Michael W Jackson – Page 24 – Political theory and practice

The Professor and the Parson

The Professor and the Parson (2018) by Adam Sisman.

GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 3.40 by 273 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: [Gasp!]

Robert Michael Parkins Peters (1918-2005) bested King Henry VIII in having eight (known) wives, and he was more efficient, at least thrice skipping the divorce before marrying anew. Three times a bigamist. His names and dates above are estimates since he used many names and many dates of birth. It may even be that he managed by occult means to lie about the date of his death. That would be consistent with his character.

From the mid-1940s Peters made his way in clerical and academic life by lies, forgeries, thefts, and plagiarisms spiced with bigamy, deportations, jail terms, and all those wives. That later supplied the media hacks with headlines off and on over the years, but nothing, nothing at all, stopped him. And it seems it was no one’s job to eradicate this blood sucker. His determination, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, and creativity are a marvel equal to the trail of destruction he left behind.

He continued despite setbacks partly because no one could quite believe he was doing what he did, and the more blatant it was, the more incredible it seemed to any nearly normal person. His life was a work of fiction which he wrote every day.

Moreover, he had some skill in picking his victims, often a dewey-eyed churchman who could believe no wrong of him, a headmaster desperate for staff, or a women in want of a husband. Yet there were other churchmen and other women who should have known better and who were slow in grasping the reality of his criminal endeavours. There were also many academics, from professors to deans, who took his bait whole, and regretted it.

To avoid creditors, to avoid warrants, to avoid his own past he moved back forth among England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and South Africa. In each country his persistent and energetic efforts netted victims. He also made use of many aliases by shuffling around the four names above. But his ego never let him avoid a photograph so there are many that show the man with many names.

What were his crimes? He forged letters of recommendations, diplomas, transcripts, credentials, and passed more than one dud cheque. He took money for tuition from naive students to teach them subjects about which he knew nothing. He claimed his instruction was accepted for admission to schools and universities when it was not. There were persistent and recurrent suggestions that he forced himself on young women in the girls schools where he was supposed to be teaching. But again it seems to have been no one’s job to sort that out. He plagiarised the work of others and published it as his own, and if confronted with the facts, tried to claim it was the other way around despite the dates, evidence, and facts. That is only the beginning.

He also masqueraded as a preacher and a priest and was so convincing he gave sermons and officiated at weddings, which because he was in fact unlicensed, were invalid. Not forgetting the bigamies.

More than once a bookstore proprietor was defrauded when Peters would open an account, claiming to be a lecturer at an Oxford college, say, and take any number of books on credit, sometimes by the box-load, never to pay the bill. When the proprietor contacted the college it was to discover that he was unknown there. These bills were measured in the hundreds of pounds.

He gained employment more than once in a clerical or an academic position by forging degrees from Oxford, London, Liverpool, Manchester, and elsewhere depriving other qualified candidates of the opportunities. Invariably he was unable, and sometimes unwilling, to perform the tasks for which he was employed. His longest tenure in this account is eighteen months, and most were a few weeks, or less. Some only a few days. His stay at a school in Sri Lanka was shorter than the sea voyage to get there.

Then there were the wives whose ranks grew over the years. In the many photographs he seems to be balding, middle aged man with spectacles, but he must have had something. One of the early wives, Sisman supposes, wrote the only sensible thing Peters published, while others funded his forays. These women were secretaries, school teachers, civil servants, and all victims. Some stubbornly stuck by him when the consequences caught up with him, until he walked out on them for another.

His approach to courtship was direct, and if rebuffed he turned to the next in line, as it were. Likewise, when he passed himself off as a churchmen he went at it head on. He would appear at a Bishop’s palace, ask for an interview, introduce himself as the possessor of many degrees and licenses, and might even modestly show a letter of recommendation (he had composed the night before) from a respected authority. He set about making himself useful and secured a sinecure, until the balloon burst, say, when another churchman recognised him. This recognition occurred because he often revisited the same locales.

For the academy it was much the same with the variation that he would attend a conference in medieval history and in a question period rise to speak, introducing himself as Dr Peters of Magdalen College, after first having ascertained that no one from the college was at the conference, and pose a simple question that would allow him to follow-up privately with the speaker thereafter. In that later conversation he seems usually to have made a good impression and he would shyly allow that he was unhappy in his current (imaginary) position and could be persuaded to move. If he got a bite, then he closed the deal. If not, he went to another conference session and repeated the act.

