The Gravity's Rainbow Support Group (GRSG) began in June, 202o as a "reading group" of two people as a support mechanism to plow though Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (a book you should never try to read alone) during the pandemic. The GRSG took the challenge out of reading challenging books and provided a way to keep two now-retired college chums ( from Indiana University) Francis Walker of Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Murray Browne of Decatur, Georgia in touch. Basically, we decided to keep this good thing going.
This page is the third installment of our reading-discussion notes of books we assigned ourselves in 2022. Like in the pages past, (See Gravity's Rainbow Support Group and Gravity's Rainbow Support Group - 2021) it is full of favorite quotes and passages. Don't expect coherent prose or well thought out arguments, but our musings may provide insights to your own understanding of these books.
First up:
The Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
Thanks to our Kansas friend Bruce Woods, this book was recommended. We were left scratching our heads wondering why this book wasn't already on our radar. Published in 2017, Mishra gives a wide-sweeping historical account explaining the paranoid hatreds that grip our world tracing its roots of the competing thoughts of Voltaire and Rousseau. Interesting that Rousseau became inspired on the road to visit Denis Diderot not unlike the apostle Paul blinded on the road to Damascus. Buckle up because Mishra provides plenty to think about:
Ressentiment
A major theme in the book, Mishra explains ressentiment on pages 13 and 14.
"But in between justice and ressentiment is a rich gray area where schadenfreude can serve a valuable purpose."
Memorable passages
p. 41 - George Santayana " (America) has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom even when covered with slaves."
p.45 - "The easy availability of assault weapons in the United States was always likely to assist the privatization and socialization of violence."
p.65 - "The appeal of democracy, broadly defined as equality of conditions and the end of hierarchy would grow to the paradoxical point where Fascists, Nazis and Stalinists would claim to be the real democrats realizing a despair principle of equality." (Of course, this is true in 2022 as Republicans use the argument that they are preserving democracy as they block the Voting Rights Act and the John Lewis Bill)
This week in Georgia. On Monday (1/10/22) in the Georgia General Assembly praised UGA and predicted an upcoming victory over Alabama in the College Football Championship. My (Murray) reaction on Tuesday was "Now that the Georgia has won the National Football Championship it can get back to the business of suppressing voter's rights."
p.68 - Dostoyevsky and the dangers of the Crystal Palace, a glass and iron structure built by Joseph Paxton in 1851 in London. An embodiment of utopian future, but with acute dangers. (Kind of like Disney World)
P.80 - Blue collar Christians in the Rust Belt, post-communist Poland, Muslims in France push Victimhood.
From Francis
Page 90 –This one sounds a bit like social media and its overbearing effect on people.
"Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else." --It continues--
Page 91 "Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom."
Page 98 - The top-down analogy is a good one—and it does a good job summarizing what a lot of us have felt from time to time about administrative no-nothings that issue dictates to those of us trying to get a job done:
"Voltaire was an unequivocal top-down modernizer, like most of the Enlightenment philosophes, and an enraptured chronicler in particular of Peter the Great."
Page 56 - The following comment seems relevant since we discussed if Orwell was an ideologue or an idealist—this is a nice take on a dialogue being an ideologist—in which personal viewpoints serve to keep up one’s membership in a group.
"(Not accidentally, one of the philosophes, Helvetius, founded the modern theory of ideology: the notion that ideas express the conflicting interests of individuals or groups.)"
Page 90: - I liked this comment, because it talks about masks—which of course are the current rage in Paris—although not for fashion.
"Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces’."
Page 107: - Finally, this is one of the authors sweeping generalizations (he tries to bury in parentheses) again anti-male and a bit over the top. The book editor should have tamped this one down a bit—but, maybe he is referring to India where maybe it is not that far off within certain subcultures….
"Any equality between the sexes, according to him, should be based on different roles in distinct domains of activity; and the demand for women to be educated like men, and increased similarity between the two sexes, would lessen the influence women have over men. (The rapid overturning of these entrenched prejudices in our time is one major source of male rage and hysteria today.)"
Some of the passages reminds Francis of the conservative writer Roger Scruton that seem to echo themes of the book:
- ...Dealing with anger and resentment should not be seen along a liberal-conservative divide, rather they need to be viewed as emotions that can easily deteriorate if are put in place untampered as policies—which then become the enemy of all of us.
- The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth - "Rousseau & the origins of liberalism," The New Criterion (October 1998) wikiq
- Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows. Roger Scruton "The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator (December 2008)
- Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on. "Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," - The Spectator (January 2014)
- Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.
Second session, Monday, January 31, 2022
“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” -- Harry Truman
This quote seems most appropriate because Mishra shows us clearly that the arguments, the patterns of tyranny, fascism, and radical nihilism etc. has repeated itself over and over from the mid-18th century of Voltaire and Rousseau to the Trump, Modi and ISIS era.
Francis has other notes and quotes:
- “The most fanatical engineers of the human soul, such as Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov and Stalin, were either children of priests or seminarians (like, remarkably, Al‑e‑Ahmad, Shariati, Qutb and many Islamist ideologues). “—Mishra, page 157
- “They are driven by what Freud once called the ‘narcissism of small difference’: the effect of differences that loom large in the imagination precisely because they are very small.” –Mishra, page 158
An older colleague of mine put it this way: “The fights at University faculty meetings are so intense, because the stakes are so low.”
- “Georg Forster, the writer and activist, who fled a failed mini-revolution in the German city of Mainz to Paris (to die there embittered in 1794), wrote to his wife that ‘the tyranny of reason, perhaps the most unyielding of all, lies yet in store for the world’.” ----Mishra page 186
This statement reminds me of two aphorisms:
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.” ― Roland Barthes, Mythologies
“Damn the solar system! bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble contrivance; — could make a better with great ease." ---Sydney Smith (letter to a friend who complained about everything, maybe even gravity….)
- “Georges Sorel, the most influential thinker of fin de siècle France, insightfully noted in Reflections on Violence (1908) that Mazzini, while apparently pursuing a ‘mad chimera’, confirmed the importance of myth in revolutionary processes. ‘Contemporary myths lead men,’ Sorel affirmed, ‘to prepare themselves for a combat that will destroy the existing state of things.’ “ --Mishra, page 228
When myth meets myth, the collision is very real, --Stanislaw J. Lec Unkempt Thoughts. 1962
- “The militant Zionist Jabotinsky, who was then a pacifist student in Rome reporting on Italian events to his compatriots in Odessa, spoke of the ‘malcontento’ in Italy and ‘the ‘incredible dissatisfaction’ which ‘would sooner or later lead to rebellion’.” Mishra page 233
- “The modern terrorist tradition has many such instances of zealous pupils exceeding their master.” Mishra page 309,
Here is the concept expressed somewhat differently: One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. --Fredrich Nietzsche
- “The violence was aimed at different political ends. But it was inspired by the belief – fundamental to much modern terrorism – that assaults on symbols of political and social order, and the self sacrifice of individuals, had a propaganda value that far exceeded any immediate political ends.” Mishra page 314
Anarchists and Orwell
Interesting that in our previous book Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Orwell described himself as a member of the Anarchist party, but the Orwell sided with the anarchists for fundamental changes in Spain (democratic socialists) are not to be confused with the Trotsky-Lenin-Stalinist Communists or the anarchist movement that Mishra writes about. (To the Anarchists "capitalist democracy is no more than a centralized swindling machine." We did not realize that it was so widespread worldwide most notably the assassination of William McKinley and the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Bosnia which led to World War I.
Speaking more about this, Mishra writes (p116) that “Anarchist spectacles were meat and drink to the newspaper sensationalist media making anarchist militancy more widespread that it was.” (Not unlike the alt-right extremists that stormed the Capital on January 6th.
