What Book to Read?

Ramona Koval is well known to Australian readers as a radio broadcaster with a particular interest in literature, having hosted the ABC’s former ‘Books and Writing’ program for many years. This book (2005) is a collection of interviews she did with a range of writers between 1996 and 2004, mostly at writers’ festivals, with a few in writers’ homes. The list of contributors is a sort of who’s who of contemporary literature, though no doubt there could be arguments about who is included and who left out – why no Margaret Atwood, for example.

It’s easy enough to see why writers appear at literary events; they hope to sell more books. And some may even enjoy it. But what do audiences hope for when they attend sessions at writers’ festivals? Personally I like to see writers I already admire perform in public, and also to check out writers I haven’t read, but might read in the future. Part of the pleasure is the element of theatre that comes with a good public conversation. I guess I also hope to learn something that may help me better understand the work of the writer in question. When faced with the transcripts of such conversations rather than the physical reality, there is both loss and gain. Some of the excitement is missing, but the ability to consider and reflect is much enhanced.

But what is it that writers can say about their work that adds to the pleasure of reading it? I was struck by an exchange between Koval and Saul Bellow. He says: ‘I don’t want to bare my soul, or my self, to a public …’ And she replies: ‘as a writer of novels, that’s what you’ve been doing all your life – showing us what’s going on in your head and your heart.’ To which Bellow replies: ’Yes, but between me and the public, there is my art. Between me and the … audience there is no art.’ So does the work of art stand alone, without further explication from the author? Bellow’s comment didn’t stop him from talking more generally about how he sees the ‘modern predicament’ – an ‘unbearable state of distraction’ – or how he finds that this world encourages comedy more than the great and deep emotions he had initially hoped to evoke with his writing. But interesting as his views might be in themselves, I’m not sure they help me understand Bellow’s ‘art’.

Ramona Koval is an experienced interviewer who allows the conversation to take its course, rather than imposing a framework on it through her questions. However I wonder if she sees literature as offering us truths about the world, as she often asks her interviewees about whether a writer has a special wisdom. Mostly they seem to say ‘no’. Normal Mailer, for example, says a writer may approach the truth, but never find it. Saul Bellow says: ‘I don’t know the answers. I only know my answers.’ David Malouf says that going to writers for wisdom is ‘unwise’. And Harold Pinter says: ‘I never think of myself as wise’. Susan Sontag, on the other hand, doesn’t suggest that she is wise, but thinks that literature should ‘embody a certain wisdom’. Unlike many of the interviewees, she places more emphasis on reality than imagination. Others offer a whole range of reasons for writing, including a sense of ‘reflecting the tenor of the times’ (Morris West), exploring conflict (Edna O’Brien), a desire to ‘inhabit other minds’ (Ian McEwan), revealing ‘moral peril’ (Tom Keneally) or simply as ‘a form of love’ (Judith Wright). These are in a sense truths about the world, though they are certainly not prescriptions for action. I guess writers offer insights into living, rather than formal prescriptions on how to do it. Though there is also William Gass: ‘people who read novels to pretend to find out about life are just fooling themselves’.

As one would expect, Koval also asks questions that relate to the content and form of the writers’ work. Again, the answers are as various as the writers, though not of course mutually exclusive. Several said how important they found it to show what makes people do what they do. Some inhabited their characters to the point that this dictated the way the story developed. Others considered language the most important element of the novel – including the misuse and distortion of language that several saw as the scourge of official communication, like ‘humanitarian intervention’ when they mean war, or ‘freedom-loving peoples’ when they mean clients of the United States (Harold Pinter). I can’t agree with David Malouf, who thinks that readers get caught up in a relationship with a writer because of the ‘particular music’ of a writer’s language, but that just shows that writers’ concerns and readers’ responses are as various of the leaves of autumn. Note here Alfred Kazin: ‘I don’t believe for a moment that language by itself is the primary literary force in any literary work.’

