Category: Biography

Marc Wortman, Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power (2022). 

Good Reads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 4.33 by a scant six raters.  

Genre: biography. 

Verdict: compelling.

Young Hymie (1900-1986) was carried to the promised land in his mother’s arms, Russian Jews escaping Cossack pogroms to Ellis Island. How this five foot nothing, 98-pound weakling Jewboy (as he was frequently called, and worse) became a dominating force in the US Navy is quite a story.  One thing is sure, he did not fall off a charm bracelet.  

His father eked out a living in Chicago as a tailor while his mother cleaned up behind rich people on the Gold Coast of the Lake. No genius, the boy had his parents’ work ethic, and knew he had to make his own way. By some assiduous trading of favours his father got his son nominated to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis because it was a route to a free higher education. There was never any nautical motivation. After the nomination to a secure place he had to take a battery of entrance examinations, some contrived to exclude undesirable elements from the Navy, and he fit that category: small, working class, Jewish. He started with three strikes. The prejudice of the examiners and the examinations were his first exposure to the US Navy. He had expected nothing less, schooled as he partly was on the streets of Chicago, and prepared to the maximum so that he could not be excluded. Once in the Academy he experienced the bullying, racism, brutality, snobbery, anti-semitism, and stupidity he forever associated with the Navy, but he also discovered the engineer within himself. Engineering was working class and few other cadets showed any interest in it.   

In his first sea duty on a WWI destroyer he spent all of his time taking it apart and putting it back together.  He did not rely only on the blueprints, the gospel for most engineers, but rather went over the ship on and off duty, wrench in hand seeing how, why, and what worked, and soon learned that reality differed from blueprint. Soon he was making changes to increase efficiency. That DIY approach, and skepticism about blueprints continued throughout his career, even when he was an admiral inspecting an aircraft carrier, his ADC carried a wrench not a brief case. 

Two qualities developed in his formative years. (1) The engineer who assumed nothing and tested everything, and (2) the officer who went full steam ahead at all times. He often made changes without seeking permission or telling anyone. He saw it; it needed doing; he did it. That got him attention and made him enemies. The efficiency reports by which careers are made or broken suited Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  He was a good engineer and an incompetent officer. He was also a workaholic who had no other interests. None. That lack of social life made him anathema in the Navy where a premium was placed on getting along with others, such a large premium that it trumped technical or tactical competence.  (Ergo the miserable performance of the US Navy in the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign when the dancing officers failed to take the most elementary tactical precautions and paid for that in blood.)

His later sea duty included a battleship where he rewired the telephone system more or less single handed because no one would or could work with him and he was unable and unwilling to delegate, a submarine where he started thinking about alternative propulsion, a mine sweeper where he experimented with demagnetising mines, and so on.  During this service he hated the cramped living quarters and the traditional schedule of four hours on and four hours off. Later he changed both these in the nuclear navy he created.  

He was a loner, a martinet, foul mouthed, contemptuous of authority, and abusive of subordinates. Why he stayed in the Navy is one mystery, the other is how he stayed in Navy. As to the latter, there were guardian angels who wanted to keep good engineers in the service, and who were far enough up the hierarchy to influence that without having to suffer personal contact with him. As to the former, he was offered jobs in commerce more than once with a great deal more money but he never hesitated to say his favourite word, ‘No!’  He would never compromise on quality which he thought defined business.

He seldom wore the Navy uniform despite the standing order to do so, and that continued even when he was an admiral.  His attire was either a business suit or a boiler suit.  (See the cover illustration.) When he showed up for an inspection in a boiler suit, and he did do that, the captain of the ship to be inspected turned his thoughts to his retirement portfolio.  

He worked in Navy procurement during WWII and dealt with contractors, designers, builders, quartermasters, and kept the fleet of thousands of ships at sea supplied, refitted, and armed.  In doing that he rode roughshod over standard operating procedures, traditions, superior officers, the letter of the law, due process, and personal sensitivities.  The enemies list grew but other guardian angels saw in him a capital letter Trouble Shooter who would boldly go where wiser heads would not tread and who could then break log jams that stymied other officers.  He signed some 3000 contracts and insured by a rigorous, sometimes personal – remember that wrench – system of checking that all were honoured on time, on target, on budget.  The Truman Committee singled out Rickover’s department alone for praise in its otherwise scathing review of Pentagon procurement in 1944.  

One story in the procurement period brings home his way of doing business.  This midget sat at a desk in a business suit, while two executives from RCA did a sales pitch on a new radio for the Navy. It was smaller and better than those in service, also products of RCA.  They knew their stuff and spun a good line. One criterion for a radio was ease of repair in difficult circumstances.  Putting an example of this new radio on his desk they demonstrated how easy it was to operate, after which he got up, and pushed the radio onto the floor. ‘Gentleman a five-inch shell just hit the bridge and damaged the radio. Repair it!’ They squawked, we are not operators. He rejoined, neither is the sailor who just pulled the dead operator off the set, but he has to use the radio to report the attack. Repair it!’   

That was prelude.  The payoff was nuclear.  Signing all those contracts brought him into competition for resources with the Manhattan Project, and he became aware of speculations about atomic energy to generate electricity, and it came to him that it could be an alternative to coal, diesel, and oil. It was easier to say yes to him than to fight him, and he eventually established a Naval Reactor Project at Oak Ridge.  First it had a staff of one, him.  He schooled himself in nuclear energy with the same drive, determination, insensitivity, and – well – brutality that he did everything else.  He worked twenty-hours a day, travelled far and wide to attend seminars and lectures, and to interview specialists. Having arrived late for a lecture on one occasion he bullied the home address of the speaker from a secretary who was working late, and knocked on the lecturer’s door at midnight demanding that the lecture be repeated for him here and now!  

