The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

“The Man in the Iron Mask” is the last portion of the D’Artagnan Romances and was serialized between 1847 and 1850 in its original language: French. Neither Dad’s nor my edition has a translator listed.

WES:

The introduction to my copy of The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas likens it to a comic book or one of the pulp western novels that were popular some years ago. It also resembles the populist Robin Hood in England and the cowboy to America. These analogies are right on as The Three Musketeers stories seem to fulfil the same purpose for the nineteenth century Frenchman. This book is the final in Dumas’ series about the musketeers and their adventures as the upholders of truth, honor and loyalty to the French kings in the late 1500s and early 1600s when swordsmanship still predominated and romanticist depictions of the kings and their courts tickled the tastes of the French reading public.

In this book, the great scandal is the discovery by Aramis, Bishop of Vannes, an ex-musketeer that the present king of France, Louis XIV, has a twin brother who has been secreted away in the Bastille by his mother, Queen Anne of Austria, allegedly to protect the kingdom from potential disruptions in the royal succession. I never quite understood how Aramis figured this out since it was such a momentous secret. Since the two princes look exactly alike, Aramis plots to capture the king while he is visiting Monsieur Fouquet, the surintendant (yes, that’s what they call this post – not superintendent) of finance – the principle minister to the king. It also happens that both the king (who is married and has a queen) and Fouquet are in love with the same woman, Mademoiselle de la Valliere, who is the king’s mistress. She really is also secretly in love with Raoul, son of Athos, another retired musketeer, but has evidently decided her best interests are with the king.

Anyway, the plot is consummated when Aramis whisks Philippe, the brother, from the dungeon and takes him to the fete where the king is celebrating. They secretly have a room overlooking the king’s room and spy on how he conducts his toilet for a couple of days. One night they lower the king’s entire bed below ground, kidnap him, and take him to the Bastille where he is inserted via a clever ruse into the ex-prisoner’s room. His screaming and beating the door is fruitless as Aramis convinces the governor of the Bastille that he is mad. Meanwhile, Philippe replaces the king and attempts to fool all that he is the king. Aramis has to fool his old friend, D’Artagnan, the captain of the musketeers, who is ordered to arrest Fouquet for using his office to enrich himself and trying to steal the king’s mistress.

For some inexplicable reason, Aramis reveals to Fouquet the whole plot to exchange the kings, one the good king, Philippe, for Louis, the alleged 2nd born usurper. Fouquet, instead of going along with the plan, blows up the whole thing, and actually goes to the Bastille and rescues the king who had previously ordered his arrest. Before the king could react, Fouquet offered Aramis and Porthos, another ex-musketeer who was unwittingly helping Aramis, a refuge to escape the king’s wrath, his property on Belle Isle (no, not the Island in Detroit River – this one is off the coast of France). When the king returns, he is understandingly enraged at all the plotters and orders D’Artagnan to arrest them but not before he personally orders Philippe to wear an iron mask and D’Artagnan to secretly take him to a desert island where he can be held for the rest of his life. Thusly, Philippe is last heard of on page 318 of a 574 page book. I guess his curse is to last forever as the musketeers never do rescue him.

Instead, the rest of the book is devoted to the fate of the major characters and the last adventures of the musketeers. We find that Raoul is so crushed by the lost love of de la Valliere that he goes off to war. He is killed in the African war and the news causes the death of his father hours before the embalmed body of the hero-son returns. They are buried together and de la Valliere comes to weep over the grave after being superseded by a younger mistress. Fouquet, despite his heroic efforts to save the king, is imprisoned by D’Artagnan after betrayal by his clerk, Colbert, who takes his place. D’Artagnan does manage to save him from the gallows. D’Artagnan is ordered to capture Aramis and Porthos by besieging Belle Isle but instead gives them time to escape. This brings the wrath of the king onto him. He’s fired and the siege proceeds without him. Aramis escapes to Spain but Porthos is killed when the powder keg he throws at a company of attacking soldiers collapses the cave on top of him.

Louis suddenly becomes mellow and seems to forgive everybody. D’Artagnan gets back into good graces simply through his sheer loyalty and honor to the king. Even Aramis comes back later to lead an effort to turn Spain into a neutral while Louis moves to war against the United Provinces who were formally his allies against Spain. France, however, is loath to ally itself to a Protestant confederation against a fellow Catholic state. D’Artagnan in reward for his virtue and loyalty is promoted to Marshal of France and leads the attack but on the very day of his marshal’s baton award, he is killed attacking a Dutch fort. Thus comes to an end the musketeer story. Aramis died in his bed, I guess.

This story was somewhat disappointing in several ways. After spending the first 50 pages bemoaning the injustices done to Philippe by his mother and Louis XIII, I was looking forward to seeing him mount the throne and be the good king and somehow fool everyone by convincing everyone he was Louis XIV. I figured Louis would be the man in the iron mask. Instead, there was no redemption – the bad king remained king and Phillipe was sentenced to wear the mask and suffer eternal anonymity. The long description of Athos parting with Raoul as he went off to war was a bit much in the romanticism vein although this device was necessary, I guess, as a means to show the fate of Phillipe. I about tore my hair out with all the names that the characters used almost as a means of disguise. Everyone seemed to have multiple names. For instance, Porthos was known intermittently as Baron du Vallon, Signeur of Bracieux, and Signeur de Pierrefonds, among others. I guess the French are fond of all these titles. Every place you own gives you a different title, I suppose. I am the Baron de Little Oak Pond!  