Overall, I find it hard to say what I took from this book. Obviously I’ve left out a huge amount that is important. While I enjoyed reading each of the interviews and thought a number of them compelling or moving or thought-provoking, I found it difficult to think coherently about the whole collection. Possibly my appreciation was limited by the fact that I’ve only read works by about half of the writers, and often not the ones specifically mentioned in the interviews. I found it hard afterwards to remember which author said what. Each sees things a little differently. Perhaps this was Koval’s intention. One test for the book is whether reading interviews with authors I haven’t read has made me want to read them. I’ll have to think further about that. Amos Oz, perhaps.

In conclusion, I can’t go past one of the best misprints I’ve ever seen. P.D. James comments on women having to cede their property to their husbands on marriage until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act in1882. This has been rendered here as the Mad Women’s Property Act. Perhaps the rather upper class tones of Baroness James of Holland Park got mistranscribed …

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This is a most disturbing book. Whether or not you agree with the author’s analysis, the situation he describes should be of concern to everyone. He is writing about the small town, white working poor, those who are only ‘two pay days away from homelessness’. Much of what he talks about in the years up to 2007, when the book was published, has been exacerbated by the Global Financial Crisis – which had its roots in some of the practices Bageant discusses.

Joe Bageant was born in Winchester, Virginia, of a family just like the ones he describes in the book. As a young man, ‘penniless and dumber than tree bark’, he escaped to California, got a degree and worked as a journalist and editor. There he developed a critique of the ideas and practices he thinks produce the underclass he writes about. Later in life, he returned to Winchester, where he mixed with the ‘white trash’ he had gone to school with, and chronicled their lives.

Through some of the people around him, and members of his own family, he looks at specific issues and circumstances that he says exist far more widely. An old school friend works for the one large employer in Winchester, a plastics factory, which pays him a wage of $8 (US) an hour. Another is taking out a mortgage he cannot afford on a mobile home that will start depreciating as soon as he buys it. One woman, who is overweight, diabetic and has breathing problems, cannot afford health care. Another old woman decays in a grossly underfunded nursing home. These cameos are the ‘dispatches’ – the reports from the war zone.
For Bageant believes there is a war in America. ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is that only one side understands that a class war is going on, the side that gets to do the arse kicking.’ The people he is describing certainly don’t understand it in that way. They see their poor education, low wages and insecure work, their inability to save, to own a house, to be able to pay their medical bills as at best, just the way things are, and at worst, their own fault. Staunchly individualistic and anti-union, they see accepting public help as ‘a sign of failure and moral weakness.’ Those on the other side in the war don’t usually recognise the conflict either, but they are those who benefit from globalisation and the outsourcing of American jobs to low cost countries like Mexico, who perpetuate the inequalities inherent in the health care system, and who profit from the ‘white trashonomics’ that promotes unaffordable mortgages and credit card debt to the working poor. These are manifested at the local level in the form of rapacious slum landlords, bosses after the quickest buck, predatory lending policies and dirty public hospitals.

Bageant doesn’t blame the poor people he writes about for their situation. Indeed he is more critical of the intellectual elite who condemn ‘rednecks’ for their views without ever taking the time to understand their circumstances. For these are the ‘heartland’ of America, intensely patriotic voters who support the Republican Party, despite the fact that it is not in their economic interests to do so, and who hate college educated ‘liberals’. Bageant blames poor education and harsh working conditions. ‘Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial theatre of the market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness … It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation…’

Nor does he condemn the beliefs and pastimes they take comfort in – guns and evangelical religion. Gun ownership he sees as a normal part of life, and is even a bit nostalgic for the hunting expeditions of his youth. He condemns only the fascination of some enthusiasts for guns designed solely to kill people. The fundamentalist church, he says, is ‘one of the few social structures still functioning in America, and it welcomes everyone’. He is critical of the anti-intellectual and self-referential culture these churches promote, but he can see why they are attractive to people who feel alienated from so much of mainstream culture.