There was a bitter rivalry among the armed forces over who got the atom bomb, but when the Air Force hived off from the Army it was a foregone conclusion.  Such a weapon in 1948 seemed to sink the Navy even more comprehensively than Bill Mitchell’s bombers.  Who cares about ships at sea when there are long range aircraft carrying the Big One.  In the scramble to maintain its relevance (budget along with careers), the Navy tried all sorts of gimmicks and one of them was nuclear power for the one ship that still seemed relevant, because it could hide from airplanes, the submarine. The Navy began pushing this project, and about that time the Truman Administration, President Truman himself conscience stricken about using the atomic bomb, though he would never admit it even to himself, was eager to turn atomic power to peaceful and constructive uses and nuclear energy offered him a chance to do that, so he backed the development.  

No senior officer in the Navy thought a nuclear submarine was either possible or desirable, and so none of them wanted that job. Thus, Rickover stayed in place because no one else wanted it. The technicians involved also thought it would taken ten years to realise the concept but Rickover immediately cut that in half and promised a ship in five years. He delivered.  

In the best tradition of McKinsey management as soon as the nuclear submarine was a reality, superior officers dismissed Rickover from the program he had created, masterminded, and driven.  He had been passed over for promotion time and again, and when he was unanimously rejected a final time by the nine-man board of review, he was placed on the retired list.  Such was the animosity toward him that when the first nuclear submarine was initiated in a ceremony he had organised, he was not allowed to attend.  Only a direct and personal intervention by President Truman who wanted to met him put him at the platform. For this special occasion, he wore a business suit and not a uniform. Defying the order to wear the uniform on such an occasion of course added to his enemies.    

Further interventions followed and he was promoted to Admiral in a rare split decision. The officers who knew him best hated him the most and they voted against him. Others realised he had to be promoted to save the Navy.  

The USS Nautilus went to sea, setting off a bureaucratic battle in the Navy to crew it.  The Naval Personnel Selection Board, otherwise known as God, selected three captains and decreed that Rickover choose one from among them. Leaving the decision to him was regarded as a great concession.

All were three candidates were Academy graduates, all were socially acceptable to the admirals club, all were experienced submariners, none had shown any interest in the nuclear propulsion. Rickover ignored the list and choose a submarine captain who was not an Academy graduate but who had risen to bridge, who was not dance party material, who had been passed over for promotion more than once, and who had been an avid contributor to the reactor program and knew how to use a wrench.

More ructions followed. Rickover was summoned to Washington to get an earful. He refused to go ‘at this critical time.’  It was always a critical time when such a summons appeared. By now he had been on the cover of Time Magazine as Mr Atom Power, he had been profiled on the front page of the New York Times for creating the Nautilus, he had been singled out by first President Truman and then President Eisenhower, and so he was well insulated. That, of course, only further enraged his legion of nautical enemies.  Later when another forced retirement loomed an ex-Navy man, President John Kennedy, went to bat for him by holding the bill for naval appropriations until Rickover was promoted. Then Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all supported him against the US Navy.

The Nautilus did the impossible by passing under the North Pole in 1958 which was as big a deal at the time as Moon landing in 1969 and a rejoinder to Sputnik the year before.  When this feat was celebrated, the Navy insured that Rickover was not invited to the ceremony.  However, President Eisenhower insisted on shaking his hand, and so he was permitted to attend but placed at the rear of the podium, and to prove how low the US Navy could go his wife was refused an invitation. 

On another occasion when the reactor he built, some of it by his own hands, to supply electricity near Pittsburgh was switched on, the Naval Chiefs proposed that another, ‘better looking’ officer do the honours.  Incredible, but it seems to be true. Rickover outmanoeuvred this sleight by inviting the president to do it, which he did.  

While he made nuclear power possible he opposed with his usual belligerence and tenacity turning it over to civilians. He testified to Congress, he gave press conferences, he wrote books, he spoke at meetings in which he said that the commercial imperative would lead to compromises in safety.  Contractors cut corners unless inspected with a wrench. Few materials are supplied to specifications unless there is constant inspection.  Blueprints are no more likely to match reality than the plates in medical textbooks resemble a patient. He had been dealing with designers, contractors, builders for forty years and knew whereof he spoke, citing a myriad of examples to prove his point. The enemies list lengthened because many of the examples he cited involved the contractors now lining up to take over nuclear power.  

The nuclear submarines, more than a hundred, and a few nuclear surface ships became known as Rickover’s Navy.  He insisted that he alone select officers to crew these ships and he did that in his characteristically wilful manner.  He sawed two inches off the front legs of the chair for candidates to sit on to make them uncomfortable from the start. He subjected about 15,000 officers to this test, and the many others that went with it, and so knew just about every officer in his navy, though he did not remember Jimmie Who. But Carter remembered him as a higher being, and made him a mainstay.  

He also insured his ships offered each sailor a space and bed of his own, and an eight-hour shift.  He also nagged Congress to fund a special bathysphere that cost more than a submarine to rescue crews from the deepest water.  Members of the first subcommittee considering this proposal endured his midnight phone calls.  

He stayed in the Navy, despite that ever longer list of enemies, for 63 years.  He was one of four people to receive a presidential gold medal, until the Crook-in-Chief started handing them out to himself, strippers, drug dealers, ETs, and KGB agents.  

A succession of presidents sponsored his renewal every two years until Reagan, whose Secretary of the Navy dedicated himself to forcing him out. He did not go quietly as President Reagan himself discovered! The implication is that the nuclear power industry wanted him gone and with him went a powerful voice for intense and constant regulation. Instead the Reagan Administration in this as in so much else, went for self-certifiction.

There is nothing in the book about either blacks or women in Rickover’s nuclear navy.  Nor is there much about how he met and married his wife of forty years.

Perhaps the last word is that a Rickover reactor has never had an accident, while there have been dozens in the Soviet and Russian navies.  

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (1976).

GoodReads meta-data is 391 pages rated 3.90 by 155 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: A curiosity.

An anodyne entry about Backhouse in the Dictionary of National Biography of Great Britain in 1970 described him as a sinologist, antiquarian, and businessman, longtime resident in China. That belied a very colourful life of a forger, confidence man, thief, confabulator, swindler, and traitor.     

