A superbly researched and written study of Chinese and American relations during World War II told through the experiences and career of Joseph Stilwell, who first went to China in 1911 and left in 1944. He was a twenty-eight year old lieutenant when he arrived and a sixty year old four star general when he left. The book is detailed in its 530 pages of text and supplemented with nearly a hundred more pages of appendices and notes. Tuchman wears her scholarship lightly and the book reads itself. There is far too much to summarize so I offer a few conclusions.
First as to China, the inescapable fact is that Chiang Kai-Shek was a warlord who pretended to be the national government, and credulous and desperate Americans accepted that claim. The credulous spoke no Chinese and did not venture beyond Chiang’s court. They included diplomats, journalists, missionaries, business men, and soldiers. The desperate wanted to keep China in the war to hold down the Japanese occupation force estimated at one million men who would not then be fought in the Philippines or Malaya. They included FDR and George Marshall. FDR long nursed the hope that China would emerge as a friendly great power in Asia after the war, and was willing to pay an enormous price toward that end until even this great optimist gave up on Chiang.
What distinguished Chiang from the other warlords who ruled fiefdoms when the dynasty decayed and collapsed was his pretentious claim to the nation (over the corpse of Sun Yat-Sen) and Madame May Chiang, a Wellesley graduate, who acted as his press agent to good effect. They affected Western ways and talked airly of sovereignty and democracy while their death squads reduced the competition. Think of Ann Coulter with a Uzi.
What Chiang wanted was to stay out of the war and let the barbarians fight each other, the barbarians being Japan and the Allies (Britain, USA, and Holland). Invaders come, the Manchu, the Mongol, but then they go. Insofar as he had a strategy it was to retreat and retreat until that happened, and then to reassert his authority by being on the winning side.
To reassert his power he needed the material wealth of American Lend-Lease which he took as a gift and offered no lease in return. Rather he cached this wealth for inevitable conflict with the Communist Chinese in the distant north. The Communist being Chinese were the real threat. To secure American largesse and protection to some degree, Chiang went through the motions of fighting the Japanese. At times this took the form of press statements describing gigantic battles in which the noble Chinese defeated, against all odds, the Japanese. The credulous took these press releases at face value. Stilwell did not.
Stilwell went to the alleged battlefields to see for himself, and he knew the lies for what they were. But because of the desperation to keep Chiang, read China, in the war, Washington did nothing, and there was probably nothing that could be done.
Turning then to the man: Stilwell loved and hated China. He had a facility and interest in languages before he went to China, and there he learned Chinese and became fluent. He was a driven man, restless, energetic, determined, smart, and over the years very knowledgeable of China and Chinese. He was also tactless and volatile, and Chiang was a ready catalyst. Stilwell came to despise Chiang and to see the Kuomintang regime as a nearly impotent fascist dictatorship – a message no one wanted to receive in Washington. True to his calling Stilwell as a soldier tried to make the best of the bad marriage, often by staying as far away from Chiang as possible, in Burma.
He did try to paper over the cracks for the sake of the war effort. Witness this picture, three people who hated each other smiling for the camera, which certainly does lie. (I say it this way because one infers from Tuchman’s pages that there was little love-lost between Madame Chiang and her husband; it was a family alliance.)
In Burma Stilwell did the impossible. He built the Burma Road over impossible terrain after having been told by British colonial officials it was impossible, technically, politically, and militarily. He created an army out of the rejects Chiang let him have, hoping that he would fail and be recalled to be replaced by a more compliant officer. This army defeated the Japanese and drove them out of Burma again after being told it was impossible by the British, whose principal interest was to retain the colonies after the war, not to fight Japanese.
Stilwell found the Chinese soldier cheerful, durable, quick to learn, and responsive to leadership. A hopeless generalization of course: ‘the Chinese soldier.‘ Stilwell respected Chinese people as much as he despised the warlords who misruled them. And that respect is part of what kept him in China. He could have left at nearly anytime by asking to be relieved.