Overall, this book was interesting, especially the fierce loyalty of everyone to the king even when he steps on your neck. I did not like how it didn’t proceed as I thought it should. Poor Phillipe might still be sitting out there on his prison island of Ste. Marguerite – where ever the heck that is – I looked for it off the coast of France! I did like the character of the musketeers and their all for one, one for all attitude and dialogue. It was interesting seeing Aramis trying to outwit D’Artagnan. I still don’t know why he divulged the plot to Fouquet and NOT to his fellow musketeers, especially to the captain of the king’s guard who was most in position to help the cause. I guess that was a case of one for one! Although it was an easy read, the problems I had with it leads me to rate it as a 5 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

ALLISON:

It took me longer than usual to read this book, in part because my edition (Oxford World’s Classics) has twenty-nine more chapters than other versions, indeed the one Dad read. What might you have missed, were you not to read the first 200 pages that I unknowingly slogged through? As the intro of my edition points out, the reader would miss a single day (maybe in both the effort of reading—although, I’d estimate my 200 pages took more like a week—and narratively in the plot). This single day, detailed by Dumas, reveals some backstory that may or may not be critical to understanding future relationships. Raoul has a much bigger role, and his heartbreak with Louise is played out, setting him as a hopeless rival with King Louis. Financial, political, and romantic complications between Fouquet and Colbert are expounded. Largely the chapters are concerned with the plot to free Philippe, which is painstakingly revealed, along with its various motivations from key players. A critical and exciting piece of the book contained in these opening 200 pages was the revelation of the Queen’s birthing of secret twins, as detailed by Madame de Chevreuse to the Queen herself, and the following explanation of how the baby, young child, and eventual man, were hidden and cared for without even his brother, King Louis, the wiser. (This is arguable. At some points it is assumed Louis has been complicit in the plot to hide his brother, at others it is insisted that he was unaware of Philippe’s existence.) The plot to free Philippe was so dense in the first half of this book, that when the event is actually carried out, its quick failure and subsequent disappearance of Philippe from the narrative is surprising. He’s the title character after all and such a romantic figure. Without the first twenty-nine chapters, he becomes supporting cast, if not a fleeting walk-on.

But The Man in the Iron Mask is not the accurate title of this tome and the history of these characters extends far beyond the first 29 chapters. An alternate title for this portion of Dumas’ epic is Ten Years Later, as this is a continuation of the saga of The Three Musketeers. I didn’t know this going in, in fact I was unfamiliar with the names of the heroes (Athos, Aramis, Porthos, D’Artagnan) and it took me quite some time to figure out their particular significance. My early readings of Porthos were especially comical. The chapter “How Mouston had Become Fatter without giving Porthos Notice Thereof, and of the Troubles which Consequently Befell that Worthy Gentleman” although already ridiculous, was made even more hilarious without the context of Porthos’ Andre-the-Giant-esque stature. I spent a good portion of this book wondering why I felt untethered to the characters, like I was missing critical information before I discovered that there were likely 1200 or so serialized pages preceding even the extra ones I had read. So, yes, I was missing quite a bit.

We’ve read a couple of serializations in the bookclub thus far: The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Moonstone. Neither of which are as complex and encompassing as what Dumas accomplished with The Three Musketeers series. Dumas, although not the first, could be considered the Godfather of historical novel, employing real life figures as his protagonists and villains. I am quite fascinated by the time of long-running serializations. If we were to compare this format with the media of today, we might consider Dickens and Collins as having written one-off six-episode television mini-series that the BBC has so expertly mastered. Dumas, rather, has written a twelve year epically-arced American television series, like NYPD Blue. Where Dickens and Collins both had suspense-driven plots, Dumas was almost theatrically Sophoclean, or more contemporarily, soap-oprean, in its longwinded and complicated conversational interactions. All of the plot points are reiterated in verbal form, individually, by all parties involved. I won’t lie, this was tiring. In the introduction to my edition, David Coward says Dumas spent little energy creating a universe of historical detail, like “descriptions of dress, buildings, or court ritual” or even mooring the reader in summaries of previous action, “which would simply have bored the reader.” However, being a Johnny-come-lately reader, I would have much preferred an anchorage in the history of our heroes to the thick dialogue of “What we’re going to do, why we might do it, how we’re going to do it, and who we plan to undercut while we’re at it,” over and over again.

Which brings me Dumas’ panache for thrilling action! Once they finally stop pontificating and get to it, the action of this book was marvelous. I recently watched the film Titanic and recalled the bookclub’s reading of Dead Wake and thought, “Would Larson’s depiction of the sinking of the Lusitania have been so successful without the visual impact of Cameron’s film?” We all experienced the Titanic sinking so viscerally, in one of the very first CGI masterpieces, that much of Larson’s work conjuring the horror of an event few of us could possibly fathom, was done for him already. That’s not the case for Dumas. This being the final chapter of the Musketeers histories, Dumas was especially rousing in their demise. The grotto scene where Porthos and Aramis lay trap and kill dozens of soldiers is chilling and brutal and as terrifying as any horror film. Porthos’ death scene has all the emotional impact of an avalanche. The chase of the black horse and the white horse (my absolute favorite chapter), in which D’Artagnan arrests Fouquet is in equal measure poetic and kinetic, as to have left me breathless. And Raoul, poor Raoul and Athos’ heartbreaking finale. I did not need any visual context to experience these dramas to their fullest—all of it was imbedded terrifically in the text. Unfortunately, in the end, I wanted more of this, earlier and sustained.

And what the heck happened to Philippe?

In the intro, David Coward, absurdly states: “But a summary of the plot so far is as necessary as a handle on cabbage.” I’ve hardly heard a more bizarre comparison (although I plan to use this often and immediately). A handle is unthinkably incongruent to the function of vegetable, but a rooting in time and place, would have greatly influenced my reading, especially as there was so much political machinations going on in this story. Dumas is not responsible for my loss of footing, of course. He meant for me to be hooked from the start. If only I hadn’t started from the end.

