Cleaning Up in 2009

Hello, it's been awhile. You haven't changed a bit! Still the same as ever, I must admit.

No, okay, it really has been awhile. This blog has not been abandoned, all available evidence to the contrary. It's just been a rough year, folks. A rough rough year, and when you're going through stuff certain things inevitably get put on the back burner.

But I have, among other things, a new computer (let's hope this one lasts at least the three years or so the last one did) and at least some unfinished business before we start 2010 on, I hope, better terms all around. So that's why I'm calling this a housekeeping post: it's a housekeeping post, duh.

We're going to try to gear this thing back up on Jan of '10. We'll be focusing on George Macdonald Fraser (because I love Fraser and this gives me an excuse to reread what I have of him and get what I don't) and either Samuel Shellabarger or Keith Roberts, I haven't decided quite yet though am leaning towards Shellabarger.

But to put a capstone on things read this year:

John Buchan – PRESTER JOHN

Buchan's first famous book, anyway, this details a young man's adventures in Colonial Africa where the natives are getting restless. Interesting for being so standup and traditional, very much in the mold of the classic British Adventure story. Interesting too for having such an interesting villain – the bad guy is genuinely bad, no doubt, but not completely unredeemingly bad, in fact he's portrayed as being somebody with much merit, somebody whom, in other circumstances, would be a hero. This gives the story a certain poignancy that I do not remember in the Hannay novels. Book's biggest fault is that it goes on far too long, clearly missing it's natural endpoint – a long standing weakness of Buchan's, I'd say. (In fact I'd say one of the reasons I think HUNTING TOWER is his best is that's the only example of his I can find where the novel feels fully formed, completely done.) But it's surprisingly good, better than I'd hoped for, frankly better as a book than the Hannay novels, and recommended.

I also tried one last time to read WITCH WOOD, but bounced off it again and have said “Uncle”. There are those – I think Michael Moorcock – who admire this book, I think it made the Best 100 Horror novel list. Not for me, though, I cannot seem to get through it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E Howard

I revisted both of these boys authors this year. Burroughs does not hold up well, in fact it's kind of depressing to read him nowadays. He is very pulpy, in the worst, episodic notion of the term (ie, the episodes of his narrative feel like a string of beads, one after another, connected only by the chain of “and then that happened”). There is no internal drive to reading him at any longer than a few pages, Burroughs cannot seem to derive suspense over the long haul. His characterizations are shallow, to say the least; John Carter is just “adventure guy of that era” and Tarzan is a cross between that and “noble savage hooha we've all bought from that era”. I am not an especial admirer of Philip Jose Farmer, but I do agree with him in A FEAST UNKNOWN that the reality of Tarzan's (and Doc Savage's, although I'd argue Doc is inherently a more interesting character than Tarzan) likely existence has been edited out of the accounts.

The one thing I will say for Burroughs is that he can be quite funny, even sardonic. The best parts of THE CAVE GIRL is Burroughs writing about his hero with his tongue firmly lodged between his teeth. Unfortunately he didn't go further down that root – though I really do wonder if at heart he didn't see himself as something of a social critic ala Mencken.

Howard is quite a different matter all together. I got the two volume BEST-OF set and many of these stories seem absolutely fresh and modern, extraordinary when you contemplate the age in which he was writing. (The Thirties were a long, long time ago, friends.) Howard wrote about doom haunted protagonists who fight seemingly for basic existential reasons – because they can. The stench of their inevitable future defeat hangs over all of them, which gives it all a tragic aura. The general sense is that Howard's characters are in a Lovecraftian universe, which could roll over and kill them all in a heartbeat, if it wished. In a lot of stories Howard's protagonists, despite their action, really come across as almost spectators, see “The Tower of the Elephant”, for instance, where by the end you get the idea that the big story happened somewhere off to the side somewhere, just beyond what you could see.

Howard is for the ages. He's not perfect, despite the insistence of the authors a lot of the stuff he ground out to pay the bills (Steve Costigan stories) are not especially interesting, mainly due to the face that he is not nearly as funny as he's trying to be, and I would certainly have replaced those stories with others. But at his best he is remarkably, amazingly good. A lot of reading Howard is like hearing a lonely man's desperate shriek of defiance into the void. Of course he knew the void would win, eventually, nobody who read him can have any doubt that it would've ended the way it did.

John O'Hara – And we'll end up where we left off, with this guy.

I had reviewed the two “critically approved” novels, finding a mild satisfaction in APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA and mostly grooving behind BUTTERFIELD 8. What was left were the big novels (A RAGE TO LIVE, FROM THE TERRACE, TEN NORTH FREDERIC) and the short stories.

My thesis on O'Hara is this: he's okay, not anything special. Despite periodic attempts to revive his career he's basically forgotten because he deserves to be. That said, if you want to understand American literature (a rather different thing than appreciating it) than O'Hara is an author you need to know, for whatever one thinks of the quality of his work, his influence is huge.

No, seriously, who does? Everyone says they do, of course, but this is just highbrow literary classism at work, nobody really goes around reading these things nowadays. I offer for exhibit one: which among you not in a graduate English program (a) heard of John O'Hara and hell (b) knew that Irwin Shaw was once well known for his high-falutin' short fiction? Yeah, that's right, NONE of you. That's not because you're stupid or ill-read; it's because their work lacks inherent interest.

