If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands

BTCNews has this charming photo of our President, and elsewhere this suggestion for dealing with dunning e-mails from the Democratic Party.

I wrote back to tell her that if she can explain to my satisfaction why the president named walking tumor Alan Simpson to head a wholly unnecessary deficit reduction commission, and why the president thinks he has the authority to assassinate US citizens on his own say-so, I will send her $5 by midnight Tuesday despite being on a fixed income of the sort that Alan Simpson despises. She probably gets a lot of email but since she doesn’t spend a lot of time sending it I’m hoping she’ll find the time to respond to mine before the Tuesday midnight deadline. I want to help!

I want to help, too! I want to help Barack Obama return to private life and a cozy cell in the Hague, next to George W. Bush.

The Young Man on the Staircase

Ah, I feel much better now: done with My Queer War, a hundred pages into Christopher and His Kind.

Maybe it's unfair to compare the two, since Isherwood was one of the great English prose writers of the twentieth century. I last read (or reread) Christopher and His Kind a quarter century ago, and I worried just a little that it wouldn't work for me now, but I'm getting enormous pleasure from it. Not just the writing, either: Isherwood's portraits of the people he knew and loved in Berlin from 1929 to 1939 are wonderful. This one, for example, of his acquaintance with Chris Wood, the partner (as we'd call him today) of Gerald Heard, "then a prominent figure in the British intellectual world" who "gave BBC radio talks explaining the latest findings of science in popular language" (101) :

Since Wystan [Auden] was primarily Gerald's friend, the two of them would withdraw to Gerald's room for abstruse scientific conversation, leaving Chris and Christopher alone together. Thus they quickly became intimate. It may even have been at their first meeting that Chris coyly asked Christopher if he had been at the Hirschfeld Institute on such and such a date. Christopher couldn't be sure but thought it was probable. Chris then told him that this was the day on which he had visited the Institute and had very briefly glimpsed, going up the staircase, the most attractive young man he had ever seen in his life. Chris implied that this young man might have been Christopher. He also implied that Christopher, as Chris now saw him, was sadly inferior to that glimpse. Therefore, the attractive man was either an untraceable stranger whom Chris could never hope to meet again; or he was Christopher, in which case he didn't exist ... Chris cherished frustrations of this sort. He would gloat over the impossibility of finding the delicious marmalade which he had had for breakfast when he was six. The young man on the staircase was to become a private joke between Chris and Christopher for many years [103].

You'll notice that Isherwood refers to his younger self in the third person, as "Christopher," though he often speaks in the first person as well. This is partly because of the forty-year gap between Christopher in Berlin and the writing of Christopher and His Kind, but also because Isherwood had written about himself and many of these people in his earlier fiction, especially the Berlin Stories that were adapted as I Am a Camera and Cabaret. "Christopher Isherwood" is a fictional character as well as the writer who created him, and part of Isherwood's aim in this book was to "be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned" (1), and he's often critical of his younger self. I still feel guilty when I read of young Christopher's war with his mother Kathleen, recognizing in it some of my adolescent rebellion against my own mother, which I regret now.

I wonder, though, how Isherwood's style will look to people much younger than I am. I've become aware of just how rapidly language changes: not just over centuries but between generations. I've noticed, when rereading some writers of even my parents' generation, let alone my grandparents' (Isherwood was born in 1904), that prose that felt 'modern' when I read it in high school, in the 1960s, has begun to look old-fashioned to me now. In Laura Miller's The Magician's Book she describes her surprise that she couldn't connect with the work of George MacDonald, the 19th century fantasy writer C. S. Lewis loved as Miller had formerly loved Lewis: "By all rights, the book that had had the same effect on Lewis ought to move me deeply, but it doesn't ... How to explain why certain stories exert a power that feels virtually biological over me, while leaving other readers cold?" This isn't purely generational, of course -- most of Lewis's peers couldn't see what he saw in MacDonald's writing either -- but I think it is a factor. The conventions not just of storytelling but of style and sentence-making, and the English language itself, have changed since the 1800s. And also since the 1920s and 1930s. It often takes patience to hear again the writing voices that moved us decades ago, and even more to encounter them for the first time as their day recedes further into the past.

Christopher and His Kind is about a period that was already past when it was published, the world of Europe between the World Wars. The double vision Isherwood employs -- his older self looking at his very well-documented younger self -- helps to bridge the gap. It also helps that Isherwood was, by temperament and conscious choice, so upbeat about being a "bugger." (That was Isherwood's term of choice in the 30s, a reminder of how acceptable labels cycle and recycle. Like many buggers of his generation, he hated "gay.") There's no apology, no self-pity here, and it makes Christopher and His Kind still refreshing to read, even compared to later writing by much younger writers.

