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.

 

 

Eve L. Ewing's 1919 (#poem)

or does it explode

July 27 was hot, 96 degrees, or fourteen points above normal. It was the culmination of a series of days with high temperatures around 95 degrees, which meant that nerves were strained. (11)

man it was so hot

how hot was it

it was so hot

you could cook an egg

on that big forehead of yours

 

you a lie

 

man i tell you it was so hot

 

how hot

 

it was so hot

i dropped a tomato in the lake

and made campbell's soup

nuh uh

it was so hot

the sun tried to get in the swimming pool

and everybody else had to get out

boy that's hot

who you tellin

that day was so hot

how hot

it was so hot

our dreams laid out on the sidewalk

and said 'never mind, we good'

-Eve L. Ewing

On July 27th, 1919, a race riot broke out in Chicago. The beaches of the south side were de facto segregated, and a seventeen-year-old Black boy strayed too close what was thought of as a White beach. He may have been struck by a stone--stones were thrown--or he may have been afraid to come into the White beach when his strength ran out, but in any case he drowned. The police, on the scene, took no action, and a riot started that engulfed the city. Twenty-three Black people were killed and fifteen White people in addition to numerous injuries and enormous property damage.

In the aftermath, a committee was appointed by the governor of Illinois to investigate; it consisted of six White people and six Black people. They produced a report: The Negro in Chicago, a Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot, that came out in 1922. The report sounds (by the standards of the time) balanced enough; the epigraph to the poem above comes from that report.

Eve L. Ewing is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, as well as a poet. (She also writes for Marvel Comics!) In the course of her academic research, she was reading the report and was inspired to write this short book of poems in reaction. The title of this poem of course alludes to Langston Hughes' Harlem, sometimes known as A Dream Deferred. ("What happens to a dream deferred?/.../or does it explode?"--in this case it exploded.)

As a Chicagoan, I knew the basic outlines of the story but not as many details as I now know after finishing the book, which also includes a historical overview. I did not know for instance that Mayor Daley (the first Mayor Daley, Richard J.) was likely a rioter, though he refused to talk about it and it was never definitely proven. This is shocking...though also not. He would have been seventeen at the time of the riot.

 

Anyway, a fascinating short volume and one I'm glad my library was able to supply.

Two Novellas (Kushner, Algren) #NovNov

Rachel Kushner's The Mayor of Leipzig

So, I was putting my name on the list at my library of Kushner's new novel Creation Lake (I'm currently 256 and my library has 127 copies) but then I saw there was this book The Mayor of Leipzig that came out in 2021. Where did that come from? I never heard about it. Send me that! 

They did. Conveniently, it turned out to be novella length.

An unnamed woman artist, forty-five years old, based in New York, tells her story. She goes to Germany. She meets her gallerist in Cologne and from there travels on to Leipzig, where she will have an exhibition. "After lunch I went to the exhibition space where I would have my show and that part gets technical, so I'll spare you." We're given some speculation on art, learn about her artist friends, about her analyst, whom she doesn't see any more.

We also learn that her story is being ghostwritten by Rachel Kushner, who "probably understands less about me than you will, after you read this." Amusingly the protagonist accuses Rachel Kushner of being an art groupie, though based on The Flamethrowers, maybe she is.

We also learn about Spencer Schlosnagle, the mayor of Friendsville, who's a real person. Google him, the protagonist says, and I did. A strange enough story.

There may be a ghost involved--our protagonist says she ought to talk to her analyst about it, but then she's not seeing her analyst anymore--and then there's the 'Mayor' of Leipzig, who's probably not the mayor, but is like Spencer Schlosnagle in Spencer's other famous feature.

Interesting enough, occasionally amusing. It's not The Flamethrowers and I assume it won't be the equal of Creation Lake either. 

70p., but it's large print with lots of white space. It's short for a novella, maybe more long short story instead.

Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make

I'd wanted to read this since I read the biography of Nelson Algren in summer. (Well, I'd probably wanted to read it before then, but had half-forgotten.) My library didn't have a copy, but I found one when I was in Chicago recently.

It comes out in 1951 and it's Algren's personal history of Chicago until that time. Or maybe it's a prose poem. "By its padlocked poolrooms and its nightshade neon, by its carbarn Christs punching transfers all night long; by its nuns studying gin-fizz ads in the Englewood Local, you shall know Chicago."

