In A Lonely Place - Dorothy B. Hughes

Check out this nicely creepy 1947 noir that is a cross between Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955).  Since In a Lonely Place came first, I wonder if either or both Thompson or Highsmith were influenced by Dorothy B. Hughes.  If this novel is any indication of her other work, she was a proud 15-minute egg among the hard-boiled.

This short, sharp novel is as gritty and gloomy as you could desire, and Hughes' sentences are brutally beautiful.  They're cold and pointed like icicles precariously hanging on an upstairs window.  In a Lonely Place is not a mystery; the killer is known pretty early on.  It's more a question of when and how will the cops figure everything out?  Also, at what point is the switch from the killer toying with them to them toying with him?

My only nitpick is that the two main characters have such silly names -- Dix Steele (yes, I snickered) and Brub Nicolai --that it was difficult at times for me to not overly focus on that aspect.  But that's just a tiny grievance, compared to the enjoyment I got out of the book.  I'm a Dorothy B. Hughes fan now and I want to read her other works, especially Ride the Pink Horse, The Blackbirder and her critical biography of Erle Stanley Gardner.

In a Lonely Place was made into a movie in 1950 starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.  The movie resembles the book only superficially.  Bogart's character isn't a killer, but he's a classic example of fubb.  In some ways, he's even more intriguing than the Dix Steele portrayed in Hughes' novel.  It's a fascinating movie which I'll re-watch sometime when I have some distance from the book.  Being a Bogart
fan, I'm sure I would have liked it better if I hadn't been expecting a more faithful rendition of the novel.

Canadian Book Challenge 4: My Wussy American Self Falls Short Again

This challenge is almost at an end, and I'm not going to be able to complete it successfully.  If I had an airplane I still couldn't make it on time.  Eleven books.  Close, but no Canadian cigar.  No celebratory mug of Moosehead.  No congratulatory call from Alex Trebek -- but don't cry for me, Nova Scotia.  I'm smiling through my maple leaf-shaped tears, because I made some excellent reading discoveries this year and after all, there's always Canadian Book Challenge #5, eh?

Here's my list for the year:

1. Gone to an Aunt's:  Remembering Canada's Homes for Unwed Mothers - Anne Petrie.

2. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler.

3. The Diviners - Margaret Laurence.

4. Piling Blood - Al Purdy.

5. To Paris Never Again - Al Purdy.

6. Me Write Book:  It Bigfoot Memoir - Graham Roumieu.

7. The Cariboo Horses - Al Purdy.

8. The Tenderness of Wolves - Steph Penney.

9. Room - Emma Donoghue.

10. 50 Below Zero - Robert Munsch.

11. The Road Past Altamont - Gabrielle Roy.

Canadian Book Challenge 4: The Road Past Altamont - Gabrielle Roy

The Road Past Altamont is a slim volume of four stories about a young girl named Christine growing up on the prairies of Manitoba.  Roy's style is dreamlike and introspective, but it's infused with a luminous kind of energy.  In the first selection, "My Almighty Grandmother", Christine, who is six years old, goes to stay with her grandmother and feels quite bored and irritated until her grandmother creates a doll for her.  It's not so much having a new toy as the act of creation that mesmerizes Christine, who was staunchly convinced up to that point that dolls only came from stores.

Soon after that, the grandmother, who is steadily declining, comes to live with Christine and her family.  At the end of her life, she can no longer speak or move, and Christine's mother despairs of reaching her.  Christine gets the idea of retrieving the family album and calling out to her grandmother the names of everyone in the pictures.  "In this way, it seemed to me, Grandmother would be able to gather once more into her mind all those who belonged to her."  Christine's mother walking by the bedroom, catches Christine at her new pastime and  gives her

"a sad and very tender smile...But why did she look so pleased with me?  I was only playing, as she herself had taught me to do, as Memere also  had played with me one day...as we all play perhaps, throughout our lives, at trying to catch up with one another."

In the second story, "The Old Man and the Child", Christine is slightly older.  She strikes up a friendship with one of her neighbors, an old man named Monsieur St-Hilaire during the hot prairie summertime.  Each admires the other's imagination, and when the old gentleman finds out that Christine has never seen a large body of water, he arranges a trip to Lake Winnipeg for the two of them.  In one of the most arresting images in the book, they sit on the sand by the water, dressed up in their best clothing while people laugh and cavort all around them.  They just sit solemnly and look at the breakers and listen to "the deep song of the lake".