How Long, O Lord, How Long?

Back to my grumpy face for a moment, because I'm still slogging through the mud of James Lord's My Queer War, and I'm feeling a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here. Compare this:

Japan had hardly been endeared to me by Teddy’s fate [killed by a Japanese sniper in the Pacific], and in fact even before Pearl Harbor I’d felt neither sympathy nor curiosity toward a remote and occult country, which the feudal dictatorships had reluctantly revealed to Western eyes less than a century before. Adding to my distaste was the Japanese liking for sadism and cruelty confirmed by shameless atrocities [296-7].

with this:

Nevertheless, the first of these vanquished survivors [Nazi POWs!] were soon to be seen trudging sadly and sullenly along Germany’s roadsides. It was difficult not to feel a certain compassion for them, a quickening of sympathy. They had fought bravely and much, much too well, defiant to the end even when the end threatened to be theirs [297].

To be fair, Lord immediately and reflexively adds: "Then the Satanic question inevitably popped up: Did they know?" But despite the "shameless atrocities" which confirmed German "sadism and cruelty," despite the "feudal dictatorship" to which they'd submitted (and the US had done business with quite happily), Lord can feel a certain compassion for them, even to playing "Das Lied der Deutschen" on the piano for a local audience in a German gasthaus. (But he wasn't responsible -- he'd "played into their hands" [302]!)And we won't even bring up the American atrocities -- the torture of prisoners, the murder of displaced persons -- that Lord himself witnessed during his tour of Europe.



I don't hold any brief for the Japanese, whose cruelty in Asia was indeed monstrous. But it's interesting -- telling, even, though I'm not sure what it tells -- that Lord could summon up some fellow-feeling for Nazis though not for the Japanese, who if no better were no worse.

Almost 50 pages still to go.

The Magician's Book

I've been giving my grumpy side free rein lately, so I figured I should write about a book I really like: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008). Though, as the title makes clear, Miller's focus is on C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the subject of the book is reading -- what it means to be a reader, how one learns to read, and the complex relationship between the writer, the writing, and the reader.

Miller was handed a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by a teacher when she was in second grade. For a few years she read and reread the series, though she also read and loved other books too. But as she grew older, things changed.

Although I miss the childhood experience of being engulfed by a story, I would not willingly surrender my adult ability to recognize when a writer is taking me someplace I don't want to go. In my early teens, I discovered what is instantly obvious to any adult reader: that the Chronicles of Narnia are filled with Christian symbolism and that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers a parallel account of the Passion of Christ. I'd been raised as a Catholic, but what faith I'd had was never based on anything more than the fact that children tend to believe whatever adults tell them. As soon as I acquired any independence of thought, I drifted away from the Church and what I saw as its endless proscriptions and requirements, its guilt-mongering and tedious rituals. So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the church in disguise. I looked back at my favorite book and found it appallingly transfigured. Of course, the self-sacrifice of Aslan to compensate for the treachery of Edmund was exactly like the crucifixion of Christ to pay off the sins of mankind! How could I have missed that? I felt angry and humiliated because I have been fooled [6].

About ten years ago, Miller was assigned to write about the book that had meant the most to her, so she reread the Chronicles of Narnia to see how she responded to them as an adult.

When I finally came back to Narnia, I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or its beauty, or at least not entirely. Although I am a little bit abashed about this ... the radiant books of my youth still seem radiant to me. Yet there are aspects of Narnia I can no longer embrace with the childish credulousness that [Graham] Greene describes. ... Nevertheless, what I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it, and the contents of my own mind still have the capacity to surprise me when I study them carefully enough [8].

It's not easy to review a book. There's so much going in any text of any length that it's hard to keep track of it all. I was always nervous when I did book reviewing that I'd make some awful embarrassing mistake. Reviewers do this, as any fan of a book will know. The book editor of the Seattle Times, for example, smooshed together Miller's original encounter with Narnia with her disillusionment:

Literary critic Laura Miller first passed through the Narnia portal in the second grade. She was raised Catholic but had fallen away from what she calls the church's "guilt-mongering and tedious rituals." She writes, "I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrine of the Church in disguise."

If Miller could have read the Chronicles that way in the second grade, she probably would never have come to love them: her disillusionment was deepened by her earlier acceptance of the tale. She would also have been remarkably precocious, since few if any second-graders can spot multiple meanings in stories this way; many adults never manage to do it. The reviewer continues:

But Miller could never escape Narnia's spell, and in "The Magician's Book," she returns to the landscape of Narnia to search for its deeper meaning.