Stilwell was a leader, of that there is no doubt. He was creative and resourceful, using what he had, starting where he was, and doing what he could. If the Chinese troops were untrained he would train them, and he did that sometimes personally, lying on the rifle range with recruits showing the action of the rifle. If they were hungry he would find food for them. If they were wounded he would supply doctors, nurses, and medicine. If they were low on ammunition he would get it somewhere, somehow. The miracles were daily.
Perhaps the most famous example is the best. When defeated by the Japanese the first time, he led his headquarters staff of 114 on a walk out of the northern Burmese jungles. He was a gruelling task master on the walk at 105 paces a minute. He was a tyrant over the food and water, and all but assaulted stragglers. As the Commander-in-Chief he was expected to fly out and direct the retreat from India, but Stilwell wanted to show to his defeated troops that he was one of them, one with them and so he walked just like they did. Their fate was his fate.
On he went at 105 paces a minute, at the end of the walk most of the 114 men hated him, and that was a tribute to Stilwell, because all 114 of them survived. Not one was lost on the two weeks in the circle of hell through which they walked. Rain, jungle, no road, no maps, dehydration, no local guides, no porters, Japanese planes, out of touch, occasional rifle fire from Japanese patrols, exhaustion, wildlife, malnutrition, and disease; the list goes on.
Stilwell ate with his men, ate what they ate. He stood in line at the mess tent for food or for the barber’s chair. He wore one set of clothes until they rotted away. He seldom wore the stars of his rank. When he did it was to show the soldiers that their general was there with them. When he went to Chiang’s court he borrowed a uniform because he had none. He carried a rifle in Burma and used it more than once. When he sent men on forced marches through terrible terrain, he went with them to see for himself what it was like. He accepted the promotions and medals that came without ceremony, no photographers present to immortalize his genius recognized. The only medal he valued was the Combat Infantry Man’s Badge, the only general to earn this medal. He was holding it when he died about a year after he left China.
The warlord generals, including Chiang, were not like this. In defeat Stilwell became something of a legend in the minds of many Chinese solders and this made him all the more frightening to Chiang. After that first encounter with the Japanese, Stilwell publicly admitted defeat and silently vowed to return, which he did without the histrionics of Douglas MacArthur.
The puzzle of Chinese politics gave the red baiters in post-war American politics much with which to play. Stilwell was duly blamed for not giving Chiang enough support (material) and for concentrating on fighting the Japanese rather than heading off the Communists, etc. Such hindsight as is given to the gods. All drivel to be sure, but it happened, as much drivel still does. Check the news today.
George Marshall figures in much of this story and as always seems to be both a pillar of strength and a sage. I single him out since I reviewed a biography of him earlier on this blog.
John Stuart Mill said one man with an idea can do a lot. Stilwell was such a man. His idea was that the Chinese deserve better than Chiang and his kind. His example also shows what one person with enormous energy and good will cannot do: the impossible.
His story has parallels with others. In the Peloponesian War Sparta sent one man, the general Brasidas, to northern Greece and he, too, very nearly won the war. Stilwell was that Spartan.
Category: Book Review
Warren G. Harding (2004) by John Dean
Now that I have ordered some presidential biographies from Amazon I get notices about others. These I have been ignoring. But one caught my eye, not because of the president, but rather because of the author: John W. Dean. Think about it.
Given Dean’s experiences I thought that alone might make the book interesting. My only residual knowledge of Harding was the innumerable scandals associated with him. Dean would know about scandalous behavior by a president, I thought.
Get it yet? This is the John Dean of Watergrate, the president’s counsel who would not lie for his president and who kept meticulous notes, and made himself the star witness at the Senate hearings of Sam Ervin. That president was Richard Nixon.
As it happens Dean is from the same town in Ohio as Harding. This book is part of a series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., so it has two strikes against it. It is written to a series template, and it has Schlesinger’s name associated with it. Many of the authors in this series are interesting but odd choices, for example, the novelist Louis Auchincloss on Theodore Roosevelt, television newsman Douglas Brinkley on John F. Kennedy, and presidential aspirant Gary Hart on James Monroe. It also includes one title I have already read, James Madison by Gary Wills. None of these authors is a scholar, though Wills is a man of penetrating insight, Auchincloss a fine writer, Hart is from Colorado, and Brinkley used to talk to Chet Huntley (his associate on the national news).
