Good Reads meta-data is 416 pages, rate 3.91 by 715 litizens.
Genre: Historical Fiction.
Verdict: Deep and meaningful.
Having been to Tolstoy’s home in Moscow, this title caught my eye. A quick look corrected my mistaken assumption. It is not about the great writer, but rather a detailed examination of a Wehrmacht field surgery that occupies Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s country estate) for six weeks in the winter late in 1941 as it becomes apparent to those that have eyes to see that the Soviets will endure.
The focus is Dr Bauer who does his best to save the lives of the battered and broken men who appear on his cutting table. There are some ghastly descriptions of wounds that I flicked over. His commander is a good surgeon who is slowly cracking under the incessant pressures – the management of 200-man unit, the constant surgery, the shortage of everything, the savage winter, the demand to be a good Nazi, the environment of hostility from the scant remaining population, the tensions among the men in his command, the artillery fire that seems closer each day, the threat of partisan attacks, and that is just the beginning. Another enemy is added to his list when the ghost of Tolstoy visits him.
Meanwhile, Bauer tries to be a good German in this Circle of Hell by doing his job well, treating the locals with guarded respect, and re-reading Tolstoy. The mediator between the occupiers and the natives is the estate manager, a no-nonsense woman. Long ago as a failed literature student, Bauer learned to read some Russian because of Tolstoy; this smattering of Russian makes him the designated liaison between occupier and occupied. She and Bauer slowly, reluctantly realise that they have much in common behind the walls of steel each has erected.
Believe it or not, Ripley, in that bloody and doomed context this is an engaging love story, and it is superbly well rendered. Not a cheap shot in sight. Slow and measured, deep and meaningful. The result is a quiet tragedy that has, paradoxically, a happy ending, of sorts.
The descriptions of the winter are good but… I don’t think the author ever lived through one like it or the descriptions would be less external – about the snow, ice, and temperature – and more internal – what constant cold does to your body and your mind. Those who know needn’t be told and those that don’t know can’t be told. ‘Noses are red, fingers are blue’ is just the beginning.
Steven Conte
After I started on the sample, I stopped, supposing it was going to be a shoot ‘em up, but Martin Nunn encouraged me to keep reading. I am glad that he did and that I did.
As a refresher on the current state of the idiocracy I glanced at a few of the GoodReads one-star reviews. The vapid are still with us and proud of it.
The Professor and the Parson (2018) by Adam Sisman.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 3.40 by 273 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: [Gasp!]
Robert Michael Parkins Peters (1918-2005) bested King Henry VIII in having eight (known) wives, and he was more efficient, at least thrice skipping the divorce before marrying anew. Three times a bigamist. His names and dates above are estimates since he used many names and many dates of birth. It may even be that he managed by occult means to lie about the date of his death. That would be consistent with his character.
From the mid-1940s Peters made his way in clerical and academic life by lies, forgeries, thefts, and plagiarisms spiced with bigamy, deportations, jail terms, and all those wives. That later supplied the media hacks with headlines off and on over the years, but nothing, nothing at all, stopped him. And it seems it was no one’s job to eradicate this blood sucker. His determination, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, and creativity are a marvel equal to the trail of destruction he left behind.
He continued despite setbacks partly because no one could quite believe he was doing what he did, and the more blatant it was, the more incredible it seemed to any nearly normal person. His life was a work of fiction which he wrote every day.
Moreover, he had some skill in picking his victims, often a dewey-eyed churchman who could believe no wrong of him, a headmaster desperate for staff, or a women in want of a husband. Yet there were other churchmen and other women who should have known better and who were slow in grasping the reality of his criminal endeavours. There were also many academics, from professors to deans, who took his bait whole, and regretted it.
To avoid creditors, to avoid warrants, to avoid his own past he moved back forth among England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, the United States, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and South Africa. In each country his persistent and energetic efforts netted victims. He also made use of many aliases by shuffling around the four names above. But his ego never let him avoid a photograph so there are many that show the man with many names.
What were his crimes? He forged letters of recommendations, diplomas, transcripts, credentials, and passed more than one dud cheque. He took money for tuition from naive students to teach them subjects about which he knew nothing. He claimed his instruction was accepted for admission to schools and universities when it was not. There were persistent and recurrent suggestions that he forced himself on young women in the girls schools where he was supposed to be teaching. But again it seems to have been no one’s job to sort that out. He plagiarised the work of others and published it as his own, and if confronted with the facts, tried to claim it was the other way around despite the dates, evidence, and facts. That is only the beginning.
He also masqueraded as a preacher and a priest and was so convincing he gave sermons and officiated at weddings, which because he was in fact unlicensed, were invalid. Not forgetting the bigamies.
More than once a bookstore proprietor was defrauded when Peters would open an account, claiming to be a lecturer at an Oxford college, say, and take any number of books on credit, sometimes by the box-load, never to pay the bill. When the proprietor contacted the college it was to discover that he was unknown there. These bills were measured in the hundreds of pounds.
He gained employment more than once in a clerical or an academic position by forging degrees from Oxford, London, Liverpool, Manchester, and elsewhere depriving other qualified candidates of the opportunities. Invariably he was unable, and sometimes unwilling, to perform the tasks for which he was employed. His longest tenure in this account is eighteen months, and most were a few weeks, or less. Some only a few days. His stay at a school in Sri Lanka was shorter than the sea voyage to get there.
Then there were the wives whose ranks grew over the years. In the many photographs he seems to be balding, middle aged man with spectacles, but he must have had something. One of the early wives, Sisman supposes, wrote the only sensible thing Peters published, while others funded his forays. These women were secretaries, school teachers, civil servants, and all victims. Some stubbornly stuck by him when the consequences caught up with him, until he walked out on them for another.
His approach to courtship was direct, and if rebuffed he turned to the next in line, as it were. Likewise, when he passed himself off as a churchmen he went at it head on. He would appear at a Bishop’s palace, ask for an interview, introduce himself as the possessor of many degrees and licenses, and might even modestly show a letter of recommendation (he had composed the night before) from a respected authority. He set about making himself useful and secured a sinecure, until the balloon burst, say, when another churchman recognised him. This recognition occurred because he often revisited the same locales.
For the academy it was much the same with the variation that he would attend a conference in medieval history and in a question period rise to speak, introducing himself as Dr Peters of Magdalen College, after first having ascertained that no one from the college was at the conference, and pose a simple question that would allow him to follow-up privately with the speaker thereafter. In that later conversation he seems usually to have made a good impression and he would shyly allow that he was unhappy in his current (imaginary) position and could be persuaded to move. If he got a bite, then he closed the deal. If not, he went to another conference session and repeated the act.
There was no great artifice in his deceptions. The forged degrees were poorly done but no one seems to have noticed at first. When he applied for a post and submitted fraudulent letters of recommendations both the application and the three letters of recommendation were written in same handwriting, but this passed unnoticed. He was so oblivious that he made one such application to an Oxford college, which was rejected, and then applied to the same college again a few years later and was accepted. No one noticed that he had applied before and been rejected because the application was suspect. In each case the application and all the letters of recommendation were written in his own handwriting with badly forged documents.
In other instances he got appointments to schools, colleges, and universities on the strength of interviews, and no paperwork, neither transcripts, diplomas, nor letters. It is hard to feel sympathy for those who do not take the most elementary precautions.
One of his recurrent gambits was to set himself up in a rented house as a school of theology and then seek articulation with a university, meaning that completion of his program would be considered adequate for admission to the university. So desperate are some universities for fee-paying students that they will say yes to any such articulations. To be sure, Quality Assurance (QA) must be satisfied and often it consisted of Peters writing up a curriculum and sending that in. It would be approved. Then Peters could claim with a slight bit of truth that the course he offered was accredited by a major university. Seeing the crest of a well-known university on the wall of his establishment, the naive students, never many, but always some, would pay him a fee so that he could strut around calling himself Dr, Professor, Dean, and Principal to this audience, often in clerical vestments or an academic gown.
He did this half a dozen times and only once did a university bother to check on the reality behind the paperwork to find…nothing. That sounds like QA, all right, all paper covers rock, no scissors.
He tried to avoid confrontation with his victims or people who knew his past, but if confronted he either (1) cried foul, that he was the victim, or (2) threatened litigation. At the least these tactics gave him time to abscond one scene for another.
Generally, many took his baits, but there were even more others who did not. Women who rejected him instantly. Institutions hiring staff that did not go as far as an interview. Submissions for articulation that were denied prima facie. But they are not featured in the stories of his crimes told in these pages.
Reverend Dr Professor Peters
There are many gaps in the story as Peters went to ground, moved around, and changed his name yet again. In these gaps there were likely to have been further crimes and perforce other marriages.
