The Captain 
by 

Jan de Hartog

 

BlackOxford's review 

Apr 25, 2017  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: dutch-flemish 

Worse Things Happen at Sea

A ripping yarn, a wizard adventure. Only Patrick O'Brian holds a candle to Jan de Hartog in authentic tales of the sea. It's the combination of human relations and the relations with the ship itself that does it for me. 

Men under stress act in interesting ways. And all men on a ship, not just in time of war, are stressed. They live (or did when Captain was written) more or less in conditions of deprivation - of sleep, of palatable food, of basic comforts like showers and silence, and perhaps most importantly, female influence. Working ships like ocean-going tugs, icebreakers, and most military vessels were traditionally designed and built with accommodation for the crew as a last consideration. Crammed between fuel tanks or below-decks equipment into spaces lacking ventilation, hygiene, and ... well space, it is no exaggeration to say that they were treated worse than animals in a zoo. 

And the conditions only get worse at sea: bobbing like a cork, shuddering and sliding with every wave, pounding over and through ice, wet through with no chance of completely drying out, continuously cold with nothing but cold food and cold, undrinkable coffee. The smell of diesel fumes is one that no one really gets accustomed to. If it really gets rough, everyone is sick, even the old salts. In wartime convoys, people die.

And yet men perform their duties. They get up for watch at 3:30 in the morning, stand in the rain or snow and dark for four hours, do their daylight chores and drills, chip paint and paint rust, go back on afternoon watch, then do it again and again. For months on end. None of it very edifying, except at the pen of a master like de Hartog who recognises the stamina, the grit necessary to persevere. And somehow it is the ship, which they simultaneously distrust and love, that allows them to transcend the objective misery of their existence. The ship is a god-like object of faith that mediates their relationships. Its operating, its maintenance, its survival is shared as an existential fact; something that needs no discussion, no explanation or theory. It just is.

De Hartog insistently makes the point that the idea of the ship is very different for military and civilian crews, especially on Dutch ocean-going tugs. This difference goes beyond spit-and-polish versus slovenly make-do-and-mend. De Hartog's portrayal of the culture of high seas towing and salvage is clearly based on the old Dutch 'sleepdienst' company L. Smit & Co. Smit became known as the 'vulture of the seas,' as well as the more romantic Hollands Glorie, because it made its money by being the first on scene anywhere in the world to claim salvage rights for vessels in distress. Smit's fleet of huge tugs were strategically placed to offer assistance ... as soon as everyone was off the stricken vessel in order to establish salvage, but not a moment before.

Life on Smit tugs wasn't governed by military discipline but by mutual confidence in competence and respect for the ship. But the relationships are more than that of camaraderies among heavy equipment operators. De Hartog plays on the tension between the naval commander of the convoy and the tug captain to great effect. Both their motivations and their methods of command are fundamentally incompatible. Warships are machines run on fear of the consequences of disobedience. Tugs are organic entities powered by a sort of hive-mind which is as delicate as lace. The former operates by rote procedure, the latter by experiential skills. The convoy commander wants to get as many ships as possible to Murmansk. The tug captain wants to get a single ship through the war, his.

No glorification of war. No romanticising of life at sea. No sympathy for loneliness and discomfort. Just a stirring tale of quiet persistence.

Mao II by Don DeLillo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Novelist as Substitute Terrorist (Or the other way round?)

I have a great deal of sympathy for DeLillo's protagonist, Bill Gray, alias Willard Skansey Jr. He has my fear of being over the hill. He, like me, talks to relative strangers more intimately than is warranted. I share his doubt that any of my accomplishments have even personal importance. And I really would prefer to spend my remaining days being ignored by the world.

On the other hand, Bill puts me off viscerally. His clipped conversational banter packed with urbane wit, his hapless set-up of his own professional and existential demise, his absence of credible motives for any actions he takes, his weird idea that the rise of terrorism has reduced the moral power of writers of fiction, and his compulsion to do something about that - all of it is alien and contrived. I'm left cold and unmoved in any direction.

There are many captivating phrases. This is DeLillo after all. But some appear to be nonsense: "We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a spatial distinction between thinking and acting." Is this a philosophy? A new understanding of the world? Or just a novelist's novelistic hubris?