Scion of a wealthy Quaker banker, Backhouse (1873-1944) was a wastrel from the off, and his father refused to support him, though the title did eventually pass to the son, but not the dosh. By the way, the family pronounces the name as Back-us. To escape the collection agents come for the money he sailed for China in 1899, and fell in with the foreign ex-pats in Peking. 

He had shown at Oxford (before leaving under a cloud of debt never repaid) a remarkable facility for languages and that was the mainstay for the rest of his life.  As a student he learned French, Russian, German, Japanese, and started on Mandarin.  He continued the latter along with Tibetan and Cantonese in China. Being poly-lingual put him in demand as a translator in Peking for Western journalists, businessmen, politicians, and others.   

His modest manner masked as unscrupulous character.  Hired to translate a Chinese document, say a contract, into German, he always insured the result said what the employer wanted it to say.  If reality subsequently exposed the lie, he then claimed that the Chinese were at fault for changing their minds, and so on.  He was plausible, Quaker upbringing, son a banker baron, lately of Oxford University, well-connected (he always claimed), impeccable in manner and dress with a diffident even obsequious manner. 

His authority as an expert on all things Chinese was confirmed as he went native in abode, dress, diet, and manner.  He gradually withdrew from European society in Peking and lived like a hermit scholar (hence the title), emerging only when he needed some money. Like Jekyll and Hyde (or Bruce Wayne and Batman), he was one man but two people: a modest European and a hermit Chinese.  

As a scholar he claimed to be friends with numerous, important political, financial, and social leaders in China, and at times to prove this, produced letters from them recommending him, praising him, and so on. These he always produced only when pressed for his bona fides. And they were always in Mandarin with his own translations attached and which he himself certified as genuine.  At times a suspicious European would challenge these credentials, even once face to face with the Chinese who denied all knowledge of this man Backhouse, who then told the European that the Chinese was lying to save face, and he was so convincing that the European continued, to his later cost, to do business with him. 

He became the agent for a major Clyde ship builder on the strength of his assertion that China was re-arming after the defeat by Japan and after witnessing the Japanese defeat of Russia, and would buy battleships by the score. He made a show of only reluctantly taking a retainer (which he then anted up by claiming he was entertaining court officials to grease the deal), and the ship builder paid and paid, and no battleship orders ever came, but instead his many promises that they would – for years, and thousands of pounds. Even at the time Trevor-Roper was researching this biography, the ship building firm was unwilling to cooperate with him by opening its archives to him. It surely was embarrassing to this firm for its stupidity to be aired in a book that its shareholders might read.

Then there were his exploits with Oxford University from which he extracted an honorary degree through a handsome gift to the library of a trove of rare and important Chinese books, scrolls, objects, and relics.  This first gift was very valuable and genuine, leading to his name being incised in marble on a plaque in the Bodleian Library.  After a suitable elapse of time so that it did not seem that he had bought his honouris causa by this gift, he got the degree.  Later he contacted the grateful librarian at the Bodleian with the prospect of further additions to the collection, if only he had the money to purchase, pack, and ship the treasure.  First it was to cost £500, then £2,000, and by the time the scam snapped it had run to £20,000.  A few volumes did arrive at Oxford, but University scholars quickly ruled them to be forgeries. And that caused them to look more carefully at the first gift, with the predictable results. There was much dross interleaved with a little gold. Like the ship building above, Oxford did not want to expose its own foolishness, and kept the matter as quiet as possible.   

Most incredible of all was a scheme he hatched to sell arms to the British embassy in Peking. When the Great War began, Britain was desperate for weapons and bought them around the world (until its own armaments industry began to manufacture in bulk).  In September 1914 when this subject came up in conversation with an official Backhouse claimed he knew a Chinese general who would sell an arsenal. But he would have to be bribed and the arms paid for.  In time Backhouse claimed to have located and secured the cooperation of a number of generals willing to sell vast quantities of arms – which he listed in detailed inventories running to pages and pages.  But since this was illegal, he could not name any names or indicate where the arms were.  Since it was illegal to steal government property and illegal to export arms, maximum secrecy must be assured so no one must negotiate and organise the purchase but Backhouse.  Officials in the Peking embassy were determined to pull off a major coup by securing such a stock of weapons and in due course as much £2,000,000 was invested in the exercise.  Well, no weapons ever appeared and most of the money disappeared.  When confronted with the failure, Backhouse blamed the unnamed Chinese for welshing on the deal, and to save face the British officials swallowed that tale.  They could hardly complain since the whole affair was illegal.  Still less could they broadcast it to warn others off Backhouse.

He went on to an American Printing firm which wanted to print Chinese bank notes and pulled another scam on it.  Again because of the questionable legality of some of the things done, no one could complain too much, too often, or too loudly.  

The pattern is made abundantly clear by the author, and it is repeated at intervals whenever Backhouse needed money.  Whenever things got out of hand Backhouse went to ground.  He just upped stakes and left Peking for Victoria (on Vancouver Island, for the geographically challenged) or other parts.  While visiting his family once, when subjected to some insistent questioning by his hostile brother-in-law, Backhouse went for a walk to clear his head and did not return to remain incommunicado for thirteen years.  Some walk.  He only resurfaced when he again needed a bolthole.  

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, despite being a lifelong Sinophile he became a cheerleader for the Japanese, who, in his eyes, were going to end Chinese corruption and restore the old empire – he took the puppet regime Japan had installed in Manchukuo as an example of that – and eradicate pernicious Western influence.  Eventually, as an enemy national he was confined to a compound in Peking where he continued to declare his enthusiasm for the Japanese war effort even as Singapore, Malaya, Burma, and India were all attacked. One fellow internee said Backhouse volunteered to broadcast his support for Japanese on the radio, but the Japanese were not interested in this strange character in either his English or Chinese incarnations.  

