IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 6.6 by 2242. cinematizens.
Genre: Holmes.
Verdict: The moor!
The elder Baskerville dies out on the moor in peculiar circumstances, and his young heir arrives from Canada to assume the title. But Dr Mortimer has seen that footprint and goes to Sherlock Holmes for advice. This is a perfectly cast Holmes, though his attention to personal grooming is not Holmesian, but he crackles with intelligence and dominates proceedings even while off-camera.
The cast of characters is assembled in the rambling and slightly ramshackle mansion near the moor. The hound puts in a stunning, early appearance that stayed with me after I first saw this twenty years ago. The staging is great but the inserted dialogue is pathetic in compassion. Likewise the outdoor scenes on the moor are splendid but the accompanying dialogue is not, and too little of it comes from the original.
The villain is obvious, since he is the only one we get to know, the others are ciphers and might as well be CGI. Even the subplot with the butler and his wife is bleached into near nothingness. But the villain, played by Richard Grant, is magnificent. He switches on and off from maniacal to charming, from genial to menacing, from sincere to evil in a twinkle. Superb.
Richard Grant was brilliant.
The Jeremy Brett version was absolutely literal to Conan Doyle’s text and the poorer for it. It did not make use of the sight and sound to do what ink on the page could not do to generate an atmosphere. Ergo literary fidelity is not an end in itself, but in this 2002 version so many liberties are taken with the text that the air is let out of the plot.
Watson is made a credible figure in the dialogue, though the actor in the role is far from convincing. He seems like a little boy trying to act like a big boy, even his hat seems too big for him. Underneath Dr Mortimer’s beard, side burns, straggling hair, and moustache is Inspector Barnaby who would have made a far better Watson.
A casual search on the IMDb returns a dozen of more versions of the HotB, and there are others with altered titles. I have seen Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Christoper Lee, Jeremy Brett, and Ian Richardson each in turn battle that dog, as well as Benedict Cumberatch, and now (again) Richard Roxborough.
GoodReads meta-data is 344 pages, rated 3.91 by 66 litizens.
Genre: Hybrid – academic krimi.
Verdict: Different.
In which the untenured professor of industrial sociology Stanley interviews female workers about job satisfaction and is almost murdered, almost loses his wife, and does not get tenure. But learns a lot about the specialised porn film industry in Los Angeles, far away from home in small-town, down-state Illinois.
When the opportunity arises to go to LA and interview a cohort of workers the hapless professor is quickly in way over his head, but perseveres. After all he knows how to interview people, so he starts interviewing people and when one of them is murdered he keeps on interviewing, and adding things up.
The investigating police officer starts out as a stereotype but there is more to him than meets the cliché, and that is nicely done. The character are differentiated, and the setting is, well, distinctive. Likewise his wife proves more than a match for the odd circumstances. These good qualities are diluted by a denouement that is too much deus ex machina for this reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 305 pages, 4.67 by a paltry three litizens. Read faster you lot!
Genre: Pastiche.
Verdict: Razor tongue strikes again.
The redoubtable Maggie has been burrowing away in Romania when…. This is the fourth title in Bailes’s series of tributes to the Universal Horror films. In her archeological pursuits Maggie usually works with Amy. Confronted with a problem on a dig, they had a division of labor; Amy retires to the library to research it, while Maggie hits it with a spade to see what happens.
The title gives away quite a bit, but Maggie didn’t read it and when trudging through the snow during a winter storm in the Carpathian Mountains she is glad of a welcome and a warm fire in the Gothic castle on the hilltop; she shows no surprise to meet the Lord….Dracula. He’s kindly old gent, bit pale, but it is deep in a long winter, and he keeps telling her to unwrap the scarf from her neck… Keep the spade handy, Maggie! Readers want you on deck for later titles in this series.
The time line is fractured but immortals like Dracula don’t wear watches and the cast of characters got lost on me. I did think too much was made of the English village doctor in the first third of the book and then he more or less disappears. But in general Bailes ties up all the loose ends by the last page! Can one say of the Count: The End?
Robin Bailes
Bailes hosts a zinger You Tube channel called My Dark Corner of this Sick World on which he savages bad movies once a week, and more. Highly recommended for the brilliant editing and razor sharp commentary in 5 – 7 minutes. Plus you can chart his ever changing hair styles and speculate on the reasons why at no extra charge.
A Concise History of Bulgaria (2d ed) (2005) by Richard Crampton.
Goodreads meta-data is 287 pages, rate 3.71 by 114 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: Be glad, be very glad….
Bulgars are not Slavs and they were not always all Christians either. One early Bulgar ruler negotiated with the Roman Pontiff and the Byzantine Prelate for the best terms to convert the kingdom to Christianity. This episode seems to prefigure much of the following history for the Bulgars, dealing with internal divisions between Bulgars and Slavs, while holding off two powerful neighbours. By the way he got the best deal from Constantinople though later it was reneged. That, too, recurred: Deal followed by no deal.