I give this book a 4 on Dad’s scale of 1-10, 1 being highest. Although oft lost, I was also oft moved. n and immediately).ary, wouldarlly in the text.rilling in their demise.  mastered.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage was published in 2001 when Alice Munro was 70 years old. Two of the stories have been adapted for film, the title story and "The Bear Comes Over the Mountain".

Allison:

This is Alice Munro’s tenth (tenth!) collection of short stories. She has published sixteen books of collected stories, never a novel. In 2013 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming one of only two Canadians to win the prize (Saul Bellow, an antithesis and the only other) and the first North American since Toni Morrison twenty years earlier. As far as I can tell, and what I remember from the time she won, Alice Munro is the only author to ever win the prize for a body of work comprising only short stories. I picked this book because I think Alice Munro best encompasses the phrase “contemporary classic.” I have also never read her, and doubted very much if Dad had.

            These stories are about loss. I was thinking how, although some of her main characters are in their twenties, I am glad I waited until my mid-thirties to read this. The loss of these characters is quiet, not romantic and weepy and wailing like loss is felt in youth. There is tremendous loneliness in these stories, in the frank manner the narrators (mostly first person, but some close and even omniscient third) reveal their fantastical escape from the narrowness of their bodily lives. I am thinking of Jinny (close third person) in “Floating Bridge” who at forty-two has gone through a submission to cancer: “And yet—the excitement. The unspeakable excitement you feel when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life. Then for shame you must compose yourself and stay very quiet.” These are words that sum all of what I got from Munro. Jinny isn’t dying. She’s been told the cancer is in remission. The news doesn’t feel like relief, because she is so very tired, and she’s done all the hard work of acceptance. Now she starts over, still her, still alive.  These are rough, rough feelings. Given a coveted second chance and lamenting the loss of the freedom of death. We the reader are getting unprecedented access to the inner contents of individuals, stuff they don’t speak aloud to even those closest to them, and it is melancholic, like we humans are. Or I am. But not pitiable. Rather, complicated, unsortable, as Jinny expresses, unutterable. What if she said this to her husband? How that would wound.

            Things like this, when offered aloud have impact on the one who receives because the one who hears is just as selfish and isolated as the one who speaks. But when mused alone, these big floppy ideas remain suspended, “floating” as it were. Lonely, but painless. This is what the book is about. The unutterables. It so happens, Munro’s stories come full circle, because she, in writing, is communing with our own unutterables, those that are so lonely yet extraordinarily identifiable in art. We can’t express it our own little universes because to do so means terrible impact and impact is not the desire, not the point.  Instead, we search it out in film, art, literature, any medium that can possibly make our interior existence less tiny and insular.

            Alone in our heads, we can imagine what we’d like, and we can interpret what we don’t. In “Family Furnishings” we readers get a clue that the narrator (first person this time) easily ignores. There’s a hint that the narrator’s second cousin, Alfrida, bore a child by the narrator’s father, a child she had to give up because of the incestuous and scandalous nature of conception. A secret easily sussed, but of course we can only speculate because we are locked into the mind of the narrator and for her, this thought simply must not be thought. Maybe we readers find this the most interesting part of the story, but it’s not what the narrator wants to tell us. This is a story about her after all, not Alfrida’s demons. So instead, “Family Furnishings” ends with the narrator, who is a burgeoning writer, justifying her creation of a short story stolen from Alfrida’s deepest pain. The narrator lies to herself deliberately, and arguably less convincingly, but informs the reader that it doesn’t matter if she’s manipulating truth when she says: “I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories… This is what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.” Alfrida had given the narrator something precious. She had said aloud words that had belonged only to her, something so arresting and gorgeous, I underlined it three times on the page and wrote “whoa!” in the margins before I even knew the future significance. The narrator steals this spoken marvel and puts it into writing and is possibly never forgiven. This goes back to the unutterable, the melancholic interior. When these things are offered as spoken words they lose their lonely subservience to the thinker. They become free rein for anyone to snatch and exploit. That’s what writers do after all, and Alice Munro is conducting a master class in this story.

            I could talk long and thoroughly about all these stories. Things I would love to talk about:

-Canada. Its pioneer presence in the stories. Women and men marry young and hard, and then all the “love that was not usable” (from “Nettles”). Is this a generational concept, Munro is 85 years old after all, or is there something transferable from these vaguely rural lifestyles to my own Metropolis living? How can we compare the interior solitude these characters to the vapid loneliness of Fitzgerald’s wealthy in The Beautiful and Damned? Does one feel more authentic than the other?

-Point of view. She writes predominately from the feminine and men’s unutterables are for the most part tightly explained by women: “Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.” (“Family Furnishings”) But then in “Nettles” the man does confess, he offers the ugliest thing he can as release, while in the same story the narrator passes over her own loss of connection to her children through divorce, as ugly and arguably as painful to acknowledge. And in the final story, “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain” we have a male narrator (close third person) who confesses infidelities and offers new love to his Alzheimer’s inflicted wife in the form of another man, without hesitation. What a beautiful and complicated story. But I am a woman. I am hyper critical of men writing women (the favorite and best exception is Peter Carey’s astonishing book My Life as a Fake—potentially my favorite book of all time). Is it convincing from the male point of view?