I will say something about the book itself at the end, but for now let’s see what can gleaned about Warren G. Harding. He was a middle class, small town newspaper editor and owner. He was a born networker who genuinely liked people with an organized mind and a good memory for faces. He avoided conflict and seldom took sides. He was handsome and commanding in his physique. Sounds a perfect Libra! Though he was born on 2 November.
How did he become president? His own political career began in Marion Ohio then to the Ohio legislature, then lieutenant governor, then U.S. Senator, where the personal qualities mentioned above stood him in good stead. Ohio was solidly Democratic but Harding was a Republican. In that smaller talent pool, he looked good. At each stop along this cursus honorum he travelled widely and spoke to any gathering, mostly Republicans.
Nationally the situation was vexed. Teddy Roosevelt’s efforts to regain the Republican nomination in 1912 had rent the Grand Old Party. William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes who had run against Woodrow Wilson had been unable to heal and unite it. But when Wilson had a debilitating heart attack in 1919, the Democrats were leaderless, too.
In that gap Harding emerged. He got the Republican nomination on the tenth ballot after three days. By then there was pressure to choose someone and he was inoffensive, and no doubt some like Mark Hanna, the eminence gris of Ohio politics smoothed the way. When it was clear that Wilson would not seek an unprecedented third term, and that had been bruited about for a time, James Cox got the Democratic nomination. James who? More important than James was his vice presidential running mate. One Franklin D. Roosevelt. But I digress.
It was an Ohio affair between the Senator from Ohio, Harding, and the incumbent governor of Ohio, James Cox. Eugene Debs was on the Socialist ticket and got nearly a million votes from a jail cell in Atlanta. H. L. Mencken once said Debs spoke with a tongue of fire, but that is another story.
Harding took the oath of office in March 1921. He convinced Charles Evans Hughes to serve as Secretary of State, and let him get on with the job. Hughes tried to integrate the United States into world affairs to repair the damage done in the struggle for the League of Nations.
One of Harding’s best and most lasting achievements was to create the Bureau of the Budget with a director appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate who reports directly to the President. The President submits a budget to Congress which then amends it into an unrecognizable form to accommodate the interests of the constituents of the majority of Representatives and Senators. Congress sends it back to the White House, and then the serious negotiations begin. It is a fiction because after all the sound and fury there was never any check on how the money was spent. Indeed there was no way of knowing if it had been spent or on what. With his experience as a small businessman Harding did not like that and much to his credit he created this small but powerful and independent agency. But… It came back to haunt him.
The only thing I knew about the Harding Administration was the Teapot Dome scandal. It seems that three of Harding’s cabinet, at least, used the public trust of their offices to defraud the government in a big way. All were alike in a way, they sold government assets (which had ballooned during World War I) at unbelieveable prices to old pals in business and got enormous kickbacks, sometimes delivered in $100,000 units in black Gladstone bags to the office. Subtle, not!
The Bureau of the Budget did notice the decline in government assets valued at millions for peppercorn returns. The Bureau of the Budget did draw the President’s attention to these events several times. Dean has it that Harding tried to persuade the malfactors to stop. Others say, my source is Wikipedia, that he had long experience of doing the same. In any event, they did not stop, and the press got the news and passed it on. Think what the Sage of Baltimore had to say! (That is H. L. Mencken for the slow wits.)
Once one scandal was examined, it lead to another, and another. And it all unravelled.
While in San Francisco, Harding died in office of a heart attach at age 59 in August 1923 at the height of the Roaring Twenties, succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge. From San Francesco, Florence Harding, herself very ill, by telegraph asked an Ohio confidante in the White House to burn Harding’s files. Dean has it that she did this to protect President Harding’s reputation. There is much speculation about why she did this. And that is all it is: speculation, just what passes for news today on the ABC. There is also speculation that she killed him.
The fact is that papers were burned in those days before presidential libraries. But the confidante did not burn everything, and again there is no evidence to explain why. Many boxes were stored in the third basement of the White House coming to light years later when restoration were done. In time these papers found their way to the Harding Association in Ohio in the middle of the 1960s they were catalogued and available.