The last chapters concern a lengthy autobiography that Backhouse compiled in his dotage that details a fantasy life of grand, if grotesque, proportions. In examining the claims and assertions of these stories, Trevor-Roper begins to psychoanalyse Backhouse, because, to be sure, the question all along is ‘Why?’ Why did he forge when he could have made a perfectly respectable living as a sinologist, and at one point he was all but offered the chair of Chinese studies at Oxford University.  It is pretty clear that Trevor-Roper cannot image why anyone would want anything more than that.

While a great deal of money came and went, very little of it ever stayed with Backhouse for he was once and always a wastrel.  As fast as money came in, it went out even faster.  

Some of the forgeries were undoubtedly done to get some cash, but that is no explanation for the vast effort and creativity he put into the major endeavours, like sixteen printed and bound volumes of fabricated secret diaries of a Chinese court official.  Each volume ran to a million characters. That must have been hard and exacting work sustained over a long period of time. The conclusion is that Backhouse enjoyed dreaming of himself being the court official and writing the diary. That once he discovered this self-induced fantasy life he returned to it again and again in a bizarre instance of vanity publishing. That is as good an explanation as any.  

That DNB entry has since been changed.  See for yourself.  

I read it as an example of how to research, present, and write a biography.  It certainly makes use of an impressive array of materials, letters of contemporaries to others in which he is mentioned, company archives, embassy records, newspaper reports, and so.  Some of which Trevor-Roper solicited by mail and which the source dutifully copied and sent to him. Oxford letterhead in those days seems to have worked wonders. 

At the Existentialist Café (2016) by Sarah Bakewell

GoodReads meta-data is 440 pages, rated 4.24 by 12,819 litizens.  

Genre: Explanation.  

Verdict: Chapeaux!  

In which the author explains the mystery of life, or rather the way a band of daring layabouts made things so complicated no one could decide what to have for lunch.  Whereas philosophers in the past had tried to understand the world, their point was to obfuscate everything so completely that understanding was impossible.

It all started with the gigantic ego named Martin Heidegger who invented his own language, which bears in retrospect a startling similarity to Klingon, convincing every one who tried to read his books that he must be a genius, because his prose was unfathomable.  For him lunch was food-being.  In German that term is impressive in itself – Nahrungswesen – and when it comes in a sentence full of such portmanteau neologisms, it is masterful.  That impression is enhanced by the German practice of putting a capital letter on every noun, and in Heidegger’s prose nearly every word is a noun. By way, Nahrungswesen is preceded by Nahrungswnichtsesen.  See, impressive.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a bored high school teacher until he read Heidegger, then he became a boring high school teacher, one who had to tell everyone, in writing, about his sore feet, because philosophy was everywhere and everything, including bunions. This insight sustained him while he was a prisoner of war in 1940-1941 before he liberated himself.  Quite a story there.  

Bakewell is an amused tour guide who steers readers through the origin, development, narcissism, and decline of existentialism as a school of thought, drinking club, and celebrity coterie.  Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir emerge as serious people whose enthusiasms carry them off.  Bakewell does observe that though both were brilliant students, there was always another one who bested them in the rounds of competitive examinations of supreme importance in France, Simone Weil, who categorically refused to take them seriously.  Not sure what to make of that because Weil lived like a creature from another world, seldom eating, never drinking alcohol, sleeping on the floor in an unheated room, and working herself to death in a factory in solidarity with the underclass. She lived the and died talk. That is, however, another story.

The nova that cast off the field of energy called existentialism traces back to Edmund Husserl (1859 -1938), who appears in this story as refreshingly normal.  A quiet and introspective scholar who scribbled away without end.  He was Jewish and, well, he tried to ignore the world but it did not ignore him. He was abused by the Nazi regime and after his death from natural causes there is ripping yarn about hiding his archive from the Christian book burners. His surviving wife, Malvina, and one of his students risked their lives to conceal his unpublished manuscripts in Germany, then in France, and finally in neutral Belgium. The student smuggled the cartons of papers into neutral Belgium and hid them in the basement of the University Louvain Library. History buffs know what happened next.  The whole library was blown up (just as it had been in 1917) again. That is a library to avoid.  

Martin Heidegger’s betrayal of his mentor Husserl for worldly success has been much discussed, and is rehearsed here with an even hand, but there is no doubt that the opportunities the Nazi regime offered Heidegger blinded him to everything else.  The fact that he proved to be inept and incompetent in exercising those opportunities does not exonerate him. Bakewell also implies that his mangled prose, mystical thinking, suffocating egotism aligned with the apocalyptic Götterdämmerung of the Nazis, and if she doesn’t I do. Heidegger always banged on about freedom and found that ultimate freedom in abject surrender to Nazi cannibalism.  Of course freedom by submission makes no sense to a sane person, but did that number include Heidegger?  

I spent a summer once trying to read and understand Heidegger. Big mistake. There is nothing there to understand, except possibly the gymnastics of translators trying to translate the incomprehensible.  

While Sartre’s prose was never as deep and dark as Heidegger’s, reading it is no stroll in the park; it is saved by the novels which for all their self-indulgent brooding do tell stories of a sort.  Even more so for de Beauvoir whose prose is lucid in comparison and whose novels are spare and focussed (unlike Sartre’s).  

Sartre grew to like his celebrity status and cultivated it, and Bakewell certainly provides evidence for that cultivation. He was a public intellectual avant le mot, and loved it.  He could drop an opinion on any cause at any time, just as his public intellectual descendants today can switch from opinion on Covid to the War in Ukraine without missing a beat. That is  partly because the underlying motif is constant – ‘Everyone else is wrong!’  Irresponsibility is the ultimate freedom of the public intellectual or Fox journalist, two of a kind.

There were so many causes and many opinions, and so many contradictions. Long before John Rawls conceived the Least Advantaged Class, Sartre used the Least Favoured as his reference point. A good start, perhaps, but the concept was neither defined nor managed, and it simply became a rhetorical weapon just like those he despised others using.  While Bakewell’s judgement is Solomonic, mine is not. Too much truck with too many murderous dictators for my blind eye(s).   

