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Impressions: Beyond That, the Sea

01 Monday May 2023

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Review: Beyond That, the Sea, by Laura Spence-Ash
Celadon, 2023. 348 pp. $28

In 1940, as London’s taking a beating from German bombs, Beatrix Thompson’s parents make a difficult, painful decision, sending her, at age eleven, to live out the war with a family near Boston. How this evacuation happens isn’t explained—you’re asked to take it on trust, and apparently, the historical record supports it—but the rest unfolds as naturally as you please.

Landing among the Gregory family, Bea, an only child, now lives with two brothers—William, thirteen, and Gerald, nine. Ethan, their father, is somewhat withdrawn and controlling, a schoolmaster who takes himself too seriously and never looks at his wife, Nancy, long enough to realize he’s stifling her.

No bombs falling here: streetcar in South Boston, 1940 (courtesy City of Boston Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But Nancy, apparently the prime mover behind Bea’s presence in their home, is warm and attentive. Aside from tending the boys, she loves nothing better than to care for the girl, whether that means baking cookies or muffins, shopping for a new dress, tucking her in at night, or shepherding her past the social hurdles of a new country.

Just as Bea represents the daughter Nancy always wanted, Nancy’s the kinder, more demonstrative mother Bea has never had. But the girl understands that the life she now enjoys derives partly from the Gregorys’ financial resources, greater than her parents’, and American peacetime plenty, at which her eyes pop.

However, there’s more: the Gregorys also know how to have fun in ways Bea has never experienced. The high point comes during the summer, when the family vacations in Maine, in a house on an island all by itself. The girl learns to eat lobster, to swim, to bake, and to hold her own against two boys competing for her attention.

Consequently, you have to wonder what will happen when America joins the war and again, when Bea returns to London.

I like this premise, which offers plenty of chances for conflict, as with how her parents feel reading her letters; the boys’ sibling rivalry; and Nancy’s instant, consuming love for Bea, which grates on her prissy husband. Nevertheless, I like Beyond That, the Sea less than I wanted to.

Still, there are pleasures here, and first among these is the prose. It’s spare, economical, understated, creating mood and feeling in a few words, as with this early passage in which Bea struggles to write her parents:

She wants to tell them about the colors here: the way the yellow leaves cover the ground under the trees; the tiny purple flowers on the wallpaper on her bedroom wall; the golden raspberries from the garden that ooze out of the breakfast muffins. But she can never find the words. Or the words are there but it feels wrong to share them. She imagines the two of them sitting on the couch in the dark flat . . . . Or she sees them heading to the shelter beneath their building, to their spot a few feet from the unsteady pine steps. The smell of urine and the skittering of the rats.

That economy extends to the narrative, which spans decades lightly, in an impressionistic way. Chapters last only two or three pages, each through the eyes of a different character—seven third-person narrators during the war years, from both sides of the Atlantic. In keeping with the understated approach, Spence-Ash seems to want the reader to think, to enter the story. I want that too.

But I don’t think she succeeds. The terse chapters can be frustrating—I want to know more, see more—and many skip around conflict rather than show it. Often, they begin after a confrontation that a previous chapter has set up, revealing the characters’ reactions to what has happened, a lot of telling after the fact. I have trouble entering a narrative like that, let alone get cozy in it.

The storytelling leaves the outside world at a distance too. Even in the London scenes, the war doesn’t seep into minds or souls; and after America joins the fight, the atmosphere around Boston changes very little. I like my historical fiction to put me up close to the mood and mindset of the time, if not the action. That doesn’t happen here.

In a way, the manner in which the narrative avoids conflict, historical or personal, suits the characters, practically none of whom have a clue how to connect, and who’d rather dance around a point of contention instead of facing it. That’s frustrating too.

The tight-lipped restraint would work better if the reader glimpsed what the characters wanted but couldn’t ask for. But Spence-Ash’s scenes, though they reveal what’s happening in a particular moment, feel transitory, skimming the surface. As a result, I don’t see these characters’ inner lives.

