This is a lengthy and detailed biography of one Jeremy Thorpe (1929-2014). Jeremy who? He served in the British parliament for twenty years (1959-1979) and was leader of the Liberal Party, 1967-1976, until a spectacular fall from grace. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a scion of the upper middle class of his time and place, reared by nannies, sheltered and seldom disciplined. His mother doted on him as the only boy in the family to the occasional resentment of his two older sisters. Jeremy was fifteen when his father died, and thereafter the money slowly ran out.
When German bombing threatened in 1939 his parents sent him (and the girls) to the United States, where he spent three years in middle school. There he found the environment freer with more emphasis on individuality than the conformism stressed at home. He was neither athletic nor bookish. He had a ear for music and accents, playing the violin quite well (sometimes in public) and mimicking teachers to the amusement of his peers. That combined with a theatrical bent, though he did not act in school plays. He craved to be the centre of attention, dressing to catch the eye, making grand entrances, and saying things to surprise or shock. This is all rather like most adolescent boys, but he did not grow out these but cultivated them as he matured. By the same token he was considerate of others, egalitarian in manner, one who looked to the future and not the past, gregarious, optimistic, and energetic, this latter being, I have always thought, an essential for anyone in politics. His American experience left him with a lifelong commitment to the Special Relationship across the Atlantic.
He had powers of concentration and a retentive memory. He would have made a good barrister, one who could absorb a brief inside out, as they say in chambers, if only he concentrated on it. If someone told him about a book he took it in, and made it his own, so that later if he told someone else about the book, it sounded as if he had read it himself. He focussed on people and he was good at remembering names. When he talked to someone – a duchess at a soiree or a dustman at a political rally — he locked onto them as if, for those moments, they were the most important people in the world. He did not fidget and look over their shoulder for someone else more important to whom to talk. These are assets in campaigning. But he was not particularly adept at debating and if challenged on a point by either the duchess or the dustman he was likely to escape with a quip or laugh.
Much influenced by family friend Lloyd George’s example, he committed himself to the Liberal Party nearly in cradle and never wavered from that though by the time he entered politics, it had been nearly extinguished. His mother was a dyed in the wool Conservative who held an elected office the local shire council, but she was unstinting in her support for his ambitious, and perhaps always hoped that he, like others who started out as Liberals, Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson, would change. He spent his years at Oxford pursuing impressive offices, ending as president of the Oxford Union. He was a very poor student and barely completed the law degree and only passed the bar examination on a second or third sitting thanks to the great effort of a chum to prepare him. He was an indifferent barrister, best at appealing to a jury’s emotions and completely unaware of points of law or court procedure, with no grasp of detail, as more than one judge said. His real interest was always politics.
While a student he campaigned often for Liberals in General and By Elections. When he was old enough, rather than vying for one of the very few safe Liberal seats, which might have been possible due to retirements, he picked a rock-ribbed Conservative constituency that had not voted Liberal in two generations, and set to work and seven years later he was elected. The man had application.
He made little money from law, but when ITV was born he applied for a job there and become the host for a popular science program. In an age when all television was live to air, he was just the man, an easy manner, a ready smile, a quick wit, an adroit ability to segue over cracks in the proceedings. He became a reporter on international news and went to Africa for the independence celebrations in Ghana, and he kept travelling and reporting as the Empire converted itself to the Commonwealth. He met and befriended many of the leaders of the emerging nations in Africa, and did his best to explain their causes to his audience in Great Britain. He had a career in television for some years while still practicing law, when there was client, and working in the constituency. Television gave him exposure but very little money. He practiced law in the constituency, too, at cut rates to establish himself. For years he wore his father’s clothes to save money but that also made him seem a dandy from another age that appealed to his sense of theatre, and he lived at home with his mother in Surrey from which he travelled on British Rail to London and North Devon, the constituency, and in all those hours on trains, he chatted up one and all, some of whom recognised him from television and he lapped that up. The man loved an audience. The first time he ran in North Devon he doubled the previous Liberal vote and lost. Four years later he doubled it again and won.
When Jo Grimond retired as Liberal parliamentary leader, Thorpe became leader of the ten Liberals in the House of Commons. Though the Liberals were then a tiny party in electoral terms they retained an elaborate party organization from the days when they were a governing party, councils, assemblies, committees, and boards in profusion. Thorpe proposed changes to streamline that but those who sat on those councils, assemblies, committees, and boards resisted, though they did next to nothing to promote the Liberal cause in the electorate. He then did the next best thing and ignored them. He had three jobs: member of parliament, barrister in London, and travelling correspondent for television, and now leader of a parliamentary party. It was too much even for him, and he quit the law which brought in less money than the cost of the chambers.
In politics he was a vigorous champion of human rights, at the forefront of many campaigns against apartheid in South Africa and the rebel regime in Rhodesia. He also espoused equality for women and recognition of homosexuality in British legislation. He likewise advocated British entry into the European Community. The high water mark of his career was 1974 when the Liberal won 20% of the vote and in the consequent hung parliament, the prospect of a coalition government arose. The Labour leader Harold Wilson wanted another election, not a coalition. Edward Heath, the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister conferred with Thorpe, but Heath refused to consider electoral reform, i.e., proportional representation, ending that brief episode. Sound familiar? In 2010, for those who have not been paying attention, the Liberals entered a coalition with the Tories and for their trouble were obliterated in the 2015 British election to the benefit of the Conservatives.
Bust of Thorpe in the House of Commons.
In this period Harold Wilson, first as leader of the Opposition and then as Prime Minister, encouraged the Liberals because they siphoned most of their votes from the Conservatives. Accordingly he always treated Thorpe well, invited him to events, praised his speeches, allowed him some patronage to distribute, enacted legislation that gave tax benefits to those who contributed to the Liberal Party, sent cars to pick him up…. By contrast Edward Heath found Thorpe a poseur of no substance, and could hardly abide him and made no such efforts to court him or the Liberal Party. What a triumvirate! Heath the detail-minded plodder, Wilson the wheeler-dealer, and Thorpe the razzmatazz showman.
Ted Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, and Harold Wilson.
The few people who remember Jeremy Thorpe today most likely recall the debacle that ended his career in 1976 when his name was regularly in 30-point type on newspaper screamers at every tube station in London and throughout Great Britain. He was a homosexual at a time when homosexuals in important positions were, in addition to the social, religious opprobrium, and illegality, were regarded as security threats thanks to Guy Burgess. Added to the animal satisfaction, in Thorpe’s case there was the added appeal of the secrecy, melodrama, and theatricality of secret homosexual liaisons. Such was his discretion that even well-known homosexuals who knew him did not realise he shared their orientation, though in time he became less and less discreet. The author gives quite a compelling account of how homosexuality meshed with Thorpe’s personality without descending into the prurient details of an ABC interviewer. Though a good number of people came to know of his homosexuality over the years, including the police and security services, they turned a blind eye but I am not sure why because as Liberal leader he had access to security and defence briefings. There many boyfriends and they came and went. But one of them, Norman Scott, plagued him for years and years and years. Asking for money, bragging to others of his hold on Thorpe, writing letters to Thorpe’s mother, appearing at Thorpe’s parliamentary office. Scott was by all accounts mentally disturbed though he was good looking and could be personable in short bursts. Thorpe tried for years to find a niche for him, securing a number of jobs for him while giving him money. Scott soon wore out his welcome at the jobs and came ever back to Thorpe for more, and more, and more. He even denounced Thorpe to the police who duly noted the allegation and ignored it, noting that Scott had spent time in more than one asylum.
