Mikhail Sholokhov-And Quiet Flows the Don (1928)

Middling long Soviet-era--really Stalin-era--novel, the major work of Mikhail Sholokhov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. Sholokhov is a figure not unattended with some controversy. At numerous points in his life he was accused of either plagiarizing or not having written most of his most famous book, though it appears that modern scholarship with regard to the surviving manuscripts as well as computer analysis of his authorial style across all of his extant works has acquitted him of this charge. Without knowing anything else about him, he also arouses a sense of suspicion at first consideration, deservedly or not, by the circumstance of his being a working writer through the teeth of the Stalin reign of terror in the U.S.S.R. without ever having to go into exile, or be imprisoned, or shot, as our conditioning tells would have been the case with any writer of that time or place who was at all good, or honest, or courageous. Sholokhov, however, survived the entirety of this period in apparent good standing, and on several occasions is reported at least to have written fairly bold missives to Stalin himself regarding the dire conditions in his home region (The Rostov--Don River area in the South of European Russia, roughly northeast of Ukraine). He met the dictator on at least two occasions and was summoned (well, according to his Wikipedia page he was 'invited') to the Kremlin for a personal meeting in 1937. Whatever his character or position with regard to the regime I imagine it would certainly have required a degree of fortitude lacking in most western middle class men to endure a face to face meeting with Stalin in 1937. No one was so 'in' as to be certain nothing very bad wasn't going to happen to them at any given time. Sholokhov, born of a generation of men who between war, revolution, famine, and political violence died young in large numbers, lived until 1984 and was awarded many titles and honors in the Soviet Union.

An interesting thing about the IFE list is that while it is more or less a family-friendly set of titles for middle America, and includes a fair number of specifically children's or adolescent's books, it also has a decent share of books like this which deal with grimmer material. And Quiet Flows the Don is concerned with the lives of various members of a Cossack village, mostly male, from the years just before World War I and continuing through that conflict, the Revolution of 1917, and ending in the midst of the Civil War, in the book as yet unresolved, which followed upon the revolution, the closing episodes involving the capture and executions of various troops of "reds", though these episodes follow upon others in which it is the "reds" who are administering the executions. I think it is a good book, the style in keeping with the grand tradition of Russian novels, though the main characters are drawn from a much rougher and less polite segment of society than one usually finds in the classics of the 19th century. The descriptions of the country and the working and social life of the Cossacks were presented unobtrusively, woven into the narrative and all of that, but gave a vivid picture of the setting of the book nonetheless. The physical intimacy with the earth, and with animals of all sorts, though common to many older novels, made a more than usually strong impression in this. Against this background swept the drama and intensity of rape, adultery, casual violence between men, class exploitation of all kinds, war, political executions. Much of this, especially towards the end of the book, was in the service of Communist agitprop, which weakened the impact of certain episodes, though others had the quality of seeming to be authentic accounts of real situation, regardless of the politics involved. The politically motivated violence from the sections about the Revolution and the Civil War strike me as possibly honestly observed accounts of what went on at the time. It is not implied that the communist side was pristine or at all times just in its carrying out of executions and the like, though in the service of a necessary end.

The section on World War I I thought contained some good material. I have always found books about this war to be in general more interesting than books about World War II, because the old, classical Europe that is in the process of being blown apart is almost always still present in some degree both in the consciousness of the protagonists of the books and in the geography and manner of life of whatever country we are in. The descriptions of the initial skirmishes, and the last days, and hours, just before them, along the borderlands of Austria and Russia in August 1914 partake of this haunting quality that I find so attractive and central to my perception of so much about the nature of the world.

"The silence howled stupefyingly. From the open window of one house came the naive striking of a clock."

"1916. October. Night. Rain and wind. The trenches in the alder-grown marshes of Polesie. Barbed-wire entanglements in front. A freezing slush in the trenches. The wet sheet-iron of an observation post gleams faintly. Lights here and there in the dugouts."

The first world war is famous for its atrocious weather. Mainly rain, wind, cold and mud.

In the book at least, it took some time and build-up before someone took the decisive step of putting quick bullets into the heads of captured or otherwise defenseless members of the higher social classes during the revolution. One wonders about something like this coming to pass here, especially based on what one reads on the internet, the degree of utter contempt in which so many people seem to hold their fellow countrymen, and the desire to deprive their enemies of all pretension to to dignity and human worth, well beyond the point, as far as I can see, of any reconciliation.

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

Due to the 14-way tie for 9th place, we had to have an expanded tournament this time.

