”The future is not for parties ‘playing politics,’ but for measures conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders are statesmen, no”The future is not for parties ‘playing politics,’ but for measures conceived in the largest spirit, pushed by parties whose leaders are statesmen, not demagogues, who love not their offices, but their duty and their opportunity for service.”---Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was the eighth and last president from the state of Virginia. Ohio also can claim eight presidents, of whom four died in office. Only eight presidents have died in office so there is something extremely unlucky about winning the presidency from the great state of Ohio. Warren G. Harding, who assumed the presidency after Wilson, was the eighth and final president from Ohio and also was one of the men who died in office. It is interesting that the streaks for the two states who produced the most presidents ended within a matter of years of one another. Maybe the American public put two and two together to equal four and realized that, odds were, voting for another Ohio man for president was dooming the candidate to death.
I started reading this book because, after surviving the 2020 election, at least I think I have survived it, I was really wanting to read a presidential book, and Obama’s book release was still weeks away. I scanned my shelves and skipped quickly over Reagan, Nixon, and Coolidge. I wasn’t in the mood (the last four years have cured me of some of that interest) for dissecting Republican neurosis. I nearly decided to start the four, rather large volumes of the Caro LBJ biographies, but Wilson by A. Scott Berg caught my eye. Compared to the Caro books, the Berg book is a tidy 743 pages of what I hoped would be some escape from the crazed political environment of today. Of course, the Republicans were mucking about even back in the early twentieth century. Henry Cabot Lodge was gleefully trying to undermine everything that Woodrow Wilson attempted to do, including striking down the treaty that ended WW1 and he ensured as well that America would not join the League of Nations, which had a long lasting impact on world events, including, quite possibly, contributing to WW2.
Wilson was a very popular president with the American people. If not for ill health, I do believe that Wilson would have run for a third term. Despite the dire news on his medical chart, he did contemplate the idea. He was incapacitated, okay we might be able to use the word nearly incapacitated, by a stroke in his final term, leading many to call his wife Edith the first female president of the United States. I’m a Wilson fan, but I have to tell you that he should have stepped down from office. He had recovered enough to walk and talk, and most of his razor wit had returned by the time the 1920 election season rolled around, but fortunately, common sense won out over another grueling election.
”Seldom in the nation’s history had the change in government swung so far in the opposite direction.” Berg is talking of course about 1920, but for a moment there I thought he was talking about 2016. It was baffling to think that, after the vast popularity for our arguably most well-educated president, we would choose to elect, as Alice Roosevelt referred to him,...a slob. Warren G. Harding was enjoying life, drinking, gambling, and chasing skirts. He wasn’t really that interested in being president, but the powers that be in the Republican party selected him because he...looked presidential.
He did have a bit of the look of Roman Caesar about him, but below the face he was an empty suit. Henry Ford, after meeting him, decided that he was going to have to run for president in 1924 just to remove this immoral, useless man from office. Harding’s first order of business was to undo everything that Wilson ever accomplished. Sound familiar? The voting American public is certainly schizophrenic. They were thrilled with Wilson, but then voted for someone diametrically opposed to everything Wilson stood for. They were thrilled with Barack Obama, but then voted in...what’s his name? Can we erase history and chisel his name off everything in the tradition of the pharaohs of Egypt? Certainly, Harding and _____ tried to do that.
I was surprised to learn that Wilson was a great orator. I had always thought of him as this stiff academic. When he was a teacher at Princeton, he was the most popular lecturer. It wasn’t abnormal for his lessons to end to the sound of applause from his highly engaged students. One of his favorite sayings was,” Don’t learn history, learn from history.” He encouraged his students to place themselves in history, think about what they would have done, what they would have supported. I love to personally do that as well, and it certainly increases my enjoyment with any history book I read. When he became president of Princeton, he tried to turn the school back to a focus on learning instead of an obsession with social clubs. It was turning into a place to meet future powerful people, rather than to get an education. I think we can certainly agree that our institutes of higher learning have become too focused on the social aspects of college.
When he was president, he continued to use those oratory skills to override Republican opposition. If not for his health that derailed his cross country train trip to raise support for the treaty and the League of Nations, I have a feeling he might have forced Lodge to support both. Women finally achieved the right to vote in 1920, under his administration. Wilson deftly used their sacrifices and their contribution to the war effort to convince enough elected officials to finally get them the vote. It should have happened earlier in his administration, but thank goodness this was done before the beginning of a decade of Republican presidents. Otherwise, women might have had to wait until FDR was elected in 1933.
Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, but Congress overrode his veto, ushering in yet another disastrous Republican policy that opened our country up to organized crime and spawned a generation of dedicated drinkers. There is a lot to love about Wilson, but one place that he really failed to come up to the mark was on Civil Rights. He was a man of Dixie, and like most men of his era, his speech was littered with racist allusions. For all that, black men in the South voted in great numbers for him. They saw that, despite his heritage, he was still a better choice for them. I wish that he had used WW1 to desegregate the armed forces, but he was too unsure of his position. He ran in 1916 with the slogan...he kept us out of war, then he promptly got us in the war in Europe. The Republicans were against going across the pond to fight, in their minds, a European war. When Wilson gave his rousing speech to convince Congress to vote for war, he found the excessive applause... heinous. He wept over his message of death.
It wasn���t until 1948 that another Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, desegregated the armed forces.
Wilson was quite the amorous man. As a young man he fell in love fast and hard and was so dedicated to winning a wife that he sent more than one scurrying away to the hills. He loved his first wife Ellen dearly and wrote her love letters long after the ardor of first love should have cooled. Whenever they were parted, he would write her salacious notes, not only of his love, but of his desire for her. One of my favorite lines from one of his letters was: ”Are you prepared for the storm of love making with which you will be assailed?”
Goodness Professor!
