Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 33

Movie Mistakes that Drive Me Nuts (They're in Books, too).

Not long ago I was watching an old Clint Eastwood movie at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. A strange film, mainly remembered now as the flick which introduced both Michael Cimino and Jeff Bridges to the world. Anyway, there is a sequence rather early in the story, in which Eastwood and Bridges and confronted by two hit men wielding revolvers with silencers screwed to their barrels. As I sat there, stuffing fistfuls of popcorn into my mouth, I rolled my eyes to the extremely ornate ceiling of the movie theater (it looks like an ancient Egyptian tomb) in disgust. Why? You cannot attach a silencer to a revolver. That is to say, you can, but the act is pointless. The noise of a revolver is emitted from area around the cylinder, in other words out the sides of the weapon, and not through the barrel, as in, say a 9mm or .45 pistol. So, in effect, you are silencing the wrong part of the pistol. Silencers on revolvers, though common on television and seen even in a couple of old James Bond movies, are simply an example of lazy-ass production design by people who couldn't be bothered to do research, or whose idea of research was watching, well, old James Bond movies. When you consider how much money goes into making a film, how many people are employed on them, and how many of those well-paid employees have no other job than to get the little details right, it's aggravating as hell. To me, anyway.

This got me thinking, as I drove home, queasy from the trash bag of popcorn I had just washed down with a bucket of Coke, about how there are, in fact, no such things as silencers. Not, at any rate, in the way they are depicted by Hollywood. A silencer's true name in the trade (by which I mean the intelligence community, the military and law enforcement) is a "suppressor." The reason for this is that guns are so goddamned loud that to actually silence them would require a device about the size of a fire hydrant, which also weigh nearly as much. (It must be remembered that even a small-caliber pistol is essentially a miniature cannon.) A suppressor, as the name suggests, reduces the amount of noise a gun makes when it goes off; it does not eliminate it completely. That "thwit!" noise you always hear in movies when somebody plugs somebody else with a "silenced" pistol is pure fantasy. A suppressed pistol is at least as loud as balloon bursting and possibly as loud as a small firecracker. Maybe the CIA has a super-duper grade of suppressor that is no louder than a handclap in an enclosed space, but even this device suffers from a shortcoming which exposes yet another aggravating mistake encountered in film. The bottomless silencer.

Assault on Precinct 13 is an early John Carpenter movie in which the bad guys wield submachineguns fitted with suppressors that hardly make a sound. Since this plot element, is key to the story, it can and should be forgiven; however, in the flick the baddies use their guns like water cannons, and at the end of the film they are just as eerily quiet as at the beginning. In real life, even the highest-grade military-level suppressors lose their efficacy with increasing speed as each bullet moves through the device. This is because the baffles which absorb the sound decompress further with each explosion, which means after just a few shots the suppressor is so much dead weight. Put another way, "silencers" get noisier the more they are used, which means using them like squirt guns is not an option.

Hollywood is replete with technical advisers of every sort, so it crazes me still further how often detective shows and cop movies blunder on other details of this kind. For example, not too long ago I saw a forensics show in which the techs were dusting a doorknob for fingerprints. Doubtless a few cases have been cracked in this manner, but for the most part, in my day anyway, crime scene techs didn't bother dusting doorknobs. By the very nature of what they are, knobs are so smeared by thousands upon thousands of overlapping prints that getting usable ones impossible, or damned near. (Ditto the button panels in elevators) In the same show, which is to say the same series, a guy gets knocked unconscious and, after waking up, shakes his head and recounts all the events leading up to the moment he was kayoed. In reality, nobody hit hard enough to get sent into dreamland will be able to remember anything for about a half an hour before the lights went out. In fact, in real life, people who claim to have been knocked out who tell police they can remember every detail beforehand usually become suspects from that moment forward, because the cops knowthey are lying.

Police. Is there a profession, except for doctor or lawyer, which has more representation on television and in film? And yet the writers, or the production designers or the technical advisers on these shows, are always blundering on simple details. Like having detectives given the rank of "sergeant" (because it sounds tough) but having no supervisory responsibilities. Or having lieutenants and captains investigate cases personally, like Capt. Jim Brass on CSI. Lieutenants and captains don't investigate shit. They supervise others. And those others, those detectives, never just work one case. Every homicide detective in a big city has multiple outstanding unsolved murders on his caseload. They juggle all of them simultaneously.

But novelists are hardly exempt from these mistakes, either. In the horror novel The Relic, a New York cop working security detail at a museum on a Friday night finishes his shift, but is eaten by a monster on his way out the door. Nobody notices anything even happened to him until Monday morning, and even then, when he doesn't show up for work, nobody is particularly alarmed. What the fuck? Policemen don't go home when their shifts end; they return to their station house for roll call, inventory their squad cars, do any outstanding paperwork, change clothes. A cop leaves his detail and never shows up at the station house, the whole freaking NYPD would be out looking for him. In that same novel, an FBI agent is described as working alone and wearing a flashy red vest. In real life FBI agents almost never go anywhere alone; they work in pairs, like Mulder and Scully, and no FBI agent in the history of the Bureau has ever worn a red vest. Ever. Ever. J. Edgar Hoover once had a clerk fired for wearing a red vest; agents wear conservative gray or dark blue suits. And they refer to themselves as specialagents, not agents.

Some blunders in film and fiction, like the silencer on the revolver, have become so ingrained that they have acquired a certain legitimacy even though they are nonsense. Stories in which Mafia dons speak like Oxford dons are incredibly common. Again, what the actual fuck? Show me a Mafia boss in this country who can speak two sentences without betraying the fact he dropped out of 9th grade and I'll show you a penguin that can fly. Mobsters make a worse hash of the English language than tweenage girls Snap-chatting at the mall. Granted, one or two have been articulate in their own rough-spun way -- Paul Castellano comes to mind -- but none of them can refrain from saying "fuck" for more than half a sentence, which kind of spoils the intellectual effect.

