The Vulgar Streak by Wyndham Lewis

"Where's the sense," asked a neighbour with militantly folded arms, "in bringin' children up above their station, I should like to know?  That young lady...young Maddie, I should say--she doesn't never seem happy, do she, for all her dollin' up and puttin' on the talk?"

In his introduction to an excerpt of Wyndham Lewis's criticism of George Orwell in the collection Enemy Salvoes, C. J. Fox mentions Lewis's 1941 novel The Vulgar Streak, calling it "a book about a proletarian con-man's attempted rise to middle-class prosperity."  In his Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, Paul O'Keefe reports that American publishers during World War II rejected The Vulgar Streak for being "too critical of England."  This sounded interesting to me, so I decided to read the novel.  I acquired a 1973 US printing via interlibrary loan; a scan of the same edition is available for free at the internet archive, though this edition is full of irritating typographical issues, so those interested should perhaps seek the 1985 edition from Black Sparrow (which I have never seen.)

From the start we see that The Vulgar Streak is about men who, to put it charitably, create or recreate themselves, or, to put it not so charitably, are fake phony frauds.  On the very first page of text we meet a man, Martin Penny-Smythe, a short and fat Englishman, who "cultivated a mild stammer."  Later we learn that he is a convert to Catholicism, and that he carries around a pipe (Lewis on that first page, before revealing his name, actually calls Martin "the pipe-sucker") in part to drive away women.  Martin is a man who has consciously created an identity for himself, crafted an image of himself to present to the world that is not entirely natural--he hasn't accepted the religion of his birth, nor even the speaking ability he has been born with.

On that first page Martin is walking ("strolling" is how the characters and Lewis describe it) in Venice in the late 1930s with another Englishman, an artist, the tall and elegant Vincent Penhale.  It is Vincent who turns out to be the novel's protagonist.  Vincent is even more affected (or self-created) than Martin.  While they ride a gondola, Vincent, jocularly referring to Martin's Catholicism, makes a "confession" to his friend, admitting that he is not the product of a middle-class family and a good school as he has led people to believe, but the child of a slum-dwelling working-class couple.  "...I am a sham person from head to foot," he tells Martin.  As Vincent flirts with a young Englishwoman, the niece of a baronet, April Mallow, he makes poses that she recognizes as theatrical, "reminiscent of the footlights."  We later learn that most of Vincent's artistic work has been for the theatre, designing costumes and the like, and that he is an actor who has appeared on stage.

In the first of the book's three parts, Vincent seduces April, who falls in love with him, despite her revulsion over another friend of Vincent's who makes an unexpected appearance, a thuggish working-class man named Bill Halvorsen, and her suspicions about a mysterious interaction Vincent has with the local police.  April is vulnerable to Vincent's advances for a number of reasons, including the tense atmosphere in which these British tourists in Venice are living: they all spend lots of time listening to the radio, scrutinizing the newspapers and assessing rumors regarding the possibility of war as a result of the ongoing Sudetenland crisis. 

The second part of the 247-page novel begins two months later, in London.  We learn that Vincent and April were married because April was pregnant; though April is as much in love as ever.  We become acquainted with Vincent's home and lifestyle, and meet Vincent's family, most of whom he hides from April and her wealthy family.  The one Penhale whom Vincent introduces to April is his beautiful sister Madeline ("Maddie.")  Like Vincent, Madeline has risen above her working-class origins, having married a professional cartoonist (whom Lewis tells us is "a hack.")  Also like Vincent, Maddie is perpetually putting on an act, and she too has a professional background redolent with artifice and performance, having done work as an artist's model.  Lewis emphasizes the tremendous amount of exhausting work it takes for Vincent and Maddie to keep up their facades ("One reason why she held herself so stately and unsmiling--perhaps a little queenly--was because she had had to be always on her best behavior"), in particular focusing on the study and concentration it takes for them to maintain their bogus Oxford accents.  Vincent, in one scene, gives Maddie lessons on how to pronounce "Buckingham Palace," complete with lecture notes and mnemonic devices.  Other characters remark that Maddie hardly ever talks--they don't realize that she keeps mum for fear of revealing her working class origins via some blunder in pronunciation.  Maddie even goes on "dates" with an educated man, Dougal Tandish, thus risking her relationship with her husband, because Tandish has, she believes, a good accent and she can learn by listening to him.

The reason Vincent and Maddie go to all this trouble, according to Vincent at least, is the stifling English class system.  "The relentless pressure of the English class incubus had poisoned the existence of one as much as of the other," Lewis tells us.  In this second part of The Vulgar Streak Lewis has various characters air their views on class.  Not only does Vincent discuss the English class system with a German therapist--a refugee from Nazi Germany--but we see Vincent interact with his working class siblings and in-laws--charwomen and automobile mechanics and the like whom Lewis gives broad accents--at his father's funeral.   

We hear lots of complaints from the Penhale clan about their treatment at the hands of the middle class and the government: e.g., doctors won't prescribe poor people the (expensive) medicine they need, and the tax-payer-funded hospital tries to speed up the death of poor patients rather than to cure them.  And then there is Vincent's pretentious lament to the curate who presides at Dad's funeral: "when are they going to learn, I wonder, to design a standard house for the Worker that is both sanitary and beautiful?"

More provocatively, especially for us 21st-century readers, Vincent compares the English poor to African-American slaves and to women in China.  In England, he opines, the working classes are considered an inferior breed, "creatures of another clay," and calls his siblings' accent and slang "a slave-jargon" that they can't help themselves from speaking.  He claims that:

"Since there are no niggers here, they had to create niggers.  The poor are the niggers in this country."

(Compare to this John Lennon / Yoko Ono production...at home with headphones on)

and:

"...the religion of class...in England restricts the personal development of any man or woman born outside the genteel pale.  It denies expansion to him or her as much as the shoes formerly worn by Chinese ladies denied normal development to the feet."

While Vincent (and the mysterious Bill Halvorsen, it turns out) are willing to go to any length, to take terrible risks, to escape their class or oppose the class system, most of the other working-class people in the novel accept their station and even resent Vincent and Maddie's "putting on airs."  There is the unnamed minor character quoted in the passage I use as an epigraph to this blog post, for example, and one of Vincent's sisters, Minnie, who vocally resents her siblings' attitude and declares "I belong to the working-class an' I'm not ashamed to say so."  It was not clear to me if Lewis expected the reader to see the wisdom of these working class people's resignation to their fate, or condemn them, as Vincent does, as complicit in their own oppression.

After the funeral, the plot of The Vulgar Streak becomes increasingly melodramatic.  We learn how Vincent is able to afford trips to Venice--he is passing counterfeit money for Bill Halvorsen, who is a socialist activist and engraver who forges banknotes as a way of undermining the capitalist system (Vincent even voices a precis of Halvorsen's views on monetary theory.)  When Maddie's boyfriend (or whatever he is) Dougal Tandish, who is too clever for his own good, starts to suspect something is fishy with Vincent and Bill, he investigates Bill's engraving shop, where Bill shoots him dead.  (The best joke in The Vulgar Streak is that Vincent starts calling Halvorsen "Buffalo Bill.")  Vincent helps Bill toss the corpse in the Thames, but the bobbies are on to them almost immediately.  Vincent's true origins and involvement in the murder are splashed all over the papers, leading April to collapse and have a miscarriage, from which she dies.  Maddie's husband the hack cartoonist abandons Maddie.  Seeing how he has ruined April's and Maddie's lives, Vincent hangs himself.  Maddie has to move into the slum quarters of her alcoholic widowed mother and her resentful sister, and take up modelling again to put food on the table.

The Vulgar Streak is a little lackluster; Lewis is an idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, and I was hoping for something surprising and strange here, but I didn't get it. Tarr was challenging and unusual, and Self Condemned was full of unconventional opinions as well as memorable incidents, characters and images and even some quite funny jokes, but The Vulgar Streak feels like a pretty ordinary novel. I can't really object to the book's ideas about class and the dangers of maintaining a facade (and associating with commies!), but these ideas are not particularly novel or surprising--I feel like people are deploring the English class system and exhorting you to "be yourself" all the time.  Maybe the ambiguity of the novel (on the one hand the English class system is restrictive, but on the other people who resist it cause unhappiness for themselves and everybody they come into contact with) is "literary."  As for the style, it is just acceptable; there were no particularly scintillating passages or images, and I didn't really feel for or care about the various characters.