In 1976 Scott’s life was threatened by a man with a gun who killed Scott’s dog. Did Jeremy Thorpe have anything to do with this…well, there is the mystery? He resigned as leader, very reluctantly, under great pressure from his parliamentary colleagues. Three years later there was a trial for conspiracy to commit murder and Thorpe was one of four arraigned, and it all came spilling out in every last detail. It was a feast for the carrion of the media and every morsel was chewed, belched up, and chewed again. His legion of friends and admirers melted away. The men involved, apart from Thorpe, were dubious characters and with chequered histories. Several were accomplished and repeated liars, and should they now be believed? In the end they were acquitted and Thorpe tried to turn that into a victory, but in the course of the trial a great deal had come out of the tube that would not go back. He ran again for parliament and lost….
In the midst of this sage with Scott, Thorpe married a women who knew his homosexuality but like many others found him engaging, and she enjoyed the glamor or Westminster, lunches at the Palace, trips to exotic Africa, and so on. Moreover, they shared intellectual interests in art and architecture. Many observers have since said that he changed as a result, became less theatrical, more relaxed, more confident. Thorpe timed his surprised wedding to upstage a coup against his leadership in the party, and it worked a treat. She was killed in a car accident two years after marriage and he went into a stunned silence for a year and a half. Emerging only occasionally to perform his public duties. He did re-marry on similar terms and this women stuck with him through the ordeal of the trial.
The book is lively and replete with incidents and colourful characters but at 600 pages the detail is so great, the names carpet bombed that I was lost most of the time. The pages are dotted with endnotes to sources of the assertions made and events reported, and replete with asterisked explanatory notes on the characters at the bottom of every other page or so. The author worked on this study over a 25-year period, interviewing everyone and anyone who knew, saw, worked with or against Thorpe, including Thorpe himself. It is all very dense. The length might also seem disproportionate to Thorpe’s achievements. As far I could tell, despite his many pronouncements no cause, no legislation depended on his advocacy his voice, vote, or his action. On the other hand, had he been silent or opposed these matters, then perhaps their progress might have slower. And he was one of the founders of Amnesty International, a tireless advocate for European union, and an effective publicist for the British Commonwealth as a model of cooperation. Even more impressive is to know that many of his most compelling speeches were unscripted.
In common with most contemporary biographers, Bloch says nothing at all about religion in Thorpe’s life, though I expect his parents were churchgoers and he must have been, too, as a child and boy. Not quite, there is one reference half way through within wife died and Thorpe spoke of the spirit living on.
There are a lot of might-have-beens in Thorpe’s story. Had he joined Conservative or Labour he would certainly have made it to the front bench and perhaps leadership. Had homosexuality not been illegal and socially unacceptable, he would have perhaps been even more successful as Liberal leader, because hiding his life as a homosexual must have drained a great deal of energy and concentration from his day job, and hiding it finally undid him. Had he followed the advice of several friends to call the bluff of his nemesis and get it over with once and for all even that meant going public, he might have weathered it.
Michael Bloch
The book delivers on the potential seldom realised in the biographies of showing that the boy fathered the man. The traits, attitudes, postures, affectations of young Jeremy formed the man he became. Indeed it does that explicitly and effectively.
Author: Michael W Jackson
‘A reformer of the world’
Reading Nicholas Capaldi’s biography put me in mind of John Stuart Mill’s ‘Autobiography’ and I found I had it on Audible already, so the rest was easy, well not quite. See below.
Although his voice was a clarion for social equality and personal responsibility, generations of students have since been taught to despise him as a progenitor of evil liberalism. Sounds odd I know but since the 1970s jaded intellectuals have made careers biting the hand – liberalism – that feds them, having insufficient imagination to do anything creative themselves. When these pygmies are long gone, John Stuart Mill’s books will still be read; that will be the judgement of history.
Mill started to write the ‘Autobiography’ when he a nervous breakdown early in life and then went back to it later. In addition, Harriet Taylor had a hand in editing it. Many PhDs have been earned trying to figure out when Mill wrote portions of it, and what Taylor took out or put in. The Audible version I listened spared me this detail.
The early chapters are a description of the childhood of this prodigy with an emphasis on his father’s method of educating him. It is exhausting to listen to the account, the more so knowing, as he must surely have himself known in retrospect, that most of it was meaningless. Prodigious, yes, but not lasting or meaningful. He may have read in Greek Plato’s ‘Apology’ at five years of age, but he did not understand it. So, too, with much else in this force-fed education, which was all work and no play everyday for years on end.
One unintended consequence of this gruelling education was that Mill was a Galaxy-class nerd. He grew up in a hothouse that he seldom left until he was a late teenager when he went out of the house to go to the East India Company where he worked for his father. He was in his father’s shadow for much of his life everyday, socially, intellectually, morally. It is painfully apparent to an auditor of the ‘Autobiography’ that Mill had no friends. He had peers; he had colleagues; he had associates; he had debaters and opponents. But he had no friends, which he as much as says more than once. Part of the reason for that is that he had no interests but the unforgiving logical analysis of important matters learned from and constantly reinforced by his father. This is not the person to sit next to at dinner. He could debate the great issues of the day but he could not make small talk, or show any interest in pictures of a seat-mate’s children. A cold fish, I would guess. Ready to beat you to death in argument and inept in passing the butter. That he never played any boyish games meant he had zero physical dexterity, hence the comment about the butter.
Chapter Five (5) is superb. In it Mill reflects on his many and varied experiences, and knocks off some bon mots as only he could. He paraphrases Thomas Hobbes’s remark that ‘When reason is against a man, he retaliates by being against reason’ which made me think of all those deniers (climate change, Catholic Church pedophilia, Holocaust, etc.). I listened to this while walking the dog, pushing pedals at the gym, or taking the train, so I could not take notes or mark-up the text.
HIs conclusion in this chapter is that political theory is best confined to a few principles which would allow inferences to be drawn in particular circumstances, rather than trying to lay down a set of single ideal institutions. Like Miguel Unamuno’s story about Don Emmanuel, Mill lost faith in a singularly unified theory and recognised the inescapable influence of context. (Unamuno’s story made an impression upon me, Don Emmanuel is a village priest who loses faith in god. Read it.) Under the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill wanted the deductions to be based on facts, hence I referred to inferences above.
John Stuart Mill, London, The Embankment
Likewise, Mill concluded that perfect political institutions were of no value in themselves. The underlying social order was decisive. The most perfect political institutions would be hollow shells unless the society valued and embraced them for their purposes. To make a comparison, the church may be full, but do they really believe? Did they act like Christians everyday, or only for a couple of hours on Sunday?
Mill once fancied himself ‘a reformer of the world,’ but during his depression, he asked himself this question: If all the material and moral ideals he espoused were realised in the world, would he then be happy? No, he answered. He concluded that happiness if not an end in itself, but rather a by-product of purposeful activity. Both trip and arrival are important.