In "The Mover" Christine's mother (Maman) finds out what comes of having fed her daughter's imagination with stories of traveling from Quebec to Manitoba by covered wagon when she herself was a little girl.  Christine, who is now eleven years old, has always lived in the same home, and when she strikes up an acquaintance with the daughter of a man who moves furniture with his horse and cart to earn a little extra money, she is determined to accompany him on one of these moves so she can have a similar experience to her mother's.  Christine understands that moving ideally means going to something bigger and better, so she is disillusioned when the mover takes a family from one ugly shack in Winnipeg to an almost identical one on the other side of the city.  This is the least introspective of the four stories and the most entertaining.

The last story is the title story.  Christine is a young adult now and driving her mother to visit her relatives.  Maman is starting to pine for the hills she left behind in her childhood, and while traveling the back roads to take a shortcut to the highway, Christine gets lost and somehow ends up in the Pembina Mountains, which is the only mountain range in their part of Manitoba, which delights Maman.  Their only clue as to how they could possibly find their way back again is a post office sign for Altamont.  They go back again later and find some hills, but Maman is sure that they are not "their" hills, and that Christine has carelessly lost the way.  Furthermore, Christine has expressed a longing to leave Manitoba and go abroad to Europe, so Maman is feeling a double betrayal.

I've never read another writer that reminded me so much of Virginia Woolf -- that same strong combination of intelligence, empathy and elegance.  What a wonderful introduction to this author's work.  I want more.  The next book I'll be looking for by Gabrielle Roy is her 1945 novel The Tin Flute.

Canadian Book Challenge: 50 Below Zero - Robert Munsch

I read and enjoyed this picture book back when The Spawn was an elementary school student and very much attached to anything Robert Munsch wrote. This was my favorite.  I'm not sure which one The Spawn liked best.  I do remember the time Robert Munsch came to town, though.  I'd never seen a bookstore so full of people in my life.  Fans of all ages were lined up clear out the door and down the sidewalk.

I ordered 50 Below Zero a few months ago to beef up the children's section of the Bybee-ary and had every intention of reading it to my Children's Literature class. During the semester, I put a really strong emphasis on the importance of picture books and gave the class a list of all the ways that they are important to a child's development as a reader.  This approach worked very well for a class of 62 second language learners whose levels were all over the place.   I was sorry we didn't get to 50 Below Zero, but we ran out of time.

Instead, I ended up reading it to my Native English 1 class.  One of the units had a reading exercise about a woman who not only sleepwalked, she sleepdrove the car one night.  There  were also some discussion questions about the best way to handle sleepwalkers.  We had 10 minutes left at the end of class, so I decided to read 50 Below Zero to them.  They loved the silliness, the repetition and the hilarious illustrations by Michael Martchenko.  Determined to wring every bit of English out of them that I could, I asked the students to translate the title into Celsius. "-45.5555" just doesn't pack the same punch, eh?

The Help - Kathryn Stockett

Part of my problem is that I'm so completely over Southern American fiction written by women.*  Blame it on the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and their Divine Secrets and their subsequent Bloom.  They accomplished what Anne Rivers Siddons could not, although she came close.  I cracked.  I wolfed down that final praline, packed up, scrambled over that last jasmine bush and  ran off in search of my Inner Yankee Male.

I read The Help because of my Bookleaves book group.  It was a pretty fast read; author Kathryn Stockett knows how to keep a story going.  Although I was racing along, a hum of irritation started up in my bookworm nerve endings and got louder as the novel went on.

This book is The Secret Life of Bees, except inverted.  Both books take place in the early 1960s in the deep South and the Civil Rights movement is starting to catch on.  Three wise black women help Lily, a confused and abused young southern girl in Sue Monk Kidd's book.  In The Help, a wise young southern girl-woman named Skeeter helps three confused and abused black women.  Everyone else is spineless, villainous, prejudiced or crazy in both books. Sometimes, they dip a toe in all those categories like Skeeter's mom and Lily's dad.  Lily and Skeeter both have that thin cutesy, folksy plaintive voice (and so does Daisy Fay from Fannie Flagg's first novel, come to think of it) that drives me dippy.  Nails on the chalkboard. 

