Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger

JD Salinger (1919-2010) has always been my favourite prose stylist. He didn’t write much, and of that, until a couple of years ago I finally caught up with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), I had only owned and read Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Salinger was born in Manhattan to a Lithuanian Jewish father and to a “German, Irish, Scottish” mother, who converted to Judaism. He had one sibling, a sister, 7 years older. He appears to have been raised in relatively affluent circumstances; he went to a private school, and had a couple of goes at starting college before being drafted in 1942 and serving in the US Infantry in Europe and post-war Germany.

His first ambition was probably to have been an actor, which his father opposed (sending him to Poland to experience the supply end of the meat importing business). He began writing while still at school, mostly short stories. He was first published in 1940 – so at age 21 – and the following year had the story “Slight Rebellion off Madison”, in which we first see Holden Caulfield, accepted by The New Yorker. Sadly, Pearl Harbour intervened, and it ended up not being published until 1946.

In 1947, Salinger became an “avid follower of Zen Buddhism” – this is all relevant to this review – and in 1948 The New Yorker published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, the first of seven stories in which Salinger establishes the fictional Glass family, retired vaudeville performers, Bessie and Les, with seven children: Seymour, Buddy (who might be the author), Boo Boo (a matron with 3 children of her own by the 1950s), twins Walt and Waker, Zooey, and Franny (Frances); with birth dates spread over about 16 years, from 1917 to 1933; brought up in a family sized fifth floor apartment in Manhattan overlooking a girls school.

“Franny” and “Zooey” originally appeared as separate stories in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. In the former Franny goes on a date, gets ill and faints; and the latter begins a few days later with Zooey in the bath (behind a hastily pulled curtain) discussing a severely depressed Franny with his mother who is sitting beside the bath chain smoking. There is no reason not to consider them as one novella.

All of the Glass children had been, serially over a long period, child prodigies on a radio quiz programme. Zooey has gone on to be a seriously good looking TV actor; Franny, the other good looking, not to say beautiful, sibling, is still at college. One of the twins has died in an accident during the war; Seymour has committed suicide; and Buddy is somewhere uncontactable, still without a degree, but teaching creative writing.

Franny, on her date, was carrying with her a green clothbound book which she says she got from the library but which she has actually taken from (the late) Seymour’s desk, The Way of a Pilgrim. I looked it up, it’s a real book, “a 19th-century Russian work, recounting the narrator’s journey as a mendicant pilgrim while practicing the Jesus Prayer [a repetitive chant, like the Buddhist ‘Om’]” (wiki); and apparently made famous by its centrality to these stories.

I guess the underlying theme is that Seymour and Buddy took idiosyncratic charge of their younger siblings’ education, particularly their reading, and that now he is gone, Seymour is missed. I sadly suspect that the main theme is that the religious is in everything. As Zooey says to Franny in the final, optimistic scene –

“… if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have the sense to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup – which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse.”

“Franny” starts with her boyfriend Lane meeting the train bringing Franny from her residential college to spend a weekend away, attending the Yale football game. They start off well enough, but at dinner, Lane gets on Franny’s nerves, is too attentive, too loving; Franny starts picking at him, talks at length about the Way of a Pilgrim, won’t order, appears ill, and eventually faints, coming to in the manager’s office. My suspicion is that she’s pregnant.

Lane .. sat a trifle closer to her and bent down and kissed her, briefly… ‘You’re just going to rest this afternoon. That’s all you’re going to do.’ He stroked her arm for a moment. ‘Then maybe after a while, if you get any decent rest, I can get upstairs somehow. I think there’s a goddam back staircase. I can find out.
Franny didn’t say anything. She looked at the ceiling.
‘You know how long it’s been?’ Lane said. ‘When was that Friday night? Way the hell early last month, wasn’t it?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly.’

Lane goes out. Franny begins praying. “Her lips began to move, forming soundless words.”

“Zooey”, which is much longer, is Zooey getting ready to go out, bathing and shaving while discussing Franny with Bessie; then making two attempts to talk Franny out of her depression (I’m clearly wrong about pregnancy), first in the lounge where she’s lying on the couch, then on the way out, ringing her, pretending to be Buddy. And that’s the whole novella. A tour de force of conversation and description.

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JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey, first pub. 1961. 157pp.

Rose in Bloom & 1937

Journal: 114

I read Little Women for the first time just a few years ago, and then happened to see Rose in Bloom in a charity shop on the Murray Valley Hwy near Yarrawonga – I’d stopped to buy a pie or a cake at the bakery next door – bought it and stuck it out of the way, on my top shelf.

Where it stayed until I finished The Famished Road (review end of Feb.) and was looking for something a little easier, and here we are. I’ve mentioned Jo from Little Women a few times in the context of the ‘Independent Woman’, and thought this one might fit in as a late entry for Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week.

If you know your Alcott then you’ll be aware that Rose in Bloom (1876) is the sequel to Eight Cousins which I gather is about Rose, an orphan heiress, and her 7 boy cousins, a matriarch and a whole heap of uncles and aunts, all well off, all living within a few miles of each other (in New England? I’m not sure. And what is the major city nearby, L______?).

At the end of Eight Cousins, bachelor Uncle Alec takes Rose and her maid, Phebe, to Europe for a couple of years, where Phebe, also an orphan, takes singing lessons as a route to gaining her independence. Rose in Bloom begins with the four older boy cousins – Archie, ‘Prince’ Charlie, Mac and Steve – now in their twenties, waiting on the wharf for Rose’s ship to dock.