There are a few interesting things here and there in The Vulgar Streak for us culture vultures.  Lewis, one of the most prominent of the early 20th-century British painters and a prolific art critic, fills the Venice part of the novel with references to Guardi, Canaletto and Ruskin, figures with whom I was familiar.  I was more excited to be introduced to The Magnet and Billy Bunter, an element of British pop culture to which I had never been exposed.  Near the end of the novel there is a little talk of Stendhal's The Red and The Black, which Martin has read but Vincent has not.  I haven't read it either, but the juxtaposition of red and black reminded me of Lewis's own metaphorical description of 1930s Europe as being a plain in which 90% of the people live docilely, trapped between mountains inhabited by menacing hill tribes, one tribe following the red principle of communism and the other the black principle of fascism.  (This parable of Lewis's is quoted at length in Paul O'Keefe's Some Sort of Genius, where I read it; originally it appeared in the book Left Wings Over Europe.)

The Amazon page advertising the 1985 edition of The Vulgar Streak gives one the impression that the book is about fascism, that Vincent is a fascist sympathizer, but there is not really much in the novel about fascism, and Vincent is vocally hostile to fascists.  (He calls Dougal Tandish, whom he abominates, a fascist, though it is not clear if this is an accurate assessment or just Vincent, who is constantly lying, maligning the man unfairly.)  Vincent does have something in common with Hitler and Mussolini, however: when he visits the German shrink the idea that Vincent is a man characterized by "an excess of Will" is raised, and the therapist notes that Mussolini and Hitler are "extreme, and curiously disagreeable, expressions of this morbid Will."  Maybe another thing about The Vulgar Streak that is "literary" is that it seems to argue that being a "go-getter," what Samuel Johnson might have called a "projector," is a terrible mistake, that you, your spouse, your colleagues, and your relatives will be made miserable if not outright killed if you embark on some grand scheme to change your station in life or, even worse, change the world.  Entertainment fiction, of course, regularly celebrates the hero who masters his environment and accomplishes some project or solves some problem, or tries to do so and nobly fails--in The Vulgar Streak if you are a charwoman or a motor car mechanic you probably should just embrace it.   

Not bad, but not really remarkable, I'm awarding The Vulgar Streak the "acceptable" rating that gets so much use here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Hopefully my next foray into Wyndham Lewis's fiction will be more exciting.

Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis

"I am really awfully sorry; I sympathize with you most genuinely."  He sighed.  "What Canada is like I do not know.  They say it is a tough place."  Then he said facetiously, with a broad smile, "You may end up as a lumberjack!  That would be rather fun!"

Here's another novel by Wyndham Lewis, one of T. S. Eliot's favorite people.  Check out these blurbs if you think I might be exaggerating:

Damn, now that is a friend.

Self Condemned was first published in 1954, more than thirty years after Tarr, Lewis's first published novel, which I read in June.  As with Tarr, I got my hands on a copy of Self Condemned via interlibrary loan through a suburban Maryland public library.  When I picked up the 1955 printing of the novel, along with a 1951 printing of Lewis's Rude Assignment, the librarian who presented them to me said, "Wow, these books look old!"

The copy of Self Condemned which I read

Self Condemned is the story of René Harding, a 47-year old British college professor and successful author of two books; as our story begins he is living in London.  Harding has decided, without consulting his wife Hester (AKA "Essie") or his family (his French-born mother and his two married sisters), to quit ("throw up" is the phrase used) his position as Chair of History at some unnamed university and move to Canada.  Why is he leaving his "first-rate job, as good as a man of my mental habits can have," an act which one uncharitable character calls "committing suicide."?  Why is René abandoning a center of international culture, power and finance to live in what all the book's English characters think is some kind of godforsaken wilderness, a grim frontier where where he has no job prospects ("I may have to teach Algebra or--oh yes, or History in an elementary school...of course I may prefer to earn my living as a waiter....")?

The novel, like 400 pages in this edition, is split into three parts.  Part One, "The Resignation," consisting of ten chapters, is set mostly in London and its environs.  We accompany René as he visits in turn individual friends and family members to explain to them his shocking change of life and to bid them a final farewell.  Satirist Lewis entertains us with the amusing antics and odd personalities of Rene's acquaintances, most of whom are oddballs or creeps of one kind or another, while exposing us to René the intellectual's ideas and René the man's public and inner character. 

René's best friend is Robert Parkinson, AKA "Rotter," a writer of  articles and reviews for highbrow publications, and we get an extensive introduction to our hero's thinking when Rotter reads aloud--to its very subject himself--a draft of an article he has been commissioned to write about René.  René, we learn, is a master at interpreting and predicting historical events--his more recent book was entitled A Secret History of World War II, written and published before the actual war has begun!  René is bitterly hostile to Marxism and laments and condemns its pernicious effect on academia and on modern life--René believes that if it were not for the malign influence of Marxist thought and of the Soviet Union, that the 20th century, instead of a century of mass war and totalitarianism, could have fulfilled the dreams of peace and prosperity of the Victorian liberals.

Perhaps most importantly, René believes that historians, instead of focusing their researches on and dominating their narratives with rulers, most of whom are tyrants and mass murderers who live out tedious melodramas, should prioritize the small minority of inventive and creative people. In a later part of the book we get another look at René's theory of what historical writing should be when René is explaining his belief that the natural world is insane, is a madhouse:

If the chapter devoted to Rotter gives us a full description of Rene's ideas and his professional work, the chapters in which he has his final meetings with his French-born mother, his sister Mary and her husband Percy Lamport, his sister Helen and her husband Robert Kerridge, and his sister-in-law Janet and her husband Victor Painter, give us explanations and demonstrations of why Harding has chosen to go into voluntary exile from his field and his country.  Not only is Rene's brand of thinking not welcome in the academy, but he in turn looks at the world of academia as "fundamentally a racket" whose inhabitants are, to a man, "dishonest."  He can spend no more time in such an environment lest he lose his self respect!  His last encounters with Percy Lamport, Robert Kerridge (why are there two characters named "Robert?"), and Victor Painter give us an idea of the kind of dolts, jerks and phonies René has to deal with in England.  Percy is an anti-Semite and successful businessman who strikes a pose as a member of the progressive avant garde, collecting Marie Laurencin paintings and reading George Orwell, G. D. H. Cole, George Bernard Shaw and leftist periodicals: "the richer he [Percy] became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies moved."  Victor is a snobbish nouveau riche striver with whom René gets into a shouting match at their last meal together in a restaurant.  Robert Kerridge, husband of Rene's favorite sister Helen, is a leftist clergyman; at their last meeting, at the Kerridge home in Robert's country parish, Robert and his friend, a local leftist schoolmaster, insult René, calling him a fascist--Rene's hostility to Marxism and his calling out of the hypocrisy of those who abominate Hitler but admire the equally murderous and despotic Bolsheviks has attracted such attacks from many quarters.  (Self Condemned is to some extent I am not yet cognizant of autobiographical, and Lewis himself is often dismissed as a fascist.)

Lewis is adept at making some of these scenes funny, but also conveying René's sense of isolation from his peers in the educated middle classes and his and his sister Helen's sadness at parting, presumably to never meet again.  (Rene's last sight of Helen actually cleverly foreshadows his last sight of Hester, one of the devices by which Lewis encourages us to compare René's relationship with his wife and his favorite sister.)

The tenth chapter of Part One describes René and Hester's voyage across the Atlantic to Canada; during the journey Great Britain declares war on Germany (we are told that the ships' passengers were "very little affected" by the news or by the King's speech.)  We had Lewis, a successful painter himself, doing a little art criticism when he attacked Laurencin's paintings in Percy's mansion, and on the ship we get some Lewis literary criticism.  René, who has "read few of the English classics," tries to read George Eliot's Middlemarch, and after Lewis presents us a deadpan page-long summary of the novel's beginning, Rene wonders "Why am I reading this dull nonsense?" and throws the book over the side into the ocean.

As Part Two, entitled "The Room," begins, we learn that René and Hester have lived for over three years in the same hotel room in the fictional Canadian city of Momaco.  Lewis, born in 1882, spent the first five years of his life in the US and Canada, and spent World War II there as well; I haven't read any biographies of Lewis yet, but his description of the place in Self Condemned suggests he hated North America like poison!