There was no great artifice in his deceptions. The forged degrees were poorly done but no one seems to have noticed at first. When he applied for a post and submitted fraudulent letters of recommendations both the application and the three letters of recommendation were written in same handwriting, but this passed unnoticed. He was so oblivious that he made one such application to an Oxford college, which was rejected, and then applied to the same college again a few years later and was accepted. No one noticed that he had applied before and been rejected because the application was suspect. In each case the application and all the letters of recommendation were written in his own handwriting with badly forged documents.

In other instances he got appointments to schools, colleges, and universities on the strength of interviews, and no paperwork, neither transcripts, diplomas, nor letters. It is hard to feel sympathy for those who do not take the most elementary precautions.

One of his recurrent gambits was to set himself up in a rented house as a school of theology and then seek articulation with a university, meaning that completion of his program would be considered adequate for admission to the university. So desperate are some universities for fee-paying students that they will say yes to any such articulations. To be sure, Quality Assurance (QA) must be satisfied and often it consisted of Peters writing up a curriculum and sending that in. It would be approved. Then Peters could claim with a slight bit of truth that the course he offered was accredited by a major university. Seeing the crest of a well-known university on the wall of his establishment, the naive students, never many, but always some, would pay him a fee so that he could strut around calling himself Dr, Professor, Dean, and Principal to this audience, often in clerical vestments or an academic gown.

He did this half a dozen times and only once did a university bother to check on the reality behind the paperwork to find…nothing. That sounds like QA, all right, all paper covers rock, no scissors.

He tried to avoid confrontation with his victims or people who knew his past, but if confronted he either (1) cried foul, that he was the victim, or (2) threatened litigation. At the least these tactics gave him time to abscond one scene for another.

Generally, many took his baits, but there were even more others who did not. Women who rejected him instantly. Institutions hiring staff that did not go as far as an interview. Submissions for articulation that were denied prima facie. But they are not featured in the stories of his crimes told in these pages.

There are many gaps in the story as Peters went to ground, moved around, and changed his name yet again. In these gaps there were likely to have been further crimes and perforce other marriages.

One omission from this account is how Peters managed to stay out of the army during World War II. But he did.

We know all of this, and much more, because he came to the notice of the scourge of confidence men and tricksters, until he himself fell hard for one, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who loved kicking people when they were down, and who over the years, having met Peters in one of his early incursions to Oxford, kept a dossier on Peters’s adventures, and solicited reports from others. This dossier in its many box files became the basis for this book.

(It is likewise hard to feel any sympathy for his Lordship’s own fall, he who specialised in ruining the careers of many others with his savage reviews, assessments, and vitriol. It seems somehow appropriate that the fictitious Hitler Diaries got him. There is a discussion of this sorry episode elsewhere on the blog reacting to Robert Harris’s book on the subject. That is another instance of a fraud so simple, so blatant that the only explanation of its success is the will of those deceived to be deceived.)

Speaking of explanations, what explained Robert Michael Parkins Peters’s many deceptions? It was not money. He seldom made more than a subsistence income and not always that, often relying on a wife’s salary and savings. But he did revel in the status that his fantasies gave him. He puffed himself up and insisted on being addressed ‘Reverend’ or ‘Dr’ or ‘Dean’ or ‘Principal’ as he moved from one dreamworld to another. Of course, with a modicum of ability and application he might have earned that kind of status in the normal way.

Perhaps once he started his fabrications and at first found how easy it was, they became a habit, though they got harder as he acquired a reputation, a police record, a list of victims, for Lord Dacre was not the only one to keep a file on him, though Dacre’s was called a dossier as befits his Lordly status. Even if it got harder, lying was all Peters knew how to do so he kept at it. Regardless of Peters’s many victims, his frequent crimes, his recidivism, his disregard for others, his rumoured sexual aggression, his frauds, his theft, his serial exploitation of lady wives, his defrauding of naive students, there was no one responsible for containing him. He was convicted for one bigamy and served six-months in jail, and once for defrauding a bookstore which landed him in the nick for a few weeks, but mostly his victims were left unsatisfied.