            There’s much to examine in Munro’s craft. The plot is spare, the echoes of the body tied close to the interior of the mind is fascinating and elicit and normal and plain and startling all the same. These are long stories compared to contemporary style. Nowadays we want to read on our cell phones, on our 15 minute coffee breaks, even still I was surprised that they filled 315 pages. 315 pages is a substantial novel, but Alice Munro has given nine micronovels in the same space. I felt the investment I feel reading novels in each of the stories. Novel vs short story is kind of like debating memoir vs autobiography. Memoir is thought to be a highlight—a moment of a life, while autobiography encompasses all. Memoir: a pork chop, autobiography (and biography): outdoor pig roast. These stories defy convention. These stories are whole hog.   

            I give this book a 1 on a scale of 1-10. Yep. My fist solid 1.

Wes:

This month’s reading is a collection of short stories by the Canadian author, Alice Munro. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 with this work. Commentaries on the cover rank her with Chekhov and predict she will be the “living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.” Whether this is true or not is to be seen. My thoughts about each story are provided below under each title.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The title of the whole collection comes from the first story. It is a story about a plain, but sturdy, housekeeper, Johanna Parry, who is tricked by her employer’s teenage granddaughter into forsaking her life in Ontario for the romantic hope that the grandfather’s widowed son-in-law, Ken Boudreau, recently a winner of a hotel in the Saskatchewan prairie, might marry her and they would then live happily ever after. The daughter and her friend intercepted a letter Johanna had secretly inserted into the outgoing letter and they forged a correspondence from Boudreau to Johanna that led Johanna to quit her job and flee to Saskatchewan to meet who she thought was her lover. Finding Boudreau delirious, she nurses him to health and they, in fact, do marry and have a child to the mystification of the teenagers

The title evidently cycles through this chain of events, turning from the hatred of the daughter for her father (hateship) through the aberrant friendship of the two young girls to the mysterious courtship and marriage of Boudreau and Johanna. I liked the story but found much fluff in the tale with some weird descriptions that had little to do with the tale such as the long description in the dress shop and the train station when Johanna planned her wedding and shipping Boudreau’s furniture. Why Johanna walked miles to a town when Boudreau’s hotel was within sight of the prairie station was weird. Overall, it was a good story but was rather contrived to make the unlikely plot work.

Floating Bridge

Jinny, a recovering cancer patient is being taken home by Neal Lockyer, her aging hipster husband. He plans to hire a young woman, Helen, to nurse his wife and picks her up on the way home but, instead of taking Jinny home, they drive several miles to Helen’s parent’s house where Neal and Helen disappear while Jinny sits in the hot car for an extended period, spending time wandering in a cornfield. Helen’s brother, Rickie, suddenly appears on his bike and insists on driving Jinny home. When she agrees, he takes her out into the darkening night to a tannin bog, common in Canada, where they stop on a floating bridge and stare at the stars for a while. Suddenly the youngster passionately kisses Jinny, twice his age, and the story ends. This story made such little sense that I think it was really a dream. She is probably still in the hospital and is having her final dream sequence. I think this is clear when, off the wall, we find Jinny has no panties on and suddenly urinates dark brown urine in the middle of the road. Brown urine is a sure sign of approaching death and the dream-like quality of the story seemed to be her final thoughts proceeding over the River Styx. 

Family Furnishings                   

An unnamed female narrator presents anecdotes of her parents as they entertain relatives over the years. One memorable visitor to the farm is Alfrida, the first cousin of the narrator’s father, both of whom were in high school at or around the end of World War I. This woman seems a more extraordinary event than usual – she seems some kind of a special person. We learn more and more about this second cousin as the story proceeds. The narrator grows up and goes off to college and later meets Alfrida and her boyfriend in her apartment. Moving forward many years later, the narrator attends her father’s funeral where she meets Alfrida’s daughter who says she was abandoned when a baby. The circumstances of the discussion at the end led me to believe that the narrator and this daughter probably were twin sisters from an illicit love affair of Alfrida and her father long ago. The two girls were probably split up, one to adoption with the narrator to the biological father. That is my story on the meaning of this convoluted tale and I’m sticking to it.   

Comfort

Nina Spiers comes home and discovers that her husband has committed suicide with his medicine. He has been afflicted with a rapid degenerative disease and was troubled by his separation from his job as a high school biology teacher. We find that his problems stemmed from his insistence that he could never teach the creation theory despite opposition from the locals. Nina has long supported him but has doubts about his intense stubbornness over the issue. The story weaves in her distress over having him immediately cremated as he desired. The funeral director has, against her will, embalmed the body for those who wanted to memorialize him. We find that the director, Ed Shore, has had a crush on Nina for a while. I think the author had an interesting dialogue with someone about how bodies are prepared for burial and she wrote this whole story in order to feature a description of that process.

Nettles

This is sort of a whimsical tale of a woman going to visit a friend’s summer home and unexpectedly meeting a childhood friend she has not seen in many years. Her somewhat troubled life and marriage is outlined as she retreats across the country from her original home. Meeting Mike, the long-lost friend, brings a flood of memories of when Mike’s father came to dig a well on her father’s farm and they whiled away the summer in innocent child play. Now as adults with marriage problems, both exhibit different urges. The narrator has strong desires toward Mike until she finds out he is grieving over his child he has tragically run over and killed. This presents a wall she cannot cross. They go alone together to golf but a sudden storm and the revelation of his sad story interrupt any chance at intimacy. Instead they get a rash from nettles from weeds they took cover in from in the storm. The narrator still yearns for her lost love as the years pass. We know this by her searching for the summer home and the golf course trying to revive those long-lost feelings.