For instance, William, the older Gregory brother, appeals to Bea for his intent to go places, be someone. He’s restless, unsatisfied, passionate, angry. But what would going places look like? He never says; he just wants to be different from his parents.

Accordingly, Beyond That, the Sea, though poignant in moments, never builds for me. I sense no crescendo, no rush of feeling, and no particular immediacy. It’s an interesting story, but I’m not compelled.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this commentary appears in different, shorter form.

Parenting advice, World War I era

14 Thursday Jul 2022

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Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

My protagonist, Rollie Birch, returns from Over There in 1919 and scandalizes the town that reveres him as a war hero by choosing to raise his infant daughter by himself. So I looked for a parenting book from those years to see what advice the experts were dishing out.

The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses, appeared in multiple editions before, during, and after the war, the most popular guide of its time. The author, L. Emmett Holt, MD, offered rigorous instructions for pasteurizing raw milk—the only kind available—at 155˚ F. for thirty minutes, in which case you had to use it within twenty-four hours, or boiled one hour, in which case the milk would keep two or three weeks.

Luther Emmett Holt, MD, eminent pediatrician, championed pasteurization, unusual for his time, and eugenics, a more mainstream position (no date; courtesy National Library of Medicine via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Either way, the stuff must have tasted mighty appetizing. Such were the days before flash heating, but you had no choice; back then, so many babies died from milk containing pathogens.

As for hands-on childcare, Holt counseled feeding on a strict schedule and deplored the instinct to pick up a fussing infant; no healthy baby, he averred, would cry for more than twenty minutes. (Rollie’s daughter ignores this rule.) Further, the doctor warned against playing with children younger than six months, which would make them nervous and irritable, and disliked the notion of playing with infants at all.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he cautioned against kissing infants, even on the cheek or forehead, for fear of transmitting diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other diseases.

Rollie reads this and laughs.

A Woman’s Place: Girl in Disguise

12 Monday Jul 2021

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Review: Girl in Disguise, by Greer Macallister
Sourcebooks, 2017. 301 pp. $26

Kate Warne’s up against it. Chicago in 1856 is a rough town for a young widow with no money, no job prospects, and no desire to remarry. Mistreated by parents who never loved her, exploited her, and taught her never to love or trust anyone, Kate has learned to lie and dissemble, as circumstances seem to require. That skill, at least, she picked up from her father, a down-on-his-luck actor who, when not putting on stage makeup to perform, tried his hand at con games.

Alexander Gardner’s photo at Antietam, September 1862, of Allan Pinkerton (seated, right) and a woman believed to be Kate Warne, standing behind him. (courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Which explains why, when Kate reads a want ad run by Allan Pinkerton looking for an operative to join his agency, she applies. After all, doesn’t she have the natural talent? Pinkerton nearly throws her out of his office; his profession is no place for a woman, he says. But Kate perseveres, of course, and Pinkerton reluctantly gives her a trial run — which doesn’t work out too well.

How that happens, and what she does about it, I’ll leave for you to find out, for Girl in Disguise is well worth your exploration. Be warned, however: Readers expecting a whodunit or thriller or even a unified plot will be disappointed, but, I expect, not for long. Such is the brio with which Macallister tells her story, and the loving attention she pays her protagonist, that it hardly matters.

Girl in Disguise is a coming-into-her-own novel, as Kate settles into her profession and masters it. Sometimes that process feels too easy, but rest assured, “no — and furthermore” resides here. The chapters represent cases, some of which are connected, especially in the narrative’s latter stages. But most stand alone, showing Kate’s progression, the professional and personal obstacles she faces, and, above all, how she handles a line of work that excites and fascinates her, yet leaves little or no room for a private life, let alone intimacy.

That, in turn, leads her toward self-discovery, because she must ask herself what she wants, and whether she’s lied so well to the world, she has fooled herself as well. As such, her character drives the narrative, an essential, given that the plot is episodic and fragmented. It’s an unusual way to approach a suspense novel, but here, it works.