I cannot remember for the life of me one of these O'Hara stories, like most stories of their ilk that rely on epiphanies and images, well, nobody remembers them. They seemed competently done as these things go, very well observed, but well, the point is whether these things should “go” like this, dig. I believe this whole direction was a bad direction for short fiction, innumerable writer's workshops to the contrary. Life may be best understood as a parade of tedium and ephiphanic moments, hell, who knows, but it sure don't work in art. Ridiculously, Howard will be remember when O'Hara is long forgotten because Howard had actually a more original vision of life, swords and sorcerors to one side.

This is one of the reasons why one must look at writing complete and in toto, free of preconceptions of highbrow/lowbrow. Whatever the trappings of Howard, go beneath the surface and he's just a more interesting writer than O'Hara. Having said all that, though, again, if you want to learn about American Literature you really need to know about these stories, I rather suspect this is the root from which that often dried-desiccated tree grew

The big novels are variations of the endless attempt in American letters from this period to write the Great American Novel Capturing Our Country In All It's Diversity. Crap, no matter how you want to look at it, although they're smoothly and competently done, and O'Hara is a fine observer in minature. You can read along A RAGE TO LIVE and nod and smile and mostly enjoy yourself on a page to page basis, it's just when taken in larger chunks it starts to smell, rather a problem when you're writing a big ol' book that's meant to be taken in bigger chunks. Another way to say it: O'Hara knew his world, but didn't really have much by way of thoughts about it, other than seemingly we'd all be better off if we had better orgasms, the naivete of which continues to amuse. Yes, I believe O'Hara must be the root source of this old chestnut in American fiction.

Does a big fat novel need thought? If you're trying to write a big fat Greatest American novel, then yeah, it sure does.

The one thing I do find interesting about the novels is that they are apparently a root (if not the root) of the modern American bestseller family dynasty kind of thing. We follow a family or a group of people through the years, watching their ups and downs, etc. Could PEYTON PLACE have existed without John O'Hara.

Though I think I much prefer Marquand's novels, as limited as they are often are in scope he's oddly more of an actual novelist.

As for the short stories, these are the Officially Approved output of O'Hara, rare you do not see an establishment critic, when this guy comes up, who does get all misty-eyed about the short stories. I read through most of THE COLLECTED STORIES which I believe is actually better understood to be THE SELECTED STORIES and they're basically “New Yorker” type literary short stories. Very much so, in fact I was rather surprised by it. I was expecting something like a highbrow variant of Dashiell Hammett, I suppose because so many hardboiled writers admire him; when this really is the founding document of Wallace Shawn-ism.

Three Books

David Karp – HARDMAN

One of the many ways in which the Onion’s “AV Blog” annoys is that its the default authority for hipsters – if you want to know what the Consensus Hipster View is of this or that cultural artifact, that’s the place you want to go to. Its annoying partly because Consensus Authorities are smothering in general, and partly because there’s a lack of self-awareness in the very conception of the Approved Hipster Position. Whatever else a hipster is supposed to be, he’s really not supposed to be Roger Ebert in a finely turned-out leather jacket.

They’ve recently started to doing a reoccurring series called something like “Gateways to Geekery”, where they try to show you how to enter various cult phenomenon like Japanese horror movies or French cabaret music. Or crime fiction, which brings us to Karp. Or rather, the lack of Karp; I looked at this one and it was full of the same routine choices – Hammett, Chandler, Jim Thompson. Not anything against any of those guys, everyone should read them, of course, but there’s nothing particularly edgy about these picks. This isn’t the sort of thing a crime fiction geek is going to looking to be introduced to.

He’s more likely to be looking at Karp, an extremely obscure author who’s Lion pb originals are in high demand nowadays among the cognoscenti. This one isn’t a Lion, but obscure enough in its own way, and actually the first Karp I’ve ever been able to lay my hands on. A rather traditional “writer makes good/then declines” sort of story, not particularly different from many of its type, although much tighter and a bit better told. It does suffer from the usual problem of shoehorning a romance, of sorts, into it, although Karp does an amusing thing with it (more about that in a second). In general, as I think I’ve mentioned before, writer’s lives are not particularly interesting, and most stories about them have to whip up something to actually just talk about.

What’s amusing about HARDMAN is the Spillaine influence. It is hard for people nowadays to understand this, but in the early Fifties Spillaine was an immensely important and divisive cultural figure. His great success, combined with the type of stories he was successful telling, convinced a lot of people that the end times were actually upon us. Our hero, “Hardman”, is a pure Spillaine stand-in, or at least who a lot of people feared Spillaine was – a sadist who got off on torturing women. The “romance” is all caught up in that, and comes to a fairly amusing end…although I don’t think its intended to be amusing at all.

Poor old Mickey. Actually a straightforward reading of Spillane suggests a diehard Romantic and a guy who’s rather deeply religious. And most of his books hold up pretty well – I think Spillaine is too well-known for this blog, but I agree with Kingsley Amis on him: the fact that you don’t want to live in Spillaine’s universe doesn’t mean that its not well-presented.

As for HARDMAN, not really that great, more an amusing cultural artifact than anything. Although I do very much like this notion that a popular writer can be a screwup, not something you much see in books of this type but probably very true to life.