Buried in a textual footnote near the end is the author’s remark that many people, upon hearing something of Peters’s story, have remarked that it could not happen today in the age to the internet. Sisman demurs, suggesting that people are tricked this way and that every day. The evidence of the truth of that suggestion is readily available. After reading this book I went to ride the exercise bike at the local gym in front of a television screen where Dr Phil was interviewing a woman who admitted to giving $US 900,000, amassed from her life savings, selling her home, and borrowing money from her adult children, to a man on the internet who claimed he loved her but whom she had never met, and never will since he is fictitious. Go figure. (Victims seem to be a regular feature of Dr Phil.)

Truth can be stranger than fiction, because fiction writers usually try to be credible where life has no such restraint. Then there is the ease of forging documents with computers these days. Consider all those fraudulent web sites and emails that look just like the real thing.

In the final chapter author Sisman suggests Peters is an example of the psychosis known as the narcissistic personality. Reading the list of characteristics that comprise this disorder certainly describes him, as well as the recent Thief-in-Chief. However, labelling is not explaining because that does not tell us how and why he got that way and stayed that way.

On Lord Dacre see the passages about him Ved Mehta’s imperishable Fly and the Fly Bottle (1961).

These are the Damned 1962

These are the Damned 1962 aka The Damned.

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 6.6 by 3,744 cinematizens.

Genre: Sci fi; species Nuke paranoia.

Verdict: Lugubrious.

Dr Tom is on vacation from General Hospital when he encounters caveman Ollie on the one day of summer in England. Adventures for both follow. Dr Tom engages in some safe activity with Ollie’s squeeze who has trouble remembering her name, and Ollie loses face and much more.

Spoilers ahead.

As this well-worn trope unfolds, in a parallel line we meet C with his artistic mistress who carves driftwood into members…of her collection. These two are so posh, few dare approach them. But wherever C goes men with military ranks dog his steps with reports. He may be in donnish mufti but he is one big kahuna for sure.

These two story lines collide when, with Ollie lumbering after them in slo-mo pursuit, Tom and Squeeze accidentally take refuge in C’s cliffside lair on the fatal shore. Ollie makes three.

Ever wondered what happened to the Village (of the Damned) children? It seems, C adopted them for his science experiment and has them locked away in a stone chamber (aka lair) where nary a geiger counter is heard. In the cave the children are monitored by Big Brother’s television cameras, and occasional nocturnal visits by some of those army officers in heavy duty radiation suits to give them nightmares. Ambiguity intended.

Yes, these sweet innocents are radioactive, and bred to be that way so that they will survive tomorrow’s nuclear war. C is not only a mad scientist, he is also a stable genius whose progeny will inherit the dust.

Tom, Squeeze, and even Ollie get all paternal with the cute kiddies, but recoil when they discover that the kids are icicles. In some Geordie-speak earlier we know they have been infused with radiation so that they will survive in a post-apocalyptic world, and that makes them radioactive to a fatal degree in a normal person. Their blood is uranium enriched! This fact gradually sinks into the would-be rescuers who have exposed themselves. Gulp! Ollie is quicker on the uptake than Dr Tom with all his degree-mill papers. One side effect of the radiation is that the children are colder than ice, but after a while everyone forgets that. The other side effect is that one hug, and you are dead.

The three (alleged) adults act spontaneously to escape with the tots without a plan or a clue and it ends accordingly.

There are nice touches. The children are very well integrated into the story, and penultimate scene when in a downbeat ending they are forcibly rounded up and reincarcerated is disturbing. It is not quite the SS in the ghetto but evocative of it. In a way the children drive the action because they are not all the docile sweetness and light that they have convinced C they are when he spies on them. Knowing that he is watching, they have worked out how to avoid that. If C has secrets, they have more.

The inevitability of Nuclear War shadows everything, as it did for us all at the time, and that became the justification for many unsavoury things without a doubt.

C is even colder than the children when he casually murdered his mistress because she learned too much about his work, criticised it, and beat him at scrabble. Three strikes and she was out!

British censors accepted the word ‘Damned’ in titles like the ‘Village’ (1960) of that name, and film producers rushed to get it into titles to titillate audiences. It was even easier to get that word than to get a coveted X-rating to lure in the gullible cinematizens. This film evokes the Village and its sequel, but stands on its own for a viewer who has not seen the others. The children are all posh white bread from the same casting agency. No cockney, no Pakistani. no Geordie, no West Indian, no Irish, no Nigerian…. All home counties.

Dr Tom is as unlikely an action hero as George Sanders was in 1960. He also knows precious little about radiation, it seems, despite his decades at General Hospital where he mostly looked wise.

