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?”

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

To say that Ulrich, the central figure in Robert Musil’s novel is “the man without qualities” is like saying that a chameleon has no color. The chamelion is many colors, and Ulrich is many qualities, none of them particularly stable. It is 1913 and the place is Vienna. Franz Joseph is the admired and aging emperor of that almost-always-about-to-distinegrate concern, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It may be that the man without qualities represents an empire without qualities. All is indeterminate and undetermined, a continuous and wearying process.

The mind has learned that beauty can make things good, bad, stupid or enchanting. The mind dissects and analyses a sheep and finds humility and patience in both. It investigates a substance and observes that in large quantities it is a poison, in smaller quantities a stimulant…. It mixes things up, unravels them again and forms new combinations. Good and evil, above and below, are for it not relative ideas tinged with scepticism, but terms of a function, values dependent on the context in which they appear. It has learnt from the centuries that vices may turn into virtues and virtues into vices….

and so on and so forth. I have rarely had such difficulty in finishing a book and, truly, had I known 20 to 50 pages in that it would on like this, page after page, I would have abandoned it then. Musil has been compared to Proust and, like Proust, he does know when enough is enough. I remember a passage where Proust, describes a carriage ride which reaches a certain crossroads where there are trees. Six pages later he is still going on about those trees, while the carriage is making no progress at all.

So why did I persist? Partly because of Musil’s reputation which is very high. Wikipedia: “Though he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he felt he did not receive the recognition he deserved.” Further, there are passages of wonderful social comedy and good humor; the characters are entertainingly drawn. Since Musil had served in World War I and published The Man without Qualities in several volumes in the 1930′s, he writes of a time and a society he knows are doomed. The upper classes of pre-war Vienna do not have his knwoledge. They expect the Empire and Franz Joseph to live forever — look, they are planning to celebrate and 70th anniversary of his reign. He dies of course, and the war happens, and the empire dissolves.

Svejk and The Glorious Licking

When Jaroslav Hasek published the first volume of his World War I novel, The Good Soldier Svejk, it was such a success that he planned a total of six volumes. He finished volumes two and three and was working on volume four when he died. The three, plus the fragment of four, are published together in the Penguin Classics edition, translated from the Czech by Cecil Parrott.

I have already posted on volumes one, Behind the Lines, and two, At the Front. Volumes three and four are devoted to The Glorious Licking. Svejk approaches the enemy, but has yet to fire a shot. His closeness is so great that he dons the uniform of an escaped Russian prisoner-of-war and is subsequently taken prisoner by his own side. A spy! A turncoat! He is in imminent of danger of hanging but, when Hasek died, Svejk was still very much alive and ready for his next adventure.

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy grinds on. Difficulties are addressed, slowly and with due regard to precedent

Military greatcoats and caps were stored there and the mice bit through them with great confidence and in great security, because it was only a year later that the quartermaster’s office remembered to introduce into the military forces crown-property cats without pension rights, which were entered into the administration records under the heading: ‘Imperial and Royal military store cats.’ The rank of cat was in fact only a revival of an old institution which had been abolished after the war of 1866.

Cats who fail to adequately perform their duties are “hanged by the verdict of a court-martial.”

Hasek continues to deride the military and the polyglot Imperial army, but the last sections of the book are much darker than any that have gone before. The hunger is real, the dead and dying are real, and the war is to go one from three more years although Hasek did not live to tell about it.

Svejk at the Front

Funny thing about Part II of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk — although entitled “At the Front”, Svejk never gets there. Instead, the simple and innocent (or wily, sly and apparently innocent) Svejk continues to wrestle with many levels of the military bureaucracy. By page 443 in my edition he may be getting ready to go where the fighting is. World War I went on for four years, so he has some time yet.

My edition has a selection of Joseph Lada’s cartoon illustrations for the book published in serial form. Here, the Good Soldier Svejk waits for telephone messages.

He transcribes a telegram.

‘As a result of more detailed it has been permitted or the same can on the other hand none the less be supplemented.’

‘This is all pointless,’ said Vanek, when Svejk was frightfully puzzled by what he had written and read it out aloud three times in succession: ‘Sheer stupidity, although God knows it could be in cipher, but in the company we’re  not equipped to receive cipher. You may throw it away as well.’

‘I think so too,’ said Svejk. ‘If I were to report to the lieutenant that he has as a result of more detailed it has been permitted or the same can on the other hand none the less be supplemented, I think he’d perhaps feel offended.’