Although Phebe has gained a great deal of polish (and beauty) as Rose’s ‘friend’, a more accurate description would be companion as she is still expected, and paid, to serve. The oldest cousin, Archie, almost immediately falls in love with her, which the family find unacceptable, and Phebe goes off to L______ to find paid employment in a church choir.

Here is the paragraph that got my hopes up. Charlie has just told Rose that a woman doesn’t need plans, she must just break a dozen hearts, before she finds one to suit, “then marry and settle.”

“That may be the case with many, but not with us; for Phebe and I believe that it is as much a right and a duty for women to do something with their lives as for men; and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us,” cried Rose with kindling eyes. “I … won’t have anything to do with love till I prove that I am something beside a housekeeper and a baby-tender!”

“Heaven preserve us! here’s woman’s rights with a vengeance!’ cried Charlie …

They go on to discuss what profession she might choose, considering first medicine – “you know how well women have succeeded in this profession” – but she has decided on philanthropy. Two or three years ago I listened to a history of women doctors in the UK (university education began in 1881, but it’s complicated because at least one woman became a doctor before then by being ‘apprenticed’ to another doctor), but I have never got a handle on when women first became doctors in the US.

Rose does become a philanthropist (and Phebe a successful singer) but sadly, most of the rest of the book is about Rose falling in and out of love.

Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, first pub. 1876. My edition (pictured above), Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London, hardback, undated (Sampson Low, Marston & Co were established in 1872. But the book looks to be maybe 1930s and is available in better condition than mine from Abe Books UK for just £4.64).

1937

1937 Ford Club coupe

I haven’t previously participated in Kaggsy and Simon’s ‘year’ clubs, but 1937 seems so me that this time I will put up one or hopefully, two reviews in the week 15-21 Apr (I couldn’t resist the photo that searching on ‘1937 club’ brought up). Serendipitously I had already scheduled one 1937 book – Catherine Helen Spence’s autobiography as completed by her companion Jeanne Lewis – for my April contribution to the Australian Women Writers Challenge site.

A look around my shelves (and one quick purchase) reveal these other contenders:

Australia:
KS Prichard, Intimate Strangers
Martin Boyd, The Picnic
Ernestine Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness (review)
Ernestine Hill, Water into Gold
Kenneth Mackenzie, The Young Desire It
Arthur W. Upfield, Mr Jelly’s Business (review)
Other:
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (review)
MJ Farrell (Molly Keane), The Rising Tide
LM Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill (review)
Leslie Charteris The Ace of Knaves (a ‘Saint’ adventure)
PC Wren Worth Wile
Georgette Heyer An Infamous Army

Of the authors I collect, I have a heap of William books, by Richmal Crompton, but not William the Showman (1937), and both Simenon and Evelyn Waugh wrote all around 1937 but not that year. There is another Heyer, which I don’t have though my daughter might, the crime novel They Found Him Dead. If you’re wondering, the nearest Miles Franklin is All that Swagger (1936).

Other 1937 Australians are:
Eleanor Dark, Sun Across the Sky
M Barnard Eldershaw, Plaque with Laurel
Leonard Mann, A Murder in Sydney
Vance Palmer, Legend for Sanderson
Helen Simpson, Under Capricorn (Hist.Fic. – made into a Hitchcock film starring Ingrid Bergman)

I’m still off the road. I asked the mechanic what went wrong with my gearbox and he said “two million kilometres, mate”, which wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Milly wants to go down to our daughter’s, so that’s the weekend taken care of and I should be back in my truck by Tuesday. But will I have work? I bloody hope so!

The Yellow Wall-Paper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

If, like me before last week, you haven’t read Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper‘ (1892), then follow the link to Project Gutenberg, and go no further here until you have. I have the Penguin edition above, and made the mistake of reading Kate Bolick’s Introduction first, which took away all the tension.

So, this is the story, written in the first person present, of a woman suffering from a nervous condition, whose doctor husband takes her away to a rented house –

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house … but that would be asking too much of fate!

and then persuades her to take the large, sunny room on the top (third) floor, a former nursery, and maybe a gym when the house was for a while a school; rather than a smaller, more comfortable room on the ground floor.

All her husband, John’s, persuasions sound like orders. He is the physician. He has only her best interests at heart. He knows best about how to manage her foolish fears, and her doctor brother agrees.

So I take phosphate or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again… Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

The shabby wall-paper in her room, the wall-paper of the title, torn off in large patches by the schoolboys, is “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow”, with one of “those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere.

The (unnamed) writer’s “work” is writing. We are reading a journal being kept in secret. Her husband does not want her to think about her illness; his sister, who is keeping house, believes it is writing which has made her sick.

Some weeks in to their three months long lease, we get the first hint of the problem developing:

I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

She’s lonely in the house, her husband away all day and some nights doctoring; lonely and unoccupied, but he will not let her go on a visit to friends, she is not strong enough, and she breaks down in tears and does not make her case very well. He says “I must use my will and self control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.”

I know you have all read this, all feminists have, I’m sure, and it’s probably compulsory in American colleges; but I wanted to open up the detail in the order that Gilman does. Here we are on the ninth page of 16 with a text book case of depression, and she is being told to snap out of it. I am sorry that Psyche is not here to discuss it with me.

I am aware that ‘snap out of it’ was a common reaction till quite recently; and also that nineteenth century women were fearful, as the writer is, of being institutionalized. Jess White looked at this with Rosa Praed’s daughter in Hearing Maud. But I also seem to remember, in Australia’s early days, so, much earlier than this story, that the people around him were aware that John Macarthur’s mania and depression were an illness, and were treated as such.

As I say, we’re more than halfway along, when we see, “There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.”