One omission from this account is how Peters managed to stay out of the army during World War II. But he did.
We know all of this, and much more, because he came to the notice of the scourge of confidence men and tricksters, until he himself fell hard for one, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who loved kicking people when they were down, and who over the years, having met Peters in one of his early incursions to Oxford, kept a dossier on Peters’s adventures, and solicited reports from others. This dossier in its many box files became the basis for this book.
(It is likewise hard to feel any sympathy for his Lordship’s own fall, he who specialised in ruining the careers of many others with his savage reviews, assessments, and vitriol. It seems somehow appropriate that the fictitious Hitler Diaries got him. There is a discussion of this sorry episode elsewhere on the blog reacting to Robert Harris’s book on the subject. That is another instance of a fraud so simple, so blatant that the only explanation of its success is the will of those deceived to be deceived.)
Speaking of explanations, what explained Robert Michael Parkins Peters’s many deceptions? It was not money. He seldom made more than a subsistence income and not always that, often relying on a wife’s salary and savings. But he did revel in the status that his fantasies gave him. He puffed himself up and insisted on being addressed ‘Reverend’ or ‘Dr’ or ‘Dean’ or ‘Principal’ as he moved from one dreamworld to another. Of course, with a modicum of ability and application he might have earned that kind of status in the normal way.
Perhaps once he started his fabrications and at first found how easy it was, they became a habit, though they got harder as he acquired a reputation, a police record, a list of victims, for Lord Dacre was not the only one to keep a file on him, though Dacre’s was called a dossier as befits his Lordly status. Even if it got harder, lying was all Peters knew how to do so he kept at it. Regardless of Peters’s many victims, his frequent crimes, his recidivism, his disregard for others, his rumoured sexual aggression, his frauds, his theft, his serial exploitation of lady wives, his defrauding of naive students, there was no one responsible for containing him. He was convicted for one bigamy and served six-months in jail, and once for defrauding a bookstore which landed him in the nick for a few weeks, but mostly his victims were left unsatisfied.
Buried in a textual footnote near the end is the author’s remark that many people, upon hearing something of Peters’s story, have remarked that it could not happen today in the age to the internet. Sisman demurs, suggesting that people are tricked this way and that every day. The evidence of the truth of that suggestion is readily available. After reading this book I went to ride the exercise bike at the local gym in front of a television screen where Dr Phil was interviewing a woman who admitted to giving $US 900,000, amassed from her life savings, selling her home, and borrowing money from her adult children, to a man on the internet who claimed he loved her but whom she had never met, and never will since he is fictitious. Go figure. (Victims seem to be a regular feature of Dr Phil.)
Truth can be stranger than fiction, because fiction writers usually try to be credible where life has no such restraint. Then there is the ease of forging documents with computers these days. Consider all those fraudulent web sites and emails that look just like the real thing.
In the final chapter author Sisman suggests Peters is an example of the psychosis known as the narcissistic personality. Reading the list of characteristics that comprise this disorder certainly describes him, as well as the recent Thief-in-Chief. However, labelling is not explaining because that does not tell us how and why he got that way and stayed that way.
On Lord Dacre see the passages about him Ved Mehta’s imperishable Fly and the Fly Bottle (1961).
Honoré de Balzac, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (1831)
Good Reads meta-data is 28 pages, rated 3.85 by 3,858 litizens.
Genre: Short Story.
Verdict: A gem.
This story is the 71st entry in Balzac’s sequence La Comédie Humaine.
An ingénue befriends a celebrated artist only to realise that this painter profits from the advice, assistance, and creativity of another, much less well-known, but far greater artist. The descriptions of painting and painters are superb, even better than those in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise (2004) and those are memorable.
It all leads to an ironic denouncement worthy of an O’Henry story. It is all about knowing when to quit, about the perfect being the enemy of the good, about the means becoming the end. Read it for yourself. The story is usually bound with others so that the page numbers are deceptive.
There are more than ninety items in the whole sequence, and Balzac left behind notes for another forty or so pieces. He did think big. I first heard about and read Balzac in high school whereas today the references are to Marvel Comics I am told. Go figure.
Balzac
When we got our first Rocket E-Books in the 1990s I set out to read La Comédie Humaine in order. Nothing if not ambitious. I got as far as Letters of Two Brides before surrender. Defeat was the result of (1) the terrible formatting of the contemporary public domain texts from Project Gutenberg which did not fit the screen, have line wrap, paragraph breaks, or any of the other formatting we take for granted today and by (2) the sheer boredom of that novel for no doubt the ever penurious Balzac spun it out to get paid by the word, but after some of the rip-snorters that preceded it the result was numbing.
GoodReads meta-data is 246 pages rated 3.79 by 5,465 litizens.
Genre: SyFy
Verdict: The history of the future
These pages offer a tour de horizon of a five-billion-year history of seventeen human species from the First, homo sapiens (that’s us), to the Last who watch Sol die and they with it. In between all manner of men evolve and disappear to be replaced by another lot. Along the way there is a viral invasion from Mars and the colonisation of Venus. It is a novel without drama, without characters, and without a narrative that has a start, middle, and finish. The story of Earth is told with a nearly divine detachment by The Last of The Last Men. It will remind some of those sociological studies where social forces, cleavages, structures, and other abstractions push us Sims back and forth.
In evolution through the billions of years, the Last Men can project their thoughts backward in time, even to some among the First Men. (That, by the way, is the explanation for visitations, ghosts, angels, saints, martyrs, messianics, charismatics, nutcases, UFOs, aliens, ETs, and other inexplicable often unseen things, events, and occurrences.) This projection without Blue Tooth is difficult, incomplete, and subject to distortion, like using the NBN in 2022. However among the Last Men some have perfected this projection so that this book can be dictated by the Last of the Last Men to a nameless receptive First Man of 1930. (Would such an ability to inhabit the mind of a subject make a Last Man the perfect biographer?) This future influence on the past reveals that the relationship we call time is lateral, not linear.
Between the First and Last Men are billions of years and seventeen (17) species of Men. Succeeding species develop as giant brains in jars. Others grow to twenty feet in height. Then there are the ones that sprout wings and take to the air. With each evolution there are cultural and moral changes, too. Though some verities remain, like jealousy, envy, bad will, selfishness, and McKinsey management.
The beginning of the book forecasts (though it is told in retrospect) the future of we homo sapiens, and it is all too believable. Stupid wars, avoidable virus plagues, anticipated but neglected climate change, personal vendettas that escalate to planet-wide wars that kill off half the population, denial of undeniable facts, and so on. It reads like BBC World Service reports this week. Move over Nostradamus, there is a contender.
Of women, first, last, or in-between, there is none. There is plenty of troll-food in the many, necessary generalisations about peoples and places. Check out the sanctimonious comments on Good Reads.
Olaf Stapledon
For his day job John O. Stapledon (1886-1950) lectured in politics at Liverpool University. That work left him, we must conclude, plenty of time to write as this was just the first of his dozen novels, all SyFy. (Did these count in his annual Research Impact Statement?) Others include: Last Men in London (1932), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and six more. The books sold well but reviewers, unable to categorise them, did not like them. Thus is creative writing denigrated by the gatekeepers of creative writing.
Although it is nearly lost in the giga-historical details that crowd onto the pages, the core idea is that of influence from the future on the past. That reminded this reader of Chris Marker’s haunting short film La Jetée (1962). There are some similarities though the execution is completely different.
There is a 70-minute film inspired by Stapledon’s novel which I can find only on Blu Ray and that does not interest me. I cannot find it on DVD. If someone can, please let me know. My cursory research into converting Blu Ray to another format left me confused. One guide offered a four-step procedure that involved about fifty steps, grouped into four categories. (Reminded me of the Man in Seat 61’s claim that the train from Amsterdam to Prague stopped only twice, whereas in fact it stopped nearly a dozen times. It all depends on definition.) The surrounding images are from the film.
I happened to see a reference to this novel in something else I was reading and that sparked my curiosity. I could not remember having read it (though I knew the author’s name and felt certain I had read something by him) so I found it available on Kindle and hour later and started to read it. At first I could not put it down, but as clever permutations piled one on top of another, going – as far as I could tell – nowhere except to the next page, I soon adopted the Kindle flick, reading only topic sentences. Fortunately, Stapledon learned the craft when a topic sentence was a topic sentence and that eased my speedy navigation. He is reported to have said that he turned to fiction for a wider audience than academic writing (and yes, he did a good deal of that, too) had. Strong stuff, those wider readers if they marched through several volumes of this detail.
The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II
Goodreads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.83 by 1211 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: Young Adult
After reading The Good Shepard I was primed for more nautical escapades and the write-up and praise for this title enticed me into downloading the (lengthy) sample. I read it and was glad when it ended. That is an hour lost.
