It Tolls for Thee

Now that I've finished Hemingway's longest novel, I find myself wondering whether it would have been a different sort of book if it had been written in 1936 and 1937, instead of after the Loyalist effort had failed.  While there is a certain amount of idealism, even good humor, the foreshadowing of disaster both personal and political is difficult to avoid.  "But remember this that as long as we can hold them here we keep the fascists tied up.  They can't attack any other country until they finish with us and they can never finish with us.  If the French help at all, if only they leave the frontier open and if we get planes from America they can never finish with us.  Never, if we get anything at all." (p. 432)

Of course, by the time he wrote those words Hemingway was perfectly well aware that fascist sympathizers in France had prevailed upon the Blum government to close the frontier, and that FDR had found it politically expedient not to send planes to fly side by side with communist pilots.  With troglodytes like Andre Marty purifying the International Brigades and the NKVD performing a similar disservice among the anarchists, the CNT, and POUM, it's no wonder Franco won.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

As I am two-thirds of the way through this classic, I wonder whether anyone reads it anymore.  After all, Hemingway writes as an apologist for the Stalinist communists, at the expense of the P.O.U.M. anarcho-syndicalists.  There is a fascinating comment on Palin and Huckabee on page 207 of the original 1940 edition: 

     "But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes.  Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here," Primitivo said.
     "It is possible."
     "Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here."
     "Yes, we will have to fight."
     " But are there not many fascists in your country?"
     "There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes."

Fading in the Stretch

At midnight tonight, I will officially be one book off the pace.  I blame Hermann Broch:  the first part of his trilogy "The Sleepwalkers" has turned out to be fearsomely dull (like a Balzac bereft of wit).  So much for essaying "The Death of Vergil" later this summer.

Latest Books

This week I 've finished three more books:  "The Praise of Folly" by Erasmus of Rotterdam; "The Thirty-Nine Steps" by John Buchan; and "The Leopard" by Giuseppi Tommaso di Lampedusa.

Ah! Balzac!

I've just finished my tenth book, Balzac's unknown "The Collection of Antiquities".  It is classic Balzac and excellent, the story of a Marquis who loses everything during the Revolution and stakes all his hopes on a brilliant, handsome son.  As in most of Balzac's oeuvre, we know in advance that the Marquis is doomed to disappointment.

Fadiman writes of Balzac:  "He lived in a period, like our own, of money-making, money-losing, money-loving; a period in which the greatest sin was not treachery but bankruptcy.  No other novelist before him understood the world of money as did Balzac." 

"Le Cabinet des Antiques" bears out this praise in fascinating form, and I recommend it without reservation to anyone who wishes to glimpse the riches that lie in the forgotten tomes beyond "Pere Goriot".

Latest Books

I've finished four books since my last post:  "The New Lifetime Reading Plan" by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major; "A General Theory of Love" by Dr. Thomas Lewis et al; "The Master of Ballantrae" by Robert Louis Stevenson; and "Almayer's Folly" by Joseph Conrad.

Change Your Attitude, Change Your Life

I've just finished my fifth book, "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.  The first two-thirds, which takes place at Auschwitz and Dachau, reads like a shot.  The final third, which is a good deal more technical than the survivor's memoir which acts as a prelude, is considerably tougher sledding, but ultimately worthwhile.

I suspect that I will be recommending this book to friends as frequently as anything I've ever encountered.  That's a pretty powerful statement about its quality.

Essential.

Speaking Truth to Power

My fourth book of 2011, and my first major achievement, is "Recent American Foreign Policy:  Conflicting Interpretations" by Lawrence S. Kaplan of Kent State.  A college-level textbook dating back to 1968, it covers US policy decisions from 1945 to roughly 1965, through the medium of lengthy contemporary documentation:  excerpts from treaties, presidential and other administration figure speeches, Congressional testimony, articles from the more scholarly press.  Most of the great figures of the day are represented:  Beard, Kennan, Lippmann, Taft, and the full gamut of political names.  As a primer on the nuts and bolts of a generation of Cold war decision-making, the book is superb.

Now I'm ready for Kissinger's "Diplomacy".

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills

My third book is Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country".

I once read a critic who said that the highest compliment that could be paid a novel by a man of taste is "I should be proud to have written it myself."

Brilliant.

The greatest novel ever written about Africa.

Ex Ecclesia Nulla Salus

I've finished my second book, G. G. Coulton's The Medieval Scene:  an Informal Introduction to the Middle Ages, and I had no need of the overseer's rod to spur me on.  Although brief, Coulton is scholarly and well-informed; his judgements are particularly corrective in dispelling popular myths, like the image of monks painstakingly copying manuscripts as the lion's share of their daily toil (When the great scholar St. Bernard left his library to the Church, it contained only twenty-four books).

Thoroughly enjoyable.

Noch Einmal Mit Gefuhl

I've set myself the task of completing 100 significant books in 2011.  Today I finished the first:  Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield".  The novel begins promisingly, but after a long series of increasingly far-fetched coincidences and secret identities, it ends with a denoument that reads more like Act Three of a stage play than the conclusion of a novel.  I could likewise have dispensed with the chapters devoted to recounting whole sermons verbatim.  Frye, in "Anatomy of Criticism", dismisses such comedies of manners as invariably ending "with a rustle of bridal gowns and a sheaf of banknotes"; he must surely have had this novel in mind when he penned those words.

Barely worth my time as a period piece, it lends weight to my suspicion that Goldsmith must have been a tiresome companion to Dr. Johnson et. al.