Post and Beam

Lorna and Brendan have married and for some years lived in North Vancouver, across the country from where Lorna grew up. They have befriended a brilliant mathematics student, Lionel, who dropped out of college, lost his mother to suicide and has some mental problems. Brendan is a college professor whose routine in their classic “Post and Beam” style house is disrupted when Polly, Lorna’s cousin, comes to visit for a couple of weeks. Lorna fears for her well-being when they suddenly leave for an out-of-town wedding and leaves Polly alone in the house. Instead of Polly’s suicide, which Lorna envisions happening on the return drive, Lionel meets Polly and both he and she seem radically changed for the better by their relationship. Lorna, an unbeliever, had prayed promising to change her ways if Polly is OK when they return. Now she has to reciprocate but the only change she decides to do is to go on living her life.

What is Remembered

Meriel and her husband, Pierre, attend the funeral of one of his friends who was killed in a motorcycle accident. The doctor who treated the decedent becomes acquainted with them at the wake and offers to take Meriel to visit her Aunt Muriel in a local rest home while her husband hurries to relieve the baby sitter of their two children. Meriel and the doctor end up having a brief affair that afternoon before he takes her to the ferry home. For the next 30 years, she mentally relives every detail of that afternoon until Pierre passes away when she suddenly remembers the way Doctor Asher brushed off a final kiss at their parting, a mannerism that probably saved her marriage and prevented a life of wantonness and promiscuity.

Queenie

Chrissy heads to Toronto looking for a summer job until college opens in the fall. She stays with her half-sister, Lena, otherwise known as Queenie, and her husband. Queenie ran away from home and married their next door neighbor, Stan Vorguilla, whose previous wife had died. The story bounces from childhood past to tidbits of Queenie’s life with Mr. Vorguilla. Queenie’s mother/Chrissy’s step-mother suspected her neighbor of something evil and was distressed when Lena ran away. What her suspicions were are not made clear but hints emerge. As Chrissy begins college, she learns that Queenie again ran away allegedly with one of Stan’s music students. It is never known for sure and for many years, Chrissy thinks of her half-sister and believes she sees her here and there but never is there closure. The reader has several options on what might have happened. I think Stan was exceedingly domineering sexually and emotionally and drove his first wife to death and Queenie away. The incident with the book on odalisque behavior in harems was the biggest clue.

The Bear Came over the Mountain

Fiona and Grant have been married for almost 50 years and are living in Fiona’s parent’s house. Their retirement is interrupted by the onset of Fiona’s dementia. Whether it’s Alzheimer’s is not known but she is sent to a rest home for those with those problems. Grant visits after a month’s hiatus and discovers Fiona has affections for Aubrey, a male patient who is confined to a wheelchair. Although Fiona lives on the 1^st floor where those with some cognizance stay (the second floor is the lockup for those “out of it”), she seems not to recognize Grant when he visits and clings to Aubrey. After Aubrey’s wife removes him, Fiona begins to decline. The desperate Grant visits Marian, the wife, seeking to have her bring Aubrey back for visits. She denies his request initially but their mutual loneliness brings them together and Marian takes Aubrey for visits with Fiona again. Although the story is straightforward, we find Grant was quite a philanderer as a college professor and his guilt over sending Fiona away early is palpable but not enough to stop his philandering ways.

Overall, this book was interesting in the scope and breadth of the stories. They had a kind of wistful quality about them. They each seemed to all provide one person’s perception of their surroundings and what others are doing. One seldom knows the whole story about others. You only get brief glimpses of what really is going on – sort of like a kaleidoscope of life around you. You make of it what you like but you may be right or you might be wrong in analyzing those glimpses. Seldom does what you think have much effect on the outcomes in other’s lives. I rate this collection of stories as a 3 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best). 

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned was published in 1922 and is the second novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When reviewed by The New York Times, the critic found Fitzgerald to be "pessimistic".

WES:

The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is our novel for this month and it appears quite representative of the genre of the 1920s. It seems to reflect the persona of the time, a time when the universities began kicking out God, society was becoming ever more soulless, Progressives (ala Woodrow Wilson and Teddy/Franklin Roosevelt) were busy reshaping policy and society, with people bouncing from one fad to another looking for something but never seeming to find it. This novel appears to me to be almost the epitome of the meaninglessness and fecklessness of lives where there are no moral guideposts, no strictures, and no basis for one’s life except the pursuit of pleasure. The book seems to have several themes that intersect in the lives of Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert whose travails are depicted in this tale. Those themes appear in the quotes below. I shall highlight in the ensuing paragraphs what I think the author’s purpose was in these quotes as well as a few of my own perspectives on these themes:

·         “It seemed a tragedy to want nothing – and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was – some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.”

·         “Gloria’s penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic…”

·         “But the book lived always, so beautifully written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

·         “He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”

·         “’I always have an instinct to kick a cat,’ he said idly.”

·         “Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin.”

·         “There was nothing it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.”

·         “Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life – and he stuck it out stanchly….’I showed them,’ he was saying. ‘It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and came through!’”

Anthony’s life surely was drastically affected by the loss of both of his parents before he was 11. His father died while they were in Switzerland so he must have been tremendously traumatized by that event and the strenuous journey home with his father’s body nearby. His early life was impacted by his grandfather’s great wealth and long, intimidating shadow. He felt a need to do something after Harvard but could never actually get around to doing anything. Instead he lived on his mother’s limited legacy and his grandfather’s yearly Christmas bond. That money was quite enough for a fellow right out of college but soon melted away after he married Gloria and their joint lives became more and more expensive. They began to depend on the grandfather’s inheritance but that became only a tenuous hope when the grandfather was disgusted over a drunken incident and completely wrote Anthony out of his will. 

Fitzgerald apparently coined the word “Bilphism” himself in this book as it does not appear in dictionaries. It supposedly means the science of all religions where the soul lives on in reincarnation. Gloria appeared to be afflicted with this curse and demonstrated it at the deaths of her parents but it seems apparent that Fitzgerald did not believe in it. He cynically appears to have invented the term as a derogatory reference to anyone foolish or stupid enough to believe in or have a psychological “complex” involving a supernatural religion.