When the Bulgarian Empire waxed it needed a common language for cadastral lists, i.e., tax collection by another name. Cyrillic script was developed within its borders for that purpose. At times the Bulgarian lands reached from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea.
The bigger it got, the bigger target it became for Magyars, Serbs, Russians, Greeks (inevitably Byzantine tax collectors), and finally the Ottomans who were less inclined to negotiate than the Byzantines had been. Later enemies of the Ottomans saw in the Bulgars an ally.
Bulgaria and Bulgarians inevitably were sucked into the recurrent wars between Russia and Turkey, each side quick to take revenge on the smaller, third party. Bulgarians long saw Russians, because of Christianity, as saviours. In 1878 Russians and Ottomans agreed to permit a Bulgarian state, but later the same year the Treaty of Berlin pared down its territory to weaken it. The result was to dispossess many ethnic Bulgarians whose cause became the main foreign policy target for successive Bulgarian regimes, justifying the Serbian war (1908), the First Balkan War (1912), and the Second Balkan War (1913), and World War I allied with Germany and with the ancient enemy, the Ottomans in return from promises of new borders that would encompass all Bulgarians (and some others besides).
An Ottoman army officer in the First Balkan War, Kemal Ataturk, envied Bulgarians their unity, nationalism, and language. While the Ottoman Empire was gigantic in comparison, it was also disorganised, dispirited, and disunited. There was nearly nothing in common to rally the troops. Later when he became the philosopher-king of Turkey, he created a Turkish language and a panoply of national symbols to match those he had seen among Bulgars.
In the Great War Bulgarian troops held off an Allied Expeditionary Force operating from Greece for years, despite being outnumbered and outgunned at times. But the human and material cost was considerable with dead, wounded, and displaced refugees. In the Treaty of Versailles it lost considerable ground and several hundred thousand ethnic Bulgars migrated into its new, reduced borders, causing many dislocations. Tsar Boris III initiated a long period of authoritarian rule in 1918.
With the intrusion of German hegemony in the Balkans, Boris III entered into a passive alliance with the Nazi regime. In return for this association Bulgaria was to occupy Macedonia, lately part of Yugoslavia, and Thrace, taken from Greece, and there was a complicated arrangement with Rumania, too. True many residents of these territories were ethnic Bulgars, but not all. These early gains were popular until resistance in them occurred and casualty lists arrived. Boris insisted that the Bulgarian army, undertrained and ill equiped with few capable officers, was totally committed in these territories, and had to remain as a buffer and deterrent to any attack from Greece or Turkey. Ergo Bulgaria did not take part in the war on the Soviet Union, though German troops and supplies for the East passed through its lands. Pressure from the Germans led to anti-Jewish measures but Bulgaria made little effort to enforce them. Also to placate Hitler it did declare war on England and the USA, a symbolic gesture that led the Allies to seize Bulgarian assets, few as they were, and to bomb Sofia and elsewhere. It never did declare war on the Soviet Union despite increasing German pressure.
In the 1930s there had been parliamentary elections in Bulgaria in which voting was compulsory for men and optional for married women. These affairs were carefully managed, administered, and manipulated to get the result Boris desired (as in Florida and Texas), but nonetheless they occurred and sometimes threw up surprises. Remember it was not until 1979 that woman got the vote in enlightened, Western, and democratic Switzerland.
Tsar Boris III
In August 1943 upon returning from a meeting with Hitler, who raged at him about deporting Jews more than fighting the Soviets, at age 49 Boris died. Rumours of poison soon circulated. He was succeeded by his six year old son and a coup d’état followed. Thence came a succession of governments, some self-appointed, and efforts to steer between the Soviets and Nazis, pleasing neither. Bulgarian Jews who were Bulgarian citizens in Bulgaria had the best chances of survival, but not the Bulgarian Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens even if in Bulgaria, still less those from areas outside the map lines of Bulgaria at the time. It is no doubt a more complicated and messy story. In latter 1944 the Bulgarian government dominated by communists changed sides and declared war on Germany in a desperate effort to assuage the all-conquering Soviets. Italy’s 1943 switch saved it from much Allied retribution but the Bulgarians had no such luck with the Soviets who used the Bulgarian Army in the remainder of the war as cannon fodder and then in the subsequent peace punished Bulgaria as a defeated enemy.
While there were plenty of home-grown anti-semites, Germanophiles, and fascists in Bulgaria in these pages they never seemed to have much influence on the government or army. Don’t know quite why even after reading this book, when such types were so influential in other places.