1. Top Gun (movie)...........................................................................................1,499
2. The New England Primer.................................................................................159
3. Orlando Figes--A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution.....117
4. Jose Saramago--Raised From the Ground.......................................................38
5. Alina Bronsky--The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine................................23
6. Victor Serge--From Lenin to Stalin.....................................................................5
7. R.R. Palmer-The Age of the Democratic Revolution...........................................3
8. Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke....................................1
9. William Masselink--I and the Children Thou Hast Given Me.............................0
10. William Masselink--Sermons on the Commandments.......................................0
11. William Masselink--J. Gresham Macken-.........................................................0
12. Ben Masselink--General Revelation and Common Grace.................................0
13. William Masselink--Why Thousand Years?.......................................................0
14. Ben Masselink--The Cracker Jack Marines.......................................................0
15. Edward Masselink--The Heidelberg Story.........................................................0
16. Ben Masselink--The Deadliest Weapon..............................................................0
17. Ben Masselink--The Danger Islands..................................................................0
18. Ben Masselink--Green........................................................................................0
19. Ethel Mannin--Young in the Twenties.................................................................0
20. Ethel Mannin--Stories From My Life..................................................................0
21. Ethel Mannin--Sunset Over Dartmoor................................................................0
22. Burbank and Ransel (eds.)--Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire.....0

1st Round

#22 Burbank and Ransel over #11 Masselink. The New Hampshire library database does have an entry for the winning book in its system, though there don't seem to currently be any copies of it available anywhere in the state.

#12 Masselink over #21 Mannin. With one exception, none of the other books in the first round have any presence in the New Hampshire State library system.

#13 Masselink over #20 Mannin.

The Masselinks are all related, There are some web pages devoted to the extensive genealogy of this moderately distinguished family, but I don't have the time to do more extensive researches into their respective scholarly and literary careers.

#14 Masselink over #19 Mannin

Ethel Mannin was a very prolific and long-lived British author (active 1923-1977) who probably wrote seventy or eighty books. She doesn't seem to be read much anymore.

#18 Ben Masselink over #15 Edward Masselink. This is the exception. Green: the Story of a Caribbean Turtle's Struggle for Survival is available at three locations, these being, for the record, the University of New Hampshire, the Finch Museum (?), and Lilac Public (?).

#16 The Deadliest Weapon over #17 The Danger Islands

The Sweet 16. 

#22 Burbank & Ransel over #1 Top Gun

#2 New England Primer over #18 Masselink. Kind of a grind it out victory for the #2 seed, which does not have a much stronger library presence than the Masselink champion.

#3 Figes over #16 Masselink.

#4 Saramago over #14 Masselink

#5 Bronsky over #13 Masselink

#6 Serge over #12 Masselink

#7 Palmer over #10 Masselink

#8 Clarkes over #9 Masselink

Elite 8

#2 New England Primer over #22 Burbank and Ransel

#3 Figes over #8 the Clarkes

#7 Palmer over #4 Saramago. Despite winning the Nobel Prize the Saramago book is not available at libraries easily accessible to me while Palmer's antediluvian historical tome is.

#5 Bronsky over #6 Serge

Final Four

#7 Palmer over #2 New England Primer. On a technicality. The New England Primer in the collection of the New Hampshire State library is non-circulating.

#3 Figes over #5 Bronsky. Figes's book is not available at my local libraries, while Bronsky's is, but due to multiple recurrences during the qualifying round, Figes is entitled to one upset, and he gets that here.

Championship

#7 Palmer over #3 Figes. Figes is not entitled to two upsets, giving Palmer a most improbable victory.

March Update

A List: Somerset Maugham--Ashenden, or the British Agent..............................282/304

B List: Currently between books.

C List: R. R. Palmer--The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Challenge...333/528

Late this month. The 6th fell on a Sunday, which is a bad day for me to get any computer time. Obviously any writing time is hard to come by at this point.

The Maugham book is a readable product, ideally consumed, as Ashenden himself would do so, in first class railway carriages and sitting in one's robe and slippers with a glass of sherry by the fire in a Swiss hotel. He (Maugham) does have some literary skills, notably in the area of dialogue that moves the particular episode forward and is somewhat satisfying to the brain at the same time. He is mostly a reassuring kind of writer, the reassurance being that if you are a socially unsophisticated and only modestly smart reader, but find those qualities at a slightly higher, but not dangerous, stage of development attractive in others, he is there for you. As far as this book is concerned, Ashenden is involved in espionage, but it is really more of a travelogue and study of broad and recognizable types than a spy book, Ashenden is never in any physical danger nor is he required to outwit any particularly formidable opponent. The American character is an ignoramus and a bore who is enamored of the sound of his own voice, the Russian ones are fiercely serious and tormented and intellectual. It's that kind of book.