Kate Warne was a real person, but little is known about her. Macallister does an impressive job re-creating her in plausible fashion. I particularly like the family history, which both brings out her character and influences the story line. Better yet, she lets Kate remain emotionally scarred. No miraculous transformations mar this book, for the author is too psychologically astute for that. The most exciting parts involve what few traces the real Kate Warne left in the historical record, and what tantalizing bits they are. She helped spirit Lincoln safely through Baltimore just before his first inauguration, foiling an assassination attempt. Later, during the Civil War, she performed surveillance on Rose Greenhow, a Washington socialite and clever Confederate spy.

Greenhow not only makes a worthy opponent, she comes across with particular vividness:

Artfully, she flirted, and I watched how she flirted. Her hands were deployed like soldiers to any front where they were needed: stroking a man’s sleeve to create intimacy, resting on the piano to reinforce her wealth, trailing along the side of her neck to draw attention to her body. She was not a young woman, but she was a beautiful one, no mistake. Her beauty alone was not all she had to offer. She gave off some kind of energy that drew men to her. Her gift, I saw, was attention. There was nothing more intoxicating to these men.

I wish Pinkerton’s characterization reached this level, but I don’t see his inner life or motivations as clearly as Kate’s or Greenhow’s. I wanted more from this major character. Lincoln’s cameo appearance provides just enough detail, I suppose, though I could have used a little more with him too, and George B. McClellan gets even shorter shrift, which I understand, yet which sets off my historian’s itch. During the war, McClellan would later command the Army of the Potomac and employ Pinkerton to run informants, who invariably offered inflated estimates of Confederate strength. McClellan swallowed them whole and used them as an excuse not to fight, driving Lincoln crazy. Maybe some other novelist will tackle that triangle.

The relative shallowness of the male characters is the most serious weakness of Girl in Disguise. With one exception, a suave, dapper colleague at Pinkerton’s agency who has a secret to protect, the men don’t measure up to Kate, Greenhow, or two women whom Kate trains as operatives.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed Girl in Disguise, which richly imagines a complex tale based on a sketchy historical record.

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

A Way of Seeing: The Electric Hotel

12 Monday Apr 2021

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Review: The Electric Hotel, by Dominic Smith
FSG, 2019. 352 pp. $18

In 1962, Claude Ballard lives in a once-fashionable Los Angeles residential hotel, among old film containers and equipment and memories of a difficult, yet stimulating, past. A long-forgotten (fictional) film director whose magnum opus was The Electric Hotel, shown only once, in 1910, Claude lives out his days taking neighborhood walks with camera in hand and keeping a benevolent eye on a neighbor, a former silent film star whose memory and understanding of her surroundings often desert her.

Into Claude’s quiet, measured existence wanders Martin Embry, an academic field historian writing his dissertation, who takes one look at the director’s apartment and wants to know if the celluloid in those canisters has been developed and preserved. Actually, he takes one whiff and realizes they haven’t, for the decomposing film gives off a strong odor, like vinegar, which Claude has never noticed. That shocks him and makes him more receptive when Martin tries to persuade him to loan him the films that can still be salvaged in the laboratory. Just as important, he coaxes the hermit to recount his life story; it’s as though Claude suddenly realizes that he’s been gathering dust and doesn’t have to.

And what a story, from a lonely youth in Alsace — Claude’s French, by birth — in which his mother died of smallpox when he was quite young. Claude nearly succumbs himself, and afterward, when his vision falters — “the edges of objects began to slowly quake and fringe” — the village doctor sends him to a specialist:

… Claude emerged with a wire frame prescription wrapped behind his ears and it was suddenly as if he’d swum to the surface of a very deep lake. The world rushed back in as the coppered edge of an October leaf, the crinoline hem of his teacher’s skirt, the yellow-white flange of a chanterelle mushroom on his father’s foraging table… He was a diver emerging from the murky, myopic depths into a bell jar of crystalline edges and forms.

That’s exactly the same impression Claude has when, years later in Paris, he watches the first moving pictures of his life. The Lumière brothers, pioneers known today mostly to ardent cinephiles, create minute-long films of everyday life — a bus traveling down the street, people in a crowd. From that moment, Claude knows his life mission. Not only does he want to learn about and make films, he wants to see and record life the way the Lumières do. A shy, withdrawn person who expects no one to notice him, for him, this is true adventure.