It is presented in the manner of a thriller, chopping and changing from time and place without apparent rhyme of reason to keep the reader guessing, or in my case, grousing. Not only that…. Each vignette is padded with back and side stories which have nothing to do with the title.
The offering is based on a synthesis of secondary sources and it shows. The descriptions, of which there are far too many anyway in those back and side stories, are thin. In first sixty pages only one woman appears and a charitable reader will suppose she must be one of the ingenues who became ingenious. But it is only guesswork.
I could go on but I noticed that the writer’s biography refers to him as a ‘video game pundit’ and that suffices to indicate the intellectual level of this book by a writer whose ‘criticism and journalism has been featured in numerous high-profile publications,’ followed by a depressing list of mastheads whose editors ought to have known better.
The breathless History Channel ‘Now It Can Be Told’ presentation is trite. The author warns the reader will be surprised and shocked that board games are used in planning military operations. It seems to have been news to the author that the boards are maps and tokens represent forces constrained by circumstance. Alexander the Great used sand tables to out-think his adversaries; generals and sergeants since have drawn plans in dirt to assess a situation. (Themistocles did so, too, long before Alex but I fear this author will have not heard of this admiral who lured the Persian fleet to its doom by using pebbles on a beach to test his hypothesis.)
The Verdict above as Young Adult indicates that such a readership might find it informative. Anyone who has any interest in the subject already knows all of this and more. Indeed, many tweenage boys who play video games will know all of this already.
By the way, some of the Good Reads reviewers who made it to the end have observed that the ingenious women amount to less than a quarter of the total. Does it follow that three-quarters is padding? ‘Fraid so. Still the overall rating of 3.83 is IMHO proof of the value of Good Reads ratings.
GoodReads meta-data is 222 pages, rated 4.17 by 8,192 litizens.
Genre: historical fiction.
Verdict: Detailed and compelling.
It reads in good part like a study in leadership with much inner dialogue and very little of CGI shot ‘em action of the (trailers for the) film (Greyhound).
Convoy J45 of thirty-seven merchant ships crosses the North Atlantic in the winter of early 1942. There are troop ships from Canada packed with men. Enough fuel in five oilers to power the entirety of the Britain’s Royal Navy all over the world for one day. Food and medicine to keep alive thousands of the very young and the very old. There is also a boatload of women, volunteer nurses. The load is a weighty in every sense.
It is also varied. The merchants, liners, and oilers are Greek, Norwegian, American, Canadian, Dutch, Danish, Polish, and French. Each nationality must put aside its way of doing things and cooperate with the whole, led by a British ship. Accordingly, the signals (by flag and light) are terse and few. No complex manoeuvre or qualified directions can be given to such a polyglot assembly. Keep it simple!
By a quirk of enlistment dates, the senior naval officer is Commander Krause, USN. He has many years of preparation and is well trained and highly motivated, and completely inexperienced in the duty, to the North Atlantic, and with the new ship he is on, and unknown to both his crew and 3000 other men sailing under his command in the whole of the convoy.
His interior monologues in decision-making lay out the tactical and strategic chessboard on which each ship moves. We also learn along the way that Krause, despite his obsessive efforts, has been judged only an average officer and will not be promoted any time soon. He is a ‘C’ student who studies long hours, keeps notes, tries hard, is dedicated, and just scapes by. In war even ‘C’ students must serve.
Keeping the convey’s ships together in the cruel sea is almost impossible but absolutely necessary since stragglers attract U-boats. To herd the ships of the convoy and to protect them from U-boats Krause has two destroyers and two corvettes. His own ship, one of the destroyers, is the reeling USS Keeling, as the crewmen say, while the other destroyer is a battle-scared Polish ship that escaped Danzig. One corvette is British and the other Free French. Four navies working as one with four different sets of protocols, training, equipment, and attitudes. The officers of the four ships have been expected to learn and comply with a 259-page manual of operations for such missions in their spare time. It is, of course, in English and the French and Polish officers have tutors (liaison officers) to help them. The manual is a compromise written by a committee in London, and reads like it. There is no index.
The other three naval captains, his juniors in service, have been at war for more than two years and their crews have suffered casualties and the ships show battle damage. Yet he and the pristine Keeling are in command.
Krause is a serious man who is mindful of his own limitations and has devoured the manual in between sessions of meditation and prayer in the few minutes he has to himself. Those minutes are few. His dedication might compensate for his lack of ability and his lack of experience in these waters and convoy duty, the writer seems to imply.
The decisions, the assessments, the reports, the weather are all endless, relentless, and merciless. On the bridge there is a constant flow of information to which he must react. Radar and sonar are limited in the weather, and so are the six-man lookout watches in rubber suits, roped to their stations, drenched in ice water at every pitch, roll, or yaw. They can see things the radar and the sonar cannot see or may miss with so many other ships nearby, a periscope, a floating mine, an oil slick, a torpedo wake ten-feet below the surface of the boiling sea, a life raft; if they don’t blink; if the salt water does not burn their eyes; if the cold does not freeze over the binocular lenses.
None of this is good. The pressure, the friction, the potential for catastrophe are ever-present. Then it gets worse when the six-week trained sonar operator reports a positive return. Ping! Action is required this instant. Or is it? Sonar operators before the war were trained in twelve-weeks, and passed by scoring 9 out of 10 or better on three tests. In order to get ships crewed, that training had been cut to six weeks, and one test with a passing score of 6 out of 10. The same can be said of most of the rest of the crew from the gunners, to the depth charge mechanics, to the cooks, all of them half-trained and inexperienced in the North Atlantic.
Moreover, as Krause had silently observed since taking command of the Keeling some of them did not want to be there and it showed in posture, by intonation, and with looks. He knew that for all of them to survive, for the ship to complete its mission, everyone of them had to do his assigned duty completely and immediately. He knew that. He was not so sure some of the crewmen knew that. Well, they are going to find out now.
Green water coming!
There follows a long game of hide-and-seek as the Keeling, with Krause’s lack of experience but that thick manual, tracks that sonar ping, which in time by its own manoeuvres proves itself to be a U-boat commanded by an practiced and cunning captain with a disciplined crew. While on the surface the Krause has many advantages, but the U-boat turns some of the strengths into weaknesses with tricks and feints. The Keeling is faster, but with a deke here causes it to overshoot and lose time in U-turning.
In the flow of data that is fed to Krause about the elusive U-boat, the Keeling itself, the other escorting warships, the 37 craft of the convoy, also comes – in writing – a Most Secret Signal from the British Admiralty that the radio operator hands him, because it must not be spoken aloud. A wolf-pack is definitely in the waters ahead. (This intelligence is the fruit of the Bletchley Park boffins and must not be revealed to anyone who does not need to know in anyway. After reading the message Krause orders the operator to destroy it by burning it in a bucket on the bridge.)
The tension of all of these proceedings is marvellous, and not a shot has been fired, nor a definite sighting of the enemy made, but the knowledge that he is there becomes an electric charge in the hull of the ship, everyone feels it. More decisions are required. How long can Krause keep his crew, and the others on the warships, at Battle Stations before they tire, lose concentration, become bored, and if nothing happens then come to be less responsive to that alarm in the future. At the same time the cooks want to know if dinner will be served. The radar officer says one of the screens has to be reset to offer more clarity and that means turning off the radar for two hours to change tubes. To turn it off deprives Krause of one of his advantages. To rely on its erratic dancing blurs that now fade in and out is also risky. The battering of the green water has loosened the forward chains, and they should be fixed, but that would require turning away from the gale-force wind, offering a target. So it goes.
The pressure on the captain will make him a diamond or crush him. That pressure cascades downward as the deck officers realise how high the stakes are and the importance of his own duty by the book. Similarly the bridge crewmen imbibe the gravity of the situation and it radiates from them through the whole ship. The increasing strain is palpable.
The cruel sea.
At every step Krause must be aware that to utter a sharp word or to ask for a repetition might undermine the confidence of a crewman and impair his efficacy next time. Always he must speak in a flat, level voice without emotion, haste, or temper. Always he must speak the approved navy phrases — deck talk — with no embellishments, for these could be misunderstood in this perpetual crisis, always he must speak with a dead calm to promote that same calm in others.
In the two days covered in these page Krause gives more than two hundred orders about navigation alone. Then there are other orders about search patterns, patrol assignments for three other ships in the flotilla, running repairs, meal service, and the like. He also communicates with the cargo fleet in the convoy. Try another metaphor: The stone he is made of is slowing chipped away by these decisions to expose the inner man.