Bolick writes, Gilman’s “symbolic fictionalization of her own postpartum depression, shocked readers when it first appeared in 1892” and also led to the “forgotten masterpiece” being added, 80 years later, “to the then-nascent feminist canon” [which only adds to my belief that Australian women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century was much more overtly feminist than US (or British) women’s].

The baby is only mentioned a couple of more times, and while that might be a clever device, leaving us to draw our own conclusions, there is in fact no evidence the depression began with the birth, or that Gilman herself understands – presumably without the terminology – she might be suffering postpartum depression.

The remainder of the story concerns the writer’s gradual descent into madness, brilliantly described, until in the last page or so she becomes her own worst nightmare, but, luckily for us, still writing.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings, Penguin, 2019. Introduction by Kate Bolick. The Yellow Wall-Paper first pub. 1892.

From the Penguin bio:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) married CW Stetson in 1884 and was almost immediately pregnant with a daughter. After the birth she “sank into a deep depression” which lasted several years. She spent some time in a sanatorium, taking a rest cure; got out; had a nervous breakdown; left her husband in 1888 and went to California “where her recovery was swift”. In the 1890s she began writing and lecturing. In 1894 she relinquished custody of her daughter to Stetson.

Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

Light from Uncommon Stars (2021) was recommended to me by one of you, Lou or Melanie probably – sorry I don’t remember – I bought it on Audible, listened, liked it and promptly forgot it (and forgot to list it in ‘Recent Audiobooks’). So this last trip I listened to it again and loved it.

The author, Ryka Aoki, is Japanese American, a trans woman, an author, a composer, a poet and a lecturer in English and Gender Studies. She appears to use the pronouns she/her – and her trans protagonist definitely does. This is her second novel. She has also published two ‘collections’.

The novel begins with Katrina Nguyen, a young trans woman and potential violin prodigy catching a bus out of town to get away from an abusive father and unsupportive mother. She’s making for Los Angeles where there’s a gay guy she thinks is supportive of her being trans, and who might give her a room.

He gives her a couch and he and his friends steal from her while she makes a little money from prostitution. Eventually he pawns her violin and she has no option but to leave. In the meantime she has met, on a park bench, and played for, Shizuka Satomi, an old woman and fabled (former) violin teacher.

Shizuka decides she wants Katrina to be her final pupil, waiting daily on the park bench until Katrina reappears. They recover Katrina’s violin; give it to Lucy Matía, the last in a family of male-only luthiers, to be restored; and Shizuka takes Katrina to her semi-rural home in the San Gabriel Valley, where she will be cared for by Shizuka’s housekeeper and friend (unnamed in any review or summary. I skip listen. Astrid).

This is a novel of strong women, set if not entirely in the Asian-American community, then still well to one side of mainstream America. Shizuka meets Lan Tran, a refugee woman running a donut shop, Starrgate Donuts, with her children, Shirley, Markus and the twins. Shizuka and Lan are attracted, but take a very long time to do anything about it. Shirley and Katrina, who are similarly aged, become friends, go shopping together as Katrina begins to accept she is secure, not outcast, not hunted.

Shizuka struggles with teaching Katrina, who till now, has been largely self taught and has developed a presence on the internet with videos of her playing the themes from games, rather than any of the classical repertoire. And so the story develops through to the inevitable climax where Katrina performs on stage to tumultuous acclaim.

Aoki’s rendering of Katrina’s story as a trans woman; of Shizuka’s as an ageing teacher with one last student; of Lucy’s, overcoming generations of opposition to her doing men’s work; of daily life in the Asian-American community are all brilliantly done. But wait, there’s more.

This is a Fantasy novel and a Science Fiction novel. Ursula Le Guin wrote, in her criticism of Margaret Atwood in 2009, that realistic fiction has complex characters and genre fiction has ‘types’. Le Guin’s own SF writing gives the lie to that, and in fact, I think it is a feature of women’s SF that by and large the characters are complex rather than types. Certainly, that is true here. The great bulk of this novel is ‘realistic’, yet the underlying themes are fantasy – Shizuka has sold her soul to the Devil; and SF – the Starrgate Donut shop is a buried spaceship; ‘Captain’ Lan Tran and her family are refugees from a distant, failing galactic civilization; and Shirley, her daughter and deputy, is a computer simulation and hologram projection.

Shizuka is known within the violin community as the Queen of Hell. For complicated reasons she has agreed with the Devil’s representative, Tremon, that she will deliver up to him the souls of seven superlative violinists. She has delivered six, and decides that she can train Katrina up to be the seventh. Katrina however, doesn’t have that fierce ambition that would lead her to give up her soul for worldly success, but when she becomes aware of the pact, she determines that she will accept Tremon’s offer anyway and save Shizuka.

Meanwhile, Lan Tran has a problem with Markus, her older son, and decides to return him to his father, one of the commanders in the war which is dooming her former home. She needs a pilot for the shuttle and orders Shirley to duplicate herself and to install a self-destruct routine. Shirley has grown from the brain of Lan Tran’s first child who died in infancy, but when push comes to shove Lan Tran treats her as a machine. She runs away from home and hides in the hologram projector at Katrina’s.

There’s a lot to resolve and Aoki does it very, very well.

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Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars, Tor Books, New York, 2021. Audible edition read by Cindy Kay. 13 hours

Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Not Without Laughter (1930) was his first novel – I think he may be better known for his poetry, short stories and drama, but this is my introduction to his work – and it describes a young boy growing up in his grandmother’s house, as Hughes did in his grandmother’s house in Lawrence, Kansas, in the years before WWI.

I will deal more with the Harlem Renaissance, known at the time as the New Negro Movement, as I learn more about it.