Marcellin Auzolle’s 1896 publicity poster for a Lumière brothers comic film, L’Arroseur arrosé (The Waterer Watered), showing the astonished, enthralled audience (courtesy moah.org/exhibits/archives/movies/movie _theatres_p.html; public domain in the United States)

The Electric Hotel requires a reader’s patience, for the narrative takes a while to get places, portraying Claude’s career, associates, and obsessive love for Sabine Montrose, a French actress who stars in his films. But every time I asked myself if I really wanted to continue reading, once I started, I got lost in the story. It’s not just the writing, which often leaps off the page. Nor is it the fascinating detail about making movies back in the old days–and Smith means old, before any of the silent-film stars commonly discussed today got their start (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Mary Pickford, to name a few).

The tale of how Claude and his friends film The Electric Hotel, which occupies the bulk of the novel, involves a Siberian tiger, a dirigible, an impossible leading lady, and a cameo appearance by a grasping, self-involved Thomas Edison. Equally important, the novel portrays a forgotten time and place. As always, people crave novelty, wish to be entertained, even to be shocked. But after they see Claude’s films, they may resent them afterward, because their attraction to the images tells them something about themselves they’d have preferred not to know.

So too with Claude, who tries to hide behind the camera, even into old age, to avoid facing his past. But the past never leaves — it’s all there, whether on celluloid or in meaning—and he’s a casualty.

Most of the characters come through fully, at least the important ones; other than Claude and Sabine, I particularly like Chip Spalding, the Australian stunt man who covers himself with grease and sets himself on fire. However, several lesser figures remain faceless, and I wish the narrative had paid more attention to them, rather than include certain sequences that contribute very little. I especially wonder about a long First World War segment in Belgium, which, though well told, seems utterly superfluous (and bears little resemblance to any historical facts I know, or even possibilities).

Nevertheless, The Electric Hotel may beguile you as a tale of a bygone era, evoking passionate excitement over a way of seeing that hadn’t existed before—and which we now take for granted.

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

Portrait of a Gentleman: The Master

31 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: The Master, by Colm Toíbín
Scribner, 2004. 339 pp. $17

Around the turn of the twentieth century, two famous brothers, Henry and William James, converse in Henry’s seaside home in Rye, East Sussex. William, philosopher, psychologist, and lecturer (in public life and private), says, “Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean. In this crowded and hurried reading age you will remain unread and neglected as long as you continue to indulge in this style and these subjects.”

Even — especially — as an admirer of Henry James, I have to laugh. I used to share William’s criticism of his brother’s prose, as probably many readers do today. But in this biographical novel of an author perhaps more closely attuned to social nuance and unspoken truth than any other of English expression, James’s world opens up with impressive clarity, poignancy, and depth. You see how the master thinks, observes, derives his fictions, absorbs tragedy and setbacks and — always tentatively — ventures beyond himself, almost invariably to retreat.

The great writer as a boy alongside his father, Henry, Sr., whose influence loomed large. From an 1854 daguerrotype by Mathew Brady (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Consequently, The Master delivers the story of how a writer’s mind works, the stuff that anyone who writes will recognize — the bits of life that beg to be set down, impatience for tiresome guests to depart so that you can get to work, the pains of failure, the glories when a reader picks up your work for the first time and tells you how much she likes it. (Notice how long my sentences are getting; be it known that Toíbín’s aren’t, for he hasn’t tried to write James, only about him.) But there’s much more, for Toíbín focuses on how a man who observes so keenly often remains an observer, and why. James’s fear of emotional entrapment conveys a figure who feels constantly under siege, though he might not say so. He worries that the world he knows is fast disappearing.

There’s little plot in The Master, yet there’s much activity, all laden with meaning. As the novel begins in 1895, Henry tries to circumvent his anxieties about the first performance of his play in London by attending a nearby theater showing Oscar Wilde’s comic drama, An Ideal Husband. James, who could be a prig, finds Wilde’s work completely vulgar and resents his success, more so after his own play fails miserably. But months later, when Wilde sues his lover’s father for slander over accusations of homosexuality, James takes a renewed interest in Wilde. It’s not schadenfreude but the first intimation that James has homosexual attractions and desires he’s never acted on.

