?'

"...the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have been reading.'" 

Florian Illies' The Magic of Silence (Caspar David Friedrich)

"You can dream about his works, but you can't understand them clearly because they are indefinite, even in his own soul...He says himself he can explain neither the idea nor the picture that expresses it."

-Alexander Turgenev

 

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter. Illies' book, which came out in German in 2023 and last year in an English translation by Tony Crawford, is about Friedrich's life, but also about the history and reception of his paintings after his death. Friedrich had fallen into obscurity when he died in Dresden, and it wasn't until 1900, when a Norwegian art historian interested in a friend of Friedrich's came across some paintings and made Friedrich his cause.

Illies' style in the book is anecdotal and impressionistic. Looking at a Friedrich painting in Dresden gave Samuel Beckett the idea for Waiting for Godot. Goethe awarded Friedrich the Weimar art prize in 1805, but later said that Friedrich was taking art in the wrong direction.

Both the Nazis and the East German Communists thought Friedrich was one of theirs; they may both have been wrong... In the late 1930s, a Jewish art dealer came to a Berlin museum and said I have a painting of Friedrich's that I want to sell. The museum agreed to buy it, at a fair value, but it didn't have enough money in its acquisitions budget, so it appealed to Hitler to cough up. Which he did. And which enabled the art dealer to get his family out of Germany in time.

A couple of years ago I read Illies' 1913. It works the same way: an anecdotal style that jumps around, but still it suggests a larger picture. It's not straightforward history, but it works and makes good reading. While I'd known of Friedrich before, I got to know him better when I saw several of his paintings in Germany last fall.

One of  the paintings I saw (at the Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin):

The Cross on the Baltic

Covering Germany for my European Reading Challenge.

 

George Gissing's New Grub Street (#CCSpin)

"Best or worst, novels are all the same. Nothing but love, love, love. What silly nonsense it is."

Gissing's novel of 1891 New Grub Street isn't that kind of novel. Or not exactly.

It's not that there isn't talk about love: that's Amy Reardon above and she has just been discussing with her friend Edith why it is divorce is so difficult in England at the time. She had loved her husband Edwin at one point, but that point is probably past, beaten down by the couple's unbearable poverty.

So what it is, is a novel of money, or more, the lack of it. Balzac is referenced several times as a novelist writing on the right kind of subject.

Edwin Reardon is a novelist, maybe aspiring to be what we would now call midlist. And as in Balzac, we learn about the finances; in this case what it takes--and what you can make--as a novelist. Reardon's biggest success brought him £100, an amount that is the barest minimum for a respectable existence in London for a year. That was for a so-called triple-decker, a novel of 200,000 words or 600-800 pages. Think Middlemarch in size. He needs to write one of those a year, and with no guarantee he'll meet the demands of the moment. He can't. Book reviewing? Articles for the magazines? These pay, but not well. Reardon writes a shorter novel with a sensationalist plot; he hopes to get £75 for it, but nobody is willing to buy.

Reardon is not the only writer; the novel is set among a circle of writers. There's Whelpdale: 

"And what's more, he made six guineas in the first fortnight; so he says, at all events. Now that's one of the finest jokes I ever heard. A man who can't get anyone to publish his own books makes a living by telling other people how to write!"

There's the nearly heroic Biffen, who lives in utter poverty in a garret, has (almost) no hope of marrying, toiling away on his novel: Mr. Bailey, Grocer. Nobody expects it to be read when he does finish it. Biffen himself says of it, "The result will be something unutterably tedious...If it were anything but tedious, it would be untrue." A nod to the naturalism still mostly in the future in English?

Amy Reardon's uncle Alfred Yule writes for the magazines with the aid of his talented daughter Marian. Someday he hopes to edit his own magazine. But until then:

"Seeing him in the title-lists of a periodical most people knew what to expect, but not a few forbore cutting open the pages he occupied." 

Dora and Maud Milvain (and mostly it's Dora) write religious stories for magazines; once their mother dies, and her annuity with her, that's what they will have to live on. Dora finds the work beneath her, but she is good at it. Her brother Jasper tells her: "Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the earliest opportunity."

The other main character is Jasper Milvain. He can't write 'stories' he says, but he sees making his way in the writing trade, via magazine articles, then an editorship:

"First of all, my qualities are not of the kind which demand the recognition of posterity. My writing is for to-day, most distinctly hodiernal. It has no value except in reference to to-day."