.. with the Harlem Renaissance came a sense of acceptance for African American writers; as Langston Hughes put it, with Harlem came the courage “to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925) was considered the cornerstone of this cultural revolution. The anthology featured several African American writers and poets, from the well-known, such as Zora Neale Hurston and communists Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, to the lesser known, like the poet Anne Spencer.

wiki (17 Dec 2023)

One thing I want to get out of the way early is that this novel has very little of the poetry of say Hurston – first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). It is a very straight, almost stereotypical, account of a poor Black boy, Sandy (for his hair), growing up in the mid-west, in the presumably fictional town of Stanton, Kansas, a little separated from the south, but still subject to much racism.

I don’t have much history of US writing, but it is possible Not Without Laughter was important as an early account of African-American life post-Emancipation (1863). It also gives along the way some glimpses into Hughes’ fusing of music, Blues of course, and writing into the Jazz Poetry for which I think he became well known.

He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!

Langston Hughes, from The Weary Blues (1925)

Sandy lives with his mother, Anjee, in the house of her mother, ‘Aunt Hager’, who had been born into slavery in the south, had come north after the Civil War, and who makes her living taking in washing for ‘white folks’. Anjee has a younger sister, Harriett, doing well in high school and an older sister, Tempy, who has married well, maintains her distance from her family, and insists that Blacks must model their lives on whites to earn acceptance.

Sandy’s father, Jimboy, is a guitar playing wanderer, who lives at Aunt Hager’s when he’s in Stanton, but mostly rides the rails, looking for work, looking to keep moving, only rarely writing home. Anjee works long hours for little money housekeeping for a white family, bringing home scraps of meals. Jimboy sometimes finds work in Stanton, but not for long. In the evenings, if he’s home, he sits out the back with his guitar, encouraging Harriett to sing and dance.

The music rose hoarse and wild:

I wonder where my easy rider’s gone?
He done left me, put ma new gold watch in pawn

It was Harriett’s voice in plaintive moan to the night sky. Jimboy had taught her that song, but a slight, clay-coloured brown boy … discovered its meaning to her. Puppy love, maybe, but it hurt when he went away, saying nothing.

Hughes quite often discusses gradations in colour, and whether lightness of colour made one, male or female, more attractive.

Harriett starts staying out late; runs away with a fair; comes home briefly then goes to live on the wrong side of the tracks, where she becomes ‘well known’; drops out of the story for a while, reappearing near the end as a rising success on the musical hall stage.

Sandy gets after-school jobs, graduates into high school, does well; gets a girl whom he treats with respect, more respect than she wanted he finds out eventually; moves on to sweeping up and shining shoes in a barbershop, to cleaning in a downmarket hotel, where he hears, and sees, more. Lives with, is hurt by, small town racism: forced to sit up the back in class, refused admission to shows, not sitting in white seats at the movies, casual abuse from drunks and all the rest of it. And still his grandmother preaches black and white can be friends, equals, even as whites must be called Miss, Mister.

Jimboy goes away, a letter comes from Toledo, then, months later from Chicago. Anjee goes to join him there, leaving Sandy with her mother, gets work, living in a single room with Jimboy until at the start of WWI he joins up and is soon in France, not writing.

Anjee is only able to send back very small sums for Sandy’s upkeep, Aunt Hager is getting frail; Sandy lives for a while with the childless Aunt Tempy but doesn’t easily bear her rules about behaving white. Anjee wants him with her in Chicago, working; Sandy wants to finish high school.

There’s a Tom Sawyer vibe to the story, especially early on, as Sandy mucks around with his mates, Ellie Mae next door, Buster, who can pass as white, Jim Lane, who is orphaned and tempts him downtown; but there is never that freedom you feel with Tom, freedom from the cares of poverty, freedom to wander the town (and the river).

Did I enjoy it? To be honest I rarely ‘enjoy’ stories. I love language, and the best writers deploy language in new and strange and wonderful ways; I am interested in character and relationship development (right down to soppy romance); but mostly, books like this are just another step in … whatever it is I read for.

Ok, it’s an interesting and well-written story. How’s that?

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Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter, first pub. 1930. This edition (pictured) Vintage, 2022. 274pp.

see also, Marcie, Buried in Print:
The Writing Life: Langston Hughes (1/4)
The Writing Life: Langston Hughes (2/4)
The Writing Life: Langston Hughes (3/4)
The Writing Life: Langston Hughes (4/4)

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

12 Books of Boyhood. #11

During my teenage years I read dozens of WWII paperbacks, most notably Paul Brickhill’s (I didn’t know he was Australian) The Great Escape (1950), The Dam Busters (1951) and Reach for the Sky (1954); The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952), Pierre Boulle; Beyond the Chindwin (1945), Bernard Fergusson; Stand Easy; and many, many others. I still have 15 boxes of my father’s WWI and WWII books under the spare bed. I could have read Catch 22 (1961) in those years but I didn’t until I’d been at uni a year or so and it was associated in my mind, and I think in most minds, with the anti-war movement and the Vietnam War.

Whether or not the release of the movie in 1970 made the book more popular, I had already read it when the movie reached the Carlton fleapit and thought that the book was far superior.

The first question with Catch 22 is how did yet another WWII book become such an icon of the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 70s? Probably only Kurt Vonnegut’s later Slaughterhouse Five (1969) approaches it.

Catch 22 emphasises not so much the futility of war as the stupidity and venality of senior officers, and unlike those other books I read as a boy, makes clear there is absolutely no romance involved. And it was that, in the general disillusion occasioned by the Vietnam War, which made it so iconic for us in the movement.

