What I Read in March 2013

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War with the Red Army, 1941-1945. Grossman, the author of the novel Life and Fate, was a journalist with Red Star, the Soviet army newspaper, during the entire Great Patriotic War, from Stalingrad right through to Berlin. This book is made up of excerpts of his reportage from those years with explanatory text by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova.

Michael Connelly, Trunk Music. The fifth in the series devoted to Los Angeles homicide detective Hieronymus Bosch, this one has has plenty of twists and false starts, with a pleasant surprise at the very end. Harry’s my man.

Ha Jin, In the Pond. Young man who works in Chinese fertilizer factory practices his calligraphy at night and perfects his brush strokes. Young man’s bosses refuse to recognize his talents and obstruct his opportunities. What happens then to this energetic small frog “in the pond”?

Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door. This novel, set in England during World War I, is a sequel to Barker’s Regeneration. We follow the lives of real and fictional characters struggling with the moral and psychological trauma of a war that never should have been. The eye is the door observes you when you are imprisoned for your pacifist beliefs.

David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down. In this 1960s comic novel, the Museum is not really falling down, but one of the regular inhabitants of its famous Reading Room is certainly in a state of near collapse.

Richard Francis, Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia. In a test of their Transcendentalist beliefs, Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane led Alcott’s family, plus occasional others, in an attempt to create utopia. Fruitlands, the farm where they pursued their ideals was both more and less than they expected.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions. Kilmore Trout, prolific but unrecognized science fiction author, goes on a road trip to an arts festival where he meets Dwayne Hoover, Pontiac dealer. Damage ensues. I am late to the party and this is my first Vonnegut. It was ok, but I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read it in high school.

Julian Barnes, Arthur and George. This novel recreates the interaction of famous writer Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and the unjustly imprisoned George Edalji. Based closely on the historical record, the men and their situation are brought to life, vividly and believably.

Alastair Cooke, The American Home Front 1941-1942. I hope you remember Alastair Cooke, the original debonair host of Masterpiece Theater on public television. As a young reported for the BBC, Cooke made a road trip all around this country in the early days of America’s participation in World War II. He did report on the activities related to the war, but he also provides for us now a snapshot of the U.S. in the early 1940s.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Part memoir, part writer’s guide, On Writing shows us a man who writes because he has to and because it brings him joy. His parting thought for writers, including bloggers: “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and about enriching your own life as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay?”

Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door

In The Eye in the Door Pat Barker continues the story of Billy Prior, Siegfried Sassoon, Dr. Rivers and others, the story she began in Regeneration. Prior is a fictional character in this novel; Sassoon and Rivers were real in their time, as well as being characters here.

And what is the “eye in the door”? It is the eye which watches the conscientious objector lying naked in his prison cell or the more friendly eye of the neurologist observing his shell-shocked patient. That friendly eye can also become the eye of the detached observer.

He watched Head’s expression as he looked at Lucas’s shaved scalp, and realized it differed hardly at all from his expression that morning as he’d bent over the cadaver. For the moment, Lucas had become simply a technical problem. Then Lucas looked up from his task, and instantly Head’s face flashed open in his transforming smile.

For Rivers to hear of so much pain without collapse, he must separate himself from it, just as the men in the trenches much separate themselves emotionally from the reality of killing and being killed. He is not always successful. Rivers considers Siegfired Sassoon’s return to France.

He had gone back hating the war, turning his face away from the reality of killing and maiming, and as soon as that reality was borne in upon him, he found the situation unbearable. All of which might have been foreseen. Had been foreseen…. If Siegfried’s attept as dissociation had failed, so had his own. He was finding it difficult to be both involved and objective, to turn steadily on Siegfried both sides of medicine’s split face.

They are all split by the war, both those who fight and those who stay at home. They are separated from who they were. As Prior says,  “I was born two years ago. In a shell-hole in France. I have no father.”

Pat Barker, Regeneration

What happens when a nerve is severed? It may regenerate, grow back, slowly and imperfectly but somewhat functional. Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration is based on the experiences of solders suffering what was then called Shell Shock in the trenches of World War I.

Barker’s book is the first of a trilogy which also includes The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. Having come to Regeneration directly from Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, I need to commit myself to finishing the series.

These books are wonderful and terrible, in the original senses of inciting wonder and terror. You think your life is under control. In August you enlist in a war which the professionals say will be over by Christmas — and spend four years in the trenches watching your men be blown apart. They are your men because you are an officer (and perhaps a gentleman) and responsible for their welfare.

When personal collapse comes, they send you home for rehabilitation. The officers receive rest and a 1916 version of the talking cure at a mental hospital like the one at Craiglockhart where Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred met when both were invalided home. The other ranks get much less benign treatment; their psychosomatic symptoms are typically treated with electric shock.

There are many important themes in the book including class distinctions and the importance of poetry, but the most important one is a moral issue: for what are these men being regenerated? The answer is clear: to go back to France and fight again.

….’I'd’ve thought there was a case for letting him be.’

‘No, there’s no case,’ Rivers said. ‘He’s a mentally and physically healthy man. It’s his duty to go back, and it’s my duty to see he does.’

The means may vary, but the end is always the same, and this despite the fact that all of them — the doctor Rivers and the officers Graves and Owen and Sassoon — know that the war is a mistake for which a generation is being sacrificed. In their code, it would just not do to quit. Graves says to Sassoon,

I believe in keeping my word. You agreed to serve, Siegfried. Nobody’s asking you to change your opinions, or even to keep quiet about them, but you agreed to serve, and if you want the response of the kind of people you’re trying to influence — the Bobbies and the Tommies — you’ve got to be seen to keep your word. They won’t understand if you turn around in the middle of the war and say “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.” To them, that’s just bad form. They’ll say you’re not behaving like a gentleman — and that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.’

I take it that it is more important to avoid bad form than to go out to kill and be killed. We had hot words about this issue in our Ex Libris discussion, with my opponent pointing out the obligations of citizenship: you benefit from the country so you must be willing to serve the country. Sounds like Viet Nam to me. When is it your obligation as a citizen to refuse to participate in wrong actions? Graves and Sassoon come down on different sides of that question and even Rivers, who was so sure at first what was right to do, comes to have doubts.