And he knows how to go about it: 

"Art must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade."

Milvain is a goer, and it's he who largely makes the plot go. At the beginning of the novel Milvain and Reardon are friends, with the impractical, somewhat older Reardon, having had some success.  Milvain tries to get him to capitalize on it, but to no avail, with little effect other than increasing Amy Reardon's dissatisfaction. They don't become enemies, but their differening trajectories pull them apart.

Milvain meets Marian Yule (Amy Reardon's cousin) and falls in love with her. He certainly can't afford to marry when he first sees her, but if one or the other of them should ever come into enough money? But until then Milvain cannot acknowledge his love to anyone, scarcely even to himself. And maybe he could marry an heiress?

"You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame."

How to get around that conundrum? That's Milvain's problem and he intends to solve it. There's an inheritance to be sorted out, and there are marriages--though are any of them for love? (I'd say maybe one. If you've read it, what did you think?) Milvain's a bit of a monster, but not entirely. Milvain's advice to Reardon is sound, if unhelpful. When Mr. Bailey, Grocer finally does appear in print, Milvain does what he can to puff it.

The book was my Classics Club spin book, and I finished it last month, but I've only now gotten around to the post. (We went on vacation--though since I'm mostly retired, what exactly was I vacationing from? Blog posting, perhaps.) The novel is dark, but funny, complex, and engaging. It portrays a believable segment of society in interesting detail, different from today, but maybe not so different: even today midlist authors today scramble to publish articles, get grants, teach writing, all in order to achieve a bare middle-class existence, if that.

It's one of those novels I've known of for a long time, more read about than actually read, and I pulled off the shelf a couple of things I'd previously read to remind myself what they had to say.

Woolf's essay from the second volume of The Common Reader is a little harsh on Gissing, I thought, even though she remains positive. Her complaint is Gissing is a novelist who can only write about himself, unable to create other characters. Despite the current fashion for auto-fiction, I would agree if this were true it would be a valid complaint. Give me Middlemarch over Leaving the Atocha Station. But I don't feel it applies to New Grub Street. Edwin Reardon is no doubt a roughly accurate self-portrait of Gissing. But Jasper Milvain, Amy Reardon, Marian Yule, Dora Milvain are also rounded characters. Even a comic type like Whelpdale has some substance to him. (Woolf's may be a more fair charge for something like Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.)

But she also writes, "Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of the mind, who makes his people think," and this is quite true. He's not Dostoevsky, but his characters do think, do have ideas, those ideas come into conflict, and nobody is tendentiously given the right answer ahead of time. Milvain is perhaps shallow, but Reardon is unable to function.

As for Orwell, I feel Gissing is all over him, and the index of my four-volume Collected Essays, Letters, and Journalism backs me up. Well, one would expect the author of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier to be deeply interested in a novelist of poverty. But in 1948 Orwell was requested to write an essay on Gissing for the magazine Politics and Letters on the occasion of the reissuing of two lesser-known Gissing novels. The magazine went bankrupt before the article appeared, and Orwell had difficulty recouping his manuscript from the empty offices. The article only appeared in 1960, so it was Orwell's heirs who got paid, an ironic outcome Gissing would have darkly appreciated, I'm sure.

Orwell separates out what Gissing does from picaresque novels and other earlier types of narrative. 

"A true novel...will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability..."

The very criteria for which Woolf faulted Gissing. But Orwell writes:

"But merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain England has produced very few better novelists."

I think Orwell has the better of this argument.

From the last page of New Grub Street: 

"'Ha! Isn't the world a glorious place?'

'For rich people.'

'Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils.'"

Maybe the world hasn't changed so much?  

The Yak

 

The Yak

As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.

  You will find it exactly the thing:

It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,

  Or lead it about with a string.

 

The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet

  (A desolate region of snow)

Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,

  And surely the Tartar should know!

 

Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got

  And if he is awfully rich

He will buy you the Creature--or else he will not.

  (I cannot be positive which.)

 

-Hilaire Belloc

 

This is from Hilaire Belloc's The Bad Child's Book of Beasts of 1896.  

 

Off travelling and this was scheduled in advance. Not in Thibet...

Two Recent Novels Set in Chicago

"All roads--always, always--lead back to Chicago."

-Peter Orner, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter

 

More even than Rome? And I thought I was a Chicago booster...