The Western allies left Eastern Europe to the Soviets and by 1947 Bulgarian was a one-party state with a monotone press. The repression that followed was, well, repressive, violent, erratic, relentless…. Bulgaria became more Red than Moscow most of the time. When regime change came to Moscow, Bulgaria’s north star was gone. The incredulous response of Bulgarian communists to the indifference of Gorbachev’s Russia would be amusing were it not so destructive. As long as Bulgaria was Red, Moscow had subsidised it, but with Gorbachev the subsidies stopped…abruptly. The result was a disaster that got worse over the following years of the New World Disorder.
With Russia indifferent, the only choice was the West, i.e., the EU and NATO, and Bulgaria has tried to fit into both, but, well, the rule of law is one problem it has in common with Romania (and now Washington DC).
The book ends with a nice reflection on the vexed history of this crossroads, that inevitably is at the margins of either East or West.
Richard Crampton
It seems to have been my week in the Balkans. On the night table is Robin Bailes’s The Immortal Dracula (2020) set in contemporary Transylvania and on the day table is this title.
Bulgaria has tried to manage two large, aggressive neighbours in Germany and the Russia. When I read about Finland’s efforts during World War II to work with but not join the Nazi Axis powers, there were a few allusions to Bulgaria’s efforts to ally with Nazi Germany on its own terms. How did that work? Time to find out. See above.
IMDB meta-data is 39 episodes of 24 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 984 cinematizens and then another fifty of 50 minutes each.
Genre: Adventure
Verdict: Go!
Before he became Prisoner Number Six, he was Danger Man or was that Dangerman, or even Secret Agent, roaming the world as either American, British, NATOist, or Irish. That is all part of the mystic. The initial opening credits show the US capitol dome and that has led most reviewers to conclude he was supposed to be American, but the earliest episodes occur in the ebbing British Empire and in the opening voice over the phrasing of the reference to NATO sounds like that is the one, while in later episodes he says he works for his country (whichever that might be), but then he also names NATO as his employer in another. He also says he is Irish-American. The man always has a cover story. By the way, NATO headquarters at the time was in Paris, not DC. Later he becomes British if not English.
The half-hour episodes zip along. The opening is a crime of some sort, and then our hero, Drake, John Drake, is dispatched to some obscure, exotic, distant locale to sort it out. The characters are set in motion without tedious backstories and get on with it. The narratives are models of construction, as opposed to the padded and wandering story lines that dominate bloated, wallowing films these days.
Some of the scripts are very clever. I particularly liked the seeing blind woman. In another, Drake’s contact on site is a woman who is in effect his boss during the mission. No fuss is made over that, it just is that way. Ditto when a woman is the CEO of an African Airline. Best might be Drake in a wheel chair. Never seen that done before or since. Although there are clangers, even in the earliest episodes, say when a banker absconds with a ton of gold and stores it in a really big and really heavy box, which no one notices for some time, or the Swedish school teacher stereotype who trips over everything.
Everyone smokes more or less constantly, even when lying in wait to ambush Drake, and no one is without a drink of alcohol in hand for more than two minutes. There are many tuxedos as Drake moves among the elite where there is the most opportunity for corruption. But then there is that leather pork pie hat he sports in some later episodes that takes the couture down to leagues club level. In early episodes he gets by on his wits and fists and audacity but as the series goes on more gadgets (cameras, microphones, drones, and other gizmos) and guns are added to the mix.
Patrick McGoohan was more Roman Catholic than the Pope and made it part of his contract that the character would not bed women nor do anything immoral, like assassinate a target. While Drake is often compared to James Bond, the similarities end there.
The first two seasons were not a great success, but then Dr No created a demand for spy entertainment, and Danger Man was rejuvenated, re-newed, re-titled to Secret Agent, and extended to an hour. To lure McGoohan back the episodes were expanded to one hour and he was given considerable creative input, often under pseudonyms. In these longer episodes he is clearly British right down to the Austin Cooper.
The hour long scripts are repetitive and preachy all too often as Drake has become a more or less self-appointed, self-righteous, and cosmopolitan do-gooder. He spares no one his sermons, not even his superiors whom he takes to task regularly even as they sign the pay cheques. He is altogether insufferable. It is easy to see why he went to the Village.
In the wake of Dr No there are also even more guns, girls, and gadgets.
The hour long episodes are hard to watch and I find myself tuning out in a way that I did not do with the shorter ones, where to blink was to miss the action where Drake outsmarted is opponents rather than berated his superiors.
It is chance to see a host of performers in earlier days from Derren Nesbitt, Lois Maxwell, Donald Pleasance, Hazel Court, John Le Mesurier, Charles Gray, Mai Zetterling, Honor Blackman, Nigel Green, Ron Fraser, Burt Kwok, Sylvia Sims, and the list goes on and on. Most, but not all episodes can be found on You Tube or Daily Motion and the DVDs are available from Amazon.
GoodReads meta-data is 285 pages rated 3.85 by 310 litizens.
Genre: Mythology.
Verdict: The beginning and the end.