Ollie tries to look smouldering but mostly looks hungry – bulimia warning. The portrayal of the biker gang members is, well, silly. They are all martial when Teddy Boys were rebels (without a cause) against authority. Ollie wears a tweed sports coat and the gang biker members leather, that is how we know he is the boss. For those who must know ‘Ted’ comes from Edward, as in Edwardian. Suffice it to say that tweed is not Edwardian. Look it up! I did.

The direction by expatriate blacklisted American Joseph Losey is excellent even if the story is disjointed. Kenneth Cope as one of the bikers conveys his love for Squeeze without a word or deed in a few superb moments. You might remember him as Hopkirk, deceased, a few years later.

There is no resolution at the end, which I took to be a reference to the end of Dr No.

The Education of Henry Adams (1919)

The Education of Henry Adams (1919) by Henry Adams.

Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.64 by 4,669 litizens.

Genre: Autobiography.

Verdict: Sprightly before sagging.

Everything is a learning experience in the life of Henry Adams (1838-1918), each twist and turn in life furthers his education about the ways of the world. Though I began to worry when he reached his twentieth year there was no sign of interest in the ways of women.

Inheritor of a weighty family tradition with two presidents and innumerable other worthies, congressmen, governors, Ambassadors, young Henry Adams, as he calls himself, never felt equal to the responsibility of being an Adams of Quincy. Yet he had no choice but to try. This book records his participant-observation of his own life from boy to man. While it is sometimes introspective, it does not drip with the self-indulgent carping of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography, The Confessions. Having read very few autobiographies, put off by the aforementioned Rousseau, I cannot compare the book at hand to another title.

Henry Adams had extensive schooling in the classics and languages, of which he makes light, and travelled in Europe before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) through France, Germany, and Italy in particular. During the Civil War he served as the private secretary to his father who was the United States ambassador to Great Britain. Again he makes light of this service but it was crucial to keep Britain neutral despite the incessant lobbying of Confederate interests aligned with the English cotton industry. Moreover, many Brits wanted a weakened Dis-United States to reduce a commercial rival, and a long, bitter, internal war was to be encouraged. The ambassador had his work cut out for him, and Henry Adams lent a willing hand whenever, wherever, and however he could.

In the post-war Gilded Age Adams mixed with Secretaries of State, novelists like Henry James, and others of the great and good with his mixture of bonhomie and sarcasm. James used him as the basis for several characters in his novels.

Many of the glosses on Education like those on – shudder! – Good Reads, take it rather literally. For such glossers the thesis is that his classics education fitted him for the Eighteenth Century with its languages and literature but not for the Twentieth Century with its science, mathematics, and technology. He certainly has some things to say about college education like this passage: ‘the lecture system … flourished in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make notes’ (p 44). They would have learned more in discussion or by reading the books themselves but to get a degree the professor had to lecture and they had to listen.

How little has changed with Zoom lectures.

As salty as his comments are on education that subject is not the overarching theme of the book. The master narrative is the coming of the Civil War, the War itself, and the aftermath with all the accompanying financial, social, and political turmoil that ushered in the Twentieth Century.

Near the halfway point the book skips the twenty years between 1872-1892 (the apogee of the Gilded Age), and does not mention at all his marriage and the illness and suicide of his wife, Clover Hooper, in 1885, who, while ill herself, had fallen into an inconsolable depression after the sudden death of her father. The second half has none of zip or esprit of the first, and reads almost as though it were an assignment, perhaps self-imposed therapy after the death of his wife. Yet it goes on and on about the people and personalities of Washington DC, none too minor, none too obscure to mention.

By the way if you have ever tramped through Rock Creek Park in D.C. you may have come across the memorial Adams raised to Clover. I am pretty sure I did on the infamous occasion when I got lost there as darkness fell.

Taken as a whole the book is a thud. If only the first half, well it has something to recommend it in both form (zip) and content (the politicking of English neutrality). That achievement is numbed by the lifeless second half.

Published posthumously, it is a title I have heard since Year Zero, but never turned a page of it, but then the Mechanical Turk at Amazon recommended it and I tasted the Kindle sample, found it lively, and more importantly I noticed that the Modern Library sometime in the 1960s placed it first in a list of the best one hundred works of nonfiction published in the United States in the Twentieth Century. That seemed to be quite an accolade, and from a source that I respected. Only later did I realise that all the top hundred books on the Modern Library’s many lists were – you guessed it – published by the Modern Library.