The Kraut, as the crewmen call him, draws strength from his Biblical education with many well chosen homilies that remind him of eternity, that is, the bigger picture. Pondering some of these passages is one of the pleasures of reading this book. Rather than telling others what to do, this Christian tries with every conscious minute to live up to that faith’s highest standards, largely in silence.
C S Forester
Cecil Scott Troughton Forester did not serve in the Royal Navy either in World War II, still less the Napoleonic Wars of his 12-book Hornblower series. While he was born in Cairo, he left Africa at age five and never returned. He did write about thirty (30) other novels, of which this is his last. He also published another fifteen works of popular history.
Loved skimming the condescending comments on Good Reads. Always good to know the trolls are feeding.
GoodReads meta data is 331 pages rated 3.95 by 39 litizens.
Genre: biography*
Verdict: Scatter gun does occasionally hit targets.
William Lever (1851-1925) was born a dry goods store owner’s son, who learned the business sweeping the floor. That was an especially onerous duty in the backroom where large bars of all-purpose soap were cut into one pound sizes. The trimmings that fell to the floor were profuse and sticky. This boy had a lot of trouble sweeping them up only to throw them away. That seemed like wasted effort and so the first of a long string of innovations came. He wrapped these floor sweepings neatly and labeled them soap flakes. After all, to use the one-pound lumps of soap a housewife had to scrape flakes off it, thus buying ready-made flakes was a labour-saving step and they could be sold cheap since they had been heretofore waste, and it proved popular and profitable. His father soon gave him his head and stood back.
There followed many other elementary changes that brought a competitive advantage, like cutting the soap into bars of a hand size. Later he distinguished between soap for laundry and soap for person with additives in the latter. And so.
He made his soap first a national and then an international business, scattering innovations like seeds in the wind. Some did not work out, most did. He was quick to make use of new-fangled advertising and made innovations in that, too.
The paternalism in him led to philanthropy, although he always denied that he ever gave anything away. It was all a business investment in his mind. He built an ideal community in Cheshire near Liverpool for his principal manufacturing plant, called Port Sunlight (after his most successful product line), which we visited in 2004. It reflects the man in that the architecture is varied, not uniform as it is in other model communities, and endowed with art works and green spaces galore. An art gallery was located between the residences and the factory so that workers on the way to and from home could walk through it for their edification. It provided a dry-cut when it rained and was designed to accommodate wet feet and umbrellas with drains and mats.
He collected art by the simple expedient of buying the complete collections of others, selecting for his private residences the works he liked, and using the rest to adorn Port Sunlight and Lever offices around the world. He was something of a magpie in collecting as the museum at Port Sunlight shows.
He established the eight-hour day at Port Sunlight. Paid the highest wages in the land, and turned gigantic profits much of which he ploughed back into Port Sunlight, while expanding the business overseas and vertically integrating it with suppliers. In time, with increased mechanisation, he cut the week from 6 to 5 and 1/2 to 5 days. He was widely detested for all this by business rivals who tried to blacken his name with smears and innuendo. Each of which he batted off with a team of lawyers.
The Gallery at Port Sunlight
He was a lifelong supporter of the Gladstone Liberal Party, including its efforts to end the state religion and grant home rule to Ireland, and was elected to parliament where his sole purpose was to advocate and agitate for a national old age pension comparable to that which he paid his retiring employees, both men and women. The norm at Lever Brothers was equal pay for equal work between men and women. He carried that over more generally and was an advocate of female suffrage. Thus he practiced and preached equality for women with men, but that was not enough for some people.
One zealot made an example of him by burning down his house (and all its familial and artistic contents), she said, to light a beacon for women’s suffrage, further saying that until that goal is achieved everything has to be attacked, even allies, it seems. It is a kind of Pox News logic of attacking a soft target. No one was home and no one was injured but it both hurt his feelings and angered him so that he rebuilt the house…in stone, so that it could not be burned again by another nutcase. It did not cause him to weaken in his advocacy of the suffrage, but he did take pleasure when the malefactor was slammed up.
His efforts at vertical integration in the Solomon Islands and then the Congo led him to realise how terrible colonialism was, and he treated the natives he dealt with better than any other European had ever done. This fact does not spare him the troll attacks on Wikipedia today where he is castigated for not having 21st Century sensibilities by people whom in turn will be castigated one day for not having 23rd Century sensibilities. History has become troll berate troll.
He was a micro-manager even as the business grew and grew to become an international behemoth. To do so he wrote – yes wrote, not dictated – 50,000 letters a year. The archive swamps most biographers. This one did not even dip a toe into it. As the majority owner he did not distinguish his private interest from those of the company and in time that came unstuck. Lever Bros did not quite recover from World War I and its aftermath, when prices fell, competition emerged, foreign markets disappeared. Lever tried to keep doing things the old way as the capital dissipated, until there was a management coup d’état in 1922-1923 and he finally let go of the reins, reluctantly, slowly, sporadically….
In the 1930s Lever Bros merged with United Soaps of the Netherlands and become UniLever which remains a diverse and gigantic multi-national. It long operated a large plant nearby in Balmain (established 1895) until land prices made it profitable to sell the area (for residences) and relocate to Minto south west of Sydney. Here are a few of the current UniLever brands: Vaseline, Ben & Jerry’s, Knorr, Magnum, Vif, Comfort, Domestos, Lifebuoy, Dove, Omo, Sunlight, and so on and on.
How his formative years led him to these ventures, how he learned and changed as he went, his relationship with his long-suffering wife (for he insisted throughout his life on sleeping in the open air on specially designed rooftops – true!), his response to failure (and he had a few), are invisible in these pages.
Adam McQueen
*The book has to be catalogued as biography but it isn’t, hence the asterisk above. It is a string of anecdotes that reflect the interests of the author more than the importance of the stories in forming or revealing Lever. It is also punctuated with the sort of snide, adolescent ad hominem cheap shots so prolific in Bill Bryon’s sophomoric books.
There is a short, grudging entry on Lever in Wikipedia that hardly does the man justice. Pedants note. There was a younger brother who worked in the business initially, hence the name, but left it after few years.
I listened to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 program Great Lives about Lever while on my walks across north Newtown, and recalling our visit in 2004 to Port Sunlight, I followed up with this book. Lever is certainly worth reading about but I cannot recommend this book to any serious reader. It is too self-indulgent, too one-eyed, and superficial. The author is the star of this show, not the subject.
Maigret’s World (2017) by Murielle Wenger and Stephen Trusell.
Good Reads meta-data is 245 pages rated 2.83 by 6.
Genre: Manual.
Verdict: Frequent Readers of Maigret only.
Georges Simenon (1903-1989) wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Maigret from the first in 1929 to the last in 1972. At the height of his powers, he published six novels and more stories in a year. Whew! The Maigrets were not his only fiction. He also wrote what he called romans durs, numbering more than a dozen along with scores of short stories. Double whew! But wait there is more! He also published more than a score of other novels under several pseudonyms. That brings the total of novels to a 100+! Is there is such a thing as ‘Triple whew!’ Then there are the volumes of an autobiography! Wikipedia suggests that 500 publications bear his name. (I have read a couple of the romans durs and they are memorable but that is for another time. Suffice it to say that these are his ‘hard’ [in the sense of durable] novels. We might say ‘serious novels.’ Or in the language of bookstores these days ‘literary fiction.’)
Readers of Maigret often comment on the atmosphere Simenon creates in each story, usually but not always set in a Paris enclave. Indeed it is the central motif of the Maigret stories that he enters a (nearly) closed world and gradually learns to navigate it so as to understand the attitudes and motivations of its inhabitants. He comes to discern first the wind waves on the surface of the locale, the tides, and then the underlying reefs and shoals and later the wreckage now submerged, to extend the metaphor. That microcosm may be a stable at the Longchamps race course, a dilapidated mansion in Ivry, a nightclub in Pigalle, a flotilla of canal boats plying the River Seine, an automobile factory shop floor in Belleville, a brothel in Montmarte, a private clinic near hôpital Val de Grace, a cul de sac like Rue Mouffetard (where I stayed once up a time), a student boarding house at Montsouris, a luxurious apartment in St Germain, and so on. Each time Simenon stamps the reader’s visa for this world.
He draws these places with such economy that most of the novels run to 150 pages in a Penguin edition. The style is impressionistic not descriptive. Often the reader has no reason to know what a character is wearing, eating, sitting on, or even looks like. Those Ikea, Elle, and Gourmet details that deaden while inflating so many krimis are often absent. It is true that sometimes he does describe a character and place in these terms to reveal character and situation. It is not done mechanically but rather as an organic part of Maigret’s immersion into the cast, costume, and the play that is performed in that milieu. The handbag Louise Laboine carried was carefully described and later that proved decisive. A reader learns to trust Simenon. If he describes something, it will prove to be relevant to the story, not a mere ornament to fill pages.