Throughout, Toíbín handles that theme with the delicacy befitting his protagonist. How sad that this man, whose instincts are kindly and sensitive, who has many friends who clamor for his company, who understands children and easily befriends them, suppresses the longing that might have made him happier. Granted, no one’s more keenly aware of societal disapproval and pressure than Henry James, yet you sense that tact and discretion might have permitted more leeway than he allows himself.

But Toíbín also reveals Henry’s less attractive facets, such as his selfish refusal to help a couple dear friends in dire need. Or, earlier in his life, how his parents somehow decide the Civil War has nothing to do with him—startling, considering that the Jameses are staunch New England abolitionists, as are their friends. Two of Henry’s brothers enlist and serve as officers in a famous Black regiment; one is grievously wounded.

Those failures point to how his parents have arranged Henry’s life for him (and William’s, to some extent), though it’s Henry who never escapes that confinement. As he muses over the body of his only, beloved sister, who’s just died, he realizes what a circumscribed life they have both led:

Her face changed as the light changed. She seemed young and old, exhausted and quite utterly beautiful. . . . He and his sister would die childless; what they owned was theirs only while they lived. There would be no direct heirs. They had both recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love. They had never wanted it. He felt they had both been banished, sent into exile, left alone, while their siblings had married and their parents had followed one another into death. Sadly and tenderly, he touched her cold, composed hands.

The Master may not be for everybody. But you don’t have to be a fan of Henry James to appreciate its breadth and poignancy.

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

Which Side Are You on, Boys?: The Women of the Copper Country

11 Monday Nov 2019

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Review: The Women of the Copper Country, by Mary Doria Russell
Atria, 2019. 339 pp. $27

In June 1913, a man dies inside the Calumet and Hecla copper mine in Calumet, Michigan, the world’s largest. The fatality is neither remarkable nor surprising, for everyone in Calumet knows and dreads the sight of the dark-suited underling sent to inform the bereaved family — and, perhaps, repossess the house they rent from the company. Further, few people liked the dead man, stern and ill-tempered, even for a copper miner hardened by years of back-breaking, life-threatening toil for little more than pennies a day.

Nevertheless, this particular death fans the flame that has been smoldering within Annie Clements for years. What follows earns her the nickname “America’s Joan of Arc.” At first, the tale carries a whiff of Hollywood feel-good, because Annie’s efforts to unionize Calumet copper miners begin with great success and fanfare, even gain national attention. Meanwhile, James MacNaughton, the mine’s general manager, is so thoroughly despicable that even an opera librettist would hesitate to put a character like him on stage.

Anna Klobuchar Clemenc (pronounced “Clements”), as Jane Whitaker saw her in February 1914 (courtesy The Day Book, Chicago, via Wikimedia Commons)

But consider the source. Russell hews closely to biographical facts in her historical fiction, as she did with Doc, for instance; here, her afterword argues that the historical record justifies MacNaughton’s portrayal. As for Annie Clements, her miracle working meets immovable obstacles soon enough. Despite sympathy from a progressive governor, a National Guard commander who mistrusts hired strikebreakers, and even the White House–an alignment of constellations perhaps unique in the American labor firmament–MacNaughton will not be moved. He’s the definition of brutality and ruthlessness, and the company owns the town.

Russell begins every chapter with a brief quotation from Romeo and Juliet, which compares this struggle to that of Montague versus Capulet. But since nobody’s reading much Shakespeare in copper country, the device feels authorial and intrusive; and the quotations announce the mood and substance of what you’re about to read, which steals a march on the storytelling.

It also contributes to the sense of earnestness that mars the novel on occasion, visible partly in the exclamation points that pepper the pages. I agree wholeheartedly with Russell’s message, especially its resonance with today’s politics. Yet, for example, an early interior narrative from MacNaughton’s point of view feels cloying, historically accurate or not; let the man’s actions speak rather than his thoughts.