 

I read two new releases set in Chicago. The first one was:

 

Rob Osler/The Case of the Murdered Muckraker (2026)

 

This is the second case in a new series about Harriet Morrow, the Lesbian, bike-riding first female detective at the Prescott Agency in Chicago. It takes place in 1898. The Pinkertons (historical fact) had hired their first female agent not long before, and Theodore Prescott thinks it could work for him as well. But Morrow is still on probation, even in this her second case.

 

Eugene Eldridge is an investigative journalist, who has evidence about corruption among Chicago aldermen. (Shocking, I know.) He's stabbed while in a tenement near the Stockyards. Where did the evidence go? Somebody in the tenement must have seen something, and maybe Morrow, posing as a worker from a settlement house, is more likely to earn their trust?

 

The recurring characters in this series are fun: the orphaned Harriet Morrow, looking after her younger brother, her boss Theodore Prescott, her fellow detectives. Her possible girlfriend. The plot is strong as well. It's a series I'll continue to follow.

 

Peter Orner/The Gossip Columnist's Daughter (2025) 

 

The gossip columnist is Irv Kupcinet, known around Chicago as Kup. He was an actual newspaperman and from 1943 until he died in 2003, he wrote a gossip column for the Chicago Sun-Times. "Among the guests at Joan Crawford's Mental Health Ball at the Conrad Hilton Friday was crooner Vic Damone and Blackhawk Bobby Orr." That sort of thing.

 

In 1963, a few days after JFK was shot, his daughter Karyn "Cookie" Kupcinet died in Los Angeles. Cookie was an aspiring actress with a few credits--her last was a Perry Mason episode--but also with a drug problem. Was it murder, accident, suicide? Was it somehow tied in to the Kennedy assassination? (Almost certainly not, though conspiracy addicts were sure it was.) The case is open even now. Her hyoid bone was cracked, suggesting strangulation, but there's evidence the autopsy was botched. That's all historical fact and it's a good setup.

 

The book is billed as a novel, and Orner tells the story obliquely. Babs and Lou Rosenthal are friends of the Kupcinets--Babs and Essee Kupcinet had both aspired to be dancers and took classes together--and it's their grandson Jedediah Rosenthal, a not terribly successful author and single parent living in Chicago, who is telling the story. It offers a plausible (but not provable) solution to the death of Karyn Kupcinet about halfway through the novel, but that's not Orner's real target. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the friendship between the Kupcinets and the Rosenthals falls apart. Why? 

"A friendship ended. In November of 1963, seven years before I was born, a friendship between two couples severed."

Rosenthal's sister jokes in the book to Rosenthal, so how's your auto-fiction going, and I believe, while it says 'Novel' on that matchbook on the cover, it owes a fair amount to Orner's family history. He wrote an earlier novel Love and Shame and Love that covers the same three generations of a Jewish Chicago-area family, with a different last name, but the same family structure.

 

Chicago's my home town, and I sometimes read novels just because they're set there. Chicago's a fairly easy city for such a project, though not as easy as London or Paris, of course. I get curious how they do it. Osler and Orner have fairly different styles. Both men have lived in Chicago but don't currently. Orner grew up in the Chicago suburbs; I'm not sure about Osler.

 

Osler uses fairly well-known landmarks in the city. Theodore Prescott lives on Prairie Avenue and either in visiting him or Prescott's neighbor, Harriet Monroe goes there often. As you can see Prairie Avenue has a Wikipedia article and was once known as Millionaire's Row. People with brand-name names like Pullman, Field, or Armour once lived there, and a couple of years ago I visited one of the mansions myself, now a museum, though when I was a kid the street was considered a no-go zone, and if you drove down it you didn't get out of your car: you were likely to see impoverished Black men warming themselves at fires in barrels. He similarly uses downtown office buildings or the University of Chicago Settlement House.

 

Orner has a different, but curious strategy for locations that works in Chicago, though maybe not elsewhere. He gives an actual address. For example: 1739 W. Jarvis or 711 W. Pratt, Apt. 5D. Often the locations don't actually exist--711 W. Pratt would be in the lake, though not by much--and I can picture the places he specifies. I know exactly the sort of building that would be near the lake at the end of Pratt, and I would be pretty knowledgeable about the socio-economic class of a person living there. (Well-made brick apartment buildings of three stories, a little worn, in better shape now than they were forty years ago. Some of them will have been turned into condos. You could live there cheaply in the 80s. Living there now would cost more.) You can use Google streetview to get a sense of the neighborhood if you don't just happen to know it. But how would it feel if you weren't from Chicago? I'm less certain.