Another thing that gave me the fantods was all that hinting.  I don't mind when a writer lets something drop in the first chapter, and I go right over it, um hmm because when she picks it up again at the end, I go Oh yeah...and I feel all smarty and pleased with both the writer and myself.  But I  don't feel smarty and pleased when a hint or an allusion gets dropped again and again AND AGAIN like a big brass spittoon on my bare foot.  I feel like snarling.  I feel as if the writer thinks I'm a dumbass that can't remember 35 pages back.

It would have been bad enough if Stockett had done it once, but she turned her hint bag upside down and shook it like a Polaroid picture.  She hinted repeatedly about:  What Minnie did,  what Skeeter's asshole boyfriend's ex-girlfriend did,  there was that wtf?-ery about Celia and Johnny and finally, the truth about Constantine.**  Everyone in the book sighed and opened and closed their mouths so often when the subject of her disappearance came up that I was reminded of that Zombies song Time of the Season. "Oh come on, spit it out," I grumbled more than once.  When they finally did, it was usually a letdown.

One last thing:  Stockett did her research for The Help.  She carefully, meticulously researched her time period.  I know it because I crashed into a historical or cultural reference every time I turned the page.  JFK.  Medgar Evers.  To Kill A Mockingbird.  Bob Dylan.***  The Surgeon General on smoking.  Tabs on beer cans.  It felt like too much furniture in the room.

So, after all that bitching and carping, I have to admit that I'm going to try and catch the movie version when it comes out in August.  I'm a little disappointed that Aibileen isn't being played by Morgan Freeman (that's whose voice I heard in my head during her sections in the book), but I want to see Cicely Tyson and I'm intrigued by the casting of Bryce Dallas Howard as the evil Hilly Holbrook, a gal who really loves her pie.  After the movie, I'm really done with you, Female Southern American Literature.  I'm closing my door.  Unless you're a Zora Neale Hurston book, don't come a-knockin'.

*This type of fiction and I had a good long run, starting with Gone with the Wind when I was 12.

**I kind of liked Kathryn Stockett's choice of a name for this character.

***Wes Tooke in Lucky: Maris, Mantle and My Best Summer Ever also used To Kill a Mockingbird and Bob Dylan to establish an early 1960s setting. As much as I love Harper and Zimmy, isn't there some fresh way to express this?

On Father's Day: It was 30 years ago today...

Up until my twentieth year, I let my mom do the heavy lifting when it came to giving gifts.  She would decide on an appropriate gift, buy the gift, purchase the accompanying card and hand them to me to wrap and sign.  She was, and is, a master at shopping.  Who was I to stand in the way of genius, especially as it was zooming to the mall?

One spring day in 1981, I was at the mall myself.  While at Waldenbooks, in the "Movies, Music & TV" section (looking at movie books), I saw a biography of Hank Williams called Your Cheatin' Heart by Chet Flippo.  I recognized Flippo's name from Rolling Stone magazine, to which I had been a faithful subscriber since high school.  I had always read Chet Flippo's articles, with interest, since he was slowly but persistently introducing country music into the usual rock/pop coverage.  Of course I recognized Hank Williams' name because country music reigned supreme with both my parents.

I wanted to buy the book because of Chet Flippo, but I didn't necessarily want to read about Hank Williams.  Plus, this was a hardcover book, which would eat up most of a ten dollar bill.  Then it hit me:  Mother's Day had just passed.  That meant that Father's Day was coming up soon.  I would get this book for my father, and we could both read it and discuss it!

Giddy with bookworm glee, I cast my mind into the near future, and imagined the beginnings of a father/daughter book group in which we sat in front of the fireplace and render earnest and insightful pronouncements about what we'd read together.  My father would wear his tweed sweater with the leather patches on the elbows and smoke his pipe.  The flickering fire would cast shadows on my face, making it look deep and intellectual.  Never mind that our military base housing didn't have a fireplace, my father favored western shirts with snap buttons, he was a cigarette kind of guy and Hollywood itself  would have struggled to make me look even remotely bright.  Never mind all of that.  This book contained possibilities.  I headed for the cash register.

A couple of weeks later, my mom told me what gifts she was going to buy for my father which would be from my brother and me.  "I've got it covered," I told her.  "Oh?" she said.  I showed her the book. "Oh...OK.  Don't forget the card."  I got a little snooty.  "Actually, I've got that covered as well."  I didn't.  I had forgotten the card.  Oh well, back to the mall.  No biggie.

