Take These Men by Cyril Joly

It was uncanny that out of the silent, motionless wastes of desert there should be coming so much noise.  Interspersed with the duller, heavier explosions of the field-guns I could hear the sharper, vicious cracks of the high-velocity guns and the frenzied chatter of machine-guns and rifles.  Gradually over the edge of the horizon there rose a pall of black, billowing smoke, touched here and there with a long tongue of flame. 

Spine of copy
I read

Followers of this here blog and of my thrilling twitter feed (have you heard I am collecting glow-in-the-dark dinosaur bones made in China and marketed to cranky seven-year-olds who have been dragged against their will to the supermarket?) may recall that I admire Robert Crisp's memoir of his service in tanks in North Africa, Brazen Chariots, first published in 1959.  In Brazen Chariots Crisp mentions Cyril Joly, a fellow tank officer, and praises Joly's novel, Take These Men.  Via interlibrary loan I borrowed a dilapidated copy of the 357-page novel, published in Great Britain in 1955 and currently owned by the University of Baltimore, and over the last week or so I read it.

Take These Men, which Wikipedia tells us is a "lightly fictionalized" account of Joly's own experiences serving with the 7th Armored Division in North Africa, has six parts.  As the novel begins in Part One it is 1940 as our narrator, a Regular Army officer and veteran of the fighting in France whom other officers call "Tony," arrives in Egypt to take command of a troop (three vehicles) of A9 tanks.  An Italian attack across the Libyan border is expected, and Tony fights in skirmishes on patrol before the attack and major battles after it comes, as well as during the British counterattack which makes up Part Two of the novel and routs the Italian forces.  The British conquest of eastern Libya is short-lived, however, as the Germans arrive in 1941 with their superior equipment (at this point the British Army in Africa is so short of tanks that Tony's regiment is manning captured Italian M13 tanks) and push the Allies back towards the Egyptian border in Part Three.  Tony's M13 is damaged, and he switches to an A9, but this tank is knocked out while Tony is bringing up the rear of the British retreat and he and his crew have to sneak back to Allied lines on foot over a series of days; they hide by day, move at night and steal food and water from poorly guarded Italian camps.  After further fighting in British tanks, at the end of Part Three the commander of Tony's squadron, Kinnaird, is promoted to command of an entire regiment, and brings Tony with him to Cairo as his adjutant.  In Part Four, after helping organize the new regiment, Tony is given command of one of its four squadrons (a squadron is made up of four troops plus a command troop) and heads back into battle, this time in American-built Stuart tanks, called by the British troops "Honeys" due to their superior reliability.

Joly does a terrific job of describing both the routines of daily life of the tankers in the desert and their harrowing experiences of battle.  There are vivid descriptions of varied types of engagements, and the author also touches upon the roles played in the campaign by armored cars, anti-tank guns, infantry, supply units, artillery, etc.  We learn all about the physical conditions and psychological stresses endured by the fighting men, and about their relationships with each other; those between officers, and between officers and enlisted men.  Deep friendships can quickly grow among personnel who spend their time crammed together, travelling in, maintaining and fighting in the same tank.

The links of discipline, though strong, were tempered as nowhere else by a degree of tolerance, compassion or mutual esteem which bound the crew together as a small but complete family.  There were liberties which I expected and accepted from my crew which I would not have countenanced from any other man, except perhaps my batman.  

Just as quickly these deep relationships can dissolve when the crew is split up after the tank commander is promoted or transferred, or each crew member is of sent to a different tank after their own is incapacitated.  Tony commands many different crews over the course of the three-year war, as his tanks are often damaged or knocked out, in which event he commandeers the tank of some inferior officer and leaves behind his former mates.  There is also the fact that people are getting killed left and right, and Tony learns not to become too closely attached to fellow officers because they have a tendency to get blown to pieces.

The term "batman" brings up class issues, and those interested in such issues may find much to chew on in Take These Men.  The way Joly, an officer and an educated man who is writing in the voice of a man much like himself, describes the men who serve under Tony and his efforts to portray working class men (trying to reproduce their accents via phonetic spellings, for example) are worthy of scrutiny. This early description of some enlisted men, one of Tony's first crews, hints at Tony's background and the author's experiences and perspectives back in England:

My crew were all old soldiers with a keenness and sense of humour which amused and encouraged me.  They reminded me of my father's workers at home: men who knew their jobs and who were as capable of deciding what was to be done as my father was himself, but who nevertheless never resented the show of authority inherent in each instruction that was given. 

This passage foreshadows how, again and again in tight spots, Tony, who at times is at a loss how to proceed, seriously considers the advice and suggestions of his crewmen, and often seizes upon their solutions.

Presumably the copy I read
once had a charming jacket like this

Take These Men is a valuable record of the fighting in North Africa prior to El Alamein; I feel like I know much more about the experiences of the participating soldiers in than I did before.  But does Take These Men work as a novel?  The book is definitely vulnerable to the charge that it reads more like a war memoir than a conventional piece of fiction.  Obviously, there is not a lot of suspense or surprise about big issues--we know ahead of time that Tony doesn't get killed and that the Allies win the war, and Joly exacerbates this issue by giving the chapters titles that spoil the fates of many of the characters, titles like "Templeton Dies," "Peters is Killed" and "Posted to Brigade Headquarters." However, individual scenes do achieve suspense of the "how will he get out of this one?" sort, and there are many exciting adventure-type episodes whose ending I could not predict.  In one such episode, during a withdrawal as the sun is setting, Tony's tank is immobilized and its radio knocked out.  Will Tony and crew bale out and sneak back to Allied lines on foot, or try to repair the track under cover of darkness?  Will the noise of using sledgehammers to fix the track attract a German patrol, or a British patrol which might shoot them down before identifying them?  In another scene Tony acts in the finest Nelsonian  tradition, pretending to not have heard a radio signal from Kinnaird ordering him to withdraw so he can instead strike out on his own to wipe out two dozen defenseless German trucks ("lorries") and a battery of anti-tank guns which is hooked up behind the trucks for transport.  Will our narrator be punished for his insubordination?  Will his refusal to return to his commander when ordered to do so put some other plan in jeopardy or some of his comrades in danger?

Joly's emphasis on the characters' psychologies, I think, also has some literary merit and provides compelling reading for those not fascinated by military equipment and battle tactics.  As the novel and the war wear on, Tony, and those around him, are changed by their terrible experiences.  In one memorably horrible episode in late 1941 fourteen hapless Italian soldiers surrender to Tony's tank, and to the shock of all concerned Tony's gunner massacres them with the Stuart's machine gun.  When upbraided by our appalled narrator, the gunner explains, "They killed me Mum and Dad with a bomb.  They deserved it....Ities or Jerries, it's just the same--they're as bad as each other."

Another such scene of horror grounded in psychology and human relationships is the final monologue of a troop commander who didn't get along well with his fellow officers.  When he and his troop are outflanked by the Germans and his tank is destroyed in a hail of fire, the misfit suffers an agonizing and lingering death, and his bitter and pathetic dying words, in which he curses the other members of the squadron ("Oh God, if they've deserted us, we haven't a hope in hell....the bastards have deserted me....They all hated me, and now they have left me....") are heard over the radio by the rest of the squadron, who have been ordered to escape without him.  The sensitive reader will have difficulty avoiding imagining himself in the place of the dying man, and in the shoes of the officers who do nothing to save him--chilling!

It is not all horror, though.  Our narrator and Kinnaird, who is a sort of role model and father figure to Tony, grow as people over the course of the book, learning to manage the weighty responsibilities and face the dreadful challenges presented to them by the war.  "Through it all I had gained a degree of self-confidence which I could not have acquired in any other way.  I had had responsibilities thrust upon me which before the war I would never have dreamnt of."  In the nightmare of war, Tony (and Joly?) found what the shrinks call self-actualization.