R. R. Palmer (1909-2002) was a historian and college professor, mainly at Princeton, from 1936 to 1977. Several of his publications are considered distinguished, and the two-part Age of the Democratic Revolution is considered his masterpiece. How I came to be reading this large work I will go into more in my next book report when I get around to it. It is a departure from the kind of thing I usually read, which is good, but some sections in it come more alive to me for whatever reason than others. To my surprise, for example, I am finding the account of the anti-aristocratic movement in the Netherlands in the 1780s to be quite interesting. As a smaller country without an internationally famous literature or, in this era, any other art, the texture of its history is not very well understood, by me at least. At the same time I was not as enthralled by the chapter dealing with a similar movement in Ireland during the same period, mainly because the main actors were almost exclusively Anglo-Irish, Catholics being entirely forbidden from the Irish parliament and other offices at that time, which dynamic--the Catholics being as it were on the sideline in the politics of the time--I had a hard time getting a clear vision of. Palmer was a man of his time and his own sympathies and principles seem to be against oligarchy and too great social and economic inequality, for wide participation (by way of voting and representation) in government and so on. His summation of the mood in Europe at the outbreak of the French Revolution resonates a little too closely to that of our own time:

"By a revolutionary situation is here meant one in which confidence in the justice or reasonableness of existing authority is undermined; where old loyalties fade, obligations are felt as impositions, law seems arbitrary, and respect for superiors is felt as a form of humiliation; where existing sources of prestige seem undeserved, hitherto accepted forms of wealth and income seem ill-gained, and government is sensed as distant, apart from the governed and not really 'representing' them. In such a situation the sense of community is lost, and the bond between social classes turns to jealousy and frustration. People of a kind formerly integrated begin to feel as outsiders, or those who have never been integrated begin to feel left out."

He had a good quote on how too extreme inequality really was bad for societies but I can't find it now.

Picture Gallery

 

Germany

1. Thuringia...........................…..10
2. Berlin.........................................9
3. Hesse.........................................7

 
4. Lower Saxony...........................6
5. Saxony...………………………5
6. Baden-Wurttemberg...………...4
    North Rhine-Westphalia............4

8. Bavaria...……………………....2
    Mecklenburg-Vorpommem.......2
    Rhineland-Palatinate-------------2

    Saxony-Anhalt...........................2
    Schleswig-Holstein....................2

13. Brandenburg.............................1
      Bremen.....................................1
      Hamburg...................................1

February Update

A List: Maurice Baring--Comfortless Memory.....................182/192

B List: Mikhail Sholokhov--And Quiet Flows the Don........314/554

C List: Luis Alberto Urrea--The Devil's Highway................153/220

Not the most celebrated group of authors this month. Mike Sholokhov did win the Nobel Prize
in 1965, though his current reputation is attended with much controversy, including the suggestion
that he did not actually write his most famous book. I will revisit this when I do my big report on him.

Baring was one of those prolific English authors of light social comedies set among the privileged classes, often in foreign locales, who flourished in the period between the world wars. I was hoping his book, published in that high-spirited year of 1928, would be a Nightmare Abbey-ish work full of drolleries and inimitable upper class English bantering, but it is nothing much. It doesn't live.

The subject matter of The Devil's Highway, which is about an expedition of Mexican would-be illegal migrants who got lost in the inhospitable Arizona desert after entering the United States on foot in 2001, resulting in the deaths of fourteen men, is one that interests me. Like most Americans I have always been curious to go out to the west and see the desert and check out what is going on out there, but besides that of course there is whole angle of the future being formed and playing out in the mass movements across the border. Urrea writes in a kind of pseudo hard-boiled, wearily knowing style that I find annoying, but evidently other people like it, so I guess it works for him...Maybe I will finish my thoughts on this book in a separate post. The continuous interruptions while trying to do what should take 30 minutes at most have defeated me for tonight...   

Picture Gallery

Apparently there is a film of 'And Quiet Flows the Don'

Viktoria Federova, "the Sophia Loren of Soviet Cinema".

Is this real? 

Author List Volume IX

Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832-1910) The Fisher Lass (1868) Born: North Osterdalen Museum, Bjorgan Farm, Kvikne, Norway. Buried: Var Frelsers Gravlund, Oslo, Norway.  Aulestad, Follebu, Norway. College: Oslo.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) Flowering Judas (1930) Born: Indian Creek, Texas. Buried: Indian Creek Cemetery, Indian Creek, Texas. Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, 508 Center Street, Kyle, Texas.

Jose Echegaray (1832-1916) Folly or Saintliness (1876), The Great Galeoto (1881) Born: Madrid, Spain. Buried: Cemeterio Sacramental de San Isidro, Madrid, Spain. College: Escuela de Caminos

Maxim Gorki (1868-1936) Foma Gordyeeff (1899) Born: Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Nov. obl,, Russia. Buried: Kremlin Wall, Moscow, Russia. Gorky Museum (Ryabushinsky Mansion), Mal. Nikitskaya St 62, Moscow, Russia. Maxim Gorky Museum House, Semashko St 19, Nizhni Novgorod, Russia. Monument to Sadriddin Aini and Maxim Gorky, Somoni Avenue, Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Wouldn't you like to see this guy take on Jonathan Franzen in a bar fight?

Kathleen Winsor (1919-2003) Forever Amber (1944) Born: Olivia, Minnesota. Buried: Apparently unknown. College: California (Berkeley)

Artie Shaw (1910-2004) Born: 255 E 7th Street, New York, New York. Buried: Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park, Westlake Village, Los Angeles, California.