Like Vonnegut, Joseph Heller (1923-1999) served in the US Army; Heller as a bombadier in B-25s, flying 60 missions over Italy, which is also the situation of his hero, Yossarian.

B-25s of the US Army Air Corps had a crew of four officers and two men – the bombadier and and navigator in the nose, the pilot and co-pilot above and behind them, and two gunners in the mid-section towards the rear. Over the target, and in anti aircraft flak, the bombadier seems to have been in charge, shouting directions to the pilot, and Yossarian was often in charge of a section of three or four planes.

Yossarian’s squadron was based on the little island of Pianosa, near Elba, a couple of hundred kms north west of Rome. I thought for a long time it was fictional, but remembered a reference to Elba, and thought to look it up.

Although other summaries say otherwise, the action takes place over the six months or so of the autumn and winter of 1944, as Yossarian, who at the beginning of that period has flown 40 something missions, attempts to get out of flying any more, as he processes the death of Snowden, a gunner he barely knew, who died in his arms.

The B-25s they flew in were stable, dependable, dull-green ships with twin rudders and engines and wide wings. Their single fault, from where Yossarian sat as a bombadier, was the tight crawlway separatig the bombadier’s compartment in the plexiglass nose from the nearest escape hatch. The crawlway was a narrow, square cold tunnel hollowed out beneath the flight controls, and a large man like Yossarian could squeeze through only with difficulty …

There was room for an additional escape hatch right there in the nose of a B-25, but there was no escape hatch. Instead there was the crawlway, and since the mess in the mission over Avignon, he had learned to detest every mammoth inch of it ..

p.57

“since the mess in the mission over Avignon” and so we approach, briefly, the mission during which Snowden died and which Yossarian circles back to, over and over, in ever increasing detail, until we understand how and why he is so traumatised.

Around this central story there are many others, of greater or lesser importance, whose main purpose is to satirise the military. And a host of characters, whose purpose is mainly the same: their commander Colonel Cathcart, whose only thought is how he might be promoted; Milo Minderbender who volunteers to run the canteen, building it up into a mighty enterprise, buying and selling all across the Mediterranean in borrowed planes, until PwC-like, he is contracting bombing runs to both the Allies and the Germans; the chaplain, an anabaptist too simple, too moral for his role, who sees a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral, not knowing that it is Yossarian, whose uniform is saturated with Snowden’s blood; Nately, Aarfy, Orr, Dunbar, Chief White Halfoat, his fellow officers, kids most of them, straight out of privileged homes and private colleges, with no idea about anything; the nurses in the camp hospital where Yossarian retreats at will for a break; Nately’s whore – whom Nately is determined to marry – and Nately’s whore’s kid sister, just 12, and determined not to miss out; Doc Daneeka who gets himself written onto manifests so he can be paid for flight time, is on the manifest of a plane which crashes, and so must be counted as dead; the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, who flew a mission as soon as he arrived, without signing into camp, and now dead, cannot be counted or even have his gear moved.

Almost as soon as I started listening this time round, I looked up Groucho Marx. Heller is Brooklyn Jewish, and so is Groucho. There are great similarities in the way they talk/write. A rush of words – which I have noted in other New York writers, Salinger, Christina Stead’s Lettie Fox, and back to Baldwin – and also a slanginess in the delivery.

This is a wonderful work, seamlessly sliding backwards and forwards in time, as Yossarian processes Snowden’s death, as all the officers of his cohort, die in ones and twos around him. Ending in farce as Nately’s whore makes multiple attempts to kill him, and in hope and despair – that desertion is possible and the only avenue for escape.

‘Catch 22’ of course is the idea that you should be discharged if you are insane, that a discharge must be requested, but that only the sane will request a discharge. Though Heller uses the name more widely than that at different places through the book, little guessing, I suppose, how widely and quickly it would become accepted into common discourse.

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Joseph Heller, Catch 22, first pub. 1961. 478pp. Audible version, 2011, read by Trevor White. 16 hrs.

I’ve run out of time, and will review Book 12, Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Leftwing Alternative, about the Paris uprising of 1968, sometime during 2024.

Links to all the reviews arising from my annual ‘projects’ may be found in the Projects menu above.

The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

12 Books of Boyhood. #10

It is impossible to think that books 9 and 10 of my ‘boyhood’, Brideshead Revisited and The Naked Lunch were released in the same year, 1959. The one so traditional and the other so subversive, the next big step in what was possible in writing, after Joyce’s Ulysses.

As story-telling, Burroughs’ writing is nearly incomprehensible. In a step beyond stream of consciousness the author mimics the thought processes of a drug addict, barely connected words and phrases in a flow that may only be read as poetry – that is, for the words rather than initially at least, for the meaning, but from which meaning gradually/hopefully accrues.

The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Saturday Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One Day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke.

p.21

My introduction to the Beat Generation was a slim book of Beat poetry belonging to RT, my best friend at uni. I would carry it around and read poems to myself out loud, though the only one I still remember went ‘Ta-ra for now the tadpole said/and wrapped his tadtail round his head.’ From there I graduated to Burroughs. I don’t think I ever read much Ginsberg and somehow I didn’t read Kerouac’s On the Road until some years later.

It is quite likely the Burroughs book I read first was Nova Express, “a social commentary on human and machine control of life” (Wiki) which would have been in the SF section of the Melb Uni Union library where I spent more of my time than I had to spare from 40 hours/week first year Engineering (plus College tutorials). I wish now it was Nova Express that I had chosen to reread for this project as I am finding Naked Lunch hard going.