Joel Townsley Rogers – THE RED RIGHT HAND

This is basically the second best Cornell Woolrich novel Cornell never wrote. Which is only middling praise from me, as I’m not a fan, really, of Woolrich, finding his vision curiously limited and his endless vamping in most of his novels tiresome, after awhile.

For a while I used to think Woolrich was better in the short story form, but I’ve read enough of those now to not really believe that, either: the short stories tend toward the gimmicky twist endings of their time. Woolrich is in a curious position of generally needing length to broaden his vision…but he couldn’t go too long or it all gets repetitive. This is why I think his best work, by far incidentally, is RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, the structure (four interrelated vignettes) cannily works to Woolrich’s strengths, plus for whatever reason this seems to be the purest, darkest expression of his vision.

But anyway, HAND is pretty obviously inspired by Woolrich, it has many of the same notions – the idea that the world is in conspiracy against you, fragility of identity, the notion that love and happiness is fleeting. Rogers manages to vamp it up for a very long time, although the final reveal was a little less shocking to me than I think it was intended to be. Interesting, but I don’t think its worth a tremendous amount of bother to search out.


John Buchan – HUNTING TOWER

One of the ways you can distinguish a good minor writer from a major writer is that they really only have one thing to say – the trick is to get the best expression of it. Its a tricky criteria – I think sometimes the perfection of a minor writer looks a bit better than the sloppiness that you often find with major writers But taken as a whole (I think the best way to approach writers all around, through their career) Dumas, for example, strikes me as a major writer – Lord Knows he had his faults, but there’s a kind of drive there and creativity that’s undeniable. Many of the modern action adventure tropes we value were invented by Dumas.

While Buchan, despite his great merits, really strikes me as a minor writer. A good minor writer, to be sure, but a minor writer nonetheless. Once you get past the puffery (Buchan is often praised for his descriptive abilities for instance, I think JOHN MCNAB retains its readership, such as it is, soley for that, but his descriptive passages, while admirably complete, strike me as beyond tedious – I genuinely am amazed that anyone’s made it all the way through WITCH WOOD, which is all description, very literately presented but not very exciting.) Buchan really had only one thing to say – “Romance still exists in the world, you simply have to look for it” – and as I type this I am reminded that was also one of G.K. Chesterton’s ideas, too. Maybe it was simply in the air in those days? Anthony Hope’s PRISONER OF ZENDA (which we’ll probably get to one of these days) also believed much the same thing. But Chesterton is a major writer, I think, he had a lot more going on than Buchan, who only really has this.

The trick then is to get the best expression of it, and HUNTING TOWER is it. The book is literally a fairy tale, complete with a princess trapped in a tower, a noble knight (actually a couple), a treasure, a scurrilous villain, and a rousing battle at the finish. Buchan had always jabbed in this direction, that’s really what the Hannay novels are intended to be, up to date knight errant romances, but he tends to get distracted there either by political points or by a certain belaboredness. I admire MR STANDFAST, for instance, which I think is a fairly polished piece of work in much the same form as this, but HUNTING TOWER just has a kind of appealing sprightliness that STANDFAST lacks. It may come down to simply Buchan’s willingness to have fun here, while STANDFAST is Very Serious; it may have something to do with taking PILGRIM’S PROGRESS as an inspiration instead of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA; it may just be that HUNTING TOWER is shorter and that helped. I don’t know. HUNTING TOWER is tighter, funnier (the comic relief here is, wonder of wonders, actually amusing), makes it’s points in a much lighter way that ensure they stick better. It even has a better climax and a better ending – like a lot of early adventure fiction writers Buchan had trouble with climaxes but this one could actually be filmed as stated, and has a good bit with dramatic reversals and ironic moments.

Anyway. Recently reissued by Oxford U Press, this is a gem, definitely my favorite Buchan book (pretty much in a walk, actually), and like I said, pretty much the summit of his career, I venture. What you want out of Buchan – a modern day romance, a celebration of the British middle class, evocative locales that don’t overwhelm you, some notions about the magic of life – you’ll find here, without the awkwardness or heavy-handedness that a lot of his books run into. Highly recommended.

Next Time: John O'Hara's Short Stories

John O'Hara - APPOINTMENT IN SAMAARA AND BUTTERFIELD 8

O’Hara’s a big deal, and there’s no way I can handle him in one post. Well, I could, but it’d be a monster post.

So, we’re gonna break him into threes. Part one is this, his two more critically acclaimed books. The second part will be the big novels like A RAGE TO LIVE; part three will be the short stories. Though I might switch that around. If I’m so inclined.

These two novels are the ones the critics usually chat up, particularly APPOINTMENT. But oddly they’re also the forgotten stepchildren of O’Hara’s oeuvre – the critics want to talk about the short stories, the hoi polloi wanted to read the big potboilers. Yet oddly, too, they’re the easiest books of O’Hara’s to find nowadays, both of ‘em are still in print. The short stories are not so easily available and trust me, you got to hunt around to find the once-bestsellers.

You know why they’re so easy to find? They’re small! Easy to fit on the shelf!

Well, I don’t know that, but I betcha.

APPOINTMENT was the first O’Hara I read and while it has its pleasures, it has all the self-conscious faults of first time literary novels of this era. Its reputation is definitely overrated, and again I’m annoyed by the late John Updike, who more and more seems to me to be the bland consensus voice of Approval that modern American society seems to need in its culture. Do you want to know what the Consensus Approves Of in its highbrow literature? Ask Updike, he’ll tell you. In fact, he’s an ineffable guide to it.