To her credit, the reviewer acknowledges, "It's a journey of great pleasure -- Miller is a wise, down-to-earth and often funny narrator. The result is one of the best books about stories and their power that I have ever read." Here I agree on every point; I'd only add that it is also a book about readers and their power, how we learn to understand stories in all their richness.

The Magician's Book contains a wealth of ideas and stories, partly the result of following up her original assignment. Miller interviewed many fans and critics of Narnia, starting with the teacher who first gave her the book.

Long before I learned of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before it was even written, a twelve-year-old girl named Wilanne Belden walked two miles once a week to the library in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to check out the maximum quantity of five books. It was the Depression, and buying any book was a luxury. The deal Wilanne's parents struck with her was that if she checked out the same title from the library three times, and read it from cover to cover, she could have a copy of her own. This arrangement worked well enough until Wilanne discovered what would become her favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (then in its first edition, before even Tolkien himself knew the significance of Bilbo Baggins's magic ring). The Hobbit is long for a children's book, and by the time she had read it three times, it had gone out of stock in bookstores. Buying a copy was no longer an option. So Wilanne decided to make her own, checking the book out of the library over and over again, typing up a couple dozen pages at a time using two fingers on the family's manual typewriter. She got as far as page 107 before the book returned to the stores [21].

This story won me over completely. I made my own handwritten copies of poems I liked in high school, copied from Louis Untermeyer's anthologies, not so much because I couldn't afford the books themselves (though I couldn't), but because copying them out by hand helped me to concentrate on the poems. And I recognize that craving to own a copy of a book one loves.

I'm lucky, because I still get immersed, lost, in books I'm reading. Not always, of course, but often enough. Sometimes it even happens with non-fiction, as it did with parts of The Magician's Book.

The Seattle Times reviewer concluded, "It will come as no surprise that the rift between Miller, a bright young girl grown older and wiser, and Lewis, a magician of stories and their power, ends in reconciliation." I don't think "reconciliation" is the right word, though of course it's the kind of thing many people like to believe. Miller remains a "skeptic," as her subtitle labels her, and she remains critical of Lewis as man and, more important, as writer. Though the books are still "radiant" for her, she probably dislikes more about Narnia than she did as a teenager, because she's older and more knowledgeable now. That, I think, is part of what it means to be an adult: to be able to love without blinding oneself to the shortcomings of the beloved, and perhaps also to separate the artist from the art.

One Amazon user complained that Miller didn't cut Lewis much slack, but I think that only an idolatrous fan could think so; Miller cuts him a great deal of slack, more than most of his Christian fans seem to be able to do. Because they can't admire him or his work while admitting any failings at all, they have to deny, excuse, explain them away. "C. S. Lewis’s most devoted Christian readers regard his writings as, if not quite sacred, then at least sacralized," Miller says. "For them, the temptation to deny that he held a lot of objectionable opinions is very strong" (171). Anyone who can see Lewis more or less whole must be wholly on the other side; there is no middle ground. It's odd, but not at all unusual, I think, that it's Christians -- who like to suppose that only they really grasp human imperfection (or "sinfulness") -- who refuse to see any imperfection in someone like Lewis, and a non-Christian like Miller who, because she doesn't see Lewis as a saint, doesn't need to deny that he had feet of clay.

There's more I'd like to write about The Magician's Book, but it'll keep until later. Happy Labor Day!

The Man Who Got Away

I'll probably finish reading James Lord's My Queer War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), having passed the halfway point today. If I'd checked it out from a library, I probably wouldn't have gotten that far, but I bought it: partly because the subject was interesting -- the World War II experiences of a gay man of my parents' generation -- and partly because the book had received rapturous reviews. I'd only read one of Lord's previous books, the 1965 A Giacometti Portrait, and don't remember anything of it, for good or bad.

My Queer War has been a serious disappointment. The writing ranges from the serviceable -- when Lord writes about his interaction with other people -- to the dire. I've come to believe that there may be no objective criteria for good or bad writing, so I'll try to explain what bothers me about Lord's prose and let the reader form his or her own opinion. Maybe this is what's meant by good writing, who knows? But I don't think so.

Lord breaks one of the rules that got hammered into my head long ago, not only in school but in most of what I've read about being a good writer: don't overuse modifiers. Lord can't seem to use a noun without duct-taping an adjective to it, a verb without an adverb -- and he often chooses them badly. Here are some examples.