Wikipedia begins its Plot Summary with “Naked Lunch is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot” and ends with “The book then becomes increasingly disjointed and impressionistic, and finally simply stops.” In between are lots of short chapters or ‘routines’, often with entirely different characters, as Burroughs’ alter ego, the homosexual drug addict William Lee, apparently moves from the US to Mexico to Freeland and the Interzone, which may be aspects of Tangier.

Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, “Do you think they will do it?”
And he says, “I think so. They are hungry.”
And I say, “That’s the way I like to see them.”
Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, “Son cosas de la vida,” as Soberda de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar O Motel and fucking it …

p.78

It is a commonplace to claim the 1960s as revolutionary, but they genuinely were, however much has been wound back since. The 1950s were the climax of a long period of intense mono-cultural conservatism. For those of us growing up in those years our parents were dinosaurs. We had to discard their religion, their morals, their politics, their England-is-home, their music. Burroughs’ work was illegal on three levels – drugs, homosexuality and the open discussion of sex – as well as representing a break from conventional styles of writing. Of course I had to read it.

I reviewed some years ago William Burroughs’ Junky (1953), his first novel and the first of three, relatively straightforward works based on his life taking drugs in the US and Central America. Burroughs’ second period saw him living in North Africa and Europe and the publication of Naked Lunch and the Nova Trilogy – The Soft Machine (1961), Nova Express (1964), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). He kept on writing and I have some of his later works – Exterminator! (1973) and Cities of the Red Night (1981), not that I can say anything about them.

In the Nova Trilogy Burroughs expressly adopts the ‘Brion Gysin cut-up method‘ – cutting up pages of text into sections and randomly placing them on a new page – but he had tried an earlier version of cut-up in Naked Lunch, composing it from a much larger collection of vignettes or ‘routines’.

I’m pushing on with Naked Lunch but there’s nothing much else I can realistically say about it. At a later date I will read and review Nova Express, and there try and better fit Burroughs into the scheme of things – abstraction/experimental writing, erotic fiction, grunge and so on. I have William S Burroughs: A life (2014) by Barry Miles, 700pp that should keep me going for a while; and Melanie (GTL) has mentioned a couple of times Davis Schneiderman, “a scholar of Burroughs” (and author of SF novel Drain) whose Retaking the Universe: William S Burroughs in the Age of Globalization I have downloaded.

white flash . . . mangled insect screams . . .
I woke up with the taste of metal in my mouth back from the dead
trailing the colorless death smell
afterbirth of a withered grey monkey
phantom twinges of amputation . . .
“Taxi boys waiting for a pickup,” Eduardo said and died of an overdose in Madrid …

p.260

And so, when I finally get there, it comes to an end.

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William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (sometimes The Naked Lunch), first pub. 1959. My edition, pictured above, Corgi, reprinted 1972. 286pp.

Next month (Nov. 2023): Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Brother Alive, Zain Khalid

Brother Alive (2022) is the second book Marcie McCauley (Buried in Print) and I have read from the shortlist for the second annual Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

I could say we both struggled with it, which would be true, and that we both found it in the end to be worth reading, also true, maybe. It’s not that the writing is difficult, and it’s certainly not bad, but that it takes a long time to work out where the author is taking us.

Three brothers, Dayo, Iseul and Youssef live in the upper storey of a building used as a mosque, on Staten Island NY, with their Iman father. They live Muslim lives, as you would expect, and the language throughout presupposes a knowledge of Muslim practice and custom which challenges the usual Euro/Christian preconceptions of American literature.

During the course of the novel Iseul marries and has two children. The first and third parts of the novel are each a ‘letter’ from Youssef to Iseul’s daughter, Ruhi; and the middle part is a letter from the Iman, Salim, to his sons. To his foster sons, as it turns out, though, as they are of respectively Nigerian, Korean and Middle Eastern descent, that was always understood.

Ya Ruhi, I say to begin with any birth is maliciously unoriginal. I also say time will destroy all that we do, whatever it is. And so, once more for the gallery. Dayo, Iseul, and I were born in that order in 1990. That is true. What came next is not so much true as it is what we were told. Your grandfather knows memory is often a lie sealed with the hot wax of repitition. It helps that he wielded his lies with the aplomb of God’s own press secretary.

The first letter is largely a relatively ordinary coming of age story for three unusual boys in what seems to be a working class New York backwater. Iman Salim is remote, will not display affection, and seems to actively dislike Youssef.

Youssef, writing the account, seems to have an imaginary friend ‘Brother’, whom the others cannot see and whose sustenance is Youssef’s memories. Mostly Youssef memorizes passages from the Qur’an and passes those on, though sometimes Brother will take a memory Youssef is upset about losing.

Brother, it turns out, is not imaginary, and as the story progresses, takes on an increasingly important role. It is only on rereading that I understand the opening sentence of Chapter 1: “When you ask, what should I tell you? Should I tell you that you inherited your leech, your louse, your pest from your grandfather?” that he is referring to Ruhi’s ‘Brother’; and that the Science Fiction aspect of the novel is an explanation of how ‘Brothers’ came about.

Salim rarely sleeps, writes long letters to correspondents in the Middle East. Youssef in his teens follows Salim one night and observes him with a gay lover, which is important in the context of Youssef ‘coming of age’ but of little relevance to the main story. Dayo is academic. Iseul gets a wife and begins a career as a pro basketballer. All three boys move away. Youssef gets a job in advertising and loses it. Salim returns home to Saudi Arabia.

Part 2, Salim’s letter to the boys, sets us on a new path. It begins slowly, with an account of Salim’s own young manhood, but eventually gets to the boys’ parents; his awareness of a disastrous programme to induce belief through drugs; the boys’ births; the parents’ deaths.