APPOINTMENT is one of those self-conscious "fables" and in fact is rather reminiscent of THE LATE GEORGE APLEY, though a much better book, I think. Still, it’s easy to see why the litterateurs latched onto it: our protagonist’s journey is meant to parallel Christ’s, with a variety of stations of the cross and a dying for our "sins", here presumably the sins of narrow-minded small town conformity. There’s other things to say about that but first let’s just remark upon the gaudy sense of self-importance needed to try and get your protagonist compared to Christ, of all things. You don’t read APPOINTMENT and read a story, you read it and read "a story", with all the precious self-consciousness that inevitably entails.

In fact, once you think about it you realize our protagonist (I’m sorry, I don’t have his name, I’m experimenting with writing these posts during my lunch hour at work, which may help to increase the speed of ‘em but the downside is that I don’t have the books in front of me. Ah well, look it up on Wikipedia.) isn’t much like Christ at all. He’s not a perfect God incarnated in the flesh to take the sins of mankind upon Himself; he’s a spoiled failure who behaves badly and is summarily crushed for it. O’Hara obviously wants us to criticize small town mores, and he brings in the Christ metaphor sort of by the servant’s door in order to give the whole thing a bit more gravitas, but it’s only there to the extent that you want to buy into it. The fascinating fact is that so many tastemakers do indeed want to buy into it – Christianity is always useful as a hammer for the Great Unwashed, apparently.

And it’s odd, because APPOINTMENT is potentially about something much more interesting, the inescapability of fate. BUTTERFIELD 8 is more clear about that, and as a result is a much better book (one we’ll get to in a second) but y’know, that epigram isn’t only there to make the whole book sound spooky – it’s explicitly about the inescapability of fate. O’Hara sort of wants to dance around that fact here, but the book is less interesting as "small town mores crush the soul" (although this is a theme that O’Hara will return to, and it proved to be a very influential theme, see PEYTON PLACE, among others) and more interesting as "people are ground down by circumstance and don’t really have much of a choice or chance against life".

Of course, that’s a pretty bleak vision, and there ain’t going to be a lot of people who want to buy all-in to a vision of the world that tells you life is mechanistic and ultimately futile. Where I think O’Hara ultimately shines – it starts here although you really get to see it later on – is in the small areas, the small touches. It’s too bad I don’t have the novel here in front of me, to quote from – he had a wonderful ear, just a real gift for capturing in writing the way people of all sorts of classes talked. When hardboiled writers state that they admire O’Hara – and a lot of them do – this is the kind of thing I think they like. O’Hara also brought a real sense of place and understanding to his work – his small Pennsylvania city comes alive here, O’Hara really understands how the politics of such places work, how behavior can breach the careful mores of a town, the unstated rules, and how breaches can be dealt with. I grew up in a small isolated Pennsylvania town probably at the last time when such places could really be isolated, and even though that world was dying even then, I can still recognize parts of it in APPOINTMENT. (The amount of deference shown to certain families, for instance.)

That’s what’s valuable about APPOINTMENT. It’s merits outweigh it’s defects and it’s certainly worth reading, although it does tend to be rotely overpraised in some quarters.

BUTTERFIELD 8 is a much better book, and is one that I do recommend wholeheartedly. It’s much clearer about it’s real theme: life sucks and people are trapped and happiness is fleeting and frankly, we’ll all die alone in some horrible miserable lonely way. Which as you might guess doesn’t make it the most engaging book in the world, it is in fact a small masterpiece of despair and depression and in sections can be extremely exhausting to read.

Based on the mysterious suicide of…well, there’s no real modern equivalent of what she was, sadly, "slut" is accurate but too general; "hooker" isn’t quite right. Maybe "groupie" if you extended the concept out a bit. (Back in the day I think "doxy" worked.) Anyway, whatever you want to call her, BUTTERFIELD 8 manages to give you an unrelenting vision as well as small little grace notes, portraits of people and places that just jump off the page. The heroine’s rationale for stealing the mink coat, for instance, rings true, as does her complex sort of "love" (and sadly she can only seem to feel it covered by scare quotes) for the guy, and the rationale of the men in her life. O’Hara also gives us a very nice glimpse of the speakeasy culture of the day, which seems to me at least somewhat different from what you get in the movies, anyway. Not that the movies have ever lied to me about life before.

So O’Hara on the basis of these two books has put himself in the rather odd position that the things that are best about ‘em are not the things that I think he wanted to be best about ‘em. What works about APPOINTMENT are the small little touches, the small pictures of how a town and a way of life work – not the grandiose themes about Morality and Existence, none of which seem anything more than silly, really, today. And BUTTERFIELD 8 – well, I guess you can kinda sorta say it "works" as an unrelenting portrait of despair, but it’s an uncomfortable kind of "works" and probably stretches the definition of "works" to the breaking point. (The guillotine ‘works’ as a way to take care of the crime problem, but I think the criminal might have a point of view on this.) Certainly it’s more likely read now – again – for the small slices of life O’Hara presents, a vision of a different world.

Which leads us next to the short stories. Yeah, I’ve decided. The short stories next.

More of an Update but some stuff on Dumas and Rohmer

Hello.

