Category: Books

“The Glass Key,” by Dashiell Hammett (1931)

There are no normal people in this novel: only gangsters, ward bosses, corrupt politicians and corrupt government officials and corrupt cops and corrupt journalists. No children, no young lovers, no happy married couples, nobody going to work or shopping in the neighbourhood or picnicking in the park. Noir, noir, noir.

There is a murder—or at least an accidental death—to solve in this novel, but there is no detective, per se. Instead, the protagonist is a political operative and collection of incongruities, Ned Beaumont. He takes a multiple-day beating that makes the typical knock-out of classic detective fiction seem a mere love-tap, but never reciprocates. He has been in the town where the story is set for only a year and a half, and yet he is best friends with his boss, the town’s political kingpin, and on very affectionate terms with his boss’s mother and sister—besides knowing everyone, down to the last punk and cab driver and speakeasy operator. Relentlessly stoical and transcendently astute, he is nevertheless addicted to gambling. Irresistibly attractive to every woman in the story, he never shows the slightest interest in them and seems as much the career loner as any mysterious cowboy gunslinger in a Wild West novel; and yet he leaves town with the best of the women at the end. And despite an extended stay in hospital after that beating, he seems to suffer no long-term effects: no limp, no scars, no kidney damage, no chronic weakness.

But still there is something compelling in Hammett’s grim, stripped-down, laconic narrative style. Like his protagonist, Hammett never lets up, never gives in, and we are pulled into his narrative’s irresistible current.

“Spinoza: A Life,” by Steven Nadler

This is an excellent biography of an extraordinary man. Benedict Spinoza, a lapsed Jew excommunicated by his synagogue and living in a Holland rancorously divided between Calvinists and Catholics, republicans and monarchists, was far ahead of his time. Even the most liberal of his contemporaries could not stomach his sceptical views of religion. The only major work that he published (anonymously) in his lifetime made him the target of vicious attacks, to the point that his grand opus, the Ethics, was published only after his death. Besides being brilliant, Spinoza lived very modestly, never sought public attention, and was known for his kindness and even temper. He died young of a respiratory illness exacerbated by years of grinding lenses and inhaling glass dust, but he may have been lucky to die when he did. Just five years before his death in 1677, the De Witt brothers, Jan and Cornelis, were beaten to death by an angry mob that stripped them naked, mutilated their bodies, and hung them up by their heels. Spinoza’s insistence on logic and reason put him at odds with his own age, and indeed with almost any place or time, and it is not hard to imagine him becoming another victim of the mob. I wish I could have met him, and shook his hand . . . and warned him about inhaling glass dust.

Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, and Tony Hillerman

Zane Grey’s writing is corny, clunky, and amateurish.

“Out of date” is a polite way to describe his language and attitudes, which are casually racist. His characters, at best barely better than cartoonish, adhere to age-old sexist stereotypes.

The historic popularity of Zane Grey’s work can only be understood as his readers’ recognition of their own values in the “Old West” mythology of white settlers, ranchers, rustlers, and gunmen as the heroes of a white-supremacist melodrama. (Or else, if you came to Grey’s stories in your youth, you might have a nostalgic love of them.)

The anti-Mormon screed in Riders of the Purple Sage, too, would have appealed to most of his original readers.

Louis L’Amour adopted Grey’s basic ideas, created a formula, and cranked out a prodigious number of stories built on it.

The Old West in the novels of Grey and L’Amour is a largely lawless Hobbesian state of nature in which evil men seek to rule and dominate by any means necessary, while good men band together under the leadership of a hero to defeat the villains and protect their land, property, and families. These novels are quintessential boys’ fiction, allowing male readers to wonder if they would be wise, brave, and strong enough to defeat the bad guys.

Tony Hillerman’s detective novels, set in the same region a century later and featuring Navaho policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, are much better on all counts. Within the conventions of the genre (we still have melodramatically evil villains) Hillerman introduces realistic, well-rounded characters, authentic portrayals of indigenous people and their cultures, and female characters who are something more than patriarchal caricatures. If you enjoy detective fiction, I warmly recommend Dance Hall of the Dead as a good introduction to Hillerman’s work.

Robert Graves, “Good-bye to All That” (1929, 1957)

Robert Graves, born in England in 1895, enlisted as a second lieutenant in August 1914, rising to the rank of captain by October 1915. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme (July to November, 1916). He was expected to die but, sent back to England, he recovered. He nearly died again in the flu epidemic of 1918.

He went on to become one of the most notable and controversial writers of the twentieth century: critic, poet, novelist, and memoirist. In 1921 Graves and his wife moved to a village outside of Oxford.

. . . The Rector . . . asked me to speak . . . at a War Memorial service. He suggested that I should read war-poems. But instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems by [Siegfried] Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying from gas-poisoning, and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. I also suggested that the men who had died . . . were not particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors should thank God they were alive, and do their best to avoid wars in the future. Though  [some in the audience] professed to be scandalized, the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return, and liked to be told that they stood on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest men: I noticed that, though respecting the King’s [request that they] wear their campaign medals on this occasion, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.