Life is a battle and life is a journey, it is often said. If so, then Homer covered it all. Ten years of battle followed by ten years of journey.
Manguel passes lightly over the caltrops that plague classrooms, was there anyone called Homer, did he live at the right time, were the texts written, could he have witnessed anything, was there a Troy,…? (We visited the site of Troy in 2015.) These obstacles often obstruct college readers. Well, I know they impeded my first readings, but Homer rises above the pygmies and prevails. While those controversies come and go with the tide of tenured controversialists, Homer endures.
The book charts the passage of the two books through European culture with the sure hand that Manguel always displays, and with some of the most compelling insights this reader has ever encountered in a lifetime of reading (about) these texts. The obvious comparison is the essayist Umberto Eco, who has become a showman, all form and no substance; in contrast, Manguel has both form and substance to spare.
For example, he lays bare the love stories within the Iliad, missed by those who see only a war story, that is, Achilles for slave girl Briseis, Patroclus for comrade in arms Achilles, Hector for wife Andromache and she for him, Priam for son Hector, and Paris for ineffable Helen. All of these are blotted out by the dark fate that brings them into collision. Love does not conquer all but is omnipresent. By the way, the only survivor in the foregoing list of lovers is Briseis.
When Hector and Andromache, he holding their young son, Astyanax, embrace Homer closes this scene of familial love by saying ‘the bright helmet lay at his feet.’ The fate it betokens is inescapable.
Yes, it is war, and there is killing, but as Manguel notes Homer describes the deaths of warriors individually and no two of them are the same. He gives to each of the fallen a name and a distinctive turn of phrase, more than sixty of them. There are no unknown soldiers here in mass graves. Each of them is a tragedy in which a noble spirit becomes a thing dragged in the dust. If it is a war story it is also the first anti-war story in its merciless detail.
A recent translation.
Both Achilles and Odysseus tried to dodge the draft. Achilles hid among women while Odysseus feigned madness by plowing sand. But neither could escape fate. In the afterlife Achilles laments the fate that befell him, though he partly chose it, making it all the more bitter.
In his decade-long return Odysseus remained staunch to Penelope, giving way only to goddesses where he had no choice. The one mortal woman who came to him, he politely declined. Circe and Calypso he could not decline. (Try that one sometime with Mrs and see what happens.)
I liked the story of Alexander Pope’s rendering of the Iliad. Pope knew no Greek (and only some autodidact Latin) and thus did not work from a Greek text or an early Latin version, but rather compiled the existing English translations and synthesised them into a single text, and then edited it to get the right effects. While the result is thus not a translation from the Greek text, the emotional resonance is perfect.
While Manguel covers much he could not mention Madeline Miller’s beautiful novel Circe (2018) and I wish he could have done so. Perhaps in a second edition. What would he make of this splendid novel? Nor does he mention the drum-beat cadence of Christoper Logue’s War Music (2003), a translation of parts of the Iliad. Nor does he mention any of the audible versions now available, though he does note some of the public recitations that have become a fashion. I was tempted by one in Sydney last year until I realised that it was standing room only. That is, to say the audience was to stand for three three-hour sessions over three nights. Include me out.
Nor does he mention Homer’s contention that heroes need poets more than vice versa for without poets to tell the story and make it memorable no one would know what heroes have done. Poets can versify other things, if there are no heroes, but for heroes without poets there is only oblivion. I looked for the passage just now but could not find it readily. Perhaps a reader can lay eyes on it.
Alberto Mangual
There is no discussion of the philology of the foundation text of either poem. Indeed, is there a foundation text somewhere in the world? I assume the Homeric texts came to Europe through Spain via Arabic translations, but have no confirmation for that assumption from these pages. Hold on, Wikipedia has it that the oldest complete, authentic text was middle Greek from the Tenth Century AD in Byzantium. It was the basis for Latin translations at the time, but has since itself been lost, either to a private collector, or – more likely – to destruction. A Latin translation might have been taken to Florence when the Medici’s offered a bounty for such treasures.
A title in a series concerning books that changed the world, I have read at least two others in this series. One was adequate and the other not, but this one rises well above the series as a stand alone title.
GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages, rated 3.37 by fifteen litizens.
Genre: biography.
Verdict: [See Edmund Burke]
Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945) was head of the central intelligence service, the Abwehr, in Nazi Germany from January 1935 to December 1944, appointed by Adolf Hitler. He went into the Imperial German Navy in 1912 and during the Great War served on a U-Boat, based at Pola on the Adriatic Coast of Austria, and we were there a couple of years ago on the way to Venice, sailing in South American waters during World War I. Fluent in Spanish, while doing so, he set up coast watching networks that observed Allied shipping movements. This was the beginning of his career as a spy.