Algren is interested in the underside of Chicago life, and likes the people who also care about the downtrodden. Jane Addams and Richard Wright are heroes in the book; the first edition was dedicated to Carl Sandburg. He doesn't like the rich and the powerful and the righteous, and goes after them hard.

It's pretty fascinating, even if it's more atmosphere than actual information. You probably want to get the edition shown, and I don't just say that because I went to high school with the editor Bill Savage. 😉But the notes (by Bill Savage and David Schmittgens) are nearly essential. I grew up in Chicago, I know who Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin were (shady Chicago politicians, are you surprised?) but even I found the notes hard to do without.

130p in this edition, with those notes, a fun introduction by Studs Terkel, and a somewhat sour afterword from the second edition by Nelson Algren himself, who'd become a bit of a grump by the sixties.

This book is the source of the famous description of Chicago:

"Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

 It's Novellas in November!

 

 

Gwendolyn Brooks' Family Pictures (#1970Club)

 

Speech to the Young

Say to them,

say to the down-keepers,

the sun-slappers,

the self-soilers,

the harmony-hushers,

"Even if you are not ready for day,

it cannot always be night."

You will be right.

For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.

Live not for the end-of-the-song.

Live in the along.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Paul Robeson

That time,

we all heard it,

cool and clear,

cutting across the hot grit of the day.

The major Voice,

the adult Voice,

forgoing Rolling River,

forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge

and other symptoms of an old despond.

Warning, in music words

devout and large,

that we are each other's

harvest:

we are each other's

business:

we are each other's

magnitude and bond.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks' short volume of poetry Family Pictures came out in 1970. Two years earlier she had been appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a title she held until her death in 2000. She was also the Poet Laureate of the U.S. for the 1985-6 term. She was a lifelong resident of Chicago. Gwendolyn Brooks has always been a favorite of mine.

I'm not sure exactly which song of Paul Robeson's she's thinking of--by 1970 Paul Robeson's health was poor and he wasn't performing anymore. The poem suggests he's moved on from Ol' Man River, and it's true that Paul Robeson became much more political. (Not always in admirable ways.) So here's Paul Robeson singing "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill," the union organizing song:

Nelson Algren: A Life by Mary Wisniewski (#ParisInJuly)

I feel I am of them--

I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself--

And henceforth I will not deny them--

For how can I deny myself?

-Walt Whitman

That quote from Leaves of Grass serves as the epigraph to Nelson Algren's second novel Never Comes Morning. But it could also very well be Algren talking about himself.

Mary Wisniewski's biography of Algren came out in 2016 with Chicago Review Press. She's a fan, but not starry-eyed: she can see where he goes wrong, both personally (more often) but also in his writing. I read a bunch of Algren in the 80s when I was on a Chicago novelist kick, and I was explaining to the Other Reader what his stories were like: people in a miserable degraded situation manage to end up in an even worse plight by the end. Now you may not very often be--maybe not ever be...😉--in a mood to read such a book, but Wisniewski does an excellent job of why you might still want to. 

Nelson Algren was born in 1909 as Nelson Abraham to a mostly Jewish, though not practising, family. His middle name is Ahlgren and comes from his Swedish grandfather; it gets simplified to serve as his pen name. 

How miserable are his characters? The Man With The Golden Arm is the best-known novel; it won the inaugural National Book Award in 1950. Its protagonist, Frankie 'Machine' Majcinek, is a skilled poker dealer, where skilled means he can gull the rubes and not be detected. Poker is of course illegal in Chicago, and so he's working for a hoodlum. He's also a morphine addict, something he picked up as a soldier when he served in WWII. So he's a man with a golden arm in two senses. We first see him in a police lineup. His final appearance is a more serious encounter with the law...

Otto Preminger made a movie of the book with Frank Sinatra in Frankie Machine role.  Preminger wanted to use the movie to blow up the Hays Code, and he kind of did, but still the movie is far more upbeat than the book.

Algren lived most of his adult life on the northwest side of Chicago in the heart of Polonia, the Polish neighborhood, and it's the underclass of that area he writes about. His characterizations didn't win him many friends among his neighbors. Wisniewski quotes her father at one point: "I didn't know any people like that. Those people were bums." (Though Mike Royko, of Polish-Ukrainian stock was a big fan.)

Wisniewski's own style makes this a pretty sharp read: [Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer] "claimed that the Poles were like the Irish of Chicago,... But this was silly. The Irish were the Irish of Chicago--controlling city politics and dominating the police force." 