- “Barcelona, where a series of bombs exploded from 1903 to 1909, causing widespread terror and panic, became known as the ‘city of bombs’. The random attacks caused a precipitate decline in the tourist trade and provoked the city’s affluent class to flee to safer locations.” Mishra page 314
Francis adds - See discussions on Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which highlighted the adaptability of the Barcelona elite—during the revolutionary phase in the 1930s they all dressed as commoners and called each other comrade until the tide changed, and then they resumed their distinct social distance and formal mien.)
Then there is quote from Orwell’s 1984 (Mishra 325)
“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football*, beer and above all, gambling filled
up the horizon of their (the Proletariat) in control was not difficult” (* of course Orwell was referring to soccer, but when nearly 50 million people watch the NFL playoffs with plenty of gambling on the side and beer ads…"
Is there hope in this book?
There is amazing scholarship and synthetization (look at the 25 pages of Bibliography Essay at the end), but no hope. Francis described the author as almost ranting. The final paragraph of: “…that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud; they incite a broader and more apocalyptic mood than we have witnessed before. They also underscore the need for truly transformative thinking about both self and the world.”
Or this quote from page 324 about the destruction of faith “Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except perhaps, in Silicon Valley mansions of baby faced millennials.
Not much hope there BUT WITH ONE TINY EXECEPTION the mention of Gandhi and Simone Weil in the same sentence on page 250: “Gandhi together with Simone Weil was among the 20th century thinkers who questioned the emphasis on rights – the claims of self-seeking possessive individuals against others that underpinned the expansion of commercial society around the world. They too said that a free society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations.”
Hmmm. Further discussion perhaps?
Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey by Michael Pereira
After the draining Mishra, book we opted for something lighter and since Francis has plans for a trip to Turkey in the fall, we selected this book, which we discussed on February 21, 2022.
Originally published in 1966, Paul Dry Books republished the book in 2015. In this thin travelogue, Pereira combines the history of the country with his solo travels along the southern Mediterranean coastline and Taurus Mountains. (The map above is from the book.) Because Pereira speaks Turkish and insists on traveling the way that the locals do: by foot, by donkey if necessary, and the most common mode of transportation— the bus. He writes:
“…the role played by buses is of immense importance, and I came away with nothing but admiration for them and their drivers. For they have to contend with the trains, bridges washed away or simply non-existent, and, by no means the least, other Turkish drivers.
To help them overcome these hazards they very reasonably enlist the help of the Almighty, and in the space above the windscreen is always written some brief prayer or exhortation. Some of these are pious rather than comforting, such as: ‘May God protect you!’ and others, to my mind, needlessly eschatological: ‘Forget not thy God!’… The most popular of all, however, is the single word ‘Maşallah’, which used in much the same way as a Spaniard uses the sign of the cross to avert danger.”
You feel every bump in the road as he travels the mountainous swerving roads often overlooking the Mediterranean. Pereira’s purposely traveled to an area of a country that he believed would be much more developed in the upcoming decades.
His descriptions of the kebabs, and the centuries-old churches and muezzins’ calls to prayers from the minarets reminded me of my trip to Turkey with my partner Denise in 201o. Books like Pereira’s expand what I normally think of as a travel book. Sometimes you read a travel book with a purpose to plan an upcoming trip or to be a companion while traveling, but Mountains and A Shore, provided a respite from our daily routine by reliving memories of our trip to this fascinating country. (I cannot forget our visit to the Hagia Sophia and the pickle shop in Istanbul.)
Orhan Pamuk Essays
As a companion to the Pereria book, I pulled the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's collection of essays Other Colors (2007) off the shelf. I skipped around the first two sections "Living and Worrying" and "Books and Reading." Pamuk's essays from pages 61 to 104 about living with earthquakes and boat trips on the Bosphorus are good. In the second section his essays about Mario Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes and Salman Rushdie's' Satanic Verses caught my attention, but it was Pamuk's republished forward to Tristam Shandy that has given GRSG some direction.
It is time to do a classic work of literature (uh-oh) and we selected the Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gent. written between 1760-1767 as a novel which will require support from a fellow reader.
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
We selected this classic of English literature written between 1760 and 1767 for several reasons:
1. We were overdue for another hard-to-read, lengthy book that is worthy of the support group. In 2020 it was Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and last year it was Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. In other words, we need mutual support to get through a book of this nature.
2. While reading some Orhan Pamuk essays for our book on Turkey, one of the pieces on Tristam Shandy.
3.) I already had a copy of the Modern Library edition that I purchased for 30 cents years ago. (Of course, the print was too small) so I purchased a very good hardback copy of the Britannica Great Books edition from Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas which is a great source for ol' timey literature books.
4.) And we cannot connect Laurence Sterne to one of the stars of The Age of Anger the French philosopher and writer Voltaire. Both Sterne and Voltaire were more than acquaintances with French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784). Sterne and Diderot met in 17??)
Plot
"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;— they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance, —you might as well take the book along with them; " instance," Book I, Chapter 22. (in Bartlett's Book of Quotations)
"So long as a man rides his hobby horse peaceably and quietly along the king's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him--pray sir, what have either you or I to do with it." Book 1, Chapter 7 (in Bartlett's) Define: hobby horse.
There is very little plot. The narrator Tristam Shandy gives an account of his life starting from his conception. For details he relies on his Uncle Toby, an ex-military man and the dialogue often the dialogue between Tristam's father Walter (a scholar) and Pastor Yorick (who represents religion). Our narrator spins digressions and digressions within digressions and often talks to reader directly. At one point in Book IV, Chapter 25 the page numbers skip from page 270 to 283 on purpose. He writes:
The group (of Francis and me) agreed you could say this book is like Seinfeld "a book about nothing."
The Humor
Other Strengths
The Universality of the Human Condition
Examples include:
Corporal Trim's sermon on conscience, which ends with two or three short rules, including "your conscience is not the law." Book II, Chapter 17.
"Sterne moves form the problems of ethic into the general theory of knowledge; his satire is moral, but his comedy is epistemological." -- essay, Art & Nature the Duality of Man by Martin Price.
"What a jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worship, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!" - Book VI, Chapter 14.
The Humor/The Use of Languages
Countless examples of Sterne's use of language-- his wit:
"When one runs over the catalogue of all the cross reckonings and sorrowful items which the heart of man is overcharged."
"The hand of death pressed heavily upon his eyelids." - Book VI, Chapter 10
It's easy to imagine Monty Python quoting some of these passages in a skit where he describes the birth of Tristam: "for it was obstetrical,--scriptural, squirtical, papistical--and as far as the coach-horse was concerned in it--caball-istical--and only partly musical." Book III, Chapter 8
The nun's story:
The abbess of Andouillets,…… being in danger of an Anchylosis or stiff joint (the sinovia of her knee becoming hard by long matins), and having tried every remedy—first, prayers and thanksgiving; then invocations to all the saints in heaven promiscuously—then particularly to every saint who had ever had a stiff leg before her—then touching it with all the reliques of the convent, principally with the thigh-bone of the man of Lystra, who had been impotent from his youth—then wrapping it up in her veil when she went to bed—then cross-wise her rosary—then bringing in to her aid the secular arm, and anointing it with oils and hot fat of animals—then treating it with emollient and resolving fomentations—then with poultices of marsh-mallows, mallows, bonus Henricus, white lillies and fenugreek—then taking the woods, I mean the smoke of 'em, holding her scapulary across her lap—then decoctions of wild chicory, water-cresses, chervil, sweet cecily and cochlearia—and nothing all this while answering, was prevailed on at last to try the hot-baths of Bourbon—so having first obtained leave of the visitor general to take care of her existence—she ordered all to be got ready for her journey: a novice of the convent of about seventeen, who had been troubled with a whitloe in her middle finger, by sticking it constantly into the abbess's cast poultices, &c.—had gained such an interest, that overlooking a sciatical old nun, who might have been set up for ever by the hot-baths of Bourbon, Margarita, the little novice, was elected as the companion of the journey.