Lana Turner (1921-1995) Born: Wallace, Idaho. Buried: Cremated, ashes in private hands.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) The Man of Property (1906), In Chancery (1920), To Let (1922), The White Monkey/The Silver Spoon/Swan Song (1928) Born: Parkfield, Kingston Hill, Kingston-upon-Thames, London, England. Buried: Ashes scattered over South Downs, nr Bury, Sussex, England. Memorial, Cloisters, New College, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England. Memorial, Highgate Cemetery West, Highgate, London, England. College: New (Oxford).

One of the whiter of the infamous Dead White Males

Franz Werfel (1890-1945) The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), The Song of Bernadette (1941) Born: Havricek 11, Prague, Czech Republic. Buried: Zentralfriedhof, Vienna, Austria.

John Donne (1572-1631) Born: Bread Street, Cheapside, City, London, England (*****9-1-96*****) Buried: St Paul's Cathedral, City, London, England (*****6-21-01*****). John Donne Pub, Nikitsky Boulevard 12, Moscow, Russia. College: Hertford (Oxford).

Charles Morgan (1894-1958) The Fountain (1932) Born: Warreston, Rodway Road, Bromley, Kent, England. Buried: Gunnersbury Cemetery, Hounslow, London, England. College: Brasenose (Oxford)

Vicente Blasco Ibanez (1867-1928) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) Born: Corner of Editor Manuel Aguilar Street and Baron de Carcer Avenue, Valencia, Spain. Buried: Cementeri di Valencia, Valencia, Spain. Blasco Ibanez House/Museum, Paseo Maritimo, Valencia, Spain. Fontana Rosa, Avenue Blasco Ibanez, Menton, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, France. College: Valencia

Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926) Born: Rudolph Valentino Museum, Via V. Emmanuelle 17, Castellaneta, Apulia, Italy. Buried: Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.

St John the Divine (c.6-c.100) Born: Bethsaida, Israel. Buried: Basilica of St John, Ephesus, Turkey. Cathedral of St John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York.

Anne Frank (1929-1945) Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952) Born: Anne Frank Educational Center, Hansaallee 150, Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany. Grave: Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Lohheide, Lower Saxony, Germany. Anne Frank House, Prinsengracht 263-267, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Anne Frank Center USA, 44 Park Place, New York, New York.

Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851) Frankenstein (1818) Born: Oakshott Court, Werrington Street, Somers Town, London, England. Buried: St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, Hampshire, England. Frankenstein Castle, Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1818) Born: 1 Milk Street, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts. Buried: Christ Church Burial Ground, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin Museum, Franklin Court, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin House, 36 Craven Street, Westminster, London, England. Franklin Institute, 222 N 20th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Gene Stratton-Porter (1863-1924) Freckles (1904) Born: near Lagro, Indiana. Buried: Gene Stratton-Porter State Historic Site, 1205 Pleasant Point, Rome City, Indiana. Limberlost State Historic Site, 200 East 6th Street, Geneva, Indiana.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1910)  Born: Sigmund Freud Museum, Zamecnicka 17, Pribor, Czech Republic. Buried: Golders Green Crematorium, Golders Green, London, England. Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria. Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, England. College: Vienna.

Robert Greene (1558-1592) Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1590) Born: Norwich, Norfolk, England. Buried: Unknown. College: St John's (Cambridge)

James Jones (1921-1977) From Here to Eternity (1951) Born: Robinson, Illinois. Buried: Poxabrogue-Evergreen Cemetery, Bridgehampton, Suffolk, New York.

Charles MacArthur (1895-1956) The Front Page (1928) Born: Scranton, Pennsylvania. Buried: Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, Rockland, New York.

Ben Hecht (1894-1964) The Front Page (1928) Born: Lower East Side, New York, New York. Buried: Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, Rockland, New York, New York.

William Stevenson (1530-1575) Gammer Gurton's Needle (c.1553-1566) Born: Hunwick, Durham, England. Buried: Unknown? College: Christ Church (Cambridge)

Robert Hichens (1864-1950) The Garden of Allah (1904) Born: Speldhurst, Kent, England. Buried: ??? College: Royal College of Music.

Francois Rabelais (1490-1553) Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-62) Born: Musee Rabelais (La Deviniere), Seuilly, Touraine, France. Buried: St Paul des Champs, corner of Rues St Paul et Neuve St Pierre, 4eme, Paris, Ile, France. (ed--This church and its cemetery were unfortunately destroyed during the Revolution in 1796. However, it appears that some ruins of the old church remain on the spot. College: Montpellier

Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660) Born: Cromarty House, Cromarty, Highland, Scotland. Courthouse Museum, Church Street, Cromarty, Highland, Scotland. Buried: Windsor Castle (?), Windsor, Berkshire, England. Urquhart Castle, nr Drumnadrochit, Highland, Scotland. College: King's (Aberdeen)

Urquhart collects donations at the Cromarty Courthouse Museum. 