On Never Come Morning, Algren's first novel about Polonia: "Nelson presented an exceedingly narrow view of Polish-American life...This claustrophobia was the effect Nelson wanted--but it is so complete it can feel like a distortion." This is astute and could be said of a lot of Algren's fiction.

Algren wrote four novels, the last a ground-up rewrite of the first, two volumes of short stories, and a fair amount of non-fiction. Not a bad career, but also not tremendously prolific, which was the result of a lot of personal troubles--mostly self-inflicted--and insecurities. He died in 1981.

 

But wait! What sort of bait and switch is this? I put #ParisInJuly up there in the header. But this is a biography of a grim, naturalistic, Chicago novelist. Well, that brings us to...

The Crazy Frog and the Crocodile

"The romance of Nelson Algren and the French writer, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir was the most ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible, unreasonable, and amazing thing to come into both their lives."

They first met in Chicago in 1947. De Beauvoir was in Chicago and she'd been given Algren's phone number as somebody she might want to look up. Algren had been warned this French philosopher was going to call, but he still managed to hang up on her twice, either because he couldn't understand her accent, or out of cussedness. Nevertheless they managed to meet that February, and pretty soon they were both hopelessly in love. De Beauvoir at one point says it's the best sex she's ever had.

Crazy Frog and Crocodile were their nicknames for each other.

Theirs was mostly a long-distance romance, though. Both were writers who felt they had to be in 'their' city to write, Chicago for him, Paris for her. De Beauvoir also wouldn't leave Sartre, though she told Algren she was no longer sleeping with him. Algren found this hard to understand (and for going on three-quarters of a century now, that's true of a lot of people). Algren wanted to be married, though Wisniewski at one point dryly remarks he wasn't very good at it. (There were three marriages, though only two wives.)

Algren gets to Paris to visit her, hang out at the Café de Flore, meet Sartre and the crowd. "By this time in my life I was ready to vote existentialist," he writes in a letter, and it's not Sartre he's thinking about. When the romance is in its first flush, they're both writing their major books: Golden Arm for him, The Second Sex for her.

Later it gets more difficult. Algren, who had a bunch of communist friends, and who may have been a communist himself in the 30s, (though he denied it, and was willing to do so on oath) can't get a passport in the 50s. Both have affairs with others, and eventually Algren remarries his first wife, though it's even less of a success the second time than the first. He's portrayed as Lewis in de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, and Algren wasn't fond of his portrait. But de Beauvoir is buried with Algren's ring on her finger.

And I was amused to see in that first flush they enjoyed watching Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a Chicago program whose reruns still showed up mixed in with Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid:

So innocent.

The photo Wisniewski uses for the cover of her book shows Algren was rather a good-looking guy--so maybe de Beauvoir had taste?--but why are his pants so grease-spotted? But I think that's rather representatively Algren: he probably chose to wear grease-spotted pants for his formal portrait.

Anyway, Wisniewski's bio made me want me to read (reread) Algren, and is there a better recommendation for a literary biography than that? I'm currently in the middle of Never Come Morning.

And while de Beauvoir's imprimatur is probably of more use to Algren these days--she thought his novels were great, and was instrumental in seeing they were translated into French--I can't resist quoting Hemingway's pretty famous blurb. It's Hemingway being so much his clichéd Hemingway self it's kind of hilarious. [He's writing of The Man With The Golden Arm]:

"This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."

Though it has to be said Algren was thrilled with the blurb, and posted the letter from Hemingway containing it on his refrigerator, that new refrigerator the success of The Man With the Golden Arm enabled him to buy.

Full Disclosure: Mary Wisniewski is the friend of a friend, though I've never met her. (I think.) If I thought the book was poor, I simply wouldn't have mentioned it. But instead, I thought it was quite good.

For some strange reason I haven't been able to comment on any WordPress-based blogs lately. Argh. Has anybody else seen this?

W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (#ParisInJuly-just in time!)

"I'm counting the days until I can get back to Paris. It's the only place in the world for a civilized man to live."

It hurts me to report the speaker was in Chicago when he said it.

W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge comes out in 1944, but the events end before the Second World War and start in 1919. 