Momaco has no cafes!  Momaco has no theater, and the cinemas only show Hollywood garbage, no French, Italian, or German movies!  And the weather!  If it is not thirty or forty below, the streets a treacherous sheet of ice, it is the brief summer, when the hard sunlight (sunlight in England, we are told, is soft) makes your eyes water and monstrous flies devour you!  Our heroes come up with divers hilarious euphemisms and nicknames for Canada/Momaco, like "the living death" and "the hideous ice-box."

The hotel in which René and Hester spend their first three Canadian years is ill-run and inhabited by dangerous criminals, maniacs, and whores, and René repeatedly describes it as a microcosm of North America and of the entire world.  North America, Lewis declares, is a matriarchy, and sure enough, the hotel's owner and its (mis)manager are women, a Mrs. Plant and a Mrs. McAffie, called "Affie."  The ethnic diversity of America, that we are all so used to hearing panegyrized, is by Lewis called "a jumble" and held up as one example of the characteristic mixed identity or multiple personality of the New World: "an incoherence customary on this new continent where nothing can ever be one thing."  The different ethnic groups that make up the population of North America all hate each other and contact with each other brings out the worst in each:

...the protestant English, backward and bigoted, rage against the papist hierarchy ruling the French.... the Anglo-Saxon suffers from a Hitlerian superiority feeling, and the 'Peasoups' (as the French are called) have to put up with a lot of contempt from the master-race.

When a Canadian thug and his American friend, a draft dodger, overhear René and Hester's English accents, our heroes are physically assaulted, and René is beaten up, even viciously kicked as he lays on the floor.  The hotel is full of violence, with fights in the bar a common occurrence and René and Hester often hearing the bloodcurdling screams of a German woman tenant as her live-in (American) Indian boyfriend beats her:

...the Indian--drunk as all Indians had been ever since the Whites had landed--dwelling amid the sentimental screams of his blonde Teutonic squaw...

Part Two of the novel concludes with a murder and then a tremendous fire, set by the murderer, that razes the hotel.

Part Two of Self Condemned is very (blackly) humorous, with Lewis presenting us with many strange and amusing figures.  These bizarre characters, among them a generous and wealthy homosexual book-collector, Mr. Furber (one wonders if this is somehow a reference to Faber and Faber, the famous literary publishing house), who hires René to aid him in organizing his library, and the aforementioned manageress of the hotel, Affie, who reads all the hotel employees' and tenants' futures in tea leaves and makes uncannily accurate predictions (her powers derive from her practices of steaming open everyone's mail before it is delivered and plastering her ear to keyholes), are each of them endearing, amusing, and sinister, all at the same time.

The ordeal of the fire and the need to move to another (less poorly managed) hotel works changes in the social and psychological lives of the Hardings.  Furber, macabrely fascinated by René's acquaintance with the hotel arsonist and murderer, intensifies their relationship and shows him off to friends, so that, after over three years in Canada, René and Hester receive their first dinner invitation, to the home of a British college professor, McKenzie, and his wife; the McKenzies moved to Canada a year or so after the Hardings, and experienced the Blitz back in England.  Talking to a fellow scholar reignites René's mind, which begins percolating with new ideas and theories, and he begins writing a new book; his new social contacts lead to a regular job writing a well-received newspaper column in which he applies his expertise to predicting the twists and turns of the raging war, and then a teaching position at a university in Momaco is offered to him!   René hopes that their improved financial circumstances, new intellectual stimulation, and new friends, will make Hester more amenable to their life in the New World, but their fiery expulsion from the vile hotel and intimate familiarity with murder has left Hester more than ever obsessed with returning to England.

"Whether Momaco ignores you or fetes you, it is always Momaco.  Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in this awful city?"  

René, however, has no interest in returning to London.  At the end of her rope, unable to dislodge René from his steadfast determination to stay in the "God-forsaken ice box," on page 369 Hester commits suicide by jumping in front of a moving truck.  René is physically and psychologically broken by the sight of her mangled body and the enormity of this catastrophe, and spends long months recuperating in a hospital and then a Catholic retreat, where he is surrounded by priests and considers converting to Catholicism.  The last 37 pages of the book consist of René trying to come to terms with his new life and sort out his radically shifting feelings about his wife and her final desperate act, feelings which range from love and pity to hate and contempt.  He achieves career success--wealth and a position at an important American university--but he is a hollowed out man, a man who went against the tide, who saw through all of the bogus stratagems and deceptions of the universe and of human society, but who has suffered from this enlightenment, been punished like a character in a Greek myth who defied the gods.

Self Condemned excels as an entertaining and moving story about unusual people and their unhappy fates, but Lewis doesn't see himself merely as a comedian and tragedian, but as a satirist, and he takes a dim view of our world and its people, and he works a number of satiric themes.

Prominent among these themes is the absurdity of life.  Lewis and René use the word "absurd" again and again, and several times Rene is taken aback by how absurdly other characters act.  Lewis also presents us with many incidents which are at once absurd, but also wholly believable.  The attitude of Affie and her staff about janitors, for example:

She actually preferred a man to be a thief and drunkard....the only kind of janitor she heartily disliked was a competent one, like a man called Jan--whom everybody hated because he was so clean, sober, and good at his job.

Another instance is Rene's job with the book collector, Furber; this guy is paying Rene to offer advice on the value of rare books and whether he should add such and such a book to his collection, but Rene is a scholar, not a bookdealer:

He knew as little about the market value of a book, as he did of the value of diamonds or fur coats...since most of Furber's books did not interest him, it was a waste of time consulting him as to the desirability of adding a little-known Marquis de Sade to the collection.  But he had to affect enthusiasm, in order to retain his position....  

The hotel, Canada, and the world: all one big madhouse!

A more recent edition

A related theme of the novel is the prolonged fit of insanity commonly called the Second World War.  We are accustomed, when WWII is discussed, of hearing such terms as "the finest hour" and "the greatest generation" when the Allies are the topic at hand, and denunciations of German aggression and Nazi racism in reference to the Axis powers.  Lewis does not take this tack.  As evidenced by the reaction of the liner's passengers to the King's speech (which I am told has recently been romanticized in a fanciful Hollywood picture), Lewis's characters feel disconnected from the war and are far from patriotic heroes.  When the war is directly addressed Lewis does not mention the stirring victories of military men or the noble sacrifices and selfless dedication of blitzed Londoners and "Rosie the Riveter;" rather, he has René and Hester hear reports on the radio about what we might consider Allied misbehavior, like the shackling of German prisoners in Britain and Canada and FDR's receipt of the gift of a letter opener made from the bone of a Japanese fighting man.  (Lewis does not provide any context for these regrettable British and American actions, such as the fact that they were responses to more systematic and severe German and Japanese atrocities, or that there was a public outcry in America against abuse of Japanese war dead and that FDR later repudiated the gruesome trophy Lewis cites.)  Mrs. McKenzie was far from willing to "do her bit" during the Blitz--she complains bitterly about how the local air warden harassed her over her failure to meet black out regulations and how the government tried to force her to house a crippled twelve-year-old Jewish refugee--she took it as a personal affront that they tried to pollute her home with a Jew!  Mrs. McKenzie also complains about the war profiteering of shopkeepers.  Both times Winston Churchill is mentioned by name it is not done to extol the man; one time it is only so Lewis can goof on him for using outdated American slang.  There is no talk about the German invasion of Poland or Japanese sneak attacks on Pearl Harbor or British Pacific colonies; when the characters blame the war on anything it is on government in general (Rene asserts that "Government is often in the hands of criminals or morons, never in the hands of first-rate men.")  Affie wins Rene's approval when she expresses her horror of the war in a way that condemns all authority and stresses continuity between the World Wars:

'They are taking our boys,' she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself and the fact that her eyes were dry was only because anger dried them up.  'They are taking our boys again.'

Lewis eschews the particular and the familiar when talking about WWII in an effort to argue that WWII is not as "special" as we are commonly lead to believe, not an episode of unique heroism among the Allied peoples and unprecedented evil on the part of Hitler and his henchmen and the German war machine.  In his telling, war seems like the inevitable result of immutable human evil, not the particular crime of individual malefactors or evil political parties.  In fact, the book René is inspired to write by his intellectually invigorating relationship with McKenzie has as one of its arguments the claim that the cataclysmic period of World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II is not some kind of horrible outlier, but a normal period of history: "His slogan was as follows: 'The past thirty years is typical, not exceptional.'"