The Quotes
"There is a Northwest Passage to the intellectual world," - Book V, Chapter 42 (in Bartlett's book of quotations - Bartlett gives him Sterne two pages.)
Sterne on families:
Though in one sense, our family was certainly a simple machine, as it consisted of a few wheels; yet there was thus much to be said for it, that these wheels were set in motion by so many different springs, and acted one upon the other from such a variety of strange principles and impulses—that though it was a simple machine, it had all the honour and advantages of a complex one,—and a number of as odd movements within it, as ever were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silk-mill.
Why Tristam Shandy Is a Classic
People who read only the classics are sure to remain up to date. -- Maria von-Ebner Eschelbach
“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” –-Mark Twain
In John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, he calls Tristam Shandy "English literature's greatest comic novel." He further explains why:
Technically what Tristam Shandy bequeathed to English fiction was immediacy - "writing to the moment." His sign manual is the dash —typically a 5em thing which lubricates the frictionless pace of narrative (speeding up one's reading of the process). Tristam Shandy, with its expressive typography (super large capitals, different fonts, the creative use of white space and blocked pages) is a tribute to the growing skill of the mid-eighteenth century London printing trade. The fluidity Sterne aimed at was that of speech. "Writing" he wrote, "when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) but a different name for conversation.
In other words, as demonstrated in the examples below, Sterne did things on the printed page that no one had done before as well as things that we accept as normal in writing.
Final Thoughts
Yes, Tristam Shandy qualifies as a classic. With respect to Maria von-Ebner Eschelbach, it is a book that is timeless in its subject matter, because it deals with the foibles of the human condition. And it qualifies because as we discovered its style and point of view was revolutionary for its times.
That's not say it doesn't qualify in terms of Mark Twain's definition of a classic as book that no one reads. Some of us found it much more a challenge (Murray) than others (Francis). A worthy choice for the GRSG.
Grant by Ron Chernow
This 2017 biography hits the vortex of books we've read:
- We like voluminous books. (This is one is 1000 pages).
- We like history. (Tuchman on Stillwell, George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War)
- We like study different approaches to history (Marc Bloch, Drew Gilpin Faust - who wrote about Shiloh)
- The 200th anniversary of Grant's birth was April 27th, 2022
- Francis and I made a day trip to Shiloh around 1999.
And we must always begin with an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago quote:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
You can read Chernow's introduction to get a strong sense of how from the depths of failure ("Grant had been a failure, better by life at every turn." - beginning to Chapter VI) to the Presidency in less than a decade (similar to Harry Truman). And his toughness, as he persevered through the excruciatingly painful throat cancer to finish his Memoirs. And there were his demons with alcoholism and reoccurring headaches from malaria that he contacted while crossing the isthmus of Panama enroute for his tours of duty in the Pacific Northwest.
In our discussion, which took us to the brink of the Civil War. We couldn't help comparing our current riven country between the division between the abolitionist North and the slaveholding, States rights South. Well, we all know how that ended.
Some of Francis favorite quotes:
Jesse (Grant’s father) contributed to a lively newspaper called The Castigator that made its local debut in 1826.
About Grant’s first taste in America’s (imperialistic) War Against Mexico where he served with Robert E. Lee, who Grant said “was not endowed with supernatural abilities.” (This would serve Grant well in the Spring of 1864).
“(Zachery) Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words.”
While some nearby officers mocked Grant’s take-charge style of leadership, Taylor promptly endorsed it: “I wish I had more officers like Grant, who would stand ready to set a personal example when needed.” (on Grant--showing his soldiers how to do a menial task)
During his maiden battle, Grant discovered something curious about his own metabolism: he was tranquil in warfare, as if temporarily anesthetized, preternaturally cool under fire.
This early experience made Grant tend to view war as a hard-luck saga of talented, professional soldiers betrayed by political opportunists plotting back in Washington.
Francis Memorable Passages from the book Grant:
Colonel Walter Gresham of Indiana wrote admiringly of Grant: “The grasp General Grant then exhibited in the teeth of the incompetency of Halleck and the inefficiency in the War Department stamped him, at least in the eyes of his subordinates, as a man of force and genius.” Page 196
Gresham is especially meaningful since Francis and I lived in Foster Quad during our undergrad days at Indiana. The dining hall was named after Gresham. - Murray
Grant’s endurance in the face of unexpected setbacks perhaps owed something to having survived the ups and downs of his own improbable life before the war. Page 207
“Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn. (p.114). It is a remarkable part of biography of how a man who could not have been a more miserable failure in business, with his father and father-in-law etc. in 1860 could be President of the United States, eight years later.
He (Grant) talked less and thought more than anyone in the service.” Page 364
In Halleck’s topsy-turvy world, it was more important to look and act the part of a general than to win battles and crush the enemy. Esse quam videri. Cicero (To be rather than to seem—(good))
Grant approved it with startling speed. Rusling asked Grant if he was sure he was correct. “No, I am not,” Grant shot back, “but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.” Page 330
Grant broke it open and mutely weighed its meaning. “There was no more expression in Grant’s countenance than in a last year’s bird nest,” observed a journalist. Page 504
The tone of Grant’s reminiscence (after Appomattox) confirmed the Duke of Wellington’s adage that “next to a battle lost, there is no spectacle more melancholy than a battle won.”page 508
Evidently Lee relaxed when he realized Parker was a Native American. “I am glad to see one real American here,” he ventured, shaking his hand. To which Parker retorted memorably: “We are all Americans.”page 509
As he (Grant) remarked bitterly, “The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor—our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect. Lee was a demigod, Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.” Page 516
One aspect of the book is that it really demythologizes Robert E. Lee. Grant met Lee during the Mexican War and they served together. “Lee was not an immortal…was not endowed with supernatural abilities.” (Chapter 3). This would serve Grant well when they faced off in 1864. Grant was not in awe of Lee. Chernow makes the point that Lee was a tactician, but Grant was the strategist. “Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War.” (p.370). (Lee hamstrung himself by always making defending Richmond his main priority.) Chernow debunks arguments that Lee fought for Virginia. He fought for the Southern way of life as well.
Grant’s brilliance was on display during the Vicksburg campaign, the lifting of the siege of Chattanooga and even the campaign to entrap Lee in Richmond. Vicksburg and the Richmond campaign required handling the many rivers that made Confederate positions strong. As Francis pointed out the Russians have similar difficulties in the Ukraine.
A few relevant aphorisms/adages that might apply to Grant:
One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. - T.H. Huxley, 1893.
Francis adds: I think that lacking prepossessing height or bearing, Grant with his introversion and inscrutability made it possible for others, particularly his enemies, to ascribe to him whatever labels served their interests best.)
How gracefully, or not, one loses in life generally matters much more to one’s present happiness than how spectacularly one succeeds. --Matthew Stewart (The management myth page 145)--(There are other presidents to whom this would apply as well--FW)
Grant is similar to Lincoln in this manner since Lincoln was judged by his “railsplitter” appearance. According to Shelby Foote, I believe, Lincoln’s true strength is that he understood how individuals judged him and used that to his advantage. In this Topp Civil War trading card from the 1960s. Lincoln makes a mental note that Grant is staring at his hands.
A few relevant aphorisms/adages that might apply to Grant:
One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. - T.H. Huxley, 1893.