The Atomic Submarine (1959)

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The Atomic Submarine (1959)

IMDB metadata is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 5.1 by 1,600 generous spirits.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Numbing.

Set up: The fabled northwest passage is big business with cargo submarines passing beneath the Arctic ice cap on a polar route. But then disaster strikes: I watched this movie! Curiosity will kill not only cats. Will I ever learn to leave the unseen unseen? Probably not.

One after another of the cargo subs is blown up. No reason to be in a hurry and after about ten explosions the US Navy oozes into action. Slowly, very slowly. The budget cutters have been here. Not only is Navy impoverished so is this production.

We got this far with a ponderous voice-over of plastic models in fish tanks. Commies in the aquarium! It is all Cold War with icicles. Brrr!

America’s finest are recruited from the Retired Actors Home, shorn of their canes and crutches, and sent into action as the A for Arthritic Team. Some of the cast and crew of geriatrics started in silent movies, while others pre-date film itself.

Fortunately the screenplay does not require them to move often from the floor marks however when they do the creaking sounds are their joints not the cardboard submarine set. I ask you what kind of submarine movie is it when the captain does not once say ‘Scope up!’ and so never says ‘Scope down.’

It is almost beyond the pale yet has, surprisingly enough, some merits. First is an ongoing argument between a gung-ho sailor who wants to shoot first and a pacifist civilian scientist. We have, of course, seen this debate before, and seen it better done, but the surprising thing is that it is here at all in this paper thin screen play. Moreover, in this offering the sailor is a hot head while the scientist is the voice of reason. Some marks for good intentions on this point.

The only time the visuals rise above the high school play level is when the intrepid leads find and enter the alien ship, which is a submerged flying saucer, which we all figured out long before any of these droolers did. It is all very German expressionism and cheap, no lights, no sets and the better for it.

By the time the sub-Arctic Sea saucer was found, I realised it belonged to James Arness, aka the Giant Carrot, from The Thing (from another world) (1951), a far superior movie, having sunk through the ice, making Jim an ET with no way to get home.

There is also an echo of the Odyssey, Ripley. Don’t see that often in B minus movies.

Most of the acting is squinting with furrowed brow. Lead Arthur Franz never made it to the A-List and in this film the chip on his shoulder about that is starting to show. He almost as disdainful of his lines as I am.

The alien is a hand puppet but upstages the actors, and it has better dialogue. No wonder it got a second gig with The Simpsons. Kang did not use the lowest bidder to build the flying and submersible saucer spacecraft that is self-repairing like a living being.

Even so our heroes blow it up! It does take them three or four efforts to do so, turning a torpedo into a Polaris missile with some duct tape, but they succeed and we can all heave a sigh of relief because the film grates and grinds to a halt. They make not the slightest effort at technology transfer – theft – from the alien ship while they stumbled around on it.

Overall, it’s so bad that … it’s bad.

I was tempted to watch it after reading a biography of Hyman Rickover, who built the Nautilus, the first atomic powered submarine which transited the North Pole in 1958. There are several other atomic sub movies, but this is enough for now.

6 June 44 – The Light of Dawn

6 June 44 – The Light of Dawn (2014)

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, and nothing more.

Genre: Documentary.

Verdict: Impressive.

On that day 7,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and 1,200,000 men converged on a 45-mile stretch of the French coast. More than 7,000 vehicles soon joined the throng. What an organisational achievement.

In such an enormous and unprecedented undertaking what could go wrong did go wrong. The sea and weather interfered. The tide came earlier and heavier than anticipated and caused havoc all along the strand. Scores of those soldiers drowned in the resulting surf. Machinery broke down; nervous men made mistakes; unexpected obstacles emerged; the bluff at Omaha beach was more than ten feet higher than estimated. Ships collided. Aircraft engines failed. Earlier in the pre-dawn darkness half the 20,000 airborne troops missed the drop zones, many were killed, lost, captured, and ineffective. Maps were misread and Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery took a month to reach his first day’s objective, Caen. A few days later storms in the English Channel disrupted supply.

This documentary features a trove of archival film that I have not seen before. Among the footage is one odd and oddly moving sequence of a uniformed, bespectacled, battered, lone Wehrmacht soldier playing a Brahms requiem on an organ in a bombed-out Normandy church at 1 hour and 23 minutes. Solace of a kind, perhaps.