As above noted, Fitzgerald consistently denigrates religion, especially the biblical account. One particular scene where this occurred was where Gloria left a drunken party after Joe Hull made a pass at her and she decided on the spur of the moment to return from the summer cottage upstate back to New York. Everyone in the party goes searching for her and they all end up at the train station in the wee hours of the morning waiting for the train with each drunken sot revealing their psychological motivations and religious underpinnings or lack of same. The quote cited was the end of a long cynical monologue by Gloria’s cousin who spends his time temporizing quality literature by writing claptrap to make a buck. 

Anthony reveals himself to be a thoroughly unlikeable guy. He cannot make a decision and puts off ever making a move to succeed in life. He is in it only to engage in pleasure and constantly asks forgiveness from Gloria as he falls deeper into alcoholism, debt, and ennui. This is revealed in the quote about nightmares and the simple one liner about kicking the cat. Any man who kicks a cat is worthless in my book. He reinforces his roguishness by shacking up with Dot while in the Army, then dumping her and later throwing a chair at her when she shows up in New York hoping to resume the relationship he simply had abandoned.

The theme of this book has got to be the utter futility of life. Life constantly stinks for Gloria and Anthony as everyone around them moves along while they sink deeper and deeper. They apparently fail to move because of the promise of millions from the contested inheritance that they believe will solve all their problems. They can’t see what is happening even when Anthony is thrown out of the club after drunkenly accosting Joseph Bloeckmann, the film producer, who had genuinely tried to help Gloria.

Pleasure consistently is the principle purpose of their lives and that mostly comes right out of the bottle. They had to do something, meet someone, or party every night and it nearly ruined them. As every addict is well aware of, it took more booze each time to get the desired effect and that meant more and more money and fewer and ultimately fewer friends.

After all the time spent showing a downward spiral, finally, in the last couple of pages, their legal appeal is a success and suddenly Anthony comes into a $30 million inheritance. The last quote is actually the last couple lines in the book. It shows or I think it shows Fitzgerald’s ultimate belief in the sheer uncertainty of life. Anthony and Gloria in a moral universe should have been wrecked but instead they are rewarded. Anthony actually thinks he has won out due to his own abilities given in the quote when it is actually a pure twist of fate that has put him safely on the ship to a holiday in Europe.

Overall, this book had a few plusses and held some interest but I found much I disliked. I did not like the characters. There was nothing redeeming in their actions and reactions. The title might really be an insightful one. These characters wanted to be beautiful and lived for pleasure but as the Bible says, pleasure is only for a season. Without morality and redemption, they are damned – except in this one everyone apparently will live happily ever after. Is that life – I don’t think so. I also did not like the high degree of fluff with many characters and scenes irrelevant to the main story line. This is probably due to the author’s inexperience. I will have to explore his career more fully – maybe this was an early effort for him. I rate this book as a 7 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

ALLISON:

Dad wrote an email to remind me that the title of this book is The Beautiful and Damned and not “The Beautiful and the Damned” as I have always called it, even after reading the damn thing, and carrying it around with me, staring at its beautiful cover for over a week.

            The Beautiful and Damned.

Well, that changes everything.

Why did I subconsciously and so thoroughly add that the? My version is maybe easier on the ear? “The Beautiful and The Damned”—a dichotomy, one and the other, situated across a gulf. Truly, I don’t know why or how I misread, but it’s not an opposition, not at all, and I suddenly feel I’ve misinterpreted the whole book! What a difference a the can make! Our two protagonists jointly assume these descriptions rather than the assignments I had carelessly given them: Gloria, beauty, Anthony, damnation.  Well, shoot.

There are a lot of titles in this book that I didn’t pay attention to. I am a lazy reader, which is partly why I enjoy reading with Dad, who is inquisitive and follows all plot points meticulously. Fitzgerald structured the story into three Books, each with three main chapters, and countless mini chapters, all carefully labeled and I don’t know that I ingested a single title. I don’t care for fiction that comes in neat categories, so I reject chapter headings, almost unconsciously, but in doing so I am surely missing out. Titles require thought. They are not unintentional. Let this be a lesson to me.

I will come out immediately and say I struggled to identify with these characters that want for nothing, yet are entitled everything. This is a New York novel, and I love to read about New York because New York novels tell about the city as if it’s the only city—the universal, and there’s something so bold and obnoxious about that. As a New Yorker (and I call myself a New Yorker because I’ve lived in the city longer than I’ve lived anywhere else) it makes me feel included in the joke. I want to recognize myself in New York, but our heroes Anthony and Gloria may as well live on the moon, their privileged birthright so elevates them from squall of the streets. I can’t live in this version of New York, but I certainly recognize the cast of characters. I just don’t like them very much. 

As I neared the end of this book, I heard echoes of Fitzgerald in another deeply devastating American novel: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Despite similar fates, Yates’ book is about ambition which is arguably a theme more familiar to our American indoctrinations than that of the elite. Of course this country is supposed to offer wealth and security and love and warmth to those who only seize their opportunity. The heartbreak of Revolutionary Road comes from the dissolution of the myth of the American Dream, which is also why my heart steels toward Anthony and Gloria. They refuse to struggle. But, as Buddha says, “life is suffering.” Their agony instead manifests from the lack of fight and in the end Anthony refers to himself as a cautionary tale. If you fail to strive, fail to be motivated by a fragile ego, or shrewd greed, or even the extraordinary effort of pulling up one’s bootstraps, then you are undeserving.