As a polemic it’s great. As a book, it gets a bit repetitive. As you can see from passages I’ve quoted, Bageant writes in a colloquial style that is both amusing and horrifying. This is indeed sociology from the trenches. Even if you don’t agree with his politics, the book has a disquieting reality about it; after all, it was the very lending policies he chronicles that fuelled the Global Financial Crisis. And don’t even ask about climate change.

While Joe Bageant offers a fascinating glimpse into one group of disadvantaged Americans, it is not a snapshot of ‘the poor’ in America. Poverty more generally is a function not just of income level; it also involves race and region. Here is a more nuanced discussion of the complexities.

Joe Bageant died in 2011 at the age of 65, victim of the ill-health endemic to the poor whites of Winchester. You can read more about him here.

PS. I couldn’t helping thinking that this America is about as far from the one my book group read about in Anne Tyler’s Digging to America as it is possible to get; you can read my post on her book here. And here’s an interesting illustration of the distribution of wealth in America.

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This intriguing little book (2008) is about a nasty murder that happened at Road Hill House in Wiltshire in 1860. It’s also about public reactions to the case, in particular to the role of the detective, Mr Whicher, who investigated it. There is a whole slice of social history in the descriptions of the life of the household where the murder occurred. And Kate Summerscale also talks about the way the case influenced writers at the time, including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

In his excellent review of the book, Ian Rankin tells the reader who committed the crime. He doesn’t, as he says, give away the end, but I’m not even going that far. I guess it’s pretty obvious who the culprit is, as there isn’t a large cast to choose from. But I found there was real suspense in not knowing until it was revealed, though Rankin is right that that is not the end of the story.

When the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough got up on the morning of 30 June, 1860, one of her charges, Saville Kent, aged 3, was not in his cot. She said she thought at first that his mother, Mary Kent, must have taken him into her room, which adjoined the nursery. But he wasn’t there. Samuel Kent, the boy’s father, had locked the house carefully the night before. Where could the child be? A window was found slightly open. Could someone have crept in and stolen him? But all too soon the body of the little boy was found in the servant’s privy; he had been stabbed, and his throat cut. Everyone in the house, family and servants alike, fell under suspicion. The local police had their own ideas, but insufficient evidence to back them up. Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard was called in.

Whicher was one of the original eight detectives appointed in 1842 by the London Metropolitan Police to deal with serious crime in the city. By 1860, he was famous for his ingenuity in catching thieves, conmen and murderers. He thought what evidence there was pointed clearly to the perpetrator, but he was unable to make out a case that convinced the local magistrates.

The case caused huge public interest on a number of levels. That such a terrible thing could happen in what was outwardly a respectable middle class home seemed to undermine the assumptions on which families’ peace and security were founded, or so newspapers editorialised. Everyone had a view of who dunnit, and wrote to the police and the papers to say so. Then there was the role of the detective himself. The initial euphoria of expectation surrounding him soon evaporated, and he was blamed variously for trampling class boundaries and invading the privacy of a respectable family and for being personally arrogant and incompetent. ‘For the country as a whole,’ Summerscale writes, ‘the murder at Road Hill became a kind of myth – a dark fable about the Victorian family and the dangers of detection.’ Had the public known what Summerscale finally reveals as the probable root of all the evil, they would have been even more disturbed. The writer does a great job of creating her own mystery story.

I found the social history personified in the Kent family fascinating. They are clearly perceived as middle class: Road Hill House was a three story Georgian affair on a hill above the village of Road, and Samuel Kent employed several servants. His friends seem to have been doctors, lawyers or other professional men. Yet Samuel was the son of a cabinetmaker. How did the son of a tradesman make it into the ranks of the middle class? He was a sub-inspector of factories, and hoped to be made a full inspector; he needed the extra money to support his growing family – four children from a first marriage, three from a second, with another on the way. His first wife was the daughter of a prosperous coachmaker, so perhaps she brought some money into the family. His second wife was the children’s governess, who he married as soon as his first wife died. He must have been a self-made man, and though Summerscale doesn’t discuss this, there is some interesting social mobility going on here.