Pierre Le Motteux (1663-1718) Born: Rouen, Normandy, France. Buried: Church of St Andrew Undershaft, City, London, England.

Jacques Leclercq (1898-1972) Born: Austria. Buried: Long Island National Cemetery, East Farmingdale, Suffolk, New York.

There are many references on the internet to Leclercq's brilliance, sophistication and bon-vivant nature. His daughter was a noted ballet dancer and Leclercq himself was well-known as a man about town in cultured New York circles during the middle years of the 20th century. Basic biographical information about him on the internet is scant however. (His well-regarded translation of Rabelais for the Modern Library was published in 1930, hence his appearance in our notes here). I also cannot find any pictures that are definitely confirmed to be him. 

Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) The Gentleman From San Francisco (1916) Born: Voronezh, Voronezh obl, Russia. Buried: Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, Essonne, Ile, France. Ivan Bunin Museum, ul Maksima Gorkogo 16, Yelets, Lipetz obl, Russia. Ivan Bunin Museum, Georgievsky per 1, Oryol, Oryol Obl, Russia. Bunin House-Museum, Turgeneva St 47, Efremov, Tula obl, Russia. Vorontsov Palace, Alupka, Ukraine.

Anita Loos (1889-1981) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) Born: Mount Shasta, Siskiyou, California. Buried: Etna Cemetery, Etna, Siskiyou, California. Chantilly lace cocktail dress, Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Avenue, New York, New York.

MacKinlay Kantor--Andersonville (1955)

MacKinlay Kantor was a prolific and well-known American writer of mainly Civil War-themed books (mostly novels, to my surprise; my father had a number of his books when I was young and I had always assumed they were popular histories) during the middle decades of the 20th century whose profile has inevitably dropped since his death in 1977, and that of most of his readers in the years since. Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize for its year, beating out, among other contenders, The Recognitions, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and The Ginger Man. (Lolita was originally published that year in Paris as well, but did not appear in the U.S. until 1958). It is an earnest effort, much in keeping with the fashion of the time, at writing a sprawling, epic-caliber masterwork that would, by way of the cauldron of the Andersonville prison and the fall of the Confederacy, define and celebrate the National Character. And 'celebrate', is not, in this instance, by any means an ill-chosen word. Even though his subject is a horrific prison camp where over 13,000 men died, mainly of starvation, gangrene, scurvy, infections, and the like, the books lacks the moral edge, the shaming effect on the reader that modern books about this subject anyway seem to need to attain important status. Kantor is not an angry writer, looking around for people to condemn and wish some kind of retribution on, or if he does it is more for their incompetence and slipshod management, their deficiency of honor and military professionalism than for their being evil. He views the ordeal of Andersonville as a personal tragedy for the young men, especially those possessed of some promise, who had the misfortune to die there, though with something of the attitude that such unpleasant things will occur in war, and great wars are formative and probably necessary experiences for Great Nations to go through. Certainly at the end of the book the central character, the plantation owner and erstwhile slaveholder Ira Claffey, is reconciled to and almost giddy about the reunification of the states, the abolition of slavery, and the wonderful future that the country had to look forward to.

I gather that my book, while not a first edition, is a fairly early one, since the author blurb in the back refers to Andersonville as if it were Kantor's latest effort, and makes no mention of the Pulitzer Prize. As a book that was a big seller in the 1950s and has kind of been forgotten in the ensuing years, my local used book barn had at least five copies of it moldering away in the stacks. The author blurb is one of the better ones I have read in a while; though I hadn't realized it about him, Kantor's biography was right in tune with those of the to us impossibly self-confident, manly, wide-ranging white male writers of his generation who were supremely convinced of their importance and superiority vis-a-vis everyone than other supremely confident and high-achieving white male men of action:

"MacKinlay Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa, February 4, 1904. His parents were separated before his birth, divorced soon afterward. The future novelist spent a chaotic childhood and youth in Iowa and in Chicago--years marked by poverty, hard work, and occasional moments of comparative luxury. He started to write seriously at sixteen, became a newspaper reporter at seventeen, and an author devoted exclusively to fiction at the age of twenty-three. Mr Kantor's first novel was published in 1928. Since then thirty of his books in all have been appreciated by readers in America and abroad: novels, verse, collections of short stories and novelettes, juvenile books, and histories. He has come to be regarded as a foremost interpreter of the essentially American flavor and scene. MacKinlay Kantor's accomplishments vary from the Hollywood motion-picture complex (he wrote the original story for the world-famous The Best Years of Our Lives, which won thirteen Academy Awards) to a year and a half spent living the life of a patrolman in the New York City Police Department. He has achieved combat experience in two wars and was personally decorated by the commander of the United States Air Force. Mr Kantor was married in 1926 to Irene Layne, an artist. They are the parents of a daughter and a son (the latter now a flyer in that same Air Force) and the grandparents of two small boys. The Kantors divide their time between Sarasota, Florida, and Spain, where much of Andersonville was written. The author began his intensive study of the Andersonville prison more than twenty-five years ago."

