Quentin Reynolds' The Curtain Rises

The Curtain Rises is a collection of the war dispatches Quentin Reynolds filed for Collier's Weekly in 1943. He goes to Moscow via North Africa and Iran and is in Moscow from April through June of that year. Then he heads back to North Africa again transiting through Iran; by the end of July he's in Palermo, on Sicily, now controlled by the allied armies. He's on General Mark Clark's command ship for the invasion of the Italian mainland in September; it's here he gets closest to the fighting of any of his stops along the way. With the allied armies on the Italian mainland, Collier's calls him back to the U.S. and by the end of the year he's home in New York.

It's an interesting book. Reynolds is not an analyst and doesn't pretend to be one; he's more a high-class merchant of gossip. His best stories, I thought, are the ones taking place just behind the lines: he meets (and drinks with) Ernie Pyle, John Steinbeck, FDR, Jr., Bob Hope along the way. He drinks lemonade with Monty--Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery--who was a teetotaller. Who knew? One of the best pieces describes Easter of 1943 in Moscow; the Soviet Union has captured the German 6th Army at Stalingrad not that long before.

I pulled this off the shelf for the 1944 Club, and started it at the end of that week, but didn't finish it in time. But it's a fascinating look at the period and it's interesting to see what they didn't see. It also makes a great pairing with John Hersey's A Bell For Adano, because one of the better pieces is about the allied military government in Sicily.

But he doesn't see, and part of the reason I slowed down in reading it once I'd missed finishing it for the 1944 club was precisely his political blindness. Reynolds seems to have been left-wing, but not Communist; Wikipedia tells me he got into a legal squabble after the war with the conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, a fight which Reynolds seems to have won. Maybe he felt he needed to say nice things about Stalin so long as Stalin was our ally. But one of the pieces is about the recently (in 1943) discovered Katyn Forest massacre, and Reynolds is so miserably wrong-headed about it, I couldn't bear the book for a while. In 1943, he couldn't know that the Polish officers had been murdered by the Soviets; he couldn't know about the secret codicil to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; he couldn't know about the funk that Stalin fell into after the surprise of Operation Barbarossa. But he could have known there were things he didn't know, and he didn't.

Anyway, interesting enough for its view of the time, and for its gossipy look at war as a boy's own adventure.

#1944Club: Karl Shapiro's V-Letter

The fact that I already had on my shelves the 1944 books that went on to win the Pulitzer for both poetry and fiction when #1944club started is the sign of something, I suppose...

Likely what it is a sign of is my insane addiction to buying books,... though I do doubt there's any other year to which that would apply. (But I was afraid to check.)

Karl Shapiro was born in Baltimore in 1913; dropped out of college; was drafted into the US Army in 1942 and assigned to the Medical Corp, eventually stationed in Australia and New Guinea. V-Letter is his third book, not counting a privately printed volume of juvenilia. The second was printed in Australia in 1942.

I've known Shapiro for pretty much as long as I've been reading poetry, though for a long time only through the widely anthologized 'Scyros' from his first volume: "The doctor punched my vein/The captain called me Cain/Upon my belly sat the sow of fear..." A couple of years ago I read the Shapiro volume in the American Poets Project from the Library of America. (Any actual facts in this come from Updike's introduction to that volume; misstatements and ill-informed opinion are naturally my own.)

This is one of the best poems, I thought, in V-Letter; it's also anthologized in the American Poets Project volume:

'Full Moon: New Guinea'

These nights we fear the aspects of the moon,
Sleep lightly in the radiance falling clear
On palms and ferns and hills and us; for soon
The small burr of the bombers in our ear
Tickles our rest; we rise as from a nap
And take our helmets absently and meet,
Prepared for any spectacle or mishap,
At trenches fresh and narrow at our feet.

Look up, look  up, and wait and breathe. These nights
We fear Orion and the Cross. The crowd
Of deadly insects caught in our long lights
Glitter and seek to burrow in the a cloud
Soft-mined with high explosive. Breathe and wait,
The bombs are falling darkly for our fate.

Shapiro says in his one-page introduction to the volume that he's reluctant to be a war poet, but clearly he is, at least for now; even in a poem on the sound of the piano, he compares it to 'the burst of monstrous guns.' The war provides his subjects and his metaphors. Though not entirely: a number of poems are about Judaism, his religion from birth; a surprising number also include Christian imagery, though Updike's introduction says he was thinking of converting to Catholicism at this time. A couple, among them poems on Jefferson and Franklin, are about Americanness.

The poems are almost all formal, with a number of sonnets and a fondness for the terza rima sonnet in particular, as in Shelley's 'Ode To The West Wind' or Frost's 'Acquainted With The Night.' He also likes anapaests, e. g., (chosen for any Australians who might read this...)

'Sydney Bridge'

Though I see you, O rainbow of iron and rivetted lace
As a dancer who leaps to the music of music and light,
And poised on the pin of the moment of marvellous grace
Holds her breath in the downfall and curve of her motionless flight;

Though you walk like a queen with the stays of your womanly steel
And the pearls of your bodice are heavy with sensual pride,
And the million come under your notice and graciously kneel,
As the navies of nations come slowly to moor at your side;

Yet your pace is the pace of a man's, and your arms are outspread
In a trick of endurance to charm the demand of the bays,
And your tendons are common--the cables are coarse on your head,

You are marxist and sweaty! You grind for the labor of days;
And O sphinx of our harbor of beauty, your banner is red
And outflung on the street of the world like a silvery phrase!