The influence of this crime on literature is also fascinating. One of the main Hill Road House ‘clues’ was a missing nightgown; Wilkie Collins uses just such a circumstance in The Moonstone, (reviewed here). Sergeant Cuff, in the same story, is loosely based on Inspector Whicher. Charles Dickens used elements of the case in his unfinished detective story Edwin Drood. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James also has some resonances with it. Summerscale has done a good job of more generally connecting the rise of detective fiction in Victorian England to this case.

Kate Summerscale says of herself: ‘I’m a journalist playing historian, and then I try to convert what I’ve found into something like a novel’. She’s done a pretty good job. You can read an interview with her here.

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I’ve been reading this book for a while, for as befits such a big topic, it’s a big book. And Judt makes the scope even wider than some other histories of Europe by including Eastern Europe within his scope. I found it fascinating, with new insights – new to me anyway – on almost every page.

Judt looks at Europe in terms both of its common themes, and its multiplicity. He has a (mostly) dramatic story to tell. The period the book covers – 1945 to 2005 – has seen huge changes that were almost unimaginable in 1945 when Europe was mired in the chaos and destruction of war, and soon to be divided by a seemingly unassailable iron curtain. Much that has happened since, Judt argues, is a legacy of the war (and the years leading up to it), and is in that sense, ‘postwar’. ‘Shadowed by history,’ Europe’s leaders, in both the West and the East, and in very different ways, ‘built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.’ By 2005 he considers this period to be coming to a close, though given Europe’s problem since the Global Financial Crisis, I’m not sure he’d still make this claim.

So vast a topic imposes the need for the historian to be very selective, and Judt is quite open about the personal quality of what he has included or left out. ‘Without, I hope, abandoning objectivity and fairness,’ he writes, ‘Postwar offers an avowedly personal interpretation of the recent European past.’ He identifies five main themes around which his interpretation is based. The first is the ‘reduction of Europe’, with the loss of imperial territories and aspirations – a reduction long deferred in the case of the Soviet Union, but shattering the old order when it came. Secondly, he says, the last decades of the century saw the ‘withering away’ of the ‘master narratives’ of revolution and transformation that had driven the politics of Europe. Third, he sees an emergence ‘belatedly – and largely by accident’, of the ‘European model’, which encompasses more than just the bureaucratic forms of the European Union, and amounts to a distinctively ‘European’ way that is consciously at odds with a notional ‘American’ way. Fourth is Europe’s ‘complicated and frequently misunderstood’ relationship with America. And fifth, there is Europe’s post-war history as a story ‘shadowed by silences; by absence.’ He argues that initially, nearly all European countries to a greater or lesser degree supressed the history of persecution and genocide which they had taken part in, and their versions of the war involved much ‘forgetful remembering’. The Holocaust, in particular, was ignored. Not until this has been corrected does he believe that Europe can move on; ‘a nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it’.

I’m not in a position to judge the accuracy of Judt’s history; as he says himself, his judgements may prove to be right or wrong. But I do find them illuminating. There are some phrases that will stay with me when the detail is (all too quickly) forgotten, such as the ‘forgetful remembering’ mentioned above, or the Soviet Union’s transition to free market capitalism as ‘privatisation as kelptocracy’. His arguments that totalitarian regimes cannot reform, only collapse once any piece of the jigsaw is removed, or that poorly restrained market capitalism and communism both hollow out institutions essential to civil society, to the detriment of citizens, are hardly new, but none the less important for that. I’m not sure that I agree that in retrospect, ‘Auschwitz’ is ‘the most important thing to know about World War II’, but it’s certainly food for thought. And I’ve stuck his quote from Carlyle up on the fridge: ‘if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.’ (Climate change, anyone?)