 

Anyway, there could be more said, but this post is long enough, and it's been sitting in my draft folder for a while. Do you particularly enjoy novels set in your hometown or where you live? Double-check them for accuracy? 😉

 
 

How To Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors (#poem)

How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors

It's not rocket surgery.

First, get all your ducks on the same page.

After all, you can't make an omelette

without breaking stride.

 

Be sure to watch what you write

with a fine-tuned comb.

Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.

It's as easy as falling off a cake.

 

Don't worry about opening up

a whole hill of beans:

you can burn that bridge when you come to it,

if you follow where I'm coming from.

 

Concentrate! Keep your door closed

and your enemies closer.

Finally, don't take the moral high horse:

if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.

 

-Brian Bilston

 

I just came across this as 3 Quarks Daily, a cultural aggregator site, which among other things does a new poem daily. It definitely caught my eye, or ear, or something.

 

Brian Bilston is a pseudonym for Paul Millicheap, a British poet with several books out, but who generally releases his new poetry at that place formerly known as Twitter. As the photo suggests he prefers his privacy. Totally new to me, but I'll be keeping my eye out for more.

 

Is it really that easy to fall off a cake? Sounds difficult to me... 😉 

Ed McBain's The Con Man

"Meanwhile back at the morgue..."

The first chapter introduces two cases: Arthur Brown and Bert Kling interview a young black woman working as a maid who's been conned out of five dollars by a pretend preacher, and Steve Carella is called in where a dead body of a woman is found floating by the docks.

 

Brown is determined to find the con man; Carella first has to determine if what he's looking at is a crime, but it is. His floater didn't drown, but went into the water already dead from arsenic poisoning. ("Back at the morgue...")

 

Then a second woman is found floating in the harbor, also dead from arsenic poisoning. Both women have tattoos on their hand.

 

This is the fourth of McBain's series of 87th Precinct novels. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it was a particularly strong entry in the series. McBain can occasionally be didactic about police methods--he does famously precede his novels with:

 

"The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."

In this one, we learned how fingerprints are taken from dead bodies, which was grisly, and maybe interesting? At least relevant to the plot. But there was too much about how con men do their thing, which didn't have much to do with our particular con men. But the final chase was certainly thrilling enough...

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1957). Policeman.

 

I suppose that's Steve Carella on the cover in plainclothes, and Fred di Angelo, the beat cop to whom the body was first reported behind him.

 

So Adam's offspring live...

 

from Vis and Ramin 

So Adam's offspring live, and put away

The happiness and grief of yesterday.

Why should you grieve for what's gone by? Forget!

Why brood on things that haven't happened yet?

Grief won't bring back the past, and all your scolding

Will not prevent the future from unfolding.

Enjoy a hundred years of victory

But one day's all your lifetime here will be ;

Whatever riches you might hope to win

One day alone is yours--the day you're in;

The best course is to look for pleasure, to

Enjoy the single day that's given you. [p. 264]

 

-Fakraddin Gorgani (tr. Dick Davis)

 

Sections in Vis and Ramin often ended in a bit of general wisdom, with applicability (possibly ironic) to what just happened. Just before this is in the story line Vis and King Mobad had been reconciled, and Mobad had given a stack of gifts to both Vis and her nurse. It wasn't to last, of course, and we knew it wouldn't even before what I quoted. "The moon-faced beauty lied, Mobad believed her/And asked her to forgive him that he'd grieved her."

 

I had copied out some other sections as I was reading but they didn't fit in my earlier post. But now, here I am thinking about Iran again... 

Peter Dickinson's The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

     "We've got a lovely little set-up here, all airy-fairy. Just the thing for Pibble, I said, the moment I'd seen the Kus."

    "Coos?"

    "Every single member of the household, my dear, is called Ku. They're a tribe from New Guinea, somewhere. Deceased's a Ku, suspects all Kus, witnesses all Kus. Except there aren't any."

 

This was totally bats. But I really mean that in the best possible way...

 

During World War II, the Ku tribe sheltered a downed Australian airman. The Japanese found out and killed everyone they could lay their hands on, and this included the British anthropologist studying the tribe. The anthropologist's daughter Elizabeth has brought the remains of the tribe to London, where they live in a house, attempting to keep up their tribal customs in an alien environment. They all take the last name Ku.