At the end of Part Four, on Christmas Eve, 1941, Tony suffers a head wound and is sent back to Cairo to recuperate for two months.  When he is done convalescing his squadron is equipped with American-built Grant tanks armed with a 75mm gun that can fire the kind of high explosive shells needed to deal with the famously effective German anti-tank guns.  (The A9 carried a 40mm gun, and the Stuart a 37mm.)  Part Five covers famous events like the fall of Tobruk and the Battles of Gazala and Alam Halfa, and is the least interesting and entertaining part of the book because much of it reads like a conventional military history--this division went here and fought that division and took this point after suffering so many hundred casualties and then the next day was reinforced by this other division zzzzzzzzzzzz--with fewer of the adventurous capers and intimate details about daily life of front line soldiers that made the earlier chapters so interesting and entertaining.  (Though there are still some good scenes about fighting in the Grant tanks and Tony's relationships with his fellow officers, including a working class noncom who gets a commission.)  The theme of Part Five is that under Auchinleck the Allied forces face setbacks because of a lack of a coherent plan and because the British armored units are dispersed throughout the Allied army-- in contrast, Rommel concentrates the Afrika Korps' tanks and thus achieves local superiorities which enable him to defeat the British tanks piecemeal.  As Joly tells it, the arrival of Montgomery, of whom Joly apparently heartily approves, vastly improves morale and paves the way for victory. as the Allied forces "were now controlled by a strong hand...there was no vacillation or indefiniteness in our plans."  (Joly doesn't actually name Auchinleck or Montgomery, just says things like "...the commander of the Army was changed...." but looking at the dates involved makes it clear who he is talking about.)

The comparatively brief Part Six sees Kinnaird promoted to brigadier (commander of three regiments), and Tony accompanies him as his right-hand man.  From this relatively lofty perch Tony observes the climactic (Second) Battle of El Alamein in October of 1942 and the British pursuit of the defeated Axis forces through Egypt, Libya, and into Tunisia where they finally surrender in May 1943.  Of interest in this section is the comparison of Tony's veteran force, the British Eighth Army, with the fresh British force which landed with the Americans in French North Africa, the British First Army.

A few years ago I read novels about World War II naval warfare by Royal Navy combat veterans Alistair Maclean and Nicholas Monsarrat, and these books were in my mind as I read Joly's Take These Men.  MacLean's novel, H.M.S. Ulysses, was an extravagant tragedy, portraying the Germans as superior to the Allies and the sailors of the Royal Navy as victims of an incompetent British government and high command, while Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea was full of criticism of British civilians, suggesting that unionized workers, unfaithful wives and smothering mothers were failing to do their part in the war effort and undeserving of the sacrifices and heroism of the Royal Navy's servicemen.

Epigraph from the title page

Joly's project, signaled by his choice of title page epigraph, a quote from Pericles which suggests the people of the British Commonwealth deserve freedom and prosperity because their men have had the courage to fight for them, is a different one from MacLean's or Monsarrat's.  In his intro Joly provides two reasons for writing his book: firstly, as a response to the incessant talk about the Afrika Korps ("...we have heard and read so much of Rommel and the Germans that we may perhaps forget that they originally learnt the foundations of their armoured doctrine from us and that we beat them soundly in the end.")  Reflecting this aim of the author's, Joly's characters, during Part Five, insist that German success is a result not of any peculiar genius on Rommel's part, but because the Germans have superior equipment.  Secondly, Joly tells us that most writing about the Desert War has been focused on the movements of entire armies and divisions, and Joly believes the "gallantry" of the ordinary Allied soldiers, the ways they lived, fought and died in North Africa, has not been but deserves to be recorded. While Joly talks at length about the psychological stresses suffered by the Allied servicemen, and almost all of the many characters we meet get maimed or killed, in contrast to MacLean, Joly is not cynical or bitter, and the soldiers he writes about are not the pitiful victims of higher powers but heroes who are fighting for freedom and justice.

When all was done and still no orders had come, I asked and obtained permission to visit the grave.  The burial party had long since gone, so that I was alone as I stood, beret in hand, in silent homage to the dead.  I felt no sorrow.  I knew that Peters had died in a just cause, as many more would die.  Rather, his death had steeled my determination for ever.     

Even though the whole novel takes place in Africa, in contrast to Monsarrat's criticisms of people on the home front, Joly finds a way to shoehorn in some mentions of the bravery of English civilians, and the officer's wives Tony meets in Cairo are all devoted to their husbands and the war effort.

When you read books from the past you gain insight into the thinking of an earlier age, thinking which, perhaps, is anathema to today's moral arbiters, an offense to our sensibilities.  Is there anything in this 60-year-old book that might stand out to readers in our politically correct age?  Reading Bill Mauldin's very interesting 1945 book Up Front a few weeks ago (I paid two bucks for a copy of the fourth printing at the Upper Arlington Library's huge book sale, where I got a stack of books and which I recommend to all in Central Ohio) I was surprised at how low an opinion Mauldin expressed of Italian civilians--the women and children are all entitled beggars and the men are all thieves, apparently--and in Take These Men I was a bit taken aback by Joly's harsh commentary on the Egyptians and Arabs native to the region where the Allies and Axis powers fought the titanic struggle he describes.

We saw the Egyptians as a craven and crooked nation, hiding behind the shield of our protection.  To us all it seemed natural that a race who would not move in self-defence even when the enemy had actually crossed their borders should be reviled in word and deed whenever need or opportunity arose.  We could have no respect for them, no sympathy with their sufferings, no hesitation in thinking of them as "Wogs" or "Gyppos" or "Gyppies."  The only words of their language which we bothered to learn were the more offensive and shorter epithets to summon or dismiss them.

In a scene late in the book the British tank crews and their vehicles are riding a train from Cairo to the front lines, and Tony and his comrades cannot sleep while en route, because the train must stop frequently and when it does "we had immediately to guard the whole length against a swarm of thieves and pilferers who emerged mysteriously from the shadows...." Later, when the narrator arrives at a battlefield in Tunisia he finds that the bodies of the German dead have "been denuded during the night by swarms of thieving Arabs."

(No doubt the people of North Africa would have equally choice words for the European interlopers who highhandedly dominated their region for ages, and as for looting German bodies, Joly makes no secret of the fact that individual Allied soldiers and the formal military apparatus are constantly appropriating the supplies and equipment of defeated Axis troops.)

Also noteworthy (to me at least), is what Joly's characters say about the Soviet Union. It is normal when people talk about World War II to hear a lot about the great sacrifices of the Russian people and how such and such high percentage of German divisions or casualties suffered were on the Eastern Front, but we don't get any of that from Tony and his subordinates.  When the British troops in Africa hear of the German invasion of Russia, Joly relates: "There was no sympathy with Russia, after her dealings in the summer of 1939 and the rape of Poland.  Indeed, I felt the situation could not have been better put than by my driver, who remarked tersely, 'Thieves always fall out.'"  When the United States is dragged directly into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a lorry driver cheerily announces "We've got friends besides them twisty Ruskies now."  It seems likely that Joly had the same attitude about revolutionary communism expressed so memorably by Bertie Wooster in that immortal classic of literature, "Comrade Bingo": "...as far as I can make out, the whole hub of the scheme seems to be to massacre coves like me; and I don't mind owning I'm not frightfully keen on the idea."

Though it has flaws when taken as a whole and considered solely as a work of modern fiction, Take These Men is full of very entertaining battle and adventure anecdotes and is a great source of knowledge about the lives of British soldiers serving in North Africa in the Second World War.  Highly recommended for WWII buffs and for fans of realistic adventure fiction.

Son of the Tree by Jack Vance

"I order you!" exclaimed Elfane.  This was fantastic, insane--contrary to the axioms of her existence. 

Joe shook his head, watching warily.  "Sorry." 

Elfane dismissed the paradox from her mind.  She turned to Manaolo. "Kill him here then.  His corpse, at least, will provoke no speculation." 

Manaolo grinned regretfully.  "I'm afraid the clobberclaw is aiming a gun at us.  He will refuse to let me kill him." 

Elfane tightened her lips.  "This is ridiculous." 

April, famously the cruelest of months, has been Ace Double Month here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and here is our final Ace Double (for the time being, at least), Son of the Tree by Jack Vance, half of my battered copy of 1964's F-265.  The other side of F-265 is The Houses of Iszm, and both novels are adorned with a Jack Gaughan cover highlighting energy pistols and a small charming interior illo, also by Gaughan. Son of the Tree first appeared in 1951 in Thrilling Wonder Stories, where it was lead story, and has been reprinted numerous times.  In the period before I started this blog I read lots of Vance, but I never got to Son of the Tree, so I am looking forward to this.  isfdb says Son of the Tree is part of the Nopalgarth Series, along with Houses of Iszm and Nopalgarth; I know I read Houses of Iszm but suspect that, like Son of the Tree, I never read Nopalgarth (AKA Brains of Earth.)