During the Cold War, despite the Hungarian invasion, Sartre applied the label Least Favoured to the Soviet Union, and became an asset as Rupert Moloch is today.  Being blind in one eye, that was the orb Sartre turned on the Gulag, and ignored the Least Favoured there.  Ditto when he shook Comrade Number One’s hand in Havana, he did not notice the homosexuals in Cuban prison camps.  

Then there is the book Dialectical Reason (1960) in which – hocus-pocus videocus! – Sartre synthesised existentialism with Marxism.  It is all very Heidegger, the ultimate freedom is submission to an organic whole.  The more Sartre I read, the more sense I saw in Ayn Rand! However, that antidote was worse than the disease.  

In a parallel track Albert Camus decided life was absurd, having no meaning beyond itself – the unbearable lightness of being – while the firm of de Beauvoir and Sartre decided that we had to give meaning to meaningless life by signing up to a cause, or in their cases, causes.  

Then there was the only likeable one of the bunch Maurice Merleau-Ponty who tried first the de Beauvoir-Sartre recipe becoming a truculent communist for four years but finding that boring he then switched to Camus’s fatalism with a dopey smile. All the while he continued to dance the night away to jazz, had a normal home and family life, and enjoyed a good meal without once having to philosophise about his bunions. Moreover, he wrote a lucid French that anyone could understand.  No wonder he was nearly barred from the Existentialist Café.   

One of the character actors in these dramas was Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) whose prose was so inscrutable he surpassed master Heidegger in incomprehensibility.  No one understood what he meant – did he?- yet the publishers produced about forty of his books.  A coterie of PhDs has since made a living interpreting his runes in an even bigger pile … of books.  In the last generation Post Modernism has made this obscurantism into a totem and incomprehensible books are a career path. Levinas’s dauphin was Félix Guattari (1930-1992) whose prose is overgrown like a temple in a tropical jungle with no Indiana Jones in sight to cut it away. There are more than forty books bearing his name. He became the favourite whipping boy of critics of Po-Mo who quote from his overgrown, tangled prose in which no straight lines ever appear. His posthumous persecution by these critics has aroused spirited defences by the defenders of the indefensible in Wiki and Blog Wars far and wide. A nearby keyboard will reveal all.  Get clicking to find out more.  

There is much more in Bakewell’s book than these selective and acerbic comments cover, so read it!  

Mussolini 2d ed (2002) by Richard Bosworth

Goodreads meta-data is 584 pages rated 3.79 by 219 litizens

Genre: biography

Verdict: Measured, informative, and dense.

How did this itinerant contract school teacher from a backwater become Il Duce? Some of the ingredients to answer that question follow: he was accustomed to talking to audiences and writing as a teacher. He also moved around (albeit only in the middle of the peninsula) from one short-term contract to another and learned first some German and then some French. So far…so what?  His assignments were in peasant villages and prior to the Great War, Italian socialism was rural and many of the milieus in which he taught were socialist to one degree or another.  (Think of Ignazio Silone’s novels.) Young Benito was smart, ambitious, energetic, and social. He was literate and that soon saw him become a journalist for many small towns had their own weekly newspapers and many of them in his environs were socialist. He supplemented his pedagogical income with whatever they might pay, and from these came invitations to speak, and speak he did. (Though the author does not explore the point, I concluded that Benito loved an audience, a stager at heart.)

In that place and in those times, what did socialism mean?  Improving the lives of those who lived on the land was the goal, but figuring out how to do that was puzzling. Easier to rail against the alleged powers that be and call for their destruction. The message was essentially negative, and… international. Socialism was the international brotherhood of workers (yet Italy then had few urban factory workers).  

Then came the Great War and Benito, like many, but not all, others, shed the international skin and became a nationalist first and last, training his verbal guns on those wishy-washy socialist (like Antonio Gramsci) who were peaceniks because of the universal brotherhood of the working class. Mussolini, by the way, accepted induction into the army and served near the front, was wounded when a grenade exploded prematurely in a training accident, and hospitalised. The nationalism aroused by the War was partly irredentist to reclaim lands (Fiume, Trieste, Tyrol, and the other cites on the Adriatic Coast that had once been Venetian) from Austria, and those borderlands of the Veneto became a lifelong preoccupation with Mussolini. We travelled through some of this rugged terrain a few years ago.

After war, Italy’s territorial ambitions were not sated, and, moreover, the million plus returned soldiers were ignored by an impoverished and exhausted government in distant Rome. (Wherever you are Italy, went the saying, you are a long way from Rome.) They began to form self-help leagues (as the Ku Klux Klan started out to be) called Fascios and Mussolini became a self-appointed spokesman for one of these organisations, and began to meld several of them together with a torrent of words and anti-government vitriol. He came to the notice of Rome’s political elite and efforts were made to cultivate and co-opt him. Consistency was never a constraint for him, and he liked this attention, trimming his rhetoric. He was soon elected to the Chamber of Deputies where he led the Fascist bloc numbering about thirty among the six hundred. Though always irreligious he began to speak respectfully of the Church and the Pope. Always anti-monarchist he began to pay obeisance to the king. Always anti-Roman government he began to itemise its virtues. 

In the immediate post-war years the Rome government had been unstable. There were three major factions jockeying for position, and within each of them more than one aspirant leader with a personal following. Among the Fascistas there were several other leaders whom Mussolini had to out maneuverer, in so doing he learned to read men, promising one an ambassadorship, another a subsidy to publish anything he wrote, still another the prospect of being ennobled as prince, and he simply outlasted others because he had no alternative, whereas they did. The wealthy baron could retire to his property. The industrialist went to the counting house. The aviator took to the skies.    