The narrative is cool, detached, and factual. None of that juvenile breathless ‘Now it can be told’ recitation of trivia from the History Channel and its ilk.

Despite its outstanding high quality it evidently did not have a commercial release. That would explain the voids on the IMDb entry. There are no ratings because raters did not see it. I came across it on You Tube.

De Gaulle (2020)

De Gaulle (2020)

IMDb meta-data is run time 1 hour and 48 minutes, rated 6.1 by 1,500 cinematizens.

Genre: snapshot biopic.

Verdict: The man under the kepi.

The film, covers less than three months from April to June 1940 with an emphasis on De Gaulle’s family and home life upon which the war intrudes with the Blitzkrieg causing the two strands of the story to unravel. Wife Yvonne stays at home in Lille with the children and the soldier goes to war. Events pull them further apart when De Gaulle’s duties take him here and there, to Bordeaux, to London, to Toulouse, to Nantes, to Paris, and back and forth. Communication is lost with Yvonne, and she in turn flees the Wehrmacht advance, children in tow, like thousands and thousands of others.

Two stories unwind, her flight and his fight. She travels through a war zone (check the TV news tonight from Ukraine for graphics) and he battles across a table first with the French cabinet where he lost and then with Churchill where he drew.

Why would Churchill invest in this nobody? De Gaulle has an answer: Because I am here.

Much of it is nicely done, though the historic timeline is altered to tell the stories and many written exchanges become interviews.

Listening to others at the conference tables speak in abstract generalisations about the distant war, De Gaulle imagines what Yvonne must be going through. For her part when she sees fields strewn with corpses in uniforms she wonders if De Gaulle might lying in a ditch somewhere. Ironically, the soldier is relatively safe in all the proceedings while she is constantly at risk from army, air, and naval attack as she eventually finds her way in a human tide to England.

There are some explanations along the way about why De Gaulle, a soldier’s soldier, took the doubtful, dubious, and dangerous path he did, and part of it was his personal loathing for what his one-time mentor Philip Pétain had become – arrogant, vain, greedy, rapacious, selfish – but more important was a determination to keep faith with the fallen, some of whom had died at his command around Sedan, continuing their fight so that they did not die in vain.

There is also an explanation of the first radio broadcast that makes sense even if it is not quite historically accurate. Like a lot of good ideas, it came from a subordinate.

Why would Churchill let him on the BBC when there was still hope of negotiation with a French government? De Gaulle has an answer for that, too: Because you know the power of words. Let them be spoken.

The events are cataclysmic but the presentation is low key, emphasising the individuals and not the big booms and bangs, to the disappoint of many of the cinematizens raters. The actors look and dress the parts they play so unlike Hollywood or Pinewood. The fashions are of the times for both men and women. Soldiers have army haircuts and wear hats most of the time. The production values of Yvonne’s trek are excellent, if disturbing, from one disaster to another across the early summer countryside amid the blooming wild flowers, some splattered with the blood of children. The anguish of the Premier Paul Reynaud (with his frightened Jewish wife) as he struggles to fight on are in the background but very well realised. Georges Mandel, the only Jew in the cabinet, is a crucial player in supporting both Reynaud and De Gaulle, and that fact condemns them in the eyes of Pétain as tools of the Jews.

This Churchill, played by Tim Hudson, is one of the better ones, because the actor does not try to incorporate every tic and mannerism, and so distract, but concentrates on the inherent drama of the moment.

Honoré de Balzac, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’

Honoré de Balzac, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (1831)

Good Reads meta-data is 28 pages, rated 3.85 by 3,858 litizens.

Genre: Short Story.

Verdict: A gem.

This story is the 71st entry in Balzac’s sequence La Comédie Humaine.

An ingénue befriends a celebrated artist only to realise that this painter profits from the advice, assistance, and creativity of another, much less well-known, but far greater artist. The descriptions of painting and painters are superb, even better than those in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise (2004) and those are memorable.

It all leads to an ironic denouncement worthy of an O’Henry story. It is all about knowing when to quit, about the perfect being the enemy of the good, about the means becoming the end. Read it for yourself. The story is usually bound with others so that the page numbers are deceptive.

There are more than ninety items in the whole sequence, and Balzac left behind notes for another forty or so pieces. He did think big. I first heard about and read Balzac in high school whereas today the references are to Marvel Comics I am told. Go figure.