I have a little confession here:  I got terribly impatient for Father's Day to arrive and started reading Your Cheatin' Heart.  I was being very careful to read in my room with the door closed and wash my hands before handling the book.  He'd never suspect it was a used book.  My rationalization was that as soon as Dad finished the book, we could get the discussion underway immediately.  I didn't really like how Flippo had fictionalized it up a bit, presuming that he knew Hank's thoughts, but he'd done his research well.  I never knew about Williams' substance problems stemmed chiefly from his lifelong struggle with pain from spina bifida.

Father's Day finally rolled around.  My father read the book.  Every evening I saw him reading a few pages.  Finally, he finished Your Cheatin' Heart, and we had kind of a non-conversation about it.  He seemed rather guarded and many of his sentences started like "Yeah, old Hank..." then he'd shake his head.  I talked about what I'd learned from the book.  Then  that was that.  I figured that I was some kind of insatiable freak, and there was no one in the world who wanted to babble on and on about books except me.  I'd never be completely happy, I supposed. 

A year went by and I was keeping an eye on the calendar, tenderly planning my next bookish gift for Dad.  Then my mom spoke up.  "Have you gotten your father his Father's Day gift yet?"

"No, not yet."

"Well, for God's sake, whatever you do, don't get him another book."

"Why not?  That was a good book.  It was about Hank Williams."

"I know!  He hated it.  He said that he'd rather be horsewhipped than have to sit and read another whole book.  Why don't you get him a western shirt?"

I got the shirt.  It was slightly too small, but he wore it anyway.  I never got him another book.  I was mortified that I had bombed with my present when I was so sure I had succeeded.  Then my mortification died down to a simmering resentment.  Why did my mom have to tell me that?  My father didn't really hate my book, did he?  Was my mother projecting her own dislike of receiving books for gifts?  Or did my father want that information passed along?

I'll never know, and it doesn't matter now.  What's important, I now realize, is that reader or not, he understood what forces were driving me.  He knew I was tickled to have found the 'perfect' gift and he was determined that I should savor that feeling in full.  On this Father's Day, I'd like thank my dad wherever he is.  Thanks for reading that book.

The Story of Charlotte's Web

 

I can't wait to read this book, but that subtitle is really awkward.  Don't you think E.B. White would cringe?  Actually, subtitles have been getting clunkier and more unwieldy in recent years.  Is there such a thing as subtitle school? Oh well, never mind all of that.  I want to buy this book and delve into it just in time for E.B. White's birthday on July 11.  I hope there are numerous mentions of illustrator Garth Williams and editor Ursula Nordstrom.

Coincidentally, my Children's Literature class just wrapped up a semester of reading Charlotte's Web.  Most of them did a great job on the quiz below.  I really wanted to ask some higher-order questions, but it was a mixed-level class and there was still too much of a language barrier for many of the students.

How much do you remember about this novel?
 
1. What was Mr. Arable carrying at the beginning of the novel? (an ax)

2. In what ways did Fern treat Wilbur like a baby?  (she fed him with a bottle, wheeled him in her doll buggy)

3. Mr. Arable wanted to sell Wilbur when he was 5 weeks old.  Why?  (Wilbur was starting to eat more and the brothers and sisters had been sold)

4. Fern’s mother made a suggestion that made both Mr. Arable and Fern happy. What was the suggestion?  (Fern should sell the pig to her Uncle Homer and Fern could see Wilbur whenever she wanted.)

5. How much did Homer Zuckerman pay Fern for Wilbur? (6 dollars)

6. Why wasn’t Wilbur happy in his new home? (he was bored and he missed Fern)

7. Why didn't the goose want to play with Wilbur?  (she was sitting on her eggs)

8. How did Templeton say he preferred to spend his time? (eating, gnawing, spying and hiding)

9. Who said, "I'll be your friend?"  (Charlotte)

10. Why did Charlotte say that it’s good that spiders eat bugs? (if spiders didn't eat bugs, they would get so numerous they would destroy the earth)

11. Wilbur thought that Charlotte was b____________ and c______________ and he said that friendship is a g______________________. (bloodthirsty, cruel, gamble)

12.  The gander made a deal with Templeton. What was the deal? (Templeton could have the dud egg, but he must stay away from the goslings)

13. Templeton "had no ___________ of rodent kindness." (milk)

14. What bad news did the old sheep give Wilbur? (Zuckerman was planning to kill him at Christmastime.)

15. How many sections did Charlotte’s legs have?  4  5   6   7 (7)

16. Why was the rotten goose egg important? (when it broke, the smell was so bad, it drove Avery out of the barnyard.  He was in the process of capturing Charlotte, so it saved her life.)