No, I haven't given up the blog. I am reading O'Hara's BUTTERFIELD 8, in fact, as we speak, and even though I'm only in the opening pages of it I'm almost ready to say it might be his best novel.

It has been on something of a pause because all of a sudden I had a couple really really crappy things happen in my personal life, which is neither here nor there for the purpose of this blog, except to say that it's hard to get too interested in John O'Hara's gloomy visions of life (basically, we all suck and everything fails) when, well, you're dealing with your own gloomy reality of life. Ultimately my interest in all art, all culture, is in its immersive escapism – its potential to free me from the surly bonds of this world. That's what I want out of a book. That's why I like genre fiction, that's why I have a weakness for populist fiction, that's why I prefer the movies over the theatah, that's why I'm hard on the self-consciously literary or bohemian. It's not the only why, but it's a why. I'm looking for art to take me out of myself; sure, John O'Hara can do it, but when you're feeling down O'Hara ain't the best guy to be reading.

I really do wish that I could post more, but unlike the various blogs I do read, the topic does not lend itself to quickness. I have thought about opening it up to others but decided against it because this blog is really all about me, yo. I wouldn’t be happy unless whoever posted said something I entirely agreed with, and if they did, well, why am I not posting it myself?

Me, trapped in a hallway of mirrors, endlessly fascinated by my own gaze.

Anyhow.

What I have been reading is CHICOT THE JESTER and a lot of Sax Rohmer.

I have come to the conclusion that CHICOT is a minor Dumas classic, and is surely deserving to be back in print. Much more so than the dreary THE WOMEN'S WAR or, for that matter, the rather dreary LA REINE MARGOT. This is going to sound thuddingly obvious, but it's worth repeating for Dumas because a lot of people don't get it – Dumas's best books are the Musketeer saga and COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO because that's where good characters meet up with a sturdy story structure. For all of Dumas's popular success, he was, curiously, something of an indifferent storyteller, and for every COUNT there's stuff like THE WOMEN'S WAR, the plot of which I couldn't tell you if my life depended on it, or LA REINE MARGOT/QUEEN MARGOT, which kind of ambles along from sequence to sequence, until Dumas just tires of the whole thing and kills off his main characters and bawls about it in a Romantic flurry.

It's rare, but it happens in Dumas, that you get a good story with dull characters. GEORGES, I'd argue, is that – a potentially fascinating story of slave revolts, and race, and colonization, all made more interesting by Dumas's own racial background. Unfortunately the hero's an uncharismatic bore and he almost closes the door to you getting involved in the story. I'd still include it in the recommended camp, but GEORGES is really for hardcore Dumas fans, and is more interesting than good.

It's rare, but again it happens in Dumas, that you get a dull story with a great character. CHICOT is that, and I think CHICOT wears a lot better than GEORGES. What's interesting is that CHICOT isn't even really the protagonist of the story – that honor goes to Bussy d'Amboise, a typical noble Dumas hero/soon to be a victim character. I don't know how it's going to end but I already know how it's gonna end – Bussy's gonna get screwed, is how.

Chicot, though, takes over every scene he's in. Illustrating that useful cliché that verily, there is nothing new under the sun, he is a modern anti-establishment hero long before that concept was even conceived of, goofing on the King and his court even as he really, secretly, protects him. And it's shown that it's his very anti-establishment tendencies that make him the King's best protector, as he can see things and understand things that the rest of the court (and the King himself) are blind to.

It's funny – one of the most appealing things about Dumas is that reading him is like reading storytelling talent raw, just whiskey right out of the cask and poured onto the page. You can actually see him lose interest in Bussy and gain interest in Chicot as the character develops. It's a fascinating thing. It can’t be said to exactly make for a great book, no book that works against itself in this way can ever be said to be “great”, but it is quite fun.

As for Sax Rohmer, I remember posting earlier here that I wasn’t sure where all that racist stuff with Rohmer came from. Well…forget all that. I did read some earlier Fu Manchu stuff recently, particularly THE INSIDUOUS FU MANCHU and THE RETURN OF FU MANCHU and THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU and yeah, there’s a lot of stuff there about evil yellow perils. Even – I think this is in INSIDUOUS – a whole bit about “how to you properly evaluate a race of people who sacrifice their female children”, etc.

But the books really are great, especially if you have any feeling at all for popular conventions of the time. I mean, beats there a heart so cold that it doesn’t flurry when they hear lines like this? “Oh my God! Not the Zayat Kiss!” I mean there’s a whole potpourri of secret dens, evil insects, I think in one book killer mushrooms, hypnosis, zombification, mad plans to take over the world with plagues, etc. The Fu Manchu books, particularly the early ones, have that kind of almost oriental baroqueness, the kind of preciousness where Asian assassins can truly be at large in the Devonshire countryside, and good upstanding British men can be swept away by the passion of mysteriously sultry Asian women, and secret dens of unspeakable evil are hanging out on the docks.

I love that sense, the sense that there’s a secret, more fascinating reality just beyond what you can see, and that if you venture carefully enough, you may in fact find it. I think it’s that, coupled with Rohmer’s often mad sense of invention, which has kept him so readable and so memorable for so long. Rohmer does have problems over longer narratives – his early books are fixit novels from shorter pieces and rather the better for it, as their episodic nature enhances Rohmer’s natural talents for the arresting image or idea. The books generally get duller as they go on, more plodding in their craftsmanship, if that makes sense. Rohmer just didn’t think like a novelist. A lot of very good writers don’t.