There are some odd things about the ‘Autobiography’ to be sure. Mill never mentions his mother though there are many, many references to his father who died when Mill was thirty (30). It would seem his father had those nine (9) children all by himself. James Mill was a formidable fellow but he was no hermaphrodite. While there are only a few early references to Mill’s work for the East India Company. Yet Mill specialists have some strange stories about his habits at work.
This review affords an opportunity to correct some errors I made in the review of Capaldi’s biography. It was not Bentham that introduced Mill to poetry. Several peers led him to poetry. I also said he was called a Mechanical Man, not quite, but rather a Manufactured Man by some who found the analytical engine of his mind artificial and inhuman.
I found this Audible reading to be unsympathetic. It sounded almost mechanical, phrases of equal length and inflection followed one another without regard to the content. Perhaps that is partly a fault of Mill’s writing style, which is replete with dependent, relative, and embedded clauses with asides and comparisons which makes it precise but it has no flow.
Not quite easy I said, because Audible kept dropping out, asking me to log in again, resetting the book mark, and so on. None of that is easy when using the iPhone while dog walking. No doubt I brought this on myself, somehow. But it was annoying, and a lesser man might have quit.
‘The Life of Girolamo Savonarola’ (1952) by Robert Ridolfi
Savonarola (1452-1498) was a critical figure in the history of the city of Firenze (Italia). Born to a comfortable family he learned Latin as preparation for a career in law or medicine. But a dream when he was twenty (20) convinced him to renounce the world and take orders in a Dominican monastery. His sleep then, as throughout his life, was troubled, perhaps by ulcers, speculates Ridolfi. In this troubled sleep he feared for his immortal soul because, well, he was a young man and his thoughts often turned to young women.
Giro never did anything by halves. He left home at night leaving a letter behind and entered the Church never to leave. Thereafter he had little contact with his parents or siblings. Then his apocalyptic thoughts turned from himself to all mankind.
Though well educated he had a thick accent from his region, Ferrara, north east of Bologna. This marked him as an outsider wherever he went. He was holier than thou and was sent from place to place by his Order (Dominican) trying to find a place where he fitted in, did something useful, and was content. He had few chances to preach but when he did the message was repentance. He was assigned to a monastery in Fiesole just outside Florence. This building is now part of the European Universities Institute where I spent a semester once upon a time.
With his Ferreranese accent, his gloomy message, and his blunt manners he did not fit into Florentine society at the birth of Renaissance where the emphasis fell on elaborate manners, rich clothing, refined tastes in religious art, sensual music, and optimism about the future at the time of Lorenzo il Magnifico (a conventional honorific that was descriptive in this case). After a brief residence, Giro was sent away on other duties, but he later returned. In the meanwhile he had an epiphany, being called by God to scourge the world of sin, he said. A big job for one humble monk but he shouldered it. He began to preach with a newfound confidence, speaking slowly and in simple phrases, though always in Latin, he denounced arbitrary taxes that deprived humble people of the means of honouring god by giving alms. He denounced those who lavished money on useless trinkets, i.e., fine clothes, paintings, sculptures, etc. in the city where Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were hard at work, and Filippo Brunelleschi had made that great dome.
Statue of Savonarola in full flight, Ferrara.
His populist message found a constituency and his sermons attracted ever more auditors. Lorenzo tried to get him re-assigned elsewhere but the letter was lost in the Italian postal service where millions have followed them. (I got my letter of appointment to EUI about ten months after I returned from my tenure there. Thank goodness for faxes in those days). Larry then tried hiring some competition, and brought in some other, more showy, and acceptable preachers to no avail. He also tried to coax Giro into a more reasonable approach by asking a few local intellectuals to befriend him, which they did and both were won over by Giro’s sincerity and intellect. Hmm. He finally tried money but Giro gave it to charity. Then, considering it all small potatoes anyway, Lorenzo ceded the field.
In Milan Il Moro had invited the French King Charles VIII to support his rule, and Charles found Italy congenial. There was no match for the French army and King Charles, like some many other later tourists, found the shopping excellent. His army would appear, and whole towns and cities would surrender everything to him, gold altar pieces, oil paintings, rich silks, musical instruments, tapestries, fur coats, chests of gold, and a good number of women. He shipped home tons of boodle to stock up the Louvre.
Spain had a matrimonial alliance with Naples and soon enough these two incipient nation-states fought out their war in Italy over the next generation. The micro Italian city-states made shifting alliances with each other and France or Spain as seemed opportune. Venice watched with one hand on the sword, while the Pope in Rome schemed and plotted in hyperdrive. Cesare Borgia supported by his father, the Pope, seized his opportunity to create a kingdom in Romagna. Think of Afghanistan today, that is the picture.
When Charles appeared near Florence, Piero de Medici who had succeeded Lorenzo set a record in the speed of his surrender thus forever sacrificing the support of Florentines who, being traders, expected him at least to bargain. Charles was not at all sure that Piero could deliver the goods, and bided his time. Then the Signoria sent a delegation of four to plead with the king to spare the city. Because of his perfect Christianity, Savonarola was one of the four. He found common ground with Charles by appealing to his Christianity and Charles spared the city. Giro was hailed as a hero. It is more complicated than that but it seemed to everyone that Giro had saved the day.
Giro had also had visions and predicted the future a few times, and enough happened to make the predictions credible. His direct line to God seemed very real. No wonder then that on occasion his sermons would attract 15,000 people. He was a celebrity by word of mouth. Crowds would gather to watch him walk between buildings, hoping that by proximity some of his divine grace would come to them.
During a calm period, the elders of Florence asked his advice (remember that direct line to the divine) on government. He suggested a process of generating and evaluating alternatives that results in three constituent bodies. What is impressive is that he suggested a process and did not simply say do this or that.
He also counselled moderation and clemency when hot heads wanted to exact vengeance on the followers of the Medici. His many enemies, including Medici loyalists, tried to trick him into making more prophecies but he proved astute in not biting. His oracular statements were few, making them all the more mysterious and remarkable. His fame spread throughout Italy. A Venetian ambassador was instructed particularly to observe and report on his activities.
Savonarola seems to have established some kind of relation to King Charles VIII of France during the latter’s several Italian campaigns, which Giro used to protect Florence. This elevated his status still more, but not with the Mediceans (though King Charles was reserving his options by tolerating the current Medici pretender in his entourage).
Factions in Florence rejected Savonarola’s castigations and threats of damnation and petitioned Pope Alexander VI (Borgia) to reassign, recall, criticise, and finally excommunicate him. The Pope went through the motions at first but did not follow through, until…. King Charles threatened Rome again, then the Pope tried to coerce Florence into joining the Venetian League against France and if it did, then he would tolerate Savonarola. If it did not, he would excommunicate him. This see-sawed for a while and further divided opinion Florence.
The executive of the Florentine government was elected every two months, and it oscillated both as to the emphasis placed on Savonarola and its support for him. In June the executive petitioned the Pope to recall Giro, and two months later another, new executive proposed his sainthood. Back and forth it went.