When we got our first Rocket E-Books in the 1990s I set out to read La Comédie Humaine in order. Nothing if not ambitious. I got as far as Letters of Two Brides before surrender. Defeat was the result of (1) the terrible formatting of the contemporary public domain texts from Project Gutenberg which did not fit the screen, have line wrap, paragraph breaks, or any of the other formatting we take for granted today and by (2) the sheer boredom of that novel for no doubt the ever penurious Balzac spun it out to get paid by the word, but after some of the rip-snorters that preceded it the result was numbing.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951).

Good Reads meta-data is 288 pages, rated 4.24 by 23,264.

Genre: fiction, autobiography .

Verdict: Zen.

The ageing Emperor Hadrian writes a long, reflective, meditative letter to his designated successor, Marcus Aurelius. In so doing he rewinds the spool of his life from beginning to his fast-approaching end. Through Hadrian, Yourcenar conjures worlds, plumbs the mysteries of life and love, and offers some hard-earned advice to Marc and over his shoulder to readers.

It seems effortless to read, smooth as glass and offering a depth of vision with a calm detachment. It is no surprise then to learn in an afterword that she worked on this manuscript for more than twenty years to achieve this diamond finish. The poet W. B. Yeats said revision made him a better person, or something like that. Marguerite Yourcenar must have been a truly excellent person to have spun this prose.

Hadrian’s travels make up much of the book. One long episode concerns his efforts to negotiate a peace with some Zealots in Israel. No matter how much he was willing to concede it was never enough for his interlocutor, Akiba, who preferred isolation, and finally eradication to – in Hadrian’s eyes – the slightest compromise. Hadrian describes him as dried, rigid, ignorant, wilful, narrow, bigoted, but listened to his harangues for eight days in an Olympic instance of patience. Seeing that Hadrian had not begged forgiveness for having been born and had not admitted his inferiority to him, Akiba gave up trying to save his soul and left. Worse came to worst. (Self-indulgent note: I came across more than one Little Akiba in university life, intransigent individuals who could not see a matter from any point of view but their own. Any other perspective was at best wrong, and more likely to be evil. A Manichaean world view often seems attached to the PhD.)

That approach to negotiation as an opportunity to harangue others into admitting your superiority still seems to characterise much of domestic and regional politics in the Middle East. The race is to the high ground, not to the common ground.

There are lower key episodes on Hadrian’s difficulty in sleeping, his political marriage, the competition for his favour, his hopes for Marc, and more.

Some of the wise words:

Battles are not won with hate. Anger can make a man brave, but it also makes him stupid, tripping over his own feet.

Good like bad becomes a habit and the temporary tends to endure, and that what is eternal permeates to the inside; over time the mask becomes the face.

Watching the season come and is constant travelling of the earth.

A book may lie dormant for years, even eons, yet upon being opened its marvels, abysses, and more are revealed to the reader alone.

Friendship is a kind of choreography.

An ineffable current passes through a poet in creating a poem.

Libraries are a reserve against spiritual winters which recur.

One of the many things to like about this book is that Hadrian, speaking of the past, uses the past tense. Oh, if even historians these days would do that instead of flattening the topography of time into the eternal present tense.

Henry James, The Aspern Papers

Henry James, The Aspern Papers (1888)

Good Reads meta-data is 106 pages rated 3.71 by 5,042 litizens.

Genre: drama.

Verdict: Intriguing.

Ambitious scholar learns that some letters by a dead white poet might be in the possession of an elderly woman in Venice, despite her frequent and loud denials. Writing a biography of this poet, Ambitious decides to go to Venice to test the hypothesis. His approach is oblique. He will pose as a journalist looking for accommodation and rent a room from Dowager.

In the household, apart from the nearly invisible servants are Dowager and her naive, plain, and shy dependent Niece. Ambitious insinuates himself into the household and finds Dowager avaricious and Niece tedious, but needs must, however, he makes no progress and frets. He dare not raise the question directly with Dowager least she give him, not the papers, but the boot.

Dowager sees through his ruse but likes the rental income, while Niece is flummoxed to have a man in attendance. His own finances are draining away but Niece admits that there are papers and a cameo likeness of the dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. That convinces Ambitious to hang on.

One night thinking the Dowager bed ridden with illness, Ambitious steals into her private study and rifles her desk to no avail. Dowager catches him at it and faints. He scampers and lies to Niece.