Anthony thinks he is damned by a woman—by achieving the one woman he wants. But he’s not damned. He’s spared a war of over 38 million (!!!) causalities, he never starves, and he teeters on the edge of disaster the entire book, even perhaps, getting away with murder. His damnation is psychic, and his own concoction. Conversely, we want to feel compassion for the marriage of Richard Yates’ couple in Revolutionary Road which is shattered by ambition and ponderings about feminine “choices” between family and independence, or how a woman might measure a successful life against the manly American algorithm of work = reward. Gloria, finding Anthony’s role as provider lacking, asks these questions, but her only “work” (becoming an actress) relies on her beauty, employed too little, too late.  

Maurice Sendak wrote a trilogy of children’s books which he describes as “how children master various feelings - danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy - and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives.” If you ask me, In the Night Kitchen, is his book on boredom. The hero, Mickey, (clearly a child lying in bed, waiting for sleep) conquers insufferable boredom with ingenuity and creation. He takes control of his dreamworld and removes himself from peril by forcefully protesting. He then builds a plane out of dough, and delivers milk to the batter so we all can have cake for breakfast. He is rewarded with pride, a job well done. I was reminded of Mickey and Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, particularly when Anthony delivers an oft-quoted speech to his unrequited mistress, Dot. Anthony tries to temper her heartache by explaining that it’s better to desire than achieve when he says: “I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity of the success.” He’s not exactly saying “be careful what you wish for” because there’s no real longing for anything, as all that’s to be desired has been fated already through fortunate birth—wealth, status, and beauty. Yet all of these surface advantages fall short of fruition. Anthony is only wealthy enough to not have to do anything. Gloria is only beautiful enough to find Anthony, wasting the vague prize of her youth and beauty on a sad marriage of disrepair. No one works at fixing anything, and the shiny veneer dulls and flakes with boredom turned madness. This is a novel of neglected narcissists, stuck gazing in the mirror. Anthony missed Sendak’s lesson of childhood, never learnt how to protect his own ego, so that when things spiral out of control he relents to the chaos rather than designing a world in which he is redeemed. A world in which he is the hero.

I loved the language of this book, it was so very beautiful and accessible, even as written nearly 100 years ago. But the book was so very depressing and any morals gleaned, like Mickey, I thankfully mastered in childhood. I found it hard to like this book at all. I give it a 4 out of 10. 

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett was published in the magazine Redbook in 1934. While Hammett never wrote a sequel in novel form, he went on to pen the stories for six Thin Man films, despite the literal "thin man" perishing in the only book. 

ALLISON:           

It’s no use beating around the bush. I really liked this book. Really, really. Outside of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, this is the most entertaining reading experience I’ve had in some time. I was trying to think of why I liked this book so much, especially as there are things that I’ve come to expect in crime novels that Hammett’s Thin Man doesn’t address. For example, I wasn’t particularly challenged or inspired to figure out the mystery—I took a wild guess that the murderer was Dorothy in the opening pages and was contented not to think about it from there on out. Also, my heart wasn’t tugged for the victim, she wasn’t built as a sympathetic character. And I wasn’t worried for the health and fitness of our heroes, although this isn’t Hammett’s fault. I had mistakenly assumed there were subsequent Nick and Nora novels, assuring their safe passage through this one. There are not more books, I’ve learned—only a series of Nick and Nora movies, also penned by Hammett. Nevertheless, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of suspense or edge of my seat sitting.

What I’ve listed are qualities that usually enhance a crime novel, but there are also typical interferers in the genre, devices that turn my stomach, or irritate me. As a critical feminist, I often struggle with the mores of masculine mysteries. Especially (ESPECIALLY!!) when the victim is a pretty young woman. There’s too much romanticization of women and violence in our media. Much to my chagrin, I was not piqued, not even a little, by this crime novel written in the 1930’s. I said to a coworker at the bookshop, “It’s the best kind of misogyny. The women send it back in equal measure.” I exaggerate of course, (the women are interesting, and certainly tough—the victim is killed because of her association with crime, not other more passionate and clichéd reasons) but much like the Ferrante novels, I didn’t worry about feminism while I was reading. Which is rare. While everyone is calling the Neapolitan novels triumphs of feminist literature, I find myself silently commenting, “Or, they are just good.”  Fully comprehending the benefits of scrutinizing art and media for their commentary on our cultural norms, I’m not chuckling that Ferrante’s books about a female friendship are so transcendent that men (gasp! MEN!) stand at the bookstore counter thumbing through the pastel soap opera covers. Likewise, I’m not aghast that Nora thinks dirty old men are entertaining, enabling a casual yet potentially sinister chauvinism. Because The Thin Man is just good. It’s worth saying, though that I find a crime novel to be exceptional (and I find many, many crime novels thus) is quite a bit less frustrating than the rest of the world’s surprise that a book about women should be so fantastic.

            None of this is to say The Thin Man isn’t political. One of the more startling characters in the novel is alcohol. Everyone drinks, all the time. The lawyers, the brokers, the gangsters, and even the cops. No one drinks more than Nick Charles, who despite downing a drink for every new thought, is never drunk. The only drink Nick refuses is the one offered by Guild, the police detective on the case. He abstains not because he worries about the cop (the pair have shared a drink at other opportunities) rather because of his experience with the quality of cops’ drink. The book was published in 1934, the near the time Prohibition was repealed after thirteen dry years. Late in the novel Nick says to Nora, “This excitement has put us behind on our drinking,” Drinking, despite its criminality, is an obligation, like paperwork. The alcohol consumption in The Thin Man is not sustainable. That Nick remains so lucid throughout the novel, despite the drinking and being shot in the gut within the first few pages, is a stretch. We forget his injury, even as he engages in a few physical altercations. The stitches only pop in the final reveal, as he tosses a punch at the murderer, reminding us that Nick has been tussling baddies with a belly full of booze and a bullet wound! One would think he’d have bled to death, his blood thinned to zero. The quantity drunk is ridiculous, certainly lethal, but fictionally imbibing with such obsessive punctuation can serve as a tipsy flip of the bird at the establishment.