Oh, and on the subject of the Mafia -- nobody uses the word "don" except journalists. The heads of crime families are called "boss" or, in the familiar, "bo." And the Families are not, as a rule, hereditary dynasties. Leadership is not passed from father to son, except in rare cases where the son is of high rank and viewed as capable of doing the job -- and even then such a move can cause resentment, which in Mafia circles is expressed with car bombs. As for the scene in The Godfather (both the book and the movie) where one of the bosses says he pays his people extra so they don't get involved in drugs -- huh? what? Mafia soldiers do not get paid by their bosses. Quite the opposite. The Mafia is a pyramid scheme. Money flows up, not down, and there are no exceptions to this rule.

Certain writers are repeat offenders in the category of sloppy research. The most notorious is probably Stephen King, who has freely (and cheerfully) admitted his failing in this area. But I can never read a book of his which features spooks, cops or soldiers without cringing. Referring to the butt of a pistol as a "handle" is egregious, as is calling a weapon a "carbine rifle" (sort of like calling a car a "sedan-coupe") or referring to a CIA agent as, well "a CIA agent." (CIA people are called "officers"; "agents" are the foreigners who work for them.) And no, "terminate with extreme prejudice" is not and never has been official terminology in the cloak-and-dagger set. When you hear this phrase in a movie or read it in a book, you can be damned sure the writer did his research on Netflix. As much as I have mocked Tom Clancy over the years for his personality failings, jingo patriotism and terrifyingly naive belief in the power of bombs to settle arguments, he was, by and large, a fucking trouper when it came to cracking the books.

As for war movies and war novels, man, I am not even going to touch that right now. I can't, or this blog would be longer than the Oscars.

Contrary to what you may think by this point, I don't want to come off self-righteous here, for I am certainly not without sins of my own in this area. The best short story I ever wrote, "Roadtrip," originally contained a sequence in which a woman shot a police officer with a silenced revolver. Only many years after I'd penned it did I realize my mistake. Likewise, in another short, "Shadows and Glory," which made the rounds on the literary prize circuit back in the early 1990s, made a cartoon blunder in regards to some historical details about Nazi Germany. And these mistakes were hardly unique. I can think of at least three more works of mine which make easily-avoidable errors, without even trying. But the embarrassment these errors caused did make me keener not to repeat my errors, and I wish to hell that movies with budgets large enough to finance small wars, and writers who can afford to hire entire universities to do research for them, would pay a little more attention to details. Because in my experience, it's the details that sell the story.

Otherwise, the next time I'm at a movie I might choke on my popcorn, and what an enormous loss that would be to us all.

Hitler's Hollywood: The Movies of Nazi Germany, Part 2

As promised -- or threatened -- I have returned for the first of my reviews of Nazi Cinema. I have decided to start with two sharply contrasting films, not in spite of their differences but because of them. I am hoping, with these analyses, to demonstrate the breadth of "Hitler's Hollywood" in terms of tone and subject matter. Also to settle the question of just what sort of popular entertainment was made for the German people during the Nazi years (1932 - 1945). After all, the issue of just what sort of art can be produced under censorship is a complex one: few people have broached the subject since George Orwell. Was Nazi cinema noisy and bombastic and full of militarism and overt propaganda, or was there a subtler approach, one which allowed for artistic merit?

Our first film is called ICH KLAGE AN. It was released in 1941 and directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner. The story begins with the effervescent and life-loving Hanna Heyt (Heidemarie Hatheyer) celebrating the appointment of her research-scientist husband Thomas (Paul Hartmann) to a professorship in Munich. When Hanna injures her arm slightly during their dinner celebration, however, the injuries don't heal, so Thomas calls in a former romantic rival of his, Dr. Bernhard Lang (Mathias Wieman) to perform an examination. To everyone's horror, Lang, who is still in love with Hanna, diagnoses her with multiple sclerosis. Thomas immediately throws himself into researching a treatment for the progressive and fatal disease, which is steadily robbing Hanna of all the quality of her life; but when his efforts come to nothing he begins to seriously contemplate granting her wish for euthanasia, even though the law forbids it. Lang is militantly opposed, and Thomas' decision to give his wife a fatal dose of morphine ultimately lands him before a court of inquiry (somewhat similar to a British police court or an American coroner's inquest). There Thomas' actions and motives are scrutinized and some evidence is presented that may exonerate him -- but without a clear decision as to the morality of assisted suicide. But Thomas isn't having it: refusing to grant anyone an easy way out, he demands to be tried solely on the basis of whether his actions were right or wrong, and its upon this verdict that his fate rests. The film ends ambiguously, with Thomas demanding directly of the audience that he answer the question raised in the inquiry: should he have killed his wife, or not?

IMDB's review of this ICH KLAGE AN calls it "morbid melodrama," but I no longer trust any official reviews of Nazi-era films, since the reviewers inevitably confuse enjoying a film produced by the Nazi government to mean the viewer is in sympathy with its ideology and methods. I myself found the film deeply moving and extremely dramatic. The direction by Wolfgang Liebeneiner is crisp and assured, the performances are absolutely first-rate and the script is tight and beautifully written. The lovely Heidemarie Hatheyer delivers an award-worthy performance full of charm and pathos. Hartmann and Weiman are also superb as the rival doctors. Margarete Haagen is also excellent as Hanna's housekeeper/surrogate mother, the loving Berta, as is the always-reliable Christian Kayssler as the judge. This film won the prestigious (at the time, anyway) cinematic award the Biennale Cup in 1941, and I believe deservedly so. It's at least as good, and probably considerably more gutsy in its subject matter, than most American and British films shot at the same time. The film was a commercial success and seems to have had an appreciable impact on the ordinary German's attitude toward euthanasia.