Other of DeLillo's quips read like they came from Pseuds Corner in Private Eye Magazine: "... when the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?... When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottle tops." He also very much likes to bite the hand that feeds him, particularly that of publishers: "The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless." Indeed, that threat of the powerful writer must keep them up at night at Penguin.

The narrator's snobbishness is obvious:

"They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fuelled by credulousness. They speak half a language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorised and passed on ... This is what people have wanted since consciousness became corrupt."

Who is it, does one suppose, DeLillo is addressing? Not his readers surely. More likely the unread masses, at least those not having read DeLillo, including all those dead folk born after corruption but before the DeLillian Enlightenment .

And of course, authors don't fair much better. "If you've got the language of being smart, you'll never catch a cold or get a parking ticker or die," says his sarcastic protagonist who has a houseful of notes, drafts, proofs, corrections, and emendations of a book he refuses to finish for no clear reason. He's a lush, a lech, and an absent father who sleeps with his assistant's wacky Moonie girlfriend and thinks that having his photograph taken is equivalent to a notice of impending death. His apparent intention is to allow Lebanese terrorists to 'trade-up' on their literary captive Swiss poet by sacrificing himself. His life, as they say, is complicated. Mostly because his egotism appears unbounded.

References to Mao, Arafat, and Khomeini abound. I can't understand why. Are these the terrorists who have undermined the importance of Western fiction? If they have, does this imply that authors are compelled to involve themselves in terrorist liaisons and media-manipulation? "Great leaders regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns," notes one of the characters. And? Are great novelists included as great leaders? Someone involved with this novel apparently thinks such a pretentious conceit has merit. Good luck with that.

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Decoded by Mai Jia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Educating Genius

Mai Jia is a Chinese Borges. Using documents presented as factual he constructs a fiction that is the truth of a culture. For Borges, it was European culture and its influence in South America that was a primary topic. In Mai's case the culture is that of China: driven, obsessive, clever, and secretive. The relationship between Europe and China is more complex than what Borges had to deal with, and Mai has come up with a brilliant metaphor in cryptography to investigate that complexity.

Some of the most interesting parts of Decoded are about what is presumed to need no explanation: the significance of family-relations, the necessity to sacrifice oneself for the national good, an acceptance of the fateful chance involved in life, the spiritualisation of chance as divinely sourced luck, and the reluctance to challenge authority as unjust, balanced by a profound sense of fairness. This is the sort of existential backdrop of things that just 'are' in China. These 'gaps' make the metaphor both more pointed and more compelling.

Ostensibly, Decoded is about the life and fate of an autistic mathematical savant, the bastard child of a family of intellectuals. He, like China itself, is passed from one controlling authority to another. Each transfer involves a renaming as well as new conditions of existence. He is even somewhat 'Christianised' into a distinctly Pauline view of the relation between life and after-life. Crucially, he is intellectually influenced most by a foreign mathematician who is married to a Chinese woman and enculturated deeply into the country. Through him, the savant is drawn into the life of the mind and into decades-long cultural as well as cryptographic warfare.

The Chinese ability to temporise about their history is presented as a rule of the game of cryptography. Knowing history is only confusing for a cryptographer, the author contends. It makes progress difficult by trapping one's thinking in the past, in the patterns that have already been established and discarded as obsolete. The invasion by Japan and its horrors are, therefore, footnotes to the main story; the Korean War mentioned en passant; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are asides; the emergence of entrepreneurial China doesn't merit even a comment.

The other "Iron-clad rule" in ciphers, according to Mai, is that one should never attempt to be on both sides of a code. A good encryptor risks not just his talent but also his sanity by engaging in decryption; and vice-versa. The message, perhaps to Chinese authority, is plain: the ability to confuse others is incompatible with an ability to understand what others are really up to. The attempt to do both provokes cultural madness. Pointedly, the key to the most profound cipher of the time is that there is no key: The cryptographic key was the number zero! It was nothing! Absolute nothing! ... a cipher with no key."

The protagonist's internal state, his personality, is never revealed. He is incomprehensible, inscrutable even, to everyone he has known and worked with, including government officials. He is admired for his achievements, but also feared for his unpredictable behaviour. He is intimate with no one, among other reasons because his intelligence is so oppressively off-putting. One of his notebooks shows him to be a hidden religious obsessive. The protagonist's doctoral thesis considers mankind as the irrational number Pi, an eternal constant but ultimately indeterminant. China anyone?