The central character in Salim’s Saudia Arabia is Ibrahim, a member of the ruling class and apparently a ‘moderate’. My opinion is that he is standing in for Mohammed bin Salman, the murderous MBS, Crown Prince and dictator (and generous donor to Trump and the Kushners).

Part 3. The boys’ response to reading Salim’s letter is to immediately fly to Saudi Arabia, to seek out evidence of the parents they had not known they had. They find that they are employed by Ibrahim in a new megacity, probably referencing Neom, MBS’s proposed “two mirror-encased skyscrapers stretching more than 100 miles across a swathe of desert and mountain terrain” (Guardian, 28 July 2022).

Of course, I can’t say much more. The boys work out who are their friends and who are their enemies. There are adventures and gunfights, as in most straight SF.

Khalid’s website says nothing about his background – describes him simply as a New York writer – but, maybe his family are from there, or just because he thinks it is important, he wishes to say something about Saudi Arabia and its outward capitalist normalcy. This fable tells us that beneath the surface, religion is used to mask gross inequality and unrestrained violence. As it always has. Everywhere.

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Zain Khalid, Brother Alive, first pub. 2022. My version, ebook from Amazon/Kindle. 352pp.

New York Times review, Pete Tosiello, 12 July 2022 (here)

The Imp of the Perverse, Edgar Allan Poe

12 Books of Boyhood. #6

This is my Edgar Allan Poe, inscribed “William Holloway, Christmas 1966”, 27 stories and “his best poems” all of which I read over and over for the next few years – forms 5 and 6 and uni – and then, slowly, I grew out of them. I wonder why. SF maybe. That is, at uni I discovered ‘pulp’ SF. Or is Poe’s drama more suited to teenagers?

This 1961 American edition has an Introduction by Laura Benet, who writes Poe “fills a special need in the world of literature. His stories appeal to young and old, but have always been especially favored by young readers. For Poe provides high excitement and satisfies a natural human interest in the grisly, the ghoulish and the strange – all within a highly literate framework that makes use of word rhythms and imagery to create suspense and atmosphere..”

Benet points out Poe’s contemporaries were Hawthorne and Melville and they were each writing at a time when there was a great ‘scientific’ interest in electro-magnetism, life force, phrenology and spiritualism.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Three years later his mother died of TB and he was fostered by the wealthy Allan family in Virginia and subsequently, England. Back in the US he finished his schooling and began writing, eventually being disowned by the Allans for his gambling and drinking. He began and lost several journalism jobs, published ‘Ms Found in a Bottle’ and for a while, found national recognition with ‘The Raven’.

Living always in poverty, he married his cousin, who also died of TB, published more volumes of poetry, of stories, and died, largely unknown, “in a delirium”, at 40 of unknown causes.

Wikipedia adds that Virginia, his cousin, was 13 when her married her in 1835; that Poe was mostly known as a (fierce) literary critic and theorist; that he was translated in France by Baudelaire; but I still have no publication dates, though Britannica says stories including ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ were published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia, to which Poe was a monthly contributor, in 1839; and at the end of that year the anthology, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared.

The Imp of the Perverse

This story has stuck with me because I often find myself saying things that I was sure I was going to keep quiet. It begins with a quasi-scientific Introduction –

With certain minds under certain conditions, it [perverseness] becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us, to its prosecution.

The story when we get to it, is brief. The narrator has come into a fortune by the undetectable murder of its previous owner. For a very long period he has enjoyed not so much the material benefits, as the knowledge that his scheme had worked so well. But one day he utters aloud the words, “I am safe – I am safe. Yes, if I be not fool enough to make an open confession.” And from that moment, he is lost.

The Fall of the House of Usher

I read some study guides, but they were all concerned with meanings, while I was hoping for a discussion of the rhythms of the text. This is a story demanding to be read out loud.

During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country. At length I found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

And so we begin. The narrator, after some years, has been summoned to the home of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, and as he pauses “on the brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling” he reflects on “the appellation which seemed to include … both the family and the family mansion.” We wonder, is the ‘fall’ presaged by the title to encompass one or both?

Inside, we find Roderick and his twin sister, Madelaine, the last of their line, fading away, and indeed within a few days Madelaine, cold and lifeless, is placed in her coffin and the two men carry her down to the sepulchre beneath the house. They pause before screwing down the lid –

Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead, for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in youthful maturity had left, as is usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptic character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

Eight or nine days pass. Late at night there is a storm without; strange noises issue from the depths of the house, echoing the story the narrator is reading to Roderick in a vain attempt to calm him. An apparition appears at the door. “From that chamber and from that mansion, I fled aghast”.

I wonder if Poe was peak-Gothic. It’s not a genre to which I am generally attracted. And Poe’s narrators are not noticeably a young men, with the intense feelings of young men, which have been a feature of a number of my ‘books of boyhood’. But of course, his stories are intense and that is no doubt both what got me in, and what I grew out of.

Next month I will review Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which I don’t remember as being intense in that way and then Brideshead Revisited, which of course is.

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Edgar Allan Poe, Stories, Platt& Munk, New York, 1961. Foreword by Laura Benet. 510pp

The Iron Heel, Jack London

12 Books of Boyhood. #5

Dad’s mother was a very straightlaced lady, resolutely upper middle class, the widow of a senior-ish Canberra public servant, who never pretended she wasn’t unhappy that her oldest son had married an unpolished country girl.