Meanwhile, Savonarola – becoming more extreme and apocalyptic – challenged believers to sacrifice their most precious belongings at Lent, not just forgo their use (say by draping statues or turning paintings to the wall which had sufficed previously). This happened in two successive Lents. The second time the pyre of goods (silk clothes, paintings, statuary, musical instruments, sheet music, books, manuscripts, etc) was so impressive than the Venetian ambassador offered 20,000 gold ducats for it, but Savonarola refused. That is an enormous sum. He must have been biding for the city of Venice because no individual had that many gold ducats. Earlier Giro might have taken the dosh to succour the poor, widows, orphans, cripples, the sick, but he had become more and more obsessed with symbols in the mystified world he inhabited.
His sermons also become more hellfire and brimstone, and he became much more agitated, voluble, and loud when he preached and began to pound the banister on the pulpit in castigating his congregation. In the streets there were clashes between his supporters and opponents resulting in injury and death. When King Charles VIII lost a couple of battles, Giro’s big brother friend no longer intimidated his local opponents.
The Pope’s efforts to discipline Giro got nowhere, but he wanted Florence, perhaps the richest city in Italy at the time, on his side and against the French. The last card was to threaten to excommunicate all of Florence. While many Florentines individually might have agreed with Giro that the Pope, being irredeemably corrupt, had no divine mandate to do this and laughed it off personally, it also meant an interdict on Florence so that no Christian would trade and do business with it. That is, it threatened the livelihood of the city and the fortunes of those who thrived on trade and business, which was most of them. That was serious!
Savonarola was also increasing erratic, even rejecting as evil sinners those who tried to help or protect him.
The Pope finally took more enegetic action, but the Signoria beat him to it. Savonarola was arrested and tried as a heretic, tortured repeatedly over several weeks, until brought to a point where he would confess anything, which he did. He was then hanged and burned in a public spectacle in the Piazza della Signora, where we many tourists have admired the replica of Michelangelo’s David. In all likelihood Niccolò Machiavelli, about 28 at the time, saw this. He has a few words to say about unarmed prophets later in ‘Il Principe.’
Giro published a lot of his sermons, and his acolytes acted as amanuenses at times and wrote his words down. To true believers he was a saint in all but name, and they spread his fame. Visitors to Florence looked at the art work and at Giro. He was also a prodigious letter writer and many remain.
Martin Luther was at it up north during this time, and he is the obvious comparison. Giro was less interested in denouncing the corruption of the Papacy than in saving souls by abnegation. He was also less egotistical than Luther, at least as portrayed in Erik Erikson’s biography ‘Young Man Luther’ (1958).
There is no doubt that Ridolfi’s sentiments lies with Savonarola. He smooths over some of Giro’s behaviour which I have read about in other studies of the time and place, e.g., he minimizes the bonfires of the vanities at Lent. Giro really whipped believers up to do this, and he encouraged them to break into public buildings and private houses and steal valuables to be burned, and no matter how much was burned it was no enough.
These days Giro is known to many tweeners as a character in Assassin’s Creed. To find out more about that, ask any 12-year old boy.
This English translation is minus the footnotes, though the text makes many references to sources and archives, these cannot be traced with this edition.
Michel Basilières. ‘A Free Man’ (2015)
In which Skid tells the story of his life, or a part thereof, to our nameless narrator who is trying to finish his second, long over due, novel, i.e., Basilières’s alter ego. Though a work of fiction it has some of the layout of nonfiction. There is a preface, and the text has footnotes that supplement the dialogue. The setting is contemporary Toronto.
Skid’s efforts are hindered by a Lem, a shape-shifting monkey from three hundred (300) years in the future. Yep! Lem tries to convince Skid that he is needed in the future. To do that Lem pops up at very inopportune times. Lem does that, pops up.
In the Preface our deuce Basilières makes it clear that he has laboured under expectations for a second novel since his marvellous first one (‘Black Bird’ in 2004), and that he had given up but would pass along this story from his friend Skid. Skid works in a bookstore and lusts after the female employees and customers, but being a terminally inept nerd he gets no further.
It sounds rather like Basilières himself, who works in a Toronto bookstore….
When a writer, or anyone else for that matter, speaks of the expectations – demands – of customers I am reminded of that Stephen King story ‘Misery’ about the writer trapped by a fan and chained to typewriter to produce more stories, and getting whacked by a baseball bat if the stories are not up to standard! Whack!
Michel Basilières
Some authors are one book authors, I have heard, and perhaps that applies here. Sympathise as I do for the angry and demanding god Expectations, the novel bears no relation to the exhilarating Black Bird. I am turning the pages through it in honour of that first novel. Let’s hope, however, that getting A Free Man out might stimulate Basilières to stick to the keyboard, and try again.
Martin Limón, ‘The Wandering Ghost’ (2007)
An early entry in the long running series of the cases of sergeants Ernie Bascom and George Sueño, two investigators in the United States 8th Army in South Korea in the middle 1970s. The Cold War is intense and no where more intense than along the Military Demarcation Line within the Demilitarized Zone. South Korea has a military government that justifies its crimes as necessary for security. American conscripts discover that money can be made in the black market, selling U.S. army equipment and supplies to Koreans. There is plenty to go around, unless someone gets greedy. Well, yes, that does happen.
The time and place are richly detailed. including the ways of Korean National Police and the interstices of the U.S. Army. The 8th Army wants no trouble, preferring to ignore corruption and even murder within its ranks rather than face bad publicity. The investigation of the death PFC Marvin Druwood was superficial and the subsequent disappearance of MP Jill Matthewson is even less thorough. No sooner is the carpet replaced on these two events, then Bascom and Sueño arrive.
Jill’s mother had written to her congressman who in turn has insisted on answers. To go through the motions Bascon and Sueño are sent to the Second Division near the DMZ with a very limited remit. The Second is a field unit while our protagonists are Rear Echelon M…. F…..s; they are not welcome and the veneer of cooperation drops quickly. No one is happy about the assignment. But of course, once engaged Bascom and Sueño just will not let go.
Bascom is the action man. Show him a door and he kicks it in. A roomful of thugs delights him and only Sueño can hold him back, most of the time. Volatile! He has a self-destructive fearlessness that frightens Sueño at times. For his part Sueño is the strong silent type who spends all his spare time learning the Korean language and culture. Life is a puzzle to him and tries to figure it out. Bascom is on a one-way ticket and determined to enjoy the ride, while Sueño cannot quit an unfinished job. Bascom is often impatient with Sueño’s efforts to figure things out, and he neither understands nor cares about the explanations Sueño produces.
They are both cast-iron in these pages. They drink enough alcohol to kill a normal man and seldom sleep more than four (4) hours a night on the case, while travelling the length and breadth of South Korea in an open jeep in the winter! After several beatings, it takes each of then a few pages to recover. Ironmen, indeed.
Limón draws his Korean characters with respect, none are plot devices. The prostitutes are business girls, proprietors of their own small business. The bars and brothels supply the American demand which has created much that is ugly in Korea, but nonetheless the Northern threat is very real. There are martinets among the army men they encounter but there are also some very wise owls who have survived a long time in troubled waters from whom a nod or a hint goes a long way. Sueño has learned to read these signs, which largely escape Bascom.