Mai summarises his cultural perceptions in the mouth of one code-breaker,

"With respect to those working in cryptography, our collective fate is naturally tied up with the various games of chess – especially those with commonplace lives. Finally they will all be seduced by the art of chess, just like pirates and drug pushers are seduced by their own wares. It is just like how some people become interested in good works in their old age."

With this, Mai signals, subtly but clearly, a recognition of the generational differences that exist in China, as well as the tension between the Party-insiders and the rest of the population.

"Genius and madness issue forth from the same track; both are brought about by bewitchment," says the same decoder. Perhaps this is Mai's central message to his compatriots. As one of the main symptoms of democratic politics, this warning about bewitchment seems particularly apt at the moment to European culture as well.

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Getting Religion: Faith, Culture & Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama by Kenneth L. Woodward
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Oh for the Days

Going very deeply into the surface of things is what journalists are paid to do. When journalists publish their memoirs, therefore, no matter what their favourite 'beat', the result is most often a very smooth, very flat skating-rink of a book with a depth measurable only by micrometer.

Getting Religion skates over 60 years or so of the professional life of Kenneth Woodward. For most of that time, Woodward was the Religious Affairs man for the magazine Newsweek. The book is billed as an analysis of religious change in the United States. It is actually a memoir of religious war-stories (mostly Catholic) punctuated by some rather well-known sociological data and personal anecdotes. There is much about the good old days of uniform religious education and second generation immigrant culture in the American Mid-West. Interesting opinion, much less analysis, is simply absent.

There is, therefore, a great deal in Getting Religion to jog the memories of those of us old enough, but not yet senile, about the days of 'parochial' primary schools, nuns in starched linen, lily-white, post-war, suburban neighbourhoods in which children romped without supervision and without fear of molestation or abduction. Clergy were sacred; Catholic clergy were close to divine. Religion was terribly important but not at all serious from the President on down.

Then came Vatican II, the American Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the Beatles. The smug world of American civil religion crumbled much faster than the Roman Empire. Familial religious tradition went into meltdown. By the end of the 1960's Christianity, as it had been known in 1950, was dead. It was replaced by a vague sort of non-sectarian background spiritual radiation and a militant evangelicalism of Pentecostals, Mormons, and Baptists. The former constitutes today's politically liberal America; the latter has become the heart of American Republicanism. Guess which one is better organised.

There isn't much more than this level of insight in Woodward's book. But if you're craving a bit of cultural nostalgia, he could be your man.

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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What About the Children?

The Reader is a profound exposition of the 'second generation' issues concerning moral guilt for the Holocaust. But it is, I think, also relevant more generally to the way in which human beings get ensnared incrementally into the evils of their society. We are all inevitably involved in this larger problem. And, like the SS guards at a Nazi death camp, we are unaware of the moral peril of our situation, and unwilling to remove ourselves from that situation even when its harmful effects are obvious.

To be more personal and concrete: At the moment I have three acquaintances, each of whom has had a reasonably successful corporate career - one as an investment manager in the City, the second as a senior executive of an international sporting organisation, and the third as a partner of a global accounting firm. All three are, however, deeply dissatisfied with their lives.

Their marriages, they all feel, are on the edge of breakdown. One has had a psychological breakdown and is now institutionalised. Another has been made redundant and, despite a large payout, sees nothing but existential gloom for the rest of his days. The last is disgusted with the complete indifference of both his colleagues and clients to the visible harm their firms are inflicting on the world. All of them, it shouldn't be necessary to emphasise, 'volunteered' for the careers and styles of living they now suffer from.

A central question posed to The Reader's defendant in her trial for causing the death of Jewish prisoners trapped in a burning church is, "Why didn't you unlock the door?" I posed essentially the same question to my three acquaintances: "The situation you now find yourself in did not occur overnight." I gently suggested, "Therefore as you perceived what was happening to your mind, to your family, to the quality of your life, to national culture, why didn't you stop?" In principle, stopping is even less difficult than unlocking a door.

The reasons given for not stopping were almost identical in all three cases: "I can't afford to." The financial denotation of 'afford', however, wasn't the main point. Guilt in not providing what their families needed was important. Financial compensation had become just that - compensation for the companionship of marriage and family that had been denied. This was associated with a fear of the disappointment or disapproval by their friends and family. Success is naturally a social matter defined for us by those we know well. But upon pushing a bit harder, it was also clear that the common strand among them was that each believed he had somehow let himself down by not realising the full potential he believed he had in him.