And another

While relatively few passages address the war directly, many more seem to address it obliquely or symbolically.  One hilarious and somewhat disgusting scene covers Affie's enthusiastic warmaking on the cockroaches which infest the hotel--she is not reluctant to get up close and personal, down and dirty, in her pitiless campaign of extermination against the six-legged fiends, engaging with brio in chemical warfare and hand to hand combat with the vermin.  The hotel's barkeep, after a particularly desperate scrap, declares he is "neutral" and will no longer intervene in the regular bar fights.  And the fire that destroys the hotel occurs just after Rene predicts that the war will trigger the very quick ("overnight") dissolution of the British Empire.

Self Condemned's themes, topics and techniques are perfectly suited to my interests and temperament: loneliness, exile, and suicide; difficult sexual relationships; hostility to Marxism and disillusionment with academia; detailed descriptions of claustrophobic rooms and their psychological effect on those who live in them, who feel imprisoned in them.  Lewis even provides a page-long debunking of the romantic mythology that has grown up around motherhood!  Compared to Tarr, this is a more conventional and straightforward novel; it is definitely "easier" and its settings and characters are more clearly and more sharply drawn, so that you can see in your mind bold and disturbing images of the book's people and the places they inhabit.  I ate it up!

A good balance of laugh out loud humor, pathos, and Lewis's idiosyncratic and against-the-grain opinions make Self Condemned a fun, at times affecting, at times surprising, read.  I particularly recommend it to those who enjoy narratives about down-and-out self-important outsider smart guys, like those of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski.

Eight Against Utopia by Douglas R. Mason

"A group of us are aiming to set up a colony outside--in the open.  We need two or three more people.  Would you come?"

"How is that possible?  The books say that life outside had to be given up.  North is too cold.  South is too hot and has hostile cities.  You will not be allowed to go."

"Never mind about that." 

Publisher's Weekly, your source for
fake news--every word of that blurb is false

In our last episode I told you that I purchased my 1970 paperback copy of Douglas R. Mason's 1966 novel From Carthage Then I Came, retitled Eight Against Utopia in this edition, partly because it appeared to be inspired or influenced by one of the 20th century's foremost poets, T. S. Eliot, one of the most important of all Christian theologians, Augustine of Hippo, and the ancient tales of the sons of Oedipus.  I even described my experience of reading Seven Against Thebes by Greek playwright Aeschylus and The Thebaid by Roman poet Statius.  Now let's read the lovely blue paperback which set me on that mission of reading books from 2,000 years ago.  Joachim Boaz, star SF blogger and tweeter, warned us that Eight Against Utopia is dull, but let's cross our fingers and dive in anyway!

Seven thousand years ago mankind retreated into domed cities in order to survive a new ice age!  (This must be the ice age J.G. Bennett warned us about on Robert Fripp's experimental rock music album Exposure!)  Over the millennia, ostensibly to conserve scarce resources and maintain order in the shelter's tight confines, the northernmost domed city, Carthage, sited on the African coast of the Mediterranean, has developed into a repressive authoritarian state; each citizen's bodily functions and brainwaves are monitored, so the government can even tell (more or less) what you are thinking!  This system doesn't have the capacity to read everybody's mind at once, reminding the reader of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, and with effort clever people can evade its probing by filling the surface of their minds with a jumble of tedious calculations and trick it by thinking of forbidden matters via misdirecting symbols. 

Gaul T. Kalmar is an engineer in Carthage, and because his duties include doing maintenance on the outer dome, he knows full well that the ice age is over--he has opened hatches and spent time in an almost forgotten observatory atop the dome, and there he has breathed the outside air and seen that the dome is surrounded by forests instead of glaciers.  He wants to leave Carthage and start a new, more free, society in Europe he will call "New Troy."  He gathers together seven additional like-minded people, including a beautiful psychologist, Tania Clermont, and they plot their escape.  The headshrinker (or "mind-bender," as they call psychologists in this book) is a critical member of the team--in her office is a room shielded from the mind-reading rays, so the pioneers can discuss their plans openly in there.  (People can actually sense the oppressive intrusion into their minds of the government monitors, and so to treat her patients Clermont needs a place where they can temporarily escape this source of anxiety.)

One of the remarkable things about Eight Against Utopia is that it is chockablock with learned cultural references.  There are the aforementioned quotes from Eliot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets, a description of a woman as having a "Marie Antoinette bust," a passage in which the "posture of the wife of Indra" (link NSFW!) is mentioned, another in which a character refers to La Venus du Gaz, and many more.  Of course I enjoy these nods to works of art with which I am familiar, and enjoy looking up online mentioned works with which I am unfamiliar.  (Just a few days ago I was reading Wyndham Lewis's Rude Assignment, and was moved to look up Gerald Leslie Brockhurst because Lewis mentioned him.  Even though Lewis brought Brockhurst's paintings up as an example of lowbrow gunk that appeals to the masses, I kind of liked them!)  Unfortunately, Mason's esoteric references add almost nothing to his book!

Firstly, the fact that the characters are intimately familiar with the work of T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso makes them seem more like 1950s grad students in the humanities than the engineers and psychologists of a eugenically bred, constantly surveilled and intensely propagandized population of the year 9000 A. D.  Mason is apparently more interested in showing off his own erudition than in conjuring up the atmosphere of an alien milieu and depicting the mindset of its inhabitants.

Secondly, all these erudite allusions and quotations are not integral building blocks of a deeply philosophical work, but merely window dressing tossed practically at random into a routine adventure story.  Despite the cover text that invokes George Orwell's 1984 and the cradle-to-grave welfare state, Eight Against Utopia doesn't have much to say about how a state socialist system operates or what it does to human psychology and sociology, and it isn't a defense of individualism or a celebration of man's unquenchable desire for freedom.  Rather, it is a series of tedious engineering scenes and mediocre action scenes starring a superfluity of bland and forgettable characters.

The bulk of the first half or so of the novel consists of detailed descriptions of Kalmar and company secretly digging through the dome foundation (they have a sort of hand held disintegrator device called a "matter pulverizer") in search of a point of egress and sabotaging the city's power source, which they hope will hamper the security forces' efforts to track them down after their breakout.  What Mason describes are not emotions or psychological states, but architecture and the laborious cutting of walls and opening of seized doors, and thus these scenes generate no suspense or fear and do not move or even interest the reader.  I have to admit that I found these engineering scenes difficult to visualize, maybe because I have only the dimmest sense of what "tie bars," "flanges" and "culverts" really look like and in what context one encounters them, but also, I think, because of another problem, Mason's writing style, which is not good.

Instead of explaining things clearly, Mason employs a style full of euphemisms, cliches, and not-at-all-funny ironic deadpan humor, which not only makes it hard to tell what is going on in the many scenes that include architectural and geographical description, but undercuts any excitement or tension the action scenes might generate.

Another distracting tic of Mason's is his reusing again and again the same words and phrases, even though plenty of perfectly suitable synonyms are available.  We see "tack" (for direction or approach) three times in the book's first chapter alone, and Mason uses the phrase "when the balloon goes up" (meaning when some dangerous operation has irrevocably begun) on pages 43, 46 and 57.  This brings us back to my earlier complaint: why are people who have lived in a dome for 7,000 years using sailing and ballooning metaphors, anyway?  These people have never seen the ocean or the sky!  If Mason is going to make no effort to depict the mindset of people living in an environment radically different than our own, why does he set his story in such an environment?

A passage that I think demonstrates many of the essential characteristics of Eight Against Utopia comes on the day our heroes make their break for freedom (the day the balloon goes up!)  While everybody is hustling to the airlock and the hovercraft the men of the group have excavated, Tania Clermont is revealed to be a traitor working for the government!  When Clermont pulls her government-issued gun, one of the men, Shultz, knocks her cold with a karate chop, and then he carries her out of the dome on his shoulder because he still thinks he can make her his girlfriend!

She was very light.  He slung her over his shoulder and through the thin leotard could feel the pneumatic tension of her jagana against the side of his face.  Her scent was a matter of some subtlety and care, with a faint overtone of sandalwood.  Without overt intention, she was doing a fair job of mind-bending.  

