Monthly Archives: January 2017

What Price Glory: To Conquer Hell

30 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, by Edward G. Lengel
Holt, 2008. 491 pp.

When I started this book, I never thought to finish it, let alone review it. I was looking for a few paragraphs of background information I could use for a character in a novel I’m writing, and I figured To Conquer Hell would give them to me. But it gave me so much more that I kept reading, and what I read moved and angered me so much that I couldn’t let go.

Let’s get one thing straight. Few people other than historians–maybe even military historians–will be tempted to learn in agonizing depth about the Meuse-Argonne, which lasted the final six weeks of the First World War and was the bloodiest campaign American soldiers have ever fought. In a sense, Lengel’s thoroughness tests the reader, for he covers every single engagement (there were dozens), often down to platoon level, always from eyewitness sources. His research is more than voluminous; it’s heroic.

Destruction at Argonne, 1920 (courtesy U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons)

Destruction at Argonne, 1920 (courtesy U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons)

But just as Georges Clemenceau, premier of France at the time, observed that war was too serious a matter to leave to the generals, what Lengel has to say about war, citizen-soldiers, and the responsibilities of government are too important to leave to military historians. By setting these facts and arguments down, Lengel has done a true service. Reading his narrative, you see how the failure to prepare for a war nobody wanted made it even more horrible than it needed to be.

In telling this story, it’s not just that he breathes life into names well known (John J. Pershing, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur) and obscure, or that the words of ordinary soldiers drive the narrative. Nor is it only that you see, feel, and smell the battlefields, sense the tension and terror in the participants, and empathize with their heartbreak. Most importantly, I think, Lengel conveys how poorly they were led at every level, including the highest, with an appalling indifference to their sufferings that amounted to criminal negligence. Citizens of a democratic nation expect better, and the United States failed.

Start at the top. President Woodrow Wilson had no inkling of how to conduct a war, nor any desire to discuss strategy, political goals, or general objectives with his chief field commander, Pershing, whom he left completely in the dark. The only imperative was rushing as many soldiers as possible to France as quickly as possible, which meant they arrived with little or no training or equipment. I shuddered to read of the poor young soldier, about to go into battle for the first time, who didn’t know how to fire his rifle; or another, who, when the command came to fix bayonets, kept staring at his, as if it must be broken.

Speaking of bayonets, Pershing believed that it was the ultimate weapon, and that neither artillery nor machine guns mattered. Firepower didn’t win battles, he thought; spirit and will to victory did. That was what the French and British had believed in 1914 and had spent three costly, bloody years unlearning. But Pershing was convinced he knew better, and that the Western Front hadn’t seen what American bravery could do. As a consequence, he stubbornly and repeatedly ordered frontal assaults against heavily entrenched positions, to be taken regardless of losses. The results were predictable–units mauled, not to say murdered, sometimes cut down to half strength, demoralized, isolated from one another and from supply lines. Yet the attacks continued, as men went into battle having gone without food or water for days, lacking ammunition or other essential material–and when they failed to take their objectives, headquarters blamed their lack of drive.

Commanders who told the truth were replaced. But few even bothered; more typical were the likes of Patton and MacArthur, who cared only for their own glory. Patton, whom Lengel calls “insane,” claimed to have killed a soldier who refused to attack by hitting him over the head with a shovel. MacArthur’s vanity vastly overshadowed his grasp of military tactics; he twice promised his superior that either he’d capture an assigned objective, or his entire command would die trying.

I’m not arguing (nor does Lengel try to suggest) that the country should have prepared for war much earlier, thereby avoiding these problems. After all, Wilson won reelection in November 1916 on an antiwar platform, and it took repeated German blunders to persuade him and the nation to intervene in a conflict widely considered a European imperial blood feud. Rather, Lengel argues that once the United States entered the war, vain, incompetent leadership doomed the American common soldier, and that their sacrifice–125,000 casualties in six weeks–was unnecessary.