Joe Smith is travelling across the galaxy on passenger starships.  At each planetfall he works for a while to accumulate enough money to take the next leg of the trip, hypnotized and shipped practically dead as cargo in the hold with scores of other such lower ranked passengers.  Thusly he has journeyed so far from his home planet of Earth that the people he meets think Earth is a mere myth.

Whoa!  This sounds a lot like the premise of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series!  Is it possible Tubb was influenced by Son of the Tree?  I feel like a detective!

As the 111-page novel (novella?) begins, Joe arrives on planet Kyril, where two million aristocratic priests (called "Druids") lord it over five billion impoverished serfs (the "Laity.")  At the center of the planet's capitol city and its culture is a tree bigger than a skyscraper that the people worship--they think that when industrious workers die they become one of the three-foot leaves on the tree (slackers become "rootlets" mired in the "slime.")  One of the strategies the Druids employ to maintain control of the Laity is to keep the planet at a low technological level, so Joe, who has a technical background, easily finds a job as a chauffeur among the elite because he is able to improve on the shoddily cobbled-together aircars used by the Druids.

Like a lot of Vance books, Son of the Tree takes place in a future in which mankind has spread throughout the universe, and enough isolation, mutation and evolution has taken place that new races or subspecies of humans have developed. One of the first people Joe meets on Kyril is Hableyat, a Mang, one of the yellow-skinned people of planet Mangste.  Kyril is involved in a sort of Cold War with Mangste, a modern industrial world, and the Druids assume all Mangs on Kyril are spies. Working in the household of an important Druid, and being friendly with Hableyat, Joe quickly gets embroiled in life-threatening intrigue between different ruthless factions of Druids and Mangs.  Complicating matters is the fact that Joe falls in love with one of the callous aristocratic Druids, the Priestess Elfane, even though she is willing to kill the Earthman to pursue her goals and is involved in some kind of relationship with the equally ruthless Eccleasiarch Manaolo.

Joe, Hableyat, Elfane and Manaolo all take passage (not in the hold, but awake) on a starship headed for the planet Ballenkarch.  The people of Ballenkarch are politically and economically primitive, but rapidly developing and a source of raw materials and manpower, and both Kyril and Mangste hope to manipulate the planet to aid their side in the cold war (perhaps Vance is referring here to the role in the real-life Cold War played by places like Africa and the Middle East.)  Elfane and Manaolo have with them a shoot from their divine Tree (the "Son" of the title), and hope to plant it on Ballenkarch and convince the natives to worship it and join Kyril in a kind of religious union.  Hableyat's faction of Mangs and another, perhaps more influential, faction of Mangs disagree on how to respond to this Druid scheme, and both parties are willing to go to any length to enact their policy.  Joe is right in the middle of this multi-sided conflict among cold-blooded killers, not really caring about the Kyril-Mangste struggle but instead hoping he can convince the alluring Elfane to be his lover and the clever Hableyat to be his friend and that the three of them can leave all this murderous intrigue behind and go together to an easy life on the peaceful Earth.

In 1971 Ace rereleased the Son of the Tree/Houses of Iszm Double with
a different cover and a higher price 

As the Druid-Mang-Ballenkarch plot progresses Vance fills in the blanks of Joe's past and we slowly learn why Joe is crossing the galaxy, leading us readers to wonder if perhaps Joe in his own way is as fanatical as Elfane and as manipulative as Hableyat. On Ballenkarch the plot threads reach their violent conclusions, Joe learns the true natures of the elites of the three planets, and the main characters make decisions about how they want to live the rest of their lives.

Son of the Tree is a great thriller set in a vivid alien environment, full of Vance's signature witty dialogue.  Vance's style is often compared to that of the great P. G. Wodehouse, and the comparison is very appropriate: Son of the Tree, like so much of Vance's work, is a pleasure to read, almost regardless of the plot.  Not to criticize the plot of Son of the Tree; the story moves smoothly, all the twists and revelations are perfectly paced to maintain reader interest and all the characters' motivations and interactions with each other are interesting and entertaining.  A fun book that gets my enthusiastic endorsement.  I suggest you overcome your love of Jack Gaughan, however, and get a 21st-century edition of the novel that uses the Vance Integral text--my 1964 copy is full of typos.

H.M.S. Ulysses by Alistair MacLean

God, the craziness, the futile insanity of war.  Damn that German cruiser, damn those German gunners, damn them, damn them, damn them!...But why should he?  They, too, were only doing a job--and doing it terribly well.

I don't really read much bestselling mainstream popular fiction, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, that sort of thing.  Maybe P. G, Wodehouse, W. Somerset Maugham and James Dickey (I read Deliverance right before I moved to the Middle West) qualify as mainstream popular fiction, though I like to think of those writers as "literary figures." When I worked at a bookstore in northern New Jersey in the mid-90s all the bestsellers seemed to be either about lawyers and serial killers chasing each other, or knock-offs of Bridges of Madison County.  Those sorts of things do not interest me. What does interest me is British military history, and so the obvious exceptions to my aversion from popular mainstream fiction would be all those Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell I read as a teen, and the 15 or so Aubrey and Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian I read in my thirties.  It was also my interest in British military history that led me to dip my toe again into the mainstream fiction pool this week with a novel by Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone.

I never thought about reading anything by Alistair MacLean until, at the Des Moines Salvation Army earlier this month, I stumbled on a crumbling 1957 paperback edition of H.M.S. Ulysses, its cover adorned with a sturm und drang depiction of British sailors manning Oerlikon and pom-pom guns in defense against what I guess are He-111s.  Informed by the advertising text on the first page that Scotsman MacLean actually served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, I decided to read H.M.S. Ulysses in the same spirit in which I read Sapper's No Man's Land, with the presumption that reading fiction about a military campaign by a person who actually served in that very campaign would be worthwhile.  

H.M.S. Ulysses, first published in 1956, starts off with 15 lines from one of those poems everybody likes, Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses," a cool map of the voyage described in the novel, and a cool diagram of the fictional light cruiser on which the novel takes place.  Then we get down to the novel, all 319 pages of it.

H.M.S. Ulysses chronicles the week-long voyage between Scotland and Russia of a convoy bringing to the Soviet Union Canadian-built tanks, fighters, fuel and ammunition for use on the Eastern Front; nearly all scenes take place on the flagship, the light cruiser Ulysses.  MacLean seems to be the kind of writer who deals in superlatives.  Ulysses is the best ship in the world ("She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world"), with the best captain in the world ("Among naval captains--indeed, among men--he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone"), and its crew have been charged with the toughest duty faced by any servicemen anywhere in the world ("The Russian convoys, sir, are something entirely new and quite unique in the experience of mankind.")  Because she is indispensible, Ulysses has been going on more convoy missions than any other ship in the Royal Navy, and under the strain some members of the crew, just before the novel began, staged a little mutiny.  As a result, Ulysses has to redeem itself on its next trip from Scapa Flow to Murmansk.

A theme in military fiction is that those officers superior in the hierarchy to the main characters are stupid and corrupt.  (In fiction in which the main characters are top commanders, it is the politicians above them who are stupid and corrupt.)  I haven't served in the armed services myself, but I suppose it is possible that real military personnel think their superiors are all unethical jerks--everybody I meet in civilian life thinks his or her boss is a corrupt idiot who is running the organization into the ground and doesn't appreciate all the hard work he or she does.

Novels and movies about military men often have a scene in which one of the guys who has been in the trenches doing the real fighting gives a speech to one of the guys who has been maxing and relaxing back at HQ, a speech about how hard the real fighting men have it, and how the jerks in HQ do not appreciate them.  MacLean fits one of those scenes into the very first of the novel's 18 chapters when the ship's doctor yells at the Admiral sent from London to investigate the mutiny.

Military (and police) fiction is also full of scenes in which some officer has to tell somebody his or her spouse or father or brother or whoever got killed in action. MacLean also fits one of those scenes into the first chapter.  Talk about efficiency!

You may recall that I interpreted Sapper, in his book about the Western Front in World War One, to be praising the British soldier, denouncing the German people, and arguing that the rigors of war could have beneficial effects on individuals and societies.  MacLean in H.M.S. Ulysses takes the opposite tack; far from glorifying war, the novel is one grisly horror scene after another.  And it doesn't glorify the British people or their institutions, or condemn Nazi Germany or its citizens, either.  Sure, there are brave and skillful and decent British characters, but there are also evil British characters and British blunderers, and the Germans (who are only ever seen at a distance, from the deck of the Ulysses) are universally depicted as courageous and clever.  In fact, the Germans outwit the British again and again over the course of the book, and if the National Socialist German Worker's Party's genocidal racism and monstrous tyranny are ever mentioned, I missed it.  Instead Maclean tells us that German flying is "magnificent," German gunnery is "fantastic" and the like.