He was a man of grand passions, not only politically but also between the bedsheets. It was fascinating to discover a much more interesting, much more human person, behind the stuffy, academic persona.
So I came away from the biography with a more balanced view of Wilson. He was a much more complicated man than I first thought. I can’t help speculating, by taking Wilson’s own advice regarding history to heart, about what would have happened in the 1920 election if a healthy Wilson had been pitted against Harding. It’s difficult to know how many votes he would have lost from entering the war, but it never hurts to win a war in American politics. I think it would have been a close election; certainly, Harding would not have won by a landslide, like he did against Cox. I believe Wilson would have won his third term, and America would have been spared the disaster of Harding. If we take it a step further, in what universe would _____ have defeated Obama? Hopefully, not this one, but who knows? The schizophrenia of American voters is certainly hard to predict.
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1912 Electoral Presidential map. It was a three way race with Roosevelt, unhappy with his picked successor Taft, deciding to run as an “independent” candidate.
Do take a few minutes and look up the electoral maps of Presidential elections from 1912 to the present and marvel at the changes. Wilson was looking at an entirely different path to the White House than Joseph R. Biden. I do believe that we may be on the cusp of seeing a very different map in 2024 and 2028, compared to 2020.
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Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Burroughs, and Harvey Firestone.
”Beyond the pleasure it brought to the men themselves, the Edison-Ford frie
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Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Burroughs, and Harvey Firestone.
”Beyond the pleasure it brought to the men themselves, the Edison-Ford friendship also thrilled ordinary Americans, whose lives were radically changed, to great extent blessed, by the two men’s inventions and innovations. Later in 1914 the outbreak of war in Europe, and America’s potential entry into the conflict, began dominating the news. That made it even more refreshing to read about Edison and Ford in newspapers and magazines--they were among the country’s most prominent celebrities, after all--and entertaining to wonder what future advancements the unique pair of friends would deliver. Only a generation or so earlier, electric lights in homes, phonographs, movies, affordable horseless carriages, substantial factory wages, and shorter workweeks would have been beyond public imagination. As individuals, Edison and Ford had already extended the boundaries of the possible. Now their genius was joined, and more miracles were certain.”
From 1914 to 1924, Henry Ford, John Burroughs, until his death in 1921, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone would attempt to go on a motoring/camping vacation together every year. They were not always successful because one or the other had pressing concerns that would not allow them to go, but when they did all manage to go, it was a newspaper sensation. At the time, there were no more prominent Americans than Ford and Edison. One had innovated the car, and the other had brought light to all corners of America. When on these excursions, the press would follow them like the paparazzi follow movie stars, pop stars, and politicians.
Besides friendship, and I do believe these men really liked each other and enjoyed spending time together, they also appreciated the publicity that these trips produced for the products their livelihoods were tied to. Burroughs sold more books. Ford sold more cars, which meant Firestone sold more tires, and Edison sold more light bulbs and other sundry things that were made by his laboratories. These trips were one big social media hashtag.
The trips themselves were not really of much interest to me. After all, they were the early days of reality TV. Fake reality is about the lowest form of entertainment I can think of. George R. Holmes of Hearst Newspapers did write a very poignant paragraph about their campsite. ”Out of the inky blackness that hangs like a shroud over the Adirondacks these nights, there blooms nightly along some quiet mountain stream a ghost-like tented village...Eight tents, almost transparent with the incandescent lamps inside them, stood out last night like so many jewels against the velvet blackness of the forest on all sides. In the center of the tiny village a campfire burned, for it is nippy in the mountains these nights.” They were quite comfortable on these trips. The idea that these older men could be roughing it wouldn’t really make any sense. They’d all be in the hospital with pneumonia by the end of their travels.
President Warren G. Harding joined them briefly during one of their trips. It was an attempt to beef up Harding’s image as an everyday man. His administration was rocked by scandal, and the constant rumors of his flagrant infidelities were hurting his chances at reelection. So how does a guy like this get elected? Beware the American public who wants radical presidential change.
”Most major newspapers savaged Harding editorially, noting his complete lack of legislative accomplishment as a senator and describing him as one of the most unqualified presidential candidates in the nation’s history. But Americans wanted a change, and there were strong sentiments. Harding and Coolidge won in a landslide.”
President Warren G. Harding joined them for a brief amount of time on one of their trips. I won’t say much about this meeting between the four friends and this bizarre choice for president, but Henry Ford was so horrified by his impression of this man that he knew, for the good of the country, that he would have to run against him for president. Ford was at the height of his popularity at this time and would, most likely have become the 30th president. Fortunately for Ford and for the country, Harding died in office in 1923, and Ford was so impressed with his replacement Calvin Coolidge that he dropped all thoughts of running for president.
Jeff Guinn revealed several disturbing things about Henry Ford which changed my impressions of the man. I’d always praised him for paying his workers a liveable wage and being an advocate of the 40 hour workweek, but it turned out that those thoughts actually came from his general manager, James J Couzens. By paying a good wage, turnover was reduced, which cut the cost of training new people. Cutting the workweek encouraged people to buy Model Ts because they would have time to use them for pleasure drives. Investing in people is always a boon to the economy and to the companies that support their workers. Couzens later went on to be mayor of Detroit and a senator. He was defeated in the 1936 Senate race because he was a Republican supporting the New Deal programs. Mentally, I must strike those innovations from the positive column for Ford and start thinking of Couzens as the man we should all be admiring.
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Senator James J. Couzens, a man of principle.
Ford also was an antisemetic, even producing a paper that advocated his beliefs. He was also contemptuous of the importance of history and those people who read books. ”Henry Ford was mostly disdainful of books and those who loved them. In his opinion, people ‘read to escape thinking’. So far as Ford was concerned, being literary-minded was symptomatic of an escalating national softness, with far too many people content to lounge poring over pages instead of getting on their feet and doing something. ‘Book sickness is a modern ailment.’”