While reading To Conquer Hell, I kept thinking of those thousands of men who’d either enlisted in good faith or been coerced, whether through the draft or by vigilante pressure against “slackers” or “cowards,” only to be treated as cannon fodder. The home front never did learn the truth.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Eccentrics at Love and War: The Dust That Falls from Dreams

23 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: The Dust That Falls from Dreams, by Louis de Bernières
Pantheon, 2015. 511 pp. $28

To his 1939 comic drama The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan added an end note, as if he worried that his audience would miss his all-too-obvious theme: “In the time of your life, live. . . . Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.”

The Dust That Falls from Dreams reminds me of Saroyan, providing a cast of (mostly) lovable and often hilarious eccentrics. Whether they realize it or not–and someone will eventually tell them–they’re searching for goodness everywhere, which they manage to find with surprising frequency. In other words, The Dust That Falls from Dreams bears only a passing resemblance to real life, though de Bernières has taken pains to re-create the Edwardian era and the First World War in precise detail. What matters most, he plumbs his characters’ inner lives. The apparent divide between the scrupulously accurate everyday and the fairy-dust plot is at once the novel’s charm and chief drawback; the earnestness with which de Bernières tells his tale fails to persuade me that his characters are plausible, much as I’d like to meet them.

 

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod's (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod’s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

That said, it would be churlish to dismiss The Dust That Falls from Dreams as mere fluff, and even if it were only that, it’s a lot of fun. The premise, loose as it is, supposes that the children of three neighboring families in the countryside south of London have formed such a strong attachment that even the First World War can’t shake it–if anything, the bonds become stronger. How that happens, and what tragedies get in the way, make for a wide-ranging narrative that explores social class, love, sex, religious faith, valor, family relations, and a once-established morality uprooted by war. The chapters are short and episodic, a format I dislike, yet de Bernières usually succeeds with it, because his characters carry the day.

There’s Hamilton McCosh, father of four daughters and husband to Mrs. McCosh, a vicious snob, bigot, and altogether impossible woman. “What mortification and inconvenience it was to live in such terror of one’s wife,” he muses, “and to be obliged to stand up to her so often.” The only way he (or anyone else) can get around her is by telling her that a royal personage or duchess has endorsed a particular activity or behavior, in which case it passes muster. Mr. McCosh survives by playing golf, inventing gadgets, and keeping mistresses (though these are hardly mentioned and don’t figure in the story). The four daughters–Rosie, Christabel, Ottilie, and Sophie–are each irrepressible; my favorite is Sophie, whose malapropisms send everyone, this reader included, into hysterical laughter.

De Bernières takes you into all manner of nooks and crannies, whether how to fly a Sopwith Camel, what it was like to clean and maintain an Edwardian house, attend a séance, or talk philosophy with Bertrand Russell during a chance meeting on a train. You also learn what it was like to live and die in the trenches in 1915 or work in a hospital tending the wounded. But the narrative seldom shows the fighting or the chaos of triage as the stretchers are unloaded, only their aftermath, usually recounted by a witness or participant. I believe this is a conscious choice, and that de Bernières wants the reader to focus on the aftermath and effects, described with an eye to the individual, the peculiar, because it’s individuals who matter above all to him.

Where The Dust That Falls from Dreams rubs me wrong lies with Mrs. McCosh and her eldest, Rosie. Mama McCosh abuses people right and left, almost all of whom rush to excuse her. She’s maddeningly funny in her ridiculous social prejudices, but she also causes immense damage. I get that The Dust That Falls from Dreams is about the milk of human kindness, but the narrative squares up to other cruelties without making excuses for them. She, however, gets a pass.

I find Rosie irritating for similar reasons; priggish self-denial is seldom interesting, and she won’t let herself dream of what she’s missing, which makes her even duller. She remains fixated on her fiancé, killed in battle, in a plodding mysticism that surpasses understanding, and her sense of duty threatens to strangle her and everyone else. Since the fiancé was a well-liked, kind, noble-hearted romantic of no particular accomplishment or talent–a beloved nonentity, if you will–I suppose that de Bernières is trying to use the pair to represent the Edwardian age, golden but doomed, irretrievable. But Rosie’s obstinacy, which forbids even any mention of what’s happening, can be tiresome.