Still, there’s a lot to like about The Women of the Copper Country. Russell’s fans, of whom I’m one, shouldn’t expect the lyrical prose that drove Doc, and I’m glad she didn’t employ that style here. Annie’s trials are too hard-edged for that, and Calumet’s no place to indulge fancy. What you do get, though, is Russell’s trademark description, which can only come from a writer who knows a place or person from the inside:

You clock in and climb down flight after flight of slippery cut-stone stairs before a hike through miles of tunnels — just to start the day’s work. It’s cold underground. It’s wet. It smells of rock. Beyond that dim little funnel of light from your headlamp, there’s a hellish nothing, and Christ, the noise! After a few weeks, you’re half-deaf from the pounding of the drills. So you listen hard all the time to the crunch and scrape of shoveling, the squeal of train wheels grating on rusty rails, because a few seconds can make all the difference when a wall starts to come down.

This comes from Joe Clements, Annie’s rough, hard-drinking husband, one of the minor characters who help drive the novel. Annie’s a strong person, a gifted organizer, good soul, utterly courageous and self-sacrificing, feminist without knowing the word. But she’s also a little too good to be true, I think. You can see this especially when Mother Jones, the famously profane, tireless labor advocate, makes an appearance and steals the scene; her edges contrast with Annie’s smoothness. I also like Eva Savicki, a teenager who begins the novel besotted with a boy intent on ignoring her, only to come under Annie’s spell and grow into a committed, capable activist. That transition, one of Annie’s great accomplishments, echoes another theme, the belief that by helping one person, you help the whole world.

But what stays with me most from The Women of the Copper Country is the story. It may not seem memorable right way, because, unlike just about any novel you’ll ever read, in this one, things go well for our heroes at the start. But stay with it, for it’s hard to anticipate the manner in which so many setbacks take place, and how the characters struggle to overcome them or point out the injustice they suffer. Flawed though it is, The Women of the Copper Country makes a riveting tale that forces you to think about your own life.

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

The Prophet of Desire: The Dream Peddler

02 Monday Sep 2019

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Review: The Dream Peddler, by Martine Fournier Watson
Penguin, 2019. 370 pp. $16

Sometime in the early 1900s, a stranger comes to an unnamed American rural town. His name is Robert Owens, and the winter day he arrives, a young boy goes missing. Robert, though a newcomer, volunteers to help search, which creates a favorable first impression. He also dresses well, has courtly manners that people aren’t used to, and an engaging, unpretentious acceptance of human foibles, a trait that, as events prove, they’re used to even less.

Naturally, they wonder why he’s come, and whether he has designs on the widow in whose boardinghouse he lives. He doesn’t. He’s a traveling salesman, of sorts, and his product is dreams. Once word gets out, which happens slowly, he’s taken at first for a huckster and a charlatan, but he’s neither. Not once does he push his product (which comes in the form of colored liquids in glass vials), nor does he promise the sun, moon, and stars. When prospective customers approach him, he asks what they’d like to dream, decides whether he can help, and, if the answer is yes, mixes his elixirs for them, offering a money-back guarantee.

Freud’s first version of The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, in a print run of 600 copies that took eight years to sell out (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Robert’s an itinerant psychologist, in other words, and the town needs his services. Animosities and untapped desires abound, none of which must be thought of, or, heaven forbid, spoken about. Indirectly, Robert encourages his customers, who include the lovelorn, frustrated, bereft, ambitious, and heartbroken, to feel what has long lurked inside them. Not everybody believes him when he explains that dreams come from within and can’t predict the future, only provide a test version of it. They think he’s selling what they don’t have but can somehow acquire.

I love this premise and what Watson does with it. She’s made Robert a prophet of desire, and beneath his tolerant, wise exterior lies a deep shame and, perhaps, moral cowardice. He represents the notion that desire alone never hurts; it’s what you do with it that counts. I agree wholeheartedly, but many people don’t, and Watson’s fictional town is no exception, starting with the preacher, who believes Robert does Satan’s work.