 

Then the chief of the tribe, Aaron Ku, is bashed over the head by a lefty at the top of the stairs.

 

Elizabeth has gotten her own Ph.D. in anthropology after the war, and this arrangement will enable her to keep up her father's work more comfortably, with the tribe arranged for viewing like ants tunnelling in a kid's glass terrarium. And one of the things she tells Pibble is that, while the Kus don't approve of murder, of course, if they were to murder someone, they would naturally use the left hand, because that's the hand of evil deeds.

 

Most of the clues kind of go like that. This is the first case (out of six) with Chief Inspector Jimmy Pibble by Dickinson, but in his world he's already got a reputation. We're told he's the one who gets these kind of cases. He interviews an old lag at one point:

    "Hope you don't mind me asking, but are you Pibble?"

    "Yes," said Pibble. "But how did you know?"

    "Kinky little case like vis. Vey wouldn't send one of the ver big boys out on it--too much to lose, nuffing to gain. Good luck, ven."

There is a lot of slang and dialect. Pibble himself uses "Crippen" as an oath amusingly enough, but a fair amount of it might be easier for a Brit...

A second murder is in progress when it's thwarted by Pibble discovering the culprit.

Pretty entertaining. I'd read another from the series. Do you know it? Is this representative? 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1968). Staircase. 

 

 

James Weldon Johnson's The Creation

 

The Creation

(A Negro Sermon) 

And God stepped out on space,


And He looked around and said,

"I'm lonely—


I'll make me a world."
And far as the eye of God could see


Darkness covered everything,


Blacker than a hundred midnights


Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,


And the light broke,


And the darkness rolled up on one side,


And the light stood shining on the other,


And God said, "That's good!"

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,


And God rolled the light around in his hands


Until He made the sun;


And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.


And the light that was left from making the sun


God gathered it up in a shining ball


And flung it against the darkness,


Spangling the night with the moon and stars.


Then down between


The darkness and the light


He hurled the world;


And God said, "That's good!"

 
Then God himself stepped down—


And the sun was on His right hand,


And the moon was on His left;


The stars were clustered about His head,


And the earth was under His feet.


And God walked, and where He trod


His footsteps hollowed the valleys out


And bulged the mountains up.

Then He stopped and looked and saw


That the earth was hot and barren.


So God stepped over to the edge of the world


And He spat out the seven seas—


He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed—


He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled—


And the waters above the earth came down,


The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,


And the little red flowers blossomed,


The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,


And the oak spread out his arms,


The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,


And the rivers ran down to the sea;


And God smiled again,


And the rainbow appeared,


And curled itself around His shoulder.

Then God raised His arm and He waved his hand


Over the sea and over the land,


And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"


And quicker than God could drop His hand,


Fishes and fowls


And beasts and birds


Swam the rivers and the seas,


Roamed the forests and the woods,


And split the air with their wings.


And God said, "That's good!"

 
Then God walked around,


And God looked around


On all that He had made.


He looked at His sun,


And He looked at his moon,


And He looked at his little stars;


He looked on His world


With all its living things,


And God said, "I'm lonely still."

Then God sat down—


On the side of a hill where He could think;


By a deep, wide river He sat down;


With His head in His hands,


God thought and thought,


Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"

Up from the bed of the river


God scooped the clay;


And by the bank of the river


He kneeled Him down;


And there the great God Almighty


Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,


Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,


Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;


This great God,


Like a mammy bending over her baby,


Kneeled down in the dust


Toiling over a lump of clay


Till He shaped it in is His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,


And man became a living soul.


Amen.      Amen.

 

-James Weldon Johnson

 

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an author, professor, and executive of the NAACP. This comes from his book of 1927 God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. That and the novel The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man are generally considered Johnson's two major works.

 

I first read (or maybe heard) the poem in sixth grade. Mrs. Lydia Gaines was one my favourite teachers in grade school. But for the longest time all I remembered (and that not quite accurately) was "Blacker than a hundred midnights/In a cypress swamp".  

 

Jan Hilliard's Morgan's Castle (#readindies)

 "What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."

Oh, what fun this one was! 

The sixteen-year-old Laura Dean had thought she might work at the local five-and-dime for the summer; there were supposed to be some college boys in town with summer jobs of their own. But her Aunt Amy has other plans, any local boy is bound to be heedless, and Laura's father Sidney is not to be trusted.