But in addition to seeing Judt’s picture of post-war Europe, the other pleasure I found in this book was filling out my own picture. How could I have lived through most of this, and yet had such selective and fragmentary memories of it? Names barely recalled from the 1950s, events of the sixties and seventies, all these were given a context that helped to make sense of, or to challenge, my own experience of the world. What was behind the American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games? That’s right, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. What was I doing when the Berlin Wall fell? Did I then see the immense significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or the tragedy of the Serbian attack on Sarajevo? Who can follow what’s going on in all those funny little Balkan states…? Judt provides a map, no doubt over-simplified, but nevertheless immensely valuable to me.

That I admire the late Tony Judt will be evident from my earlier posts on his (much shorter) recent books Ill Fares the Land (2010) and The Memory Chalet (2010). You can read more about him here.

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Subtitled ‘The Somerton Man Mystery’ Tamam Shud (2012) is a mixture of memoir, true crime and social history. Kerry Greenwood is best known for her detective fiction series featuring Phryne Fisher, set in Melbourne in the 1920s– a TV version of which is currently being replayed on ABCTV. I’m not a fan of either the books or the TV series, but I enjoyed Tamam Shud – though the Adelaide connection might be part of the reason for this.

On 30 November 1948 a man was seen sitting propped against the seawall, fully clothed, on the beach at Somerton, an Adelaide suburb. Next morning he was found to be dead. And everything about him turned out to be a mystery. His pockets contained no identification, the labels on his clothing had all been removed, he didn’t fit the description of any person reported as missing in Adelaide. His suitcase, when found at the Adelaide Railway Station, proved equally unrevealing. The only possible identifying item he possessed was a small piece of paper tucked into the fob pocket of his coat with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ printed on it. These are the last words of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and mean, in effect, the end. So was this a suicide note? The pathologist who did the autopsy didn’t think so. He concluded that the man had been somehow poisoned, though no specific toxin could be identified. And when the book, from which the slip of paper bearing the words had been torn, was found, it contained a phone number, and some letters that looked like a code. So who and what was Somerton Man?

Kerry Greenwood was told this story by her father, Alf Greenwood, ‘who felt that if a story needed embellishment to make it a good story, then he was the man to embellish it.’ So she was very intrigued to find that the story as he told it was essentially true. She uses it as the occasion to reflect on some of her father’s experiences as a signaller at Woomera after World War II, and as a wharfie on the Melbourne docks. She is also seeking to understand and celebrate her own relationship with him through her exploration of this story.

Having outlined all that has been discovered about Somerton Man, Greenwood indulges in a variety of speculations as to the motive behind his death. Could it have been one the bizarre murders for which Adelaide is known? ‘Murder is universal,’ she says, ‘but Adelaide murder always has a twist’, and she outlines some of them. (Being a fair person, she also talks about the ways in which Adelaide has a rightful reputation for being progressive.) Could it have been a crime of passion? There was a woman who might have been involved, and might have been lying when she denied knowing him. What kind of poison could possibly have been used? Could it have been snakebite? There are lots of venomous snakes around Adelaide. But more dramatically, could Somerton Man have been a spy? Greenwood looks at some of the international issues which impinged on Australia in 1948 to see if Somerton Man could have played any clandestine part in them. Adelaide is relatively close to Woomera, which is where the British were testing nuclear weapons, making it a possible target for Soviet espionage. Or could he have been a smuggler? Could he have been running arms to the nascent Israel? The code – if code it is – has never been broken, so there’s no real evidence one way or the other.

Greenwood draws on a range of evidence, in particular the research of Gerald Feltus, the detective who originally investigated the case, and who has never been able to let it rest – he published a book about it in 2010. She also summarises several other unsuccessful attempts to identify the man, and to break the code; there is an ongoing computer research project which may yet turn up something. She even has a section explaining how codes common at the time work – though I can’t say I understand it.

Greenwood concludes that whatever the pathologist said at the time, Somerton Man could have died of natural causes. But being a writer of crime fiction, she can’t resist coming up with her own hypothesis that fits the known facts. This is clever, but still only a hypothesis. For good measure, the book also includes a Phryne Fisher short story based the Taman Shud affair, using a different hypothesis again. It’s all very intriguing, but it looks as if this is going to remain one of Adelaide’s unsolved mysteries.