The paralytic crisis of the government that occasioned the March on Rome was a result of the three factions blocking each other and closing down government; each faction was determined that neither of the other two should prevail. But an outsider might be expedient (and temporary) and members of all three factions began to see in Mussolini an acceptable interim prime minister. He was a mutual second choice for all three blocs. Commanding only thirty seats (of 600), none of the three major factions saw a threat in him. With this horde approaching Rome, the three party leaders stepped back so that the King could offer Mussolini the task of forming a government to put out this fire. By the way, he sat out the March in Milan. The march was largely organised like the 1932 Bonus Army March on Washington and 1936 Jarrow March in England by disaffected veterans.  Photographs of Mussolini with the marchers were later staged. When thus he appeared it was as a peacemaker.

Neither in this biography nor in Deakin’s Brutal Friendship did I learn why Mussolini’s long tenure was never disputed, especially in the seventeen years before World War II. Nor did I notice any reference to assassination plots and attempts. All the smart, ambitious people around him seemed content to jockey for second or third place, and there was a lot of that as described in both books. And there were long periods when ill health and ennui drained Mussolini of interest in the job of staying on top of the slippery slope. But stay he did. That endurance might be the product of a well-oiled machine but I rather doubt that. Another possibility is that despite all the son et lumière of the regime, politics was game played by a tiny portion of the populace, a few thousand out of forty plus millions, most of whose lives were untouched by it.    

Perhaps it should be stressed there was never an ideology in Mussolini, nor was there any ingrained anti-semitism. He had no grand plan apart from somehow Making Italy Great Again (MIGA). Most of rhetoric associated with that goal was negative about breaking with the past and being modern, the nature of which was never spelled out. In the years before he became PM he published the equivalent of sixteen volumes of newspaper articles, speeches and the like and there are no constant themes in them. He spoke, he wrote in many voices, chopping and changing with time and tide, ergo he stayed afloat, while many a consistent ideologue sank. 

There are many contrasts to Hitler shown through the book. Of course, over time as the situation deteriorated Mussolini changed, but for much of his career he differed. He had interests apart from politics. Chief among them were women and sports. He played golf, rode a horse, skied, walked vigorously for exercise, ate meat, and took the air on beaches when that was possible. He liked to drive a car himself, preferably open-topped on a nice day, while his appointed driver sat in the back with the body guard. He doted on his first born daughter. Took time off work when dictator to sit at home for a week with another sick child. At the office he was business-like. He worked at his desk, listened to reports, and often followed the recommendations of bureaucrats. His regime was more inclined to send enemies into internal exile (see Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi) than to murder them, though that did happen (see The Conformist by Alberto Moravia).  

In contrast Hitler had nothing but politics. Moreover, he was erratic, often rising late, ignoring the papers on his desk, seldom listening to or heeding the advice of others, like generals, obsessed by Jews, Bolsheviks, gypsies, Slavs, and countless other real and imagined enemies nearly every waking hour. Meetings often consisted of his monologues with no specific directions, programs, policies, or orders. On other occasions he talked about the weather and not the agenda. Subordinates, that is, everyone else, were left to act in conformance to the generalities he had spewed out, and those that did were later praised, promoted, and rewarded.  

The word ‘charisma’ is used in the text but unexplained. Its seems to mean merely personal rule.  Although the fascist propaganda machinery no doubt endowed Mussolini with the attributes of charisma, but the signs and wonders were few and far between as the years stretched on and on. Things were accomplished during his tenure but the author does not deal with the draining of the swamps, the running of railroads, laying of roadbeds for agricultural produce, the dredging of harbours for the fishing fleet, or other such humdrum matters of government.   

It is – what is the word? – pathetic to read of Mussolini’s meetings with Hitler, of which there were several. The early ones were marked by polite and ritualistic exchanges. Later during the war they became Hitler rants, with Mussolini barely having the opportunity to speak.  From say 1942 in these meetings, Hitler lectured and Mussolini put on a blank stare, and nodded from time to time. Still later when Fascists zealots began an Italian version of the Holocaust, Mussolini mostly dozed, letting it happen. See Primo Levi, If This be Man (1987). 

There is little discussion of the so-called Italian Social Republic of the last days established at Salo, and nothing about Mussolini’s efforts to secure Italian borders when the German Army in Italy surrendered. Deakin in The Brutal Friendship says that in these last, dark days Mussolini made several trips to Ticino in Switzerland to try to negotiate a German surrender that would retain Italy’s northeast border. Thus he took personal risk for what he perceived to be the greater and lasting good of Italy. It is hard to imagine Hitler doing something like that.  

On another point, it was news to me to realise that Mussolini tried to prop up Austria before the Anschluss as a buffer against Germany on the assumption that Austria was too weak to reassert its historic border with Italy, but a resurgent Germany would do so.  When Austria was devoured, the next alternative was to befriend Germany and try to direct its ambitions elsewhere. Strange but true. 

Mussolini had a painful ulcer for more than twenty years and with the stress of the circumstances it grew more and more painful, distracting, and enervating. Regarding this illness the book demonstrates a fair-mindedness showing the reader Mussolini the man without exonerating him of any of his crimes by commission or omission. The book also shows us the author’s pointlessly large and obscure vocabulary. I read it on the Kindle and looking up the oddments was easy, but pity the reader of the paper book.  

Goodreads meta-data is 912 pages in two volumes, rated 3.82 by 17 litizens.

Genre: History.

Verdict: Compelling.

The rapport of these two despots has a fascination about it. While we – at this distance – are inclined to lump them together, the author goes into great detail about their many differences through a magnifying glass applied to conference notes, letters, telegrams, police files, spy reports, diaries, briefing papers, memoranda, and unpublished journalism.  It draws the reader into the inner circle of Italian fascism.

In so doing, it undermines one of our preconception for there was in fact no inner circle orbiting Mussolini as there was Hitler.  Hitler’s satellites had come to him in the 1920s and stayed: Goering, Goebbles, Hess, Boreman, and others.  Mussolini had no such moons in orbit around him. He did not cultivate such a clan but made use of the talents around him and then made changes. A trusted colleague from the earliest days of the March on Rome would be sent off to Buenos Aires as ambassador, while another became Governor of Sicily, and so on. His clients circulated, and none, not even his son-in-law and partner in many crimes, Galezzo Ciano, was an intimate like Goering or Goebbles were to Hitler.