When I started the book I expected the convoy to suffer some losses, of course, but I thought Ulysses and most of the convoy would get to Murmansk and drop off a big shipment of war material to the grateful Bolshies.  Instead, the mission is a disaster! Of 32 ships that left Scotland and the New World, only five get to Russia, and the Ulysses is not among them.  Only a handful of people from the Ulysses, which starts with a crew of over 700, even survive the mission!  This is partly because the sub rosa purpose of the convoy is to lure the German battleship Tirpitz out into the open sea so a Royal Navy battlefleet can attack it, but the Tirpitz doesn't take the bait!  The Ulysses, and with it over two dozen other British, Canadian and American ships, is sunk for nothing!

Four topics fill up the lengthy narrative as the Ulysses and the rest of the convoy travel for 18 chapters through Arctic waters, enroute to Uncle Joe's worker's paradise in the teeth of German resistance.  These topics all reinforce MacLean's themes of the horror and futility of war and redemption through suffering and death.

1) The weather: MacLean spends lots of time talking about how cold it is, how windy it is, how the seas are rough, and how this can incapacitate the ships and the men. Several ships get damaged by storms and sent back to Britain, and people regularly freeze to death or have the skin ripped off their bodies when they touch cold metal.  In Chapter 6 the Allied sailors face the most severe storm in human history!  ("It was the worst storm of the war.  Beyond all doubt, had the records been preserved for Admiralty inspection, that would have proved to be incomparably the greatest storm, the most tremendous convulsion of nature since these recordings began.")  I didn't keep track of how many pages were devoted to the weather, but I felt like maybe the Weather Channel was sponsoring this novel.  Enough with the weather already!

2) The captain is sick: Captain Vallery, the world's finest captain, is always tired, always coughing up blood, etc.  This reminded me of the captain of the Space Battleship Yamato.  Maybe I'm supposed to feel bad because this dude is on his deathbed, but MacLean doesn't make him realistic or interesting enough for me to feel bad; besides, this is the middle of the most devastating war in history, in which are participating two of the most evil regimes in history--people are getting murdered in death camps and blown up in battles all over the place, why should I cry over this particular guy?  Hell, this very book is full of people getting killed in a dozen horrible ways!

Vallery, it turns out, is a Christ figure.  In the middle of the book he staggers through the ship, giving everybody a pep talk that raises their spirits as if magically, and in the end of the book he gives a speech over the PA system and dies a moment later.  Vallery's speech and death energize the British sailors, giving them the strength to fight on and redeem themselves.  I'm not a Christian so I might have missed this if a character on page 318 hadn't thought, "Vallery would have said, 'Do not judge them, for they do not understand.'"  I don't mind when the author makes it easy for us dummies in the audience.

3) Morale and mutiny: The stress faced by the crew, who are, after all, on the most stressful endeavour in human history, leads to trouble.  Most of the trouble is triggered by misbehavior by cruel officers, but there is also a rating, a career criminal, who is the ringleader of the mutinous sailors.

4) Attacks by the Germans: This is why we are reading this book, right?  The human and technological struggle between the RAF and the RN on one side, and the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine on the other, is one of the great dramas of human history!  Since I was a kid I've been fascinated and thrilled by radar, asdic, depth charges, hedgehog, torpedoes, the Hurricane, the Spitfire, the Bf-109, the Wellington, the Bismark, Window, Flak towers, the Dambusters, all that business.  When I read about this stuff I cheer on the British and their allies, and groan when something bad happens to them.  And I never feel any sympathy or guilt when I read about a U-boat being lost with all hands or an entire German city being reduced to ashes--my attitude is, "Take that you bastards!"

(Maybe that is the kind of thing about myself I shouldn't be putting on the internet for all to read.)

Anyway, the attraction of a book like this, for me at least, isn't hearing about the way ice on the deck can overbalance a ship or how some guy is coughing up blood from TB, it is hearing about naval warfare.  I have already suggested that MacLean's project in H.M.S. Ulysses is not to express patriotic sentiments or denounce Nazi Germany and celebrate its destruction, so I was doing a lot more groaning than cheering over the course of this novel.  When it comes to portraying the variety of naval actions experienced by sailors in the Second World War, however, MacLean really delivers--he unleashes on the poor doomed convoy and on us readers just about every type of German attack you can think of.  A midget submarine.  A drifting mine.  Condor reconnaissance planes.  A Hipper-class heavy cruiser.  The "largest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war."  Bombers that drop all matter of ordnance: flares, glider bombs, torpedoes, and just garden variety bombs.  The fighting is so prolonged that for the first time in the history of the Arctic convoys the naval vessels run out of depth charges.

The fighting doesn't get that repetitive, because MacLean presents a variety of scenarios, many different problems the British sailors have to try to solve.  They fight in the dark, they fight with radar , they fight without radar, they hide in a smoke screen, they have to figure out what to do when a burning oil tanker is illuminating the convoy, etc.  

There are over thirty ships in the Allied convoy when it gets underway, crewed by thousands of sailors, and MacLean describes in graphic detail all the horrible things that can happen to them, all the different ways a ship can be crippled, sink or explode, and all the horrible ways people can be burned up or drowned or frozen to death or blown to pieces.  MacLean's dwells on the horror of war: the horror of men floating on the surface of the icy ocean amid a burning oil slick or paddling for their lives away from the murderous propellers of an approaching ship, and the horror of the men on intact ships who have to watch helplessly as these men, in their hundreds, perish.  We hear all about people being burned to skeletons, frozen solid, blasted to shreds, shot full of holes.  There are lots of mistakes and friendly fire incidents, and plenty of euthanasia, and lots of guilt-ridden men who commit suicide or sacrifice themselves to assuage their guilt.  Several ships and airplanes are destroyed crashing directly into enemy vessels, so that the bodies of Allied and German servicemen are intermingled.

Did I enjoy this novel?  Can I recommend it?

On the one hand I was surprised that the mission described in the novel was a tragic disaster instead of a triumph for justice and democracy.  Even though I was a little disappointed, I have to admire a book that holds genuine surprises.  We are used to adventure stories that start with some guy saying "It's a suicide mission!" and end with our heroes coming home safe after accomplishing the mission, so it was interesting to have a story in which the characters go on a suicide mission and it turns out to really be suicidal.

I learned some things I hadn't known about Royal Navy vessels: for example, I had never even head of the Kent screen, and I also had not know the Boulton Paul gun turret was mounted on ships.  That was good.  Hearing about the multitude of ways things can go wrong on a ship was also interesting.

On the other hand, there are some problems with the book.  It is too long, for one thing.  How many pages of weather do we need?  And how many guys who sacrifice themselves?  This happens again and again.  There are also so many characters and so many ships that it is not easy to keep track of them, and MacLean will not talk about some of them for a hundred pages, then they suddenly take center stage while they are getting killed.  It is hard to care about people you've never really been introduced to until they are getting immolated or disintegrated just like a bunch of other guys did a few pages ago.  This reminded me a little of the Iliad.  It's been a long time since I read the Iliad, but I seem to recall guys we never heard of before getting extravagant death scenes in which Homer laments that they will never see their wives or participate in their favorite hobbies again.

Another of the problems with H.M.S. Ulysses is that MacLean doesn't let you decide, and doesn't require you to figure out, how to feel about the characters; he tells you how to feel about them on the first page you meet them.  Captain Vallery is a unique man, an authority on music and literature who is deeply religious, hates war, volunteered to come out of retirement the first day of the war, but never brags about any of this (we readers know he is the best thing since sliced hard tack because of the omniscient narrator.)  Sublieutenant Carslake "was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system....he was a complete ass."  Chief Petty Officer Hartley "was the Royal Navy at its best."  The mutinous stoker Riley "had at a very early age, indeed, decided upon a career of crime...his intelligence barely cleared the moron level."          