Not a bad description of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I think, and if the bridge is masculine in the end, it gets the two extra lines of the octet to be feminine.

Anyway, a strong volume of poetry, though I was pretty sure I'd like it going in.

#1944Club: Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough

Archie's in the Army!

Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe have been solving crimes in New York City for ten years (by the dates of the books) and have got a reputation for it. So when Archie, who serves as Nero Wolfe's right-hand man, volunteers for the Army, he's not sent overseas, but is assigned to Army Intelligence, where his main task is to prod Nero Wolfe into working.

Well, if you know the series, that's generally the first task in any book.

Not Quite Dead Enough contains two novellas, the title novella and 'Booby Trap.' The first finds the normally (and still) corpulent Wolfe, dining on prunes and lettuce, forswearing beer, and exercising, until he can get in shape to join the Army as an enlisted man and go overseas. But that's not what the Army wants him for: they need him for some unspecified mission, and they need him in his role as the thinking detective. Archie gets him back to working, and that's the majority (and especially fun part) of the story.

The second novella does involve war issues, though it still takes place in New York; Captain Cross is dead under suspicious circumstances; threatening letters appear; then Colonel Ryder is killed by an experimental grenade. Murders? Well, yes and yes. And Inspector Cramer of New York Homicide can't (as usual) solve them, but this time because the relevant information is classified.

I thought the first novella better than the second, though if I were recommending a place to start with the Nero Wolfe series this book as a whole would not be it. If you like Wolfe, though, you won't be disappointed. I wasn't.

Rex Stout was 55 when the US entered the war, and according to the introduction, spent the war years chairing a variety of committees, hosting radio programs, and otherwise engaged in war work. But still found time for a couple of novellas.

Another entry by me in the 1944 Club hosted by Simon and Karen. Thanks!

Also counts for the Just The Facts Mystery Challenge at My Reader's Block.

Gold. Who. Retired From or In The Armed Services.

John Hersey's A Bell For Adano

Thank you, #1944Club, for getting me to finally read John Hersey's A Bell For Adano, which has been loitering on my TBR pile for who knows how long. What fun!

A Bell For Adano is the story of Major Joppolo, an Italian-American who's put in charge of Adano, an imaginary town in Sicily, from the first days of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. 

You can imagine the sort of problems Joppolo faces in trying to sort out a town in the immediate aftermath of its liberation, but there are two in particular that bedevil Joppolo. The first is the bell of the city hall that rang until just weeks before the invasion; it was the spirit of the city; the Fascists sent it off to be melted down for munitions. It needs to be recovered, or something needs to replace it. The other is the American General Marvin, the villain of the novel, who, in a fit of anger at a traffic jam, shoots a mule and orders all carts off the streets of Adano. But Adano is a poor town, with no well; it depends on carts to bring in water as well as its other supplies. Joppolo will need to fix this. These two tasks drive the plot and come together for its resolution.

This is Hersey's first novel, though he had been a reporter for Time magazine and written two books of World War 2 reportage before this. He was embedded with American troops as they came into Sicily. He's got a pleasant spare style, both humorous and touching:

     Father Pensovecchio could not remember when so many people had come to the Church of San Angelo. 

     Perhaps he had not been without guile when he had mentioned to ten or twelve people, quite casually, that the American Major would be in Church in the morning, and that he himself had something to say about the Americans. What priest does not like to have many listeners?

Well, Joppolo is a good man in a difficult situation, fighting American ignorance and disdain, bureaucratic disregard and logrolling, not to mention the occasional actual leftover Fascist. His tale is engaging, sweet, but not too sweet. Recommended.

And if it's just a little self-congratulatory, well, that helped it to go on and win the Pulitzer for fiction in 1945, and it may also be the U. S., in comparison to every other war fought since then, could be allowed a little self-congratulation. Especially in the matter of the government they provided for occupation.

I didn't read the handsome reissue shown above, but the rather beat-up copy shown in my pile o' 1944 books:

But it does seem to actually date from the period (not sure anymore where I found the book). But this is on the inside cover:

Thanks to Karen and Simon for hosting!

#1944Club

I'm going to try to read something for the 1944 Club; it will be my first time joining in on the year club project. In my usual way for any reading project, I've pulled far more books off the shelf than I will conceivably read:

All the mysteries (to the left, next to the Hubert the Harris Bank lion) I've already read; all the serious books to the right would be first-time reads. (Oops. Should I have admitted that?)

Karl Shapiro's volume of war poetry V-Letter feels like it would be a great fit, or I've had Hersey's A Bell For Adano on a shelf for years; it's set in Sicily as the allied armies are retaking it, and went on to win the Pulitzer.

But maybe the most interesting one would be Quentin Reynolds' The Curtain Rises:

It was around my family's house forever. My dad might have bought it at the time, though he would have been fifteen or sixteen; or it's possible my grandfather or grandmother bought it. I hung on to it, thinking I'll read that someday. And maybe that day comes next week!

I also recognized that corner of Borges in the picture at KaggsysBookishRamblings, but I am not pulling Ficciones off the shelf...really...

Of course, it's possible I'll just reread Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough, which, it just so happens, is the next volume in my slow occasional project to reread all the Nero Wolfe mysteries in order.

Co-hosted at Stuck In A Book and KaggsysBookishRamblings. Thanks!

1944 books read:

1.) John Hersey's A Bell For Adano
2.) Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough
3.) Karl Shapiro's V-Letter