Presently, time having freed me from potato purgatory, the preposterous promise of Thanksgiving loomed. I had none to give, especially to myself, but welcomed with dogged stiffness of lip my parents, come to Atlantic City to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my birth [12].

Madame sat in a canvas camp chair under the grape arbor, as usual, a portrait of mature composure in the face of adversity. When I went to kiss her on both cheeks -- a la francaise -- she held in her lap a copy of Sagesse, and I thought she was wise indeed to seek the wisdom of quietude in the literature of her homeland as it lay under the dominion of diligent torturers [78].

I told Mother and Dad the tale of my devil-may-care escape from the implausible bouts of chemical warfare caused by an urbane display of intellectual know-how [78].

As I read it, that last sentence implies that Lord had seen actual (if implausible) bouts of chemical warfare, when in fact he'd been stationed at a chemical-weapons storage site in Nevada, working in an office. And, as written, it was those bouts of chemical warfare, rather than his escape from them, that were caused by an urbane display of intellectual know-how.

Frank Mariano Fasolo was born in Brooklyn, brought up in a large, old-fashioned brownstone house, almost a mansion, in Park Slope, spacious enough to lodge Frank's parents, grandparents, and one great-aunt, all of whom to their everlasting honor dwelt together in judicious compatibility. Such a serene exception to the contentiousness of human nature was surely due to the atavistic affinity of the Fasolo men for civil harmony [284].

When I showed some of these gems to a bookseller I know, after groaning about purple prose he muttered that no one edits books these days. That's not true, but it does seem to be haphazard, and not just for prestigious writers and their products. If only James Lord had had a Sassy Gay Friend to cry "What, what, what are you doing?" whenever he sat down to write, this book might have been avoided.

The examples I've given could be multiplied (I took notes!), but my reader will either have suffered enough already, or have been so enthralled by Lord's writing that he or she will have run out to buy the book. They aren't the whole story, though. When Lord describes his coming-out in the gay underworld of Boston, My Queer War changes manner and becomes more like a 1940s or 1950s gay novel, the kind described so well by Angelo D'Arcangelo in The Homosexual Handbook (Olympia Press, 1968):

If, in first years of the fifties, you had a box of bonbons and a chaise longue, it was perfect reading. One could weep tears of immaculate self-pity, as with anguished self-identification, we read of the twisted, blighted-too-soon love of these unfortunates. ... How we loved it! Oh, well, you couldn't get anything else then. But it set the tone [230].

It was interesting to hear about the difficulties and rewards of finding other gay men as friends and sex partners in a very different era, though despite gay men's greater cultural visibility nowadays I'm not sure things have changed that much. In particular his account of the golden Hanno, another GI he met while stationed in Nevada, could have happened today.

Lord also was apparently a believer in Genius, which he conceived as a sort of sun lamp, in whose rays he could bask to get a spiritual tan. He was fickle, though:

Ulysses meanwhile had fallen out of luck for me. The recondite tribulations of a prestidigitator with language no longer felt quite so relevant. What was wanted now was something more warming to the workaday heart, less chilled by arcana of the intellect. Joyce said that a man of genius changes the world. He does. And I believed with all my being in the life-enhancing grandeur of genius. Individual men had brought about all the momentous advances of civilization. Dante and Newton, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Michelangelo. Only four of that stature were then living -- Einstein, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, and Picasso - and they were all regrettably remote from Reno, Nevada [48].

In time, Lord managed to meet Picasso, and even to get the great man to sketch his portrait. But when he held the sketch in his hands,

I was disappointed. ... It's true Picasso's attention and creative faculties had not been engaged to serious effect either by his model or by his drawing while I sat before him in the restaurant. I saw in my portrait principally evidences of haste and indifference, its inadequacy, not my own [209].

So he set himself to getting Picasso to do it again, but this time "something more worthy of a creative future" (248). Later he wrote a postcard to Thomas Mann, assuring the author that he'd been meaning to write a letter but had been too busy, "so I write this now to say that I am thinking of the letter and will write it when I have time" (237). You'd think that Mann, not Lord, was the suppliant. For someone who claimed to adore Genius, Lord was oddly willing to judge it and order it around.