Liège
In each case the novels are deeply rooted in the geography and culture of France. The aroma of aioli is in the air. That is Piaf on the radio in the background. Cloudy Pernod is the drink.
Yet after his early successes Simenon wrote nearly all of his novels abroad. A few were written just over the Jura mountains in Switzerland, but a great many (scores) of these very French novels were written either in Vermont or Arizona in the United States. In each state he hired a cabin and set up a typewriter. Snowed-in among the White Mountains in Vermont, or sun-struck in the Sonora scrub of Arizona, he evoked the streets of a rainy Paris, a bone chilling winter near the Ardenne forest, a seedy bar in Montmartre, a dentist’s immaculate mansion in Neuilly, a flop house in Pigalle, a respectable bourgeoisie home on the banks of the Marne, or a small hotel for commercial travellers in the banlieues…
Reminded of his preference for visiting the States puts me in mind of another Yankeephile, Jean-Pierre Melville, the film director, who likewise had an affection for the USA. I wonder if Melville ever filmed any Maigret story. Certainly the stories have been filmed by some of the greats in French cinema, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Marcel Carné, Bernard Tavernier, Henri Verneuil, and – yes – Jean-Pierre Melville.
Everything from the size of Maigret’s shoes to the colour of his neckties and preferred pipe tobacco is to be found in this catalogue raisonné of les chose de Maigret. What a spreadsheet of facts these two über-nerds have compiled from the Maigret oeuvre. After objects they move onto Madame Maigret, including her wardrobe, and his only friend, Dr Pardon. Then onto the Quai des Orfevres where we meet the quatre fidèle: Lucas, Janiver, LaPointe, and Torrence. Maigret’s relationship with each is discussed, particularly through the use of tutoiment. Yet the more such fine distinctions are magnified, the more they blur. Voilà, Simenon was not consistent throughout the oeuvre. He did not work from a spreadsheet it seems.
While Simenon and Maigret have been subjected to much examination, this volume is not a commentary on the stories, but a catalogue of details. For the some of the scholarship try the Centre d’ètudes Georges Simenon at the Université de Liège.
In the Maigret oeuvre English characters occur now and again, and I am sure some PhD has been devoted to dissecting them, but I cannot locate it right now. Among the English (speakers) I count Inspector Pike who visited Quai des Orfevres, the deceased Mister Brown, the vanishing Monsieur Owens, the seldom sober Sir Walter Lampson on the canal boat, the likeable rouge James in the two-sous bar, the wastrel Oswald Cark, the elusive Colonel Ward, the mental Miss Simpson, and, well, there are probably others.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages rated 3.68 by 144 litizens.
Genre: biography.
Verdict: A singularity!
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) of East St Louis Missouri was illiterate and unwanted, married at age 13, and abandoned at 15, all of this does not sound like a good start in life. Yet before she was twenty she had a national reputation, soon followed by an international one, and a career singing, dancing, and starring in film.
She started in show biz by washing dishes in a gambling-club kitchen at about fourteen. In breaks she watched the floor show and volunteered to work unpaid as a maid for one of the performers after finishing in the kitchen. That performer began to teach this teenager to read and write as recompense for her work, and invited her to come along on tour, and off Baker went without a backward glance. (She was slow learner and even years later while she could read printed text with difficulty, say on programs, but she could not decipher even copperplate writing, and barely do more than scrawl her own name.) Then one night at another club, a member of the chorus line fell ill, and the director grabbed Baker (because she was the same size for the costume) and put her at the end of the line. Not knowing what to do, she stumbled around and got laughs. The director liked that, and the audience applause ‘electrified’ her, she said later. She was, as they say, stage struck and stayed that way, beginning a fifty year career on the boards that end in a 1975 swan song.
In the earliest days, travelling with a troupe of women, she experienced lesbian sex and that stayed with her, but she also liked men when they were available. She was a lifelong switch hitter.
This might be the place to indicate a conflict within her that the author handles well. On the one hand, Baker wanted a conventional life of husband, home, and children such as she had seen in magazines and movies, but never experienced personally, but on the other hand the limelight’s beckon was irresistible and the gaudy and bawdy life of sex and drugs that went with it. At times she oscillated between these two poles.
As a dancer she had a daring (topless at times and that banana skirt), an energy, a vitality, and physical wit that caught the eye of a producer preparing a revue for Paris and looking for fresh talent in the States, who recruited her. At no more than sweet sixteen she went from last in the line chorus girl sharing a room with three others with one meal a day, to a luxury suite on an ocean liner bound for Europe. The transition went to her head and for years thereafter she behaved like a spoiled brat rock star or oafish star athlete with tantrums, laziness, rudeness, and so on. Some of those outbursts arose from the clash of those two poles: domesticity versus show biz.
In time — years — she did grow out of these childish ways but she was never the professional who was on time, on target, on budget. She was often late, unprepared, and exhausted. But once she got in the limelight, the current flowed. Late, yes, but never absent. She always turned up.
She was one of those who put the ‘Roar’ into the Roaring Twenties, and she pretty much did, on this telling, take Paris by storm. As a teenager, she was the headliner of Folies de Bergère with her picture plastered onto every kiosk in Paris, playing to sold out houses eight shows a week. Her petulance did not intrude on the stage, though she often missed rehearsal and ad libbed her way through. In this period she waged a campaign to sing rather than (just) dance, and when a lead singer got sick, Josephine stepped in because she had learned all the songs.
Men, there were more than a few moths attracted to this flame. She soon learned that white men might shower her with gifts, take her to Maxim’s, buy her astounding clothes, pay for ever grander apartments as a trophy, and adorn her with precious jewels, but marriage was, as one said, ‘out of the question.’ Her conclusion from these experiences was a personal declaration of independence, made possible by the money she was raking in; she would buy everything for herself. Ergo she thence turned down and sent back innumerable gifts from many rich and famous men (and some women). She still liked men, but on her terms, not theirs. P.S. She also still liked women.
A producer in her first years in France had been a mentor who tutored her in French, table manners, dressing and so on as part of his investment, and now, in these subjects, she was motivated to be a quick learner. Through the years she remitted money to her mother and siblings in St Louis. After the War she convinced all of them to join in France and she bought and remodelled a chateau for them.
The boite du nuit patrons kept coming during the Great Depression and the money kept coming, if in smaller quantities, and she kept spending it, trying hard to outdo other celebrities with bizarre behaviour and dress. All that has a contemporary ring to it. She concentrated more on singing, in French, than on dancing, and that extended her career. She also branched out into products like hair gel, clothes, and jewellery, reaping the profits. She became one of the richest women in the world, and perhaps the only one at the time who had made all the money on her own talents. It was at this time that she began supporting children’s charities, giving away a great many francs with no tax benefit in so doing. However much money came in, more went out. She always spent faster than she earned, and in time that deficit caught up with her.
In 1934 she married a Frenchman, a Jew, and became simultaneously French and Jewish in so doing according to the laws of the day. At the time she added the accent agui to her name to make it French – Joséphine. Briefly, they had the home life a good part of her had always longed for, but then happily pregnant, she miscarried and that tragedy came between them, a year later the husband decamped, and she became ever more temperamental, while throwing herself even more frantically into work.
She made a French talkie called ZouZou (1934), and by this time was fluent in conversation. She never liked movie-making because there was no audience. Having toured European capitals several times with critical, popular, and financial success, in that year she accepted an invitation to return to the United States to star in a production of the Ziegfeld Follies. She and her European entourage arrived in New York on a luxury liner to great fanfare at the docks thronged by journalists and photographers. Off they went to the first class hotel booked for the group, where she alone was denied registration because of her race, and she was likewise denied at three other downtown hotels, before she gave that up to bunk with a woman journalist who had accompanied her from the pier. Welcome home! Everything went faster and further downhill from there, the show closed, and she returned to Paris.
There are many clips on You Tube.
Came the Drôle de guerre in 1939 and she volunteered for service and went to entertain the Allied troops, being well suited to do so with a repertoire of English and French songs familiar to the lads et les gars. She was paired with the likewise bilingual Maurice Chevalier, who was a mega-star of the day with the ego to match. He regarded her as a cheap nightclub chanteuse and insisted that as he was the star her act precede his as a warm-up. (And, non, before you ask, he would not do a duet with this parvenu.) He got his way and regretted it. In school, town, and church halls with hundreds of bored young men who had been away from home for weeks and months, she was a sin-sation and they would not let her leave the stage, demanding encore after encore, enraging Chevalier waiting in the wings. He threw a fit and stormed off, leaving her with a one-woman show, which incidentally won her fame among Brits and expanded her fame in France beyond Parisians.