GASP!
Wouldn’t it be great if we were a nation suffering from book sickness? Alas, that is simply not the case. The majority of Americans agree with Henry Ford. Reading for them is considered a waste of time.
This book might be based around the trips these four famous men took, but the real meat of the story was exploring their personalities. Firestone was the least known of the four men, but he was the mediator that helped these larger than life men get along. He was a very successful businessman in his own right, but not as good at self-promotion as the other men. This book brought to light new information and reminded me of some things I’d forgotten.
It was also strangely relaxing to wander the byways and soon to be highways of America before we started drifting away from the very things that made us great in the first place. We used to make things here, and the manufacturing jobs that made it possible for so many generations to go to college are now supporting families in China. I believe that if any company wants to sell any product in the United States that at least 51% of that product should be made in America. We are entrenched in too much greed. American business is more worried about making as much money as it can now, even if it bankrupts its future. They want us to buy their products, but they don’t want to invest in us. James Couzens, over a century ago, understood that the future is determined by how you treat people today.
Ralph Merrit buys a house on Court Street in an exclusive white neighborhood bordering Harlem. He looks white. He sounds white, but he ain’t white. Ms. Agatha Cramp, who has no idea that Merrit is playing with her in the conversation above, also lives on Court Street. She is so happy to have this successful lawyer moving into her neighborhood, until someone clues her in to the undeniable fact that he is... colored.
Ralph’s white complexion is so deceiving that he really needs to wear a sign or something warning racist old ladies that beneath that pale exterior is the red blooded, beating heart of a primordial, black man.
Linda Young first works for Ms. Cramp, and it is through her encouragement that Agatha shows an interest in devoting time and money to a Black organization, which leads to the unfortunate conversation with Mr. Merrit. To make matters worse, Merrit offers more money to Linda to come work for him. What audacity this uppity dickty is showing even before the paint is dry on his remodeling. This is simply intolerable. He’s not showing deference as he should, but actually acting like he’s one of them!
Joshua ‘Shine’ Jones has taken a shine to Linda. Just because he is a handsome specimen of a man with enticing, brooding qualities doesn’t mean diddly squat to Linda. She has big expectations for her life, and unless his plans dovetail with hers, she’s going to go her own way. Shine’s friend, Bubber, is about to tell you how good lookin’ she is. ”’Man--oh--man! A honey with high yaller laigs! And did you see that walk? That gal walks on ball-bearin’s, she do--ev’ything moves at once.’” I like the way Shine describes her better. ”And Lindy was sure good to gaze on. Skin like honey--honey with red cherries in it. Clear like thin wax with light behind it. You could almost see through it--you could see through it--you could see red flowers behind it; and when she got excited over anything it seemed that somebody waved the flowers back and forth.”
Now that Merrit has been outed as black, not that he was hiding it, but then he wasn’t advertising it either, what will the insecure white folks of Court Street do? Maybe they will set aside their natural racist tendencies and bring him a plate of cookies, slap him on the back, and invite him to the next neighborhood barbecue.
That would be a negatory.
Just as important, will Shine win his ambitious honey red cherry girl?
I was reminded of Rudolph Fisher while reading one of Langston Hughes’s autobiographies. Fisher was one of the bright stars in the Harlem Renaissance. Langston said he was one of the wittiest, smartest men he’d ever met, and though his books were good, they didn’t fully capture just how amazing a conversationalist he was in real life. Given the fact that Langston was a bright man in his own right, this is high praise indeed. The vernacular Fisher used in this book made me feel like I was fully immersed in Harlem just as it is blossoming into an oasis for Blacks. I was watching Bubber’s antics as he described this high yaller gal strolling down the street as if she was gliding. I was listening to the conversations between Shine and his work buddies as he hauled a piano up to a third story window. The prose flows so easily that I read most of the book during the course of one afternoon.
When I talk about things such as vernacular it scares some people, but don’t let that hold you back from reading this classic. A glossary of terms is included with the book for those who may find a slang word or two difficult to define.
This book came out in 1928. His next book was The Conjure-Man Dies, which came out in 1932 and is considered the first mystery novel written by a black man. Now isn’t that intriguing?
”’You know what man really desires?’ inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. ‘One of two things: to find someone who is so ”’You know what man really desires?’ inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. ‘One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.’”
Baron Felix is a man of pretenses. He is not really a baron at all, but his father had perpetrated the deception his whole life so Felix’s filial legacy is to carry on the social duplicity. ”He kept a valet and a cook; the one because he looked like Louis the Fourteenth and the other because she resembled Queen Victoria, Victoria in another cheaper material, cut to the poor man’s purse.” Notice there is no mention about how good a valet he is or how good a cook she is. It is all about how they look and, when looked upon, what value they convey to the people whom the “Baron” needs to impress.
I am left wondering if his Victoria is the young Victoria, more in the vein of Jenna Coleman from Masterpiece, or the older Victoria, as portrayed by Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown. Louis the Fourteenth, we can only hope, looks as dashing as George Blagden from the Ovation show Versailles.
The theatrical production of the Baron’s life is maintained by his own performances, but also by the supporting cast with which he chooses to surround himself.
Baron Felix becomes enamored with a beautiful American named Robin Vote. It is best that, if your life is a sham, you do not allow yourself the indulgence of love, exploitation yes, but love...never.
If Felix were observing more carefully and not blinded by the aurora borealis of infatuation, he may have noticed that Robin is not really interested in anything but having a good time. Raising children, being a supportive wife, or being faithful to a husband are, by definition, selfless acts, and she is incapable of performing any of those roles with any level of believability. Felix needs to make a new casting call.