ICH KLAGE AN translates from German to English as "I Accuse" and it is an appropriate title for the film. On trial for his life, Thomas Heyt ultimately accuses his accusers of cowardice and hypocrisy for being willing to condemn fellow human being to indefinite physical suffering merely to spare themselves moral anguish, and he asks the audience to render its own judgement on his actions. In other words, this film was designed to open a dialogue as to its subject, and I believe it does just precisely that. What surprised me was the even-handedness with which the movie explores the idea of euthanasia itself. Religious, moral and ethical arguments against it are all brought to bear and given, I believe, at least the pretense of a fair hearing. There's little doubt where the movie itself lands, but it does not subject the anti-euthanasia crowd to ridicule. For a Nazi-sanctioned film, it's surprisingly fair.

Now, it would be remiss of me to ignore the fact that I ACCUSE is viewed today as a softening-up bombardment in the Nazi campaign to desensitize its population to the idea of state-sanctioned euthanasia. As the review of the film on the back of the DVD points out, the idea here is that the state ought to become involved in euthanasia, relieving individuals of the moral agony of killing their own loved ones. And in fact this is precisely what the Nazi state did with their hideous "T-4" mass euthanasia program, which saw 100,000 mentally ill Germans gassed or poisoned as an act of "racial hygiene" under Hitler's rule (though it ought to be mentioned here that "racial hygiene" was a concept the Nazis borrowed from us: the sterilization of the mentally ill was a common practice in the U.S. up until the 1940s; Hitler and his men simply took it the next logical step, as they did all the racial-biological theories they got from Britain, France and America).
This brings the greater question as to whether any artistic merit can be drawn from a film used in such a manner, but I should like to table that question until the end of this review series, when it can be answered in full. For the moment I will simply say that I ACCUSE is a remarkable and gripping drama, far superior to what I was expecting in every respect.

The second movie is WUNSCHKONZERT, directed by Eduard von Borsody and released in 1940. "Wunschkonzert" translates to "request concert" and it is worth noting at the start that the musical request show was actually a German invention, with the "Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht" (Armed Forces Request Show) being one of the most popular radio programs in Germany once the war began. It is also worth noting that this film, while containing some serious dramatic elements, is essentially a romantic comedy and markedly different from ICH KLAGE AN in every way. Finally, and in the tradition of other German films of this period, "Request Concert" is actually a number of stories which interweave around a single unifying idea, theme or incident. This style of film-making, called "fractured narrative," is common on today's television but less so in contemporary films, and takes a little getting used to.

Our story begins at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, where the lovely Ilse Werner (Inge Wagner) meets and falls in love with air force (Luftwaffe) lieutenant Herbert Koch (Carl Raddatz). After a whirlwind courtship they plan an engagement, but he soon receives orders to go to Spain, where the civil war is raging, as a military adviser to the Fascists. The mission is top secret, and thus Koch is forced to abandon his flame without explanation. Eventually she becomes close to another Luftwaffe pilot, Helmut Wilker (Joachim Brennecke), who also befriends Koch without realizing they are in love with the same woman. As war breaks out the pilots fly together in combat, neither knowing the other is in love with Ilse.
At the same time, there is an extensive sub-plot about a unit of German infantrymen going into battle in France, which involves not only their various loved ones at home, but two bumbling soldiers who are sent to Berlin to perform a ditty of their own composition for the Wunschkonzert. As the story goes on, each character's destiny is affected and to some degree decided by their decision to request songs.

As the title implies, WUNSCHKONZERT is not so much about the individual characters in the film per se as the way their lives are tied into, and ultimately effected by, the popular request show. The fate of the two star-crossed lovers, Herbert and Ilse, actually turns on the Olympic fanfare he requests of the program; and in another sequence, the fate of a German infantry squad is decided by one soldier's rendition of a Beethoven song on an organ he finds in a burning French church. There are also performances by real-life celebrities of the day, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Marika Rökk, arguably THE pin-up girl of the Nazi era next to Lale Anderson. The film is also strong on the theme of men performing their duties in wartime while their women (moms, wives, sweethearts, sisters) wait anxiously at home, and how the music unites them. If all this seems a bit corny, one must remember that this film was released in 1940, and is not measurably sappier or more contrived than British or American romantic war movies of the same era. In fact, I would unhesitatingly say that WUNSCHKONZERT is one of the best WW2-era movies I've yet seen, featuring a skillful balance of romance, propaganda, music, history, and war-movie action, which give the modern viewer a fascinating, if idealized, view of popular culture in Nazi Germany. The acting is good, there are an unusual number of obstacles for the young lovers to face in their quest to be together, a splash of intrigue with the Spanish Civil War angle, a certain amount of pathos, and some entertaining Laurel & Hardy-style moments involving the two bumbling soldiers and a captured pig. Like all movies of this type, it tends to blur its focus on the main element of the story towards the end in favor of a grand, all-inclusive climax, but aside from that I had no major complaints. I was also especially impressed by the brief battle sequences which take place in a ruined French town. German audiences were impressed, too: the film was seen by 20 million people in the Third Reich (population: 80 million) and made a fortune for the UFA Film studio.

Believe it or not, though hundreds of feature films were released in Germany during WW2, only twenty or so actually dealt with the war which was taking place at the time, following Goebbels' undoubtedly wise decision that what the people of Germany needed was distraction from the war and not reminders of it. This stands in fascinating contrast to Britain and America, who cranked out war movies nonstop and kept them going long after the war itself had ended (I would argue we are still doing this today). And because of this, WUNSCHKONZERT is just as valuable as historical evidence as it is an entertaining flick in its own right. Like all Americans I grew up on a steady diet of WW2 movies which seldom, if ever, gave even the slightest thought of what the enemy was like -- what he wanted, what he was feeling, why he was fighting, and what was waiting for him when he put away his rifle and went home. WUNSCHKONZERT puts faces and names and hopes and dreams on the dreaded, faceless Nazi soldiers, and it's perhaps no big surprise that these things weren't a helluva lot different for guys named Gotthard, Wolfgang and Johannes than they were for the Joes, Mikes and Bobs of the war. And one of those things was entertainment. As a German song of the pre-war period refrained: "All I want is music! I don't need anything else!"