Amen! But let’s hope we have not been “doing our best” in the last century to avoid future wars . . . . If we have, then God help us.

Go pound sand, Ezra (wisdom comes, but too late)

A cautionary tale for those who so willingly proclaim the latest discoveries of the literary promoters to be masterpieces.

In Humphrey Carpenter’s 900-page biography of Ezra Pound, A Serious Character: the life of Ezra Pound, the man is nearly as annoying a century later as he must have been in real life. Half-literate, sloppy, hyperactive, supremely egoistical (even when promoting other artists); a young man whose eccentricities, confined to the harmless realm of literature, turned toxic in middle age when he left letters for politics. A narcissist incapable of admitting error. A flinger of insults when criticized, or just to claim superiority, but also a kind and generous friend. A man who, aspiring to be regarded as an intellectual, lacked the discipline to become truly learned about anything. In short, an American snake-oil salesman purveying poetry and invented poetic movements with all the boastful ignorance of a circus promoter. And the exact model of millions of obsessives today who embrace crackpot theories and bigotries and spread them enthusiastically on social media.

Immediately after his meeting with Mussolini he began a period of frenetic activity, in which he set himself up as a prophet of salvation through right economics, an interpreter of history who could save the world from its errors, a scourge of government who could unmask international conspiracies. . . .

It might be supposed from this that he had lost his sense of proportion; yet he was only behaving in character. The fervour he now devoted to questions of economics and government was the same with which he had pushed himself into the London literary world in 1909, had set up Imagism, promoted Vorticism, and championed Gaudier-Brzeska, Joyce, and Eliot. 

Pound’s internet was, of course, the radio, and his infamous wartime broadcasts from Italy got him arrested, charged with treason on dubious grounds, and confined to a mental hospital on dubious grounds for more than twelve years. Within five years he was receiving regular visits from a fan club of flaky young groupies: proto-hipster would-be poets, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites. 

And yet this jackass did somehow produce a few lines of memorable poetry, was credited by William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams as having a fine ear for rhythm, and by T. S. Eliot for editing “The Waste Land” into what came to be regarded as the poster-poem of Modernism. Having said that . . . if one were inclined to skepticism about Modernism, a closer acquaintance with its leading lights is unlikely to change that inclination. Even Eliot, whose public persona was downright priggish, turns up here writing silly letters to Pound and exchanging ridiculous nicknames with him (Possum for Eliot, Brer Rabbit for Pound). These are men in their 30s, not schoolboys. Modernism’s rebellion against traditions and conventions may have aired out literary salons that had grown staid and stuffy; but it also opened the doors to a boatload of half-baked nonsense pretending to be art, supported by equally half-baked claims that artistic judgment itself is nonsense, that whoever proclaims himself an artist is one, and that whatever claims to be art is immune from critical appraisal.

All the attempts of later avant-garde enthusiasts to find profundity in his work are rebuked by Pound himself. At 81, asked to explain the structure of his Cantos, he answers, “It’s a botch. . . . I knew too little about so many things. I’ve read too little and I read very slowly. . . . I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make . . . a work of art.” His defenders have claimed alternately that a) he said no such thing, or that b) the poet’s judgment of his own work has no value. To which I say, well, o-o-okay! A year or two later he tells Allen Ginsberg, “At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron.” When Ginsberg praises Pound’s poetry, Pound says, “A mess. . . . Stupid and ignorant all the way through. Stupid and ignorant.” He also renounced the anti-Jewish calumnies in which he had indulged.

Thus in his dotage Ezra Pound seems to have arrived, finally, at a kind of wisdom and self-knowledge, à la King Lear—reminding me of that time-tested definition of tragedy: wisdom comes, but too late.

The Magic Mountain, then and now

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) stands at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th as Dante’s Divine Comedy stands at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. The threadbare plot is merely a framework within which Mann’s characters can indulge in long undergraduate arguments (“undergraduate” because of their enthusiasm, but undergraduate at a very high level—Oxford or Cambridge, for example) about history and philosophy, and his narrator can linger, endlessly it seems, over the minute details of weather, landscape, a lady’s dress, or Hans Castorp’s intricate thoughts and feelings. The history and philosophy debates sum up the Western tradition to that point—Greeks, Hebrews, Romans, Christianity, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the bourgeois anxieties of the 19th century—while somehow anticipating the insanities of the 20th century in which, as Mann foresaw, the brutalities of far-left ideologies would be matched blow-for-blow by the brutalities of far-right ideologies. There is more than a whiff of Dostoyevsky, too, blowing through Mann’s tuberculosis resort, both in the violent oscillations of the arguments and in the dark forebodings of the future. The Karamazov brothers would fit right in with the hypersensitive patients of The Magic Mountain. Inevitably, the novel includes an evening séance, but without a ouija board or certified Theosophist in attendance. These pampered folk, perpetually bored, search for entertainment just as their progeny do, three or four generations later. The only artists among them are dilettantes. The only intellectuals, Settembrini and Naphta, talk and talk and talk, without effect, until their comic-opera duel and the symbolic suicide of the Jesuit Bolshevik, Naphta. The fecklessness of the Magic Mountain’s inhabitants mirrors that of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901); the pointlessness of their lives, that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953).