Consequently, despite the liberation that many customers experience from their dreams, you sense that Robert will wear out his welcome, and you may even guess how that unfolds. Nevertheless, the how matters more than the what, for The Dream Peddler fairly glows with feeling, a narrative as irresistible as I’ve read in a long while. With great subtlety, Watson renders the complexities of small-town rural life, while modernity licks around the edges, scaring some and enticing others. I said the novel takes place in the early 1900s, but the only substantial clue is the lone automobile in town, a Ford belonging to the doctor, presumably a Model T. The way in which a few characters itch to see the world while others prefer to keep it at bay depicts a state of mind about to change: the twentieth century and its marvels and tragedies.

It’s hard to believe that The Dream Peddler is a first novel. Even without the sure-handed characterizations and storytelling, the prose would suggest an experienced pen. Consider this passage, about a man out cutting ice alongside his horse, Martha, to store in his ice house for the summer (itself a wonderful detail):

Charles came into that familiar thinning of the trees, and then the vastness of the ice spread out before him. Far away it was uncertain, rippled in places from the water’s unseen movement, but here where he stood closer to shore it was still thick and faithful. Martha walked onto it without fear, nostrils quivering in the cold… Ice cutting was hard work, but Charles enjoyed it. He was always enthralled by the white precision of the blocks as he lifted them from their hold, like marble destined for the walls of some exotic palace in a land he would never see.

Reading the name Robert Owens, I couldn’t help think of Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century Welsh industrialist and social reformer who founded a short-lived utopian socialist community in Indiana. Does Watson’s Robert have a utopian vision of desire? Unfortunately, yes.

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

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.

Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here: A Historical Artifact

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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“It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies.”

This aphorism is merely one of many revealing nuggets in a reprint I ran across of a U.S. War Department pamphlet from 1942, called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain. Whoever wrote it had a keen wit, a sympathetic but clear-eyed view of the British, and subscribed to more than a couple widely held prejudices of the time. He (I strongly suspect male authorship) had also either intuited or experienced the young American soldier’s propensity to brag, which is why the text continually skewers the notion that the GI is a hero simply for crossing the Atlantic and bailing out his clumsy British cousins.

Courtesy glossophilia.org

Courtesy glossophilia.org

 

The Instructions are meant, then, to caution against blundering into a social or political minefield through lack of empathy or understanding, thereby threatening the Anglo-American alliance, one ill-considered confrontation at a time. Covering everything from food (or lack of it) to the wage disparity between British and American soldiers to explanations of pounds, shillings, and pence, the pamphlet consistently warns against making assumptions based on appearances.

Some observations seem minor, yet are astute and thoughtful at heart, and you can imagine how ignorance might have led to hurtful or humiliating remarks. For instance, we’re told that London has no skyscrapers not because British architects couldn’t design them, but because the city was built on swampland. The shabbiness or disrepair visible in clothing, buildings, or public transportation results not from carelessness or lack of pride but from the way finite resources are funneled to the war effort.

Other observations have to do with manners or misperceptions. Where an American spectator at a ballgame might yell, “Take him out!” at a player who fails to perform to expectations, that’s bad form in Britain. The proper response is “Good try.” (I like that one.) Beer is brewed at below-peacetime strength “but can still make a man’s tongue wag at both ends.” (I like that one too.) Women in uniform aren’t ornaments but worthy contributors: “When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic–remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.” What’s interesting here, though, is that, from what I’ve read, British men were no more likely than Americans to accord women their due and were probably even less so.

The crucial point, however, is that Instructions for American Servicemen repeatedly emphasizes that the American soldier is there to destroy a common enemy, not to clean up a mess that Britain made. The author acknowledges that Britain lost the first couple of rounds, but so did the United States; and the soldier would do well to “remember how long the British alone held Hitler off without any help from anyone.” Consequently, the populace has taken a beating, having lost sixty thousand deaths to German bombing alone. “There are housewives in aprons and youngsters in knee pants . . . who have lived through more high explosives . . . than many soldiers saw . . . in the last war.”

