What I Read in September 2012

September was a vacation month for us. What with travel by plane and train (no driving) and quiet evenings in the hotel room, I was able to do an unusual amount of reading.

Two by the New Zealand mystery writer, Ngaio Marsh, creator of Inspector Alleyn. Colour Scheme:It is wartime New Zealand and someone is suspected of signalling to the enemy. Night at the Vulcan: Young aspiring actress watches the scenes of a murder investigation. Marsh enjoys building his situations slowly — Inspector Alleyn often does not appear until halfway through the book. When he does appear, rational investigation is all.

John McPhee, Irons in the Fire. This collection of the writings of the prolific John McPhee includes pieces on cattle branding and rustling, forensic geology (do you know where this handful of sand or soil came from?) and recycling America’s millions of used tires.

Connie Willis, Fire Watch. This collection of short stories introduces us to the Oxford historians who visit the past to learn what really happened.

Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale. Those two old women — is it possible they were young once? Bennett gives us a humane, but wry, account of the lives of two sisters in industrial England.

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation. The author of David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol provides an idiosyncratic account of his tour of the United States in the 1840s.

David Lodge, Therapy. Neurotic — but successful — television writer requires psychotherapy, physical therapy, aromatherapy and acupuncture to keep going. No neurotic is ever really cured, but he is helped by the rediscovery of an old love and a pilgrimage.

H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Awakes. It’s the Rip Van Winkle theme, updated. Wells imagines the world a man finds when he wakes from a 200-year catatonic sleep. It’s not a good world, and the result of his struggles to change it are ambiguous.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone. A classic detective story involving a missing jewel, a lovers’ quarrel and, ultimately, a murder. Echoes of Sherlock Holmes before Sherlock Holmes was created.

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities. It is Vienna, 1913, and the Emperor Franz Joseph commands a disparate empire. We celebrate his success, but we do not know that war is coming, the Emperor will die, and the empire will be no more.

Connie Willis, Blackout. Three young Oxford historians use their time machine to drop from the 21st century into World War II Britain — a time of the evacuation from Dunkirk, the air battle for Britain, the London Blitz, and the fear of a German invasion. The historians know that the Germans do not invade, but they cannot share their knowledge with the “contemps”, the locals of that time. This book has a companion sequel, All Clear, so I expect to post on the two books together.

Elizabeth Jenkins, Jane Austen. I enjoyed this warm and detailed biography of the author of Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen was not the dried-up spinster some imagine but rather a bright but somewhat shy member of a large family. She fully participated in the lives of her parents, her sister, her brothers, their children and her many other relatives.

What I Read in August 2012

Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies. An interesting — and at times infuriating — demolishing of all those things you think you know. Inequality is not bad and is probably not real. Women are not discriminated against in employment. More…

David Lodge, A Man of Parts. H. G. Wells is remembered today for The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, but he was the author of tens of novels, active in socialist and other causes, and a lover of women, many women. In this biography as novel, David Lodge reveals both his inner and outer lives.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls. In this late Bowen novel, three women in late middle age meet again. They have not seen each other since they were little girls at school. Their memories of that time are strong, but their present intentions seem more than a little muddled.

Connie Willis, DoomsdayBook. This is not just time travel. This is history, experienced or imagined — it doesn’t matter what you call it — as it is lived, then and now. The young historian goes back to the 1300′s. Someone miscalculated. Epidemics rage, in both time periods. Will she survive?

Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy. This is the last of the books I have read in anticipation of the “dismal economics” course this fall. Sometimes I get it and sometimes I don’t, Robinson’s economic philosophy, but the philosophy is certainly clearer than the economics. “Any economic system requires a set of rules, an ideology to justify them, and a conscience in the individual which makes him strive to carry them out.”

Joseph Roth, The Tale of the 1002nd Night. If Scheherazade and kept talking for one more night, she might have told this story. The Shah of Persia visits Vienna and sets into motion a series of events of dubious value. Some of the characters, like the correct but dim-witted cavalry officer, will be familiar to readers of Joseph Roth’s more well-known The Radetzky March, but other are more diverse. The mood is detached, cynical at times.

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. More time travel by the energetic Oxford historians (see Doomsday Book). The dog, Cyril, accompanies three men in a boat as one of them tries to repair a discontinuity in the space-time continuum which an earlier traveler may have caused. Don’t take it too seriously — a good time is had by all including, of course, Cyril.

Nancy Horan, Loving Frank. This is a novel about a scandal, a very real scandal about which the participants said very little at the time, although everyone else had a great deal to say. Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, went off to Europe with the wife of a client. Both left their marriages and children in order to be together.

Stacy Schiff, Vera. This biography of the wife of poet and novelist Vladimir Nabokov brings us into the details of the lives of two unusual people. He wrote. She was his typist, agent, adviser, translator, and  muse.

I’m closing out the month early because we are leaving on a trip. Reading continues, but posting will be interrupted for a couple of weeks. Hasta la vista.