Robin bounces from Felix’s bed into the arms of Nora Flood, who wants to take care of Robin, but Robin wants the world collectively to take care of Robin. Jenny Petherbridge, a woman incapable of creating her own happiness, has made a life of looting other’s happiness. She soon has Robin, at least temporarily, under her control.
Robin leaves in her wake not a satisfied audience, no tears brimming at the corners of their eyes, fond memories, or even brilliant soliloquies to explain her behavior. She follows the brightest star until it dims in comparison to another.
We could generalize that everyone in this novel is horrid to everyone else. Jenny stealing Robin from Nora could be seen as inducing unhappiness in another, but frankly can any of us steal someone from someone else? Doesn’t a foot, an elbow, quite possibly a heart already have to be out the door before a lover can be absconded with? Baron Felix is a charlatan who makes a living out of contrived theatrics. It is hard to feel sympathy for him, but at the same time he is left nearly shattered by Robin leaving him. It isn’t even so much that Robin leaves, but she just seems to drift away.
Robin is the truly destructive force in the novel, whose beauty is a ”sort of fluid blue under skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge.” She could be a stand in for any of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. That might be a job she could stick with.
And who is there to pick up the pieces of each of these fractured relationships? The doctor, Matthew O’Connor, a man uncomfortable in his own skin, but who seems to somehow induce trust in those around him. ”Why do they all tell me everything then expect it to lie hushed in me, like a rabbit gone home to die?”
One character refers to the doctor as a ”valuable liar,” but he does seem to be the most honest with himself of anyone in the novel. He has desires he can only indulge in private, but he doesn’t deny any revelations about himself. He is, almost universally, the most liked person in the novel. Even T. S. Eliot, in the forward, feels the novel drags until the appearance of the doctor. I admit there is no tale of any relevance without the doctor, but there are some fascinating passages in the early pages that, despite how discombobulated I felt with the plot, are still rife with intricate sentences I enjoyed reading and reading again.
Djuna Barnes has a discerning eye and a flair for bold sentences. Some critics have said that only poets can truly enjoy Nightwood. I think that what is required of the reader is some patience. If you are confused, it might be that Barnes has you right where she wants you. Read on; do not let her scare you away. You will experience some descriptions or thoughts that you have never read before. Do not indulge in cannabis or go beyond a two drink minimum while reading this book. You will need your wits about you; maybe this book is better served with a cuppa and a piece of dark comforting chocolate.
”They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. ”They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. A minute passed and there was no sound. Then, with the ghastliness of the supernatural, in the same stealthy, noiseless, and horrifying manner, they saw the white china knob of the handle at the window turn also. Kitty, her nerves failing her, opened her mouth to scream; but, seeing what she was going to do, he swiftly put his hand over it and her cry was smothered in his fingers.”
When Kitty accepts the marriage proposal of Dr. Walter Fane, it sets off a chain of events that land them both in the middle of a cholera epidemic in Mei-Tan-Fu, China. Kitty is quickly leaving behind her debuttante years and is fast approaching an old maid status. It isn’t for lack of marriage proposals. She has plenty. She just enjoys being the center of attention for all men, rather than being confined to the servitude of one. When her younger sister, the much less attractive sister, lands a baronet, the pressure on her to be married becomes very real.
Dr. Walter Fane is not a fool, but he is a complete fool when it comes to his love of this beautiful bobble of girl who has never had to have a serious thought in her life. Even intelligent people can be blind in the ways of love. He knows Kitty doesn’t love him. He knows why she is desperately marrying him, and yet he must have believed that, given time, he can convince her that he is worth loving.
Kitty can not respect his love for her. Infatuation has always come easily for her. She has smoldering eyes and a lithe figure that drives men to distraction. ”What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?” That has been a question that has been asked for hundreds of years, if not thousands. What I have ascertained from the minefield of women that I’ve known is that a woman must not like herself very much to despise a man who loves her. It is sad that she considers him to be a fool to marry such a woman as she.
Kitty accepts his proposal impulsively. She despises his fawning attentions. She has therefore never invested any emotion or even thought into the relationship. He takes her to Hong Kong where he works as a bacteriologist. There she meets Charlie Townsend, who intuitively senses the vulnerability in their relationship. He is charming, fit, and knows the right string of words to whisper in a silly, unhappy girl’s ear. Kitty is a fool, and she can’t for the life of her understand why Walter can’t see it.
The resulting scandal, which starts with the turning of the white china knob on the door, turns out to be an embarrassing affair for all parties involved, as these things tend to do. Walter gives Kitty a choice, but as it turns out, she has only one choice, which is to follow him to Mei-Tan-Fu. ”It means death. Absolutely certain death.”
Whenever I pick up a W. Somerset Maugham book, I know I am in for a whirlwind ride fraught with betrayal, emotional upheaval, human frailty, selfishness, and aspects of malice. He explores the dark corners of our lives that are whispered about in alcoves at parties, and in shadowed doorways off of street corners. Those things about us that we hope no one knows, but we have a fearful inclination, spurred by our own guilt that everyone knows. The best solution to any scandal, in my opinion, is to brazen it out and wait for another scandal to come along to move your problems from the front page to the back page of the gossip mill. One must screw up occasionally so that everyone else feels better about themselves. It would be rather rude to be perfectly good all the time.
A masterpiece exploring the frivolous ways in which lives can be ruined.
”’Good evening, my name is Emilie Hinchliffe.’ More applause. ‘I’ve come here tonight to tell you my story,’ she gestured to the relevant subject of a”’Good evening, my name is Emilie Hinchliffe.’ More applause. ‘I’ve come here tonight to tell you my story,’ she gestured to the relevant subject of artwork as she spoke. ‘It’s about an heiress, an aeroplane, a ghost and the mightiest airship the world has ever seen. I know you’ve read the story of what happened to me, and to my husband and to many of his friends just recently. Tonight, I’m going to tell you the whole story.”