Francis adds: I think that lacking prepossessing height or bearing, Grant with his introversion and inscrutability made it possible for others, particularly his enemies, to ascribe to him whatever labels served their interests best.)
How gracefully, or not, one loses in life generally matters much more to one’s present happiness than how spectacularly one succeeds. --Matthew Stewart (The management myth page 145)--(There are other presidents to whom this would apply as well--FW)
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one. -Bertrand Russell
Maria von Ebner Eschenbach Quotes
A true friend contributes more to our happiness than a thousand enemies to our unhappiness. (i.e. Rawlins)
Control of the moment is the control of life.
What people and things are worth can only be determined when they have aged.
Fate hits us with hard or soft blows. It depends on the material we are made of.
It takes less courage to be the only one who finds fault, than to be the only one to find favor.
As a youthful Civil War buff, I learned quite a bit about the Civil War, the different generals and their shortcomings. I learned much about the Vicksburg campaign and the year between Shiloh and Vicksburg. This includes the Van Doren raid on the supply depot at Holly Springs Mississippi. (This is mentioned in the Faulkner novel Absalom, Absalom which we read.) Van Doren destroying the Union supply depot changed the war dramatically. It was from that point on that Grant and Sherman decided that they would forage the Southern countryside for livestock, feed etc. to supplement the army. This played a huge roll in Sherman’s March to the Sea.
As a youth in addition to collect Civil War trading cards, I pretty much had memorized Heroes in Blue and Gray and I would say even though the book was scaled down considerably to a 6th grade reading level it did not sacrifice accuracy. The book does mention Grant’s drinking, where Lincoln when confronted about Grant’s drinking he quips, “What brand? I should send it to my other generals” According to Chernow (page 292) Lincoln says he never remembered saying that, but wouldn’t mind taking claim for the quote.
Post Civil War Discussions
We both agreed that the most striking aspect of the book (among many) is the Chernow's writing about Reconstruction. We both knew very little beforehand and were not aware of Grant's efforts to "operationalize "Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation (a fine Francis phase).
An abolitionist before the war (more so than Abraham Lincoln) Grant was a fervent believer that blacks should be able to vote without intimidation, hold office and during his first term he enacted laws to strengthen the rights to vote (i.e. the Ku Klux Klan violence, which was “unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American History.”). He used Federal troops to disembowel the nascent Ku Klux Klan and created the Department of Justice to indict and convict over a thousand Klansmen. (A reincarnation of the Klan was formed in the 1920s.) In other words, this was only a short period of time as the white Southerners power structure reformed new militant groups like the White Rifles. This coupled with Northern “Reconstruction fatigue” contributed the evaporation of black voting rights.
Chernow maintains that it would be another 96 years after the 1872 election (1968) before a fair election would be held in many parts of the South. “Slavery had been abolished,” writes Chernow, “but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.”
(We agreed knowing this makes the debate over Critical Race Theory even more shameful. We hope they are teaching the entire story about Reconstruction in the classroom, but we suspect not.)
Grant the Centerpiece
Other pleasures of the book is learning more about Grant's cohorts: William Tecumseh Sherman, a loyal friend and comrade in arms, but not always sure of Grant's judgement as a President, a businessman or a parent. (Sherman took one of Grant's f-off sons under his wing for a while.) We also get good idea what a fireball Phil Sheridan was like and what a bastard the impeached President Andrew Johnson was and how a comparison to Donald Trump - a twice impeached President is most fitting.
On the other contrasts between Grant and Trump are most striking (we sometimes get sidetracked in our discussions):
1.) Grant graduated from West Point in 1843; Trump enrolled in Fordham on a draft deferment.
2.) Grant was an accomplished horseman and at the age of five could ride a horse standing on one leg; Trump cheats at golf.
3.) Grant led soldiers and demonstrated courage under enemy fire; Trump told employees "Yer fired" on a tv show.
4.) While on a military excursion in Panama Grant personally attended to soldiers suffering from malaria; Trump suggested those suffering from COVID-19 might consider drinking bleach.
5.) As a military leader, Grant led the Union to victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and eventually forced Lee to surrender at Appomattox; Trump withheld weapons from Ukraine.
6.) Grant was an alcoholic but overcome it by total abstinence; Trump is an uncurable pathological liar.
7.) Grant was impoverished after for being fleeced by partners in questionable business ventures; Trump boasted about fleecing others with dubious business practices that made him wealthy.
8.) Grant operationalized Lincoln's emancipation proclamation; Trump encouraged restrictions on voting.
9.) Grant won a second term by a landslide; After losing an election for a second term, Trump attempted a coup to overturn the results of the election.
10.) Under duress, Grant vowed to defend Congress from mob attack; Trump incited a mob to attack Congress.
Mark Twain
At the end of his life, Grant was swindled in a Ponzi scheme that left him penniless. Adding to his misery Grant's health turned for the worse, suffering from throat cancer (too any cigars) which would claim his life. Fortunately, an important writer and publisher of the time—Mark Twain— stepped in. Twain admired Grant and felt that he could restore Grant’s wealth by publishing the general’s memoirs. While in intense pain, Grant finished Personal Memoirs just a month before his death and the book eventually sold 300,000 copies, providing his devoted wife Julia with generous royalties.
Twain did have one complaint about the book Grant had not addressed his struggle with alcohol. It was a contest, Twain reckoned, as huge as any of the titanic battles he had fought and won. “I wish I had thought of it!” Twain exclaimed with frustration. “I would have said to General Grant, ‘Put the drunkenness in the Memoirs—& the repentance & reform. Trust the people.’” But he knew that no hint of that existed in the narrative, that it had been too sore a point with Grant, who, in his quiet, inscrutable way, carried his private thoughts on the subject to the grave.
Not so for Chernow who detailed Grant's alcoholism throughout the book.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Mark Twain's account June 1867 voyage to Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East aboard the Quaker City is the source material for his first book The Innocents Abroad published in 1869. The book is basically a compilation of newspaper accounts that Twain wrote for New York and San Francisco newspapers detailing his five-month trip to Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco, Marseille, Paris, Genoa, Rome, Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Greece, Constantinople, Smyrna, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Egypt. The travel group disembarked in Lebanon for a month-long trip by caravan through the Holy Land. (Murray left the book before then, but Francis finished it.)
Twain figured prominently in Grant's by publishing the ailing President's memoirs. In his 1885 fictional piece "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" Twain gives an account of his short military career in Confederate army in the early days of the war. The writing of this story coincided with Twain's editing Grant's memoirs and the irony, that his Confederate deserter (more or less) was only a few weeks/miles away from Grant's first command in 1861 Missouri. Apparently, Twain and Grant did discuss how close their paths almost crossed during the war. Twain quipped a false bravado, that had he known Grant was nearby he would have attacked instead of retreating. (Source: Justin Kaplan's 1969 biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain)
Two things stood out in our only discussion of the book on July 13, 2022.
The Humor of Mark Twain
You would expect that since Kennedy Center presents the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor presented to individuals who have "had an impact on American society in ways similar to" that there would be plenty of examples of Twain's humor.
There are many, many types of examples:
Overwriting and Masterful Comic Cadence
"But we love the Old Travelers (those delightful parrots who have 'been there before' ) We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we see them They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer and swell and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth.!" - Chapter XII
Then this example on Discovery!
The Fish Out of Water. The American Rube in Sophisticated Europe
The narrator prefers the beauty of Lake Tahoe in Nevada to Lake Como in Italy. (Twain had traveled extensively in Nevada, California and Hawaii before going to Europe. Those adventures were published in Roughing It.)