Consequently, I think The Dust That Falls from Dreams succeeds best as a discursive, sometimes antic take on its subject that delivers its most serious impact when, paradoxically, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Hustles and Bustles: To Capture What We Cannot Keep

16 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: To Capture What We Cannot Keep, by Beatrice Colin
Flatiron, 2016. 289 pp. $26

Imagine meeting the love of your life on a hot-air balloon ride, and that he happens to be the chief lieutenant to Gustave Eiffel, just then (1886) about to begin construction on the tower that will become famous. This is the engaging premise to a well-plotted, hard-edged romantic novel of literary credentials that vividly delivers both the luxury and seamy side of Paris during the Belle Époque. What more could you want?

Newspaper caricature of Gustave Eiffel, reflecting the storm of criticism for having compared his as-yet unbuillt structure to the pyramids (Le Temps, February 14, 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Caricature of Gustave Eiffel, who compared his unbuilt tower to the pyramids (Le Temps, 14 February 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Well, a couple things, actually, but I don’t want to carp, since I thoroughly enjoyed To Capture What We Cannot Keep and suspect that you will too. Even so, let’s get one thing out of the way, the unfortunate title, which evokes All the Light We Cannot See. Authors don’t always decide their titles, and if this one sounds like pandering, Colin succeeds in at least one respect where Anthony Doerr, her presumed predecessor, failed. There’s no treacle here, nothing that even remotely resembles it. The only obvious similarity is that both books take place in France.

Caitriona Wallace (a histrionic name, I think), is a thirty-year-old Scottish widow reduced to playing chaperone for the beloved niece and nephew of a wealthy Glaswegian industrialist on their grand tour of Europe. Shortly before the trio are to leave Paris, Caitriona, known as Cait, takes that fateful balloon ride and meets–or sort of meets–Émile Noguier, an engineer whose direct appraisal seems less than wholly gentlemanly and thus very exciting.

And so things turns out, but, as in any worthwhile romance, the course of true love never does run smooth. The memory of Cait’s marriage pains her, but where most people assume that her husband’s untimely death is what troubles her, that’s not what hurts most, the details of which take a good while to emerge. More importantly, though Cait recognizes the unfairness behind the sexual double standard and dislikes corsets and bustles, she feels bound to uphold propriety, especially since her two young charges are determined to find trouble. As for Émile, he too feels pressured, with a domineering mother and a family tradition on one side, and a taste for Montmartre artists’ models on the other.

I like how Colin uses Paris, a city she understands and loves, to embody her characters’ outlook and desires:

Children threw rocks into dirty brown puddles, while girls only a few years older, with strings of imitation pearls around their necks and jewels of rain in their hair, waited in doorways for customers. It had shocked Cait at first, the poverty, the brazenness with which young women sold themselves, the casual attitude toward destitution and morality.

For Émile, building the tower, to him a work of art unlike any known before, requires a lot of ugliness before beauty can arise:

The men had quarried down through damp clay and wet sand, through mud studded with broken crockery and shards of glass, with splinters of animal bone and flakes of flint, and now the air reeked of decayed things, of sulfur and rot. Cutting across everything, however, making your eyes water and the world intermittently gray and indistinct, were clouds of woodsmoke. The fires seemed to burn day and night, purifying and polluting in equal measure.

With prose like this and a keen eye for psychological moments, Colin conveys the fullness of her protagonists’ inner lives and how convention keeps them from seeking what will make them happy. Several secondary characters also emerge in full, such as a conniving beauty of easy virtue and a gift for manipulating the naive, and Eiffel himself–narcissistic, generous, but always looking out for number one. Colin turns a few clichés inside out and keeps you guessing as to the resolution; “no; and furthermore” flourishes here.

But sometimes to resolve the obstacles she places, she leans on a minor contrivance or two of her own, most particularly the cardboard niece and nephew. Alice is a twit of great beauty but no culture or manners who seems completely obsessed with getting engaged at age nineteen. If she’s to be a twit, at least she can show some individuality about it. Ditto her brother Jamie, a spendthrift wastrel who causes a great deal of harm without even trying.