A Man of Parts, a novel by David Lodge

Who was the “man of parts”? H. G. Wells, and this novel is the story of his life. Treating it as fiction, while staying close to the biographical facts and using excerpts from real letters and other documents, offers some great advantages. Instead of speculating what this versatile man thought and felt, the novelist can tell us right out. I especially enjoyed Wells’ dialogs with himself, damning and excusing himself at the same time.

But you made the holiday sheer hell for her. As soon as you transferred to the Maria Cristina in Algeciras, you started throwing your weight around, to her acute embarrassment.

– I wasn’t well. I was exhausted from all the travelling, and I had a sore throat.

And the dog ate his homework.

If you can imagine writing 50 novels, great amounts of non fiction, being a political activist, going on lecture tours, entertaining a large circle of friends, and bedding dozen of women, you are way ahead of me. I cannot fully imagine this level of activity, but I can enjoy David Lodge’s account of this gifted and complex man. Wells is remembered now as the author of The War of the Worlds (the basis for Orson Welles’ radio drama) and The Time Machine, but these science fiction novels are from early in career. He went on to write novels of social criticism and social comedy, political polemics and, when money was needed, potboilers. Many of them, including Tono Bungay, drew on the circumstances of his own life. Born in undistinguished circumstances and poorly-educated as a boy, Wells was fearless in writing about science, history, politics and just about anything else that interested him.

What greatly interested him was sex, although he had to be somewhat circumspect in writing about it in the early 1900s. He was married twice and also had numerous passing liaisons, passades, in addition to several serious love affairs, fathering children with Amber Reeves and Rebecca West. Yes, that Rebecca West, and their son was Anthony West. Wells’ sex life is prominent in The Man of Parts and, as Lodge portrays him, Wells tries to be honest about it.

– I just happen to enjoy sex, and if I found a woman with the same appetite I had fun with her. I never forced a woman in my life, and I’ve had long-lasting friendships with women who turned me down.

– But a contradiction runs through your thinking about sex. Sometimes you say it should be regarded as just fun,  a healthy form of recreation, like golf; at other times, with a beloved partner, it’s the most sublime physical, emotional and spiritual experience attainable, a portal to the Lover-Shadow.

– True. I oscillated between those two attitudes to sex without ever reconciling them — but that’s the human being for you. We’re a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact.

Wells was intelligent and perceptive and sympathetic with women. He didn’t want to use them, or not only to use them, but did also want to feel his power in giving them pleasure. He failed, however, to foresee the emotional consequences of his actions. He would explain up front that he had no intention of divorcing his wife and then be disappointed to find that, as the affair proceeded, the other party very much wanted him to divorce his wife. He wanted both: the loving mistress for sex and the practical wife who managed his home and children and small daily comforts. Or again, when Amber Reeves wanted to conceive a child by him, he fathered the child and then was astounded to find that all parties would not accept the result. There is a central egotism here that Lodge does not quite get hold of. This egotism made Wells a prolific and successful writer, but it also had its price, and often others paid it.

What I Read in January 2012

My View While Reading

Two weeks in Florida treated me to more time to read but left me short on computer access to keep up with my posts. This tree was my best view from my reading chair when I lifted my eyes from the page on a sunny afternoon.

H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay. I begin the new year with this non-science-fiction novel by the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Tono-Bungay is a tonic, a harmless patent medicine for the masses and the basis for a fortune which does do great harm in pre-World War I England.

Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime. An Inspector Alleyn mystery in which he meets attractive artist Agatha Troy. I knew, from reading later books in the series, that they marry — but not here, not yet. They meet. They are mutually attracted, he solves the crime. I am confident they will get together sooner or later. Wait for the next book.

Jane Smiley, At Paradise Gate. I am an admirer of Jane Smiley and her deft handling of the problems of (mostly) normal people. An old man, a partner in a long-term, often stressful marriage, lies dying. The daughters and a granddaughter gather. The wife copes.

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. This book derives from the “last lecture” delivered by Randy Pausch, while living in his last months with pancreatic cancer.

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans. Fanny Trollope was the mother of the better-known Anthony Trollope and a successful writer in her own right. In 1827 she took several of her children to seek their fortune in the New World. She was both fascinated and disappointed by the new republic. Her observations, often relieved with a little humor, scandalized us all.

Emile Zola, Germinal. This disturbing novel depicts the lives of coal miners in 1860s France and their unsuccessful strike for better conditions and pay. Free-market capitalism justifies all, then and now.

John LeCarré, A Most Wanted Man. I have long admired John LeCarré and his intricately-plotted spy novels, but I am sorry that I read this one. It left me angry at the abuse of power by all sides in our current War on Terror.

Frances Trollope, The Widow Barnaby. Since Fanny Trollope, best known for her critical Domestic Manners of the Americans, was a best-selling novelist in her day, I thought I would try one. The widow is flirtatious, maritally ambitious, outrageous — and dresses in poor taste. What will she do next! Trollope knew a thing or two about keeping the reader involved.

W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk. Pioneering sociologist DuBois depicts the situation of Blacks in the South forty years after Emancipation. “Souls” are not just the spiritual souls, but the entire consciousness of a people who, after centuries of slavery, receive little support in the freedom they have gained.

Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. Fanny Trollope is best known for her critique of the young United States, Domestic Manners of the Americans. It was her first published book, and she was 53. In the next 24 years she wrote six travel books and 35 novels. They were best sellers in their day. Oh, and she was the mother of Anthony Trollope. This well-written biography tells all.

H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay

Who said this and when?

This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invested nothing, he economized nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we organized added any real value to human life at all.

That is H.G. Wells in his 1908 novel Tono-Bungay, describing the success of the patent-medicine business and all the financial structures erected upon that foundation. It could have been written in 2008.

I knew H. G. Wells only through his science fiction novels, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau. I was aware of the strain of social criticism in them, as well as the selective but effective characterizations Wells brought to the genre. Tono-Bungay is a coming of age novel, in which George Ponderevo rises out of his social class (son of a housekeeper) and a time when technology did not fire the imagination.

Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learned of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone as a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity.

George’s first dream is on science — is Wells speaking of himself here? — but he is diverted by his entrepreneurial uncle whose accomplishments make a mockery of science.

“You don’t mean to say you think doing this stuff up in bottles and swearing it’s the quintessence of strength and making poor devils buy it as that, is straight?”

“Why not, George? How to we know it mayn’t be the quintessence of them so far as they’re concerned? …. There’s Faith. You put Faith in ‘em….”

And with Faith you make money, lots of it, with Uncle Edward to dream and write the advertizing and sober George to keep the business efficient. This same Faith allows them to buy and sell companies, create conglomerates, sell stock and promote, promote, promote. Until, of course, the inevitable crash.

This is not a “business” novel; this is a novel about trying and failing and growing up and seeking truth.

Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses, she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but she is always there! Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s for ever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange order of existence.

That is not all. Tono-Bungay is also a love story, an account of a marriage gone sour, a meditation on social class, an appreciation of English tradition. Oh, and there is even an adventure on the high seas thrown in for good measure. This is Wells at his best, and that is very good indeed.

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

If we began as animals, we will revert to our animal nature, even if we have been temporarily transformed into something else. That is a conclusion to be drawn from Wells’ 1896 science fiction fantasy of Dr. Moreau and the beast men he creates. It’s a moral that begs a question: if there any significant difference between being an animal and being a human? Aren’t we all animals also, fully partaking of an animal nature?

Wells doesn’t answer this question clearly. The Dog Man becomes a friend to the narrator because he still has characteristics of a dog, not because he is a failed man. The Leopard Man  and the Hyena-Swine are untrustworthy, as one would expect. Are Moreau and his assistant any better? The animals hunt to secure food, but Moreau torments for his own intellectual pleasure. Tellingly, near the end as the modified animals revert to their true characters, Prendrick, the narrator, also joins them as “an intimate of these half-humanized brutes.” Of this he says that “I prefer to make no chronicle of that gap of time.” He does not want to speak of a period of which he appears to be ashamed.

Some of the themes Wells effectively dramatizes in The Island of Dr. Moreau had already been explored by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein where, for example, the creation becomes a threat to its creator. The idea of a created being returning to his true nature is echoed in the recent Jurassic Park, where the supposedly-sterile cloned dinosaurs revert to two sexes.  The arrogance of the scientist is familiar also. Moreau explains,

To this day I have never been troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at least as remorseless as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing….

Moreau experiments without regard to pain or consequences because of the knowledge he gains and his pride in his creations.

When the Greeks imagined a chimera like the Sphinx, part animal and part human, they did not give it a benign nature. The one who menaced ancient Thebes destroyed those who could not answer her riddle. When Pendrick returns to London, he forced to recognize that we are all chimera, and he is troubled by a riddle no one can answer.

I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and than that…. Then I look about me at  my fellow-men. And I go in fear.

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

The route to Woking, England, goes through Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

On a recent visit to my son, who lives near Grovers Mill, he took me to the place used by Orson Welles (not related to H.G.) as the setting for the 1938 radio play which caused a sensation at the time. The radio program was a dramatization of the science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, with the Martians landing in this little New Jersey community instead of at Woking and Horsell in the Thames Valley near London. The drama was presented uninterrupted, in breaking-news style, so some people tuning in after the start of the program believed the invasion was real.

My son is involved with the restoration of the big red barn which proudly displays its location.

Nearby are the original mill, the mill owner’s house, the mill pond and a park with a plaque commemorating the Wells/Welles connection. Seeing the place reminded me that I had seen the movie — set in Los Angeles because Martians can land anywhere — but not read the book.

Published in 1898, the novel is a true time capsule, imagining the future while set in the high technology of the past. The participants signal by telegraph and heliograph (no radio or telephone), flee the on-coming Martians by horse and train (only a few early cars are seen) and, although the Martians have developed some wonderful machines, they are still attempting to make one that flies. Wells was writing in 1898 and the Wright Brothers made their first successful flight in 1903, just in time to develop a practical airplane for World War I. No computers exist.

Wells portrays the Martians as evolved far beyond the mental and technological capabilities of the human race. The Martians have come to exploit the resources of planet Earth, including its people, with no more pity than we have for the ants we crush under our feet.

It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has rubbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.

It is hard to know whether this is an optimistic or pessimistic conclusion.