I took a few notes early in the book while I was getting used to Kantor's approach to various subjects, most of which were fairly characteristic of mainstream male writers in the 1950s, though if you have not read anything from this school in a while the initial blasts can knock you off course for a moment or two. Here is the book's main character and moral center, plantation owner Ira Claffey, contemplating his (grown, or nearly grown) daughter on page 10:

"...but Lucy was yawning. He felt a fire as he saw that yawn. Soon, then--To bed, to bed! Incestuous sheets, sweet prince? Nay, my Veronica and I lie within the embrace of a mortal primness known as Holy Wedlock."

On the nobility of war, which as discussed above, is an important, but to most contemporary intellectuals probably an idiotic theme in the book:

"But he did not like their attitude. They seemed to bring a meanness to war. There should be nobility about the business of risking life, even the business of taking it..."

There is a very brief interlude in Paris near the beginning which introduces the character of Henry Wirz, who was an actual historical personage who became the commander of the Andersonville stockade and was hanged after the war for his role in that catastrophe (though Kantor did not explicitly mention the execution in the book, leaving off the character with his arrest, though it is strongly implied as he takes leave of his wife and children that he isn't going to be seeing them again). The Swiss-born Wirz, whose arm was badly injured in battle, is in France to seek medical assistance from an old university classmate who has become a renowned surgeon. The Frenchman provides one of the few comic lines in the 760 page book:

"I don't pay much attention to what goes on over there (i.e., in the war). My dear friend, you'll forgive me when I state a simple if unpleasant professional fact. Between my own patients and what goes on at the hospital and my lectures at the school--Well, my wife tells the children not to run shrieking to their nurse that a strange impostor has forced his way into the house, on those rare occasions when I do appear. As for my mistress--"

Among the many vignettes of the prior lives of various of the prisoners that Kantor drew in the course of the story to illustrate the vastness and variety of the American landscape and nation, there were a couple of buddies who hailed from the village where our Vermont house is, which was probably more populated, and was almost certainly more village-like in character, in 1850 than it is now.

We now return to the aforementioned Lucy, daughter of the plantation owner, and her fantasies while enduring the lonely years of the war, as only a mid-20th century American author with overinflated self-esteem could express them (I jest affectionately here):

"Lucy did not know exactly how the act of love was performed--she had only wicked whispered girlish gossip to go by--but in lonely nights she lay charmed by the contemplation of her own body, excited nearly into fever. Somewhere there might still be a man's body constructed for the express purpose of gratifying her own...waiting the muscular man who would step toward her, smiling and courteous but not to be restrained, out of tapestried shadows."

On a couple of southern gentleman whose close friendship might have appeared in a certain hue to the more vulgar-minded reader:

"They had held that deep love which is disassociated from sex because of the nature of the lovers; they are men made for women, never men made for men. Abhorrent as decay itself was the notion that ever either of them could have loved physically one of his own fashioning, in intimacy."

Just so we're all clear on this.

One of the westerners who ended up in Andersonville had lost his father to Indian torture in Nebraska:

When being a writer was fun

"...one day, ten miles from Fort Cottonwood, he was shot down by a party of Cheyennes who tore off his silver scalp and built a hot fire between his legs so that he might not be able to procreate in the Next World. Had they known that he took pleasure in song, they would also have cut out his tongue, since he was the enemy of the Indians and they did not wish him to have pleasure."

Kantor evidently didn't get the memo reminding him to wonder what business all these white guys had wandering into the ancestral lands of the Native Americans in the first place.

More testimony to the unabashed heterosexual pride coursing through the literary establishment of the time:

"There were a round dozen sluggers, also the cooks and housekeepers--two of these latter were homosexuals whose affection some of his men enjoyed, but Willie himself did not crave such peculiar ecstasies, his laughter burst at the very idea."

Willie by the way is Willie Collins, a real figure from history who was the most violent man in the stockade and leader of, for a while, its most brutal criminal gang.

My sense incidentally is that Kantor probably considered himself to be fairly liberal and progressive by the standard of his day. With regard to the black population, he seemed to have considered the progress made by 1955 in the professions and education just ninety years removed from slavery to have been remarkable, though current popular opinion I think would hold that these attainments were much less than they should have been, or would have been had society been operating under any kind of just system. It is evident that he did not hold acceptably high expectations where black achievement was concerned.

The episode concerning the friendship of Coral Tebbs and the escaped prisoner Naz Stricker in the waning days of the war, one a Georgian and the other a Pennsylvanian, one deprived of a foot and the other of a hand, is emblematic of the corniness that pervades and mars the end of the story.