Elliott Templeton (our Paris booster) is in Chicago to visit his sister. The narrator of the novel (a novelist much like Maugham himself) is passing through Chicago and has lunch with Templeton, an old acquaintance. He also meets most of the other figures of the novel: Louisa Bradley, Templeton's sister; his niece, Isabel Bradley; Larry Darrell, Isabel's fiancé, Gray Maturin, who's in love with Isabel, rich, and whom her mother and uncle discreetly would prefer she marry; and Sophie Macdonald, a friend of the younger generation.

It's Larry Darrell's decisions that drive the action of the novel. He had lied about his age and managed to fight as a pilot for the French during WWI. The horrors he saw there, the fact that his life was saved by a friend who died in the process, have left him wondering about the big questions. He still loves Isabel, he says, but he wants to spend two years at least on a quest to discover the meaning of existence. (That's Bill Murray as Larry in something approaching a Hindu seeker's garment on the cover of my beat-up movie tie-in edition.) Larry wants to marry Isabel, but not to give up his search, and suggests that they live on his small inheritance while he continues. In his search, Larry reads philosophy (William James, Spinoza!), makes a retreat at a Benedictine monastery, and eventually travels to India.

But, after Spinoza, and before the monastery, Isabel says unh-unh to that proposal of impoverished seeking; instead she marries Gray Maturin, who was patiently waiting at her side. They have two children and a life of great social and financial success. Until 1929.

I think the novel is usually viewed as a story of spiritual seeking, and it is, of sorts. The Wikipedia article compares it to Hesse in its early (by Western standards) interest in Eastern spirituality. But Larry is not often on the scene, and the novelist character/narrator only meets Larry occasionally over the fifteen or twenty years of the novel. "I can only guess, you know, and I may be quite wrong. I think he's been seeking for a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that'll satisfy both his head and his heart." 

There's one long discussion about philosophy between Larry and the narrator in an all-night Paris café, which might be a little dull. But:

"I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book."

Hmm. I might still have felt it worthwhile to read it without that chapter, but it is important that Larry not just be an object of fun, but that his quest be taken seriously. And so it is. Still the diffidence and irony of the narrator means that while he takes Larry's quest seriously enough, it's not taken completely seriously, and there are other possibilities.

And in fact Elliott Templeton is present in much more of the novel. He's quite an amusing character who clearly codes as gay, though he's never explicitly described as such. He made his money as an art dealer, though his trading days are so vanishingly far behind him that he won't acknowledge they ever existed; he spends his time cultivating high-status social acquaintances. He's compared to Proust at one point, and not since Recherche has there been quite so much concentration on breaking into the Boulevard St. Germain. I found him the most entertaining character. His pronouncements are sometimes shocking, and maybe we shouldn't like him:

"I have always moved in the best society in Europe and I have no doubt I shall move in the best society in heaven. Our Lord has said: The House of my Father hath many mansions. It would be highly unsuitable to lodge the hoi polloi in a way to which they're entirely unaccustomed."

But at the same time he, too, is treated with real tenderness by the narrator.

Some bad things do happen, and at one point the narrator ends up in a police office in the matter of a dead girl:

    "'We found a number of detective stories in her room and two or three volumes of poetry. There was a Baudelaire and a Rimbaud and an English volume by someone called Eliot. Is he known?'

    'Widely.'"

Our narrator can be amusingly catty himself:

    "Why d'you suppose they do it?" [get divorced]

    "Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

"A novel which she knew from the beginning (otherwise she wouldn't have read it) would end happily."

Is that the sort of novel we're reading? Well...

"...to my intense surprise it dawned on me that without in the least intending to I had written nothing more or less than a success story. For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: [Spoilers!] And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hearts all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is not so unsatisfactory after all."

Anyway, maybe I'm not one of those highbrows after all, but just another member of the public, and so I thought it was a good read. 😉

One from my Classics Club list.

And squeezing one late-breaking entry in for Paris in July!

Andrew Greeley's Happy Are The Clean Of Heart

Lisa Malone is an Irish Catholic girl from the Chicago. She could sing; she was good-looking; so she went to Hollywood and she succeeded. Now it's 1984 and she's nearly 40 and when she comes back to the old neighborhood, they're happy and envious in about equal measure. Make that measure unequal: more envious.

And on her first night back, somebody beats her to within an inch of her life in a hotel. Now she's in a coma.

Her estranged husband is found standing over the body, the cosh in his hand. He 'says' he interrupted somebody. But he's not the only suspect. There's her agent, who felt like he's the one that made her, her understudy for an upcoming Christmas special, her co-star on that special, a woman from the neighborhood, writing a biography with Lisa's approval,  a Mobbed-up bank vice president who administers Lisa's charitable foundation, her jealous older brother, and a nun who knew Lisa as a girl and whose organization is also the recipient of Lisa's charity.