Finally, I wish Colin had fleshed out one point of history, a scandal regarding an attempt to build a canal in Panama, which ruined Ferdinand de Lesseps, entrepreneur behind the Suez Canal, and almost dragged down Eiffel too. The failure bankrupted an entire swath of French society, involved government bribery–causing no end of trouble for the still-young Third Republic–and incited a wave of anti-Semitism. I understand why Colin didn’t want to get enmeshed in the Panama affair, yet I think she might have hinted at how deeply the scandal roiled the country, beyond mere mention of lost fortunes and how Eiffel suddenly lost his social cachet.

All the same, To Capture What We Cannot Keep will satisfy legions of readers.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Traitor or Dreamer?: Judas

09 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: Judas, by Amos Oz
Houghton Mifflin, 2016. 305 pp. $25

It’s not every novelist who can write a talky narrative based on three irritating characters and expect readers to sit still for it. But if anyone has earned that right, Amos Oz must be on the list. With such authors as A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, Oz is the conscience of Israel and a bold, critical voice whose refrain is what nobody wants to hear: There are no easy answers.

Raising the new flag of the State of Israel, drawn in ink, at The ink-drawn national flag of Israel flies at Um Rashrash (now Eilat), 1949, Misha Achad (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Raising the new flag of the State of Israel, drawn in ink, at Um Rashrash (now Eilat), 1949, Micha Perry (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Consider Judas, then, a musing about men and women, power and treason, and the inevitable bloodshed that ensues when a reform movement believes it can solve the world’s problems. Don’t count on a plot or even a captivating premise, but do expect provocative ideas that demand a hearing.

What story there is could be called a coming of age, set in Jerusalem in 1959. Shmuel Ash, a graduate student in Biblical studies, has lost his way, literally and figuratively. His father’s business has failed, which means that the parental stipend keeping Shmuel in school will no longer be forthcoming. But, partly because his girlfriend has left him to marry another man, he’s lost his fire to complete his master’s degree, and drops out. At loose ends, he accepts a job as companion to an elderly man, Gershom Wald, for which he receives room, board, and a modest wage from Wald’s daughter-in-law, Atalia Abravanel. Shmuel’s job is to talk to Wald every evening–or, more usually, listen, for the older man has much to say about the formation of the state of Israel, then little more than a decade old, and the state of the world. Wald is cranky, obstinate, and often rude, whereas Shmuel, though he has a kind heart, has never learned to listen or handle his many anxieties, which is why his girlfriend left him. Meanwhile, Atalia, a forty-five-year-old widow who combines the sexiness and aloofness guaranteed to drive a younger man wild, teases her houseguest, whom she can plainly see is attracted to her, often cutting him down in the process.

If this sounds like a real drag, gentle reader, I understand completely. I kept reading because it’s Oz, who writes from deep insight in terrific prose, and because the novel takes up issues as crucial now as they were in 1959. First, as Wald says (and, I believe, speaking for the author):

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all rose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood. Personally I do not believe in world reform.

According to Atalia, however, Zionism is just such a faith. Though she never gets drawn into the dialectic–she speaks with her presence–her husband was killed in the War of Independence in 1947, and she’s angry about it. She’s also angry that her late father, among the idealists who helped found the state, was dismissed from its highest councils and treated as a traitor for suggesting that Jew and Arab could live in peace and hold the land in common. He’s the Judas of the title, or one of them; but again, this is Oz, and things aren’t so simple.

Before Shmuel left graduate school, he was studying Jewish views of Jesus, a focus that led him to reexamine Judas. Shmuel believes that Judas loved Jesus, admired his teachings, and lobbied for his crucifixion as a means of perpetuating them, attempting to elevate him to the status of messiah, which Jesus never claimed for himself. Just as Judas feared that unless he acted, his master’s lessons would be lost, Atalia’s father assumed that because his Arab friends would never hurt him, all Arabs would welcome independence from Britain as allies of the Jews. Both men miscalculated, of course. Jesus became a Christian symbol, and Judas, a Christian excuse for anti-Semitism; and Israel’s War of Independence was one that the Jews could not afford to lose.