While in Milan, the narrator refers da Vinci's The Last Supper as "the mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the world." He mocks "catchy ejaculations of rapture" of the tourists who "stand entranced before it with bated breath and parted lips."
Calls Michelangelo, "Michael Angelo"
The Quip - Sometimes at the expense of others (Note: Twain was a "product of his times" when he refers to people of other nationalities and races).
"Outside the car a monster headed dwarf and mustached woman inside it. These latter were not show people. Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy to attract attention."
The Straight Satire
A handbill from the Roman Coliseum
Reliving Travel Experiences
One of the pleasures of reading this travelogue was reliving some or our travels as well. Twain's description of the Quaker City reminds me of another piece about luxury liners (David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Funny Thing, I'll Never Do Again"). Basically, The Quaker City was a forerunner for of luxury cruise liners we are so used to today.
But Twain used words for his description, which he is amazingly skilled. Here's a description from Chapter XXXIII of the Whirling Dervishes which we've all seen in travel shows.
Part of the pleasure of reading The Innocents Abroad reminded me places that I had been like the---
The Bridge of Sighs in Venice
"From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step--one might almost jump across the narrow canal that intervenes. The ponderous stone Bridge of Sighs crosses at the second story...Down below the level of the water, by the light of smoking torches, we were shown the damp, thick-walled cells where many a proud patrician's life was eaten away by the long-drawn miseries of solitary imprisonment--without light, air books; naked, unshaven, uncombed, covered with vermin..." Chapter XXIII
The Hagia Sophia - Constantinople
"I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom." Chapter XXXIII
"I shall never want another Turkish lunch. The cooking apparatus was in the little lunchroom, near the bazaar, and it was open to the street. The cook was slovenly, and so was the table, and it had no cloth on it. The fellow took a mass of sausage-meat and coated it around a wire and laid it on a charcoal fire to cook. When it was done, he laid it aside and dog walked sadly in and nipped it. He smelt it first, and probably recognized the remains of a friend. " Chapter XXXIV
Despite Twain's descriptions, it made me long to see them again.
In John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, he questions William Dean Howell's notion that Twain was "the Lincoln of our Literature" but finally provides the explains Twain's greatness in three words: "voice, eye and attitude."
All are on exhibit in The Innocents Abroad.
The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
The first thing that capture my imagination about the Dos Passo Trilogy was the clever artwork of the Signet Classics which were prominently displayed in the bookstores of my college youth. I finally bought them, and they stayed on my shelves for a number of years. I do not recall when I read them exactly, but I did it over a period of years, probably during the 1990s.
The Signet Classics were notable because they each contained an Introduction by writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin, who summarized the three books of the trilogy —The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)— as a portrayal of the America before it became a superpower. We grew up thinking of America as a superpower, but Kazin reminds us that it was not always that way.
Kazin writes that Dos Passos shows us through his series of three novels published that the powerful men of American (characterized by J. P. Morgan) and those like made their fortunes on the backs of the working men and women. Furthermore, the average man didn't have a chance against the "mass culture, mass superstition and mass slogans" and Dos Passos repeats these themes throughout the trilogy.
Another memorable aspect of the Signet Classics is that they were illustrated by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) who was an illustrator for The New Yorker in the 1920s but went on to become an artist of some renown and a contemporary of the more well-known Thomas Hart Benton. Marsh was known for his "depictions of life in New York City in the 1920s and 30s." (Wikipedia). A sample of Marsh's work graces the cover of earlier paperbacks, shown at the left.
The 42nd Parallel
We began in July, 2020 by reading The 42nd Parallel which cover the early years of the 20th Century up through the beginning of World War I and America's official entry to the war in April 1917.
The main narrative is told through several characters over a period of years. In The 42nd Parallel the main fictional characters are:
Mac (Fainey McGreary), born in Connecticut but raised by an uncle in Chicago. Mac was a printer who drifts all over the country before winding up in Mexico. He is sympathetic to the I.W.W (Industrial Workers of the World) which was established in 1905.
Janey Williams. Janey grew up in Georgetown, Maryland and has an older brother Joe who is one of the main characters in 1919. Janey works her way as a stenographer and ends up in the offices of some of the influencers in the Labor movement.
J. Ward Moorehouse, grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and was a bright boy but grew up in a lower middle class he scrapped and clawed to become a publicist for big business, especially the coal industry.
Eleanor Stoddard grew up in Chicago and showed promise and interest and art at an early age. After working at Marshall Fields in Chicago, she moves to her friend Eveline Hutchins to start a decorating business in New York City. She ends up decorating the offices of J. Ward Moorehouse and becomes romantically infatuated with him, in spite of Moorehouse's second wife who was an invalid. In a patriotic fervor, Morehouse joins the military propaganda machine. Eleanor offers to France too, "I'll join the Red Cross," she said. "I can't wait to get to France."
Charley Anderson grew up in Minnesota and acquired some skills as a mechanic, but drifted throughout the middle part of the country before ending up New York City and shipping out to fight in World War I.
As the book progresses some of the characters interact with each other. Interspersed with in these chapters are Newsreels - one or two pages full of headlines and lyrics of popular songs. Another kind of interruption is the Camera Eye (there are 27 of them in The 42nd Parallel -- almost free verse descriptions of scenes that Dos Passos makes no attempt to identify (Francis and I found these were our least favorite passages.) Dos Passos also includes thumbnail, all most free verse biographies of key historical figures such as Eugene Debs, William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Edison. (All three volumes are constructed in the same manner.)
Why the book is called The 42nd Parallel.
Not to be confused with the 49th parallel which separates the western United States and Canada, the 42nd parallel extends from the California-Oregon -- the Iowa-Minnesota boundry almost running through Chicago, and not far from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. All are major cities where are characters grew up and worked. Remember it a latitude not a straight-line.
Other Themes or Characteristics of The 42nd Parallel
Capitalism vs Socialism, Communism, etc.
The Workers/Labor versus Owner/Capitalists is one of the major themes of all the books. Although he grew up in affluence and education, Dos Passos was sympathetic to the worker and critical of the capitalists -- although later in life he reversed his stance (but his later works never had the effect and readership of the USA Trilogy.)
The forces of pro-labor forces are manifested in the International Workers of the World (IWW) which was founded in Chicago in 1905. Known as the "Wobblies" (disparagingly the IWW was known as I Won't Work people) had a rise in power and influence during the novel (but later collapsed). There were many references to the upcoming revolution in Russia, socialism and the anarchists. (and as we know from Age of Anger, those anarchists played a pivotal role in world history.)
However, Dos Passo does see the irony. In this scene Mac (a pro-worker) and his friend Ben (an oil promoter) argue in front of Concha who Mac lives with while he is in Mexico.
"Concha would finish all arguments by bringing on supper and say with a shake of her head, 'Every poor man socialista...a como no? But when you get rich, quick you all very much capitalista.' " (p.269)
Men and Women
"They all (men) drank, and smoked and talked dirty among themselves and had only one idea"
That kind of sums up a lot of the tension between the men and women. Mac and Charley Anderson throughout their travels are always craving sex. They know that they are supposed to see marriage as the way society wants them to behave, but they have strong urges and cannot always control themselves especially when they been drinking. They whore around, which sometimes ends up in a sexually transmitted disease or forced into marriage because they got their fiancé pregnant.
The women want to be married (as they are supposed to) and know the what the men want, how to try to control them, but they have their urges as well. (Such is the world without birth control). Women like Janey and Eleanor are vulnerable to men like J. Ward Moorehouse, who seems to be an up and comer with a career and status even though he had very humble origins. The fate that the women in Dos Passos novels most want to avoid is to be tied down to someone who is "tiresome."