And, well, Fr. John Blackwood "Blackie" Ryan had opportunity, too, and everybody knew he was in love with her when they were in high school. 

Then there's a second and a third attempt on her life in the hospital.

Blackie Ryan is the hero of a mystery series by Andrew Greeley, himself a priest as well as a professor at the University of Chicago. This is the second in the series, though there is an earlier non-mystery novel with Blackie Ryan as a major character. It takes until that third attempt for Blackie to figure out the villain. "Indeed," as Blackie himself might say.

There's some fun things in it for a Chicagoan. Roger Ebert and Richie Daley make appearances. (That's Richard M. Daley, former mayor of Chicago to you.) Richie is Cook County state's attorney that year. The events take place on the near north side, Chicago's Water Tower, the John Hancock building, Holy Name Cathedral, the Drake Hotel, the Playboy Building (as Blackie can barely bring himself to say, not the Playboy any longer). Lisa Malone's daughter plans on St. Ignatius for her high school, my alma mater.

I've read a bunch of the Blackie Ryan mysteries. My dad liked them, and I read them after he did, frequently because I gave him the new one for Christmas or his birthday. I can't say that this was one of the better ones. I find the early ones a bit overwritten, and Greeley's not the psychologist he wants to be. He pared them down later, and they were better for it. Oh, well...

The novel comes out in 1986 and the movie Amadeus has clearly influenced the plotting.

But it was one of the books I put on my Twenty Books of Summer list!

And it counts for Bev's Vintage Mystery Challenge:

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Knife: a knife is used in the third attempt.

Gwendolyn Brooks (#NationalPoetryMonth)

 

a song in the front yard

I've stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it's fine
How they don't have to go in at a quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate.)

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.
And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

'a song in the front yard' is from Gwendolyn Brooks' first book of poems A Street in Bronzeville. Brooks was the Poet Laureate of Illinois from early in my childhood until her death in 2000 at 83. Bronzeville is a Black neighborhood on the near south side of Chicago. 

She's always been a favorite of mine.

Poem For A Thursday is a meme created by Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness. 

(Belated) Poem For A Thursday: Lindsay

The Eagle That Is Forgotten

(John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847; died March 12, 1902)

Sleep softly...eagle forgotten...under the stone.

Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. 

"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.

They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced. 

They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you day after day.

Now you were ended. They praised you,...and laid you away. 

The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth.

The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,

The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor

That should have remembered forever,...remember no more. 

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call

The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?

They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,

A hundred white eagles have risen the sons of your sons,

The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began

The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.

Sleep softly,...eagle forgotten...under the stone

Time has its way with you there and the clay has its own. 

Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame--

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,

To live in mankind, far, far more...than to live in a name.

-Vachel Lindsay

John Peter Altgeld was elected governor of Illinois in 1892. He resisted the use of federal troops to combat the Pullman strike and pardoned the (surviving) Haymarket rioters. He was one of the first progressive politicians elected to office.

Vachel Lindsay was an American poet who died in 1931.

Jennifer has a great Robert Frost poem this week.

Saul Bellow's The Dangling Man

"I feel I am a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn. I know I am going to explode and I am continually anticipating the time, with a prayerful despair crying "Boom!" but always prematurely."

Dangling Man (1944) is Saul Bellow's first novel.  It's in the form of Joseph's diary, from December of 1942 to March of 1943. Joseph, like Bellow himself, is a Canadian citizen who has lived in Chicago since he was a child. Joseph tries to join the U.S. Army, but since he's technically a Canadian, bureaucracy intervenes, and he's not accepted. He's 'dangling.'

Joseph had quit his job on the assumption he would soon be in the army; his work was for a travel agency, not a bustling business in war time, and when he tries to get his old job back, there's nothing doing. He still expects to be in the army soon, but now it's a year since Pearl Harbor and the army still hasn't sorted out his status. Joseph is supported by his wife Iva; he's a budding intellectual, and hopes to spend the time usefully, reading and writing; instead, he does little and becomes irritable.

Underground, Dangling, Invisible. Bellow's Man is alienated from society and undergoes an existential crisis like those of Dostoevsky's or Ellison's Men, (or Turgenev's Superfluous Man, but I haven't read that one.) This novel is the least of those: well, nobody, I believe, thinks this a major Bellow novel.