            So Nick Charles is a tolerant man. Beyond his capacity for drink and pain, he is a successful sleuth because he can endure people. In this way he reminds me of my husband, who is not a private investigator, but a bartender. Todd rarely drinks but he deals with drunks for a living, drunks who come to the bar every evening, stay there all night, paying our rent, while considering Todd their best friend. He might be. Or might just be working. You have to be pretty obnoxious, or dangerous, for Todd to kick you out, but he’s not hesitant to put you in your place or tell a joke at your expense. All the characters in The Thin Man are desperate to win Nick’s favor, even as he claims he takes no sides. He’s everyone’s best friend, even when they shoot him in the gut. This is not the typical PI trope. He may be drunk, but he’s not a depressive or a wreck. He’s magnetic, the trouble, the talk and inevitable slips of truth, gravitating to him like the most popular kid in the room.

           I liked this book a lot. I liked it’s cheerful, sometimes silly tone punched with moments of chilling violence. I loved Nick’s bland distrust of everyone besides his quick-witted and unflappable wife. The dialogue is stunning, unmatched and somehow untimely—stylized but still relevant to today-speak. The one littlest question that never found an answer is why Nick started investigating in the first place. Curiosity would have brought him only so far, unless I’m mistaken, he wasn’t hired by anyone in particular, rather begged with by everyone specifically. Nick’s final monologue summarizing the crime was a bit over the top, (the added parentheticals or details assumed and proven through future investigations was particularly laughable) considering the man hardly uttered more than three consecutive sentences. BUT, overall, this book was true good fun, and I give it a whomping 2 out of 10 (1 being the highest) and am really excited to sit down for a Thin Man movie marathon in the coming weekend.  

Wes:

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett is an interesting detective story that became a rage in the early 1930s as its sharp repartee was easily translatable to the screen. The interesting relations between the main characters, Nick Charles and his classy heiress-wife Nora, also surely became infectious to the reading public as several of Hammett’s books were widely read and subsequently translated to the screen. Probably the most popular was The Maltese Falcon, which surely went a long way to making Humphrey Bogart a star. I heard that six “Thin Man” films were made featuring Nick and Nora Charles and their dog, Asta, the latter somehow transmogrified from a larger, more intimidating dog in the book to a small scaredy-cat dog in the movies.      

The book begins with Charles and his new wife vacationing in New York where Charles, an ex-gumshoe, is accosted by a young woman he once knew as a child when he was working as a detective. She was now looking for her long-lost father, a former client of Charles’. He passes her to the father’s lawyer and tries to move on but despite his best efforts to avoid it, he is drawn more and more into the case of the missing father. The problems intensify when people start dying and the papers mistakenly mention him as being on the case, a fact which brings a thug to his bedside with a pistol pointed at his gut. The thug lets one off when the cops suddenly show up and Charles is only grazed (the thin man??) but now has some literal skin in the game. The cops roust the thug and think Charles knows more than he does. Charles has to cooperate and, to avoid a gun possession rap, he thereafter exercises some of his old methods and contacts trying to work with the cops in solving the case.

The story is a real easy and quick read as it is almost non-stop dialogue. Nick Charles continually has run-ins with a wide range of interesting characters as he tries to find out why Julia Wolf and Arthur Nunheim are killed and who the killer(s) are. He moves around the speakeasies and invites a range of characters to his hotel suites as he and his wife wait for the New Year celebration. We never actually see them as the New Year (1933) never arrives before the end. It must have been quite a description if it had, because they spend almost all their time drinking, drunk, or waking up after noon with hangovers. To make a different New Year’s Day would have to be a day when they didn’t drink – that would be a celebration, I guess. In any case he solves the murders a day or two prior to the New Year and then decide to leave for home – San Francisco – before the big day.   

            The emphasis on booze in this book seems a clear intent to get prohibition repealed. Nearly everyone is boozing it up and the stuff is supposed to be illegal! The cops even are offered drinks and are offering up bottles out of their bottom drawers down at the precinct. The book has some weird things that in some cases are false leads and others seem a bit off – such as the long five page piece on cannibalism that Nick gives to Dorothy’s brother when he makes an off-the-cuff query on whether Nick knows anything about cannibals. After the book was finished, I had to ask what was up with that? Maybe the author needed some bulk to get to 200 pages – I can’t figure what else that section might mean.    

            One of the best quotes in the book was one that seemed very meaningful this month (October 2015) as one of our former leaders has been under the gun for truthfulness. Charles put her dilemma very succinctly in his description of Mimi Jorgensen’s stories:

‘The chief thing,’ I (Nick) advised them (Lt. Guild and Nora), ‘is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people – even women – get discouraged after you caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her.’

Overall the story line moved forward quickly but I found some of the clues that Nick uncovered did not follow too closely when reading the wrap-up at the end when he discussed all the clues that led him to discover who the killer was and where all the dead bodies were. I did not recall some of the logic he came up with but the author must have had them covered since he conceived the whole thing. I guess the thin man was really intended to be the dead man in the grave with the fat man’s clothes. I am also still looking for the meaning of “dromomania” and “earysipelas.” I have a large college dictionary and neither of these obscure terms is defined. This was a good read and I look forward to seeing the various movies when they show up on The Movie Channel. I rate this book as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).