Page 312:Texas girl . . . she’s a cute little thing. She said you were engaged!” Eleanor’s voice was cool and probing like a dentist’s tool.
Francis Comments:
(Murray, this passage- p.342- sounds like what I was taught in parochial school about how women take a good Catholic boy’s mind off eternal salvation)
“…..but a revolutionist ought to be careful about the girls he went with, women took a class conscious working man’s mind off his aims, they were the main seduction of capitalist society.”
Unseen Influential Forces
At the end of this novel, we see how characters are sucked into being participants in the war in Europe. J. Ward Morehouse, stuck in a second marriage he loathes and a treading water in his publicist career, makes a move to join the Red Cross in France. Eleanor who is in love with Morehouse (we're not quite sure whether their affair includes sex) decides she wants to go to and join the Red Cross to help the war effort even though her skill set is as an interior decorator.
Some of the minor characters mentioned that the reason America went to war was to secure the J.P. Morgan's loans to Russia (12 million) and Britian and France (500 million). If Germany had won the war, the House of Morgan would have been on the hook for millions.
1919 or is it Nineteen Nineteen?
We begin with a fun fact from Townsend Luddington's John Dos Passos, A Twentieth Century Odyssey (1980). Although the title of the first edition was titled 1919, Dos Passos actually preferred the title Nineteen Nineteen, which is how it appeared in the second edition.
In my reading of the trilogy, I read the Library of America edition, which includes notes from Townsend Luddington.
Francis read the XXXXXX edition, which included a forward by E.L. Doctorow, writer of quality historical fiction, which included Ragtime (1975). A retrospective on that book can be found here.
From the Forward by E.L. Doctorow:
"Given neither to he-man esthetics, like Hemingway, nor to the romance of self-destruction, like Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, their friend and contemporary—he was born in 1896—was a modest self-effacing person, an inveterate wanderer who liked to hike through foreign places and sit down for a drink with strangers and listen to their stories."
More from the forward by E.L. Doctorow:
"Edmund Wilson wondered why every one of the ordinary characters of the book went down to failure, why nobody took root, raised a family, established a worthwhile career, or found any of the satisfactions that were undeniably visible in actual middle-class American life. Others objected to the characters’ lack of ideas, Dos Passos’s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites. And it is true these are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives. But for Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1938, it was exactly in the novel’s refusal to redeem its characters that he found its greatness. Their lives are reported, their feelings and utterances put forth, says Sartre, in the style of a “statement to the Press.” And we the readers accumulate endless catalogues of individual sensory adventures, from the outside, right up to the moment the character disappears or dies—and is dissolved in the collective consciousness. And to what purpose all those feelings, all that adventure? What is the individual life against history? “The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it,” says the French existentialist philosopher."
…..last line of forward: He (Dos Passos) heard our voice and recorded it, and we play it now for our solemn contemplation. -- E.L. Doctorow
Of course, here at GRSG we have always been interested in the different perspectives of history.
Wikiquote: E.L. Doctorow
- There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
o New York Times Book Review (27 January 1988)
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
Time (26 June 2006)
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. (Sounds a bit like Faulkner here).
The Big Money
"Gosh money's a great thing" -- Charley Anderson in The Big Money
Characters Return
When reading The Big Money, we begin to see more interaction of Dos Passos characters. The dozen principal characters in the book are:
Janey Williams in The 42nd Parallel has a brother Joe Williams who leaves home and kind of bums around the world on various ships in 1919. The descriptions of life on these freighters that navigate in Europe and the Caribbean (including dealing with German U-Boats) are impressive. Janey ends up working for J. Wardhouse Moore who is player and Richard Ellsworth Savage who is always trying to suck up to Moore. Janey is always "protective" of Moore who dips in and out the entire trilogy.
At the end of The 42nd Parallel we are introduced Charley Anderson grew up in Minnesota and acquired some skills as a mechanic but drifted throughout the middle part of the country before ending up New York City and shipping out to fight in World War I. Anderson reappears as a main character in the final book. He returns as a heroic-fighter pilot hoping to leverage his aviation and engineering skills into some big money. While in New York City he has an affair with Eveline Hutchins who already has a child (not her current husband) while she was in France. Charley craves wealth, but like many of Dos Passos characters he self-serving and self-destructive.
Ben Compton is introduced at the end of 1919 as dedicated to the cause of the workers, much to his own determent. The readers doesn't see him as a major character until he returns in Mary French's life who is a main character in The Big Money. Dos Passos describes Compton when he meets up with his family: "They (his family) felt sorry about his radicalism as if was an unfortunate sickness he had contracted." Mary French also sacrifices her life (to what end) and the memorable descriptions of Boston during the imprisonment of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Dos Passo Later Writings
After The U.S.A. Trilogy Dos Passos wrote for another thirty years but you would be hard pressed to find anyone who could name any of his other works. (Ideologically he did an about face to his earlier work as Dos Passos soured on leftist ideology after the Spanish Civil War.)
Francis was much intrigued on why Dos Passos's attitudes changed. He writes:
What was impressive to me from reading this is that it provided such a helpful understanding of the labor movement and Marxism as seen from life in the early 1900s. I would submit that the appeal of these movements reflected both the monarchical hierarchy of Europe and possibly the understandable tendency of the USA, which was an aspiring power at the time—but far from a recognized contender, to ape the style and character of the known world powers. Wilson, Morgan, Hearst and their ilk are portrayed almost as monarchical figures—and, I suspect they saw themselves in a similar light to some extent—since they likely envisioned their roles in the mindset of the times—dominated by European power brokers. Since the world’s governments were so feudal at the time, it was then easy to see capitalists on the side of the royals as oppressors of their vassals (aka working class)—again, certainly true in Europe with organizations like Krupp—and likely resonant in the USA as the titans of industry saw themselves more as corporate Czars than stewards.
So, why did Dos Passos change his tune in his later years? I submit it was not just the betrayal of decency and murder of his friend by the Communist party in the Spanish Civil war—but also, I believe it resulted from the toppling of the European monarchies—after all WW1 was their coup de grace. And, after that, American capitalism—which no longer modeled itself on Royal privilege, could then develop into something beyond a grasping extension of regal control and more into an engine of economic growth. Thus, corporations evolved, still as amoral entities, but now governed by efficiency and productivity instead of by robber barons such as Morgan or Hearst. Similarly, a more representative democracy began to replace the autocratic party machines (formerly backed by media moguls of the day) which had ruled up until that time which help further shift the balance of power to the electorate. Paradoxically it was communist regimes that retained the dictatorial remnants of the monarchies they replaced—perhaps because corporate freedom—which, I think, provides some counterbalance of power to governments-- was incompatible with their philosophical underpinning—as were regular democratic elections—which would lead to an uncontrolled and intolerable rotation of those in power.
Dos Passos can be forgiven for not envisioning these developments as his imaginative talents were better suited to seeing individuals rather than the sweeping and difficult to predict global upheavals that were going to take place. And I don’t think Dos Passos ever lost his insight or compassion for individuals as decades passed—rather, he saw their lives improving—while the lives and freedoms of those in totalitarian regimes declined—perhaps reinforcing his newfound respect for the promise of a modern USA.
What I see in his characters is that they were so affected by the failure of their hardworking comrades due to the unfairness of the US in the early 1900s, that, like young Dos Passos, they opted for unconventional lifestyles—hoping this would provide them a way to circumvent the stacked deck against them. Notice how often his characters denigrate a “conventional” lifestyle. Dos Passos later, I think, came to realize that the key to thriving did not lie in the unconventionalities they chose, which were harmed not improved by the vicissitudes of alcohol and unstable relationships, but rather by adopting more conventional lifestyles which were increasingly supported by the slow but steady evolution of less malignant and better regulated corporations and responsive government.