Dowager dies and Niece inherits. Do the papers exist or was that just bait? Will Niece now give him any papers that do exist? He has spent a lot of time with her ever so subtly trying to find a path to the trove and she being completely inexperienced takes that as a kind of courtship. She hints that were they to marry then the papers would be his. It is one of those marvellous James scenes where the message is never stated but hangs in the air above the page.

In a neat role reversal Ambitious is surprised by the hint and scrams, roaming around Venice in girlish confusion, but concludes that the game is worth the candle and goes back to Niece the next day, perhaps to accept her offer, he is not sure, but being so close to the trove, which has grown in his mind in importance, spurs him on. He learns that Niece, ashamed and embarrassed at her bold hint, assumed it would never happen and burned the papers which were numerous. Ambitious is stunned. His efforts have led to the destruction of the very things he wanted to preserve.

The end.

It is a sort of mystery story. Are there any papers to get? Why is Dowager so determined not to part with the papers? Will he or won’t he get the papers? Did the confrontation over the desk precipitate Dowager’s death? Will he or won’t he marry Niece to get the papers? What will become of Niece when Ambitious leaves?

I read it for the insights into the mind of a biographer, Ambitious, and there is some of that to be had, and there are rich descriptions of life in Venice.

Henry James was a great writer. The epiphany in Memorial Hall in the Bostonians has long stayed with me along with the drawing room scene in Wings of the Dove when a secret is revealed by posture. Added to that is the offered but not quite stated proposal in this story. He was a maestro who could make the reader understand something without saying it.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers (1953).

Good Reads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.79 by 1474 litizens .

Genre: krimi; Species: PoMo.

Verdict: Meh.

Spoiler: in which the detective accidentally kills the victim whose murder he has come to investigate. Or did he? Was it no accident, but perhaps a Deep State conspiracy all along? We’ll never know….unless Hillary fesses up.

Detective Wallas comes to a dreary northern city to investigate the shooting of DuPont. We know Bonaventura planned the crime while his henchman Gatineau pulled the trigger. The story is pieced together from the points of view of these four and also Fabius, acting on the orders of the minister, who dispatched Wallas. There is the local copper, Laurent, who is only too glad to turn the inquiry over to him. A doctor, a constable, an innkeeper, and a talkative drunk. By the way, the victim DuPont has much to say, even when he was supposed to be dead. Then there are those erasers.

In his circular, repetitive perambulations around the scene of the crime and the city beyond, Wallas goes into this shop and that, one after another, where to conceal his purpose (gathering information) he buys an eraser for pencil marks. He has several les gommes in his pocket as a result. That quest embodies the story which is repeatedly rubbed out and then started again from a different perspective.

Not much happens and the plot is paper thin but tantalising enough to allow for many speculations about a conspiracy so vast, dark, and deep that it cannot be named. If you have seen L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) that is Robbe-Grillet’s work, too. The film is style over substance as a critique of the vacuous lives of its characters, but it is gorgeous to watch and enveloping. Not so these pages.

In 1953 the novel kickstarted Post-Modernism which, regrettably, continues to justify treating readers with derision and contempt.* In these pages everything is circular, not linear and heavy-handed clues to that are conspicuous in names and actions. There are those several narrators who offer different interpretations of the same facts, or different facts. Nor is it certain any of them is reliable. There is no closure at the end. Sounds like a classroom exercise in what not to do in a novel. I found no amusement in reading it but it is well enough written to sustain interest even as it goes around in circles.

I did wonder if I should have read it as a palimpsest of his POW experience (see below) but I got no purchase on that. I tried to read one of his other novels years ago, and failed. This will be my last. He once said that a true writer has nothing to say and he proved it to me with this book.

Robbe-Grillet (1922 – 2008) was born to a comfortable bourgeois family in the provinces, educated and trained as an agricultural engineer and worked on the land for some years after World War II. He was a POW during the war and did slave labour in a German factory. Perhaps the agricultural life expiated those demons. He was not part of the Parisian set but burst onto the scene with this novel. He was soon inducted into the Beau Monde and became a gatekeeper for new writers as an acquisitions editor for a major publisher.

*Has anyone yet coined the term ‘Post-Modernism Syndrome’ to refer to those readers who identify with and like the derision and contempt dished out to them by Po-Mo writers in pointless prose? If not, I claim it now!