His boat was interned with engine failure in Chile, and he made his own way back to Germany by stealth. Another credit in his spy book. He passed himself off as an Argentine when travelling through Bristol while the war was still on and went on to the neutral Netherlands and from there to Kiel.
The 1918 armistice took most German seamen by surprise, having had a steady diet of propaganda, they expected the British to capitulate at any moment, and had little idea how dire the military situation was, and even less knowledge of the privations on the home front. They were either isolated at sequestered naval bases far from the front and cosseted from the privations of citizens, or in ships far away at sea.
In the disorder of 1918-1920 that followed the armistice he took the side of order, as he understood it, and helped organise Freikorps resistance to the Spartacus Revolt. There is no doubt he feared a Red Revolution like that in Russia and he did everything he could to thwart such an occurrence in Germany, though how much he would have known about the Red Terror at the time is unclear to this reader.
These were confused and confusing times. He spend much of the 1920’s on missions to Spain as the Weimar Republic tried to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles restrictions on ship building with Iberian complicity. In so doing, he built up a network of agents and contacts that would came to serve other purposes.
When his name kept cropping up in League of Nations inquiries into Versailles compliance, the Navy hid him on one of the ageing battleships it had been allowed to retain, which he commanded for three years. His reputation as a mastermind of intelligence and his demonstrated ability as a commander brought him back to Berlin at a time when the intelligence services were being re-organised and were free(r) from conditions in the Versailles Treaty.
While centralisation was opposed by the many independent intelligence services, the compromise was to put a Navy, rather than an Army, man on top, and that was Canaris just as the Nazis completed the seizure of power, which inevitably led to another re-organisation with the SS, the SD, the SA, and the Gestapo dividing up the great game. Somehow Canaris steered through these sharks to keep the Abwehr independent and focussed externally on military matters. To do so he maintained good relations with Rudolph Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and the other Nazi cannibals. He must have joined the Party but I cannot remember right now. Through the 1930s he was drawn ever more tightly into the regime, and promoted to fleet admiral.
Along with many others in the armed forces as Hitler’s determination for war developed, Canaris wrote history memoranda. History memoranda are written and filed so that the author can say later, ‘I told you so!’ But without making any great effort to act on the conclusions. For an example see the career of Robert McNamra. This author takes those memoranda at face value, but this reader sees cynicism in many of them, including those by Canaris. He, like many generals, wanted to slow the rush to war, the better for Germany to be prepared. Later he was revolted by the exterminations that swiftly followed in Poland, but soon concluded there was nothing he could do about them.
The endless back-biting, power plays, undermining, arrogance, and selfish self-promotion among the Nazi leadership is impressive. It seems incessant with every kind of calumny employed. Of course, such goal displacement is common in any organisation, however, in this instance it is such a difference of degree to be a difference of kind. Lies, distortions, half-truths, malicious rumours are all the currency of promotion to the point of killing rivals, all the while putting everything in writing. Canaris was a master of this game, though he himself seldom wrote down anything, but he was such a big target that he attracted a host of enemies who compiled dossiers on his every move and utterance. No fool, he must have known that. But he always seemed to have a credible response to the repeated accusations.
From 1935 to 1940 there was occasional talk about a coup d’état to replace Hitler, but it was only desultory talk. The author blames the Allies at times for not supporting such clandestine efforts, but any Allied support, no matter how subtle, might equally have galvanised a furious nationalistic response. From go to whoa, Germans were responsible for what Germans did. End of story.
In July 1944 his name was linked to the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler. The fact that no evidence supported such an association was itself taken as proof of how devious he was, and he was arrested, isolated, humiliated, tortured, and executed, as were scores of others who had nothing to do with the plot or plotters. It was convenient for generals and diplomats to blame everything on the Abwehr, which after all had not won the war for Germany. So they did, hoping in vain to save themselves.
The book ends at his execution with no concluding chapter. Too bad. I came to see him as something like Albert Speer, a technician who played all sides of the table. There is no doubt he shielded many enemies of Hitler, and saved some Jews, and did not energetically promote the aggressive war, and discouraged Spain from embracing the Nazi regime, but all this can be seen as investments in alternative futures, and that seems in keeping with a man who had no deep convictions. On the other hand the Abwehr provided a constant stream of valuable tactical and strategic intelligence to the German cause.
While I always found this enigmatic character curious, I have had little taste to read about the terrible times and things in which he was involved. Still I ventured to read the Kindle sample of this biography of Canaris, and morbid curiosity kept me going.
The biggest question for me is why the Germans did not realise that the Enigma Machine had been compromised. It was originally a navy device and Canaris must have had knowledge of it. It is not mentioned in these pages, according to my memory. It is comparable to the German failure to realise in World War I that the British had cracked their most secret code even as the evidence mounted. On this latter instance see Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmerman Telegram, which is discussed elsewhere in this blog. The obvious answer in both cases is arrogance. In WWI the Germans did not believe their complicated cypher could not broken. Period. In WWII the Germans could not believe their complicated cypher machine could be broken. Wrong both times.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 5.3 by 89 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Slow but ahead of its time.