17. Charlotte told Wilbur that she did her best thinking when she (was in her web, hanging head-down)

18. One of Charlotte's cousins caught a small __________ in her web. (fish)

19. Why did Templeton agree to help save Wilbur’s life? (the old sheep made him realize that if Wilbur wasn't there to receive slops, Templeton's food supply would be drastically cut)

20. Dr. Dorian told Mrs. Arable that a spider’s web itself is a m______________________. (miracle)

21. The old sheep gave Templeton a reason why he should go to the fair. What was the reason?   (People drop food all over the ground at a fair.  It's a rat's paradise.)

22. Before going to the fair, Mrs. Zuckerman did what to Wilbur? (gave him a buttermilk bath)

23. Before everyone drove off to the fair, what did Mr. Arable say that made Wilbur faint? ("You'll get some good ham and bacon when it comes time to kill that pig.")

24. Why did the pig called ‘Uncle’ get the blue ribbon?  What did Wilbur get? (Uncle was larger.  Wilbur got a special prize of $25 and a medal)

25. When Wilbur fainted at the awards ceremony, what revived him?   (Templeton bit his tail)

26. How many eggs were in Charlotte’s egg sac?  (514)

27. How did Wilbur get the egg sac back to the barn cellar?  (he carried it in his mouth)

28. What promise did Wilbur make to Templeton?  (if you'll get the egg sac, I will let you eat first every time Lurvy slops me)

29. Where did most of Charlotte's children go?  (they were aeronauts and went out into the world on the warm wind)

30. "It is not often that someone comes along who is a __________ friend and a _________ writer.  Charlotte was both." (true friend, good writer)

BONUS:  What were the 4 words/phrases about Wilbur that Charlotte wove into her web? (Some Pig, Terrific, Radiant and Humble.)

The Former First Bookworm

I approached Laura Bush's memoir like I was going on a treasure hunt.  She may be a former president's wife, but her real identity is Super Bookworm.  She's one of us.  This is the person who started the Texas Book Festival and the National Book Festival.   While she was First Bookworm, I mean, First Lady, if she felt like having a literature symposium, she went ahead and organized one.  YES! In Asia, when you're giving someone big big respect, you kneel down and place your forehead against the floor.  It's going to be so difficult to write my review of Spoken from the Heart in that position, but here goes.

I raced through the first part of this memoir.  Laura Bush's reminiscences of her life as an only child in Midland, Texas are just so extremely readable.   Even though she gives credit to whom I suppose is a ghostwriter in her acknowledgments and the book is called Spoken from the Heart, she's writerly right down to her toes.  And no wonder.  The Former First Bookworm had a mother who loved reading:

"When I came through the door in the afternoon, I was greeted by the soft rustle of book pages and my mother, her feet propped up, book open on her lap. My mother loved to read.  Her canon ranged from the traditional to the eclectic, writers like John Marquand and Somerset Maugham.  She loved Willa Cather, especially Death Comes for the Archbishop.  She read eagerly about the Southwest; it didn't matter whether the story was set in far West Texas or New Mexico or Arizona.  She read books about anthropology, native peoples, and early explorers.  She delved into naturalists like Loren Eiseley.  And she read to me, her voice weaving its spells of character, plot and  place, until I too yearned to decipher the fine black letters printed on the page."

Most of their books came from the Midland County Public Library, which was located in the basement of the county courthouse.  This location was interesting to young Laura, since hardly any houses or buildings in Midland had basements or stairs.  Mrs. Welch started her daughter out on Golden Books then they read Little Women when Laura was seven.  "The curtain on my imagination lifted," LB writes.  Once she could read, LB read Cherry Ames and Nancy Drew.  She particularly loved Nancy Drew:  "Like me, Nancy was an only child making her way in the world."

In high school, she was "always in Honors English" and avidly read the books in the curriculum like Jane Eyre, Ethan Frome, and Silas Marner.   I was delighted to read that she pulled the well-known bookworm trick of propping up her book in math or science and hiding her latest read behind it.  "In one case," LB writes, "it was Lady Chatterley's Lover, which for 1963 Midland was quite risque."