In my last blog post I talked about Mikhail Lermontov's novella "Princess Mary." Because "Princess Mary" has a first-person narrator who is deserving of skepticism, and all the characters act irrationally and are driven by their emotions, we have to figure out how to feel about every character based on their words or actions and our own moral and ethical sensibilities.  This generates a level of mystery and tension for the reader, and forces the reader to think, and means different readers will have different reactions to the novella, some identifying with or sympathizing with characters that other readers might condemn or dismiss out of hand.  The characters in "Princess Mary" also change as the story progresses, which may force readers to rethink their earlier assessments.

H.M.S. Ulysses lacks that mystery and tension, and does not provide the reader space to think and decide, because MacLean tells you immediately how to feel about each character.  With a minor exception, I don't think the characters in MacLean's novel evolve, either.  

Despite these problems, its vivid depiction of the world of the Arctic convoys, its gruesome catalog of horrors and the wide variety of naval engagements it presents make reading H.M.S. Ulysses a worthwhile experience.  Fans of military and nautical fiction, especially fiction that eschews patriotism, unrealistic heroics and happy endings, should check it out.

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The final three pages of my edition of  H.M.S. Ulysses contain ads.  Two indicate that the people at Permabooks expected MacLean's novel to appeal to history buffs.  I often see the advertised hardcover American Heritage volumes in used bookstores and antique stores.

If I'm going to read Veus Eruopesnl or Olnuzle,
I'd prefer to read the original unabridged texts

The third ad is for Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  My mother's mother, whom we kids called "Nana" and whom we saw often (multiple times a week before I started school, then every weekend when I was older) had a bunch of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and piles and piles of the Reader's Digest magazine.  (The magazine is actually mentioned in passing in H.M.S. Ulysses.)  I would often look at the pictures in the books and magazines, and read the little jokes in the magazines, but I don't think I found them very funny (perhaps just because I was too young to get the jokes.)

I do find something funny about this ad-- the drawing that accompanies it. For whatever reason, the people that put the ad together decided, instead of showcasing one of their most popular or exciting volumes, bursting with real life bestsellers, to include a picture of a book so generic that the titles on the spine are not real, and in fact are not even real English words.  I'm not even sure all the characters are real English letters!  A strange choice whose rationale I am unable to conjecture.

Five stories by George Gissing from the 1890s

You can blame P. G. Wodehouse for getting me interested in late Victorian novelist George Gissing.  A guy who writes about "gray squalor" and whose books "don't sell?"  Sign me up!  I liked "The Prize Lodger," published in 1896 and collected in the 1898 volume Human Odds and Ends: Sketches and Stories, so I decided to read some more of the book's 29 stories.  Neither the college library in the little town where I am currently residing nor the Des Moines Public Library seem to have any fiction by Gissing, so I turned for succor to the folks at Google, who have scanned an 1898 edition of Human Odds and Ends held by Harvard University; the PDF is freely available (along with scans of other editions) via Google Books.

If you have some beef with Google, you can read the stories in Human Odds and Ends as e-texts at a webpage dedicated to Gissing maintained by Mitsu Matsuoka of Nagoya University.  Personally, I like old typefaces, while my career as a subaltern in the academic ranks (duties included scanning and copy-editing hundreds of pages of mind-numbingly lame social science articles which would never be peer-reviewed) has made me preternaturally suspicious about scanning errors, so I stuck with the Google scans.

Last week, I read the first five stories from Human Odds and Ends.  The website victorianresearch.org indicates that these stories all first appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine, a fact I confirmed by taking a look at issues of the magazine from the collection of the University of Michigan, also digitized by the tireless people at Google.  These PDFs preserve for posterity the illustrations adorning each story (samples below.)

"Comrades in Arms" (1894)

At a restaurant a successful young novelist, Wilfrid Langley, is sought out by a friend, Bertha Childerstone, a woman ten or so years older, who writes articles for periodicals and lives on the edge of poverty.  She falls ill, and is incapacitated for over a month, during which time Langley pays her bills, gives her money, writes articles published under her name, and visits her daily.  He has been hoping to get married (on the first page of the story Gissing suggests that his freedom is not enough to satisfy him: "No one was dependent upon him; no one restrained his liberty....And for all that... something seemed to him amiss in the bounty of the gods") and falls in love with Childerstone during her sickness.  When Childerstone is nearly recovered he makes his feelings known, but she rejects his proposal of marriage and warns him that he should not get married, that it would "spoil" him.  After she is fully recovered Langley gets over his love for Childerstone and their relationship returns to its former, platonic, character.

To me, this story seems to be about how clever women can manipulate those around them.  Much is made of Childerstone's younger sister Cissy, and how big sister Bertha guided her into marrying a man Bertha thought suitable, even manipulating events to make sure Cissy did not marry Langley.  Gissing suggests that such manipulation is not necessarily wholly selfish or malicious; Childerstone is the self-sacrificing type, and one reason for her illness and poverty is that she "worked herself to death to provide" for her younger sister, among other things financing Cissy's trip to South Africa to be with her betrothed.  Childerstone also seems to be manipulating Langley, for her own benefit--he pays her bills and does her work while she is ill--and for what she sees as his--discouraging his inclination to marry her, or marry anybody.

Which brings us to the issue of marriage in the story.  Langley's success feels hollow because he does not have anyone to share his life with; this feels like Gissing advocating marriage.  But Childerstone strongly argues against marriage--she doesn't want to get married, she "prefers the freedom of loneliness," and she urges Langley to follow the same course.  Perhaps in the same way that Proust tells us in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time that friendship is a waste of an artist's time and energy, Gissing is arguing that marriage is an impediment to a creative person, that a writer should be willing to sacrifice happiness in order to pursue his (or her) art.

"The Justice and the Vagabond" (1896)

Like "The Prize Lodger," this story tells of a man dominated by his wife.  (Marriage is getting a bad rap in these Gissing stories.)  As it did in "Comrades in Arms," illness plays a prominent role in the plot.

Dick Rutland and Henry Goodeve were close friends at boarding school, in their early teens; both wanted to travel the world.  As an adult Rutland, who is quite rich, has no opportunity to travel because his provincial wife ("a woman of narrow mind and strong will; she ruled him in every detail of his life") does not care to do so, and is always pushing him to do this or that (running for electoral office, performing highly visible charitable works, opening flower shows and presiding over public lectures) in order to maintain her status among the other country ladies.

By chance, when they are in their forties, Rutland and Goodeve meet again.  Goodeve has travelled all over the globe, working his passage on ships, painting houses, doing plumbing or carpentry, and other odd jobs.  Rutland laments that Goodeve has lived the life of a man, while he has lived the life of a "slave" and a "vegetable."  "I mean, what a glorious life! I envy you, Goodeve; with heart and soul I envy you!"

Rutland's wife is away for a few days, and he comes up with the scheme of running away to Latin America with his old chum.  He will skip town before his wife gets back, leaving her a note--he knows he hasn't got the nerve to disobey her to her face. Goodeve makes the arrangements, getting steam ship berths and so forth, but Rutland (who has been under the weather since the story's first line) gets seriously sick and dies in his sleep, leaving poor Goodeve at the docks to assume the wife got to his hen-pecked buddy before he could escape.

"The Firebrand" (1896)

In his youth, I am told, Gissing was a socialist, but after a few years got better.  He really burnishes his conservative bona fides in "The Firebrand," a portrait of a left-wing agitator who doesn't espouse radical beliefs and stir up trouble because of a sincere concern for the working classes, but out of selfish desires to be a big man and further his own career.  (Or does he?)

At age eighteen, Andrew Mowbray Catterick, considered by some "an idle dog...given to self-praise," leaves the North Country town of Mapplebeck for London.  Five years later he returns; he's had a difficult time, years of little sleep and little food (one of Gissing's recurring themes is how physically taxing the life of a professional writer is), but is now a journalist for two London papers.  His "revolutionary opinions" embarass his Conservative family (Mom has "a comfortable four hundred per annum"--on her death half of it will go to Andrew) and Catterick flaunts these opinions, as well as his contempt for the people of the small town he grew up in.  He starts giving vitriolic speeches to the local miners, urging them to strike.  "A strike there undoubtedly would be, sooner or later, and how could he more profitably occupy his leisure than in helping to bring it about? The public eye would at once be fixed on him; with care and skill he might achieve more than local distinction...."