Two middle age, middle class women die without any apparent case of death after attending a séance with a professional medium. For reasons not at all clear to this viewer the decision is to assign a female officer to investigate. Ah, but there are no female investigating officers so the senior, female traffic warden, Mrs Pym, is summoned, and offered the assignment with the temporary promotion to inspector. She agrees with an alacrity that surprises all.
A male offsider is assigned to assistant and also to keep an eye on her. Nudge, nudge, wink. In fact, he quickly subordinates himself to her.
She changes out of uniform and sets off. First she tries to figure out the (ingenious and fantastic) means of murder, because it is murder! Now I realise the suspicion that dogs have of vacuum cleaners is warranted. She also starts trying to identify, provoke, and trap the murderer. She makes mistakes but keeps going. The plot is thickened because….SPOILER…there were two villains working on different agendas. (Admission, I forget the details and it was just last night.)
Mary Clare (1892-1970) was Mrs Pym. Most of her theatrical career was on the stage with a few supporting roles in films likeThe Clairvoyant (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Oliver Twist (1948). This title was her only lead. Her later work was in television. I had rather hoped this was the first of a series, but not so.
It was released on 13 April 1940 just before the Phoney War got real.
GoodReads meta-data is 309 pages, rated 3.66 by 2195 litizens.
Genre: Novel.
Verdict: Amen, Sister! Tell it!
In which are chronicled the further adventures of Professor Jason Fitger who has become chair of the fractious Department of English at Payne State University after the longterm incumbent decamped over the summer. Fitger is immediately deluged with a backlog of administrative paperwork, including a Vision Statement. To be budgeted each department must submit such a statement that meets the approval of the Provost.
The University President’s main task is constantly lobbying the state legislature to slow the continued, inexorable erosion of Payne’s appropriation. In her absence the University is run by the above mentioned Provost who is seldom seen, and any effort to secure an appointment fails. Indeed some long-serving deans have never seen this shadowy provost.
In the age of McKinsey management, Payne University is dedicated to cutting deadwood, increasing quality, and turning anything and everything to a profit. The Business School has become a Forbidden City unto itself selling degrees. The sciences have been tailored into applied research and development laboratories for the industries owned by Payne donors. Drug and medical insurance companies fund and own the life sciences. Those sciences that could not secure private funding have disappeared, e.g., astronomy, with the planetarium now used for storage. The University president dreams of a future where there will be a Division of Numbers and a Division of Words, and she will then have only two direct reports to delegate to the Provost.
All the while, the administration has grown from one building to three while the student population has increased and the faculty members decreased. (Once remodelled the planetarium will be the fourth admin building.) Faculty members are constantly summoned to training sessions to keep abreast of Payne’s many, conflicting priorities. Indeed, one member of the English department has been dispatched to sensitivity training for twelve consecutive weeks. There are rumours that the consultant who runs the sensitive training is from North Korea.
A nefarious plan is afoot to eradicate all humanities departments at Payne State University. How could that be done? Not so hard when one thinks about it. Get this! That Vision Statement must be endorsed unanimously by all members of the Department with signatures! That is the killer. There was, there is, there never will be anything that all members of the English Department will agree on! Nothing.
The first line of defence is to dispute the composition of the Department. Do all the adjuncts, associates, emerita, or honoraries count? Do the drudges who do all the work count? The part-timers, the temporaries, the underpaid grad students, and the unpaid interns: Do these transitory peons four-to-a-room in the dank and dark basement count? Does anyone even know their names? Fitger’s forays into the cellar do not go well.
When the academic year begins the English Department has no Vision Statement and hence no budget, but it has more students than any other department on campus, students whose expectations have been inflated by the endless trumpeting of all those administrators recruiting students (= cash flow). It falls to Fitger to cajole, coax, bribe, coerce, or blackmail members of the English Department one-by-one to endorse a statement while dealing with the flood of students. Oh, if it were only that easy. Then there is a really big Kapow!
The catalyst for the explosion is the Shakespeare requirement. All majors in English have had to do a one semester course on the Bard since time out of mind, taught by the most senior member of the Department who is long past retirement age but whose pension was looted by corporate shenanigans facilitated by McKinsey management. His whole being is embodied in this course. He is also the only member of the faculty with a record of publications making him untouchable. But the Vision Statement has opened the whole question of the curriculum, and from the can wriggle the worms of post-modernism in its many forms. The Bard may only survive because the Po-Moeans cannot agree what should replace him.