Aunt Amy's school friend Charlotte Morgan is writing a book about the Morgan family wine business and needs a secretary, she says; her daughter-in-law has recently died in a tragic accident and maybe she needs a new daughter-in-law, too. 

In fact there have been quite a few tragic accidents in recent memory at Morgan's Castle. And just how heroically well poor Charlotte Morgan has held up in the midst of all these *accidents*...it's no wonder everybody admires her so...

There's not a lot of mystery in this crime story--even if you managed to miss the word 'murderess' in the blurb on the cover--but there is a lot of humour. It's quite darkly funny, a bit Arsenic and Old Lace, though with more real suspense than that. You suspect somebody will be murdered during the book (and somebody is) but who will it be, and how will our murderess be stopped? That's assuming she is, of course.

There's also a fine romance budding, just not the one Aunt Amy and Charlotte Morgan have in mind. 

Jan Hilliard is a pseudonym for Hilda Kay Grant (1910-1996). She was born in Nova Scotia, but lived most of her adult life around Toronto. Morgan's Castle came out in 1964 and is set in the Niagara area. Her first novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for best humorous book of the year, and this one ought to have been in the running, too. The book was reissued last month by the Montreal-based independent Véhicule Press, as part of its Ricochet line of Canadian Noir reprints, edited by Brian Busby. 

Brian kindly supplied me with a copy of the book, and I am very glad he did.

February is #readindies month, hosted by Kaggsy at Bookish Ramblings. 

 

It also fits the My Reader's Block challenge: 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1964). Damsel in Distress.
 

van de Wetering's Hard Rain

 "It was a regular Dutch summer with heavy rain and fog."

There's corruption in the Amsterdam police force!

 

Martin IJsbreker is dead and it's ruled a suicide; a second bullet was spotted but somehow lost in the investigation. Three junkies died of a heroin overdose in a houseboat across the canal from IJsbreker's house on the same day, and those are ruled accidental death. You don't believe any of that, of course.

 

And neither did Grijpstra and de Gier. They go to their boss, the unnamed Commisaris, and he authorizes reopening the case. But soon the Commisaris is facing an investigation for financial misdeeds; Grijpstra and de Gier are nearly killed in an auto accident, and are then suspended because they were purportedly at fault. (The stop sign had been covered up.)

 

There's not actually much mystery. The bad guys corrupting the police force are big time drug runners; their leader is a childhood schoolmate of the Commisaris (and distinctly not a friend). The story is who can be trusted and who not, and how they're going to do down the bad guys. And it's a pretty good one! That's partly because there's more of the Commisaris in this, and I generally find him the most entertaining character in the series. We even learn his first name: Jan.

 

Janwillem van de Wetering wrote fourteen novels and two volumes of stories about the Amsterdam police detectives, and this, from 1986, is the 11th. 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1986). Body of Water. 

Fakhraddin Gorgani's Vis and Ramin (tr. by Dick Davis)

And may there be no love at all unless

It's like this love, and brings such happiness.

How fortunate the lover whose sweet fate

It is to live in such a favoured state--

Truly, this is the way that love should be,

Good fortune, followed by simplicity!

How many days I've loved and never seen

A joy like that of Vis and her Ramin... 

Vis and Ramin is a poetic romance written by Fakhraddin Gorgani in Persian around 1050 CE, commissioned by the commander of Isfahan. It's the earliest surviving version of a story that takes place at some point in Persia under the Parthian empire (247 BCE - 220 CE).

King Mobad is the ruler of all Persia; he meets Shahru, wife of Qaren, a minor king and mother of two sons. She's beautiful and he woos her, but she says, my lord, I'm married with two boys, this is inappropriate. But if ever I were to have a daughter, I promise her to you.

Vis was that daughter. 

Years later and Vis is now of marriageable age and at least as beautiful as her mother. Shahru ignores her promise (or maybe thinks it doesn't matter anymore) and Vis is married off to her brother Viru. 

The introduction assures us that sibling marriage was fairly common among Parthian royal families (as it was in Pharaonic Egypt for that matter). At any rate, the story doesn't treat it as icky as it is for us, or would be to the Muslim Gorgani for that matter.

But King Mobad hasn't forgotten that promise. Before the marriage with Viru is even consummated, he's launched a war against Qaren. Qaren is killed. Vis was happy enough to be pledged to Viru, but she has no interest in that 'old man' and writes to him:

And if Viru weren't mine, this doesn't mean

I'd love you or consent to be your queen.