This psychic driver of "being the best you can" struck loud bells in my own experience. It also reminded me of the remarkable book by Karen Ho, a social researcher from Princeton. Her ethnographic study of the life and culture of Wall Street, Liquidated, is as insightful as it is troublesome to anyone who asks themselves why indeed they have not simply unlocked the door to an alternative life. As she discovered in her employment in an investment bank, the culture of professional firms like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company is grounded in a simple, direct message: "You are here (or want to be here in the case of applicants) because you are the best and want to be among the best." Call it the Culture of Presumptive Excellence (CPE) for short.

CPE is what stimulates people to work consistently impossible hours, in places distant from home, with no respite. It also justifies the treatment of subordinates as corporate fodder, hiring and firing with panache, and insisting on single-minded loyalty as one moves up the ranks. Standards of excellence, after all, do not maintain themselves. In my experience, CPE, not compensation, or excitement, or 'perks', is the motive force of not just Wall Street but of the entire global corporate world. Escaping that world is no easier than escaping the totalitarian society of Nazi Germany. The identity and the obligations of 'being the best' is a very powerful lock indeed, without any obvious key.

Of course CPE is not merely a corporate problem; it is a societal problem. It is a problem of the perceived order. Schlink's war-trial defendant, Hanna, did not unlock the doors of the church to let the prisoners out, not because she is evil or because she was following orders. She was afraid, she says, of the disorder that would have ensued: prisoners running amok without the proper supervision to get them back in marching line.

It is this same disorder that my three acquaintances seem to fear most. The problem with being 'the best' is that the criterion for being best has to be set by someone with authority. The self-identity of the best depends on this. To reject this classification and the criteria that define it, one also must reject the authority that sanctioned it. This authority is so diffuse throughout society, that to reject it means to reject the entire society. The loss of both identity and context for establishing a new identity is the ultimate disorder, chaos.

Jean Korelitz, for example, herself a former admissions officer for Princeton, shows how pervasive the CPE is in the steps before entering the corporate world in her novel, Admission. Princeton's 'pitch' to applicants is exactly the same as that of the Wall Street firms to its applicants: "As the best, you will want to stay among the best, so apply to Princeton." The stage before this, entry into prep school, is also fictionalised from experience, in turn, by Louis Auchincloss, particularly in his novel, The Rector of Justin. The message doesn't vary: "We are the best and will help you stay among the best."

The destruction of personalities, families, and culture by CPE is systematic. And it is systematically defended even by those whom it excludes. The effects of CPE extend beyond those who are certifiably, as it were, the best to those who aspire to become part of the elite. Deficiencies are masked by the aspiration itself, which is merely the acceptance of the defining authority.

In The Reader, Hanna is able to hide her secret shame by joining the SS, an elite corps. I can say with a moral certainty that all three of my acquaintances have what are, to them, equivalent to Hanna's secret deficiencies. Fear of exposure is therefore a powerful motivation to keep the system going, to promote its stable orderliness even when it is so evidently destructive.

Schlink's narrator, Michael Berg, knows that Hanna could not have committed the crimes she is accused of because of the secret she is unwilling to reveal. She may be guilty but not as guilty as she appears, or of what she is charged with. What duty does he have to unlock the door with which she has imprisoned herself? To speak up, either to her or the court, would expose her to profound shame, greater shame even than that of being found guilty of war crimes perhaps. And if he does decide to speak up, how should he do it - to her? To her lawyer? To the judge? I feel the same dilemmas in advising my acquaintances, knowing that any mis-step could provoke yet more consternation as well as a pointed lack of gratitude for my solicited but still impertinent advice.

Berg's father, a philosopher, advises a simple ethical rule: don't try to second guess the criterion of the good that an individual has established for himself. This is useless advice. It simply anoints conformity as the ethical norm. Conformity is the opposite of resistance, a capacity for which is essential to avoid personal co-optation, to either totalitarianism or corporatism. Resistance which can take many forms. All of them dangerous because they challenge order and the power behind order. And all demand apparently un-virtuous behaviour. How can one advise such a course to anyone one cares about? Ultimately Berg fails to act at all.