But I am now interested in tracking down more non-Fu Manchu books from him. Stay tuned for John O’Hara and then Samuel Shellabarger, I think.

Henry Morton Robinson THE CARDINAL

Henry Morton Robinson – THE CARDINAL

Well, I know nothing about this guy at all. I can tell you that THE CARDINAL was one of the first Reader's Digests Condensed Books, it appeared in the Autumn 1950 volume along with ROOSEVELT IN RETROSPECT by John Gunther, LONG THE IMPERIAL WAY by Hanama Tasaki, and the only volume I've vaguely heard of, YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN by Dorothy Baker (I think this was later a Frank Sinatra movie).

I can tell you it was the number one bestseller of 1950 and the number four bestseller of 1951, which is one hell of an impressive achievement as well as one hell of a cautionary tale – the height of literary fame and how many of you have heard of Henry Morton Robinson?

I can tell you it was later made into a minor Otto Preminger movie starring Tom Tryon (who we've talked about!) as the titular character. Haven't seen it.

I also have this odd fact for you – oddly it's one of the big facts in the short Wikipedia piece on him – Mr. Robinson died when he fell asleep in a hot bath. Not of drowning, mind, but complications afterwards of the resulting second and third degree burns.

Wow. I hate to laugh. But how hot was that damn thing?

As for the book itself – it's harmless. A slice of life novel depicting the inexorable rise of a poor Boston priest to the heights of the Vatican. The kind of novel where a lot of incidents occur but nothing much really happens: our hero's character, outside of a certain naivete that's fully sympathetically portrayed by the narrator until he learns The Real Deal, which is also fully sympathetically portrayed by the narrator, never really advances from where he begins. He starts out as a well-meaning good guy who's serious about his religion and, as far as I can tell (I didn't read the whole thing all the way to the finish) he ends it as a well-meaning good guy who's serious about his religion. It's written in an amiable sort of mushy style that's too bright and chipper to really be called “bad” or even get very angry about, just more evidence that the mediocre of the past was just better than the mediocre of today. (I'm not sure that THE CARDINAL has worn well, exactly, but you can read it without wincing. I'm not sure the same can be said of today's mass novel.)

I do not understand why it was so massively popular. Are there that many Catholics out there? Was it an instance of non-Catholics trying to understand Catholicism and this one came out at the right time? Was it the fact that it “tackled” -- Jesus, what does that word even mean? How about “tried to bring up” a lot of social phenomenon of the time like interfaith marriage and abortion? Would our hero have talked about women in the priesthood if the book had been set in present day America?

I don't think THE CARDINAL is going to tell you anything about Catholicism that you should really trust, and I'm leery anyway of books “that teach you things”, because who really wants that, honestly. If you want to learn about Catholicism go right to the source and talk to a couple of Nuns, they'll clue you in.

All that said there's nothing really wrong with it. It moves along at a chipper pace and while you won't really have any fun reading it, you won't exactly hate yourself in the morning, either. It's just kind of a generic experience. Call it “Book”.

Status Update, or, Where We Are and Where We Will Be

My accumulation of John O'Hara books proceeds apace, and once I get the other two (FROM THE TERRACE is in the mail and I still need to pick up BUTTERFIELD 8, which along with APPOINTMENT IN SAMAARA is oddly the only O'Hara now easily available) we'll start on him. I may post about him in dribs and drabs, as most of his stuff is quite long – we'll see.

But the point about dribs and drabs is that we'll be talking about other authors beforehand and maybe in between there as well. Next up is Henry Morton Robinson's THE CARDINAL which I'm sort of excited about because this is a test case for exactly what I wanted to cover in this blog – I have no idea who this guy is or what this book is, but at one time it was extremely popular.

After that? I think Helen MacInnes, which a commentator suggested to me, is an excellent suggestion and we'll probably do her. Her books are easily available, too, which is a plus. And then? I don't know, though I'm leaning towards either Kathleen Winsor's FOREVER AMBER or some of Mika Waltari's historical novels. I'm in the mood for something like that.

We'll see.

I haven't forgotten about trying to find information on these writers online, I just haven't found much worthwhile to even talk about. Anyone can find the wiki or kirjasto piece on these guys, I've decided, and there's really not much else out there besides that. You know you're in trouble with Levin when you're heading up the Google blog search on him (most everything else is simply obituaries); I can't find anything worth a damn on Armstrong at all. As for Jack Finney, the only really interesting thing out there is the knowledge – here, I'll save you the time – that TIME AND AGAIN is a cult novel, especially, it seems, among women. I'm really not sure why, I find the book absolutely impenetrable, but there you are. I suspect there's a love story in there somewhere (yes, he confessed, he's never even gotten that far into it), which may be part of it. I think there's also a certain cadre out there who romanticizes/nostalgizes (is that a word? Now it is!) New York City. Honestly, I've never been part of that crew, which might be part of the problem here too.

Still, interesting that it's a cult novel. It's a lot harder to become a cult author than it is to become a cult filmmaker, say. Most books languish unread, a select few are read like crazy. To be a cult author or write a cult book you need to attract a certain select audience – and not much more. Usually that happens more on the highbrow end of the spectrum -- Fred Exley's A FAN'S NOTES is certainly a cult book, for instance.)