All this makes for a frustrating reading experience, given the material's inherent interest, but finishing the book is my penance for having bought it without looking at it more closely. Contrary to the blurb from Larry Kramer (whose endorsement should have warned me off right away), there has been anything quite like My Queer War before, from the graphic biography Alan's War by Emmanuel Guibert (First Second, 2008), which has some incidental gay characters; to Sanford Friedman's novel Totempole (Dutton, 1965), which features a romance between an American GI and a Korean POW; to Allan Berube's oral history of gay and lesbian World War II vets Coming Out Under Fire (Free Press, 1990); to Mary Renault's The Charioteer (Longmans Green, 1953) about a gay British soldier in World War II. For memoirs by gay men of my parents' generation or before, there's always Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), which it's high time I reread.

The Destruction Was Mutual

An excellent article at Counterpunch by William Blum. Here's what he has to say about the US and Afghanistan:

In their need to defend the US occupation of Afghanistan, many Americans have cited the severe oppression of women in that desperate land and would have you believe that the United States is the last great hope of those poor ladies. However, in the 1980s the United States played an indispensable role in the overthrow of a secular and relatively progressive Afghan government, one which endeavored to grant women much more freedom than they'll ever have under the current government, more perhaps than ever again. Here are some excerpts from a 1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the policies of this government concerning women: “provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men”; “abolished forced marriages”; “bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs”; “extensive literacy programs, especially for women”; “putting girls and boys in the same classroom”; “concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics”.

The overthrow of this government paved the way for the coming to power of an Islamic fundamentalist regime, followed by the awful Taliban. And why did the United States in its infinite wisdom choose to do such a thing? Mainly because the Afghan government was allied with the Soviet Union and Washington wanted to draw the Russians into a hopeless military quagmire -- "We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War”, said Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser.

The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory.

Brzezinski has denied this allegation, but it's certain that the US sided with the Islamists against the modernizers in Afghanistan.

The whole article is worth your attention -- see especially the section on Cuba.

Every Which Way But Wrong

I just finished reading Sara Paretsky's new novel Body Work, starring her Chicago private investigator V. I. Warshawski. Paretsky's one of the writers whose work I'll buy and read pretty much as soon as it's published, despite my occasional political disagreements with her. I bought Body Work the day it appeared in my local independent bookstore, and read it a few days later because I needed to be in V. I.'s world.

Near the end of the book, V. I.'s young cousin Petra, who's been tagging along with her since the previous book (Hardball), hoping for excitement, realizes that there's such a thing as too much excitement. So she tells V. I.:

"I don't want to leave you in the lurch or anything, but, Vic, I don't think I'm cut out for detective work. People getting shot or cut to bits, I hate it. I was so scared last Sunday. And then I saw how tough and cool you were, and, don't take this the wrong way, I don't want to be like you when I'm your age. Like, living alone, and being so hard that violence doesn't seem to bother you."

"How could I take that the wrong way?" I said in my hard fashion [438].

That caught my eye because I remembered a time about twenty years ago when someone said almost exactly the same thing to me - except for the violence, which has never been part of my cowardly life, but probably including some version of "Don't take this the wrong way." The person who said to me was a gay man half my age (twenty-one to my forty-one at the time), who didn't want to be living alone when he was 40, didn't want to turn out to be like me. I was annoyed at him, as V. I. was at Petra, but also amused: the young man in question was a hard drinker with a number of public-intoxication arrests on his record, a former college student with no particular skills, who moved back and forth between his divorced parents' homes in different states when he ran out of money. I don't think I retorted that I didn't want to be him either, but I'm sure I thought it. I don't know what became of him, though thanks to the Web, I know he's still alive.

But in fairness, at his age I probably would have felt the same way about the person I eventually became. Like many young people I believed that the only worthwhile life is a coupled one, and like many young gay people I thought that it was necessary for us to form successful couples to justify our existence. When my friend criticized me for living alone at 40, he knew that I'd broken up with a live-in partner not that long before, and at the time I wouldn't have taken for granted that I wouldn't get involved with someone again.

I don't think so anymore, and I can't imagine being coupled again: not because I've 'given up,' but because I don't feel like giving anyone that much of my time and energy anymore. I'm neither alone much of the time -- thanks to a busy workplace, friends, and sexual partners -- nor lonely. Now that I'm nearly sixty and feel the shortness of the time left to me, compounded by the impossibility of knowing exactly how much time I have left, I'm determined to maintain my personal space. I couldn't have felt this way at twenty, or thirty.

Anyway, I was pleased to find that passage in Body Work. Paretsky herself is apparently happily married, but I'll bet she knows people who've been told what Petra told V. I. I wonder how many of us busy, involved, active singles in middle age have been told the same thing, and after the initial annoyance wears off, have thought that we wouldn't want our lives to be any different -- except, perhaps, for having found out sooner how much we needed to be single.