The scoundrels, criminals, gangsters, and swindlers who actually make things happen never appear on the Magic Mountain. They are down below, cooking up the catastrophe we call World War I. A century later, what has changed, essentially?

Nonsense in a Strange Land

I revisited Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land after half a century by listening to the audiobook, which, mercifully, is based on the shorter version first published in 1962, rather than the “uncut” version published in the 1990s by Heinlein’s widow.

At its worst, the novel is a hodgepodge of nonsense interspersed with offensive and mildly offensive artifacts of the time when it was written and the gender of its author. At its best it does indeed (as Heinlein claimed) raise fundamental questions worth considering about who we are as a species, and how we ought to live. It’s something like the People Magazine version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Are the questions worth the nonsense? No. But the nonsense is just treacly enough to keep the book in print and selling for another fifty years, I fear.

 

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels

Think of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, with Nick Carraway observing his dubious friends and acquaintances—part of their story but always on the margin of the action.

Think of Marcel Proust’s endless reconsiderations of everything.

Turn the narrator into a woman, who adds to endless reconsiderations endless and peculiarly feminine doubts, self-doubts, waxing and waning of self-confidence.

Begin the story with two girls in a working-class neighbourhood of post-World War II Naples and its collection of petty criminals, gangsters, shopkeepers, and fascists whose wartime activities are never mentioned but permeate the air.

Is Lila/Lina Elena’s best friend? enemy? doppelganger? evil twin? Will Elena, like Nick Carraway and Melville’s Ishmael, escape the fate of the others, or will she be dragged down with them? The novels present an exhausting yet hypnotic four-volume, slow-motion train wreck covering half a century of these fascinating, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, occasionally hilarious lives.

In the background we get the Sixties, political upheaval, Cold War, the sexual revolution, etc.

P.S.: The men, with rare exceptions, do not come off well. Not at all.

P.P.S.: The narrator’s name is Elena, as is the author’s, and in the novels Elena becomes a novelist who writes about her best friend . . . but the novelist’s name is a nom de plume. And . . . the rumour mill has it that the author may actually be a man, writing under a woman’s name! Mon dieu!

Louis Barthas: the old lady and her garden

Louis Barthas (1879 – 1952) was a cooper (barrelmaker) from a small town in the south of France. He joined the army when war broke out in 1914 despite being a 35-year-old husband, the father of two young sons, and a socialist staunchly opposed to the war. During four years of service on the Western Front he kept a diary, and miraculously both he and his notebooks survived. He never thought to publish his war diaries, however; it was only his grandson, a school teacher, who recognized their value and brought them to the attention of a historian at a nearby university who arranged their publication in 1978. They were published in English as Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918. (Poilu in French means “hairy” or “bearded”; it is the slang term for the ordinary soldiers of the French army, similar to “Tommy” for the British soldiers, and “doughboys” for the Americans.)

In this passage from 1916, Barthas reveals his talents as a storyteller, his own quiet generosity, and his love for the simple pleasures of life. In early April, 1916, Barthas and his regiment have been relieved at the front and are resting behind the lines.

The long sojourn we had in this village was such that a great intimacy built up between the poilus and the inhabitants, especially among the ladies. Some idylls were kindled; there were some amorous adventures which became tied and untied. As for me, a loving and faithful husband, I won the affections of a lady of Lamotte.

But alas, for her and for me. The snows of sixty-five winters had colored her hair, and this lady was a poor old hag living with her husband in a shack at the far end of the village.

The husband, worn down by the years and by rheumatism, lay moaning in his bed. His wife used up her last reserves of strength making sure that her bits of field didn’t go fallow, as well as a rather large garden surrounding the thatched cottage, three-quarters of which were choked with thistles and other weeds.

I observed all this one day, when I was on my way to guard duty at the village’s exit points, this useless and ridiculous guard duty which they had set up according to established practice.

Except on Sundays, this guard duty was a sort of relief for the poilus; in exchange, you could cut out twenty-four hours of drills or parades. Only the four hours of night duty you’d pull could perhaps be wearisome for those who couldn’t appreciate the charm of solitude, of nocturnal silence, of contemplation of a starry sky, etc.

It’s true that, at this time, stinging April showers often troubled the poetic moonlit vigils. Then you would seek refuge in the clever little sentry boxes which the wicker workers had fashioned out of the boughs of the Crécy forest. But if the downpour lasted, you’d be chased out by the raindrops and find better shelter behind a wall. It was during one of my breaks between guard duty shifts that I picked up a tool and went to working, spading the old lady’s garden.

“But monsieur,” said the old lady, “you’re working for nothing. I’m too poor to pay you anything.”