I find myself in Berg's position. I feel any advice I can give is vapid. To suggest resistance against a corporate culture that is so pervasive and so domineering is madness. I can only ask the question "Best is the superlative for what?" But I can't answer the question. I am as trapped as anyone else. Will the children of my acquaintances, or my own, look at the lives of their parents with the same dismay as the so-called second generation of German children perceived their parents after 1945?

Schlink's story ends in tragic sadness and unresolved guilt. Perhaps no other ending is possible.

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Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Purpose of Family

At least since the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray, the family has been portrayed as the corrupter of those who are its hapless constituents: spouses fight for superiority or escape; ambitious fathers and mothers impose their ambition and snobbery on children who might have turned out better in other circumstances; siblings prosecute relentless rivalries; everyone is driven by the imperatives of family membership. Parental duty and earnestness are parodied and filial loyalty is mocked mercilessly. Families are termed 'dysfunctional' because it's members are certifiably neurotic.

Bee Season turns the tables on this traditional slander. Its four characters - Mother, Father, Son, and Younger Daughter - come into the family, not so much psychically damaged as incomplete and certainly neurotic. Each strives for completeness in his or her own way, assisting or inhibiting the others along the way. But it is in and through the family that all recognise both their inadequacies and the effect of their strivings on the others. Families, in other words, are therapeutic. Families mitigate the neuroses of individual members.

Father, for example, is a theological scholar who feels himself a failure for never having experienced the spiritual transcendence he seeks. Daughter is a prodigy at spelling who wants Father's attention and some social recognition. Adolescent Son tries to recapture an infantile feeling of the divine presence. Mother acts out her inadequacies in petty thievery. While the condition of the family is the arena in which they operate, none of these 'neuroses' has its origin in the family itself.

Despite their apparently diverse, and uniquely personal, objectives, each member of the family is secretly pursuing the same goal of completion. And it is the gravitational field of the family, it is difficult to find a word other than love for this field, which gives them the strength and confidence to do this. Their forays into the world, sometimes bizarre, always end with a return to the touchstone of family life, including the routine weirdness of each other. Each in their own way is 'excessive' but their excess is simply accepted by the others, not encouraged.

Eventually, secrets become public knowledge. And in the mirror of the family, everyone develops into his or her own person. They leave it. But this is not a failure of the family; it is its success. Not dysfunction, then, but precisely its function: to reveal what has been hidden and thrust it into the world. And the family persists in an entirely new form. An intriguing fiction that avoids cliche and provokes some interesting thought, therefore.

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The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bleak Expectations

Part spiritual memoir, part intellectual self-portrait, part textual exegesis, part fictional dramatisation, The Kingdom is of a genre not often encountered in Anglo-Saxon letters. It is a French invention. Fame in France - in politics, in journalism, in the arts - brings with it the opportunity, possibly the obligation, to bare one's beliefs and motivations - or lack of the same. Perhaps this is a sort of rationalist Cartesian cultural legacy. Bernard Henri-Levy writes in the same vein, for example, in his The Genius of Judaism.

But whereas Henri-Levy writes about his lost and found Judaism, Emmanuel Carrere writes about his lost and found and lost again Catholicism. And whereas Henri-Levy celebrates Judaism, Carrere questions the credibility of Christianity as essentially an extension of Greek mythology. His basic question: How is it that a religion so soaked in Greek myth and magic emerged from Jewish monotheism and has come to dominate so much of the world? Carrerre is quite right to point the finger at Paul of Tarsus and his gospel-writing bag-man, Luke. For it is this dynamic duo, neither of whom ever met Jesus, who promoted his cause so effectively, and so weirdly.

Unlike the writers of other parts of the New Testament, Luke and Paul are real people. That is, we know for sure that their identities are not some symbolic or composite name. Mark, Matthew and John, for example, are unknowns aside from their gospel monikers. Paul is certainly the author of a number of letters (but not all ascribed to him). He speaks frequently in the first person: I saw, I believe, I command. And so does Luke in those parts of his writing, namely the Acts of the Apostles, in which he has first hand experience.

Carrere recognises that it is Paul's interpretation of Jesus's teaching and its significance that is the basis for Christianity. Paul, rather than Jesus, is the Christian Moses. And it is he who seeks to displace Moses, and with him Judaism, as the chosen people who proclaim the existence of the one God. Christianity rises or falls - intellectually, culturally, politically - depending on one's faith, therefore, not so much in Jesus but in Paul. And Paul has more than his fair share of credibility issues in Carrere's estimation.