Since this is turning into something of a miscellany post, let me say I remain surprised and gratified by the readership I do get here. Considering I don't do much linkages, don't have a blogroll, update infrequently despite numerous promises to the cotnrary, cover only what pleases me, and most of the time grouchily at that.

As for what I'm reading currently, outside of this project I've been mainly interested nowadays in classic heroic pulp fiction/adventure fiction.


I've dropped Doc Savage's name here before – these books have been reprinted recently in some snazzy big-form paperbacks from I think Nostalgia Ventures. (Check your local bookstore, I know the local Borders has 'em.) I took a chance on these and like them a lot, although I have to say they're more effective spaced out a bit – these reprints pair two together and while I understand the concept I think if you read them back to back the second one pales quite a bit. Lester Dent wrote exceptionally well for this genre but he still relied a lot on formula and that becomes apparent here.

What I like about Doc Savage is the concept, which points up one of my “things” -- I think Superman is a boring character as conceived. An alien who can do everything superbly and only has one weakness? You're left shoehorning kryptonite into every conceivable story, trying laboriously to give the guy a challenge, or you're left telling the only other story you can really tell about Superman , “I'm different and cannot connect with you, whom I protect.” Now, that's a good story, but how many times can you really tell it?

Contrast with Doc Savage, who's a superman too, but human. That immediately makes him more approachable, plus there's inherently some drama in just being him. Can he do it? Can he maintain his discipline and strength despite these provocations? Etc.

Anyway, as long as you space 'em out they're well worth reading.

The Spider – these are being reprinted by Baen Books – again, check your local bookstore. Most notable for a body count that defies believe and massive destruction all around. The Spider lives in an operatic world where you can almost hear the violin strings moaning as robot men destroy another city block.

The only thing that seems odd nowadays is The Spider's secret disguise, less fearsome and more funny, I think. (He dresses up like a hunchback with fangs, probably Page got it from a silent picture but just stop a moment and try to picture it...ridiculous, huh? ) These books are also pretty hyperbolically written, but if you're reading heroic pulps you expect some of that. This is probably my favorite of these sorts of series, recommended if you can make allowances.


John Buchan – JOHN MACNAB I finally caught up with this one. It's maybe the cleanest written of all the Buchan novels I've read to date, and I can understand why it has it's admirers. I think it suffers in part from being really very slight: the whole novel is hinged on a modest, albeit interesting, piece of psychology, and I'm not sure it really demanded this length to be told. Also, it's particularly an outdoor hunting and fishing book – I enjoy that sort of thing but I'm not sure I do at the length it's presented here. So, not a bad book at all, but not one of my favorites of Buchan's. I recently ordered HUNTING TOWER from Amazon and I have WITCH WOOD still in a pile somewhere.


Harold Lamb – I may talk about him more at some later date. He's probably the closest thing I know of to an American Dumas, and wrote a series of stories set in Central Asia around 1600 that are fairly remarkable adventure tales, lots of sword fighting and double crossings and armies on the march and the like. Also ordered the third volume of Bison's recent collected edition at Amazon.

Sax Rohmer – And I've been reading a lot of Sax Rohmer recently.

I do not consider him especially racist – stereotypical in his portrayal of Asians, to be sure, but not actively racist. Indeed, one of the fascinating things about Rohmer's stuff is that he obviously rather admires Asians, and was obviously sexually attracted by them. (It is impossible to read the long lascivious – well, for the time -- descriptions of women in Rohmer without picking up on it.) Of course you could argue such feelings aren't incompatible with racism, but that's a good way to start forgetting about the books themselves.

I do think his work suffers in part from a “fix it up” quality: a lot of his books started out as independent short stories that were knitted together...and they feel like that. The experience of reading THE HAND OF FU MANCHU is like feeling little peaks here and there – but it never really coalesces into a complete work.

All that being said, there are some real pleasures to be found in his books. Strange Venomous Poisons Unknown To The West? Ancient Secret Societies Devoted To Death? Hidden traps? Hidden dope dens? Mysterious Women on Secret Errands? Strange Death Traps? Beats there a heart so dead that he doesn't thrill to this sort of stuff? Rohmer, at his best, gives you the impression of a whole world lying just beneath the civilization you take for granted, a world frankly much more fascinating than the one you know. It's immensely evocative and frankly, Rohmer is rather criminally unread nowadays, almost certainly for PC reasons. (It's even getting difficult to find Rohmer titles.)

Quick Thoughts on Charlotte Armstong

A Dram of Poison
The Witch's House
Mischief
The Dream Walker


It was opportune to stumble into Ms. Armstrong – she sums up a lot of where we've gone so far on this blog.


For instance:


The Literary World is ruled by Authority.

Before I started this blog I had the half-assed idea that critical judgment was important in the “highbrow” world, that it was there that opinions were formed, consensuses were reached, and judgments were levied that affected the reputations of various authors – but that it mattered much less in the “popular” world, which, I felt, was governed mostly by fans.

I don't think that's true at all, anymore, and Charlotte Armstrong is a good example of why. Anthony Boucher in the 1950's rather idly compared her to “Cornell Woolrich and Shirley Jackson”, presumably because she wrote thrillers and those were the first two names that dropped off his tongue, and amazingly that reputation has stuck, with Ed Gorman somewhere mouthing the same opinion as though it were received wisdom on high or something.