You can find out more about Kerry Greenwood on Phryne Fisher’s website. Greenwood also writes a series about Corinna Chapman, talented baker and reluctant investigator.

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I get a little confused by the differences between memoir and autobiography, but it seems that in so far as there is a difference, memoirs are personal reflections on some aspect of the writer’s life, whereas autobiography is a fully researched account of a whole life. On that basis, Two Lives (2005) is memoir, but in a double sense. It tells of Vikram Seth’s recollections of his great uncle and aunt, and as much of the story of their lives as he can piece together. He calls it ‘a double biography, an intertwined meditation’. He says he can’t hope to ‘grasp the whole’, but hopes that ‘some shard’ may keep their memory alive. In doing so, he reflects on some of the significant events of the twentieth century.

Seth is a very well regarded poet and author: his novel An Equal Music (1999) is one of my favourites. But we don’t really learn much about Seth as a writer in this book; his role is as great nephew, rather than famous writer. What Seth tells about himself is essentially a vehicle for the story of Shanti Seth and Hennerle Caro. He says the author is ‘an anomalous third braid, sometimes visible, sometimes not’, and notes that there is a tension between ‘authorial distance’ and ‘personal immediacy’. I found the first part of the book, dealing with Seth’s initial contact with his great uncle and aunt a little slow; he has made their stories much more compelling than his own.

Most of his great uncle’s story derives from interviews Vikram did with him a few years before he died, and from letters and papers he provided. Shanti Seth was born in India in 1908, but left in 1931 to study dentistry, first in Berlin, then in Edinburgh. He later moved to London. Soon after the outbreak of World War II he joined the British Army Dental Corps, and served in various theatres of war. He suffered a serious injury and was invalided out of the army. But he managed nevertheless to set up a successful dental practice in London, and lived there for the rest of his life, returning only rarely to India.

Shanti met Hennerle in Berlin when he was a student, and their friendship continued after she arrived in London in 1939. They finally married in 1951 – too late, they agreed, to have children. Vikram thought at first that his great uncle’s wife would be much the secondary character in the story because by the time he decided to write it, she had been dead for several years, and Shanti, in grief at her passing, had destroyed her papers and photos. However he missed a box in the attic, and its contents flesh out her life during the 1940s and early 50s in a way that is even more interesting than Shanti’s experiences. For Hennerle was one of the few German Jews to get out of Berlin just before the war began – and before Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews were fully operational. But her mother and sister remained behind, and in 1943 they both disappeared into camps – Theresienstadt and Auschwitz–Birkenau. After a brief correspondence via the Red Cross, they were never heard of again. Hennerle knew nothing of their fate until after the war, when she learnt from (Christian) friends in Berlin that there was no hope of their survival. While Hennerle’s letters give some information, Seth has exercised a writer’s privilege to imagine what happened to the Caro mother and daughter, based on research into the destruction of the German Jews. It makes grim reading.

Seth says ‘My lens has zoomed in for the most part on my two subjects. But occasionally it has become wide-angled and touched upon the history of the century they inhabited.’ After the war, Hennerle corresponded with several of her Berlin friends, and we get glimpses of some of the fraught
issues for Germans in these years, such as guilt (or its absence) about the war and support for Hitler and the genocide, and the division of Berlin. But Seth goes beyond this and gently raises issues that his great uncle and aunt may have had views on, but certainly didn’t comment about. These include Indian Independence and the creation of Pakistan, the growth of racism in England (though Shanti said he never experienced any), and the rights of the Palestinians. There is also the issue of exile – of belonging fully nowhere, a sense Vikram possibly shares with his great uncle and aunt. These broader questions in my view give greater importance to the individual lives – though equally, they are only fully intelligible through such lives. ‘Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found.’ This isn’t really a writer’s book – but sometimes Seth just can’t help himself.

You can read more about Vikram Seth here.

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