However there is no evidence that Dean consulted these papers. This book is not based on original research in any sense of the term ‘original.’ Rather it is a synthesis of the existing biographies of Harding, with a slant toward rescuing the reputation of this fellow Ohioan and fellow Republican. Too often the conclusions that rehabilitate Harding seem to come from the air. The strongest claim Dean can make to defend Harding from culpable knowledge, if nothing more, is the absence of evidence. But as that other Republican ideologue Donald Rumsfeld, with whom I once crossed a street in Washington D C, said: the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Instead the book tries to cloak Harding in some kind of mist. More pages are spent on his ineffectual and inconsequential dealings with some matters that appeal to contemporary sensibilities, like race relations, than the core matters of his administration.
The book is replete with clichés that neither describe nor explain, like ‘party elders,’ ‘tough going,’ etc. I am sure lawyer Dean is expert at briefs, but sustaining a narrative for 150 pages without lapsing into the vagaries of cliché is a different discipline. Anything that exonerates Harding is taken at face value and anything that does not is clouded over with doubts. Perhaps this is a courtroom tactics but it fails on the page.
A Cookbook and more
Pat Conroy, The Cookbook: Recipes and Stories (2004).
Another title read in anticipation of visiting Charleston, South Carolina. Like K-Paul Prudhomme’s and Diane Kennedy’s cookbooks it is as much an insight into the people and places as the food and recipes. While K-Paul and Kennedy are each rooted to one place, NOLA for him and Mexico for her, Conroy’s book is also travelogue, recounting experiences from his travels as an aspiring and then successful writer.
It has the features of all of the Conroy books I have read: a wry humour, self-deprecating, modesty, a sharp eye for detail, well-turned phrases that lift the mundane to a higher level, and, of course, the burning fires of his dad-hatred. Give that last a rest, Pat!
The travels are domestic as well as international. There are stories from markets and restaurants in France and Italy, as well as such exotic places as Atlanta.
In the course of these travels, at one point Conroy said this, and I almost forgave him for his Oedipus complex. He knows whereof he writes because he was a school teacher for a time.
‘Because their impact cannot be measured, the teachers of the world drift through their praiseless days unaware of the impact and majesty of their influence. I want to fall on my knees in gratitude whenever I conjure the faces of the men and women who spent their finest days coaxing and urging me to discover the best part of myself in the pure sunshine of learning. Because the country dishonors its teachers and humiliates them with lousy pay and a mortifying deficiency of prestige among other professions, they do not receive the gifts of gratitude that brims over in men and women like me when we remember their patient, generous shaping of us into ourselves’ (p. 77).
Amen, brother.
Allow me to add that the humiliation is not limited to money but also to the easy social opprobrium that falls on school teachers. For example, ‘those who can’t, teach‘ and the assumption that the work begins when the students arrive and ends when they leave. Even we jumped up school teachers in universities cop this, too. Long ago I gave up resisting these lazy stereotypes from those satisfied with lazy stereotypes.
Always make your last shot.
Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir (2002).
I liked The Lords of Discipline so much I wanted more Conroy. This book appealed to me because it was about basketball. First the good, then the not so good.
The modesty is disarming. The description of the atmosphere of games is intoxicating. The account of plays is exhilarating. The attributes ascribed to other players, especially opponents (which made me think of Jerry Nicholarson, Mike Aspen, and Fred Hare – an honour to mix with them) are graceful and generous. The unity and division of the team through the season is moving. It started as a band of individuals but through the season often played like a team where the whole is greater than its parts. The descriptions of hot and cold players is right. The figures of speech and turns of phrase are easy and, at times, elevating. The recitation of the responsibilities of the point guard is informative, and that made me think of Captain Leo. The accounts of talented athletes who threw it away reminded me of Bob Krebsbach.
The effort in the last chapter to sum up the book from the point of view of a point guard, however, is not based on those responsibilities, and so occasions more dad-hating. The modesty becomes repetitive and even cloying.
Mel, the one-dimensional toxic coach, who never has a good word to say, who thinks screaming is motivation, who seems to have nothing to offer but the above is cardboard I am afraid. It is only at about 300 pages of chronicle of Mel’s malice is it implied that he taught Conroy some things about the game.
