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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.

A Racket, But Maybe the Best Game in Town

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review
Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2014. 495 pp. $30

You may not want to read this book, but you should at least know what it says. And what Ian Morris says is “a paradoxical, counterintuitive, and frankly disturbing notion”: that throughout human history, war has made the world both safer and richer. He distinguishes two types of war, productive and nonproductive, so the argument is somewhat finer than it first appears. But you get the rough idea.

As someone who entered his teenage years when this country abandoned the promise of the Great Society to fight a pointless war in Southeast Asia, and when civil rights marchers were being beaten, jailed, and murdered simply for demanding their constitutional right to vote, on the face of it, I have a hard time swallowing Morris’s theory.

Even so, he persuaded me more than I thought he would. (I also have to say that I  enjoyed his witty, pungent prose.) I can believe that the Roman Empire, by subduing warring tribes, ended raiding and pillaging so that the odds of dying a violent death fell substantially over time. The same advance, Morris argues, occurred in ancient China and India, whereas in medieval Europe, it didn’t. Why? Because the rulers of Rome, China, and India–or, more precisely, their administrators–understood what the later European warlords didn’t, that plunder failed to pay in the long run.

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

What paid was enforcing civil order and charging for the service, which Morris calls “a racket, but it may still be the best game in town.” The racket worked if trade thrived, peasants fed the population and paid taxes, preferably collected by honest agents, because corruption hurt the state. However, civil order depended on force, as did repelling threats from without, so much of that efficiency and created wealth went toward military power. The difference between long-lasting empires and transient warlords was the willingness to restrain greed and incompetence and fight (mostly) those wars that strengthened the state, the productive ones. Take this to its logical conclusion, and you can see why empires end when maintaining their military advantage either becomes too expensive or physically impossible, and they risk fighting the wrong wars. As he points out, the United States faces this dilemma right now.

Where Morris falls short, I think, is when he starts sounding like a think tank, assuming that because the big picture makes sense (sort of), the little pictures must too. For instance, only once does he mention, in passing, civilian control of the military, the only means available to prevent those nasty, unproductive wars. That essential democratic concept must figure in the debate over how, or whether, democracies conduct wars against insurgents. Nor am I warmed all over by the idea that had Hitler won World War II, his empire would have been too large and piratical to sustain. I don’t care how many computer models have proven this; it’s no comfort.

I also mistrust averages, especially on a global scale. You may have heard of this paradox: Eight women throw a baby shower for a friend, but does that mean that all nine women average one month’s pregnancy? Of course not. So when I read that, over centuries, war has enriched the world by such-and-such percent, I want to know who got the money.

To his credit, Morris faces many ugly implications of his theory straight on. He repeatedly acknowledges that no victim of war would ever be cheered to think that the world had just been made safer or richer. But the most disturbing aspect, which he examines with such tact and grace that I have to applaud, is how violence seems ingrained in the human species and its primate relatives. His description of primate life is fascinating and eye-opening, and he damningly challenges Margaret Mead’s findings of peace and love on Samoa. (Apparently, her field research was much shorter and less thorough than she allowed.) I also liked his depiction of how the Soviet Union, built on bloody revolution and murder, peaceably dismantled itself about seventy years later.

War! What Is It Good For? is a provocative, important book, and I’m glad I read it.

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