But to characterize the British as victims would have done them a disservice and encouraged pity instead of sympathy and respect. Rather, the author points to their toughness and worthiness as an ally. The text pays due tribute to the celebrated determination to remain cheerful under fire and further underlines the intent to pay back the enemy for what he’s done. Don’t be fooled by tendencies to be soft-spoken or polite, the pamphlet says: “The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.” Such were the mores of 1942, and the assumptions of what it meant to be masculine.

The nitty-gritty, though, comes in a brief section dealing with how to behave among people who have less money than you do. Don’t be flashy, don’t rub it in, and, if you wish to befriend a British soldier, don’t belittle his army or “swipe his girl.” These warnings are downright prescient, for the following years led to a British complaint that their American allies were “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” No doubt this summation contained a world of stories; how could it have been otherwise?

I’d be curious if the British government ever published a similar pamphlet about their American visitors and, if so, what it said.

The Freedom to Belong: The Last Runaway

23 Thursday Apr 2015

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Review: The Last Runaway, by Tracy Chevalier
Penguin, 2013. 305 pp. $27.

In 1850, a young Quaker woman from Dorset, England, sets out for America with her sister, who’s engaged to marry a man in Faithwell, Ohio. But the sister dies en route, so Honor Bright (too cute a name by half) arrives in Faithwell bereft and alone. She’s also unexpected, for she decided to accompany her late sister on a whim, having been jilted by her English fiancé.

Instead of acceptance and welcome from her fellow Friends, Honor faces criticism of her accent, clothes, and introspective character. The one thing they admire is her ability to sew a quilt, which surpasses anyone else’s, though even there, they find ways to turn that against her. Sewing is her solace, her gift, her art (not that she’d call it that), and a respite amid so much else she dislikes. To Honor, Americans seem blunt and intrusive, and her surroundings, transient–buildings are ramshackle wood, and people act as if they’ll move further west at any moment (as some do). Worse, she can no longer stay in the house that took her in, so to anchor herself in Faithwell, she must marry into this alien community.

Slave_kidnap_post_1851_boston

However, that’s the least of it. Honor believes implicitly in the Friends’ creed that slavery is plain wrong, but that’s not how things go at Faithwell. Many runaway slaves come through Ohio, and the Fugitive Slave Act makes it a criminal offense to harbor or aid them. To Honor’s disgust and dismay, most Friends obey the law, for fear of losing their farms or going to prison.

If Honor persists in her view, she’ll be an outcast, but if she gives in, she’ll be untrue to herself. Her new neighbors tell her that slavery is an abstract concept in Britain (where it’s illegal), but in Ohio, a complex reality that doesn’t allow certainties. Their argument appalls her, but she’s at their mercy. What she does about it makes an excellent, compelling novel. I’ve read four of Chevalier’s, and I think The Last Runaway is her best since Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Chevalier makes terrific use of the tension involving runaway slaves, a slave catcher to whom Honor feels attracted, her place in Faithwell, and a potential mother-in-law who’s a nasty piece of work. But I especially like how the author unfolds Honor’s character, showing how she gradually overcomes her fear of a wild, intimidating landscape to enjoy its beauties, the first aspect of her new home to excite her. She finds pleasure in fireflies, hummingbirds, and other unfamiliar creatures, and learns to accept the products of the soil:

Honor closed her eyes and bit down, slicing the kernels with her teeth. She opened her eyes. Never had she tasted anything so fresh and sweet. This was corn in its purest form, a mouthful of life. Turning the cob, she bit again and again, to savor the taste, so different from the other corn dishes she’d eaten over the past weeks.

Chevalier also contrasts point of view, revealing Honor’s feelings in plaintive, lonely letters home, even as she tries to bear up under intense pressure. I like that touch, though the articulate, perfectly grammatical prose made me wonder whether Honor had really written them, considering that the narrative says nothing about her schooling or her reading, except for the Bible. Similarly, a few phrases from a key African-American character sounded modern to my ear, though I haven’t researched them and could be wrong.

In sum, though, The Last Runaway hits the mark, and I highly recommend it.

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