In college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she took a course in Children's Literature, and when she graduated, she became an elementary school teacher.  Her favorite part of the day was story hour.  After a year or so of teaching, she applied to library school at the University of Texas in Austin.  She writes about some of the treasures in the Harry Ransom Center:  "...rare manuscripts from Shakespeare's First Folio, manuscripts by the Bronte sisters and John Keats and the page proofs from James Joyce's Ulysses.  I was learning about the conservation of books in a place with some of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the world."  When she graduated, she worked first in a public library, then as a school librarian where "each class was my much-loved story hour."

I should discuss other things I liked about the book, shouldn't I?  But I can't help being delighted that references to reading and books and authors are woven into her life with such great frequency.  Something tells me that there could have been more, but there were editors prodding her to move it along.  A lot of the book, especially the White House years, seems dutifully rendered, although she's got a nice touch with historical tidbits.  She doesn't seem to care very much for the political aspects of her life.  One might read that as just plain avoidance of touching on controversial issues, but truly, it's just not what floats her boat.

One of her disappointments as First Bookworm was in early 2003, when she scheduled a poetry symposium at the White House featuring the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes.  One of the invited poets refused to attend and urged the other poets to turn the event into an antiwar protest.  LB postponed the symposium and it was never rescheduled:  "I had not selected the poets on the basis of politics, nor had the guest list been political.  I wondered what victory the invitees thought they had won by keeping the East Room dark and silencing some of the nation's most eloquent writers."  When I read that, I let out an involuntary groan of disappointment.

Oddly enough, I didn't seen any mention of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, which seems to be based on Laura Bush.  I can't help wondering if she read it.

Since I live in South Korea, I feel compelled to mention the South Korean anecdote.  The Bushes had received intelligence that the president of South Korea loved bowling, (LB doesn't say if it was president Kim, Roh or Lee, but it was probably Kim Dae-Jung) so for a present, they gave him a customized bowling ball but when he opened it, he had no idea what it was.  Awkward!

Spoken from the Heart is a lot like Laura Bush herself: calm, graceful, sensitive, graceful and intelligent.  It's also not overly long, like a lot of recent political memoirs.  Although I've only touched on Laura Bush the reader, there's a lot more to her.  I don't suppose she ever will, but it would be so great if she did a memoir based solely on her reading life.  Meanwhile, this one is definitely worth your time.

John Barleycorn - Jack London

 

John Barleycorn is Jack London's "alcoholic memoir", but it's so much more than that.  It's also the story of his life, although always carefully examined through the glass or bottle.  It's a a tract against alcohol, but in the later chapters, it pays a grudging respect to drink for its ability to create conviviality, to aid creative thought and numb manual laborers (coal shovelers, in this instance) to  their backbreaking work:  "This strength that John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength.  It is real strength.  But it is manufactured out of the sources of strength, and it must ultimately be paid for and with interest." 

London admits that after a quarter of a century of being indifferent to alcohol, "I had the craving at last and it was mastering me."  He will not admit to being an alcoholic, nor does he have plans to quit the stuff:  "I am not a drunkard and I have not reformed."  He vows that he "will continue to drink but more skillfully, more discreetly than before."  What he really likes is the feeling of being "pleasantly jingled", which we would refer to nowadays as "buzzed".  When he reminisces about the places around the globe he's visited, he invariably thinks of the saloons, pubs, cafes, and people's homes that he sat in "glass in hand."  But he insists that he is not an alcoholic.  His repeated denials would provide the basis for a literary drinking game.

According to London scholar Clarice Stasz, Jack went on a pretty serious bender when he visited New York City in 1912, and ended up getting in the doghouse with his second wife, Charmain.  It is believed that John Barleycorn was written the next year as an apology to her for his antics in New York.  Stasz goes on to say that the book shocked many people who were surprised that the supposedly clean-living author of such adventures as The Call of the Wild and White Fang had been trying to withstand alcohol's clutches his whole life.