The more trouble Andrew stirs up the worse things get socially for his family ("Respectable Mapplebeck talked indignantly of his reckless and wicked meddling....")  There is even talk of postponing sister Bertha's wedding to the Dickensianly-named Robert Holdsworth, a solicitor.  Bertha lets slip that her brother is a coward, and Holdsworth forges a threatening letter to him; ostensibly it is from miners opposed to a strike, who warn that if a strike occurs, they will beat Catterick up.  This threat is all too believable (Catterick is well aware that the strike will hurt the miners financially, and that many are prone to violence), and when the strike begins, Catterick, making various excuses, flees to London.

Gissing certainly seems skeptical of the wisdom of the strike, and portrays Andrew Catterick as a selfish, hypocritical coward.  But Gissing also points out that, having lived in poverty himself in London, Catterick has some sincere sympathy for the workers.  While Holdsworth and the female Cattericks are the victors in the story, they win by trickery and are as selfish, or more selfish, than Andrew: like Andrew (who wants to become a famous journalist) they are driven by a desire for the approval of their social peers and a low opinion of their social inferiors.  Nobody in the story has pure motives, and nobody is particularly sympathetic, with the possible exception of the miners, whom their social betters callously disregard and use as pawns in their status games.

"The Inspiration" (1895)

On a whim, a wealthy man invites a pathetic door-to-door salesman in for dinner.  The pedlar is honest and intelligent, but also lazy:

"I'm one of those men, sir, that weren't made to get on in the world. As a lad, I couldn't stick to anything—couldn't seem to put my heart into any sort of work, and that was the ruin of me—for I had chances to begin with. I've never done anything to be ashamed of—unless it's idleness."

I know how you feel, buddy!

The wealthy guy feeds him a hearty meal and gives him a pep talk, invigorating the pedlar, who runs out and convinces his childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, to marry him.  He could never have done it without the rich guy's support:

"Do you suppose," continued the other, gravely, "that I could ever have done that if it hadn't been for your dinner ? Never! Never! I should have crept on through my miserable life, and died at last in the workhouse...."

I think this is the only of the six Gissing stories I have read in which marriage is not looked upon as some kind of mistake or (as in "The Firebrand") the impetus to some kind of misbehavior.

On the face of it, this is a story with a happy ending.  But when we consider how narrow a margin (a single meal!) lies between a life of lonely misery and one of joy and comfort, and that it was only by the merest luck that the pedlar got on the right side of that line, Gissing seems to be leading us to think that our lives are governed by chance, or a whimsical Fate or God.  (The pedlar directly compares his benefactor to "the finger of Providence.")

On the other hand, maybe Gissing is suggesting that while the universe appears chaotic, in fact Providence metes out justice.  The pedlar, being lazy, suffered loneliness and a crummy job for years, but after this period of penance was given a second chance.  (Being essentially honest and decent, he was not sentenced to Hell, only to Purgatory, where he was cleansed of the sin of idleness.)  This interpretation is bolstered by the character of the widow, an innocent person who is rescued from a life of loneliness and the clutches of legacy hunters by the pedlar's unexpected arrival.

"The Poet's Portmanteau" (1895)

I've heard that Gissing's work is full of creative people who struggle to make ends meet and create their art, and here we have an example.  In this story a young poet, having spent ten months in the country writing a long poem, The Hermit of the Tor, returns to London to try to sell the piece.  At a lodging house he meets an attractive, educated young woman, Miss Rowe, who has fallen on hard times; each makes a powerful impression on the other. Rowe, a starving artist, driven to desperation, tricks the poet out of eight shillings and steals the portmanteau which holds the only copy of The Hermit of the Tor. She sells the luggage and all its contents, save the poem.  The money is the difference between life and death for her; she is able to leave London and get a crummy job (her art career is abandoned) which keeps body and soul together, and then marry a rich man she does not love.

Eight years after his manuscript was stolen the poet has abandoned his poetry career and taken up the lucrative trade of writing sentimental novels.  A mysterious woman, an aficionado of his novels, calls on him, to return the manuscript of The Hermit of the Tor, which she says was given to her by Rowe.  Rowe, she claims, recently died.

The poet, who has never married, is intrigued by this mystery woman, who will not give her name. She advises him to eschew marriage ("I'm delighted to know that you keep your independence.")  It is strongly implied that this woman is the former Miss Rowe, and that she and the poet would have found happiness together if her poverty had not pushed her to fraud and thievery.  The day these perfect mates met, instead of setting them together on the road to happiness, set them on a course that would see them turning their backs on their artistic dreams and living lives of financial security and loneliness.

As in "Inspiration," we see how thin for some people is the margin between happiness and misery, even between survival and death, and as in "Comrades in Arms" we see a woman arguing that marriage stifles an artist.

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

I like these kinds of tragic stories, in which love relationships are fraught with peril and people's hopes and dreams are dashed, and Gissing's style is good.  Being over a century old, they also provide a little insight into ways of living and thinking of our predecessors; these stories have enough raw material about such issues as class and gender to get any social science or liberal arts grad student salivating.

Googling around, I noticed some people have awarded Gissing with the appellation "feminist," and it seems worthwhile to consider how he portrays women in these five stories.  Do they provide reason to believe Gissing has earned the feminist seal of approval?

On the one hand, we do have examples of mothers and the wives who stifle the men attached to them by blood or marriage, a time-honored male complaint.  But both sexes suffer from the yoke of matrimony in Gissing's stories, and in "Comrades in Arms" and "The Poet's Portmanteau" the institution's most vocal critics are women who value freedom and independence.  Also, in "The Poet's Portmanteau" the mysterious visitor points out one of society's double standards: "She [Miss Rowe] was a girl who did what is supposed to be the privilege of men—sowed wild oats."  Maybe Gissing really does deserve the feminist label.

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I'll be exploring more of Gissing's body of work in the future.  Until then (if it is not already too late!), make sure to think twice before letting somebody put that ring on your finger.

Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case" & Gissing's "The Prize Lodger"

I'm back on the icons of modern Brit lit beat!

In 1961's The Ice in the Bedroom P. G. Wodehouse mentions George Gissing as a kind of exemplar of the writer of "gray novels of squalor" which "don't sell."  Being a philistine with a spotty education, I had no idea if Gissing was a real guy or just a euphonious name Wodehouse had made up.  Wikipedia informed me that not only was Gissing a real person, but that he was considered one of England's top writers by people like H. G. Wells and George Orwell.  Certainly worthy of investigation.

Several of Gissing's greatest hits are available at gutenberg.org, and tucked among them is an odd title, Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages, an anthology apparently compiled in 2005 that includes stories by such figures as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan-Doyle as well as Gissing.  This sounded like it was right up my alley--I have a weakness for tales of difficult sexual relationships, and here was my chance to dip my toe in the Gissing pool of "gray squalor," and read another Kipling story while I was at it.

A charming 1960 edition of
Plain Tales from the Hills
owned by blogger Douglas Dalrymple

"The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case" by Rudyard Kipling (188?)

The Gutenberg people assert that this story first appeared in 1884 in the Civil and Military Gazette out of Lahore, where Kipling worked from 1882 to 1887.  The people at the Kipling Society say it first appeared in the 1888 collection Plain Tales from the Hills.  A little mystery for us.

Bronckhorst is an absolute anti-social jerk who is always humiliating his innocent wife and child; he takes pleasure in insulting and embarrassing them in front of visitors.  Another man, Biel, is friendly to Mrs. Bronckhorst in public, and Bronckhorst takes him to court, accusing him of having had an affair with his wife.  Kipling tells us that it is common for the native Muslims and Hindus to lie in court in return for bribes, and Bronckhorst's case against Biel relies on just such false evidence.

Biel hires a detective, Strickland, who is a master of disguise and skilled at dealing with the natives.  Strickland disguises himself as a fakir and gathers evidence that Bronckhorst's case is wholly fraudulent, and uses his ability to influence the natives to get Bronckhorst's paid perjurers to recant their testimony.  Bronkhorst is defeated in court, and then Biel thrashes him with a whip; everybody in town approves of this method of frontier justice, and Kipling hints that Bronckhorst became a better husband as a result.

This is an entertaining and interesting story; along with the detective stuff and "life in British India" stuff is the perhaps even more mysterious, and certainly more universal, theme of the inexplicability of sexual relations and marriage.  Why do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst marry men like Bronckhorst?  Why does Bronckhorst treat his wife so terribly?  Does it even make sense for people to pair off and spend decade after decade together--is seeing the same face every morning for twenty, thirty, forty years really how we want to spend our lives, really the path to happiness?  Such conundrums, Kipling suggests, are "unanswerable," and perhaps "too unpleasant to be discussed."    