Then comes the Mission Statement followed by ……
Ah, life without a budget means, among other things, that meetings cannot be held because meeting rooms are rented to departments. In the same McKinsey spirit only the student toilets and hallways are cleaned. To have offices and faculty toilets cleaned, Departments have to pay for it from the budget. No budget, no meetings and no cleaning. Still less can Fitger’s desk-top computer be repaired, nor the broken window replaced in the Department secretary’s office. Though as long as the window is in disrepair the contents of the office are not insured, as he is repeatedly reminded by the Safety Officer whose job is to harass him, not to repair the window.
Lest a reader think this rent-seeking is fantasy, when a director of a unit I was enjoined to prepare a budget that included renting the teaching rooms we used. Nothing came of it at the time but it was a trial run.
Venality, back stabbing, undermining, intransigence, solipsism, this book has it all. Innocent readers might think it is exaggerated.
Rather than agree and survive, members of the English department would rather disagree and perish. This revealed preference partly arises from a failure of imagination. Tenured members of the Department cannot imagine their own demise. Never fear, that unseen Provost can imagine it. In short, tenure means that a professor is entitled to a specific job, but if that job itself is eliminated, there is nothing to which that professor is tenured. If I am a tenured professor of Albanian political theory, when the position of professor of Albanian political theory is eliminated then so am I.
In the end Fitger proves what everyone thought. He is much too inept (nice) to be a head of department, and that is what saves him, and the Department. The last service done by the Shakespeare teacher is something to ponder.
Julie Schumacher
I waited for more than year for this title to become available on Kindle but it didn’t so I got it in hardback, because I could wait no longer to read of Fitger’s latest escapades.
With the great personal restraint I have long cultivated, I have not told a story about the conversation I once had when acting dean with the head of a department about accommodating curriculum changes in which he happily agreed that (1) he and his department would not cooperate and (2) as an inevitable result there would be fewer of them. So be it! Compromise was not an option. Sssh. The cognoscenti will know which department that was.
Good Read meta-data is 520 pages, rated 3.77 by twenty-six litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Indomitable!
“Cinema lies, sport does not,” Jean-Luc Godard, an avid sports fan.
Alice who? Among Alice Marble’s (1913-1990) lesser claims to fame is that she was the inspiration for the DC Comics character Wonder Woman!* That accolade arose from her athletic career. (See title above.)
Born to a working class family in San Francisco, Marble’s father was a mechanic on the street cars, and her mother managed the brood of children. In time Alice would give tennis lessons to King Edward VIII of England, and play private exhibition matches at San Simeon with the Hollywood A-List. Get it!
But it all started with a Louisville Slugger. (The cognoscenti will get it.) As a tweenager she idolised her older brother and followed him in playing baseball, where it quickly became apparent that she could run faster, throw harder, field better, and out hit him. It was embarrassing for him in sandlot games to be chosen after his kid sister, and it was worse when she won a ballboy tryout for the San Francisco Seals. (Again with the cognoscenti.) So this brother bought her a second-hand tennis racket from a pawn shop and more or less locked her into the fenced public concrete tennis courts in the neighbourhood while he went off to play baseball.
On these courts she took on all comers, boys, girls, Jews, Chinese, blacks, and anyone else who showed up with a racket, and she won in a serve and volley game. Pow! Going out to play like this, she wore shorts and t-shirt. In this girl one sees the woman to come and not just in the attire but also in the can-do attitude.
One observer of her powers on these courts staked her entry into local competitions (and bet on her to win). She did and he did. This led to other sponsors and other wins. Her game was completely untutored but it was dynamic and powerful enough to get local press mentions, and that led to more sponsors.
At one point, her penurious family bought her a membership in an elite tennis club, thinking she would learn things there about both tennis and life and attract more and better (i.e., not gamblers) sponsors. At this country club, she was a fish out of water the only time she went for a competition. Her clothes were not suitable; she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. The only people she knew there were the bus boys who also played tennis on the public courts. Then in the club competition draw her snobbish opponent protested at playing this pathetic nobody in shorts and a t-shirt! Rattled and embarrassed, after a re-draw Marble lost in a double humiliation.
Enter Eleanor Tennant, whose fame as a tennis coach was national, likewise of working class origins, but now tennis teacher to Carol Lombard, Marion Davies, Errol Flynn, and others. She saw in the teenage Marble the stone from which to carve a champion, and she set to work with the wit, insight, tenacity, patience, and loyalty that marked her coaching career. She passed many of these qualities onto to her protégée.
Both of Marble’s parents died young while she was still in her teens, leaving the elder brother as head of the family. All the children left school and worked. From fourteen Alice worked in a Wilson Sporting Goods store in the back, shelving and stacking. The manager later gave her a brand new racket, and she hence remained brand loyal. (The purchaser of this racket left it for pick-up and never returned.)
It is a story of ups and downs, triumphs and failures. Because of her social background Marble was often denigrated by tennis officials and her naiveté meant she was sometimes manipulated, too, because Eleanor could not be there every minute. Marble’s wins on the court were spectacular and so were her losses. With Marble there was fireworks. It was all so different from the demure and muted world of ladies’ tennis at the time.