In closing I will say that my initial impression of Nazi-era cinema was much more favorable than I expected. I ACCUSE is a fine, well-crafted drama whose propaganda, to quote on reviewer, was "virtually subliminal." REQUEST CONCERT, while more overtly patriotic (it was shot during the war), was also an enjoyable movie, blending romance, comedy, music and battle -- though it succumbed, at the end, to the urge to become a full-on propaganda piece, and abandoned its characters in the process.

I will return next week to examine two more movies. And please keep in mind I intend to discuss the greater, contextual morality of these films when this review series is finished. Auf Wiedersehen.

My 30 Day Week

I have just completed experience of having worked thirty days in a row on a production gig, and it worth noting the progression of my mental and physical state during that time, if only as a laboratory example of the old scientific principle that All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy.

The following is composed of quotes taken from my journal during the month of August. I have removed all details which would infringe on my nondisclosure agreements, redacted the names of individuals, and deleted a few of my more, uh, colorful comments. Everything else is as it was written.

The first five days passed more or less normally, being, of course, a normal work-week.

Day 6: "Working on Saturdays has a slightly surreal feel to it. The knowledge of obligation is there, but not the psychological weight that makes an ordinary workday so oppressive."

Day 8: (my birthday) "Forty-four wheels around the sun. Isn't that what I always say this time of year? Yet today I can't say as I feel anything at all. When you wake early, exercise, and work all day, every day, one more day of it doesn't feel like anything out of the ordinary. And it wasn't."

Day 9: "Ten hours in the tinpan, and very dull and exhausting hours at that. I slept poorly because of the birthday drinks, struggled out of bed a little after seven, and somehow managed to get to the pool by ten of eight. A gruff-voiced lesbian coach, like a bad stereotype out of an episode of The Simpsons
was giving instruction to five lanes full of students, and none too happy to see me, but I still managed 26 minutes of very hard swimming before I had to leave. I felt tired the moment I walked in, and as the day wore on, bored, fat, flatulent and fed up. When I say 'fed up' I don't mean disgruntled or angry or ungrateful or even irritable, just physically sick of sitting and playing monotonous games in front of a camera all goddamn day. I forgot my phone, too, and my ass was asleep half the day, or so it seemed."

Day 10: "When is this going to stop? That was all my tired, bored, numb brain could think at some point around the tenth or eleventh hour of work today. How much is enough? When do we get to go home? All my earnest and heartfelt prayers to 'give me work, dammit!' have been answered with such resounding force that I can barely lift my face to the storm, so to speak. This is another way of saying I was fourteen hours in the tinpan and have the numb ass to prove it."

Day 18: "Life has become a monotonous blur, a sort of Groundhog Day in which any detail which variates on the theme becomes outstanding simply by virtue of being different, and never mind if it is intrinsically interesting."

Day 19: "What a lousy day. Not lousy for me personally; just a shamefully lousy performance by the crew of bumbling fuck-ups my employer has hired to serve as foot soldiers for this interminable project.
I swam for a good solid half-hour this morning, trying to concentrate on my surroundings -- the blue skies, the palm trees, the cool clean feeling of the water, even the sound of my own labored breathing as I paddled along laboriously behind my kickboard. (It isn't easy, when you live as deep in your head as I do, to be aware of your surroundings, or to appreciate them.) After the swim, I ate a quick meal in the kitchen and sank into the first available chair. Unfortunately this chair was next to E., a fat, long-haired, drawling-voiced idiot who loves the sound of his own voice and rakes my nerves raw every time he speaks. I was made further uncomfortable by M., who hates E. even more than I do and seemed to be on the verge of beating him senseless, so at the first opportunity I slunk away so I wouldn't have to witness an assault -- or participate in in it! The day passed very quietly until about dinnertime. Unfortunately it took us two and a half hours to get the shot afterwards because the cretinous, submoronic lackwits hired by Casting cannot take direction. The director, who is normally very polite and even-tempered, was growing more and more frustrated and, I think, embarrassed by his inability to get any of them to do what they were told. My temper was sorely tried, and I'm not even directing the fucking scene! T. shares my low opinion of these poltroons, and supposedly they will not be returning after this weekend -- which, of course, I am now scheduled to work. At this point I have recovered from the near-breakdown I had on the Sixteenth; my emotional needle has ascended from the pits of despair to a sort of hardened plateau where I feel neither lows nor highs. I know that my next check, which I will get just before the end of the month, will be a hefty one, but I'm also too flattened mentally to appreciate it just now. When all the smoke clears and all dust is settled, I know I will be supremely grateful for the opportunity to make 20% of my normal yearly income in the span of three weeks: but for now I am incapable of anything except putting one foot in front of the other."