First ed. of Human Odds and Ends
for sale at Victorian-novels.co.uk 

"The Prize Lodger" by George Gissing (1896)

I liked the Kipling story, but it has the trappings of adventure or genre literature; an exotic locale, a criminal trial, a detective, disguises, violence.  A collection called Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages, I had expected, would include stories of a more "literary" character, with more psychology and less of what you might call "sensationalism." I'm pleased to say that "The Prize Lodger" fulfills my expectations and is quite good--it may have turned me into a George Gissing fan!

According to victorianresearch.org "The Prize Lodger" appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1896.  It was included in the collection of stories entitled Human Odds and Ends in 1898.

It is 1889 in the London neighborhood of Islington.  Archibald Jordan, age 45, has a comfortable income and leisurely lifestyle as the owner of a grocery store; he handles the books a few hours a day, and leaves most of the business operations to his partner and subordinates.  He spends his free time relaxing with friends and walking the streets of the neighborhood where he has lived his entire life.

Jordan does not own a home, but lives in lodgings, and, in fact, is famous among the local landladies for being a very desirable tenant.  He is very particular about his desires, and demands attention, but landladies are always willing to put up with his peculiarities because he is so respectable and because he not only never questions the bill, but overpays it.  To the dismay and bewilderment of the landladies, he has never, over the course of two and a half decades, stayed in one place for more than a year.

In 1889 Jordan moves into the house of a thirty-three year old widow, Mrs. Elderfield. Mrs. Elderfield turns out to be the best cook and most efficient landlady Jordan has ever encountered, and he resolves to marry her.  But the realities of married life come as a dreadful shock to Jordan.  All his adult life he has been his own master, and been able to dominate landladies, who have been eager to please him.  But as a husband it is he who is dominated.  His wife moves him out of his beloved neighborhood and into a big house in the suburban countryside, insists that he come home at the same time every evening, scolds him for tracking mud in, and demands that he break the habits of a lifetime:

'You mustn't read at meals, Archibald. It's bad manners, and bad for your digestion.'

'I've read the news at breakfast all my life, and I shall do so still,' exclaimed the husband, starting up and recovering his paper. 

'Then you will have breakfast by yourself.'

Jordan's freedom and happiness are in jeopardy, and as the story ends we are not sure what he will do.  It seems possible that Mrs. Jordan cares only about her fine house in the suburbs and her husband's comfortable income, and will not object if he moves back to Islington without her.

A great story; I loved the plot, characters, and style.  Wells and Orwell seem to have known what they were talking about!

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Two good stories about marriage that express skepticism (dare we say "realism"?) about that revered institution.  There's more Kipling and Gissing in my future.

The Ice in the Bedroom by P. G. Wodehouse

"To oblige his uncle Lord Blicester, I took him into my employment and he arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening, but apart from a certain rudimentary skill in watching the clock, probably instinctive, I would describe him as essentially a lily of the field."

My copy, veteran of innumerable readings

The doughty souls who read this here blog regularly are well aware that I recently read Edgar Pangborn's Davy, a novel which was supposed to be funny but which did not quite reach the mark.  To make sure I hadn't lost my sense of humor in some head injury my wife has tactfully neglected to mention, I next read my withdrawn library copy of P. G. Wodehouse's 1961 novel The Ice in the Bedroom.  You'll be relieved to hear it inspired quite a few smiles and laughs, proving my funny bone still functional.

I acquired the volume pictured to the left at an epic sale at the Central Branch of the Des Moines Public Library; this sale has been one of the high points of my tour of duty out here in the Middle West.  A hardcover from Simon and Schuster which says "FIRST PRINTING" on the publication page, my copy of The Ice in the Bedroom was apparently one of the Des Moines Library's star attractions for several decades, and is in quite rough shape; most pages bear one or more unidentifiable stains, many are held together with tape, and several made a break for freedom while I was reading them.  Luckily I am in the midst of packing for a move and have lots of tape of my own at hand with which to give the book a new lease on life.

The Ice in the Bedroom's 246 pages are full of intertwining plots, wacky coincidences, sharply drawn characters, and references both subtle and overt to high literature.  I sometimes find Wodehouse's plots convoluted to the point that I can't really follow them, and thus regard them as little more than a dimly-seen skeleton upon which the meat of his writing, the amusing dialogue, is hung, but I was able to master the plot of The Ice in the Bedroom without undue effort.

Unlike most of the famous Jeeves and Wooster stories, which are first person narratives, The Ice in the Bedroom is told in the omniscient third person.  Our hero is Frederick Fotheringay Widgeon, nephew of Lord Blicester and resident of the London suburb of Valley Fields, but there are like a dozen other characters, and we spend as much time with each of them as with "Freddie," and witness the workings of all of their (to varying degrees, eccentric or deranged) psyches.  Foremost among these are beautiful young blonde Dolly Molloy, shoplifter and jewel thief, and her husband, con man and brute Thomas, American crooks come to London to prey upon the English middle and upper classes; and forty-something novelist Bessie Binns, who writes under the name Leila Yorke.  Yorke is probably my favorite figure in this drama.  She has grown rich writing best-selling sentimental novels of love which almost all of The Ice in the Bedroom's characters, including Yorke herself, consider "slush" or "bilge." Yorke aspires to write something dark and serious, a grim work of literary merit:

"But can you?"

"Can I what?"

"Write an important novel?" 

"Of course I can.  All you have to do is cut out the plot and shove in plenty of misery."

Dolly Molloy with the title ice,
disguised as a maid 

Freddie is in love with Sally Foster, Yorke's assistant, but Sally is angry at him and has declared she wishes to never see him again.  To bring Sally back into a state of propinquity, Freddie convinces Yorke to rent the recently vacated house next door to him in Valley Fields, which is known as Castlewood.  He tells the novelist, quite fallaciously, that Valley Fields is a grey depressed area, where she will be able to soak up lots of atmosphere for her novel about the oppressed proletariat.  Who recently vacated the palatial estate of Castlewood?  The Molloys of Chicago--Thomas ceased renting the property while Dolly was doing a brief stint in Holloway gaol.  When Dolly gets out of gaol she reveals to Thomas that she hid some jewels she stole from Myrtle Prosser, wife of Freddie's friend Alexander Prosser, in the bedroom of Castlewood, so Thomas and Dolly devise and execute many abortive plans to sneak into Castlewood and recover the hot ice. This is no easy task, as Yorke is as handy with a shotgun as a pen and Freddie's cousin and roommate George is an officer of the law.

The other characters, like Mr. Shoesmith, Alexander's father-in-law and Freddie's boss (it is his assessment of Freddie that I chose as the epigraph to this blog post) all have their own narrative arcs which interact with Freddie's and the principal characters'; these include Sally's suspicions that Freddie is chasing Dolly, Yorke's hiring a crooked private eye to search for her estranged husband, and the fallout from Freddie blowing all his savings on shares in a valueless oil field in Arkansas, sold to him by Thomas Molloy.

All the varied plots have happy endings. In particular, the reader is relieved that Yorke, displaying the sympathy for the consumer we expect from creative types, even abandons her scheme to write a "significant" literary work and goes back to giving the people what they want:

"There rose before me the vision of all those thousands of half-witted women waiting with their tongues out for their next ration of predigested pap from my pen, and I felt it would be cruel to disappoint them.....And there was another aspect of the matter.  Inasmuch as these blighted novels of squalor have to be at least six hundred pages long, hammering one out would have been the most ghastly sweat...."

Sally discovers Freddie applying
iodine to Dolly's skinned knee 

I found The Ice in the Bedroom lots of fun; the characters and storylines are all funny, but, as usual, the real joy of Wodehouse is his writing style, turns of phrase, and all the cultural references; in this one we get a surfeit of allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, George Gissing, and the literary life.  Thanks to Wodehouse fans more learned and industrious than your humble blogger, who have compiled footnotes to The Ice in the Bedroom's allusions and quotations here, none of the cultural references need escape the reader's comprehension.

Everybody and his brother, from Jack Vance and Jonathan Ames to George Will and Christopher Hitchens, is always falling all over themselves trying to tell you how great Wodehouse is, and on this topic I am happy to be part of the crowd.  The Ice in the Bedroom is a worthwhile diversion, a charming and pleasant bit of fun I don't hesitate to recommend.  I purchased a stack of Wodehouse hardcovers at that Des Moines Public Library book sale, and don't regret spending a single one of those pennies.    