Svejk is arrested on so many different charges that I lost count. Here he is brought before Judge Advocate Ruller.

Svejk is unshaven because he has been locked up. Note, please the crucifix.

A volume of legal code lay before him, and a half-consumed glass of tea stood on top of it. On the table on the right stood a crucifix made out of imitation ivory with a dusty Christ, who looked despairingly at the pedestal of his cross, on which there were ashes and cigarette stubs.

Here, Svejk (again, unshaven because  he has been locked up on a different matter) has missed his train and consults with the local citizens.

One of them gives some excellent advice: “Only keep your wits about you and see that you don’t stay long at the front.”

Svejk behind the Lines

Part I of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk is entitled Behind the Lines. World War I is about to start. Svejk greets the news that a certain Ferdinand has been killed with a certain lack of reverence. Which Ferdinand? The messenger or the one who collects dog manure?

‘On no, sir, it’s His Imperial Highness, the Archduke Ferdinand, from Konopiste, the fat churchy one.’

‘Jesus Maria!’ exclaimed Svejk. ‘What a grand job! And where did it happen to his Imperial Highness?’

We are only page 4 of this lengthy work and the tone is already set. Svejk speaks his mind. He also tells the truth (usually), drinks (often), and looks innocent (always). Hasek himself had been a soldier, among other occupations, as well as an anarchist and a Bolshevik, but not at the same time. His book, The Good Soldier Svejk, came out piecemeal in the early 1920s in Czechoslovakia and was wildly popular. The structure is that of a picaresque adventure, as Svejk lurches from misfortune to catastrophe and back again. Like Bugs Bunny after the roadrunner, knock him down and he springs up again as full of spirit as ever.

Not wishing to serve in the army because of his rheumatism or because he has been certified an idiot — take your choice — he is considered a malingerer and falls into the hands of the medical bureaucracy. Initially declared insane, Svejk appreciates the benefits of such a status.

When Svejk subsequently described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in exceptionally eulogistic terms: ‘I don’t know why those loonies get so angry when they’re kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite. If anyone did this anywhere on the promenade people would be astonished, but there it’s the most common or garden thing to do. There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have ever dreamed of.’

After more sufferings, Svejk is assigned as a batman, or assistant, to the Chaplain. Hasek regards religious ceremonies as necessary in war.

Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination….

Before the Holy Inquisition burnt its victims, it performed the most solemn religious service — a High Mass with singing.

When criminals are executed, priests always officiate, molesting the delinquents with their presence.

Svejk cheerfully assists with all ceremonies, providing the wine, whether sacramental or not, and the oil, whether consecrated or hempseed from the local paintshop only he can know. The chaplain loses at cards and must pass his useful batman on to a Lt. Lukas. Lukas also appreciates Svejks services until his batman obtains for him a stolen dog. Since the dog belonged to the Colonel and both dog and Colonel recognize each other, Lukas and his batman are sent to the front.

‘The high command recently informed us that there is a great shortage of officers in the 91st regiment because they have all been killed by the Serbs. I give you my word of honour that within three days you will be in the 91st regiment….’

End of Part I. Part II, significantly, is entitled At the Front.

I am reading The Good Soldier Svejk as part of a Tea & Books Challenge. Only 536 pages to go.

What I Read in June 2011

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. Study of literature during, about, and after World War I.

Theodore Dreiser, The Financier. Young man on the make in 1870s Philadelphia.

Nawal El Saadawi, God Dies by the Nile. The miseries of Egyptian peasant life.

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts. A joint biography of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, and her philosopher father, Bronson Alcott.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. A writer’s life in 1920′s Paris, as remembered by Hemingway in his later years.

Louisa May Alcott, Moods. Alcott’s first novel, written and published before Little Women and definitely not intended for children.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

I was led to this book by reading novels/memoirs set during World War I, “the Great War.” First, there was Robert Graves’ account in Good-bye to All That, followed by Pat Barker’s trilogy — Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road.

Paul Fussell’s view is a broad one, but the modern memory of the Great War which he describes is a literary memory. He traces it from the developing modern sensibility in the years just before the war through to its impact in the subsequent years, for example, as echoed in the poems of T. S. Eliot and the novels of World War II. The most compelling part for me, however, was his comparison of the literary accounts of the war itself, with detailed analyses of the books by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.

At the beginning, the war was seen as a mixture of a noble cause and a great adventure. Now we would have no such certainty.