Carrere's technique of interpolating, of imagining, scenes and dialogue that supplement the gospels is one that is an ancient pious practice. Without it, Jesus and his followers become formulaic and inhuman, even in the four versions that have been deemed orthodox. Carrere's inventions are at least as plausible as the various Christmas story embellishments, for example. And for the most part they are done sympathetically, as consistent with the 'official' texts.

Paul's fundamental message, in Carrere's view, was that the world had undergone an evolutionary change through the life, but especially the death, of Jesus. The being of the world, what is known in Greek philosophy as its ontology, had been altered for the better. This message is incomprehensible and meaningless to Jews, who had never been schooled in the categories of Greek thought.

To say that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, was one thing. Such a claim might be wrong but it was plausible and could be debated. It was certainly not heretical. To say that this Messiah saved by changing the basis of existence, however, was nonsensical, except to Greeks. This implied not simply a replacement-Moses but a replacement-Genesis. And this is indeed heresy: if God had found what he had done "good," what need could there possibly be for a second try?

So Paul abandons his fellow-Jews and proselytises among the Gentiles. His preaching isn't about Jesus, whom he only knows second-hand; it is about Christ, whose sacrifice of himself somehow, Paul claims, creates a new cosmic order. It is this new arrangement of the world, its ontological character, not the person Jesus which is what Paul announces. Jesus's purported resurrection from the dead is merely the miraculous evidence for this new order.

There is no subsequent gospel story that confirms this new order among the stay-at-home Jews. Nor is there a clear relationship in these stories between the God of Israel and Jesus. Yet Paul is confident that Jesus should be worshipped as divine as part of this new arrangement. He is also confident that this new order, which he calls the kingdom, will become visible imminently. Little wonder then that Paul desisted from spreading his message too close to Jerusalem.

Told in such a clinical way, it is clear that the spread of Pauline Christianity could only have taken place in a cultural and intellectual environment like that of the Roman Empire. Rome was the source and enforcer of law. But Greek was the language and philosophical font of a largely Hellenised population. And Paul's doctrines fit far more easily into the Greek Pantheon than into the Jewish Temple. Confident of the imminent end of the world, Paul attracted what today would be classified as a cult following of those who were eagerly anticipating an apocalyptic resolution of the world's miseries.

Carrere bases much of his interpretation of sacred texts on what is generally called the New Criticism, that serious exegetical study of the bible, which is a reading from rather than a reading into the text. This method began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and continues as the dominant mode of biblical analysis today. One of its first proponents was the Frenchman Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus and History of the Origins of Christianity caused widespread scandal by treating biblical texts as historical documents. At Renan's hands, the pious myths of Christianity, particularly those of the kingdom, do not fare very well. Things have not improved at all since then for the credibility of the texts or the attempts over centuries to square Jewish monotheism with the Pauline divinity of Jesus. Carrere's summary of the results of the New Criticism, and his own speculations, are a good introduction to the discipline.

Alfred Loisy, the French theologian, excommunicated at the beginning of the 20th century because he dared to take the findings of the New Criticism seriously, created the enduring bon mot about Jesus, Paul, and the first Christians. "They expected the kingdom," he said, "But what arrived was the church." Not a bad summary of the summary.

Postscript: for more on Paul, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Marcel Malone by Lew Watts
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Beltway Neurotics

A cautionary chronicle of Yuppie suburban life in Washington, DC. He a lobbyist; she a psychotherapist, enjoying the best money can buy of the professional high-life. There is a name-dropping tour of the latest hip bistros with their selections of rare rums and ten course meals followed by candied strawberries. Their house in trendy Chevy Chase was purchased with daddy's money and their joint incomes only spur the desire for their increase to the next higher income-bracket.

The marriage is somewhat troubled, of course: he, obsessed by order and cleanliness, wants to get on in his career; she, catering to his demands resentfully, wants an intelligent conversation. The friends are banal professionals in places like the World Bank and similar international agencies who travel to less well-off places where they pontificate and negotiate lower prices for jewellery and art. Everyone drinks a bit too much but no one is watching very closely.

The protagonist psychotherapist-wife, Vera, 'makes a contribution' by addressing the neuroses of people unable to fill out a request for a new check book without help, or to date without stress. Her practice is punctuated by the occasional homicidal pedophile whom she dutifully turns over to the cops. When not with her clients, her mind moves from the issues of energy taxation to the poetry of Robert Frost with a facility and understanding enabled by her Georgetown education.