Dad-hatred piled high and deep enough for a PhD in the Oedipus complex, though there is nothing complex about it. (I also bought his cookbook, and guess what, dad-hatred is to be found there, too.)
Ditto his love-hate relationship with The Citadel. He just cannot say it often enough, well yes he can say it too often.
It is a gym rat’s adage. Only leave the gym when you have made your last shot. Never leave the gym on a miss. Superstition perhaps. But more practice never hurts.
John Tyler: The Accidental President by Edward Crapol
I did know that John Tyler had been president. Why? Because of that very early campaign slogan, ‘Tippiecanoe and Tyler, too.’ Look it up, if it is unknown. I knew he succeeded Harrison, but that is all I knew. Yet when I read Borneman’s biography of Polk’s emergence and election, Tyler seemed an interesting if remote figure.
He is widely regarded as a failure, no doubt in part because he did not win an election in his own right.
So…..
Continue reading “John Tyler: The Accidental President by Edward Crapol”
James K. Polk by Walter Borneman
The publishers statement: The first complete biography of a president often overshadowed in image but seldom outdone in accomplishment. James K. Polk’s pledge to serve a single term, which many thought would make him a lame duck, enabled him to rise above electoral politics and to outflank his adversaries. Thus he plotted and attained a formidable agenda: He fought for and won tariff reductions, reestablished an independent Treasury, and most notably, brought Texas into the Union, bluffed Great Britain out of the lion’s share of Oregon, and wrested California and much of the Southwest from Mexico. In tracing Polk’s life and career, author Borneman show a Polk who was a decisive, if not partisan, statesman whose near doubling of America’s boundaries and expansive broadening of executive powers redefined the country at large, as well as the nature of its highest office.
Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (1980)
Recommended for adults.
In anticipation of going to a conference in Charleston, South Carolina later this year I sought out novels set there. I found a couple and I started with this one. Now that I have read it I am too drained to go on to the next one right away. It is a wringing experience to follow these lords of discipline.
To say that the novel is an account of the education of four students at a college is true but without texture or meaning. The four are boys from 18 – 21 years old. The college is a military school. It is in Charleston.
The major characters, in addiiton to the four room-mates, are the president of the college, the dean of students, the family of one of the boys in the room, and a love interest for the narrator. But the major character is Charleston itself, its foliage, its seasons, its smells, its beaches, its grass, its insects, its social conventions, its colonial origins, its Confederate past, its slave past, its caste system. As a book to read before visiting Charleston it is exactly right. (Though it did not tell me why that 1920s dance is called ‘Charleston.’)
What happens? The boys learn a lot and our protagonist grows up. The novel is rich with incident and offers a flavour of that all male environment where brutality taken and brutality given is the road to manhood. To list all of the examples would make it seem a litany of violence and blasphemy, and it is not. Though there is plenty of both.
Conroy alternates very deftly between the systematic beastiality of some events at the school with lyrical descriptions of the coastal wind, or tiered reflections on love and life by the boy becoming a man. Conroy’s judgment in measuring for the reader doses of pain with relief from it is sure. He guides the reader through the distasteful parts by providing oases before moving on.
Throughout the prose is beautiful, elegiac for lost youth.
None of the characters are cardboard. Even the president, a thinly disguised representation of Douglas MacArthur, and the many who imitated him, is developed. He has his reasons, convoluted and self-serving though they be, but they are not idiosyncratic or synthetic. He is not simply a plot device. The same goes for the Dean of Students, the Commandant. He is not honest but he is trying to do what is best.
Of course the most well developed character is the narrator who tells some of this in retrospect. His inner confusions, contradictions, volte faces, his mistakes, his blunders, are very touching as he recovers from romantic rejection, deals with social ostracism, copes with responsibilities shoved onto him, is rocked by betrayal, weighs the demands of friendship…. Life is complicated at any age but the more so for youth.
The other three room-mates are also developed personalities, though we see them only in relation to the narrator. The other cadets, even the sadists, are presented as human beings, despicable though some are, and not merely as plot devices. It is a great talent that can do that. Conroy seems to be in complete control and command of the novel; he is no child prodigy but a mature observer and a seasoned ponderer on the human comedy.