Best of Kuttner 1: Part 3: "Juke-Box," "The Ego Machine," "Call Him Demon," & "The Piper's Son"

Let's return to my 1965 British copy of The Best of Kuttner 1 and read four more tales by Henry Kuttner.  Bring the packing tape; this book is falling to pieces.

"Juke-Box" (1947)

This story was first published under the pseudonym Woodrow Wilson Smith in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  The isfdb lists C. L. Moore, Kuttner's wife, as a coauthor.

Jerry Foster is one of those irresponsible guys who dates a different woman every day, spends his money at the race track and spends his time hanging around bars getting drunk and moaning about his problems to the bartender.  One particularly difficult day he leans against the jukebox, half drunk, and tells the machine that it is his new girlfriend, his true love.  The juke-box reciprocates by spitting out the money Foster needs to pay his bookie and then playing a song that includes the phrase "helping hand."  Foster bets on a horse called "Helping Hand" and makes a bundle.

The juke-box continues to give Foster career advice, and he achieves success.  But when he starts dating his secretary the juke-box gets jealous and stops helping him.  Financial ruin is staring him in the face, and things only get worse when Foster discovers that the juke-box is an alien surveillance device.  The aliens can't have Foster alerting the other Earthlings, and resolve to eliminate him.

"Juke-Box" is a sort of "Twilight Zone"-ish story, with its bizarre premise and macabre and jocular twist ending.  This one gets a passing grade; it is entertaining and just the right length (12 pages.)

"The Ego Machine" (1952)

This story first appeared in the May issue of Space Science Fiction under Kuttner's own name.  ISFDB credits C. L. Moore with co-authorship of the story.

This is a story about a robot who time travels from the future to the Twentieth Century to solve some problems.  (Don't tell Harlan Ellison's lawyer.)  Nicholas Martin is a successful Broadway playwright who has been trapped in a long term contract by a Hollywood director.  Martin's other problem is that he is too shy to declare his love for Erika Ashby, his agent.  Except for the robot, this sounds like P. G. Wodehouse stuff.

The robot from the future puts a helmet on Martin that temporarily rearranges Martin's brain cells so that they more closely follow the pattern of the ultimate man of Martin's type.  The model man of Martin's type is Benjamin Disraeli, the famous 19th century intellectual, politician and clotheshorse. With Disraeli's invincible self-confidence and heroic eloquence, Martin makes progress in solving his problems, but then has to deal with a violent foreigner who is immune to Disraeli's charm and logic.  Martin has the robot configure his brain to follow the matrix of a cave man known as Mammoth-Slayer. As Mammoth-Slayer, Martin is able to outfight the foreigner, and, in a commentary on women all you feminists will appreciate, not only Ashby but a second woman fall deeply in love with Martin after he grabs them up King Kong style, bites them on the ear (!), and declares them "Mine!"

This story isn't very good.  It is too long, 37 pages, for a story about such trifles, and the jokes are weak (guys, including the robot, get drunk; a guy spills his drink on another guy; the sex goddess of the silver screen is a narcissistic imbecile, etc.)  I've got to give this one a thumbs down.

"Call Him Demon" (1946)

"Call Him Demon" appeared under the pen name Keith Hammond in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  On the cover it is hailed as a "Fantastic Novelet."  As with the other stories we're looking at today, isfdb lists it as a collaboration between Kuttner and Moore.

"Call Him Demon" is in part an homage to L. Frank Baum's Oz books and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. I haven't read the Oz books, which are revered by important SF authors--Robert A. Heinlein and Philip Jose Farmer come to mind immediately, and I guess we can add Kuttner and Moore to the list.  I've read and enjoyed some Kipling (Kim, The Light That Failed, and some stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King") but not the Jungle Book.  Heinlein and Poul Anderson, among other SF greats, were big Kipling fans.

(Sometimes when these SF stories reference great writers like Kipling a nagging part of my mind wonders why I'm spending my time reading about time-travelling robots who get drunk by putting their fingers into light sockets and lovelorn juke-boxes when I haven't read most of the work of great writers like Kipling.)

It is 1920, and nine-year-old Jane Larkin has arrived at her grandmother's big house in Los Angeles.  Living among her relatives there is a stranger, an alien monster who has taken the form of a human being, and hypnotized the adults of the house into thinking he is a relative they have known all their lives.  But the resident children are immune to its mental powers, and know it has just moved in, three weeks before Jane's arrival.

While an extension of the monster's physical form sits in a chair along with Jane's other adult relatives, the remainder of the alien, including its soul, resides in a nether world, a sort of space-time warp. Telepathically, the monster commands the children to feed it; the only food it accepts is raw meat, and to reach the "little, horrible nest he made by warping space" the kids have to climb up into the attic and fix a particular image in their minds as they cross the portal between the dimensions.  

This story reminded me of Ray Bradbury stories about children who encounter alien or supernatural dangers, like "Zero Hour" and "The Man Upstairs," but it is not nearly as good as those Bradbury classics.  I feel like I should like this story, as the premise is good.  But the style doesn't work for me; the story is too long-winded and fails to convey any kind of fear.  "Call Me Demon" also lacks mystery; Kuttner and Moore employ an omniscient narrator and tell you exactly what is going on in the first five pages of the 20 page story.  Also, there are too many characters, like seven adults and five or six kids, and few of them stand out from the mass.  Because the characters are so dimly realized the horrific climax of the story lacks the power it could have had.

"Call Him Demon" is also one of those stories that romanticizes childhood, again and again talking about how children have different perceptions and psychologies than adults.  ("But Charles, who made the first discoveries, was only six, still young enough so that the process of going insane in that particular way wasn't possible for him.  A six-year-old is in a congenitally psychotic state; it is normal to him.")  Often in books and on TV they pull this on you--children can see fairies or whatever that adults can't--and I have never found it convincing or even interesting, and having encountered this conceit so many times I now find it annoying.

You've probably already guessed that I'm casting a negative vote on this one.  

"The Piper's Son" (1945)

This one was the cover story of Astounding, with Kuttner and Moore's pseudonym Lewis Padgett getting top billing.

I had high hopes for "The Piper's Son." Astounding has a higher reputation than Thrilling Wonder Stories, and it was in Astounding that the most critically acclaimed Kuttner/Moore stories, "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" and "Vintage Season," appeared.  The cover illustration is also promising; fully clothed men fighting with knives or short swords in a futuristic city. (The bikini girls in outer space covers you so often see are fun, but rarely correlate closely with the contents of a story.)

It is some decades after a nuclear war.  The United States now consists of small independent towns; if any town gets too big for its britches, it gets nuked.  Similarly, men all wear daggers and duels are commonplace.  (These means of keeping the peace are somewhat reminiscent of ideas in Robert Heinlein's 1940s work, like Beyond This Horizon and Space Cadet.)  Thanks to radiation from the war, a proportion of the population are "Baldies," telepaths recognizable by the fact that they have no hair whatsoever.  Baldies who want to assimilate wear wigs, fake eyebrows and fake eyelashes.  Ordinary people often view Baldies with suspicion, and the fact that some Baldies, generally those who don't wear fake hair, use their powers to take advantage of ordinary people doesn't help matters.

The plot of the story concerns Burkhalter, a Baldy with a wife and a young son. Burkhalter, in his private life and professional life, has to navigate difficult relationships with non-Baldies who are scared or resentful of the telepathic mutants.  In the climax of the story, it is discovered that one Baldy in town is trying to stir up hatred of non-Baldies among the young Baldies, including Burkhalter's own son.  In an explicit reference to the Japanese and German ideologies that led to World War Two, this racist Baldy thinks that since Baldies are superior to ordinary people they should band together to rule or exterminate the normal people.  The assimilationist Baldies, led by Burkhalter, gather together to nip this problem in the bud.

In "The Piper's Son" Kuttner and Moore come up with an interesting milieu in which to discuss topics like prejudice, racism, relationships between parents and children, and means to maintain social and international peace.  As I had hoped, Astounding comes through with a serious, thoughtful piece that is engaging and entertaining without resorting to lame jokes.  Thumbs up!

(Under the Padgett name Kuttner and Moore wrote a whole series of Baldy stories for Astounding; later collected in a volume entitled Mutant.  Probably worth looking into.)

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

So, four stories, two weak, one acceptable, one good.  A decent record.  There is a lot more Henry Kuttner in my future.