The U.S.A. Trilogy is and was GRSG worthy. In way it was similar to Gravity's Rainbow, a long read, a look at postwar Europe and America, albeit World War I. An intricate mix of fiction and history told in an extraordinary way.
Our discussions led to a long essay "The Camera Eye of Dos Passos: Looking Back at America in Turmoil" which appeared in the Tropics of Meta site on November 8, 2022.
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
This was Murdoch's first novel (1954) in what was to be long writing career of "large, extravagantly crowded and ambitious books." According to Salon's Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, Murdoch (1919-1999) was "the last of the great nineteenth century novelists. When asked to name the writers who had most influenced her, she listed Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, 'wise moralistic writers who portray the complexity of being good.'"
In contrast to Dos Passos in The U.S.A. Trilogy, Murdoch digs deep in the mindset of her protagonist Jake Donahague giving of account of his often everchanging actions and thoughts, which often reverse themselves from page to page. The book is considered a comic novel and the narrator (who is a writer and translator) is witty and observant.
Francis's Commentary
Iris Murdoch dramatizes what our senses capture with what they filter out. The lead character initially sees things uncritically, viewing the world from a life focused primarily on an avoidance of stress. Soon, though, a combination of necessity and curiosity spur him to change his approach. As he begins to actively explore what the first pass of his perceptual net has failed to capture, in essence, that which lies deep to it, he begins to appreciate that there are flaws in the meshwork. Through a series of engaging yet unpredictable adventures his understanding matures— by navigating these unfamiliar paths he develops insight into the world and himself.
Of interest, the protagonist’s evolution of character follows a trend suggested by other thinkers: Jacob Bronoski: “The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation…..The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”. Goethe: How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action.” and perhaps most aptly by Kant: All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”
A recurring attraction of the novel is the intermittent appearance of random insights into human nature.
Here is Iris Murdoch’s take on academic life: Page 25: “ Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth.” …”To Dave’s students, the world is a mystery and it should be possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that.”
Here, her lead character muses about truth telling—one wonders if Iris Murdoch would have viewed the virtual communities of modern social media as a help or a hindrance to it.: “The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a café will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”
An unexpected observation on how two sport activities are related also pops up: “Swimming has natural affinities with Judo. Both arts depend upon one’s willingness to surrender a rigid and nervous attachment to the upright position. Both bring muscles into play throughout the whole body. Both demand, over an exceptionally wide area of bodily activity, the elimination of superfluous motion. Both resemble the dynamism of water which runs through many channels to find its own level. In fact, however, once one has learnt to control one’s body and overcome the primeval fear of falling which is so deep in the human consciousness, there are few physical arts and graces which are not thereby laid open to one, or at any rate made much easier of access.”
Here is her lead character reacting to a gift that might alleviate the unrelenting burden of financial necessity: “I was being offered the key to the world in which money comes easily, and where the same amount of effort can produce enormously richer results: as when one removes a weight from one element to another…..My conscience, I could catch up with that in a few months. In time I could earn my keep in that world as well as the next man. All I had to do was to shut my eyes and walk in.” The lead character’s subsequent response suggests that he will elude a common trap --as described by Logan Pearsall Smith: “Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.”
Iris Murdoch’s lead character also denotes a peculiar rift in the ‘Men are from Mars, Women from Venus’ trope—here he is describing the reaction of the nursing staff to him as he takes a job in a hospital : Page 204: “ I noticed with interest that none of them took me seriously as a male. I exuded an aroma which, although we got on so splendidly, in some way kept them off; perhaps some obscure instinct warned them that I was an intellectual.”
The end of the novel provides a guide to pragmatic existentialism: Page 244: “All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.” And on page 250, The lead character echoes the theme: “Like a fish which swims calmly in deep water, I felt all about me the secure supporting pressure of my own life. Ragged, inglorious, and apparently purposeless, but my own.”
Final Discussion
Another aspect of the Net metaphor is how we use mental nets to understand and develop our own world view. What we gather and what we leave behind (under the net) depends on the gauge of our net and what we are fishing for. This changes with time and where we chose to cast our nets or in the case with the Deadliest Catch crew, your crab cages.
Two Wheels Good: The History and the Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
At first Two Wheels Good appeared to be an enjoyable and informative book, and it is, but closer examination (mostly by Francis) revealed some flaws.
Rosen, a journalist, travels through history and time to give an account of the "a panoramic portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first century." In 15 chapters, Rosen covers a variety of topics. Perhaps the most interesting were the chapters of those who cycled in the Yukon and Alaska during winter weather, the popularity of cycling in Bhutan, and the chapter Beast of Burden, where Rosen goes to great length to describe the deplorable conditions of the thousands of rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Lesser chapters of interest were the Biking mania of the 1890s and the chapter about sex and the bicycle.
Topping it off is the chapter Cross Country where Rosen introduces to Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe who met during the 1976 Bikecentinnial where over 4600 cyclists participated in some capacity in a ride from Oregon to Virginia. Bill and Barb would later marry for 40 years. What made this story so captivating, that Murray recognized Samsoe as his brother Neil's roommate at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington.
In Chapter Two, Dandy Chargers Rosen makes some interesting comparisons between the French-inspired English dandies who were earlier adopters of the velocipede and the spandex-clad elitists that--justified or not justified--get the same vitriol as the English dandies back in the early 19th century. (Rosen goes on a slight tangent in a note about Napoleon: Throughout the Regency period, as much as a third of England’s population faced starvation. Food riots and other rebellions erupted and were met by military crackdowns. More British troops were called up to combat machine breakers during the Luddite uprisings of 1811–13 than had been deployed by Wellington against Napoleon’s forces in the Iberian Peninsula a few years.)
Francis had some specific concerns that somewhat deflated the narrative. He writes:
First, a clip from Iris Murdoch (page 16): Against this ghastly backdrop, the bicycle takes on a virtuous glow. “The bicycle is the most civilized transport known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.” When Iris Murdoch wrote those words, in 1965, she could hardly have imagined our world, where plutocrats in global capitals rent helicopters to swoop over streets paralyzed by traffic. (Murray, notice that the author cannot resist giving us a sermon on climate change--which he expands on the the paragraph that follows)
Second: The author is obsessed with extremes: The biggest daredevil, the most extreme mountain race, the most extreme city, the most outrageous circus act and the most outrageous bicycle fantasies. This goes against the grain with Elbert Hubbard who wrote: “Little minds are interested in the extraordinary, great minds in the commonplace.” On the other hand, there are some great excerpts of corroborative detail: “Dhaka, a city with 22,000,000 people and 20 stoplights.” Or, his description of the 10 hour bike race up and down mountains in Bhutan—one climb, in particular, goes uphill for 24 miles—which makes the iconic Alpe h’Duez in the Tour de France look like a cakewalk. These do make for great factoids to share with family and friends.
Adding on to Francis's comments. I was disappointed that there was no mention of bicycle weaponization such as the Panzerfaust which was used by the Germans in the fall of Berlin in the spring of 1945. It was basically a rocket propelled grenade designed to take out Russian tanks. Also, the book did not have an index, which kind of diminishes the book as a "history" book.
Murray read this book while on vacation traveling with family members. A book like Rosen's works very well in those situations. As Francis says "I like the notion of the book you can read and still carry on a conversation or be attuned to other things around you. I am sure you will be able to coin a term to capture the type of book this is because this is a good example of one.
Perhaps an assignment for future discussions.