All of this is played out against the times in the United States in the 1960s. Civil rights and integration of this school, and the Vietnam War in which many of the graduates of the school have already served. But always more important than these externalities is the school itself and its very Charleston cosmology.
There is enough violence, profanity, stupidity, and prejudice in the book to interest a Hollywood film producer in turning it all into slam-bang cardboard. Read the book, skip the film is my advice.
Conroy has written much else, like The Great Santini, and I will read more some time. I also plan to re-read another book about a military school. It will be Calder Willingham’s End as a Man (1947). His most arresting character was not the victim but the vicious bully.
Having finished the book and before gathering my own thoughts I looked for reviews but all I could find were hundreds of comments on Good Reads and Amazon, and those I scanned were as inane as most comments on Trip Advisor. Most are about that fascinating subject, the writer of the comment, and not about the book. These are no doubt the same twits who FaceBook their every meal. I am sure there are measured and informative reviews available but they are overgrown with the obscuring and choking vines of the Twitterati. I am left to my own devices.
Herbert Hoover, A Presidential biography
Inspired by Robert Caro’s nonpareil biography of Lyndon Johnson, I have been reading biographies of US presidents as the occasion permits. Shortly after I decided to do that I chanced up Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Reading those three volumes confirmed me in the enterprise, though one volume works suffice. I have since read Willard Randall, George Washington; David McCulloch, John Adams; Walter Borneman, James Polk; and Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower.
I noticed a review of a recent book about Herbert Hoover and since it was current and available I decided it would be the Hoover biography: Gary Dean BEST, The Life of Herbert Hoover, Keeper of the Torch, 1933-1964. It covers his post-presidential years, as part of multi-volume biography, where each volume is by a different writer. Despite the title there is much reference to Hoover as president.
From the 550 pages of this book I conclude that Hoover had enormous energy and vitality and remained intellectually and political active into his 80s. He outlived many of his enemies, and all of his friends. That he was something of an intellectual, rather like T. R. Roosevelt. Hoover read a lot of books and wrote a few. He took care to do research for his many speeches and often packed them with facts and figures.
He also had a set of consistent beliefs about personal liberty that he often articulated and which informed much of this thought, action, and speech. It seems also that for all his public speaking, he was not easy with company, especially the hordes one meets at a convention. He often came, saw, spoke, and left by the side door.
In this period it was common for speeches to be reported nearly verbatim in newspapers, and often printed and distributed. They were also excerpted in newsreels shown in theatres. There was a constant demand for Hoover to speak and he did, except for the first year after leaving the White House, defeated by Franklin Roosevelt at the polls. The demand for Hoover to speak suggests that he struck a cord, as did the favorable press comment, and the audience reaction in theatres. It is too bad newsreels are gone from the silver screen because audience reactions in the darkened theatre was always uninhibited, as I recall.
I have no doubt that Herbert Hoover did much good in his life and that the reputation of his presidency has suffered in the shade cast by FDR. Having said that, in the period described in this book, Hoover appears all too often to be thin-skinned, pompous, and scheming. That he should appear thus in these pages is all the more surprising given that the author verges on hagiography in his adulation of every word, deed, and gesture Hoover made. The author is completely one-eyed. On that more at the end.
Hoover wanted to be president again, and like a lot of people who have wanted that job, he did not want to run for it, he just wanted it handed to him. So he made himself available for the Republican nomination in 1936 and again in 1940, and he opposed and undermined alternative candidates right up until the last minute. He offered mere lip-service support to the Republican nominees who emerged, Alf Landon and Wendell Wilkie, respectively. Yet he constantly felt they should pay obeisance to him, and when they did not, he withdrew further.
He spend thirty years vindicating his administration in those speeches with a mixtures of facts and figures that often made sense to him alone. He regarded every criticism of his administration as a personal slight, a smear. The author uses that word ‘smear‘ repeatedly for every objection or criticism levelled at any of Hoover’s many interjections into political life.