Still I found it interesting. My sense, I can't tell you offhand where it comes from, is that the prose in this is considered different in kind from what would be Bellow's mature style, and certainly nothing in it has the panache of the opening of Augie March, "I am an American, Chicago-born,..." But it's not as different as all that, and Bellow sets out his program to reform American novelistic prose right from the start in these, the first words of his first novel:

"There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions. But to keep a journal nowadays is considered a kind of self-indulgence, a weakness, and in poor taste. For this is an era of hardboiled-dom...Most serious matters are closed to the hardboiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring."

Pow. Take that, Hemingway. Right between the eyes, Hammett. It's a programmatic statement of the sort of prose that not only Joseph, but also Bellow, intends to write, and did write. I approve. Now Bellow got better at it going forward.

Rather the difference between this and the later novels is it's not Jewish. Joseph attends church, celebrates Christmas. It's understandable: anti-Semitism is still strong in English departments. Lionel Trilling only got his assistant professorship in 1939, and that, after having been told it would never happen. But it's a real loss in Bellow's case. The characters in Dangling Man feel like Jews in WASP-face, and that's not a good thing. When he decided to write honestly out of his Jewish experience, it liberated Bellow. The change between this and the later Bellows doesn't seem to me to be in the prose, but in the nature of the characters.

So it's a clear promise of what Bellow was going to become, even if he's not there yet. It's interesting for that.

But that also includes problems, like Bellow's handling of female characters. Now in general, men write better about male characters than female, and women write better about female characters than male. There are exceptions--George Eliot, possibly Tolstoy, though only in Anna Karenina, I would say--but in even great authors this can be true. Does anybody think Darcy or Knightley as real as Elizabeth or Emma? And male authors, I think, are generally worse in this regard than female authors. In Dangling Man, the female characters are all given physical descriptions, often unflattering or grotesque, while the men are described by the characteristics of their mind or actions. Here's Joseph describing his mother-in-law:

"She is a short, fair, rather maidenish woman. Her natural color, when visible, is healthy. Her eyes are large, and they wear a knowing look, but since there is nothing to be knowing about they only convey her foolishness. She powders herself thickly, and her lips are painted in the shape that has become the universal device of sensuality for all women, from the barely mature to the very old. Mrs. Almstadt, nearing fifty, is already quite wrinkled, much to her concern, and she is forever on the watch for new packs and face lotions."

A single example might be justifiable, but repeatedly? And in this novel, I found it less alarming than in others I've read, because Joseph is more ironized, more distant from Bellow himself, than Augie March, or Henderson, or (especially) Dean Corde of The Dean's December. It's a world where all we know about Hillary is her pantsuits. Maybe that's not entirely different from the world we live in now, but I keep hoping.

I read my first Bellow in high school (Herzog.) I went through a bit of a Bellow phase in my 20s, which ended with The Dean's December, and I decided I couldn't take it anymore. I came back to him, for a bit, with Ravelstein, and read or reread some more. I'm from Chicago, and Bellow is probably the most important Chicago writer, more even than Dreiser, than Brooks, than Farrell, than Algren, than Hecht, than Mamet, than Bodenheim, maybe even than Richard Wright, though hmm.... (And James T. Farrell is sadly underrated.)

Anyhoo, this post is in serious danger of becoming longer than the book itself... ;-) so I'll close off. If you're a Bellow fan, it's well worth reading, and not so different, I'd say, from his major works. But, even though it's short, don't start here. If you were looking for a short one to start with, I'd say Ravelstein, but the best for my money are Augie March, Henderson The Rain King, or Humboldt's Gift.

This qualifies for Classic From a Place You Lived for Karen's Back to the Classics Challenge, but really, embarrassingly enough, I pulled it for last fall's #1944Club, didn't read it until now, but never got around to putting it back on the shelf...

Poem For A Thursday: Sandburg

Happiness

I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.

And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river

And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

-Carl Sandburg

"Happiness" is from Carl Sandburg's volume of 1916, Chicago Poems. Since I'm in Chicago as this post appears, and possibly recovering from a poetry reading and beer bash celebrating the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth this seemed altogether too appropriate.

Oh, and a proper Chicagoan pronounces that the Dess Plains river. Don't even ask what we do with Goethe Street.

I trust another poem suitable to our happiness theme can be found at Holds Upon Happiness.