Nor did he have the same obedience from the army. While from 1937 onward all German army officers and men swore an oath of alliance to the man Adolf Hitler, in Italy the military oath was to the king. Victor Emmanuel was a very cautious and circumspect person, on this telling, who realised that his own position was artificial, but who nonetheless kept his distance from Il Duce, seeing him only on formal occasions with others present.  As the war developed into endless crises these formal meetings disappeared. But the king maintained an extensive network of contacts in the army and navy, but not the air force, the ranks of which were much more likely to include committed fascists than in the other two services.   

Il Duce had no enthusiasm for the Russian invasion, but cooperated to affirm the German alliance.  From mid-1942 he spoke to Ciano about a separate peace with the Soviet Union so as to concentrate on the Anglo-Saxons.  He also bruited this possibility once in person to Goering who laughed it off. Finally, at least once on Mussolini’s direct instructions Ciano raised it with Hitler who flew into a rage, making very clear his complete obsession with destroying the Communists.  

Mussolini’s penchant for moving his clients around eroded personal loyalty to him. Even the most able and dedicated acolyte might be sent off to Madagascar as a military attaché. Mussolini did this not because he felt threatened by rivals – Deakin makes it abundantly clear that he had none – but he was indifferent to others; they really were chessmen to him, pieces with certain abilities to be used and then shelved. Not even when he was toppled and imprisoned did a rival stake a claim on Fascist leadership the way Himmler and Goering each tried to do when the Third Reich disintegrated.   

Enjoyed the story of Pierre Laval travelling eighty hours by car to a meeting with Hitler, where he has only a few minutes to speak before Hitler went into one of diatribes about the vacillating French, drowning out the practical requests Laval wanted to make. In all Laval had about 20-minutes in which Hitler listened to him, eyes glazed, and then Laval got back into the car for the return of another eighty hours.  

The title comes from a remark of Hitler’s in his own last days when he lamented the fact that his esteem for Mussolini led him into a ‘brutal friendship with Italy’ that cost him the war. As usual with Hitler, someone else was responsible, not him. 

According to my marginalia, I read this book in September 1971 and have since retained the impression of its excellence.  When it came to light recently on the shelves while I was searching for something else, I put it aside and started to re-read, and then found it hard to put down.  

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) by Sarah Bakewell

GoodReads meta-data is 387 pages, rated 3.96 by 9260 litizens.

Genre: Biography

Verdict: Merveilleux!   

Michel Eyquem Montaigne (1533-1592), author of Essays, largely autobiographical. He is credited with coining the word ‘essay’ to refer to short written treatment of a single theme. After holding forth on subjects as diverse as vanity, certainty, torture, marriage, prayer, age, conscience, cripples, cannibals, anger, thumbs, sleep, liars, Cicero, clothes, nudity, early rising,  he was likely to conclude by saying, Mais alors, que sais-je? or ‘But then, what do I know?’  Few of the essays stuck to the title topic, and wandered through digressions and asides in a conversational tone. Most were between three and nine pages in print. He was a blogger avant le mot. These were the fruit of his mature years, but how did he come to that point? 

He had a hothouse upbringing even stranger than that of John Stuart Mill. 

At birth his father had him then and there separated from his biological mother (the wife) and deposited with a wet nurse and her peasant family, where he remained for two years with no familial contact.  Only on his second birthday was he taken home. According to his father this experience with the peasants was to imprint upon him an awareness of others. 

Once he was home his father had decreed and arranged that everyone speak Latin. There was a tutor who was fluent in the dead language and he taught the servants, and his father a few Latin phrases to use to and before the boy.  No one spoke French within his hearing. In this way, his father reasoned, he would learn Latin naturally as the Romans did. Latin was the language of the law, the church, the government, and the international language of the learned and that made it the bedrock of a successful career and life, reasoned his father, who knew no Latin until the tutor taught him a few phrases. By this time, his mother had other children and she ignored this eldest specimen child in his test tube.

On his sixth birthday he was sent to a residential boarding school sixty miles away where he stayed for ten years until age sixteen. He neither returned home nor was visited there by any members of his family, though there was the occasional letter in Latin from his father prepared by the tutor.  It was only then at six years old that he heard French. While the teachers knew why he ignorant, the other students neither knew nor cared and were cruel in taunting and teasing him where he was nicknamed Michau. Having no choice, he endured it and says little about it in his autobiographical musings.  At sixteen he returned to the home he barely knew.  

His father hoped that these experiences would prepare his son and heir for life. He was not following any theory of learning, for he was himself uneducated and had a distant awe and respect for knowledge. Père Montaigne had filled his library with books he could not and did not read as totems for such learning (like the wall of unopened books behind Craig Kelly these days). He was an energetic member of the lesser nobility who worked tirelessly to improve his properties.  However, he was better at starting projects – dams, bridges, retaining walls, weirs, levelling fields, clearing stones, fences, hen houses – than finishing them.    

Michau became a magistrate (part notary, part lawyer, part judge) in Bordeaux when he was about thirty.  Between sixteen and that age, not much is known of his life, though he learned to ride a horse and liked to do that.  He did not like the duties of managing the property, and when his father died, most of those unfinished projects remained unfinished. As heir and owner he turned over management of the property to an agent, confirmed a complete break with his birth mother, and ignored his six siblings whom he barely knew. When he married he had a similar distant relation with wife and his own children.  (There is an interesting explanation of the relevant manners and morēs of the time that is too detailed to summarise.  Read it.)

He travelled to and from Bordeaux and was a dutiful magistrate, thorough, patient, insightful, and bored by squabbles over chickens.  He wrote very clear briefs and rendered succinct judgements, which inevitably made him enemies because there was always someone disappointed at a result.  