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The Endeavor. The Stinson Detroiter plane used by Captain Hinchliffe and Elise Mackay. Picture provided by David Dennington
On May 20th, 1927, Charles Lindbergh left Roosevelt Field in New York in his custom made, soon to be famous plane The Spirit of St. Louis. He made the crossing in 33.5 hours and became the first man to complete a solo, nonstop flight from New York to a European landmass. He became the most famous man in the world. He also earned $25,000 in prize money.
The race was on to see who could make the trip from East to West.
Captain Raymond Hinchliffe might have been an unlikely candidate to make the trip, but he was one of the most celebrated pilots of his era. During the Great War, he was shot down. He lost an eye in the resulting crash, and one leg would never be right again, but he was undaunted in his abilities to fly as well as any man. After the war, it wasn’t easy for him to find work as a commercial pilot, and frankly, that type of work was unfulfilling. He felt that he had one more great endeavor in him, and no one had beat him to it yet. He wanted to make that flight from East to West across the Atlantic, and the 10,000 pounds in prize money would give him and his wife Millie some security for the future.
Elsie Mackay was a rich girl, not content to just be a socialite. She was an actress, which would be more than enough attention for most other young ladies, but for her, she too wanted to define herself by a bold action. There were few pilots in the 1920s, but there were really only a handful of female pilots. Some might say she was recklessly trying to impress her father, Lord Inchcape. Being the first woman to cross the Atlantic was a prize well worth trying for, despite the danger. For a woman as progressive as Elsie, keeping pace with the boys was not only fun and exciting, but also essential.
Millie Hinchliffe was the wife of Captain Hinchliffe, a concert level pianist, and an accomplished painter. She had a knack for portrait painting; sometimes she expressed so well the inner life of her subject that it could be an uncomfortable revelation for the portrait sitter. Winston Churchill noticed her particular ability to capture the auras of her subjects. As this novel progressed, her otherworldly abilities became more acute, and she began to see visions that scared her into action to attempt to warn people of impending disaster. Her most terrifying vision of all regarded the mightiest airship ever built, the Cardington R101.
To know something horrifying that no one else knows is frustrating and lonely.
Meanwhile, the race was on for Hinchliffe and Mackay to get their Stinson Detroiter plane modified for the trip across the Atlantic. They knew a German team was nearly ready to attempt the crossing. There were no second place medals. There could only be one first. The tension was revving up with each new chapter.
One of the things I most enjoy about Dennington’s books is his development of female characters. They are not merely furniture or cardboard cutouts. They are women who are multi-talented and not at all compelled to be confined to a traditional role. They want to experience life on the same scale that any man would want. We certainly should not to forget these women of the air who dared to challenge this new frontier. Lauren Notaro, author of Crossing the Horizon, released this short, but poignant, video commemorating those women. Please do give it a quick look. 1:38 video of Crossing the Horizon
This book intersects with Dennington’s other book The Airshipmen, which I have also read and reviewed. Some characters in one book show up in the other. In his first book, he tells the tale of the airship Cardington R101. A special pleasure for me is that he brings the writer and engineer Nevil Shute to life and reminds me how much I enjoy his writing. I now have planes plans to read several of Shute’s books over the coming months.
Let’s return briefly to Millie so you can have some idea of the visions this poor woman was experiencing. The trick was to even interpret what she was seeing with any level of certainty.
”The train jerked forward. It traveled slowly away, she from him, he from her. He became drowned in black smoke. It was then, in the blackness, she saw his aura--usually vibrant multicolors--now predominantly purple and mauve. As she moved away, the black smoke, too, turned into swirling clouds of purple. She didn’t take her eyes from him until he was gone. She had an unbearable sinking feeling as he disappeared. What did it mean? She sank into her seat. As she’d watched him, she’d felt his spirit slipping away, as though this iron monster was pulling them apart, clacking wheels measuring the distance yard by yard. She felt terribly afraid.”
What does it mean?
David Dennington kindly agreed to answer a few questions.
Jeffrey D. Keeten: “The problem, of course, with the art of clairvoyance is that the demand for answers from so many people who lost someone in the Great War created opportunities for charlatans.”
David Dennington: “This was true after WW1 and the R101 disaster. I reckon probably only ten percent were genuine. Money was scarce, too, and it was a good way to pick up a few pounds/dollars.”
Jeffrey D. Keeten: “I've read before about the belief held by Arthur Conan Doyle which you explored in your novel, but I'm curious to know if you believe in clairvoyants?”
David Dennington: “Conan Doyle was a lovely guy. A bit naïve and was taken for a ride at times, I think. This is why I wanted to sit in circle and develop my own psychic ability. Then I could say, ‘I saw it myself’.”
JDK: “Can we speak with the dead? Have you attended a legitimate seance?”
DD: “Yes, sometimes, and yes, I have. I can only speak for myself. Growing up as a child, I always felt as though something was there. At 10, I distinctly remember being in my little schoolroom and looking round at all the girls. I liked girls. I thought what it might be like to be married. I was told that my wife’s name would begin with the letter ‘J.’ For many years, I went to school with a good friend who said his grandmother was a ‘medium’ and would I like to meet her. I always declined—not courageous enough. But when my father died at 48, when I was 20, he asked me again, and I said ‘yes.’ She was a kindly old soul with smiling eyes who chuckled all the time. Mrs. East is based on her and a composite of my own Nan who sat beside the picture on the wall of her own son ‘Lawrie,’ torpedoed by a Uboat in WW2. His death overshadowed the family all my life. So, the old lady took me to the Spiritualist church where I ‘sat in circle’ for a year or so; it is eerily similar to Mrs East in The Ghost. My own psychic development did occur. I do have some interesting tales to tell of my experiences and some over the years since. In circle, I did encounter mediums who were ‘powerful.’ You could actually feel it coming from their bodies, like electricity (ah, now I’m thinking of Madam Harandah!) There were others who I think were just ‘wannabees’ with no power at all. I attended ‘transfigurations,’ which was interesting, and was invited to ‘materializations,’ which I declined, feeling it was too open to fraud and the ‘darkside.’ But Millie Hinchliffe did go to all those things. I am thinking of writing a memoir of all my experiences in the psychic realm.”