When she was ranked in the top ten in the USA she contracted tuberculous and collapsed on the centre court of the French Open. That seemed to end her career, if not her life. But two long years later she was back, hitting the ball harder than ever. Eleanor paid all the medical bills with the money she earned from her precarious existence as coach to the fickle glitterati. Who knew when the novelty of tennis would give way to another Hollywood whim and leave her high and dry.
By the way, the US Tennis Association that sponsored her trip to the French Open, spent years trying to sue her for failing to complete her contract to the point sending a bill collector from New York to California to extract the money while she was hospitalised in a sanitarium. Eleanor as always settled that. But it is pretty clear that had Marble been one of the tennis club snobs this treatment would not have occurred.
Part of Marble’s recovery was to take operatic singing lessons for breadth control and she discovered that she could sing and that she liked to sing. Another part was a contrived competition for Eleanor’s favour with her other protégé Bob Riggs. Yes, him.
Marble was prone to dehydration in the long matches played in the sun, and a response to that, again from Eleanor, was to put soaked cabbage leaves under her visor. These fell out at one particularly embarrassing moment. Read the book to see when.
Remember that snob who called her a nobody. A year or two later by chance they were again paired in a local competition, and Marble literally drove this snob off the court with a record number of aces and a smash that broke her nose.
With Eleanor’s instruction Marble broadened her repertoire with top spin, slices, undercuts, lobs, drop shots, back spin, cross-cuts, and tactical court management, i.e., using all the court for her shots. She also slowly adjusted to the surfaces of clay and grass which had none of the bounce of playground concrete. She also learned, as was much remarked in her mature years, to play with an effortless economy of motion while still hitting blazing shots.
She played an aggressive, masculine style and wore shorts as she had as a girl. This at a time when women wore lady-like long skirts and patrolled baselines. Not Marble who went to the net for the kill time and again. These attributes made her news copy and she quickly became famous beyond her accomplishments. She seems to have very little ego in it all, though, and soldiered on.
She made the cover of Life but not Time, as far as I can tell. This celebrity led to a line of leisure and sportswear. There was the singing, clothing, Wilson endorsements, prize money, DC Comics, and personal appearances but there was so little money in the game she was never well off and lived at home with her brothers well into maturity, when not at Eleanor’s tennis camp in the sticks, practicing all the daylight hours and retiring at 10 pm.
She grew tired of answering questions about her personal life and made up a husband on a secret military mission, and who then died. This is the mystery of the title. The author does an excellent job in unravelling this long-running deception. By the way, for those who must know Marble had lesbian relationships, though she was at times squired around by Will du Pont as a cover. Yes, that du Pont who is described as wooden, pinched, and gloomy. It is no wonder she did not accept his many offers of a marriage of convenience. There is a charming account of her first encounter with the word ‘lesbian.’
After Pearl Harbor, she tried to join up in something, anything, but was refused because of the scars on her lungs. At the personal invitation of President Roosevelt she headed a physical fitness campaign on a speaking tour, and then took to selling war bonds in another campaign of personal appearances. In one sixty-day trip she sold a million dollars of bonds, gave the same speech a hundred times, and autographed everything handed to her all day long and some of the night.
Throughout her career she played doubles, including mixed doubles. In this case the word ‘mixed’ refers to gender. Marble, however, once played double mixed doubles, which her enemies never let her forget. Huh? She and another woman played in a mixed doubles match with two black men in Harlem for a Red Cross fund raiser. In short order that more or less ended her access to courts in the South.
In retirement she struggled to make a living and her health deteriorated quickly. But with each set-back she rebounded. ‘Indomitable’ is the word that best describes her personality. She was knocked down plenty of times but always got up swinging. We won’t see her like again in today’s world of cosseted millionaire mediocrities in sports.
I had never heard of her until I came across her name in one of ‘What Happened on this Day in History’ entries I did for 2018-2019.
By the way, the public courts she started on were refurbished and named after her at the Golden Gate Park in the sky.
She published two memoirs, the second posthumously, but both, alleges this author, are very unreliable. He convinced me with his own assiduous research into dates and times. She made up more than that husband.
Robert Weintraub
This is an impressive biographer who has checked every fact more than once and has a deft way of putting aside Marble’s unreliable assertions for proven fact. In the fact-checking he reminds me of Robert Caro. There is no higher praise. But the air goes out of that comparison because Weintraub also sprinkles the pages with annoying slang like ‘the writing chops,’ ‘wiped the floor with Collins,’ ‘dough,’ ‘in the joint,’ and many more that will date the book, confuse some readers who are not native speakers of English, and leave translators at a loss.
*’Wonder Woman’ was conceived … to set a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men” because “the only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.” So said her creator.