“Don’t worry about that, grandma. I’ll stop by every day when I’m off duty, until your garden is in good shape and your potatoes are planted,” which she despaired about getting done in time.

In fact, four or five days later, the work was done. The old lady didn’t know how to express her thanks. She picked out for me the best apples in her cupboard, and I had to accept a coffee one evening. The old man wanted to be at the party, too, so we took our coffee in the sickroom.

As coquettish as any daughter of Eve, the old lady showed me her portrait at age twenty, and the old codger smiled impishly, as if to say, “You see, we were young once, and we were carefree in those days.”

And I had to listen to the tales of their young love. They were about to be married when the war broke out—the war of 1870, that is. He went off in the Garde Mobile. Once peace was signed, he hurried back to Lamotte to find his fiançee, but the Prussians were still occupying the region and the village. The marriage was put off. From morning to evening he was at her house, attending to her every need. One day, they were having a cozy tête-à-tête at home, which they hardly ever left, when a rude and insolent Unteroffizier burst in. He claimed that he needed some information, but his true purpose was to harass the lovers. He went so far as to try to kiss the young woman, right in front of her fiancé.

Evoking these distant memories, the old lady turned red with indignation, as if she could still feel the lips of the Boche.

But the story isn’t finished. The young man—now an old codger, nailed to his bed—had to defend the honor of his Picard blood, and to avenge the outrage he slapped the German on both cheeks.

The [German] dashed out more quickly than he had come in, but he came back a moment later with a squad of policemen who seized the unlucky fiancé and dragged him off to jail, under a rain of blows and kicks.

The cantonment’s [German] commander was a captain who inspired real terror among the inhabitants for his severity, his brutal discipline. He decided to set an example, to make it known that whoever dared to raise a hand against a German non-com would be shot the very next day.

He had no idea of the circumstances which brought on this incident. But luckily for our pair of young lovers, he was billeted at the home of the town’s mayor, who told him the whole story.

The terrifying officer summoned the young girl, the heroine of the story, to his office. She presented herself, fearful and faltering. There also appeared the ungallant non-com, who was forced to confess his misdeeds.

The next day they released the young Frenchman who was expecting to be shot. Three days later the village was delivered from German occupation. And our two young folks got married, loved each other, and had many children, now either dead or living far away. And they remained there, at home in the poor thatched cottage, from which only death would take them away.

E. F. Schumacher, “Small Is Beautiful” (1973)

Fifty years later, Schumacher’s critique of modern society has been confirmed by events.

He was ignored, of course, by economists, Wall Street, and politicians, and now we see the results that he predicted.

  • environmental collapse
  • pandemics
  • mass migrations into cities, and from poor countries to wealthy countries
  • rural areas and poor countries empty out and become backwaters of poverty, drug addiction, and resentment
  • the enormous wealth and income gap between the tiny billionaire class and everyone else

All of this has been driven by the greed of the ruling classes and justified by the misguided priorities of economic theory that pursue profits and growth, not universal prosperity and quality of life.

Some tasters:

Scientific or technological ‘solutions’ which poison the environment or degrade the social structure . . . are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction. . . .

Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or waterpower: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and ‘uneconomic’. . . .

Economics, which Lord Keynes had hoped would settle down as a modest occupation similar to dentistry, suddenly becomes the most important subject of all. Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government . . . . It tends to absorb the whole of ethics and to take precedence over all other human considerations. Now, quite clearly, this is a pathological development . . . .

It is a strange phenomenon indeed that the conventional wisdom of present-day economics can do nothing to help the poor.

Invariably it proves that only such policies are viable as have in fact the result of making those already rich and powerful, richer and more powerful. . . .

An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods . . . .

1782: Edward Gibbon describes the Germans and reveals himself

Edward Gibbon’s famous history may be reliable at some points, highly dubious at others. It does, however, provide a reliable portrait of its author. We see his wide learning and erudition. We feel his supreme self-confidence as he makes one bold assertion after another. We see the influence of his social class, his era, and his nationality in his unexamined assumptions about “civilization,” “savages,” and “barbarians.” (The same terms were often used by Europeans to describe the indigenous peoples of the Americas.) We see his respect for Christianity and corresponding disdain for pre-Christian, polytheistic religions. We see his disapproval of gambling, drunkenness, and infidelity, and his patriarchal attitude toward women. These oft-quoted passages about the Germanic tribes during the Roman Empire may or may not be reliable when it comes to the Germans, but they provide a clear portrait of their author. Writing reveals the writer.

From Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, Chapter IX (1782):

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [ca. 56-120 A.C.E.], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer, the ox, in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater, difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce, that without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.

Of these arts, the ancient Germans were wretchedly destitute. They passed their lives in a state of ignorance and poverty, which it has pleased some declaimers to dignify with the appellation of virtuous simplicity. . . . The value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas; and both these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent. . . . Money, in a word, is the most universal incitement, iron the most powerful instrument, of human industry; and it is very difficult to conceive by what means a people, neither actuated by the one, nor seconded by the other, could emerge from the grossest barbarism.