Day 20: "Christ and Christ and Christ. Not sure I can take much more of this, and yet I must. It's not the work, which is easy in itself: it's the bloody goddamned grind. The sameness, the monotony. The Möbius loop. I wake up. I piss. I feed Spike. I let Spike outside. I cook and eat breakfast. I pack. I bring Spike inside. I turn on Classical KUSC and double-check the locks. I drive to Park La Brea by way of Avon Street and Burbank Boulevard and Hollywood Way and Olive Street and Barham and Cahuenga (West) and Mulholland Drive and the Outpost Road and Franklin and La Brea all the way to Sixth Street and then to the entrance of Park La Brea. The fat security guard hands me another pass and I park. I get two towels and a locker and change and shower. I swim with one eye on the clock -- a lap of freestyle, a lap of breast-stroke, a lap of kickboard, repeat. Chlorine stings my eyes. I try to appreciate where I am and what I am doing. The last minute strikes: ten-thirty antemeridian. Out of the pool. Into the shower, again. Into my clothes. Hair fixed. To the car, down Sixth Street, up Fairfax to Sunset to the studio garage. Into the studio. The bathroom. Then the cap room. Then the kitchen. And then it begins: make the coffee, eat the pear, drink the water, sit down in the chair. Choreograph, rehearse, crash, shoot, crash, rehearse, shoot, shoot. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Same faces, same smells, same routines, same conversations, same fantasies and daydreams and distractions. All the same, right down to the frustrations with the laptop (new) and the internet (slow). I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Tomorrow is Sunday, and another day in the tinpan. Forever in the bloody tinpan. I can't stand it for much longer. The nerds are on my nerves x10 x10: it takes so much restraint not to get ugly. But somehow I have to hold on and endure the prosaic dullness of it all."

Day 21: "Something joyous happened today at work, something quite wonderful enough to mitigate the harassed morning I had, and the nausea I suffered in the evening as a result of some bad food I ate for lunch. E. the Mouth got fired. I haven't written much about him in here; indeed, I haven't had time to write much about anyone in here. E. was the fattish, pale, dead-eyed, long-haired jackanapes whose droning, whining voice resounded all over the set lo, these last five or ten days and who raked my nerves interminably during that time --and not just mine. Evidently his bullshit accumulated to the point where even the long-suffering production staff had had enough. When M. told me this, I was dazed with joy, because goddamnit, I really was dreading being around him for another five days -- worried I'd snap and say something that would get me canned. The fucker is just intolerable. And now I don't have to tolerate him anymore. It's remarkable how little things like this -- the surgical removal of assholes, to use some rather unpleasant imagery -- happens in life. Normally the single spoiled apple spoils the bunch, and keeps spoiling it. But not this time."

Day 22: "Thirteen hours in the tinpan. What can one say about it? In spite of everything -- every trick and device I could muster to pass the time at hand -- I reached levels of boredom that tested the mettle of my soul. Iit was just a sevencourse serving of the same old shit. Ernst Jünger said that boredom was "pain diffused over time" and he was correct. It is painful to be bored for the course of a whole day -- miserably, interminably bored, and on top of bored, frustrated."

Day 26: "The last few hours were very dull, with tempers getting short and voices getting loud, and I've been informed that they want me to work the weekend and be on standby Monday as well. Will it never end?"

August 29 (morning): "'Today ought to be the last real day of shooting.' So they tell us. I know, I know; we've heard this song before, right? Think I know the sheet music at this point."

August 29 (night): "I've seldom been so vocally disgruntled in my life around people whose opinion of me has a direct bearing on my economic future, but when I get in that mood there is no shutting me off."

August 30: "We wrapped tonight at 10:48 pm, bringing the Siege -- the longest in my experience -- to its climactic end. I fled the building, said goodbye to the crew, drove to the bank and deposited a fat check in my account, and then came home to a disgruntled cat. No parades, no speeches, no tickertape: just a sink full of dirty dishes, a hamper full of dirty laundry, and silence."

And that, folks, is why I'm running behind on this blog, which is supposed to appear at least once a week. I have worked some gnarly production gigs in my day but this was the gnarliest, at least in terms of the sheer endurance required. And yes, I am using "gnarly" in a sentence. The Valley Girl slang popularized by Fast Times At Ridgemont High and just as quickly ridiculed and forgotten, has never died here. I on the other hand probably will, if I ever have to do this shit again.

Hitler's Hollywood: The Movies of Nazi Germany

When I was in college I wrote my history thesis on the popular music of Nazi Germany. It was a subject that required a lot of research, a lot of listening and much tedious translation of German to English -- no mean feat for a guy who took only two years of that language in high school. Nevertheless, it was a rewarding task, and the experience left me with a hunger to know more about everyday life in the Third Reich. The war movies I'd grown up on, and the many academic books and firsthand accounts I'd read when I got older, had told me much about the politics, economics and war policy of this strange and fantastical country: they had told me nothing whatever about its artistic by-products. What sort of music did the Nazis listen to? What sort of newspapers, magazines and novels did they read? What sort of art did Germans produce under Nazism? And finally, what kind of movies did they make?

Two things must be understood before this last and most fascinating question could even be addressed, much less answered. The first was that Germany, prior to the rise of Hitler, had a rich moviemaking tradition, and the German people were passionate filmgoers, even during the ugliest period of the Great Depression. Though America, then as today, was the undisputed king of international cinema, Republican Germany was not far behind, especially in the European market, and in the technical arena was in some areas actually ahead: in 1932, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he thus inherited a huge and highly sophisticated studio apparatus, complete with famous actors, experienced directors and sophisticated equipment. He had much at his fingertips, but he was also keenly aware that his public was fickle, well-educated and had high expectations as to the quality of their entertainment.