I have mentioned before in some of my other writings that I have an especial fascination in the end periods of cataclysmic wars where a substantial nation that has fought and carried out the war with great fury over a period of years in brought to the point of total ruin and destruction. Our very own Civil War offers one of the more vivid manifestations of this phenomenon, particularly in modern times, and Kantor, no doubt knowing and feeling the enormity of this event, made an effort to bring it to epic life in his book. While he was pretty strong on the technical aspects of final military collapse--mainly the breakdown of organization that overwhelms any attempt at maintaining a system--he cannot call up the intensity, either moral or emotional, that the great literary depictions of these epoch-marking military defeats convey. For example Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom deals with the defeat and fall of the Old South within a much smaller framework, limited primarily to a handful of families in a single small town, but the meaning and the thoroughness of the defeat is expressed more immediately and powerfully. I cannot think of any other examples from the Civil War offhand. I haven't read Gone With the Wind, and I don't know that I ever will.

Near the end Ira Claffey ponders--about two or three weeks after the war has ended (the news of Lincoln's assassination has reached even rural southwestern Georgia) what I take to be Kantor's personal viewpoint as to the legacy of the war:

"Here was a truth to offer strength and--perhaps, later-courage. This truth: any creed for which men are willing to die achieves an historic dignity and cannot be shamed, no matter how one hated it. I hated the North, said Ira. Hated the National Government. My sons warred against the Nationals, my sons were killed by the Nationals. Yet the youths who suffered within these walls have given the National Government a greatness it did not possess before; and in time that Government may be embraced, welcomed, respected, worshipped by those who once were unwilling to love it without stint."

This was definitely written at the height of U.S. nationalistic feeling. People took it for granted it would last at least into the whole of the foreseeable future.

The IWE blurb for Andersonville is especially howl-inducing: "The forte of MacKinlay Kantor is tender pathos, sentiment such as all men feel and only the Nordics seem to consider shameful." They also note that "The major character, Ira Claffey, who loved his fellow men, has seemed to some critics to be overidealized. He is not. He existed, and he is no less typical because there were and are unfortunately too few of him." Claffey's paternalistic and semi-humane treatment of his slaves, and their loyalty and family feeling for him in return, were emphasized throughout the book. Though he has doubts at the end of the war that the suddenly freed slaves will really be able to survive in their new condition, he comes rather quickly to the revelation that that struggle has now become the necessary element animating their lives going forward. Again, this is about the best that Kantor, an obviously cognitively able and would-be liberal man of his generation, seems to have been able to muster as a vision of the role of America's black population both in its past and looking to its future.

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

While Andersonville was a very long book, it had a fairly short summary, resulting in a only a few qualifying rounds for the Challenge, enabling works with as few as 1 internet review to make it into the field.

1. Mary C. Neal--To Heaven and Back.....................2,241
2. Margaret Mitchell--Gone With the Wind...............2,036
3. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (movie).......................760
4. Rocky Balboa (movie)...............................................508
5. The Loft (movie)........................................................287
6. Luis Alberto Urrea--Devil's Highway........................222
7. Jack and Diane (movie)..............................................86
8. Heaven (movie)...........................................................85
9. Ain't Them Bodies Saints (movie)...............................69
10. Jamesy Boy (movie)..................................................66
11. John Nichol & Tony Rennell--The Last Escape.......20
12. Juri Lina--Architects of Deception............................10
13. Ronald E. Casey--To Fight For My Country, Sir.......9
14. Rebel Wife in Texas: Diary & Letters of Elizabeth 
      Scott Neblett 1852-1864.............................................4
15. Donna Rembowski--Medieval Law & Punishment....2
16. Filson Young--Christopher Columbus & the New World
      of His Discovery, Vol 1...............................................1
17. Charles Shaw--Heaven Knows, Mr Allison.................1

Play-In Round

#16 Young over #17 Shaw--Neither is readily available to me, though both books have some interest about them. The complete (8-volume) Young received 11 reviews, indicating that it still has currency somewhere, and Shaw's post-World War II novel was made into a film in 1957 which, though I have never heard of it, was directed by John Huston and starred Deborah Kerr. I am giving Young the nod because his book seems slightly more interesting to me at the moment.

Round of 16

#1 Neal over #16 Young

As noted above, the Young is not generally available to me for free.

#2 Mitchell over #15 Rembowski

No contest again because of the unavailability of the lower-seeded book.

#14 Neblett over #3 Sin City
#13 Casey over #4 Rocky Balboa
#12 Lina over #5 The Loft
#6 Urrea over #11 Nichol & Rennell

Urrea is 300 pages shorter.

#7 Jack & Diane over #10 Jamesy Boy

Jamesy Boy looks too gratuitously violent for me.

#8 Heaven over #9 Ain't Them Bodies Saints

Ain't Them Bodies Saints is giving off major pretentious/incomprehensibility vibes to me. Heaven looks to be the safe middlebrow choice.

Elite 8

#1 Neal over #14 Neblett
#2 Mitchell over #13 Casey
#6 Urrea over #12 Lina

These are all availability questions

#8 Heaven over #7 Jack & Diane

I don't know, Heaven is a few years older. Also teenage romance type stories are not very satisfying to me anymore, because I never had any in my own life and it still bothers me.