In the dull intervals of peace, these barbarians were immoderately addicted to deep gaming and excessive drinking; both of which, by different means, the one by inflaming their passions, the other by extinguishing their reason, alike relieved them from the pain of thinking. They gloried in passing whole days and nights at table; and the blood of friends and relations often stained their numerous and drunken assemblies. . . .

Strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. . . .

A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism. . . . A people thus jealous of their persons, and careless of their possessions, must have been totally destitute of industry and the arts, but animated with a high sense of honour and independence. . . .

“In the days of chivalry, or more properly of romance, all the men were brave and all the women were chaste;” and notwithstanding the latter of these virtues is acquired and preserved with much more difficulty than the former, it is ascribed, almost without exception, to the wives of the ancient Germans. Polygamy was not in use, except among the princes, and among them only for the sake of multiplying their alliances. Divorces were prohibited by manners rather than by laws. Adulteries were punished as rare and inexpiable crimes; nor was seduction justified by example and fashion. We may easily discover that Tacitus indulges an honest pleasure in the contrast of barbarian virtue with the dissolute conduct of the Roman ladies; yet there are some striking circumstances that give an air of truth, or at least probability, to the conjugal faith and chastity of the Germans. . . .

Although the progress of civilization has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favourable to the virtue of chastity, whose most dangerous enemy is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes most dangerous when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised by sentimental passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners, gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life. The German huts, open, on every side, to the eye of indiscretion or jealousy, were a better safeguard of conjugal fidelity than the walls, the bolts, and the eunuchs of a Persian harem. To this reason another may be added of a more honourable nature. The Germans treated their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion of importance, and fondly believed, that in their breasts resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human. . . . In their great invasions, the camps of the barbarians were filled with a multitude of women, who remained firm and undaunted amidst the sound of arms, the various forms of destruction, and the honourable wounds of their sons and husbands. . . . The sentiments and conduct of these high-spirited matrons may, at once, be considered as a cause, as an effect, and as a proof of the general character of the nation. . . .

The religious system of the Germans (if the wild opinions of savages can deserve that name) was dictated by their wants, their fears, and their ignorance. They adored the great visible objects and agents of nature, the Sun and the Moon, the Fire and the Earth; together with those imaginary deities, who were supposed to preside over the most important occupations of human life. They were persuaded, that, by some ridiculous arts of divination, they could discover the will of the superior beings, and that human sacrifices were the most precious and acceptable offering to their altars. Some applause has been hastily bestowed on the sublime notion, entertained by that people, of the Deity, whom they neither confined within the walls of the temple, nor represented by any human figure; but when we recollect, that the Germans were unskilled in architecture, and totally unacquainted with the art of sculpture, we shall readily assign the true reason of a scruple, which arose not so much from a superiority of reason, as from a want of ingenuity. The only temples in Germany were dark and ancient groves, consecrated by the reverence of succeeding generations. Their secret gloom, the imagined residence of an invisible power, by presenting no distinct object of fear or worship, impressed the mind with a still deeper sense of religious horror; and the priests, rude and illiterate as they were, had been taught by experience the use of every artifice that could preserve and fortify impressions so well suited to their own interest.

. . . A solemn procession was occasionally celebrated in the present countries of Mecklenburgh and Pomerania. The unknown symbol of the Earth, covered with a thick veil, was placed on a carriage drawn by cows; and in this manner the goddess, whose common residence was in the Isles of Rugen, visited several adjacent tribes of her worshippers. During her progress the sound of war was hushed, quarrels were suspended, arms laid aside, and the restless Germans had an opportunity of tasting the blessings of peace and harmony. . . .

Such was the situation, and such were the manners of the ancient Germans. Their climate, their want of learning, of arts, and of laws, their notions of honour, of gallantry, and of religion, their sense of freedom, impatience of peace, and thirst of enterprise, all contributed to form a people of military heroes. . . .

“Pigeon Tunnel,” by John Le Carré

John Le Carré’s memoir, Pigeon Tunnel (or is it David Cornwell’s memoir?) teems with con-men, fraudsters, spies, criminals, assassins, political subversives, and a gaggle of celebrities and one-percenters with whom they rub elbows at cocktail parties. I have never met any of the above, to my knowledge. Le Carré a.k.a. Cornwell’s elegantly-recounted anecdotes fascinated me, but the fascination gradually wore down to a residue of annoyance. Are there no ordinary people in Le Carré’s world? No loving mothers and fathers who do honest work, raise their kids as best they can, follow the rules, abide by the laws, and try to be the best people they can be? No. Such people do not make for exciting novels, which is why they are largely absent from Le Carré’s spy thrillers. Weirdly, though, they seem to have been equally absent from David Cornwell’s life. 