"Whole life" is not much of an exaggeration.  The first couple of chapters of John Barleycorn are a bit ranty but also entertaining, then the beginning of Chapter 3 hits the reader between the eyes with this opening sentence:  "I was five years old the first time I got drunk."  He was carrying a pail of beer to his father who was working in the fields on a hot summer's day, and he was so small, he had trouble carrying the pail without slopping the contents.  He decided not to waste it and drank some to lessen his burden.  He didn't care for the taste at all, and although he took up drinking in earnest less than ten years later, he never really cared for the taste.  What he really liked was candy, and while working as a sailor, would sneak and buy it and hide it to avoid the derision of his seagoing mates.

Alcohol may have helped young Jack get a manly reputation and some good buddies, but John Barleycorn played some chilling tricks on London.  When he was around sixteen, he got so drunk he fell overboard.  He was so tanked that the water felt good to him "it soothed me like cool linen" then suddenly, ("I had never been morbid," London assures the reader) he was entertaining thoughts of suicide and putting them into play all at once:

"The water was delicious.  It was a man's way to die.  John Barleycorn changed the tune he was playing in my drink-maddened brain.  Away with tears and regret.  It was a hero's death, and by the hero's own hand and will.  I started my death-chant...'Don't sing yet,' John Barleycorn whispered. 'There are railroad men on the wharf.  They will hear you and come out in a boat and rescue you.  and you don't want to be rescued.'  I certainly didn't.  What? Be robbed of my hero's death?  Never." 

By this time he was getting tired and cold and starting to sober up, so he swam for shore, but he'd gone out too far.  It looked like he might drown anyway, but a Greek fisherman headed for Vallejo picked him up.  London points out that this is not an uncommon trick, but he also allows that his "dramatic, romantic imagination was delighted with the suggestion."

When London is twenty years older and a successful author, he regularly encounters during his binges one of John Barleycorn's "agents", which he refers to as White Logic.  He characterizes it as an unhealthy type of truth-telling.  To paraphrase two chapters of London's total preoccupation with this particular brain maggot, White Logic's refrain is that the world is all a sham, people perpetuate shams to continue on in their pathetic lives, and they aren't really people, they're future ghosts.  What's the point of living or dreaming?  Everyone dies.  Here, have another drink.  Have the whole bottle.  Stay drunk.  Fuck life.

White Logic either scares London so much or it's such a drag that he promises himself that he'll be more careful and not invoke this shade.  He ends as he begins, determined that women should get the vote, because once they have it they will vote in Prohibition and future generations will be saved, never having known what a saloon is.

"And it will be easy. The only ones that will be hurt will be the topers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation. I am one of these, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barleycorn, that it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when no one else drinks and when no drink is obtainable. On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are so normally non-alcoholic, that, never having had access to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know of the saloon only in the pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaint old custom similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches."

John Barleycorn is available in book form and can also be read online for free here.

The Book I Love Is On That Train And Gone

It takes a worried bookworm to sing a worried song.  Except I'm not worried; I'm pissed at myself.  I took my backpack with me to Val's birthday party.  I would stay the night and venture on into Seoul the next day for a Bookleaves book group meeting.

Getting on the subway, I threw the backpack onto the shelf over me and held my purse on my lap.  I never thought of the backpack again until I was off the train, through the station and into a taxi.  Oh shit.

There wasn't much in the backpack.  I can obviously live without it:  toiletries, a shirt I've had for 7+ years, underwear that I wouldn't want to go to the hospital in, an umbrella that was starting to get a hole in it and the huge plastic glasses with candles on them that I meant for Val to wear during the festivities.

And a book.  Not just any book.  It was my hardcover copy of this book: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

O my bookworms.  I was 150 pages in and enjoying every single word.  In the darkest corner of my bibliomanic little heart, I didn't want to stop reading it long enough to go to the party, so I packed it up with my other weekend gear and promised it fondly that I'd get back to it later on in the hotel room.  Then I fell to socializing with the other partygoers and left it on the train!

I was further punished for my faulty memory by having only a 2-year-old magazine called GROOVE to read in the hotel room.  I don't know which was worse, the dull writing, the uncertain grammar or all those typos.  Nearly every hour I woke up and cursed my forgetfulness.

Since there seemed to be no bookstores in Songtan, where the party was being held, Val kindly lent me her book -- If You Really Loved Me by Ann Rule -- for the subway ride to Seoul the next day.  As soon as I could, I stormed into a Kyobo bookstore.  I didn't care.  I would re-buy the book.  Unfortunately, all they had was one copy of the large-print edition priced at approximately $35 (USD) which much more than I had paid for my lost copy.  I couldn't do it, even though being stranded at an exciting part in the narrative with no way to finish is making me crazy.