Martin Limón, whose affection for Korea shines through.
The books are more violent than my usual fare but the compensations are in the travelogue and the puzzles in the plot. In this title I also warmed to the idea that the ultimate prize was a celadon crane vase, perhaps like some we saw at the national museum in Seoul in 2004, and not money or drugs. I do find Bascom’s hormones repetitive.
In a world of misnomers, the Demilitarised Zone must take some prize. It is completely militarised. I visited the DMZ twice in 2004 and found it scary. A million or more men armed to teeth are each side of a line down the middle of a meandering river. Yikes!
‘The Case of the Love Commandos’ (2013) by Tarquin Hall
Vish Puri, India’s greatest private eye, as he finds occasion to remark several times in these pages, is on the case with his redoubtable team: Doorstop, Facecream, Tubelight, and Grunt. With such an ensemble cast, what could go wrong? There is a lot of trip and some arrival, too. The trip includes a selection of Indian cuisine became Puri is always hungry, and always eating. The back-matter of the book includes several recipes and a glossary of Indian terms, many of them are food.
In addition to Puri’s team of operatives there is his arch rival Hari Kumar and Mummy, Puri’s inquisitive. intrepid, and tenacious mother-in-law. And then there are the Love Commandos.
When Romeo met Juliet neither set of parents was happy and between the loving couple placed many barriers, yes? We all know how that story came to a sad end. They needed the Love Commandos to extract them from their parental restraints and spirit them away to a new life together. In an India with arranged marriages there are many Romeos and Juliets and the Love Commandos fill a market niche by offering elopement services for just such couples.
Puri is a traditionalist in every way including arranged marriage which has worked out fine for him. But his number one operative, Facecream, it turns out, moonlights as a Love Commando. Disapprove though he might, she has always been a loyal and adept agent and he can only return her loyalty by assisting in one of her commando operations when it turns bad.
From Dehli to Lucknow with a side trip to Agra, the adventure unfolds, while Puri eats his way through some of the regional cuisines of India but one step ahead of his rival Hari Kumar, who for reasons to be revealed later, seems to be working the same case. Corrupt politicians, unscrupulous Swedish medical researchers, retired Gurkhas hired out as muscle, an unholy holy man, some miserable Dalits (Untouchables) are among the parade of characters.
Tarquin Hall
The touch is light and the book is replete with slices of India but the plot is deadly serious.
I have read two earlier titles in this series with equal amusement and enlightenment.
‘Dynamite and Dreams’ (2008) by Robert V. Hine
This novel is derived from the the life of Job Harriman (1861-1925) an American socialist leader. He was Eugene V. Debs’s running mate in the 1900 presidential election. He also contested the mayoralty elections in Los Angeles twice prior to the Great War.
1911 campaign button
Though afflicted by tuberculous he campaigned with a fierce determination. Giving up on politics later, he led a band of true believers into the Mojave Desert east of Los Angeles to carve out a city on the hill at Llano. That effort failed and a splitter group followed this Messiah to the wilderness of Louisiana to New Llano in the pine forests on the Texas border.
The Los Angeles elections were brutal, marked by street fighting and bombs. Harriman was born to the priesthood, and campaigning gave him a chance to preach which he did with vigour and vehemence. Those who were trying to establish labor unions saw socialist politics as a distraction or worse. Then there were the Wobblies who had no use for union incrementalism or socialist election campaigns. All three of these elements were well represented in Los Angeles before World War I. Ranged against them were the plutocrats and robber merchants of the era along with the railroad magnets, who were the worst of a bad lot. In between these zealots, as always were the decent majority.
In the novel Harriman (in these pages styled Bannerman, for some reason) campaigns diligently for the Debs ticket in 1900. ‘Based on a true story,’ as they say in Hollywood, because Harriman did not campaign at all. Harriman could barely abide being in the same room with Debs (who was a union man first and last) and Harriman went to a conference in Europe to talk about socialism during the entire campaign. Because of his origins and commitment to labor unions, the hope was that Debs would unite the factions but he was reviled by the holier-than-thou socialists like Harriman and despised by the Wobbles. Harriman was on the ticket not to help Debs campaign but to hold a place for a real socialist.
The ‘dynamite’ in the title has two meanings. The first is Harriman at the pulpit; he was a dynamite speaker. The second, literal meaning, refers to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910. The owners blamed the socialists, labor unions, and Wobblies without bothering with the minute distinctions among them that so pre-occupied them. The socialists and labor unionists said that the owners had blown it up to put the blame on them. The Wobblies wished they had bombed it. If all this starts to sound like the Reichstag fire in 1933, there are parallels. No doubt some among the plutocrats would have been capable of such a deed, but they did not have to do it.
Clarence Darrow led the defence for the two brothers accused of the bombing, and Harriman worked with him. But the bombers confessed, having killed twenty-one (21) workers and injuring a hundred more, it hardly seemed a blow for the cause. The novel slides over the top of these facts, as it does many others. Bannerman-Harriman convinces himself, perhaps thanks to a feverish dream caused by his tuberculous, that the bombing and subsequent trial represented some kind of victory for socialism.
The move to Llano proved difficult in every respect.
Recruiting advertisement
The one thing that money cannot buy in Southern California is…water. The Mojave desert, home to Joshua trees, is called a ‘desert’ for a very good reason.
Joshua Tree
Llano was on the edge of the Mojave and water was scarce. The United States Weather Service says the average daily temperature at Llano ranges from 37C to 41C over a year. Whew! Booming Los Angeles soaked up all the water there was. See ‘Chinatown’ (1974) for a reminder. Long after Harriman and his band of believers left the area, Aldous Huxley spent some time nearby using peyote and, he said, starting to write ‘Brave New World’ in that drug-induced state.
Ruins at Llano.
A hard core followed the prophet Harriman to the pine forests of northwest Louisiana near Leesville and founded New Llano which eked out an existence for a few more years in a sawmill operation. It demonstrated admirable pragmatism in finding means to sustain itself, unlike many other intentional communities. The economic boom of World War I made the mill profitable, while those in New Llano denounced the war as a plutocrats’ war and avoided the draft with ingenuity. In both Llano and New Llano Harriman was something of a tyrant imposing his will on one and all, when he had the strength to do so, but that is omitted from this story. One of the reason Llano fractured was because, as one participant said, they had but exchanged one boss for another. By the way, Job Harriman was no relation to Averell Harriman (1891-1986) of New York.
From Museum of West Louisiana
The Los Angeles Times had sworn a vendetta against Harriman, it seems, and it maintained the rage with repeated press attacks on him while he was in Llano, and even when he moved to Louisiana it did not relent. The attacks were as creative and truthful as Fox News. The Llano colony lasted three years and New Llano another seven years. In the annals of such intentional communities ten years is a good run.
Robert Hine
California historian Robert Hine turned his hand to novels, this being the second. It is all rather didactic and the characters are all surface.
‘John Stuart Mill: A Biography’ by Nicholas Capaldi (2004)
This book is an intellectual biography of that singular individual John Stuart Mill, son of James Mill and husband of Harriet Taylor, these two being the most important facts in his life. Hereinafter James Mill will be referred to as James Mill and John Stuart Mill as Mill. Got it?