Immediately upon finishing Pigeon Tunnel, however, I listened to the most recent episode of Rob Reiner’s podcast series, Who Killed JFK?, and there they were again: spies, assassins, criminals, political subversives. Then I recalled reading somewhere that the three most valuable commodities in world trade were petroleum, weapons, and illegal drugs—all of which required the services of often-crooked lawyers and international bankers—and the world began to look again more like David Cornwell’s world. And I remembered one of my favourite Chinese phrases, 他们都是流氓: they are all gangsters. I am reminded, too, of Harry Lime in The Third Man, when he meets Holly Martins in Vienna’s Prater and looks down from the top of the Riesenrad at the tiny figures below. “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.”

So, are we deluded and naïve, we ordinary people who go to school and go to work and read books and listen to music and watch movies—do we live in willful ignorance on the fringes of a world fueled by greed and criminality? Or are the drug dealers and arms dealers and crooked bankers the deluded ones, fatuously believing that diamonds and caviar make life worth living?

Who are the suckers? Discuss.

Earl Palmer remembers . . .

Excerpts from Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, by Tony Scherman—long out of print, but wonderful. Earl Palmer was a first-call session drummer in Los Angeles from the late 50s into the 80s, but got his start in New Orleans (where he began as a boy tap-dancer) making records with Fats Domino and Little Richard. He is credited with inventing the straight-eighths beat on the hi-hat or cymbal that is characteristic of rock ‘n roll, and says that he got the idea from Little Richard’s straight eighth-note pounding on the piano. He is the drummer on hundreds of hit songs from the 1960s and 1970s, but also recorded film scores, TV jingles, etc., in almost every musical genre. He could sight-read almost anything, and also did a bit of arranging and composing.

Three of us in that group were the best jazz players in New Orleans at the time: Edward Frank , Red , and me. Sam Mooney never became well known but he was a good guitar player. Ellis Marsalis used to sub for Frank and sometimes for Tyler; sometimes he’d even play Earl’s bass. We welcomed that, because Earl couldn’t play. We used to cheer every time he hit a note that was actually in the chord. The people thought we were crazy. Earl had never gone near a bass, he just didn’t want to hire a bass player.

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[Racism in New Orleans]: White musicians who were in town at the Roosevelt came down . It wasn’t their fault they couldn’t take you downtown; you knew they couldn’t do a damn thing about it. 

I saw a white guy get thrown off a city bus once for sitting in the black section. “Can’t sit there, it’s the black section.”

“I can sit anywhere I want.”

“Not with niggers you can’t.” Threw him off the bus. One time Mike Sherpas, a white trumpet player we called Cheese, painted himself green. Got on the bus and said, “Where do you want me to sit, I’m green!” Threw him off, too.

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Me and Rene Hall and Plas Johnson always talked about how we could make some money and not leave the studio. One day I said, “Let’s do a rock version of ‘In the Mood.’”

“‘In the Mood’?”

Bought my house on it. 

You see, back in New Orleans millions of old white guys always said, “By God, do you boys know ‘In the Mood’?” If they liked it so much, why wouldn’t their kids, if we put a rock-and-roll beat to it? Rene and Plas said, “Okay, write an arrangement,” so I did. We put it under Ernie Fields, an old bandleader wasn’t doing nothing. It was a big, big hit. It went to number 4—that’s pop, not no R&B chart. We never did another thing, but it worked once. I’m telling you, “In the Mood.”

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When it really dawned on me that I could do this was when I had to play cartoon music, the hardest music I ever had to play. . . . Tom and Jerry fucking cartoons. . . . That music looked like fly shit, notes all over. 

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Rene Hall arranged everyone’s records. His stuff wasn’t my favorite but I admired one thing, the simplicity of it. “You Send Me,” that’s a perfect example of simplicity, I can’t think of any arrangement that could have been better for that tune. . . . 

I remember the stop-time in the bridge made me think of tap dancing. You know, that may have been my idea. I sort of remember suggesting that. 

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There was an engineer out there, I won’t call his name; somebody must have asked him what he thought once, and from then on he had to assert himself. Come a time he picked the wrongest thing in the world to say to the wrongest person and boy, when he said it the studio got to where you could hear a mouse piss on cotton. Because Red Callender was very, very particular about tuning his bass. Red was known to have great pitch, he was known to hit the note. So this engineer, sounding very authoritative, says to Red one day, “By the way, Red, I think you’re a little out of tune.”

Everybody say, “Oh shit.”

“Out of tune, you say?”

“Yeah, Red, a little bit.”

Red looks at the cat like he’s staring at an ant.

“And how in the fuck would you know?”

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Curt Wolf had the thickest German accent you could ever hear. I used to say, “Curt, man, when you going to speak English?” He’d say, “I em spicking Engglish, Airl!” 

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During a coffee break the subject came up about Orval Faubus, the segregationist in Arkansas. This same guy’s opinion was, “Segregation is a terrible thing, but those people,” meaning us, “have to be patient. Things like that don’t change overnight.”

He turned to me and said, “Do you or don’t you agree with me?”

I said, “Man, that’s a rough question.” I kept scratching my head. He didn’t notice I was stepping on his toe, harder and harder.

“Hey, you’re hurting my toe!” he finally yells. 