“The thing about being given something, like a sign, is usually very small. But to you personally, when it happens, it’s huge. But when told to someone else, it might sound daft, or that you’ve got a screw loose. I’ll give you a couple of instances. The first one was when I’d returned from Bermuda with my family to London and was pretty depressed after being in such an exotic place, leading the life of Riley. I planned to take a job in Florida, which my friend Mike (we’d been friends from our Bahama days) had arranged for me. But I thought I would go up to London to Belgrave Square to the Spiritualist Alliance and get a reading (yes, the same place Millie went to with Mrs. East). I went there, and the medium, a man, was wary of me, thinking I was a journalist (I had a pencil and a notebook). He said I would go and live in Africa, to which I thought, ‘I will never set foot in Africa.’ As I was going out the door, he said, ‘You will write a book, a very big book, and it will be rather wonderful!’ Then he pointed at me and said, ‘You must pay your taxes!’ I’ve thought about that for years. If you look at the map, South Florida and Africa look similar. I was leaving for South Florida the following week. I wonder if he’d been shown a map and got it wrong. I wrote a ‘big book’ thirty years later. And I later got into massive trouble over my taxes, which hit me like a Mack truck—all unintentional on my part.”
“The second thing happened this year. And could be pure coincidence. My best friend Mike of fifty years (who found me the job in Florida) died of brain cancer in November last year. We are all like family. I was in Bermuda in May and during the night got up and came back to my room in the dark. I sat on the bed and fondly thought of my buddy Mike and imagined him saying to me, ‘I love you man; you are my brother, you know.’ Then I felt something weird in my left ear and put my hand to it. Something was stuck to my ear. I pulled it off and put the light on. I was a heart—a child’s sticky icon left on the bed by my grandchildren. There were others, I discovered, of the alphabet. What struck me was that it was over my ear, and it was the valentine symbol of love. It could have been a letter from the alphabet. Now, to you it probably all sounds silly, but I just wonder. I keep an open mind but am always skeptical. Mike, like Christopher Hitchens, was an atheist, and we had some fights about it. He was almost bitter about the subject. We had a set to about it in Spain, and on leaving, he hugged me goodbye. Somehow I knew that would be the last time I’d see him, though we tried three times to get to Florida to see him but were prevented by hurricanes, etc. In passing, I have to tell you that I love Hitchens and agree with most of what he says (and love to watch him on Youtube). I think to believe in God, the afterlife, and all that, you have to have imagination or, should I say, an imaginative type of mind. Hitchens was a Marxist, but he thought for himself; he did not move with the herd, and that made him fascinating to the media (and of course, he was light years ahead of all of them). Now like Mike, I wonder if he’s changed his views now he’s ‘over there’! Sorry, I digress.”
JDK: “Your two novels intersect. Have you any plans to build on this world with your next novel? There are so many interesting characters associated with this period of history. I could really see you being able to do four or five novels without leaving the confines of your original research too far.”
DD:”I love this idea and often think of doing it. Some people have said they would have liked to know more about the airship crewmen and that I didn’t tell enough about their lives—as if it wasn’t long enough already! Then there’s Martha and Ramsay MacDonald, of course.”
JDK:”You have an affinity for bringing strong female characters, real or imaginary, to life.”
DD: “Thank you.”
[image]
Elsie Mackay.
JDK: “Most memorably for me was Countess Marthe Bibesco from The Airshipmen. In this novel, Millie Hinchliffe and Elsie Mackay are so vividly portrayed one might say they still haunt me.”
DD: “Thank you. No author could ask for more than that.”
JDK “For that reason I would highly recommend your books to men and women without reservations. Male readers and female readers will find people they can identify with and, in some cases, maybe someone from the opposite sex. Was this a conscious part of your writing to achieve this balance?”
DD: “Actually, I don’t consciously do that. I listen. And I write down what they say. It’s like taking dictation. I think I can feel and think what a woman feels and thinks. Maybe it was from being around my mother as an only child with my Dad at work at nights, printing the Daily Mirror. Or, maybe, and this is just a big maybe, it’s from past lives, if you believe in any of that!”
JDK: “You must have a few female beta readers who must say from time to time, ‘Oh David, she wouldn't say that or do that?”
DD: “That has not happened yet. I have had a few Nevil Shute fans say I write like him. Sometimes I think he’s been looking over my shoulder. I kick myself now that I didn’t bring him into The Ghost. He could have been in the pub and met Hinch and Millie. He could have come down and had his portrait painted, and he could have advised her on writing her own book.”
[image]
A posed photo of Elsie Mackay. I love the shoes!
JDK: “What I really like about your female characters is the fact that they are multi-talented women. They aren't just good at one thing. That is certainly why I find them so fascinating.”
DD: “Thank you. I love women. All the women in my life have been wonderful: My Nan, my mother Lena, Aunt Vi (Lawrie’s sister--still alive and more like my sister), my cousin Dawn, my daughter (who is a super intelligent Tufts graduate, my editor, and the best read person I know), and Jennifer, my wife with a 'J.'”
“Thank you again, Jeffrey. As a writer, I must say you are someone who really 'gets it.'”
JDK: My special thanks to David Dennington for graciously agreeing to answer my questions and for providing me with several photos that I used in this review.