You killed my father, he's in heaven now;

My self, my being, are from him so how

Could you become my husband or my friend? 

Vis tells her mother off for promising her away even before she was born. Viru manages a successful counterattack for a while, but it can't last: in the end she's married to Mobad. She's sent off to Marv, Mobad's capital.

She brings her nurse. Who happens to know a magic spell or two. And when Vis is no more impressed with Mobad upon seeing him, the nurse whips up a spell that makes Mobad impotent, and Vis' second marriage is also never consummated. 

Though well-done the nurse is a fairly stock figure in this sort of romance--Davis in his introduction mentions the nurse from Romeo and Juliet--and she's out to get Vis interested in and involved with somebody:

You've never truly slept with any man.

You've had no joy of men, you've never known

A man whom you could really call your own...

What use is beauty if it doesn't bless

Your life with pleasure and love's happiness?

You're innocent, you're in the dark about it,

You don't know how forlorn life is without it.

You'll have to decide just what it is.

 

Who's available? Turns out Mobad has a very much younger (and very much better-looking) brother named Ramin and he happens to have fallen in love with Vis as soon as he's seen her:

Half of my body burns, half of it freezes.

Has God created, and can heaven show,

An angel made like me from fire and snow?

Fire does not melt my snow, and who has seen

Snow coexist with fire, as in Ramin?

Ramin approaches the nurse to see what can be done and pretty soon Vis and Ramin are finding ways to meet in private.

 

Mobad is a king; he has responsibilities and has to leave town occasionally. Mobad goes hunting and Ramin falls ill; Mobad goes to war against the Romans, and Ramin, a prominent member of court and an important warrior in his own right, falls ill. Eventually Mobad catches on--a bit after everyone else in the kingdom--and leaves Vis behind in a locked castle on a mountain top with a guard outside the door. He comes back to discover that the well-guarded Vis has been enjoying herself with Ramin. Mobad is aghast. All these restraints and guards are like a belt:

A pretty belt's of no significance

Unless it's holding up some kind of pants!

Buckle your belt as tight as you can make it,

But with no pants to wear you're still stark naked!

The story quite often proceeds by speeches and similes; though it has a different tone and subject matter, think of something like the Iliad. Where the Iliad might compare its warriors to lions or boars, Vis and Ramin compares the lovers to cypresses or moonlight. The art is generally in the details of the comparison. About two thirds through Ramin and Vis break up, both half deciding this is the wiser course, each convinced by an adviser of dubious value--the nurse for Vis, a 'philosopher' for Ramin--but that doesn't last long, and pretty soon they're working their way back together. But it takes a hundred pages first of letters, then in-person speeches, full of recriminations and lament, self-justification and imprecations, and not much event. But it reads well in place, with lots of fun rhetorical flourishes.

But I am still the lover whom you knew

Whose like has never yet been seen by you;

My brightness has not dimmed, my musky hair

Has not turned camphor white yet with despair,

My clustering curls are still as black and tight,

My shining pearl-like teeth as strong and white,

My silver breasts as firm and opulent,

My cypress stature has not yet been bent.

My face was once the moon, it's now the sun

Admired throughout the world, by everyone!...

I never saw a man who didn't prize me,

So why should you reject me and despise me? 

Actually, in typing that out, it rather reminds me of The Song of Solomon.

 

The translation, by Dick Davis, is done in heroic couplets. He writes in the introduction that the original Persian is in couplets, and that the line length is close to that of iambic pentameter. The rhymes are mostly quite tame, and so don't draw attention to themselves, but he is capable of more extravagant rhymes, as in the comic outburst of Mobad quoted above. (significance/some kind of pants!) I'd earlier read Davis' translation Faces of Love, of three Shirazi poets, and quite liked it. This is different, and by design less showy at times, but still a lot of fun.

 

Given all that buildup I was prepared for a tragic ending. The story is compared to Tristan and Yseult, and is sometimes considered a source for it, and I thought it could very well end with them dying in each other's arms in some foreign country. But it doesn't. Vis and Ramin live long and happy lives and produce two sons. (Though it does end less well for some of the other characters.)  How they get to their happiness, I'll leave as an exercise for readers...😉But it does mean it's a suitably seasonable book for a post, except I hadn't quite finished it yesterday.

This is a post about Ramin and Vis,

The ancient Persian epic, blogged by Reese,

A romance written in ten thousand lines,

With love and danger for your Valentine's.

A book off my Classics Club list.