“Have a little patience, man. I’ll get off in a minute.”

He got my point. We became good friends.

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[Phil] Spector wasn’t an arranger of notes; I don’t know if he could write no notes at all. He was an arranger of ideas, of the elements that make a hit record. If there is any genius in him, that’s where it was. He had his finger on what other producers would die for: he knew what the kids wanted to hear. But you ain’t getting me to accept him as no musician.

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Sarah Vaughan was a chick that liked to hang. She was the Hang Out Queen, outhang anybody, drinking and getting high, day and night, talking and laughing and joking. . . . She had a mouth, too. Guys got furious at her but they took a swing at you. Anytime you was with her, you ran the risk of getting punched.

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The first time I met Ike [Turner] he’d just come in town. He wanted to pay everybody cash. I said I didn’t work for no cash. He starts to cuss me out and opens a briefcase with stacks of cash and a gun. That’s about what I expected. I’d heard he was a thug.

“Who the hell are you?” he says.

“I’m Palmer, and I don’t work no cash dates. I’m a union musician.”

“What I’m supposed to do, make out a contract just for you?”

“You going to have to do something like that, because I don’t want no cash money. When I get fined fifteen hundred dollars by the union, are you gonna pay?” He wound up filing a contract for me alone.

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[Bobby Darin]: He was head above shoulders more professional than most of the little singers I was doing around then: Paul Anka, Fabian, Bobby Rydell. Wayne Newton was a long-legged short-torso kid but Darin struck me as professional right off the bat.

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Paul Revere & the Raiders . . . was Hal [Blaine]’s client. . . .  

Teddy Reig asked me to do Manufacturers of Soul,  Basie’s album with Jackie Wilson. Harold Jones, Basie’s drummer at the time, didn’t play rock, which is part of why Teddy hired me. At the session he asked me, “What can we do to make these charts a little more commercial?”

“One thing, we could try using a tambourine.”

“Who can we get to play tambourine? Larry Bunker?” That made no sense—a top-notch percussionist, just to play tambourine?

“Man, let Harold play tambourine,” I said. 

“Can he?”

“All niggers play tambourine, Teddy.” Harold Jones played tambourine and got paid for it. I still have a medallion he gave me for that.

Teddy once tried to hire me to join Basie. “There was a time I would have paid to join this band,” I told him, “but I can’t afford to now.” Teddy said he understood. I said, “Man, I’m probably go home and get drunk after this.”

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They made a movie called Zachariah, a real hokey satire on cowboy days. Elvin Jones played a gunslinger. In his big scene, instead of saying, “Draw,” he says, “Gimme them drumsticks” and plays a big solo. . . .

Anyway, somehow or other the sound got messed up. The drum solo had to be played all over again. Jimmy [Haskell] told the producers, “Oh yeah, we can do that.”

I said, “Wait a minute. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to fucking do this, man.”

Haskell said, “Why not?”

“Do you know who this is? I can’t match Elvin, nobody can. The man is a genius.” Finally I said, “All right. Give me two hours.” I took my lunch and a Moviola machine and some music paper, went across the alley into a little room, and transcribed Elvin’s whole solo. Took me two-and-a-half hours to  write out a five-minute solo.  Then I played it. I not only got paid overtime, I got a bonus when they realized how hard that was and how near it came to being perfect.

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NUMEROUS DATES, 1970-74 — BAKED POTATO, SWEETS EDISON. Sundary nights, always a Sunday night. Never paid much, twenty bucks, but we drank for free and got a lot of coke. Don Randi, who owned the place, asked me about getting a group in there. I said, “Why don’t you get Sweets? He’s going to bring all the pimps and hookers in. Every musician that comes in town going to come by and see Sweets.” Sure enough, the Basie band came through and they all sat in. Ellington band, same thing. Red Foxx came in to work out his nightclub routine; he’d get up there and stay an hour or more. The band was me, Sweets, Plas Johnson, Dolo Coker on piano, Larry Gales on bass. That’s some of the best jazz I played here. Sweets is a stylist, a great stylist: the minute you hear him you know him. . . .

JANUARY 18, 1973 —  INAUGURATION, $1,500.00. Don Costa, Sinatra’s man, was musical director of the thing. Sinatra was emcee. . . . As it turned out, everybody brought their own band, so I wound up only playing with Roger Miller. All I had to do was walk around tasting hors d’oeuvres here and there. Since I was with Sinatra’s man, they gave me a Secret Service button that let me go in any room I wanted. All the guests are wondering, Who is he? They didn’t have many black Republicans then to speak of, so they all figure this is somebody they should know and don’t. It dawns on me: they’re worried. They don’t know who this nigger Republican is that’s big enough to be in this particular room. Who is this nigger? That’s exactly what they thinking. Who is this nigger? For him to be in here, must be somebody we supposed to know! I’m reading their minds. Who is this nigger? Must be an important nigger, an important nigger Republican AND WE DON’T KNOW HIM! Jesus, let’s don’t fuck up. Somebody find out who he is!