Vera's most important choices in life are what colour underwear to don and what gallery to visit between clients. She likes cracked crab and NPR. Who doesn't? The sex, of course is terrific, except when it isn't. She finds her solace in poetry about blossoming flowers. When her husband isn't selling or destroying new legislation, he watches baseball on the television. She can't tell a bunt from walk but adapts as required, primarily by obsessively speaking in iambic pentameter and ignoring his work for Big Coal.

Marcel is Vera's problematic but rewarding client. He writes her sonnets that report on his life between therapy sessions. She uses a range of apparently standard therapeutic techniques on Marcel - entrainment, paradoxical intervention, rapid-fire questioning - but, in good Jungian fashion, it's the writing and close reading of poetry that floats his boat. And it's the poetry that creates the breakthrough, for her as well as for Marcel.

There are secrets behind the middle-class facade that Vera's work with Marcel catalyses into awareness. Poetry, particularly the haikus she exchanges with Marcel, drown out sounds Vera would not like to hear. And it is poetry that also provokes her, under the veiled excuse of therapeutic necessity, to adopt an alternative persona and engage in online dating, "Just so I know what the experience is like." What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, clients die with uncomfortable frequency. And the therapist herself becomes more than a bit schizophrenic, deciding which persona to adopt with her husband, friends, surviving clients, and her random dates. On the plus side, Marcel has apparently had a breakthrough: his trauma was merely a misunderstanding, his father really had loved his mother after all. Everything tickety-boo on that front, therefore.

The skeletons in the therapist's closet eventually get revealed, however. Why they had to be revealed through an extensive discussion of the aesthetics of poetics is a mystery. Nabokov's Pale Fire is certainly better literature. Sylvia Plaith's Bell Jar is a much better demonstration of how poetry works in the psyche. And Ben Lerner's dope-soaked novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, actually does raise interesting questions about the connections between language and experience. Marcel Malone is puerile compared to any of these.

So, if Marcel Malone is meant to be a pragmatic justification of poetry as a sort of route to the inner self, it fails to make any significant connections between effective therapy and poetic skill. More likely, it seems, the author is someone who has discovered poetry as a sort of alternative universe to the sterile and false Beltway culture he realistically describes. If so, the book is merely trivial rather than inadequate. The poetry, in any case, seems as much a part of middle class pretentiousness as the trendy restaurants.

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The Fire Next Time 
by 

James Baldwin

 

Black Tyranny and How to Overcome It

We are what we read as well as what we eat. Because what we read brings us experiences we have never had. As Baldwin says elsewhere, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Reading The Fire Next Time cannot but change one's experience of the world. Written an half century ago, it sadly remains timeless. Sadly because the position of the black man in the America of white racism has not been remedied. 

White America still defines itself as 'not black'. White America has no other unifying force. Not religion, not culture, not history, not even language. Race is what determines all these things and more. The phrase "Make America Great Again" is not an abstraction. It is a call to rally against the threat of loss of racial identity, a threat which has been increased not diminished by the existence of a black man as president. Baldwin knew this: 

"... the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity... those innocents who believe that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grip on reality... If integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are."

The sight of a black president showed what black people are. The task of finding what white people are has yet to be started. Donald Trump knew his main chance lay not in directly exploiting American racism, something too powerful for Americans to confront, but in capitalising on American uncertainty, the threat to Americans' own self-image. Baldwin diagnosed this precisely: 

"It is the individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion let alone elucidation , of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality... whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."

Trump knows that without this touchstone of the self, he can say and do anything with impunity. Reality has no meaning. Baldwin understood the consequences.


American racism is best expressed in its religion, an evangelical, social, virtually tribal Christianity which has transcended sectarian divisions and has become the Republican Party at prayer. The foundation of this religion is not doctrinal but racial. As Harold Bloom, among others, have noted, the authentic American religion is a baptised Gnosticism, the principle feature of which is the dualistic separation of the world into literally its light and dark components. The belief in the ultimate triumph of the light is not a sterile, spiritual metaphor; it is a pervasive, concrete expectation. From the point of view of black America, Christianity had nothing to do with Faith, Hope, and Charity; Baldwin's experience is that it was designed to engender "Blindness, Loneliness, and Fear."