The second factor worthy of consideration is that that Nazi Germany was not merely a dictatorship, it was a totalitarian state in the true sense of the word. As Otto Dietrich wrote in his post-WW2 memoir, Hitler's claim to omniscience may have been faulty, but his claim to omnipotence was not. Hitler had a passionate interest in all things related to art and culture, and established a vast and complex bureaucracy to oversee every aspect of German cultural life: the Reichkulturkammer. This many-tentacled beast, which was controlled by Hitler's right-hand man Joseph Goebbels, had absolute power over film production: no movie in Germany (and later, Occupied Europe) could be written, much less financed, produced or distributed, without his express permission. Goebbels was a fanatical Nazi, in some ways more fanatical even than Hitler, and when I began my initial study of Nazi cinema I naturally expected movie production under his oversight to be a sort of assembly-line of violent, jingoistic propaganda, designed to inflame passions and hammer home the core Nazi values of nationalism, aggression, discipline, obedience and loyalty to the blood community. Being something of a fan of 1930s and 1940s movies of American and British manufacture, I knew well how shallow, vulgar, bloodthirsty and cardboard-patriotic Allied cinema was before and during the Second World War. Nazi Hollywood, I imagined, must be a thousand times worse. What sort of movies did Hitler make? I wanted to know. Were they noisy and bombastic, full of militarism and racism, utterly lacking in subtlety? Or was there intelligence and cleverness in their approach? Did they show any respect for their audiences, or simply cram ideas down their throats like so many fistfuls of Raisinettes? Most importantly, did they hold up as films? Did they actually entertain? Would an audience voluntarily pay to see them? It is notoriously difficult even for dictatorships to get people to attend films that have no merit: any number of political strongmen have discovered that most human beings will endure years of starvation and slave labor at gunpoint more readily than they will a boring 90 minute movie. A totalitarian state can burn books, but it cannot force people to read them -- cannot, at any rate, force them to like what they read. Mein Kampf outsold the Bible in Germany for more than a decade, but almost no one read the fucking thing. Was it the same for German filmgoers?

Something like a thousand movies were shot during the twelve years that Hitler held power, which is nothing if not a testament to the fact that Germans, in addition to sharing with America their national symbol (the eagle), share with us a national obsession -- celluloid. What I propose to do over the next few weeks is to examine a small fragment of that mass which I feel is representative -- the films in my own, slowly expanding personal collection of Nazi cinema. Among them are:

I Accuse - a story about the morality of euthanasia for terminally ill patients, whose motivation may have been to "soften" the German public to the idea of state-sanctioned mercy killings

U-Boats Westward! - as the title suggests, a tale about a submarine crew after the outbreak of WW2

Germanin: The Story of a Colonial Deed - a harshly anti-British tale set in Africa before and after WWI

Shock Troop 1917: An elite German infantry unit endures a year at the front during WWI

The Crew of the Dora - A movie about the crew of a German bomber, which has the unique distinction of having been shot in Russia, France, Germany and North Africa, all during WW2

Over All In the World - A film about a group of Germans caught outside Germany when WW 2 breaks out, and how they return to the Fatherland

GPU - An obvious, ironic and (not surprisingly) uncredited inspiration for a certain Tarantino film starring Brad Pitt, pits a vengeful woman against the Communist agent who murdered her family

DIII 88 - Young German air force pilots grapple with life, love and maturity on the eve of WW2, while an aging veteran wages his own struggle against failing health and the desire for one last glorious mission

Request Concert - The story of two star-crossed lovers who meet at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, get separated by the Spanish Civil War, and re-unite thanks to the world's first musical request show

Stukas - An out and out war movie about a squadron of dive-bomber pilots during the battles of France and Britain in 1940

Pour le Merite - A sweeping saga spanning 20 years between the end of WWI and the Nazi takeover in Germany

Cadets - A historical picture, based on a real-life event, about a group of tween-age German military cadets who, in the 1700s, took up arms against Russian invaders

Hans Westmar & Storm Trooper Brand - two films, both based on real-life stories, about Nazi Brownshirts i.e. "storm troopers' and the struggles they went through getting Hitler into power

Hitler Youth Quex - Another "true life" tale, about a young boy who embraces Nazism and pays a very high price for it

Militiaman Bruggler - A war movie set in 1917, about a simple Austrian soldier who gets swept up in the events of WWI

In addition to these I also plan to examine many non-war films (sci-fi, romance, comedy, musical, spy stories) and period pieces such as "Gold," "Uncle Kruger," "Linen From Ireland," "Titanic," "My Life For Ireland," "The Great King," "Kolberg," "Baron Munchausen," "The Rothchilds," "Jew Suess" and others. In some cases it will be necessary to reference non-Nazi era cinema as well, i.e. German films shot between 1919 - 1932, or even American or British movies from the same era, because in certain cases Nazi-era movies were shot as "answers" to these productions. (For example, "Militiaman Bruggler" was the Nazi take on a pre-Nazi film called "Mountains in Flames," which contained themes of reconciliation and international brotherhood which the Nazis could not stomach.) I am particularly interested in the themes of these movies -- whether political and racial messages were woven into the text or subtext of the scripts.

I hope to have my first set of reviews up within a few days. And of course in the mean time I plan a completely frivolous blog about the fact that I have been at work for nineteen goddamn days in a row.

Drunken Thoughts at Midnight on my Birthday

Tonight I made it from the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to my home in Burbank in precisely fifteen minutes. This will mean nothing to anyone who doesn't live, or hasn't spent significant time, in Los Angeles, but it made me feel pretty damned good. Because at the precise moment I got into my Honda, which is still ash-grey from the massive Sand Fire we had here a week ago, the clock struck midnight and it became my birthday. And zero traffic and green lights almost the whole way back, making for a swift smooth easy ride, constitutes as good a birthday gift as I could hope for.

I am not precisely sure when my expectations for birthdays began to narrow. I believe that it may have been when I turned twenty-five, and my car insurance rates plummeted. Prior to that moment there were milestones everywhere: my tenth birthday (the first with two digits); my thirteenth birthday (my first teenage b-day); my sixteenth, which was technically if not actually Sweet; my eighteenth, which technically if not actually brought manhood; my twentieth, which signaled the end of my teens; and my twenty-first, which gave me the legal right to do something I had been doing illegally for years, which was drink alcohol. After twenty-one the horizon became decidedly more boring. What did I have to look forward to now, agewise? Well, my car insurance payments would drop drastically at twenty-five if I could only avoid tickets and accidents between now and then. That seemed a very sober, a very boring, a very adult reward. No strippers. No streamers. No fountains of absinthe. Just a smaller bill. A little less stress on the wallet. A little more cash to spend on gas and groceries and utility bills. As Colonel Potter used to say on M*A*S*H -- "Wonderbar!"