Red and Black: A Chronicle of 1830 by Stendhal
Like the French novelist Marie-Henri-Beyle (1783-1842) who wrote under the pseudonym Stendhal, the title of this classic originally published in 1832, also has an alternate name The Red and the Black. Either way Stendhal's Red symbolizes the military, and the Black symbolizes the church. In the novel, the protagonist Julian Sorel is the son of a wood mill operator -- hardly of high birth - but Julien who a talent for learning Latin sees only two pathways to rise above his impoverished situation through either the military (e.g. the common-birthed Napoleon Bonaparte) or the Catholic church. But as pointed out in the Preface of the latest translation by Raymond N. MacKenzie, red and black are the random choices the of roulette wheel indicating that our lot in life is dictated by chance. Stendhal/Julien says that peasants chose the seminary other it's "a living on curdled milk and black bread, with meat only several times a year."
Summing Julien's egotistical nature, Stendhal describes him "Like Hercules he was torn, not between vice or virtue, but between the mediocrity of a comfortable life and the heroic dreams of his youth." (Book 1, Ch. 12)
A word about translation. Murray read the MacKenzie translation, which has extensive footnotes (almost 400) that give translations of phrases, and historical backgrounds on names and places from Napoleonic battlefields to actors to playwrights. In his Preface gives us the scorecard of French power. Basically in 1789, Bastille Day the monarchy was removed from power which led to the rise of Napoleon, but his military defeats weakened his power, until the Bourbon monarchy with the support and power of the Catholic Church returned to power from 1814-1830. Of course, these shifts in power are never smooth and there was a lot of back and forth between the monarchy and the Liberals. MacKenzie throughly explains the principal players and events in his Preface and his footnotes, but in the novel the characters "assume" you already know this.
Another note about translation from MacKenzie: Scott Moncreif was a translator of Stendhal to English. Moncreif also translated Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (a book I have read the first couple volumes) The masterwork is now re-translated as In Search of Lost Time. Proust took issue with Moncreif's title, but Moncrief stuck with his reference to Shakespeare. "Translate it yourself, Marcel, if you don't like it"
One of Francis and I's observations is that Julien/Stendhal spends more time in salons (a precursor to networking) than in seminary or in the military. With the exception of a small tour of duty, you would have to say the influence of Napoleon is the main vehicle of the "Red" portion of the book. The chapters when Julien is in seminary with all its pomp and politics are one the most interesting in the book.
More Observations
Beginning with Francis's Amazon review:
This novel provides unique insight into life in France after Napoleon. Who knew mercenary clergy used the sacrament of confession the way the Stasi used wiretaps? That subtleties of dress, manners, and expression led to so many distinctions of rank? That the degree of political turmoil was not dissimilar to current times, just along different themes? Although it is called ‘psychological’ because its omniscient narrator includes so much internal dialog, the author overlooks what he tells the reader: “Our true passions are selfish.” It is a thought-provoking read which, by removing the ruminations of the self-absorbed, could be shorter by half.
Yeah, I agree the book is more psychologically driven than plot driven. This is in complete contrast to Dos Passos who manages to almost race through 30 years of narrative not being bogged down with inner character dialogues. The back and forth of passion between Julien's two main love interests. The first is Mme De Renal, who is the wife of the town's mayor who gives Julien his first real job as a tutor for his family. He has an affair with her, though she has children, but keep in mind she probably married at 16 and was probably in around 30 years and Julien was 19. She loved him to the very end. Julien waffles back and forth and this makes for tedious reading.
Mathilde de La Mole is the daughter of the Marquis. She is about 19 and is bored with her life and plays a cat and mouse game with Julien, which he willingly participates. Like the major female characters in Dos Passos, she refuses to except a lover or a husband that is perfect "Men too perfect bore me. What good is love it that would makes you yawn, " she says (Is this why some women like bad boys?)
"The qualities traditionally associated with military valour—decisiveness, defiance, valour, and comradely devotion—were in danger of being drowned in tepid sentimentality. The moral disease of modern civilization was “fear of poverty” and a corresponding dependence on comfort, safety, and reassurance. Flattery and facetiousness were supplanting rigour and honor in conversations between adults and children….. Saintly acetisim could supply valour stripped from militarism."--William James
"Resigning yourself to what make the world happy: status, wealth, high rank." or Services! Talents! Merit! Bah!. Get yourself some connections. Book 2, Chapter 27 (A new slogan for Linked In?)
Rating History
As we often do, we talk about historians and history writing. Francis mentioned Eyewitness to History (1987) edited by John Carey, a Merton Professor of Literature at Oxford, he describes his selection process for the vignettes he chooses for his book—or as he calls it “reportage”. It has to be an eyewitness account (or at least someone who had access to multiple eyewitnesses prior to writing an account). He cites Stendhal’s account, in “The Charterhouse of Parma” of naive Fabrizzio in the battle of Waterloo—noticing tiny pieces of mud rising mysteriously from plowed furrows in mud—the character subsequently he realizes this is the result of bullets being fired in his direction! Clearly a piece of corroborative detail suggesting an eyewitness account. While the storyline is sometimes overly dramatic, in The Red and the Black, I think it is safe to say that Stendhal does a good job of capturing the essence of village, seminary and aristocratic life and conversation even if it is not direct reporting.
Perhaps our best eyewitness reporter is George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, which the CRSG read last year.
Powerful People and Dunces
Francis noticed a recurring theme that powerful people will often surround themselves with inferiors. Such is the case with the mayor of Julien's home village, M. Valenod, the villain/antagonist of the book
Valenod had, as it were, said to the local tradesmen “Give me the two biggest fools among your number;” to the men of law “Show me the two greatest dunces;” to the sanitary officials “Point out to me the two biggest charlatans.” When he had thus collected the most impudent members of each separate calling, he had practically said to them, “Let us reign together.” (See A Confederacy of Dunces, the book by John Kennedy Toole, or the original quote, from Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, all the dunces are in confederacy against him."
Here is Goethe's version of the same idea (circa 1790):
"The history of philosophy, of religion, of the sciences all show that opinions are spread about on a quantitative scale and that the leading position always goes to that which is easiest to grasp, that is whatever is easier and more comfortable for the human spirit. Indeed, the man who has fully educated and developed himself can always reckon to have the majority against him."
Random Quips and Quotes
You cannot call yourself a classic unless you have phrases and quips that merit writing down on one's notecard.
"I understand every word she speaks, but I don't understand the point she's trying to make." - Book 2, Chapter 25
"He's devious," --Madame Derville, Madame Renal best friend, assessment of Julien. Book 1, Chapter 13
So confused that "Did not know which saint to pray to."
"But I won't ever complain about fate again," said Julien to the abbe who replied "You should never say 'fate', my boy. Always say 'Providence' Book 2, Chapter 1. (One of church plot twists is the Jansenists. (Jansenism was an early modern theological movement within Catholicism, primarily active in the Kingdom of France, that emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. It was declared a heresy by the Catholic Church. This according to Wikipedia)
“That’s the result of vain worldly pomp. You are apparently accustomed to smiling faces, those veritable theatres of falsehood." A reminded of the "Smiling Faces Sometimes song by the Undisputed Truth in 1971:
Smiling faces sometimes
Pretend to be your friend
Smiling faces show no traces
Of the evil that lurks within (can you dig it?)
Smiling faces, smiling faces, sometimes...
Beware of the handshake, they hide the snake
“The man who is born wretched stays wretched, and there you are.”
“After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.” --The words of Julien's jailer at the end of the book.
We close 2022 GRSG with this image of Paris salon, which doesn't exactly capture our regular Zoom meetings to discuss books. We don't have those huge, framed paintings and harpsichords (It doesn't matter we loathe harpsichord music), but what we lack in settees and overstuffed chairs we make up for it with a bounty of bon mots.