I'm guessing "pneumatic," which Mason uses four times over the course of the book to describe women's bodies, is another Eliot reference, especially since at one point it is used in the same sentence with "Phoenician sailor," a famous phrase from The Waste Land, but I've never seen "jagana" before.  (I mean I've never seen the word--I can assure you I have seen a woman's jagana...whatever it is.)

Besides Mason's useless literary references, lame jokes, and vague descriptions, this passage also serves as an example of the novel's attitude towards sex and gender--were Eight Against Utopia to take flight in today's grrrlpower/MeToo era I suspect it would run into some heavy flak!  Not only are there many "male gaze" scenes and groping scenes, but during all the action sequences the women are essentially burdens--men need to tell them what to do, carry them over obstacles, rescue them, etc.  We are told that women are less adept than men at concealing their thoughts from the government monitor rays, so Kalmar keeps the women in the dark during the planning stages of their breakout.

Six of the party (this count includes unconscious Tania Clermont) fly off in the dusty old hovercraft, but the fuzz are hot on their tails and Kalmar and sexy redhead female engineer Jane Welland are left behind.  In the third quarter of the novel we get long descriptions of the six baling out the hovercraft and rigging a makeshift sail after the machine loses power and lands in the ocean, and long descriptions of Kalmar and Welland fleeing Carthage on foot.  The team's sabotage having cut the city's power, the pair traverse darkened walkways, creep through empty maintenance tunnels and then ascend the shaft of an inert elevator.  Under cover of darkness, a cop Kalmar already has a grudge against tries to rape a woman we never heard about before whom he just picks out of a crowd, Goda Hurst, and our hero Kalmar stumbles on this crime and takes it upon himself to rescue her.  Hurst joins the fugitive party and promptly falls in love with Kalmar, incurring Welland's jealousy.  From the secret little observatory atop the dome the three rappel down to the surface.

Carthaginian security forces pursue the two groups of fugitives, and we get chase scenes and fight scenes.  Kalmar's trio captures an aircraft from their pursuers, and the two groups of refugees are reunited.  They are chased into an old military installation at Gibraltar in the final quarter of the book, and there Mason gives us another punishing dose of descriptions of architecture and climbing and tunnel running and cutting holes in walls.  Tania the treacherous shrink is vaporized by the security troops' energy weapons, but don't feel bad--she had repented of her treachery and faced death with equanimity, and within minutes Shultz develops a crush on Goda Hurst.  (Any port in a storm, I guess.)  They find a MTB or some such military boat, preserved as a museum exhibit.  After 7,000 years its engine and rapid fire deck gun still operate like clockwork, so our heroes crew the thing and, in the shadow of "The Rock," win a naval battle against five Carthaginian hovercraft.  Then they sail to England to restart civilization.
   
What a disappointment!  Eight Against Utopia's references to classical and modernist literature are only skin deep and the political and philosophical issues revolving around the individual's relationship to the state get more of an airing on the back cover than in the actual text, leaving us with a 150-page book about engineering, sex and violence, but all the engineering, sex and violence scenes are inept!  Thumbs down!  (Gotta agree with Joachim this time!)

Tarr by Wyndham Lewis

The chilly and unusual air of the early morning, the empty streets and shuttered houses, destroyed all feeling of reality of what was happening for Kreisler.  Had the duel been a thing to fear, it would have had an opposite effect.  His errand did not appear as an inflexible reality, either, following upon events that there was no turning back.  It was a whim, a caprice they were pursuing, as though, for instance, they had woken up in the early morning and decided to go fishing.  They were carrying it out with a dogged persistency, with which our whims are often served.

I was inspired to read D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow because I had developed an interest in T. S. Eliot's milieu.  Here we have a novel I am reading from the same impetus, but by a personage much more closely connected to Eliot.  (Though in a December 1922 letter to his brother Henry, Eliot suggested that Joyce and Lawrence were the only contemporary novelists worth reading, Peter Ackroyd's 1984 biography of Eliot relates incidents that suggest Eliot was very skeptical about Lawrence--in a lecture in 1933 Eliot called Lawrence "a sick man" and he later called out E. M. Forster for his effusive eulogy of Lawrence, implying that calling Lawrence "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation" was vacuous, empty praise.)  In a November 1918 letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Eliot called painter, writer and soldier Wyndham Lewis "the most interesting man in London Society."  Lewis published Eliot in the second and final issue of his famous periodical Blast, while Eliot wrote a foreword for Lewis's poetry collection One-Way Song.  The two even traveled together on the Continent, where Lewis got into a bicycle accident.  (Here's an article by Jeffrey Myers all about Eliot and Lewis's relationship.)

First page of the Preface from
the copy of Tarr which I read

Tarr, Lewis's first novel, was initially published in 1918, but the author rewrote it in 1928 and there has been considerable debate among scholars as to which version is superior.  I borrowed via interlibrary loan a 1973 printing by Jubilee Books--it is not clear to me whether it presents the 1918 or the 1928 text.  I like the typeface and the little decorations at the start of each chapter, which seem to incorporate the borzoi logo of Knopf; Knopf published the first American edition of the novel.  Is this some kind of clue about which version I read?

In a 1947 radio recording you can listen to on YouTube, Lewis talks about his education in France, tells an odd story about Flaubert, discusses the influence  the great Russian writers had upon his thinking, and speculates on the differences in character among English, French and Russian young men.  (The Russians come out on top, Lewis suggesting they are serious thinkers, while the English and French are frivolous.)  Lewis's interest in national characters and in foreign cultures and ideas  is strongly reflected in Tarr, which is set in Paris and features an international cast.  On the very first page of the volume, which I reproduce here (click to enlarge), Lewis's preoccupation with these topics is evident.  The English again come in for some dismissive criticism--since they don't think for themselves, save for a few Irishmen and Americans (who is he thinking of here?  Yeats and Pound?  Joyce and Eliot?) they are at the mercy of German ideas, of the "brain waves" that "boom" from "Germany's large leaden brain;" only the sea, that has protected the English people from Continental invasion for centuries, has preserved Lewis's countrymen from the influence of German thought, which has had its way with Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians.

The novel is chock full of lines like these that succinctly characterize the various ethnic and cultural groups of Europe; here is a small sample:

The whole of English training--the great fundamental spirit of the country--is a system of deadening feeling, a prescription for Stoicism. 

Latin races are as scandalised at northern amenities, the badness of our hypocrisies or manners and total immodesty displayed, as the average man of Teutonic race is with the shameful perfection of and ease in deceit shown by the French neighbour. 

...husbands hobnobbing with their wives' lovers or husbands of their unmarried days is a commonplace of German or Scandinavian society.

...in Latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody's mouth and nerves. 

There he sat with his legs crossed and his eye fixed on the door with a Scottish solemnity.     

The main text of Tarr in this edition is some 340 pages long and consists of seven Parts, each made up of several chapters.  In Part I we meet our title character, Frederick Sorbert Tarr, an English painter living in Paris's "Knackfus Quarter."  Tarr is engaged to a German woman, Bertha Lunken, a sort of mediocrity.  Tarr puts forward his theory that an artist devotes to his art the passion an ordinary man devotes to sex; as a result an exceptional woman would distract him from his work, and so a mediocrity is the best sort of woman for him.

All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.

Tarr visits three English friends of his, one after the other, to talk over his relationship with Bertha.  Tarr treats these men pretty shabbily, insulting them and demeaning them.  His discussions with them confirm in him the need to avoid marriage, and so he goes to visit Bertha in her apartment, which is decorated with a scowling bust of Beethoven and reproductions of Max Klinger images, intent on severing their ties.  Tarr and Bertha's long and convoluted conversation settles nothing, however; Bertha calls his bluff and Tarr in any case is unsure whether he really wants to break up with her.

In my opinion, this 1926 ad for Tarr totally
mischaracterizes what the novel is all about
(image from "Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later:
Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library,
and the Domestication of Modernism" by
Lise Jaillant)

Part II introduces us to Otto Kreisler, a German painter resident in the same part of the city as Tarr and Bertha.  Kreisler actually occupies a larger portion of the narrative than our title character.  The chapters in this part, no doubt for some artistic reason, are not in chronological order, though I will summarize them here more straightforwardly.  Background: Back in the fatherland, Kreisler's fiance dropped him to marry his own father; Kreisler went to Italy to study painting, leaving Italy for Paris when his debts began piling up--Kreisler is notorious for not paying his bills and for borrowing money from others and failing to repay them.  He relies on money sent regularly by his fiance-stealing father, but, as the period covered by this novel begins, his father's regular letter, with its precious marks, is late, and Kreisler must face up to the possibility that no more money is forthcoming from Germany.