Nobody knew, except Mrs. Pat Boone. She saw me and came running over.

“Earl, what are you doing here?”

“Well, hi, Shirley. How’s Pat?”

“Wait, I’ll get him!” And she went and gets Pat and we’re shaking hands and hugging because I did a lot of work with him at Dot Records, and little Debbie’s hugging me and Shirley’s hugging me . . . . And the guests must have all breathed a great sigh of relief. Now we can find out who this nigger is. Everybody came swarming around Pat, who gave them the story.

“Oh! He’s an entertainment nigger! One of those kind, by God!

So now they all come up to me. “Oh, Mr. Palmer, are you having a nice time?” Mrs. Nixon, for one, very sweet lady.

“Yes, Mrs. President, I am, thank you very much.” I was feeling pretty good—I’d just smoked some weed with Pete Fountain’s band and Al Hirt. 

I met them all, I’m telling you, everyone but Nixon. John Dean was the only one asked me anything about what I did.

“Who are you going to be playing with?”

“Well, I don’t know yet. That’s why Mr. Costa had me come along.”

“You mean you’d be able to play with any of them?”

“Sure, that’s what we do all the time, play with anybody we have to.”

“Must be quite an experience.” . . . 

I was shocked when Sinatra exploded. They got their signals crossed and he introduced somebody, I can’t remember who, but Joey Heatherton came on. Wrong act. Sinatra hit the roof. I was in his dressing room with Costa and he storms in. “These cocksuckers don’t know what the fuck they’re doing!” I hadn’t realized until then what a rough guy this was. “Wait till my man gets in there, he’ll straighten this shit out.” I’m wondering, “What does he mean, his man? Nixon’s in.” You know what he was talking about? Agnew. He didn’t like Nixon worth a shit. That was his man, old Spiro.

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SEPTEMBER 25, 1973 — Midnight Special, . . . She came up the hall at NBC whe I was getting my shoes shined. I said, “Hello there.” Nothing wrong with saying hello.

She turned and said hi. Slowed down.

I said, “How are you? My, you look awful good.”

She said, “Thank you.” I got down off the shoeshine stand and talked to her. She was pretty, and very shapely. Had an Afro, not too big. One feature I liked about her, she had a little space between her teeth. That do something to you, too? She said she was there to be on some kind of talk show. 

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Angela,” she said. She never mentioned Davis. 

I suggested we meet for lunch. She said, “Yeah, that would be nice.” She didn’t turn a cartwheel, but she responded. I wouldn’t have imagined her to be receptive, and this is why I didn’t grasp who she was till long after. 

We met at the Carriage House, . . . I told her what I did and how busy I was. She wanted to know, “Do you have any control over what you do, over your work situation?”

“Control? Yeah, I take the job or I don’t.”

“Well, you’re rather prominent as a musician. You should be doing this and this and this,” and suddenly she’s talking all kind of politics. 

I said, “Wait a minute—why?”

She said, “Because there’s the exploiters and the exploited.”

I said, “Honey, nobody’s exploiting me, I’m just working.” I got a little indignant right there. She don’t know me from Adam and she’s already made a decision as to I’m being exploited and I don’t know what’s what in my job. I didn’t tell her she didn’t know what she was doing in whatever she did. What made her think because I flirted with her and hit on her that I was automatically an idiot? This had turned into something that had nothing to do with two people meeting and flirting, it was a real confrontation. 

She said, “Well, I can see there’s no way of reaching you. You’re just not prepared to hear what I have to say.”

“You’re damn right,” I said, and got up and walked away.

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It didn’t hit me right in the face. Maybe it should have. Ain’t like I wasn’t affected—I felt it in my pocket. Producers started letting groups record their own music, instead of session men doing it. . . . 

And then it finally hit me straight on, where you say, “Oh! This is why it’s happened and why it’s going to get worse.” If you remember, there was a movie called Chariots of Fire and one man, this Vangelis, did the whole score. Had electric drums, electric piano, had all this stuff. One man. And he got a Oscar. I said, “There you go. There’s the end of it right there.”

Trees, baby! Trees.

Bits and bobs from The Overstory, by Richard Powers:

“You’re a psychologist,” Mimi says to the recruit. “How do we convince people that we’re right?”

The newest Cascadian takes the bait. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

. . . which reminds me of e. e. cummings:

plato told

him:he couldn’t

believe it(jesus

told him;he

wouldn’t believe

it)lao

tsze

certainly told

him,and general

(yes

mam)

sherman;

and even

(believe it

or

not)you

told him:i told

him;we told him

(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took

a nipponized bit of

the old sixth

avenue

el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Another debatable claim—

The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

—seems increasingly dubious as this long, sprawling novel continues. Powers moves us most when showing us how much we have been missing in our understanding of nature—

“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. . . . Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete to eat them. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.”

—and by the end it is this overwhelming vision that sticks. The human dramas, which may have initially drawn us in to the story, have lost their power. We want to go into the woods, sit at the base of a tree, and just listen.