”When would they return? In the darkness even the smallest noise seemed infernal; the quietest of whispers grew to a roar. Silence itself became an in”When would they return? In the darkness even the smallest noise seemed infernal; the quietest of whispers grew to a roar. Silence itself became an interminable throb in the ears. He had to pull himself together, to ignore the dripping sound of his own blood as it hit the hard, damp floor.”
Inspector Gereon Rath arrives in Berlin, to a city in turmoil. The underground fleshpots are catering to every bizarre whim or dark desire that a man or woman can envision. Booze is flowing through the tangled web of bars, in quantities large enough to fill the river Spree. The dancing in the nightclubs reflects the frantic and desperate nature of those trying to make a go of it in the German capital. The cabarets are soulful and sad and full of boys dressed as girls and girls dressed as boys.
That is the nightlife, but the daylight brings more tumultuous chaos. The workers are dissatisfied with low pay and terrible working conditions. They are filling the streets with their protests, and the socialists are taking full advantage of their discontent. In the background, the Nazis are gaining power behind the fiery speeches of this scrawny corporal who is still fuming over his inability to make a go of it as an artist. Failure has bred contempt in him for those he believes are responsible for the downfall of Germany. ”On the wall hung a framed photograph of that Hitler, a strange bird with a Charlie Chaplin moustache.” Yes, in 1929, he is still perceived for whom he really is by most reasonably intelligent people.
Gereon Rath has more than one moment when he wishes he could go back to Cologne, but he would only be stepping back into the fine mess he left there. He is assigned to vice in a city where the philosophy followed by most is anything goes. Hard to make headlines or influential friends by busting up the party. He catches a break of sorts when an unidentified, brutally tortured body of a dead Russian shows up in the middle of a case he is working. He is too ambitious to turn the case over to homicide.
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Lana Nikoros, AKA Countess Svetlana Sorokina
Little does he know that he is going to be thrust in the middle of a gangland style battle going on between two factions of Russians and their search for what is being called Sorokin’s gold. Not to mention he has to deal with a host of dirty cops, the Nazis, am organized crime boss called Dr. Marlow, and the Countess Svetlana Sorokina, AKA cabaret singer Lana Nikoros, who might be the most dangerous of the lot. Whether they are motivated by greed or a cause, they all want the gold. Rath is also introduced to a powdery substance that proves irresistible.
”He had reckoned with all sorts of possibilities: with seeing stars, a variety of colors, bright lights, but all he felt as he snorted the white powder was numbness. His whole nose was numb. He wouldn’t have noticed if someone cut it off, but when he felt the cocaine taking hold of his brain, all of a sudden he was wide awake. It is as if someone had turned the music up, and yet he could understand the numerous voices talking over one another considerably better than before. He felt himself positively oozing energy and lust for life.”
”If you want to hang out, you've gotta take her out, cocaine If you want to get down, get down on the ground, cocaine She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie, Cocaine If you got that lose, you want to kick them blues, cocaine When your day is done, and you want to ride on cocaine She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie, Cocaine If your day is gone, and you want to ride on, cocaine Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back, cocaine She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie, Cocaine She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie, Cocaine”
Rath falls in love/lust with the beautiful police stenographer Charlotte Ritter. Just as quickly as he finds love, he mucks it up by using her to further his career. (He also breaks the cardinal rule that one should never, ever shag the landlady.) Rath is a mess on about all levels, saved only by the fact that he is a pretty good detective. To make it in the city of vice, he will have to go beyond just bending the rules; he will have to break them over his knee.
A convoluted mystery, to say the least. Keeping track of all the various, suspected entities that go way beyond what I’ve mentioned in this review had me wondering at times if I was reading a Russian novel, but I did enjoy the flavor of 1929 in one of the most vice ridden cities in the world at the time.
Your pleasure is their pleasure to serve.
For those who have been watching or want to watch the Netflix series, the character of Charlotte (Charly) Ritter, portrayed in the series by Liv Lisa Fries, is a far cry from the woman depicted in the books. She is much more pedestrian in the books, but in the Netflix series she is frankly frilling awesome. Svetlana Sorokina, portrayed by Severija Janusauskaite, has a much bigger role on the screen than she had in the book. She is so manipulative, calculating, and as cold as a Siberian storm.
Basically, the writers of the TV series have taken the characters of the women from the book and expanded their roles. This takes the story from being a good story to being one of the more intriguing TV series I’ve seen in a long time. If I had not seen several episodes of the series before reading the book, I would have been happier with the book. Still, I’m on board to read more of the books and see how the characters develop as Volker Kutscher takes them through more sordid Berlin adventures.
”Prosecutor Tsuchida, I am being held here as a murderer. But the truth is that I am probably not the murderer. That’s right. Probably. It saddens me ”Prosecutor Tsuchida, I am being held here as a murderer. But the truth is that I am probably not the murderer. That’s right. Probably. It saddens me to have to say this. And I apologise for expressing it in such an odd way. But if you will be so kind as to read this letter through to the end I promise that you will understand.”
There are two novellas in this collection. The Devil’s Disciple and Did He Kill Them? Both novellas were published in 1929 and explore themes that would normally be thought of as more modern concepts for fiction, such as homosexuality and other “unnatural” sexual desires. Shiro Hamao was an early advocate for what he called gay rights. The Japanese culture had always been very accepting of homosexuality, but as Western culture gained more influence in their country, the Japanese also gained more Western prejudices.
I picked this book up a while ago. I liked the theme. I love Japanese literature, and thought the cover was intriguing. Somehow, through a baffling series of events that happens all the time with my TBR list, I never got around to reading it. I was shuffling some books around to put some books I’d finished reading back on the shelf when this slender volume leaped off the top shelf at me. I had to make a miraculous sure handed catch to keep it from tumbling to the ground.
Some books just demand to be read.