Like Tarr, Kreisler has a large number of acquaintances whom he treats in a shabby manner.  (Lewis again and again provides us readers reasons to see similarities between his English and German protagonists, and I have a suspicion that one of the novel's objects is to portray the negative effect on the character of an Englishman of excessive association with Germans--Tarr is attracted to and identifies with individual Germans and proposes ideas he labels as German, and "Frederick" is a sort of classic German name, isn't it?)  In a cafe Kreisler meets a beautiful woman, Anastasya, an ethnic Russian who spent her youth in the United States and has lived in Germany as an adult.  Kreisler becomes infatuated with her.  He learns she will be at an upcoming party of Paris-living Germans, and finagles himself an invite to the party, but feels he cannot go because his evening dress clothes have been pawned.  In the course of fruitless attempts to borrow the money he needs to regain possession of his evening attire, he spots Anastasya hanging around with another of his acquaintances, Soltyk, a half-Polish Russian art dealer whom Kreisler already has complex psychological reasons to dislike.  In despair, thinking Anastasya must be beyond his reach, Kreisler decides to attend the party in his dirty morning clothes and deliberately make a scene, I guess to achieve a childish sort of revenge.

Part III covers the party to which K arrives underdressed, and is titled "Bourgeois-Bohemians."  (Whoa, remember when that David Brooks book came out?  It feels like just yesterday!)  This is one of the more entertaining parts of Tarr, as Lewis describes all the pretentious phonies and odd characters who attend the party--a grossly fat woman with a tiny violin-playing mathematics expert for a boyfriend; women who pretend to be lesbians because it is avant garde; an impoverished baroness who gets her fellow artists to pose for her for free, and so on.  Lewis's metaphors here feel more fun and more effective--the fat woman is an elephant and Der Matematiker is a flea who hops around whenever he is near her; a dull man who is in love with Frauelein Lipmann, the woman throwing the party and the center of the novel's social circle, is said to be "laying siege" to her, "investing" her.

Bertha is at the party, and notices how out of sorts Kreisler is, and approaches him, tries to comfort him.

"You are suffering!  I know you are suffering.  I wish I could do something for you....Treat me as a sister: let me help you."

Her attentions are insistent, and seem somewhat flirtatious, and Kreisler, thinking that here is an opportunity to commence his work of causing trouble at the party, grabs her and kisses her; the question of how much Bertha consents is muddled--in this novel people's motivations and actions are all ambiguous and vague, the characters seeming to act on whims and then later concoct post hoc rationalizations for their impulsive actions.  Bertha hopes word of the kiss will get back to Tarr and this will somehow bring her relationship with the Englishman to a crisis, severing it for good or inspiring jealousy that will tie Tarr securely to her.

With the salt of jealousy, and a really big row, could Tarr perhaps be landed and secured even now?

(I love how poetic this line is, with its rhyme and its metaphors--it even feels like it is in meter.)

As the party proceeds Kreisler makes a tremendous nuisance and fool of himself, groping women and insulting them, angering most everyone, except for Bertha, who does not witness this misbehavior.

The next morning, in Part IV, Kreisler receives a letter from his father informing him that no further money will be arriving and demanding his return to Germany ASAP.  Kreisler writes back a letter threatening to commit suicide on a specific date if his father's financial support is terminated. Bertha receives a letter from Tarr, who has heard the gossip of Bertha and Kreisler's kiss and decisively breaks off their relationship. Despite his efforts to avoid her, Kreisler runs into Bertha on the street, and, his "appetites" "asserting themselves," he suggests, and she agrees, to have dinner with him. All Bertha's friends warn her that Kreisler is a monster, but, for complex psychological reasons, their admonitions actually push Bertha closer to him. A few days later she agrees to model for one of his paintings, and while she is in his apartment he rapes her.

In Part V, Tarr, who has moved to another part of Paris, begins returning to the "Knackfus Quarter" on a daily basis in order to socialize with Fraulein Lipmann's circle, including his former girlfriend Bertha and Kreisler, the strange German whom he thinks is Bertha's new boyfriend.  (Tarr's reasons for returning to the neighborhood at all and for making such an effort to spend time with Kreisler I found vague and confusing, and perhaps this is Lewis's intention, to convey Tarr's own confusion and indecisiveness.  I think it is suggested that Tarr couldn't quit Bertha cold turkey, but had to wean himself off her, and that one reason he spent so much time with Kreisler is that he was trying to occupy the German's time so he (Kreisler) couldn't visit Bertha.)  Tarr meets Anastaysa, and, attracted to her, strikes up a friendship with her.  As the day upon which he has scheduled his suicide approaches, Kreisler acts in an increasingly violent and crazy manner.

Part VI, titled "Holocausts," covers Kreisler's physical altercations with Soltyk--he smacks the Pole when he finds him on a walk with Anastasya, and then again the same day in a cafe, where he publicly challenges the man to a duel. (Lewis relates the events of this Part out of chronological order, and from various vantage points; Kreisler's attack on Soltyk in the cafe is narrated twice, once from Kreisler's point of view and once from that of Tarr, who arrives at the cafe at just the right moment to witness and become briefly and peripherally involved in the caper.)  Because of the erratic behavior of Kreisler and others, the duel itself is a tragic farce where nothing goes as planned. Kreisler flees Paris, ending up in a police station near the German border where he hangs himself in a cell. The chapters about the duel and its aftermath are perhaps the best in the novel, as there is some real suspense (at times it looks like the disputants will make up or that one of them will fail to show up, preventing the duel from taking place and keeping anybody from getting killed) and because Lewis introduces some odd and interesting minor characters in the form of the men who serve as Soltyk and Kreisler’s seconds.  Kreisler's time in his cell and his suicide are also well done, Lewis giving us a striking and novel metaphor (I'll reproduce this below) and then a very good psychological description of Kreisler's process of destroying himself.

After the climaxes of the botched duel and the successful suicide, in Part VII the stories of Tarr, Bertha, and Anastasya are resolved. Anastasya, equipped with beauty, intelligence and a powerful will, calls the shots in her relationship with Tarr; he tries to break things off with her--remember that he thinks that an artist should not let his sexual relationships take up too much of his energy, and so he should not get involved with a woman who is his equal--but she asserts herself and seduces him, and they become lovers. Bertha tells Tarr that she is pregnant with Kreisler's child (she doesn't let on that the baby is the product of a rape), and Tarr marries her, it being the honorable thing. For a few years Tarr and Bertha remain married while Tarr spends most of his time with sexy sexy Anastasya, then Bertha divorces him and marries an eye doctor.  Tarr never has children with Anastasya, but he is unfaithful to her and has offspring with another woman.

This is a bleak novel in which all the characters are selfish jerks, but none of them is selfish in an ambitious or exciting way—the characters are artists, but none of them is driven by an obsession to be rich and famous or by a commitment to changing the world or altering the course of art history.  This is a marked contrast to Lewis himself and his friends Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who were always founding new schools of thought, publishing manifestos and plans, promoting new writers and artists and trying to bring to the attention of Westerners literature from other parts of the world, and pushing for societal and cultural change (let's put aside for the moment that these changes they sought could be stupid and dangerous.)   None of the characters in Tarr has any kind of guiding passion or any decent human feeling.  With the marginal exception of Tarr himself, they don’t talk about art, and none of them feels any kind of normal love or friendship, or even lust.  At best they act like (erratic, broken) machines (Lewis repeatedly uses the word "machine" in the metaphors he applies to the characters); at worst they are manipulative schemers who see each other as tools to be used or resources to be exploited, and not even to grand or romantic ends, but to petty ones.