Having won, though, the victors committed their own excesses and remain in control through military power. Consequently, Oz places Israel between a rock and a hard place: Disarm, and you die; remain armed, and you’re doomed to oppress. Interestingly, he plays out this theme in the sexual dance between Atalia and Shmuel. Having suffered terrible losses, she’s scarred and distant, but Shmuel appeals to her, a little, because he lacks the self-absorbed, macho-infused ambition of the war heroes rising to the top of Jerusalem society.

I wish I could say Judas is for everybody. Even so, I’m likely to remember what’s in it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Degas and Cassatt: I Always Loved You

02 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: I Always Loved You, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2014. 343 pp. $28

In 1877, the painter Mary Cassatt has reached a crossroads. The official Paris salon has just rejected her work, yet again, leading her to question whether her dream of being a painter is an egoistic fantasy. Back in Pennsylvania, her father thinks so, and since he’s supporting her life in Europe, he also thinks that gives him the right to tell his daughter–now in her early thirties–that it’s time to give up her foolishness and settle down to what a woman’s supposed to do. Not that she disagrees, entirely; Mary loves children and would like to have a husband and family, all other things being equal.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But they’re not equal. With few exceptions, notably Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law, a vivid character here, women don’t paint. They adorn canvases, share artists’ beds, offer admiration, and otherwise stay out of the way. Mary, as a foreigner, a real talent, and a woman unwilling to walk ten paces behind anyone, poses a threat to the fraternity of French painters, as a professional and a prospective marriage partner.

At this critical juncture, when the personal and artistic paths seem blocked, Cassatt meets an artist she’s long admired, Edgar Degas. Right away, he tells her that she can paint but is wasting herself trying to ape accepted styles rather than find her own. To be successful, she must serve her obsession, whatever great theme drives her to put brush to canvas. These words electrify her, as does his rigorous devotion to his art, and since he despises social convention, he takes her more seriously as a fellow professional than many of their contemporaries.

However, the social conventions Degas despises include sensitivity toward others, generosity, courtesy, kindness, keeping promises, or pulling together toward a common goal. He also has no love for anything or anyone other than himself and his art. Cassatt couldn’t be more different, so you know that whatever these two artists mean to one another, it will be a bumpy ride.

Then again, this is Paris, and the characters who populate this novel are artists–vain, gifted, self-doubting, jealous, often careless of others’ feelings. Oliveira excels at portraying this atmosphere, in which only the thick-skinned survive, and half the battle is knowing when not to put skin on the line. Consider this social gathering:

Soon after, the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

This tableau is like a painting, which could be titled Just Before the Verbal Fireworks. In what follows, Mary subtly bests Émile Zola, one way she proves that she belongs. But her struggle is never-ending, because that’s the artist’s lot, whether within herself, her profession, or society at large. I have to think the author is talking about writers too when she has Degas and Cassatt wrestle constantly with the “unbidden terror”: whether their work is as good as they think and hope it is, and whether the right touch will suddenly desert them, if it hasn’t already.

The stakes increase for Cassatt when her father decides to move the family back to Paris (they had lived there in Mary’s youth). Though Robert Cassatt is no longer telling her to pack up her easel and come home to Pennsylvania, he’s an impossible man, and he’s there all the time. Demanding, selfish, self-absorbed, and dedicated to the proposition that if something doesn’t make money, it’s not worth doing, he’s poison for his long-suffering daughter, who expends much energy standing up to him.

That she’s had to deal with him all her life makes her a match for Degas, whose faults loom large in these pages. Thanks to Oliveira’s fully rounded portrayal, I understand him. But I don’t like him one bit, and you have to wonder why Cassatt still bothers with him long after he’s burned her, and others, many times. There are other excellent artists within her circle, and she must have met many kinder, more sensitive men. Why, then, her fascination with a selfish boor?

As an art lover, though, I admit my biases. Degas’s work has always seemed repetitive to me–ballerinas and bathers–and it’s hard to get around his rabid anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir shared that prejudice. On the other hand, having seen too few of Cassatt’s paintings, I’d always thought of her as a minor artist, until I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., a year ago. She’s very much the real deal–Degas was right about that–and I Always Loved You does her justice.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.