But the Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable. Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant.

This was true of the literary officers who marched off to experience the realities of trench warfare, with its mud, its irrational violence, and its rats. How to express what no one could understand who had not experienced it, what they did not understand themselves? They grasped for literary models. Fussell explained the structure of a military day in the trenches, which began with stand-to at sunrise and ended with stand-down at sunset.

One of the remarkable intersections between life and literature during the war occurred when it was found that Flanders and Picardy abounded in the two species long the property of symbolic literary pastoral — larks and nightingales. The one now became associated with stand-to at dawn, the other with stand-to in the evening.

He goes on to observe that there were other birds in France — just as there were other flowers than the roses and poppies so frequently mentioned — but these were the birds and flowers of traditional English literature.

Fussell ranges through many examples in novels, poetry, plays and memoirs, and I wish I were better read in his many references. When he writes of a book I do know, I find his commentary to be very acute.

No one has ever denied the brilliance of Good-Bye to All That, and no one has ever been bored by it. Its brilliance and compelling energy reside in its strucural invention and in its perpetual resourcefulness in imposing the patterns of farce and comedy onto the blank horrors or meaningless vacancies of experience.

Our response to Graves and the others is a response to their literary expression of their very real experiences.

What I Read in April 2011

Arthur Schnitzler, The Road into the Open. A novel of life in pre-World War I Vienna. In this capital of an uneasy empire, indecision and antisemitism are the themes.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. This feminist utopian novel is being read as part of the year-long project to read Feminist Classics.

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury.  Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthrone, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.

Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door. This is the second novel of the trilogy set during World War I which began with Regeneration. We learn of the continued activities of Billy Prior, Siegfried Sassoon, and Dr. Rivers.

Cathleen Schine, Rameau’s Niece.

Apparently influenced by translating a mildly-pornographic philosophical work, a writer with lots of words but little memory gives her perfectly satisfactory husband a hard time.

Cathleen Schine, The Three Weissmanns of Westport. This one is more like it. A mother and two daughters try to figure out the changes in their lives while inhabiting a cottage at Compo Beach in Westport, CT, just up the road from where I live now.An interesting set of people despite some improbabilities, but a good read.

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.”

The Road into the Open by Arthur Schnitzler

We are in Vienna and the year is 1908. It is bitter sweet. World War I is going to happen and sweep this life away, but neither the author nor his characters know that. What do they do? They meet at each other’s houses, walk in the park, bicycle in the countryside, stop at inns, talk, compose music, sing, talk, have love affairs and talk some more.

Athur Schnitzler was a medical doctor and a Jew, the son of a medical doctor and a Jew. Father and son experienced the freedom of the liberal years in the Austro Hungarian Empire and the antisemitism which increased after the Dreyfus Affair. It was the Vienna of Freud and Herzl. Schnitzler’s interest was not in medicine but in literature, and he became a successful writer of stories and plays, best known today for his story which became the basis for the movie  LaRonde. He was interested in sex and in ideas, in love and in death.

His central character Georg, the Baron, is of the minor nobility, living off the remnants of family wealth and avoiding the need to get to work and develop his musical talents. Georg’s interest in love and death is without emotional force. He tells his friend,

“I even feel that I have a certain inclination to sentimentality, which I have to resist.”

“Yes, that’s it. Sentimentality is something that stands in direct opposition to feeling, something with which one compensates for one’s lack of feeling, one’s inner coldness. Sentimentality is feeling that one has bought, so to speak, for the purchase price. I hate sentimentality.”

“Hm, and yet I think you’re not entirely free of it yourself.”

“I’m Jewish. It’s a national illness with us. Decent people try to turn it into anger or rage.”

While he looks for his road into the future, “the open,” Georg has love affairs, one of which results in a pregnancy. That is the story, but the plot is not the point. The many characters, drawn to represent different attitudes toward their changing world, — they are the point. Georg is at the center as a young man who doesn’t know who he is and knows even less who he wants to become. Antisemitism is not his problem, but it is real in the life of his many Jewish friends. Some shrug and get on with their loves, some contemplate emigrating to the Holy Land, some consider converting. Some get angry and some cultivate indifference. Written after the first Zionist Congresses, the author doesn’t know the outcome waiting only 30 years in the future, but he understands this is a problem that is not going away. A road into the open should serve Vienna as well as Georg. Where is it? Georg doesn’t know and Schnitzler doesn’t know and we don’t know either. but we know how much they need to find it.