I'm willing to admit that Lewis here is presenting an accurate picture of how people behave, and that this may very well be an appropriate satire of artists he knew, but such characters militate against the construction of an entertaining novel, and contribute to Tarr's lack of clarity and lack of narrative drive.  I'm sure that there are people smarter than I am who think Tarr is a hilarious and biting satire that powerfully makes its point, but it didn't make me laugh and I don't feel like it had any particularly new or exciting ideas to convey.  There are a few good passages and effective scenes, and the book is certainly interesting as a historical document, but taken as a whole Tarr is not really moving or compelling.  Worthwhile for me and those with particular interests, but not a masterpiece or a satisfying read with broad appeal that I would recommend to general audiences--it's no Don Quixote or Moby Dick or In Search of Lost Time or Of Human Bondage. 

Lallia by E. C. Tubb

For Christmas my brother got me an iTunes gift card.  I don't listen to a lot of new music, and when I do, its on YouTube (I guess I am vulnerable to the charge of stealing the food right out of poor Hope Sandoval's mouth.)  So I recently used the credit to purchase from Gateway e-books of some of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.  Today I finished Lallia, the sixth Dumarest adventure, reading it on my iPhone.

I won't deny that I would rather have a paperback copy of Lallia (in particular I am always curious about the interior illustrations you find in Ace Doubles), but I've not seen one in a used bookstore, and for price and convenience, the Gateway digital edition beat out Amazon and Abebooks' used copies.

The Gateway edition of Lallia has a blurb on its cover from Michael Moorcock.  As those of you who follow my every move are aware, it is just such a Moorcock comment about Tubb that led me to start reading the Dumarest books in the first place.  I certainly agree that the Dumarest books are "fast-moving and colourful."  Another reason Moorcock, who describes himself as an "anarchist," has famously attacked more conservative writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Robert Heinlein, and C. S. Lewis, and has engaged in what you might call feminist literary activism (revising his own work to be more sensitive to womens' issues, and trying to stigmatize and marginalize John Norman's Gor books), might appreciate the Dumarest series is that Tubb populates them with callous aristocrats, greedy businessmen, and manipulative intellectuals, as well as the legions of poor desperate people who suffer from their indifference and exploitation.

The other four Dumarest books I have read have included secondary plots about competing elites who enlist Dumarest in their struggles, but in Lallia it's all Dumarest; I think he appears in every scene. Dumarest, as part of his quest across the galaxy in search of Earth, a planet most people see as a fiction, joins the crew of a small space ship.  This ship, the Moray, is bad news. The ship's captain tries to make a profit by carrying cargo and passengers between planets, but they are just barely getting by, and don't even have the money to keep the ship clean and properly maintain its systems.  Tubb pithily characterizes each member of the doomed Moray's crew; the captain, who is horrified of space and indulges in the use of an alien symbiote that provides him vivid dreams, the dipsomaniac engineer who puts everyone at risk by getting drunk when he should be carefully tending to the sensitive hyperspace drive, the naive young steward who doesn't know what he has gotten himself into by signing up.

One of the themes of the Dumarest books which I haven't mentioned in earlier blog posts is religion.  In every book the bizarre Cyclan, a galaxy-wide organization of scarlet-robe-clad geniuses who have had brain surgery to disable all emotion, appear.  The members of the Cyclan use their fantastic mathematical ability and ice cold logic to manipulate others and increase their influence.  The foil of the Cyclan is the Church of Universal Brotherhood; they have also appeared in all the Dumarest books I have read.  The members of the Church try to help the poor and wretched, giving them food, helping them negotiate with the middle class for jobs and medical care, that sort of thing.  Tubb (at least in the books I have read) has always portrayed the Church monks as selfless and sincere, but there is a Clockwork Orange aspect to the Church; those who accept food from the monks are expected to kneel before the "benediction light," which conditions them hypnotically with the command "thou shalt not kill."  (You can believe that Dumarest, who regularly finds himself fighting for his life against assassins, gladiators, and monsters, has never knelt before the benediction light.)

Religion takes center stage in Lallia.  The most responsible and sympathetic of the crew of the Moray is the navigator, who is a student of ancient religions and a committed believer.  One of the planets the Moray lands on is home to a primitivist "back-to-nature" sect that considers metal "a thing of the Evil One" and uses only wooden and stone implements.  In the end of the novel the ship crashes on a planet called Shrine, the destination of scores of sick or deformed pilgrims.  These people seek a miraculous cure, and sometimes receive it, for on Shrine is an ancient alien artifact which nobody understands, but which truly has healing properties.  Tubb's view of religion is nuanced, and each character, through his words and actions, evinces a different attitude towards religion, and we see religion employed as a tool to dominate others, as a comfort to those in trouble, and as an inspiration to perform good works.

This may be a book in which the author presents views about religion, but primarily Lallia is still an adventure story.  As in earlier volumes, Dumarest ends up fighting for his life as a gladiator and rescuing a beautiful woman who has psychic powers.  He also has to contend with a Cyclan assassin; the Cyclan is still trying to retrieve the ring that book 4's beautiful psychic woman, Kalin, gave him, a ring which has encoded within it a priceless technological secret.  Lallia also moves the plot of Dumarest's saga forward; when he touches the artifact on Shrine Dumarest receives a vision of the galaxy, with the region where Earth lies highlighted.  

Another solid Dumarest adventure; interesting characters, strange creatures and technology, plenty of violence and tragedy.  Next up on my iPhone, Technos, the seventh Dumarest caper.

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 51 to 100

Here we are as in olden days, considering Half Price Books' List of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books worthy of "geeking out" over.  Oh those kids and their wacky slang.  Today we are cutting a rug with selections 51 to 100, chosen by 3,000 "bibliomaniacs."  That's right, over the objections of the union, we are doubling production for this post.

51, 52 & 53) The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling, and Old Man' s War by John Scalzi
These are all books I have not read by authors whose books I have not read.  I remember people on the SF newsgroups praising Anubis Gates, and I have considered reading Stirling's books about people going to Venus and Mars, and John Scalzi gets a lot of attention in what the kids are calling "the blogosphere," but somehow I have not read any of their books yet.

54 & 56) The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers and The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
I haven't heard of these books or authors before.  Am I getting a magic realism vibe?

55) The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson  
This gets good press, but I'm not moved.

57) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I might read this some day.  It is my understanding that it is a condemnation of the Allied policy of raining bombs on Nazi Germany.  Maybe we've found something on which Vonnegut and John Ringo of Watch on the Rhine fame can agree.

58) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
I own the very edition chosen by the bibliomaniacs to illustrate their list.  This is Volume II of the Gormenghast Trilogy.  I own all three of the books, and have read Volume I, Titus Groan. I wanted to like it, and I finished it, but it seemed very long and slow - its over 500 pages of tiny little print, like 38 lines to a page!  There wasn't much plot that I can remember.  A bunch of weirdos live in a huge castle and have difficult conversations with each other, then there is some kind of climactic one on one fight, then a funeral.  I must be forgetting something; I am told this is one of the greatest classics of 20th century British literature.

Gormenghast looks to be even longer than Titus Groan. 

I like Peake's illustrations to the book; will that protect me from charges of philistinism?

59) Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
People are always hailing this as a masterpiece, so I am not surprised it is on the list.  I don't find overpopulation and ecological scare books very interesting, though, and the only John Brunner book I have read (Maze of Stars) was very weak.  Also, this thing is over 500 pages long.

Add another charge of philistinism to my record.

60) Mort by Terry Prachett
I read the first Discworld book when it came out, and it didn't make me laugh, so I have never read any more Terry Prachett books.  I'm not crazy about SF books whose main goal is to be funny or to be a parody of other SF books. 

In a brush with fame, on June 30, 2003, I posted something banal on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, and Terry Prachett, or someone using the name, agreed with me.

61) Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I remember women in the office reading this during the Harry Potter craze, and my wife read it as well.  Wizards during the Napoleonic Wars?  Not for me.

62) Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
I've enjoyed some Zelazny, like This Immortal and Damnation Alley and some short stories, and disliked some, including the first Amber book which I read as a kid, disliked, and then tried as an adult, and disliked again.  Lord of Light I have not attempted.  Maybe someday.

63) Ladyhawke by Joan Vinge
Ladyhawke?  I laughed when I saw this on here.  Joan Vinge is a respected writer, but a movie tie-in for a B movie?  Are the bibliomaniacs just recommending it because Michelle Pfeiffer is so good looking?   The cover image of the paperback is an arresting portrait of Pfeiffer, no doubt.