Final Four

#1 Neal over #8 Heaven
#6 Urrea over #2 Mitchell

The Urrea book sounds like it might be interesting and fresh--no suburban whitebread stuff you know--plus I am not in a frame of mind to take on a 1200 page novel that is not on my list.

Championship

#6 Urrea over #1 Neal

A very close decision, given to Urrea on the basis of more enticing subject matter, plus the indication that he might represent one of the neglected literary populations we are all supposed to be getting better acquainted with.

The winner. Obviously no stranger to the lectern.

January Update

A List: Robert Byron--The Station: Athos: Treasures and Men...51/256

B List: Kantor--Andersonville...671/760

C List: Atul Gawande--Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End...223/402

The Byron book is not really a classic, though it is a curiosity of sorts, and is periodically reprinted in modern editions. It has made its way onto the list by being one of a group of four books reviewed by D.H. Lawrence in a 1928 article that has itself attained list status. I am going to attempt to read as many of these four books as I can get my hands on. Byron's book, his second, concerning a year he and three Oxford friends spent at the now somewhat celebrated but then remote and little--known Byzantine monastery in Greece, was published when he was 22 years old. He was a cheeky, cocky sort of youth, upper class, successfully classically educated (i.e., could actually read Greek and Latin and retained the content of his learning the whole of his life), fond of contention, iconoclastic after the manner of his generation. I used to like these kinds of guys when I could sort of imagine myself as being after the same type, but I really don't know how to take them now that it is so obvious that I do not have this sort of mind at all. I becomes tiresome to be forever reading things that one is never going to have a part in, and are not doing one any good. The style of the book is also overwrought and ordinary situations and observations are presented more opaquely than they need to be. Byron wrote nine books by age 31 and then went into politics. He was killed in war action in 1941 at the age of 35.

The Kantor I will be doing a longer essay on. I have mostly enjoyed it but it is laboring to get to the end of the story and has completely lost any sort of tightness it had going over its first half.

We went over Gawande's incredible resume and accomplishments in a previous post. His book (which is not as long as it looks here--the Large Print edition was the only one that came available at my library), despite its apparent popularity, is not particularly compelling. It is an information book rather than a story book--though there are stories in it, they are not really interesting or humorous, and the salient facts that Gawande tends to notice about people, as well as the way that he relates them, have the effect of being depressing more than anything else. The subject of the book is very, very old people, as in, over age 85, and the various ways in which they become impaired and the various ways in which they are cared for at this stage of life, in the end mainly by being put into nursing homes, where people tend to be miserable due to the institutional nature and lack of any personal autonomy which becomes one's fate once you enter one. My impression is that people have very unrealistic ideas about the kind of life you can reasonably expect to have when you are in your 90s, and the baby boomers, who are going to be the worst of all, have not even begun to enter serious old age yet. It is scary, and I would not be looking forward to it if I thought I was going to live that long (people my size rarely seem to make it much past the early 80s at the utmost), and I suppose there are improvements that could be made to nursing home care, make it less impersonal and so on, but of course that would cost even more money than is already spent on elders, at a time when as a society we are doing terribly at developing young people into adults who can govern themselves or contribute meaningfully in any way...

As an honorable mention I got as a kind of stocking stuffer a little volume called The Film Snob's Dictionary. I don't know whether some kind of statement about me was intended but it is a quite funny little book. It was published in 2006 so it is slightly dated--certain notoriously pretentious video stores in places like Los Angeles and Chicago were referenced which I suspect are no longer particularly important for example, but otherwise it makes for good reading. Of the genres which feature most prominently, the only one with which I have any familiarity is that of the self-consciously and usually pretentious art films. Horror/slasher movies, the ultraviolent Asian films much loved by Quentin Tarantino, and sex films attempting to pass themselves off as artistic meditations make up much of the (often hilarious) content. Obvious entries such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini are omitted because they are "mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman movie is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes and Chardonnay." (Of course some of us can only aspire to have moms and dads who went on a date to a Bergman movie in college). From the entry on 1960s Japanese B movie director Seijun Suzuki: '...(his) violent CinemaScope action pictures grew increasingly eccentric as time went on, culminating in 1967's Branded to Kill, about a Yakuza hitman with a fetish for sniffing freshly steamed rice. Fired by his studio, Nikkatsu, for making 'incomprehensible films' (a not entirely unfair charge), Suzuki spent years in the wilderness before being lionized by his burgeoning Snob constituency (which includes Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch)." There is lots of this throughout. While I mostly agree with their assessments of various movies and the cults that have come to surround I do think L'Atalante, which the authors (David Kamp and Lawrence Levi) single out for ridicule on several occasions, really is a deep and very sad and moving picture.

Picture Gallery

   
Athos

Memorial at Andersonville

The book

Some art

 The closest thing to a hot babe picture that came up. The girl on the left is pretty cute at least.