Came the Defeat in June 1940, she was approached by a brother of a stage manager: it could be arranged that she would be invited to perform in Lisbon, would she then carry a message encoded in her sheet music? Bien sûr, because ‘I owe France everything.’ The bet was that since Portugal was a friendly neutral, the Germans would permit the trip. That worked and she did it again, and again, and no Gestapo inspector would be inclined or able to read the sheet music. Then a tour of French North Africa was arranged for the same purpose where she fell ill and after an emergency operation she got blood poisoning and was long confined to a hospital bed in Rabat where she lay when Operation Torch was executed. Bitter though she had become about American racism, she nearly danced in the street when she saw the Stars and Stripes on the shoulders patches of the GIs. Soon she was entertaining more troops across North Africa, Free French, Brit and Commonwealth, and Yankee. Four shows a day with a jeep ride over no-roads to the next camp for months, which – given than she was still recovering from repeated surgery when it started – wore her down. These travels were burning in the day time and freezing at night, and often required sleeping on the grounds or in the vehicles. General Charles de Gaulle asked her to accept induction into the French Women’s Auxiliary Army, which she did with enthusiasm. She also embarked on a fundraising campaign for de Gaulle, starting by selling her jewellery and clothes. She would say later in jest but also in truth that she gave France the clothes off her back in return for a uniform. By the way that illness in Morocco ended any prospect of children.
Despite the wartime rhetoric of equality, when she returned State-side she was once more barred from hotels and restaurants in Boston, Miami, and again in New York City. In this latter instance she complained vociferously and was then labeled a communist agitator by no less a figure than Walter Winchell – king of the airways at the time – who, with the respect for facts one associates with Pucker Up on Pox News, later also styled her a fascist. (Local lout-mouths like Alan Jones have long aspired WW’s crown.)
More important in cementing her reputation as a pinko was her insistence on performing only to integrated audiences. She turned down astronomical fees from segregated venues – what could be more Un-American than that? Worse, whenever this happened she made it known through the press that a certain promoter or venue refused to allow an integrated audience. Joe Louis, Jack Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Warren, and other civil rights activists soon flocked to her shows. It was at this time that she discovered a talent for public speaking and she went on the stump for civil rights. That put her on one of J. Edgar Hoover’s many enemies lists which often made it difficult for her to get an American visa, one requiring the direct and personal intervention of the United States Attorney-General Robert Kennedy.
There is a long story about her Rainbow Tribe which I will omit. Suffice it to say she collected orphaned children as she had earlier collected animals for a private zoo. Superficially the intention was good, but the execution was abysmal. There is an appendix devoted to these children.
She never had any sense about money, and that caught up with her in the latter 1950s when a postwar generation of performers competed for opportunities. Protracted and painful was the decline, she had to sell everything to keep the bailiffs at bay, the jewels, the cars, the houses, … the clothes [again]. By the time she was sixty, Baker was destitute and homeless, singing in the Paris equivalent of the St Louis clubs where she had started forty-five years before. Under these pressures the old, volatile temper vented and she became just about impossible to deal with. It was a speedy, downward spiral.
She was saved from herself by Princess Grace of Monaco who paid her debts, bought her a house, and set up a trust fund with a modest income and a principle that Joséphine could not touch. In return Baker performed regularly at Red Cross fundraisers. And there is a remarkable story of a journalist sent on a publicity interview prior to one such event going to Baker’s apartment a day early by mistake, and…. A bent, shrivelled, bald, shrunken old women dressed in a ragged robe, shuffling, drooling, and sniffling, answered the door and wobbled walking to the sofa. Slowly Journalist realised this was Joséphine Baker herself. Yet, the day after when the gala opened she was straight, coiffured, gleaming, vigorous, vital, and glittering, offering a full-throated performance with dancing, jokes, and many encores. The show had to go on and it always did. Despite the chaotic life she led over the years, she honoured every performance contract and delivered on stage. At times critics found the material poor but no one ever said she did not give it the works once in the spotlight. Audience attention was the eau de vie to which she was addicted.
At the last of these galas she did an impromptu singing and dancing duet with Mick Jagger, and over night died of a heart attack. One obituary writer said with some truth that she had danced herself to death.
The concoction she used to straighten her hair since the early 1920s had led to the baldness. Her diet was terrible and, given the milieu, she no doubt drank alcohol to excess and used drugs though the book is silent on these matters.
Loose ends: She marched in every Bastille Day parade wherever she was in France, wearing that auxiliary uniform with her service medals attached. She was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the great day that Dr King spoke, and did many fund rising performances for the NAACP when she was Stateside, and became very close to Coretta Scott King who tried to get her to move back to the country of her birth.
* * *
Seeing on Télévision France 2 a report on the interment of Joséphine Baker’s remains in the Panthéon (in Paris), prompted my interest in finding out more about this legend. So I did what book worms do and went looking for a biography. A title for young adult (= old enough to vote) readers suited me fine. That means it contained sidebars to explain some of the historical context, like the Depression, Folies Bergère, and the like. Many of the other titles on her that I checked were marketed for the salacious tales, sensational gossip, and Pox News value it seemed from my sampling. Compared to that pap, this one appeared sober, sane, and straightforward, no striving for shock value or gutter glamour. The author has a number of other biographies of the same sort.
Peggy Caravantes
Stepping back from the details of those other titles, it seems to me that many of the biographers do not take Baker seriously, despite the lip service to the contrary, but rather present her as a particularly determined party-girl made unique in the time by her colour, her expatriate life in France, and her longevity as a performer. Few of these titles, perhaps fearing that they might scare off readers, hint at the depths, determination, and moral core she must have had to live her own life, let alone perform the services that led to the Panthéon. They just cannot quite get beyond the banana skirt with anything but platitudes in so far as I could judge from the Kindle samples.
An American Saga: Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire (1980) by Robert Daley.
Goodreads meta-data is 529 pages rated 4.38 by 106 litizens.
Genre: Biography +
Verdict: Chapeaux!
If ever someone was born to do business it was Juan Trippe (1899-1981) who made Pan American Airways the colossus of the sky it was for two generations. Before coming to that story first a word about the name. The Trippe family emigrated from England to Maryland in 1660 which at the time was a safe haven for Roman Catholics. He was called ‘Juan’ in honour of an aunt by marriage named ‘Juanita’ who came from Venezuela. At gatherings of the clan, she was the presiding matriarch. He was whitebread through and through, and not hispanic, though it is often implied that he was, the more so because of Pan Am’s later domination of Latin American skies when it was the semi-official flag carrier of the United States in foreign air. This misperception was cultivated at times to win favours south of the border.
As a teenager he was sky-struck, as was the likes of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in France. The lad Trippe went to an exhibition of stunt flying on Long Island (circa 1912) with his father and thereafter never had another interest. Even girls came a distant second to the siren’s song of the air. (His libido is completely absent from this telling though he did marry in 1929 and sired four children.) At Yale University he day-dreamed of flying and when the Great War loomed he was quick to volunteer, lying about his age, and choosing the US Navy because it offered recruits fast entry into its flying service. Some of the things he liked about the Navy that stayed with him included the order, hierarchy, discipline, and the uniforms. Unlike, St-Ex, Trippe was a good pilot and made full use of his training. (Sidebar: As much as St-Ex loved flying and wrote lyrically about it, he was a lousy pilot. See my earlier post about a biography on this writer and soldier.) However, the war ended and so did Trippe’s flying. He was but eighteen at the time and he set about to make a living by flying.
From the myriad of details the author has assembled several characteristics of Trippe emerge. He made mistakes, and he learned from them. He was in a hurry to get to the future, often running before he could walk. He seldom dwelt on mistakes, defeats, or failures, but quickly moved on. He saw opportunities long before others. He was an unflappable negotiator and in the longer run that was his strongest asset; he just did not quit. (In this way he calls to mind Barbara Castle.) He was unfailingly soft spoken and polite, even when being verbally assailed by angry competitors who grew frustrated at his persistence. His touch at hiring subordinates was good, and once in place he delegated a great deal of authority to them.
Zipping through the stratosphere thrilled him, but he was even more enamoured of spreadsheets and ratio of fuel costs to pounds of payload. After 1918, hundreds of other military-trained pilots liked flying and tried to make a living from it by barnstorming tours, stunt flying, circus acts, joy rides, and more, in contrast he went at it as business competing with trains and ships for freight, not fun. When he talked to someone it was about miles per gallon or turn-around time on loading. He carried a notebook which he filled it repeatedly with all he learned.
When he did fly, he spent much of the air time mapping the ground below for features a pilot might need to know from flat pastures, to rock outcrops, to nearest towns. The man had application. This is in contrast to St Ex who once airborne often seemed to pass into a reverie with the skygod and sometimes overshot the destination, had not unlocked a control, failed to make a turn, ran out of fuel against a headwind because he did not notice either the wind or the gauge.