Baldwin understood the historical import Christianity and its American variant: 

"... the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul."

For Baldwin, this is not merely an historical fact which is ignored by Christians, it is the establishment of a pattern which culminates in the sanctification of white racism, 

"The struggle therefore that now begins in the world is extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in the realm of power - that is, politics - and in the realm of morals."

From missionary activities in Africa, to the enforced segregation of American churches (even those like the Pentecostalists which had been founded by black people), Christianity had been a persistent tool of black suppression.


Baldwin devotes a good proportion of the book to his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the militant Black Muslim movement. He recognises the charismatic power of the movement's message and the inherent drive for power of its leaders. So he distrusts them both. But Muhammad's pronouncements to him about the state of the world and the future of America in it is eerily prescient in light of subsequent Islamic militancy around the world. White people, he points out, are a global minority. America has no natural allies in the non-white world. Baldwin concludes that 

"... the American dream has become something much more closely resembling a nightmare on the private, domestic, and international levels... We are an unmitigated disaster."

Baldwin's solution is probably as relevant and as distant as it was in the 1960's: 

"The White man's unadmitted - and apparently to him, unspeakable - private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of the suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller's cheques, visits surreptitiously after dark."

To quote Trump, "What have you got to lose?”

 

Mother Night 
by 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

Spotting Fake News

Fake news did not arise with Donald Trump’s tweets. Propagandists of the Left and the Right have used it since before there was a Left and Right. America has always had a fascist edge. 19th century Nativists, Know-Nothings, Klansmen, Red Shirts, White Leaguers, and Constitutional Unionists invented fake news long before the John Birch Society, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs or the alt-Right of Steve Bannon claimed that mass media routinely hide the truth about immigrants, Jews, and Blacks. Fake news has been an American tradition since the first Federalists attacked Thomas Jefferson as a dupe of French radical revolutionaries.
 
Vonnegut's Mother Night is about fake news from the inside, and what it does to the insides of the man on the inside. Howard J. Campbell, a writer born in America, wrangles himself a job as chief copy-writer for Joseph Goebbels's Nazi Propaganda machine. His American-grown copy about the inhumanity of Jews impresses his boss because it goes beyond even what Nazi ideology had to say about Jewish perfidy. He is promoted to the position of lead radio-broadcaster of the Reich, and therefore tagged as a war criminal after the war, wanted by the Israelis.

But Campbell is a double agent, recruited by the Americans to relay secret messages hidden in his propaganda broadcasts. So, he is protected after the war but not acknowledged for diplomatic reasons. Returned to the United States, Campbell lives for fifteen years an open but shabby life in New York City on a private soldier's salary. Outed by a Soviet agent, he is targeted not just by the Israelis, but also by old soldiers who can't understand what they fought and suffered for but believe that Campbell is the cause of their distress.

Campbell realises that his participation in the creation of fake news requires a certain form of schizophrenia. Therefore, he recognises somewhat too late, one must be very careful about what one pretends to be. He equates his condition to the defective mechanism of the "cuckoo clock from hell". The clock occasionally tells the truth, but only unpredictably as its gears with missing cogs speed up or stop the works. 

This mechanical analogy, Campbell says, refers to a mental illness, one which is passed from generation to generation. He's right of course. The fascist tendency is a familial and widespread cultural tradition which has power because it has persisted at least as long as the American republic. There aren't just precedents, there are statutory requirements to support the idea of the conspiracy of the world against the American Way: The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Jim Crow laws of the American South, the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1918. 

It seems like the prototype of every American right wing populist lunatic from Huey Long to Father Coughlin finds his place somewhere in Mother Night. Groups like The Iron Guard of the White Sons of the Constitution and Moral Rearmament would be ludicrous if they didn't exist. But they do exist at precisely the nexus of religion and right wing ideology, with a little help from the Russians, that Vonnegut foresaw over a half-century ago. Today, these groups, as well as the Russians, seem to be in the ascendancy in the United States from the North Carolina Tea Party to the Neo-Nazi Montanans, and not forgetting the Republican Party.
 
Campbell finds a kind of salvation in his own disillusionment. One can only hope for similar personal revelations to the mass of Americans who have fallen for the latest version of fake news. But this seems unlikely to Campbell, who notes that:

"The dismaying thing about the totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined."

Check out Trump next time he smiles.