James Mill’s father, Mill’s grandfather, was a shoemaker in Scotland. James Mill was a bright lad and earned scholarship to finish a basic education and became ever after an autodidactic. The family was and remained irreligious and that barred James Mill and Mill from the clergy, the most learned of professions, as well as from the law and parliament, and also universities. A lawyer, a parliamentarian, and a university don, each had to accept publicly the thirty-nine orders of the Anglican Church and neither James Mill nor, later, Mill would do so in contravention of their own beliefs. For someone with intellectual interest and ambitions there was little other opportunity, but to work as a clerk. Since Ebenezer Scrooge was not hiring, James Mill found his way to the East India Company, which was a private corporation and did not require allegiance to the established Church.
James Mill
James Mill was a hyper-Calvinist in everything but theology. He was exacting and critical. He prospered at work, and educated all of nine children at home. His education of Mill at home is well known. It started at about age 3 by which time young Mill was reading Plato’s dialogues. It was a massive and unremitting program of force-feeding. Mill in turn was made to teach his siblings. The children seldom left the house and none had any friends. Mill does not mention his mother even once in his ‘Autobiography’ and James Mill treated her like a servant, said those who visited the house.
Mill was a child prodigy and completely inept social and physically. He had no friends and never played any games that boys played and so his motor skills were limited to shoe tying. The same is true of the other children but Mill is the focus here.
John Stuart Mill
James Mill was an acolyte of Jeremy Bentham and together they sired utilitarianism as a social and moral school of thought. Bentham became a de facto godfather to Mill who in turn was the godfather of Bertrand Russell. Bentham discretely supported James Mill’s family, having made a pile of money by investing in a mill in Scotland. The milll was at New Lanark and run by Robert Owen, himself a social reformer of note.
Jeremy Bentham
Bentham had a joie de vivre that James Mill lacked and Bentham in time revealed to young Mill something of the wider world of poetry, drama, literature, and walks in nature, and a visit to France which made the young Mill a Francophile. James Mill deferred to Bentham’s influence on his son, Mill, but turned each new interest into another assignment. A walk became an exercise in collecting, identifying, researching, and preserving botany samples. The visit to France with Bentham required Mill to learn French. To read Shakespeare became and exercise in the history of the English monarchy. James Mill drew a line at Shakespeare’s history plays. These Mill could read but not the tragedies or comedies. They might be a bad influence. See Plato on the dangers of poetry. James Mill made Mr. Gradgrind look like light relief. See Charles Dickens’s ‘Hard Times.’
I have long thought that Mill had the education of a Platonic philosopher-king. At first he learned by rote and repetition, seldom understanding what he read. His father was impossible to please and the slightest hesitation, not to say error, would mean the whole lesson had to be repeated from the beginning. Mill feared his father’s judgement. (Yes, James Mill was feared rather than loved but not hated.) One lifelong friend of James Mill said that he, James Mill, never praised anyone and criticised everyone immediately and often. When Mill taught his younger siblings, if one of them made a mistake, James Mill required Mill to repeated the lesson until all eight children were letter perfect. Their home schooling started each of seven days at 5 am and continued to 9 pm. James Mill conducted the hours 5am to 9 am and then went to work at the India House, returning for the testing session from 6pm-9pm. From 9 am to 6 pm Mill schooled his siblings. Such reinforcement as James Mill offered was always negative, though never corporeal.
James Mill educated his children at home because school education was too shallow and sloppy. His children seldom left the house. Likewise he saw no need for any of his children to go to a university. He particularly concentrated on Mill to make him the perfect and complete exposition of utilitarianism. James Mill created Mill so that he could go forth and reform the world in the image of Jeremy Bentham. Mill was an android artificially made for a mission. Indeed some of Mill’s peers in later life referred to him as the mechanical man. Mill’s upbringing differed from Plato’s philosopher-kings who were reared with others destined to be guardians and auxiliaries and even when crowned they did have annual sexual relations and common families, but Mill did not have any of that. They had social and sex lives, albeit constrained, that he did not have. A single purpose android is a more accurate description, like Mr Data without the tap dancing.
The software in the android became corrupted and Mill had a nervous breakdown when he was twenty (20). In his ‘Autobiography’ Mill blames this breakdown on the strain of his intellectual work. Capaldi, like just about everyone else, sees in it a suppressed rebellion against his domineering father. Mill did gradually recover his health and continued publicly to support his father in every way, but he began at this time to think for himself and gradually to step out of his father’s shadow in the safety of his own mind. After his father’s death Mill began to change utilitarianism, adopt liberalism, court Harriet, and more.
Harriet Taylor
Mill’s long courtship of Harriet is well known. It was contentious and scandalous at the time. She was a married woman, and yet they were seen everywhere together, she clinging to his arm and he deferring to her, including at least one unchaperoned trip to France. Mr. Taylor was none too pleased about any of this. Given Mill’s repressed nature it is unlikely that Mill and Harriet had sexual relations, but by the standards of the day, that hardly mattered. He thought the world of her and extolled her qualities far beyond the mere mortal. When Taylor died that freed Harriet, divorce having been out of the question, the appearance of adultery was preferable, it seems.
They married almost immediately after Taylor’s death and had about ten years before she died. I had not realised it, but the three most famous of his works came after her death: ‘Utilitarianism,’ ‘On Liberty,’ and ‘Considerations on Representative Government.’ Mill thought of these essays as memorials to her. In all of these three, along with his earlier work, the underlying and unifying theme is autonomy, defined as the capacity, the ability, and the responsibility to decide for oneself. Achieving that was a moral goal for individuals and a determinant for public policy to create the conditions for individuals to develop the ability and capacity for autonomy through education, example, discipline, exposure, personal growth, and surrender to the larger whole. Insofar as democratic political institution encouraged and promoted autonomy he supported them though he had learned from Tocqueville to fear the tyranny of the majority (for a current example, watch 7MATE for one whole day).
Autonomy is not license or freedom, nor even liberty. Think of an orchestra. Now take away the conductor, the first violin and any other authority or leader. If the musicians are autonomous their own comprehension of the the needs of a given piece of music will lead them to participate, or sit it out, and to do it a certain way that blends them together into a whole. a if they had a conductor. If and when that happens, that is autonomy. By the way, there are leaderless orchestras that do not descend into the conflagration of the Fellini’s ‘Orchestra Rehearsal’ (1978). Another example that came to mind is the Gospel of Mathew that calls upon believers to decide for themselves, and in so doing their decision will coincide with the divine. Emmanuel Kant makes a powerful example from that gospel by urging the devout believer even to turn away from a risen Christ, and decide… In the telling most of the power is lost; read it in Kant.
He also served one term in parliament where he was a formidable committee man, I believe, but none of his committee work is mentioned in these pages. I have read Hansard micro-cards that record of some of his testimony to parliamentary committees and interventions while on committees and found them to be trenchant. What I saw related to the Northcote and Trevelyan reforms of the civil service. In his parliamentary career Mill was usually on the side of the angels but not always. He argued and voted for the death penalty for murders.