I no longer have the copy of The Iron Heel which she gave me at the beginning of sixth form but I can only imagine she thought Jack London-wolves-goldmining, this’ll be safe, when in fact it’s the Communist Manifesto rendered as fiction and set me firmly on the path to revolutionary socialism.

Not suddenly, but definitely. I had been notionally anyway a Fabian for a couple of years; at uni the Fabians packed me off to the Anarchists; and the conscription/Vietnam War debate meant that I spent my second and third first years (I eventually did five before I managed a second year) mostly with SDS and the anti-war movement. After that I was married, a truck driver, and my politics went back to being theoretical.

It also led me to being a Jack London fan and seeking out information about him, though all I remember now is that he was a working class boy, self-educated, and later, when he prospered he had a big block in San Francisco with Australian eucalypts down the bottom of the garden under which lived some hobo-philosophers. The one book of his I never read and always wanted to was The People of the Abyss (1903) about the London underclass. Wiki says it inspired Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

It seems Jack London (1876-1916) wasn’t completely self-educated, but was in and out of school, making it into U. Cal. Berkley before dropping out. By the time The Iron Heel came out in 1908, London had been an oyster pirate, prospected for gold in the Klondike, reported on the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, been married twice, had 10 or so novels to his credit including Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), and had toured America lecturing on socialism. The ‘big block’ I remember was a 1,000 acre ranch on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain, now Jack London State Historic Park.

He died at age 40, on the porch of his ranch house, while ill, alcoholic, and self-administering (over the counter!) morphine and opium for pain relief.

The Introduction to the Penguin edition pictured above is written by Jonathon Auerbach who writes that the term ‘Iron Heel’ was in circulation in the latter 1800s, being used by Henry James to refer to the patriarchy – women “trampled under the iron heel of man”; and by President Grover Cleveland, who uses it much as London did 20 years later – referring to “trusts, combinations and monopolies” with “the citizen … trampled to death beneath an iron heel.” They/we don’t make politicians like that anymore.

The book tells the story of revolutionary hero Ernest Everhard (how Freudian is it to give yourself a name like that) and takes the form of a manuscript written by Everhard’s wife, Avis, and discovered and annotated seven centuries later when a utopian Brotherhood of Man has finally been achieved.

Of course the point of this is London can make his alter ego as valiant and all-seeing as he likes and then (mildly) disparage himself through his wife’s mostly hero-worshipping observations and the future editor Meredith’s detachment. I have always thought this novel the very worst example of a guy writing from a woman’s POV, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t so bothered this time around.

I’m not going to persuade any of you to pick up this book, unless there are some young radicals among my wider readership. As fiction it is barely readable. The first half is a series of lectures, framed as Avis’s university professor father inviting Everhard to dinner to debate politics with various corporate lawyers, capitalists and a well-meaning bishop.

“Amongst the revolutionists I found, also, warm faith in the human, ardent idealism, sweetness of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom – all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire.”

To which the corporate lawyer responds:

“We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces.”

Throughout, London uses the historian seven centuries ahead to comment in often extensive footnotes. After this speech he quotes from Ambrose Bierce’s The Cynic’s Word Book (1906): “Grape-shot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.”

Everhard challenges Avis to tour the slums with him, to see how injured men were discarded by the mills and denied compensation; the slave-like conditions worked by men, women and children. She (and the bishop) are brought round to his point of view. The professor is offered the opportunity to denounce Everhard, refuses, loses his position and is defrauded of his shareholdings and his home and must himself live in the slums.

London is writing at a time when revolutions were in the air, in France over the previous century; in Russia, with Feb and Oct 1917 to come; even meek and mild Australia, which had just elected the world’s first Labour government. And at a time of immensely unequal wealth. “… in the United States, only nine-tenths of one per cent are from the Plutocracy, yet the Putocracy owns seventy per cent of the total wealth.”

As it turns out, we avoided London’s revolution by the creation of a large and prosperous middle class – which eventually included the great majority of workers – who were happy to go along with Capitalism, for as long as that grotesque disparity in wealth was flattened out. Neo-liberalism, Thatcher and Regan began the end of that period in the 1980s, and now we are back with London 120 years ago, but with a more quiescent working class, possibly because of the distribution of manufacturing work to Asia and the huge and ongoing influx of migrant workers into all the western economies.

In 1912, that is, a few years in London’s future (yes, this is dystopian SF), the Socialists, and the small business Grange Party win a large part of the vote, but the Oligarchy, the party of big business, which London calls the Trusts, control the courts, as we are seeing once again, and their victories are meaningless.

A general strike in the US and in Germany, averts War, but the Oligarchy learns its lesson too well and sets out to crush the workers. First, as it always does, buy paying some workers very well so that they will act against the interests of their fellows.

Then, all over the US, agents provocateurs in the employ of the Iron Heel instigate riots and revolts which are put down with massacres of workers and farmers. It is hard for us to consider farmers as revolutionaries but look at Steinbeck, two or three decades later and the small cotton farmers impoverished and forced off their land by the coming of large mechanised agri-businesses.

Congress is disrupted by a bomb and all the Socialists are arrested. The Revolution holds its fire, while its leaders, as did the ANC in S Africa in the 1970s, maintain control from their prison cells. Soon Everhard escapes (to the Sonoma ranch of “a writer friend of mine”). Revolution breaks out, but the Iron Heel prevails. Only the editor from the future, after the Second and Third Revolutions, gives us cause for hope.

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Jack London, The Iron Heel, first pub. 1908, this edition Penguin, 2006. 255pp

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June’s “books of boyhood” will be Edgar Allan Poe. Specifically, The ‘Imp of the Perverse’ because I am often afflicted by it, but probably one other as well, maybe ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.