I hate going to the movie theater, smelling other people and listening to them eat.  I can recall all the films I have seen in a theater, because the number is so small.  Ladyhawke is one of the movies I saw in a theater with other kids when it came out.  We thought it was silly - we were cynical kids.  There is a scene in which we see the interior of a castle from the point of view of a fighting man in a visored helmet; we laughed because looking through the slots of the visor as the soldier advanced looked like the view from inside a TIE fighter.  The double crossbow also made me groan.  I was a real killjoy.     

Seeing the Ladyhawke tie-in here makes me wonder why there are no Star Wars or Star Trek books on this list.  If those movie/TV tie-ins were excluded, why not this one?  Half Price Books' bibliomaniacs work in ways mysterious.

64) I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
I read at least some of these stories as a kid, and of course like everybody I know the Three Laws of Robotics.  I can't recall anything about these stories, though.  I'm guessing they are puzzle stories, in which a robot behaves oddly and the human characters sit around and figure out the peculiar way the robot interpreted the Three Laws of Robotics.  Very droll.

65) Armor by John Steakly
I've already described my thinking about MilSF.

There's quite a bit of MilSF on this list, but not the series I thought was famous, one I have actually read a little of, David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers."   

66, 67 & 75) The Lathe of Heaven, The Wizard of Earthsea, and the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
I've never read any LeGuin.  I've always assumed these books would be some kind of feminist polemic.  I got my fill of feminist polemic at Rutgers and CUNY. Maybe I am missing out.  My wife has read some LeGuin, but I think they were "mainstream" books, not any of these.

68) The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffery
I might have read this when I was reading those Pern books, or maybe I just read about it.  The idea of imbedding a human intelligence in a machine is of course a good idea.  Probably I wouldn't read this today.

69 & 71) Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I must be out of touch; these I have never heard of.

70) War with the Newts by Karl Kapek
Here we go with the esoterica, a book written in Czech in 1936.  Maybe people are reading this in college?

According to Wikipedia this is an attack on racism, fascism, nationalism, consumerism, and scientism that lacks a central character.  Sounds like fun.  The film was scheduled to be released in 2013, and is still in production.  Don't pulp all those extra copies just yet, Half Price Books people! 

72 & 76) To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
I've never read anything by Willis.

73 & 99) Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
I've not read anything by Neil Gaiman. This is magical realism, right?  My wife, Gene Wolfe, and Tori Amos all like Gaiman, but so far I have resisted their blandishments.

74) Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link  
You're not going to be shocked to hear I haven't encountered this one before.  The cover is a "reimagining" of my favorite painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, "Lady with an Ermine."  I think Leonardo is a little overrated; I like Leonardo, but I think Michelangelo, Rafael, and Botticelli are all superior.  One mark of their superiority is that the secret codes embedded in their paintings have yet to be deciphered.

77) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
I remember the women in the office back in New York lugging this around.  This is a romance novel about a woman who goes back in time to fight in some sexy Anglo-Scottish war, right?  I can't really poke fun at this after gushing about Princess of Mars, can I?

Wasn't it annoying when every time Scotland came up in conversation somebody had to perform that "we got colonized by wankers" soliloquy?  I don't miss those days.  

78 & 79) Mockingbird by Walter Tevis and This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow
These are books I've never heard of.  I've been living under a rock!

Mockingbird sounds like it might be interesting, and would give me excuses to reminisce about New York.

Morrow is one of those guys who makes sure his pets are mentioned in his Author's Bio.  Woof!  This is the Way the World Ends takes an audaciously bold stand and tries to awaken the public to the possible negative effects of a nuclear war.

80) Robotech: Battlecry by Jack McKinney
Ladyhawke doesn't look so crazy now, does it?

When it was first on U.S. TV I loved loved loved the Macross sequence of Robotech.  I thought the mecha designs and the Zentraedi space ship designs were brilliant, and I even thought the soap opera story of the Rick Hunter/Lynn Minmay/Lisa Hayes love triangle and the Romeo and Juliet story of Max and Miriya Stirling worked.  (On the inside I am a sentimental sap.)  I loved the background music and the funny subplot about the three alien spies (it's like Ninotchka, isn't it?). I bought Macross comic books and role playing game books, I drew Zentraedi battle pods in my notebooks during boring college classes. I was hooked.

When I first saw these Jack McKinney novels I was past my Robotech phase.  The story of how they came about, which I just read on Wikipedia, is pretty interesting.  Jack McKinney is a pen name for two writers, one of them Brian Daley.  As a kid I read Brian Daley's Han Solo's Revenge.  The other kids in school saw me carrying it around, and so, one day, when they were trying to start a fight between me and some other kid, one of these little bastards told me, "You need to get revenge on him, like Han Solo!" 

81 & 82) Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marrillier and Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton
These must have been published while I was in that coma.

83 & 84) Parable of the Sower and Kindred by Octavia Butler
I haven't read any Octavia Butler.  We were supposed to read a Butler book in my Science Fiction class at Rutgers, but either we didn't get to it, or I just neglected to read it.  I wasn't a very conscientious student.

85 & 86) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman
Covered these already.

87 & 88) Grass by Sheri Tepper and Three Days to Never by Tim Powers
Nothing is coming up on the scanner.

89) Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Often, at the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch, I would pick up their hulking copy of this book, feel I should read it, then put it back as appearing too forbidding.  I had read Delany's Nova and The Ballad of Beta-2, both of which I thought were just OK.  Today I can remember almost nothing about either.  

The Wikipedia page for Dhalgren makes the book sound very exciting, with titans of SF ranged on both sides, ecstatically for or against the book.  800 pages full of typos, however, is an investment I am not currently willing to commit myself to. 

90) That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
I was disappointed in Out of the Silent Planet, so didn't get to this one.

91) Logan's Run by William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
I've seen this movie, and never considered reading the novel. 

92) The White Mountains by John Christopher
I read the three Tripods books as an adult, and enjoyed them.

93) Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
I thought this movie was fun because of the art direction, special effects and cast, but I never thought to read the book Asimov came up with based on the screenplay.

94) Mister Monday by Garth Nix
I see this guy's name in the anthologies I take out of the library.  Is this a kid's book?

"Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues and "Drive In Saturday" by David Bowie are great songs.  When I was a kid I went through a U2 phase, and loved "Sunday, Bloody Sunday."  

95) Ringworld by Larry Niven
This is a good novel, but has a bunch of nagging problems.  The characters are too much like caricatures, you can't take them seriously and you can't care about them.  The book's tone is too silly and light.  Also, Niven's idea that "luck" is not only real, but hereditary, is irritatingly stupid.

96) The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans   
I kind of want to read this.  When I was young I read Watt-Evans' Cyborg and the Sorcerers and really enjoyed it.  I'd like to read that again.  

On a side note, I like many of the realistic cover paintings Darrell K. Sweet and Michael Whelan have done over the years.

97) Robopacalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
I feel like I just failed a spelling test. 

98) The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Looking Glass War is my favorite novel by John Le Carre.  Is this the sequel?

100) The Giver by Lois Lowry
This is SF?  Who knew?

************

Final notes on omissions
  
There is no Frankenstein, no Dracula, no I Am Legend, and no H. P. Lovecraft.  Maybe the Half Price Books bibliomaniacs consider that those popular and important books belong in the horror category.

There's also no H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, which is odd, especially when we see Karl Kapek on there.

Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance are not represented. Wolfe and Vance have devoted followings in the SF community, and are the kind of SF writers who receive praise from prestigious mainstream institutions like The New York Times, so it is noteworthy that the bibliomaniacs left them off but put a cartoon tie-in and a movie tie-in on there.

There are fantasies I've never heard of on the list, and fantasies the critics frown on as Tolkein clones, like Sword of Shannara, but no Conan or Elric.  Robert Howard and Michael Moorcock have been very influential, have critical defenders, and Conan and Elric are very popular, so it is a little strange.

If Lord of the Rings and the Pullman thing had been considered as a single book there would have been space for representative works of famous authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Harlan Ellison, writers important to the history of the SF field like Poul Anderson or A. E. Van Vogt, or acknowledged classics like Pohl's Gateway and Haldeman's Forever War.

Still, this is a fun list of SF books, and I encourage everyone to rush to the library to seek them out.  I mean to Half Price Books.  And keep an eye out for the faithful adaptation of War with the Newts starring Will Smith coming soon to a theatre near you.