Sara Paretsky's Indemnity Only

Sara Paretsky's Indemnity Only (1982) is the first V. I. (Victoria or Vic) Warshawsky mystery. It, together with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series, were the beginning of the modern female P.I. mystery movement. The series takes place in Chicago, and since I'm going to Chicago in a few days...

The setup is this: Warshawsky is hired to find somebody's daughter, except her client doesn't give his real name, and doesn't tell her the daughter's real name either. When she goes to follow the one lead she's given, she finds a dead body, clearly murdered by a pro. She figures she's been had. But not for long.

She ends up in the middle of an insurance fraud scheme, an unholy alliance of labor bosses, insurance executives, bankers, and the mob. (Well, it is Chicago we're talking about...we're only missing a politician or three...) Vic sorts out the mystery--its outlines are never much in doubt--its real and considerable suspense is in how she sorts the goons and gets the goods.

She compares herself twice to Lord Peter Wimsey, but the final scene is straight out of The Maltese Falcon.

Quite a lot of fun.

I usually think of Vic as a Southsider, and the backstory has her raised there, but she lives near Belmont and Halsted in Chicago on the north side--where I lived for two years in my twenties. And she's not much of a Southsider, because she's a Cubs fan.

Another entry for My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Challenge.

Silver. Why: Author from your country. (Your state, your city, even your major intersection.)

Poem For A Thursday: Brooks

Sadie and Maud

Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-toothed comb. 

She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land. 

Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Every one but Sadie
Nearly died of shame. 

When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.) 

Maud, who went to college
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

My spellchecker doesn't like "livingest," but I love that word.

This is from Gwendolyn Brooks' first book, A Street In Bronzeville, of 1945. Bronzeville is a neighborhood on the near south side of Chicago, historically black and, by the standards allowed for African-Americans, middle-class. There's not much of it left any more, I think, what with various urban renewal projects.

I was a kid when Gwendolyn Brooks was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, and so I guess I've always known of her, but I'm quite sure the poem we were generally given at the time was "We Real Cool" about the dangers of skipping school...

Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness is featuring Maggie Smith this week.

Book Beginning: David Mamet's Chicago

Parlow and Mike sat quiet in the duck blind. A camouflage screen of marsh grass and twigs had been set before them; the blind itself was five feet deep, dug into the soft earth, and lined with discarded lumber. The day was dry, and the blind was dry.

...is the beginning of David Mamet's Chicago.

I was in the library the other day and they had this on the new releases shelf. My vague sense is that Mamet has become crotchety and conservative as he's aged, but I've liked his plays and his movies in the past. I'm a Chicago native, and his American Buffalo takes place in my old hood. So a gangster novel set in Chicago in the 20s sounds like it could be fun. Mike (Hodge) is a reporter in love with Annie Walsh who's loosely entwined with the Mob. Trouble ensues.

I'm about 30 pages in and I don't quite understand why a novel with that cover and that theme starts in a duck blind, but oh, well. We do learn Mike Hodge isn't a very good shot. (Though Parlow is.) I get the impression that will be important.

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a bookish meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. To play, quote the beginning of the book you're currently reading, give the author and title, and any thoughts if you like. Or I'll play you a little tune on my violin, see...

Mike Royko's Boss

The Boss of this book by Mike Royko is Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago. The book came out in 1971, when the first Daley had been mayor for 16 years, and Royko was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News.

Some quotes, for instance on nepotism:

Nobody in the Machine is more family conscious than Chairman Daley...Uncle Martin Daley had a well-paying job in county government he did so skillfully he seldom had to leave his home.

Daley didn't come from a big family but he married into one, and so Eleanor Guilfoyle's parents might very well have said that they didn't lose a daughter, they they gained an employment agency. 

Or on corruption:

Then down to the clerical job at City Hall for more learning. The first lesson is always the same: never repeat what you see or hear, or somebody might get indicted.

 [An old friend of Daley's Louis Wexler says of Daley:] "Even then, he misused the language so that you noticed it. He had trouble expressing himself and his grammar wasn't good." But thirty years later, Daley's grammar was good enough to say "yes" when Wexler appealed to their old school ties, and Wexler became a judge.

Daley's moral code was emerging: Thou shalt not steal, but thou shalt not blow the whistle on anybody who does.

Or on race relations in Chicago:

If the Negro was equal in the eyes of the law, the men wearing badges needed glasses.