Today, right now, I am 44 years old. I was told today, by someone who had absolutely no motive to lie and very little tact, that I don't look a day over 37, and I believe this to be true. A lifetime of avoiding adult responsibility and manual labor both have a preservative quality which I believe is underrated. Nevertheless I am 44, and the tug of nostalgia I felt tonight at the flicks merely served to confirm this fact. I attended a double feature at the famous Egyptian Theater -- two Clint Eastwood movies shot in the 1970s. I am old enough to remember the 1970s quite well -- the enormous cars with eight-cylinder engines, the Afros and muttonchop sideburns, the plaid bell-bottom trousers, the big medallions gleaming from within thickets of chest hair, the telephones with their curly cords and rotary dials, the knob-and-button televisions with their rabbit ears and choice of exactly five channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and one local station)...I remember it all, and very much more. But there is no point in trying to communicate the atmosphere of that particular time: as Orwell once wrote, either you were there, in which case you don't need to be told, or you weren't, in which case telling you about it would be useless. I remember, in 1989, talking to an ex-Marine who had lost an eye on Tarawa atoll in 1944 or 1945. He described to me in vivid detail how, during hand-to-hand fighting on the beach, a Japanese officer had hacked him open with a samurai sword, and how he had beaten the man to death with his M-1 carbine, which was either empty or had jammed. This same man lost his eye in a grenade explosion moments later, and woke up on a landing craft hauling a heap of dead Marines to a hospital ship just offshore. Some sailors noticed him moving and dragged him out of the heap of mangled, bloody, fly-covered corpses, and called for a doctor. His life was saved, but his parents had already been notified of his death. They had to be re-notified that he was in fact alive, and on the same day they got this notice they received another, telling them that their son, the Marine's twin brother, had been killed in combat somewhere else. I remember this conversation vividly: it took place in a restaurant near the National Press Building in Washington D.C. Yet at the same time it is just a story. I don't know what it is like to wade 100 yards through chest-high water under machine-gun fire, or fight another man to the death with my bare bleeding hands, or to lose a twin brother, or wake up half-buried in dead bodies with one of my eyes missing. Some experiences are incommunicable.
Middle age is one of them. When you are twenty-four years old, having a complete smokeshow of a girl thrust her phone number into your hand unsolicited is worthy of note. When you are forty-four, getting from Hollywood to Burbank in fifteen minutes, instead of the usual thirty, is worthy of note. The scale is a sliding one, and it slides downward.

Do not think I am feeling sorry for myself. I look pretty good. I'm healthy. I'm strong. I'm active. I can do everything I want to do. My two sources of income are playing video games for money and book royalties, and in a few days -- it was supposed to be today, but life intervened -- I am going to release my second novel and a collection of short stories. I have it pretty goddamned decent. I am just very much aware that the simple things -- the verysimple things, have greater weight for me now, as a middle-aged man, than they did when I was a young one. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps it is not a lowering of standards but an increase in the capacity to appreciate life -- that is to say, the very act of being alive. This morning, when I was hiking around the Hollywood Reservoir, I encountered four turtles and three deer and a whole host of birds -- gulls, ducks, cranes both jet black and egg white. Not one of those creatures needs to be told the meaning of life. Not one of them has to take Prozac or Valium or see a shrink or go to church to answer the questions of existence. They don't have to ask any questions because they already know the answer, that the meaning of life is to live it.

I know this, too; but I forget sometimes. It's easy to forget. So many things conspire to make me forget. Like alarm clocks, and traffic, and the rent payment, and the sort-of job, and the sort-of girl (there's always a girl, sort-of or not), and the parking ticket I forgot to pay but just remembered now, this second, as I sip cheap whiskey and tap these keys. There are so many petty logistics on the journey I forget the fucking destination -- which is not death, but life. Living. Existing. Being here, now, doing this. The scale may slide downward, but as any veteran rollercoaster jockey will tell you, it's the downward arc that sells the ride. Perhaps what middle age has over youth is simply the ability to appreciate. Not to lust, desire, imagine, demand or expect; but simply to appreciate.

I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take a moment for yourself and think about where you are in life, what you are doing, and what you really want to be doing right now. Where you want to go, and how you want to get there. Disengage from the bullshit, the everyday, the devilish details that suck up most of your time, and realy consider. Really be.. Just for a moment. Think. Ponder. Contemplate. Dream. And remember that you were not just born to pay taxes, buy products and die. You are here to live.

Humor me. It's my birthday.

Beyond 1984: Orwell's Other Novels (II)

As promised, I have returned late this Tuesday night to wind up "Orwell's Other Novels" by examining two of his very best: KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING and COMING UP FOR AIR.

KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING (1936): Written only a year after A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER, this novel shows for the first time an inkling, if only a remote one, of the events brewing in Europe which would eventually lead to the Second World War. I do not mean that it has anything whatever to do with war or makes any mention of contemporary European politics; simply that its protagonist has a vague awareness that the civilization in which he lives is about to be blown to hell with bombs -- not that he doesn't welcome the prospect!