Capaldi does a superb job analysing Mill’s many, many texts and shows Mill to be a far more complex thinker than revealed by the simple elegance of his own prose. Capaldi brings out well the the French and German influences on Mill. For the French there is Tocqueville, of course, but also Saint-Simon fils and Auguste Comte. For the Germans the romantic poets and even that dynamic duo of Kant and Hegel. In all, Capaldi goes a long way to establishing Mill as a figure who cannot be typecast. Was he a conservative? a liberal? a radical? a democrat? an elitist? a deontologist? a utilitarian? a positivist? an empiricist? The answer in each case is ‘yes’ but in his own special way. He was both a liberal and a conservative.
Mill had form. He was arrested for obscenity while a teenager. The crime, of which he was certainly guilty, was passing out pamphlets urging birth control.
Mill was a lifelong proponent of female suffrage. When he and Harriet married, they went to some pains to avoid the norm according to which he would have become the owner of all of her goods, including a considerable inheritance from Taylor.
Mill’s book ‘A System of Logic’ made his name in the first instance. It was so highly regarded that in addition to large sales, almost immediately, it also went on the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge. In short order, his other books began to follow on to the curriculum, including ‘On Liberty’ and ‘Representative Government’ and they in turn could be best understand by reference to the previous thinkers he analysed and synthesised and so was born ‘Political Theory’ as a field of study in universities. Indeed his impact on the Oxbridge universities, where he never set foot, was so great that after his death, academic reputations were made by tarnishing his; the attack of the pygmies on the defenceless is always a sure sign of stature.
Because of the range of Mill’s works, after his death he was claimed as a precursor by a wide variety of causes from co-operatives, Fabian socialism, and the 800 Club. To his contemporaries Mill was an enigma: he did not fit into any of the categories available, and they knew it. It is still true that he is an odd man out but we generally no longer recognise that, and force him into one box or another, and then dismiss him. Our loss. Today he has largely been reduced to a stereotype no less distorted than that which applies to Machiavelli.
I would have liked a more clearly presented chronology, maybe as an appendix. I also found it hard to read, especially the extensive quotations from secondary sources and Mill’s own ‘Autobiography’ which interrupted any flow the text had. While the early chapters fill out Mill’s life well, that falls away in favour of ever finer-grained examination of his ideas, arguments, and publications, despite the subtitle: ‘A biography.’ I found almost nothing about his forty (40) years of work for the East India Company, though the author does suggest that his responsibilities were comparable to a cabinet minister. I stress this reference to India because the last pages of ‘Considerations on Representative Government’ say somethings about India that give one pause. Indeed the last lines refer to India as ‘semi-barbarous.’ His tenure with the East India Company included the Sepoy Rebellion, so it was not all business as usual.
Nicholas Capaldi
The wheel turns. James Mill and Mill did much to govern India from London and today India does the same for Britain through those call centres. In fact, there is so much demand for Indian call centres, I discovered, that Indian companies are sub-contracting many of them to the Philippines. I am pretty sure that recently when I called AusGrid to report a burned out street light outside our front door, the agent I spoke to was probably in India, the accent, the slight lag in voice transmission, the formality of word choice…maybe.
Black Bird by Michel Basilières (2004)
Genre? Novel. Style? Northern Gothic, certainly. Magic Realism, maybe. Rating? * * * *
What happens in it? It is a circus of characters and incident. Part satire and part hyperrealism.
In her one-woman struggle to free Québec from the evil Anglos young Marie inadvertently blows up her maternal grandfather who becomes a spectral observer thereafter.
The Francophone police officer shown is trying to defuse an FLQ bomb. It blew up and left him maimed and crippled.
Her feckless twin brother Jean-Baptiste is irritated that with his own name in Montréal he cannot read French. The crow that Aline keeps in the kitchen attacks Grandfather. Tabernac! The FLQ consists mostly of spies in the pay of the Gendarmarie Royal.
Grandfather before and after losing the eye pursues his profession with father. They are grave robbers and Mont Royal is their hunting, well, digging, ground. They are accustomed to finding others, living there and work around them. But once the ground freezes in November, they have to wait…or do they?
In a ramshackle, decaying house three or is it four generations of Desouches live. Grandfather, father, and uncle, as our narrator terms them, shun the company of neighbours. This is another uncle apart from the one who was passing the letter box when Marie’s bomb went off, heralding a new era of freedom for Québecois. Then there is mother and Aline. I found it hard to keep the family straight. I started to make a score card, but that slowed down the reading, so I stopped. Pace is everything in these pages.
Father does not join the grave robbers, preferring instead to do nothing at all. He is surprisingly energetic in this pursuit.
Basilières includes the FLQ Crisis and the War Measures Act with René Lévesque’s manslaughter, the murder of Pierre La Porte with his own crucifix. Salutary reminders for those who find Canadian politics boring that boring is good compared to the alternative. The Montréal Basilières’s conjures from his keyboard lacks only voodoo and Spanish moss to be a cold version of mysterious and eerie New Orleans found so often in the popular culture in Southern gothic novels.
The Christmas gifts Jean Bapiste and Marie exchange in their mutual incomprehension are treasures. He only knows and relates to books but he is dimly aware of Marie’s activities. Ergo he gives her a copy of Carlos Marighella’s 1969 ‘Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.’ She supposes he means it as a condemnation of her feeble efforts, and flies into a rage. But not before she gives him a blank book to show her contempt for his reading and writing, and he takes it to mean she wants him to write in the book and he immediately sets to to work to do it and indeed does. (It is a blank note book bound to look like a book. Their misunderstanding is complete and to the core.)
The subsequent account of the performance of the play that emerges from the blank book is a wonderful satire on everything it touches from the producer-director to the audiences. Nothing is sacred. Calice!
Fact is one thing and fiction is another and this is fiction: This is a Montréal populated by grave robbers who siphon off the neighbour’s natural gas to heat their ark but cannot control it so that house is an oven during the coldest winter, a Montréal where Felquiste and Pequiste hate each other and no one but them cares one whit and that drives each of them to new heights of frustration, a Montréal where a glass eye offers better sight that the real thing, a Montréal where the timeline of history bends….
It is no accident that the family physician is named Dr. Hyde who is a famous surgeon and yet is ready and willing to make house-calls to the Desouches (because they supply what he demands – see above). The good doctor does his most important work alone at night, and has some unexpected success.
Michel Basilieres
Marie becomes an avenging angel and single-handedly kidnaps the British Trade Commissioner and later she strangles him to death with his own rosary chain. It is Rated-R and rather gruesome, and she, of course, finds it difficult to do and to live with, but…. Then there is that lousy gas connections, and boom, many problems are obliterated. Marie, in another time and place, would have been a postulant in a convent such as imagined in Ron Hansen’s fine novel ‘Mariette in Ecstasy’ (1991), reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
One of the most exhilarating novels I have read. I came across it in a Montréal bookstore while walking some of the streets described in it and that added a frisson the first time I read it in in 2009. It came to mind recently as I read a few things about Canada and Québec so I sat down with it again. Great fun. Gabrielle Roy chronicled Montréal life in a series of wonderful novels in the 1940s and 1950s. Wry, gentle, bemused and serious, they are. In this book, by contrast, nothing is serious nor sacred. Though it is deeply ‘de vieille souche’ as they used to say on that island in the fleuve St Laurent, it was written in English. Those among the Québeceratti who take themselves ever so seriously avoided any mention of the book. The contemporary reviews I found were all in English in English-language publications. One of which chides the author for mashing together the FLQ crisis and the PQ government and confusing Pierre LaPorte with James Cross. Not everyone gets the point, it seems.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye (1954)
After reading Benjamin Black’s continuation of this title in ‘The Black-eyed Blonde’ this old favourite was on my mind when I saw it on the shelf of the Megalong Bookstore in Leura.