I quote Royko primarily because at this point the main virtue of the book is its style. It was meant to reach an audience, and so it has no footnotes, it doesn't much bother with citations in the text, it's even vague on dates, though it's roughly organized by Daley's terms. It's not much use if you want to learn anything about Richard Daley, who for better or worse is now history.

As an example, Royko writes about the Richard Daley objecting because his son William has been assigned a book about race relations in Chicago by his theology teacher. The book (quite accurately) portrayed relations as poor, and Mayor Daley insisted they were good. There was some name calling at a parent-teacher conference. Now Royko only says that the younger Daley went to a Jesuit high school and gives us no further details.

There are two Jesuit high schools in the Chicago area, but no need to look it up: Bill Daley went to St. Ignatius on the near south side. I know because I went there myself about fifteen years later. I was mildly curious who his theology teacher was, because it was possible it was somebody I knew, but Royko doesn't say. Why not? Everybody in Chicago at the time knew of the connection between the Daleys and St. Ignatius, and anybody who could have done harm would have known the priest who taught theology at the time, so Royko wasn't protecting anybody that I can see. He was just being vague.

And that's the problem with the book, what limits its usefulness now. Read it if you like the dry (but maybe heavy-handed) irony of Royko, but don't read it expecting it to be a good primary source about Mayor Daley. And even if you like Royko (as I do) I'd read a collection of his columns first, several of which are still in print, or Slats Grobnik and Friends, which isn't.

It used to be easy to find a copy of this in used bookstores in Chicago, because it sold so well. It probably still is. I've been carrying this around since I lived in Chicago, so it's done some traveling of its own. But it is now off my TBR list. My Reader's Block Mount TBR Challenge.

Andrew Greeley's Happy Are The Meek

Happy Are The Meek is the second outing from 1985 in Andrew Greeley's John Blackwood "Blackie" Ryan mystery series. In this volume, Fr. Blackie is a mere Monsignor. In later mysteries, he advances to bishop, and then archbishop. Had Greeley lived long enough, Fr. Blackie would no doubt have become Chicago's mystery-solving cardinal, and possibly even the first murder-solving Pope.

I've read a bunch of Blackie Ryan mysteries completely out of order; they're set in Chicago, my home town, and so, like the V. I. Warshawsky series, for example, they have a certain appeal for me. My father was fond of the series and after he'd read one, I read it. Not infrequently he received the book as a gift from me...

Most of the events in this one take place in Long Beach, Indiana, a resort town for wealthy Chicagoans on the shore of Lake Michigan. (I've never been there.) Wolfe Tone Quinlan is the victim, he owns the house where the crime takes place, the suit of armor, the sword of which is the murder weapon, and it's not inappropriate to say he owns half the suspects, who in one way or another are all dependent on him.

Quinlan is a complete villain. He's abusive to his family (and by the end, we learn even worse.) His partners are criminal or abused. He's a drunk. He supports some sort of creepy devil-worshiping cult. By the end of 40 pages, I was ready to murder him myself. I understand the convenience for plotting of having a thoroughly detested victim, but by then I was half-hoping for an Orient Express-type solution to this one. He was so awful, it was difficult to read about him.

Greeley alternates chapters in Fr. Blackie's voice with chapters in the voice of other characters. The other problem with the novel, I thought, was the other chapters. Blackie Ryan is knowing, arch, amusing. He tends to natter on about his extended Chicago Irish clan who play useful and funny roles in the mysteries: Mike the Cop, his sister Mary Kate the psychiatrist, his various nieces and nephews who refer to him as Uncle Punk. But many (too many) of the early chapters in this were narrated by Lawrence Burke, Quinlan's financial adviser, and desperately and guiltily in lust with the widow. Catholic guilt is completely believable, but it does not amuse.

My preference is also generally for cozy, which the Blackie Ryan mysteries generally are, and this one veers into the grisly.

So all in all, not one of the better Blackie Ryan outings. Without being systematic about it, I would say Greeley improved in the series, but then the very last ones got a little sloppy. The middle ones are the best.

But there's a brunette in a bikini on the cover. I'm not really sure who she's supposed to be, but it takes place in a beach town, so I guess that's OK:

Silver Age. Brunette. My Reader's Block's Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Also this one has been aging on the shelves here since 2014 when I bought it at the University College Book Sale from the 6 for $5.00 mystery table. So it also counts for My Reader's Block Mount TBR Challenge.