Hoover wanted to contribute, as World War II drew nearer, but only on his terms and in his way, and only if begged to do so. To that end he proposed some crazy ideas about food relief, and anyone who suggested his plan was not feasible or would, as it obviously would have, aided the German war effort is said, by the author, to have smeared Hoover.
Harry Truman tried to put Hoover to work and Hoover chaired several commission to streamline the Federal government. Well Truman thought the purpose was to streamline it but Hoover’s declared aim was to wind back Roosevelt’s New Deal, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, twenty years later. Despite Truman’s several efforts to flatter Hoover, it was never enough, and Hoover reveled in Joe McCarthy’s red baiting with nary a thought to conscience or consequence to judge by this book.
Even Eisenhower’s victory in 1952 left Hoover cold. Ike had other things on his mind and did not bow to Hoover, and so Hoover had few good words to say for him. I am afraid for most of the time in the period this book covers Hoover thought it was all about him. Petulant, one might say, for thirty years.
I have made several allusions to the book itself. There is no distance between the author and Hoover. If Hoover says black, then black it is. Assertions of fact are taken solely from Hoover, more than once. The book is packed with lengthy quotations from Hoover’s speeches and letters and these are transmitted without qualm or qualification and taken as read. Perhaps one page in four is such a direct quotation. The author seldom draws a conclusion from these long passages, but rather just lets them hang, often at the end of a paragraph. It becomes very tempting just to skip them since the author is not making any declared point with them.
For good or ill this is my Hoover biography.
Having acquired a taste for presidential libraries last year, I knew there was Hoover library and I just assumed that it was in Palo Alto where he lived most of his life. But one valuable fact I got from this book is that the Hoover Library, which Truman, demonstrating a magnanimity that Hoover never had, helped him achieve, is in West Branch, Iowa on I-80, which is where Hoover was born. It is a four-hour drive from Omaha through Des Moines, and I hope to visit it someday soon. It is near Amana.
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (2009)
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (2009)
Recommended for adults.
A delightful fairy tale for grown-ups from a master of the short story. This, however, is a novel in length and conception, but it is also a book of short stories. That distinctive combination is part of its charm, and charming it most certainly is. The princess is in the tower amid a forest of eucalypts and her suitors must prove themselves worthy of her. Sound familiar?
Mr. Holland’s wife died in childbirth and he the baby girl with an insurance payout retired to the hinterland where he planted every known and some unknown eucalypts without end. There was no grand plan and yet a pattern emerged. See above. Then along came, first, the professor, and, then, the sign maker and – in time – there came a revelation.
Wonderful. It deserves the superlatives applied to it.
I have been asked the meaning of ‘adults’ in my recommendation. That is a question on notice.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).
Recommended for adults.
Eleven years after this child prodigy published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) at the tender age of twenty-one, she produced this novella. It is a meditation on love, not on what it is, but on what it does to people, even the most unlikely ones.
In a tiny mill town deep in the pines of northern Georgia Miss Amelia comes to love the drifter Lymon, but he in turn falls under the spell of the no-good Marvin Macy. These loves are not of the flesh, I add. But slowly, Amelia discovers that she likes doing things for Lymon, and the more she does, the more he takes it as his due with nary a word of thanks. This she does not mind.
Then Marvin reappears and slowly Lymon comes to admire and imitate Marvin. Along the way McCullers offers a glimpse of the people and practices of that isolated community. Lymon cannot bear to be parted from Marvin, and so the despicable Marvin moves in with Lymon and Miss Amelia. In time she is displaced from her own home to allow Lymon to serve Marvin.
I read a lot of Carson McCullers’s novels in high school and college, and having re-read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe I am reminded why. The judgements are sharp, Marvin is a creep, but even so McCullers extends a compassionate gaze on him, too: He is the way God made him, part of this world. Neither more nor less than anyone else.
That Lymon is a dwarf, Miss Amelia acts more like a man than many men, that Marvin’s brother is ineffectual, adds color to the account but these are only the surfaces beneath which McCullers peers, perceptive, unflinching, calm, and determined. No these oddities are what attracted a Hollywood film maker to mangle it.
My mission is clear. It is time to read anew The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and see how Sam and Mickey have aged since last I had their company.