This is Chandler’s last complete novel and it is twice as long as any of his previous ones. Indeed it was very long for the genre when it was published. I thought I would read a chapter or two before bed the other night and found myself on page 100 at midnight, such was the flow of characters and events. Another four nights and I was done. Of course, I had read it before and then Black’s book had refreshed some of the characters for me.
Beginners can start here. Philipp Marlowe meets an odd character, one Terry Lennox, whom he gets to like and sees now and then over several months. Very early one morning Lennox appears and asks Marlowe to drive him to Mexico, no questions asked. Marlowe agrees, opening the can of worms that wriggle out over the next 400+ pages.
Once again Chandler proves expert at pace and development. It moves but the reader can follow, and as it moves the characters and situations are fleshed out. If he describes the clothing a character wears it is because it reveals a social situation, an attitude, the money, something about the person that comes into the story. No description is an end-in-itself in Chandler; it serves a larger purpose, or it is omitted. Scores of contemporary writers should learn that lesson.
And he differentiates characters one from the other, even if the appearance is fleeting. The jailer who opens the door to the cell where Marlowe will sit and ponder friendship for three nights says nothing, but he is etched in his posture, his walk, his silent appraisal of Marlowe. Nothing is said between them but they understand one another: Marlowe will make no trouble and the jailer will leave him alone. The tough talking newspaper man is a stock character, yes, but this one is just a little bit different, an individual, neither a stereotype nor a plot device. The cab driver who declines the tip has his reasons. The several police officers are each individuals, some very unpleasant, some vacuous, and some well-meaning but exhausted, all different one from the others. Then there is the New York publisher who tries to do the right thing but cannot quite see what that is.
Another lesson for today. Too many, far too many krimies that I try to read now present a parade of characters who all effect the same speech patterns even when they ostensibly represent a variety of backgrounds because, I guess, the authors cannot control the language, or worse, do not perceive the similarities. Neither is a recommendation.
Bogart reading Chandler on the set of The Big Sleep, as a publicity shot.
Then of course there is Eillen Wade, or as Marlowe calls her: The Dream. The page crackles when she walks in. That one man in the room does not look at her is a sure sign to Marlowe that he is up to something.
In the six Marlowe titles we learn almost nothing about Marlowe but here, when quizzed, he says a few things about himself: born Santa Rosa, parents dead, only child, played football once…to explain some crooked teeth. So much for the backstory in a half a dozen lines. Chandler’s focus is always on the here and now. This focus keeps the story moving and also preserves Marlowe’s mystique. Contrast this spare account with the verbose backstories that derail the action, if there is any, in so many contemporary krimies. I read one recently that interrupted the action with a 100-page backstory about the protagonist, at which point I quit reading it. (No this back story did not tie into the story, of that I am sure.) It was like listening to the drunk in a bar who wants to tell whoever is there his own fascinating life story. No thanks.
If Chandler’s prose is economical, decisive, and penetrating, the dialogue is even better. Chandler had an ear for the spoken word. If the descriptions single out individuals, their talk clinches it. Superb.
One obituary of Raymond Chandler.
I have read this novel at least once, perhaps twice before, and I had a very strong recollection of one of the minor characters, Earl Wild, at the ranch. I anticipated his appearance and he did not let me down, but I was surprised, given the memory I had of him, how brief is his appearance on the page. Very brief. Likewise, I remembered though not as vividly the T. S. Eliot quoting chauffeur Amos in the last few pages, Chandler’s riff on pretentious literature.
The central character in the book is Chandler’s alter ego Roger Wade who, like Chandler, is a genre writer whose work sells, for reasons he cannot fathom, but that wins him no respect as an author. When Wade hits the bottom of the bottle, a frequent occurrence, he spouts self-indulgent nonsense and feels sorry for himself with great eloquence and energy. Wade is Chandler in all respects.
When Chandler wrote this book, we now know, his own wife was dying of cancer and he spent many nights and days with her at the hospital, and turned to the typewriter to escape that reality. One biographer speculates that the book is as long as it is because its composition coincided with her agonising death. A morbid thought, but it explains the mood swings and oscillating character of Roger who is also bearing a different kind of burden from his wife, she being The Dream, as above, or as Linda Loring calls her, ‘the Golden Icicle.’
No review is complete without a barb. Chandler does not manage quite as well with the rich and obnoxious characters, like Harlan Potter or Dr. Edward Loring in this book. Both are at the cardboard end of the continuum. There to be hissed at and booed. Nor is Linda Loring quite right, either, though for different reasons. I never did form a clear impression of her. The backstory of Lennox, Mendy Menendez, and Randy Starr just does not compute.
The book has a foreword, well I guess it is that, but the publisher coyly does not call it that, instead titling it ‘Jeffrey Deaver on “The Long Good-bye”.’ The real mystery is why the publisher bothered to include it. Is the hope that Deaver’s readers will, Pavlov-like, follow him to purchase and read Chandler, or simply to squeeze some more work out of Deaver’s contract? If the former, it is a well-kept secret since it is not trumpeted on the cover (see above) to lure in those Pavlovian readers. If it is the latter, it is a wash-out. Deaver’s remarks are few, banal, and trivial, as well as factually incorrect when he writes that the story takes Marlowe to Mexico. Not so. Marlowe goes no further than Dr Verringer’s ranch in Los Angeles county. Deaver’s main reference to the text is the opening lines, perhaps he got no further. He also says Chandler’s prose is like Hemingway’s. Yes, he does! Staccato. That is Hemingway. Short and sharp. To the point. One point is one sentence. Subject, verb, and object. End. If it has to be said, Chandler’s prose is not like Hemingway’s. Really, Jeffrey!
In 1954 the ‘New York Times’ reviewer, Anthony Boucher, said it was the best of the best, and Chandler’s peers voted it an Edgar award. Boucher also remarks that this novel has a strong theme of social criticism about the society and situation that produces these crimes with less of the sardonic resignation of some of the earlier Marlowe novels.
It took Hollywood twenty years to get around to it, and then to make a hash of it. Nuf said on that subject.
This publisher changed Chandler’s ‘tires’ to ‘tyres’ but stuck with ‘z’ in ‘organize’ and ‘finalize.‘ At least once a ‘he’ appears where it should be a ‘she’ and elsewhere we have ‘ice’ for ‘eyes.’
One question I always ask the inner Elmore Leonard at the end of a novel is, ‘Could I edit it down in length?’ In this case, if I worked at it I would cut and shorten a few scenes and reduce by, say, half-a-page. It all adds up, even Roger’s drunken ravings, tedious though they are to read.