The work might have been boring most of the time but the times themselves were not. It was in the midst of the Troubles, aka a 60+ year war of religion among Catholics, Protestants, and variations of each. While the main fault line was Catholic versus Protestant there were factions within each so that sometimes they attacked their own. Three- and four-sided conflicts were common.  One side would massacre several hundred of the other and retaliations would follow, until the blood lust abated and an implicit truce settled in. Then at an opportune moment, often when the victims were praying in a church, another slaughter would occur, and the dance of murder and mayhem in God’s name would begin again. God’s will, they shouted. (Starting to sound familiar?)  Murdering defenceless people at prayer has been the practice in the American south for years. Still is.) 

There was also an international dimension as Protestant England and Catholic Spain encouraged the conflicts in France so as to preoccupy it and reduce French influence in Europe. Consider contemporary parallels at leisure. 

The city of Bordeaux, though a long way from Paris, was contested as a rich prize with claret wine, agricultural produce, fishing, and sea port, and one reason Montaigne resigned and went rustic may have been to opt out of this endless, murderous conflicts.  

The Essays are not easy to read, though they are low key and can be amusing; they are also contradictory, vague, confusing, and stuffed with digressions and asides. Contradictions, there are more than a few.  He says he is solitary and he also says he is sociable.  He says he prefers books to people and he also says books are useless compared to a good talk with people.  He says he is lazy and he also says he rises at dawn to read and write and spends too much on candles after sunset to keep reading and writing. He reticent and talkative with strangers in the same sentence.   

Our author guides readers through the labyrinth of the stops and starts of Michau’s mental wanderings, often placing them in either his personal or historical context with a deft hand. The tone is informal and there are topical references to the contemporary popular culture. Most of these hit the mark. In none of them does the author try to supplant Michau, as some biographers sometimes do in shifting the focus from the ostensible subject to themselves.  (See the comments on The King of Sunlight elsewhere on this blog for an example of this Me-ism syndrome.)

There are some fascinating insights in the Sixteen Century attitudes to sex and family that are best read. We are a long way from that time and place. But it explains his distance from his own family.  

There are details, more than I wanted but which I perhaps needed, on the deadly influence of religion and Michau’s twists and turns to stay safe from condemnation from self-appointed, self-righteous apostles of one sect or another.  One of his fears was that a Savonarola would appear and burn down the tower in which his library and cabinet of curiosities were housed.  

Bordeaux was a Catholic city surrounded by a countryside of Huguenots. As a landowner and as a civic official Montaigne had frequently to navigate through these troubled waters.  One of his principles was to get along with everyone, and he was pretty good at that.  Though of course any time he was polite to a Protestant, a Catholic zealot would threaten his life, and any time magistrate Montaigne ruled in favour of a Catholic claimant, a Protestant fanatic would swear vengeance.  In this climate conflicts over butterfly farms escalated.  By and large Montaigne was more successful than many others at toning the conflicts down.  So successful was he at it that he ascended to a higher office as mayor of Bordeaux in which office he was the first ever incumbent to be re-elected.  He liked to say in later years that in his tenure nothing happened, and it took a great deal of work to ensure that.  

All of these efforts at putting oil on troubled waters made his name known, and his nearest neighbour in the countryside began to cultivate him. That was Henri de Navarre, a Huguenot champion, who saw in Montaigne an honest broker to communicate with the Catholic court in Paris. In this vexed situation the Queen Mother, Catherine d’ Medici, became an active negotiator and Montaigne was instrumental in keeping a channel of communication open between her and Henri who was to became Henri IV.  At times both Medici and Navarre offered Montaigne honours and positions which he steadfastly declined and ducked to stay out of the limelight. 

Of Montaigne’s many aphorisms, one that particularly appealed to me was his advice ‘to have a room behind the shop,’  by which he meant a wise man (and yes he assumed only men as readers) would do well to have an escape room away from the public and his family, too, a room of his own. Thus he is an exponent of the Man Cave, as some refer to my private office.  Montaigne recommended such a retreat as a place where everything is to your liking and no one else enters except by invitation. He trained a servant to clean the room in a way that did not disturb the papers on his desk, the piles books on the floor, the notes stuck to the walls, the curious oddments scattered on the shelves, and so on.  

Another of his aphorisms was to stay at home: If you want to know about the world, read a book. But he was as inconsistent about this as about much else. His poor health became an excuse to travel, rather than lie at home. Off he went in search of water treatments, clean air, cosmic balance, a miracle cure, and snake oil unavailable locally. Once he started travelling, there was no stopping him.  A two-week sojourn to a spa town two days away turned into a fifteen-month trip to Rome and back.  At each stop he sent scouts ahead to see what was on the other side of the next hill, and as soon as they reported back, he had to see for himself, and so gradually he found himself in Rome. Along the way he filled his notebooks with interviews, sights, descriptions, drawings, and collected books and curiosities just like the tourist he was.  By this time his name was known to the reading classes, and he was frequently feted along the way.  He claimed to dislike this attention but always turned up when invited, the first to arrive and the last to leave. He spoke native Latin, fluent French, and a passable Italian so he was in demand. 

Throughout his life he reworked the Essays in many editions,well, he added and added to the book, and it continued to sell well as it grew to three times its original length. He also violated his own rule of brevity and one essay is more than 250-pages long, with so many digressions and asides, not even this biographer can say with confidence what it is about.  

The collection was also translated (and abridged) into English and Italian where new audiences found it.  Over the years the Essays have been interpreted to death, the more so of late by the most dreaded of interpreters, Po-Mo PhDs in Cultural Studies. In the hands of some of these exponents the book has been taken to mean the opposite of what Montaigne said. The author skewers some of the most absurd of these sallies, though to be sure they are self-skewering, too. Reading her deadpan Stephen Colbert parodies of them is diverting.  

She also charts Montaigne’s posthumous popularity among readers and intellectuals over the centuries with an amused eye.  It is all in all a pleasant ride.  Recommended.