Except that it's not true. Armstrong doesn't resemble Woolrich at all – Woolrich wrote basically poetic paranoid pieces, there's no paranoia in Armstrong's work. Most of her characters are just ambling along until an anvil drops on their head, metaphorically speaking. As for Shirley Jackson – an interesting writer who I may deal with here at some later stage – well, she's female, yeah, and wrote some stuff that maybe you could call “thriller”, if you really stretched the point (although I don't think a reader today would class Armstrong and Jackson in the same genre at all), but Armstrong doesn't have the distance that I see in Jackson's work, the impersonality of it. If anything, Armstrong is rather resolutely maternal.

It strikes me as odd that nobody, in talking about A DRAM OF POISON, has mentioned what is the rather obvious influence, which is G.K. Chesterton. Not the Chesterton of the Father Brown stories so much as the Chesterton of the (to my mind) rather middling novels, especially THE FLYING INN and THE BALL AND THE CROSS. For one thing, it relies (as those books do) on paradox – the situation that is presented turns out not, at all, to be the situation as it really is. For another, there's a certain beneficence at work here, a certain notion that people, despite their certain differences, really at heart are very similar. As with Chesterton it's a very optimistic view of the world and of life. And most of all, the novel sets up a situation that essentially resolves itself into a theological debate, with various characters acting as spokesmen for varying points of view.

Chesterton is not read as much as he should be nowadays, and I can to some extent understand how currently people could miss this. I'm less clear how Boucher, who presumably knew what the hell he was talking about, could miss it. I am also interested that Boucher's claims were simply repeated as though they came from on high, without anyone taking the time to look at the matter themselves. Again, all literary worlds are ruled by authority – somebody's authority. Maybe – likely – out of inertia, why establish a viewpoint of your own when there's a preformed one waiting for you to put on? Here Boucher's opinion simply became “the” opinion, presumably because he was Anthony Boucher.

Never trust the critic who tells you critics don't matter – he's being disingenous. Critics always matter, especially for posterity.

As for DRAM itself, rather too redolent of Chesterton for my taste.



It's Not Who Has The Idea First, It's Who Does It Best

Knowing Stephen King like I do, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that he absorbed THE WITCHES HOUSE at some early point only to spit it out later in MISERY, as the basic premise (innocent guy laid up and imprisoned in crazy older woman's house) is exactly the same. But it also ought to be said that he just does a better job with it – this is one of his best later books, and he works in a very neat looking-glass sort of effect here, as the book is that rare thing, a thriller that actually is something more, a kind of inside look at the process of writing that it quite original. But this is a commentary on the Armstrong book, not the King, and the point here is that all the while I read this all I could do is think about the King, even though this is a smooth professional job. Such is the way of things in the popular world: like it or not ideas do matter here, and if you're especially trying for the shock of novelty as an effect, know that it all depends on what the reader encounters first. There are plenty of popular “classics” out there that have simply lost their effect because so many writers have copied them. “But I was there first!” they argue, and correctly so. Unfortunately that's just not enough.


There Is Such A Thing As A Woman Or Male-Oriented Book

By which I mean there is such a thing that is possible to have a quite good book that is so written from one sex's perspective that it's impossible for the other to get into. I think this doesn't happen all that often, more rarely than you might think, in fact, but it does occur – and I think it's the kind of thing only the other sex can really speak to. Which is a long-winded way of saying that as much as I admired and even respected MISCHIEF, a book about a crazy babysitter (it has one of the more convincing depictions of insanity that I've read in some time – the girl here is both completely pathetic and completely terrifying), it is so focused on a particular female instinct – the maternal instinct, and the feelings that involves and the threats one has to face down to protect one's cub – that I think it's just closed off for male readers. Yes, of course men love their children too, but I don't know how to put it into words...it's just conceived of in a different way. This is peculiarly a female book, and I would be very interested to hear female takes on it.

To not give every Armstong a down opinion, I very much liked THE GHOST WALKER, a peculiar little book that very cannily understands the media bubble of today's world, and what kind of threats it poses. A beloved Washington eminence (is there such a thing nowadays?) is threatened by a smear campaign who's essential pointlessness and banality makes it all the more plausible, at least to these jaded eyes. Also does a good job of that old standby “I hate you/no I love you”, and there's a really wonderful climax here, which is carefully plotted and foreshadowed and is all the more effective for that.

All the above suggests I on balance dislike Armstong – but actually I don't. MISCHIEF and THE WITCHES HOUSE are not bad books, they're simply unlucky books, one by being limited by sex, one by being limited by time. A DRAM OF POISON is, in fact, sort of a mediocre book (of course it won the MWA award that year) but it's interesting in some ways nonethless. I certainly would check out other Armstongs, and would suggest you do as well.

Oh, and contra Boucher, who's lazy opinion of Armstong's work has irritated me all through these short notes. I haven't read widely enough yet to really sense all of Armstong's influences, but I would lay money more on people like Mary Roberts Rinehart (humble women in peril), Dorothy Sayers (to my mind one of the great unacknowledged literary influences of the twentieth century, so much comes from her – in particular her use of mysteries/thrillers as a device to make social commentary, as is done here) and maybe a bit of Daphne Du Maurier (the slow turn from sensible domesticity to...something else.)