The first novella, The Devil’s Disciple, is about a man appealing to the very man who corrupted him in his youth to help him with a charge of murder. Tsuchida toyed with his emotions and introduced him to alcohol, drugs, and sex, which made him more pliable to his influence. He then dropped him for another prettier or at least fresh new conquest. ”I gained knowledge, but sold my soul. I will have to live with the fact that I sacrificed my body to your strange love, but having sold my soul fills me with regret.”
The protagonist has been struggling with his life ever since his encounter with Tsuchida, despite having a wife who desperately loves him. He treats her horribly and does his best to drive her away, but her devotion knows no limits. I can’t discuss the aspects of who is murdered, but let's just say that he is the prime suspect. He revels in his pain and his sense of injustice, so it is rather interesting that the very man who might help him out of his predicament is also the very man he blames for ruining his life.
This is an intriguing line from the story: ”But then I remembered the strange attraction of flesh turned corpse and in the dark train I imagined the figures and flesh of lots of women.” Really creepy imagery.
The solution is fascinating because we are left thinking that, even if he is prosecuted for something he didn’t do, he still is not completely innocent. So is fate taking a hand and balancing the scales of justice?
The second story is called Did He Kill Them?which is an intriguing whodunit. A man and his wife are found murdered in their bedroom with a man standing in the room with the knife. Easy solution, right? Well, of course, you would be wrong to think so, but the evidence is compelling, and it will take some sleight of hand from the writer to turn a caught-with-the-bloody-knife-in-his-hand into a holy-crap-that's-what-happened conclusion. It’s one of those solutions that left me smiling. Odd, isn’t it, that we mystery readers can find murder so amusing.
Here is an unsettling sentence from the second story that reminds me of the flesh corpse line from the first one: ”The moment your gorgeous flesh was tied up and died in agony you belonged to me and me alone.”
These were such a delight to read. The book was right to fling itself at me. I was certainly remiss in not reading it sooner. Unfortunately, Shiro Hamao died at the age of 40 in 1935. He was prolific in the short time he spent as a writer and preferred the novella length story. He spent most of his adult life working as a lawyer, but abruptly walked away from his career to become a full time writer. As far as I know, this is the only translation of his works available in English, but I do hope that more of his novellas are collected for English readers in the future. Both stories are perfect examples of chilling webs of deceit that explore the psychology and the law that Hamao knew so well.
If you were to meet Dick and Nicole Diver at a party, a restaurant, or on the beach, you would leave them feeling as if you had been in the presence of greatness. They are both witty, charming, gorgeous, majestic, sexy, and in command of whatever situation they find themselves in. They are the sun and moon merged together, and no one shines brighter in the daylight or in the moonlight. They are what many aspire to be, but few will ever achieve, the suave assurance of the Diver couple.
As Rosemary Hoyt, a burgeoning movie starlet, says after meeting them, ”The Divers made her want to stay near them forever.” She loves them both, but she wants a part of Dick for herself. She might be naive, but even she senses that to break them apart dissipates the magic of the two of them together.
The Divers are at the height of their power when Rosemary meets them. Nicole Warren is obscenely rich, and Dick is a successful, published psychologist. They met when Nicole was suffering a mental breakdown. Dick brought her back from the brink. ”They were more interested in Nicole’s exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.” The Warren family is used to owning everything in their universe.
She is so beautiful and tragic, and Dick, like most of us, wants to preserve lovely things. He is on the verge of reaching the pinnacle of his profession. He is breaking new ground and getting noticed by the top men (this is 1929) in his field. That drive he has to succeed erodes as he starts to enjoy the life on the Riviera more than the life in a clinic in Zurich. Who wouldn’t? Aren’t we supposed to enjoy being rich?
Dick is well aware that there is only a small window in every smart man’s life to experience success. ”You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believed you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like everyone else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things.”
It is impossible to separate F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre from the characters populating his novels. Their almost mythical love affair and the disastrous unraveling of their lives are mined heavily by Scott for his novels and stories. Zelda was often exasperated to find something gay and spirited she had said at a party or something dark and insightful she may have shared in the privacy of the bedroom show up in Scott’s writing. She was in many ways the subject of all of his writing. She was certainly the muse.
F. Scott drank too much, and Zelda slowly slid into madness. She died at 47 and he at 44. They had lives used up too quickly.
Dick has Rosemary fluttering around him like a lovely, lustrous satellite, but Nicole has her numerous admirers, as well. Foremost of these is Tommy Barban. ”He sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, and earnest Satan.” He is virile and alive and lustful. He lacks Dick’s polish and sophistication, but then Dick, as he drinks more and more, isn’t exactly Dick anymore.
“‘We can’t go on like this,’ Nicole suggested. ‘Or can we?--what do you think?’ Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, ‘Some of the time I think it’s my fault--I’ve ruined you.’
‘So I’m ruined, am I?’ he inquired pleasantly.
‘I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things--now you seem to want to smash them up.’”
As Dick and Nicole’s dependency on one another becomes more and more uncertain, the influences of others start to drive wedges between them. It is like watching the disintegration of a monument. They can not find the synergy with other people that they had together, but they can’t find it with each other anymore, either. The whole was greater than the sum of their parts.
Fitzgerald is wonderful at dangling this world of infinite possibility that so infused the 1920s era. Living for today, not worrying about tomorrow, and not letting the past be a burden on the present. Even as he shows us this glittering world, he begins to inch back the curtain to reveal the darkness that holds it all up. To be Dick and Nicole, they must be on the top of their game all the time. They are performance artists. They dazzle those fortunate enough to be around them, but like most rock stars, they start to feel the pressure to always entertain. Alcohol or drugs can take the edge off and temporarily make them feel like themselves, but eventually the centers of who they are become buried under the shimmering facades of the people everyone wants them to be.
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