My backpack could still turn up.  The best possible scenario is that it's in the Lost and Found at the City Hall station in Seoul.  I have pretty much mentally kissed it all goodbye, but Val is determined that I shall have it back.  This kind of thing brings out the Miss Marple in her. Stay tuned.

Movies For Bookworms: Sylvia (1965)

I caught this movie on Youtube earlier this week after Sheila from The Sheila Variations did a post commemorating Carroll Baker's birthday.  She didn't mention Sylvia, but I remembered seeing a still from it in my David Shipman movie book and I recalled that Florence King had favorably commented on it in one of her books of essays. Although the plot is a little gritty and the dialogue is a little coarse, these things seem like a veneer over a rather genteel movie from an earlier decade.  Much like the character of Sylvia herself. 

Sylvia begins with millionaire Frederick Summers (Peter Lawford) summoning private detective Alan "Mack" Macklin (George Maharis) to his estate.  Summers has found the woman he wants to marry, but she hasn't passed any of his background checks.  He can't find out who she really is, so that's where Macklin comes in.  Armed only with a name --  Sylvia West --  and a book of poems written by her, Macklin manages to uncover Sylvia's past as travels around the United States and Mexico, meeting and talking to people she's encountered.  Sure enough, Sylvia is not your typical sweet little lady poet.  She's a former prostitute with a pretty seedy background.  Everyone who meets with Macklin remembers Sylvia with some degree of affection and they all want to know if things have worked out all right for her.  The more Macklin finds out, instead of being repelled, he finds himself being drawn to Sylvia.

So why is this a movie for bookworms?  Although Sylvia has encountered more than her share of hard knocks and is willing to do what it takes to earn a buck, she's also a bookworm.  One of the first people Macklin tracks down is the librarian in Sylvia's hometown who became her mentor and friend. (The first book she recommends to Sylvia is Pride and Prejudice.) 

After a few years of mistreatment and hard living, she leaves Mexico with a traveling salesman who is her transportation to New York City in exchange for her favors.  When he figures it's time to collect, she shrugs him off, vastly preferring the book she's reading. Carroll Baker perfectly captures the intensity of Sylvia's absorption and her irritation at being prodded out of her book world.  The salesman got to see her nasty side, but not the variety of nasty he was hoping for.

 Later, when she's working in a bordello in New York, she settles down with a book between johns, much to the derision of the other prostitutes.  When the madam informs Sylvia that her "date" has arrived, it usually takes a couple of tries to break her concentration, but she finishes the sentence she's reading, carefully marks her place with a bookmark, closes the book with more tenderness than the john is ever going to see and calmly goes to do what must be done. 

 Although she's clearly in with bunches of non-readers, they always ask what she's reading, and she tells them.  Late in the movie, there's a pivotal scene in a bookstore and a generous helping of talk about authors and books.  Of course the title character's name and the mystery surrounding her brings to mind Shakespeare's lines: "Who is Sylvia?  What is she, that all our swains commend her?"  I'm pretty sure that's not a coincidence.

Although the bookworm stuff delighted me to no end, I was also captivated by Carroll Baker's performance.  She plays Sylvia at various stages in her life and each stage is nicely nuanced. George Maharis is both hot and cool.  He has the cutest grin.  Ann Sothern steals the show with her portrayal of Sylvia's roommate,  Gracie Argona, who works in an arcade and dabbles in casual prostitution and there's a small but enjoyably trashy performance by Paul Gilbert as Lola "The Barracuda" Diamond, a transvestite chaunteuse who karate-chops wooden boards as a finale to his/her world-weary torch songs. 

The look of the movie is also very nice; it was filmed in gorgeous black-and-white.  All the sets and locations look good.  My only quibbles are Joanne Dru's slightly wooden performance as Sylvia's friend Jane  and the insipid theme song whined out at the beginning of the movie by Paul Anka.  Luckily, the song can be largely ignored because of the cool jigsaw puzzle opening credits.

Sylvia is based on the 1960 novel of the same name by E.V. Cunningham  AKA Howard Fast.  As you may have guessed, I'm eager to get my hands on it.  Usually movies dial back the literary talk, so I'm guessing the book has even more about Sylvia the reader.