Trippe also spent much time in the New York City public library studying atlases, maps, sea charts, annals of shipping companies, meteorological texts, and more as he – long before anyone else – pictured aircraft flying passengers across the Atlantic and then the Pacific Oceans. Neither Wake nor Canton Islands showed on atlases in 1929 but Trippe found them mentioned in the handwritten logs of merchant sailors from Nineteenth Century sailing ships and US Navy archives, and in due course they became Pan Am way stations across the Pacific. (As first coal and then oil powered ships, replacing sails, these uninhabited islands had been by passed and forgotten.)
Trippe must have had moments of doubt and despair, but these did not make it into this book.
When in 1919 he bid for a US Postal Service contract and won the route from Miami to Havana (which at the time was a portal to all of the South America) he had no airplanes, no staff, no landing fields, no agreement with the Cuban authorities to land. But once he had the contract with nine months lead time, he got everything together. Almost.
He spend a lot of money preparing an airfield in Key West. When he finally went there to see for himself, well, no matter how much construction was done, the continual high water table engulfed the flat landing strip and as the deadline neared the aircraft engine exploded due to poor quality fuel. With days to go, Terpsichore paid him a visit. To hell with landing strips, to hell with wheeled aircraft, he found a battered seaplane (such as he had trained on in the Navy) and hired it to fly it and a twenty-pound bag of mail to Havana, where it landed on the water, needing no permissions. From that moment of invention came Pan Am’s clippers in the next decade.
Very soon he spent all of his time at a desk (often on the telephone) in New York City and seldom flew after age twenty-nine. For years he looked younger than he was, and at times when wooing investors hired an actor as a frontman to win their confidence in maturity.
Trippe was always worked ahead of the competition, and also his own investors as well as the boards of directors, and that often led to conflicts, some of which he lost, and walked away to continue elsewhere. There were other innovators in aviation, of course, but he often led the way with designing aircraft to carry cargo, to carry passengers, to carry cargo and passengers in pressurised cabins with meal service, ever more powerful engines, non-stop flights, with jet passenger planes, and jumbos, and so. Then there was the hierarchy of rank, the naval uniforms, and other amenities to make flying seem easy and normal and, most of all, safe. Putting women in the cabin crew was part of that psychological of safety.
He usually shunned the limelight, unlike many celebrity CEOs. When his companies, planes, or personnel made the news by establishing new firsts in civil aviation, others took the press interviews, not Trippe, who by then was knee-deep in a new project. Journalists who inquired of him were likely to be directed to someone else. The people he wanted to impress were bankers and financiers who would invest in his next dream, and they were not going to swayed by laudatory newspaper stories with clichéd headlines. The people he wanted to talk to were engineers, designers, and technicians. By the same token the entry in Wikipedia is sparse for an individual who had such large footprint.
Yet he understood the allure of celebrity and established and traded on a relationship with the most famous aviator of the day – Charles Lindberg. Lindy was awash with opportunities but what Trippe offered was more flying in ever newer airplanes over unexplored routes and this combination appealed to the adventurer Lindberg who flew airplanes conspicuously marked Pan Am where no one had done so before, boldy going. Such markings were another Trippe innovation. Where Lindy went the newsreels followed. (They came to a parting of the ways later when Lindberg became an apologist for Hitler. That is another sad story in its own right.)
Alarm bells rang at the State Department in Foggy Bottom when in the 1920s a German consortium set up an airline in Columbia. While the business was perfectly legal and operated through a local company in Bogotá, a German controlled airline in the Western Hemisphere touched the Monroe Doctrine nerve. After all, an airline had the potential to be an enemy air force in a future war, and one based close to the Panama Canal was a strategic threat of the first rank. Diplomatic pressure on Columbia was applied and that slowed development but did not stop it. In this context, Trippe was encouraged by the State Department to extend his ambitions southward, and that suited him fine. Pan Am was developing into a semi-official state airline that carried the flag even as France, Germany, and Great Britain were themselves developing state-owned airlines.
That status was compounded later by the Post Office Department, in letting contracts for foreign airmail, ruled that a single carrier was the most efficient and effective means, and not a series of competing airlines using different schedules, sites, standards, and so on. That single preferred carrier was…Pan Am. Yes, when not nailed to his desk in a two-room office in New York City, he was in Washington nearly every week lobbying with his spreadsheets and honeyed-tongue. He more of less wrote the Post Office ruling.
Later his exclusive and exclusionary business practices were challenged by rival airlines in both courts and Congress. He won those arguments on the grounds that he had an ‘achieved, natural monopoly,’ that is, a monopoly achieved by pioneering. Any rival ought not to profit from Pan Am’s investments, say, by using its facilities, data, or routes. The monopoly was not the result of shady financial practices but rather of bold innovation, risk-taking with its own money, and the pioneering efforts of its flyers.
While in each case the conclusion was close run and carefully worded, nonetheless the result was that Pan American Airways was a state airline in all but name. Yet it was not subject to direct control by the government that authorised it, unlike Imperial Airways in Great Britain which flew where and when the His Majesty’s government directed.
To be sure this status had benefits but it also had burdens. In 1940 Pan Am was pressured by the State Department into building more than twenty airports in Central and Latin America to a military standard in case a threat to the Western Hemisphere came from the Bulge of Africa. At the time it seemed possible that Germany would occupy the French colonies of Morocco and Senegal with the cooperation of the collaborationist Vichy regime, and then use the French and Dutch West Indies islands as forward basis to operate against the Panama Canal with the help of the many Germans resident in Columbia. Later Pan Am was again coerced into organising a series of way stations in Africa between Monrovia and Cairo to allow for air cargo en route to the British in Egypt. Much later its Latin American installations were integrated into the US Space program for tracking and weather reports. N. B. In all these cases it was Pan Am, not the State Department, that negotiated with the host governments. Because of that it was sometimes referred as the Air State Department.
Backing up to 1929, still not yet thirty years old, he had commissioned the first purpose-built airliner. conceiving of it as an astral equivalent of a luxury ocean liner. The nautical theme chimed in with the flying boat’s milieu, and it was systematically applied in both design and furnishings. As regular freight and then passenger service was established in the Pacific the new Boeings were called clippers to evoke the sailing ships that had plied that ocean blue.
Note on terminology. Land planes use wheels. Sea planes use pontoons which are filled with fuel. Amphibians have both. Ski planes have…skis. Catapult planes had a brief fashion but later were confined to military use. Flying boats like the clippers use the hull for landing, no pontoons. By the way, making the clippers amphibious was not possible for technical reasons mainly because of the weight, especially on take-off with a full load of fuel, but also on landing. They were beasts. To equip them with struts on the wheels and enough wheels to distribute the weight would add even more weight and degrade the aerodynamic qualities of the craft.
There are many other examples of his approach to management which would not get him an MBA from the McKinsey School. Noteworthy is his delegation of authority, disinterest in micro-management, long term view, premium on safety, patience, resilience, modesty, and more. He did anticipate McKinsey in his insistence that everything, and I mean everything, be documented for future reference. He was willing to gamble but he wanted to learn from mistakes, not repeat them. He valued these qualities in subordinates, too, and funded projects that took years to complete without a demur.
In 1939 there was a management coup d’état on Fifth Avenue in the Chrysler Building where it was now headquartered (before constructing its own building [the lobby of which I once entered]). A decade before Trippe had selected all the directors who were personal friends and some distant relations, but as the need for capital increased the Board of directors included more bankers and lawyers who owed him no loyalty. Though Pan Am was gargantuan as airlines of the time went, it was losing a lot more than money than it was making. It had more 50,000 miles of routes through 47 countries with 125 planes, 145 ground stations worked by 5000 employees around the world. The only gap in its route was between Hong Kong and Léopoldville (Belgian Congo) which was left to Britain’s Imperial Airways and France’s Aéropostale. That made it larger than the US Army Air Force at the time, let alone every other incipient airline. However, only the Latin American mail routes were regular enough to make pesos. In the vast Pacific service was irregular. Worse, crashes there were a few. Over the Atlantic Pan Am had ambition and had invested very heavily in preparation for flights but there was none in the offing. Trippe had made Pan Am and now it in its board of directors unmade him.
That interregnum lasted eight months, during which Trippe was moved sideways and a new CEO installed who liked having his picture taken, but everyone, including the new CEO, soon realised he did not know much about Pan Am and nothing about running an international business or an airline and he quit. With little fanfare Trippe, not yet forty years old, returned to the big office. During the months of exile he had attended meetings and sat silent for the whole time watching (and waiting).
There is a fascinating sidebar about China National Air (CNA) which Trippe had bought years before to provide a base in China when Pan Am finally got across the Pacific. When Japan invaded China in 1937 CNA was caught in the crossfire, and Trippe, wanting no part of this war, pulled everyone out, but some employees would not leave and tried to maintain service of a sort. Trippe thought this madness and fired them, but kept paying their life insurance policies (for their families) and kept them on the list for bonuses. Ergo he could truthfully say that Pan Am had divested itself of CNA, while allowing benefits to accrue to the wildcat airmen. That remainder was motivated by a love and respect for China and the Chinese, and in time found a protector in Madame Chiang. In the perilous years of the war in China, that airline became a lifeline flying over the Hump (look it up). Like Trippe himself, these employees also identified nearly completely with the airline they had built up and could not bear to dismember it. We might conclude that he saw something of himself in these few dedicated individuals. Later they were returned to the fold and credited with seniority for those lost years and back pay for the bonuses that had accrued. This is one of many instances where he demonstrated loyalty to employees quite foreign to the cosmology of McKinsey Management in which the cogs are interchangeable, a fact lightly disguised with a rhetorical lip service about the importance of ‘our people’ whoever they are.
CNA
By the middle of the 1940s it was clear that lobbying Congress and departments of state was a full-time job and Trippe put a woman in charge of Pan Am’s Washington D.C. office who became a Vice President of the company. She was often underestimated by politicians and officials she dealt with and proved invaluable to Trippe is sizing up one situation after another. The journalists of the day ignored her completely with the same unerring judgement so common today. She steered Pan Am through some very rocky patches and Trippe came to rely on her completely when he went to Washington.
By 1947 Trippe saw that the future of passenger aviation was the jet engine and for that to be profitable it had to take customers away from ships and trains. The way to do that was to offer speed. That meant non-stop flights to London, Rome, Paris with a hundred or more paying customers. Those who manufactured engines and built airplanes told him in great detail that it was impossible to do that, and he persisted. He often seemed not to hear these negatives and just pressed on. Finally, he gambled big on jet engines by buying them for airplanes that did not exist, and then convinced Boeing (after Martin, Douglas, and Lockheed declined) to design and build a jetliner round them, the Boeing 707. A knowledgable observer has opined that the 707 broke the tyranny of distance in Australia.
He followed his usual practice of divide and conquer with the airplane and engine manufacturers and drove hard for the development of the first Boeing 707 but soon moved on to the Boeing 747 and the jumbo jet, which still rule the skis in other forms. All of that cost millions and millions but on he drove until one day in 1968 when he quit. Yes, cold turkey. He announced his resignation at a board meeting in the evening, cleared his office the next morning. It was a thunder bolt both in Pan Am and in the business in general. He had typed all the necessary documents himself, so not even his personal, private secretary of twenty years knew until he told her the following morning.
One innovation Trip rejected, despite considerable pressure, was the SST or Concorde as it became. The US Air Force wanted a supersonic transport, and a commercial interest from Pan Am would help to stimulate development, but Trippe did not like anything about it. To reach the speeds it did it could carry only a few passengers and the noise it made would turn airports into uninhabited zones. We saw one of these beasts take to the air while we were trudging, suitcase ladened, across a rental-car parking lot at Heathrow, and it was L O U D! It also spewed black exhaust.
He became emeritus but never uttered another word beyond pleasantries in the office, in board meetings and in conferences, and he eschewed most invitations to speak here and there. In retirement he made it a point to preserve the history of Pan Am with a foundation that created, devised, maintained, and ran a corporate archive which this author mined.
As a national, flag-carrying airline in all but law, Pan American Airways was in the odd position of having no domestic routes to feed into its international flights. While Trippe’s lobbying had long allowed it to monopolise foreign travel, that very success united the domestic airlines against it and they prevailed with Civil Aviation Board in excluding Pan Am from domestic routes. One could fly from Sydney to LAX on Pan Am, as I did, and then from New York City to London on Pan Am, but not from LAX to New York. In time as other carriers muscled into the international market that monopoly disappeared, leaving Pan Am suspended in the ether with no domestic business, despite much lobbying. Ultimately that imbalance was fatal.
That was bad — worse was to come with the oil shock, and soon the empire that at its peak employed 40,000 people with more than a hundred long haul aircraft in the air every day, grudgingly conceded to be the industry leader, crumbled. With five years of his resignation, the Pan Am of old started to disintegrate, selling off assets, discharging employees at the top and bottom, all the while the new management paid executive bonuses of a magnitude Trippe had never done.
One of Pan Am’s many safety precautions was that each member of the crew had to be triple qualified. Think of a football coach’s depth chart. Each crewman had to qualify for three different jobs, for example, the radio operator was also qualified to pilot and navigate. And so on for each one. Ergo there was triple back-up on each crew. Qualification was done through third parties certified by the government. In addition, on long haul flights there were two of everything: two navigators, two co-pilots, two pilots, two radio operators, and two engineers so they could work twelve-hour shifts. Each of these ten would have two other qualifications.
We don’t find out much about Trippe the man in these pages. Was that name a burden as a boy? How did he court the woman who married him, and what kind of home-life did they have, if any. There were children but was he a father to him, taking them to air shows as his father took him? Did he have any interest beyond the company? Collect stamps? Dig in the garden? Did he always keep his libido in check? When he lobbied officials or politicians, did he start from first principles, appeals to patriotism, establish personal relations, belittle rivals, or offer incentives? He had always been secretive and solitary and those qualities increased with advancing age as he became some of a recluse in his corner office.
The book certainly does explain Pan Am’s semi-official status, but with its emphasis on the accomplishments of flight and the technical achievements to make that happen, apart from the management spill, I never did understand where the money that Trippe spent so freely came from, especially in the earlier days. Yes, there were investors, but who were they, especially through the years of the Great Depression? What kind of return did they expect or get?
Pan Am was always parsimonious in management costs. Trippe paid himself well below the industry standards for CEOs and so, too, everyone else employed by Pan Am from Vice-Presidents to cabin attendants. Some of the VPs he recruited were surprised to be taking a pay cut to join Pan Am. Ditto pilots. His unstated principal was that the experience of working at Pan Am was a bonus in itself. Certainly for those in technical fields Pan Am offered opportunities no other airline matched. For crew the allure of international travel was there. For all there was the glory and glamour of Pan Am. It seems a case of an individual who came to belief his own advertising. Still it worked as long as Trippe was there, but when he quit the looking glass broke and very soon pilots, mechanics, caterers, and cabin staff, they all went to strike for industry standard salaries. In response the new executive team dismissed personnel and sold off assets to pay for their own bonuses. Ah, the pure, sweet air of McKinsey management.
The book is based almost entirely on original sources, interspersed with newspaper accounts from the day. There is a detailed appendix explaining the research that went into the book, and it is impressive. Much of it was in interviews with the principals in the 1970s and rich as that lode is, one might worry about memory especially since few of these individuals kept diaries at the time. Nonetheless, the groundwork is assiduous and everything was double and triple checked, including a visit to Wake Island! Chapeux!
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Pan American Airlines was a world unto itself for generations only coming to earth with a thud in the 1980s. Seeing references to it in reading, film, broadcast, and at the air museum at Pearl Harbor, I have wondered about its origin and development. An ember of that vague interest sparked recently when I read about an unintentional round the world flight in 1941 after Pearl Harbor (discussed in another post). I went looking for a corporate history and eventually came to this title. Having now seen in this book the development of flight up to 1941 I appreciate even better what a remarkable feat that 1941 circumnavigation was. That Boeing model had only come into use in late 1939 and had a litany of teething problems.
Though there are many books on Pan Am, few matched my interest. Many concerned famous incidents involving Pan Am machines or personnel. A good few picked over the bones of the final corporate demise. Even more prolific were books about fashions in dress or, ahem, undress. Did Mortimer in the back row mutter ‘Cheap sensationalism’? Yes, there seemed to be a lot of that. In sorting through this material Juan Trippe’s name kept coming up and the tidbits harvested clearly indicated that at least for some long time Pan Am, gargantuan though it was, was a one-man band. How could that be, I wondered? As much publicity as that celebrity CEO of General Electric (GE) Jack Welch got, his influence on the company was never emphasised. GE was a behemoth before Jack and remained that after him. Not so Pan Am. It seemed Pan Am = Trippe and Trippe = Pan Am. He made Pan Am and it did not outlast him nor did he it.
I flew on Pan Am once near its end in 1979 across the wide Pacific crammed into Economy on a flight when smoking was common. The cabin crew had been trained by Houdini and disappeared before one’s eyes. It was the same from New York City to Paris. Overall it was a ghastly experience. The only benefit after the safe arrival was that I now get to say that I once flew on Pan American Airways.