Gordon Comstock, at the age of thirty, is already a decisive failure. The grandson of a robber baron who died with £50,000 in the bank, Gordon makes slightly less than £2 a week working in a flyblown bookstore in the dark and anonymous heart of London. Once he was an up-and-coming writer at an advertising agency, the last hope of a family of losers who squandered Gran'pa Comstock's fortune and left him with nothing but a legacy; but he threw all of that away to become a full-time poet. Gordon had a theory, you see: that no artist could make art when kneeling before what he calls "the money god" (i.e. capitalism). Therefore he would "chuck up" his well-paying job and work in a bookstore by day, while writing scintillating poetry at night, all the while smug in the knowledge that he had not sold out to the almighty dollar -- or rather, the almighty pound sterling. Only after he has quit and begun to embrace life on not-quite £2 a week does he come to the horrifying realization that without money -- in other words, without tobacco, hot food, comfortable lodgings and access to women -- he cannot summon up the creative energy to write. At the same time he is bitterly disappointed that his girlfriend, Rosemary, will not sleep with him, and that he cannot see his rich friend Ravelston more than once in a fortnight because good-hearted old Ravelston will inevitably offer to buy him dinner or loan him money, and the only thing worse than being offered charity is the temptation to accept it.

The plot of ASPIDISTRA is quite simple. Gordon "has made war on money," believing this to be the only ethical thing for an artist to do, and he is determined to carry his war to the poorhouse and, if necessary, the grave. At the same time, his war on money has rendered him so poor -- "so down at heel," as Orwell puts it -- that when he stumbles home from his seventy hour a week bookstore job, he has no energy to do anything but furtively brew a cup of tea, read a Sherlock Holmes story, and go to bed. Everyone in his life -- sister Julia, girlfriend Rosemary, friend Ravelston -- is nagging him to take a different course, but to Gordon, poverty is synonymous with credibility. If he cannot actually be an artist, he can at least starve like an artist, and go "down into the muck, into the sub-world where decency (capitalist respectability) was impossible." When Rosemary gets pregnant, however, Gordon must make a choice -- pay for an abortion (something he regards as an abomination), leave her to raise the baby alone so he can continue to make war against the Money God, or sell out and return to the British equivalent of Madison Avenue, to write jingles for soap, perfume and breakfast cereal.

ASPIDISTRA is a vivid, occasionally black-comic and often deeply depressing look on the effects of poverty on an intelligent and well-educated man. There is scarcely a social humiliation which Gordon does not experience because he lacks money, and, being English, humiliation is to him much worse than physical pain or even death, (Orwell writes an excruciating chapter in which Gordon recklessly spends money to impress a snobby waiter at a second-rate hotel restaurant), and yet it is the gritty, everyday details which really stick: Gordon's landlady forbids him to brew tea in his room, so he must do it on the sly, listening at keyholes and dumping the used tea-leaves down the toilet as if committing a crime. Gordon desperately wants a beer and some companionship after twelve hours in the bookstore, but he is too embarrassed to pay with his sole coin, a threepenny bit, which is traditionally given to children with their Christmas pudding ("How can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit? It isn’t a coin, it's the answer to a riddle.") Gordon takes Rosemary to a high-class restaurant, is brutally snubbed by the waiter, and spends his entire wad of cash trying to save face, only to discover he has not enough money to pay for their trip home.

There can be no doubt that the reason why ASPIDISTRA rings so true as a story is because Orwell lived every moment of it in his real life: the dirty, shabby clothing, the perpetual shortage of cigarettes, the filthy meals taken in third-rate little restaurants, the dingy furnished rooms presided over by nosy, mean-minded landladies, the sexual starvation, the endless stream of rejection letters, the ghastly Friday-night loneliness, and worst of all, the constant social snubs. Hemingway once famously quipped that "a man shouldn't write what he doesn't know" and Orwell knew this subject like the back of his ink-stained hand. It is true that ASPIDISTRA has a few issues: Gordon, though sympathetic in some ways, is not always very likeable, and it is true that most of his woes are self-inflicted, which will make it hard for some readers to care about his fate. Orwell, too, repeats his main themes too often in the narrative and perhaps contrives to humiliate Gordon one too many times, just as he did John Flory in BURMESE DAYS. On the whole, however, this picture of artistic near-poverty in the middle 1930s is as timely today as when it was written.

COMING UP FOR AIR (1939): The last of Orwell's "other novels" is also his best. It is at once an almost heartbreakingly nostaglic portrait of life during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a stinging commentary on "modern" (meaning pre-WW2) English life, and a dire warning about the future -- a terrifying future Orwell would later discuss with nightmarish clarity in his masterpiece, 1984.

George "Fatty" Bowling is an insurance salesman who lives in the inner-outer suburbs of London. He has a nagging wife, two pain-in-the-ass kids ("Unnatural little bastards!" he calls them), and mouthful of false teeth. As his nickname implies, he's also extremely fat. To add to this list of woes, George also suffers from a strange condition, which he calls "a hangover from the past." Lately, as his marriage has become more intolerable and the shadow of world war has fallen over Britain, he has begun to obsess more and more about his childhood in Lower Binfield, an idyllic market town on the Thames River where he grew up around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, he broods incessantly over visions of postwar Britain: "It's not the war I'm afraid of," he says over and over again. "It's the after war." He's convinced that the civilization he grew up in, which is already dying, will be finished off once and for all by the conflict and replaced, in its aftermath, with something which is the precise opposite of his fondly-remembered childhood world -- a world where things like the radio, the bombing plane, the secret police, and even motor cars were not only unknown but unimaginable. George develops a longing to "get back into the past," and, when a lucky bet at the racetrack puts £17 (three weeks' pay) into his pocket, he decides to sneak away from his wife and family for a week and return to Lower Binfield, which he hasn't seen in twenty years. George wants to know if, in a world as noisy, crowded, uncertain and anxious as the one he lives in now, it is still possible for a man to catch his breath and find peace.

COMING UP FOR AIR is a remarkable novel in two separate ways. Orwell's reconstruction of small-town life in the late 1800s-early 1900s (the very heart of the late Victorian-early Edwardian eras of which we spoke in the last blog) is so wonderfully atmospheric and evocative that you would swear you were right there, amidst the smell of Sunday soap and hay, beer and horse-droppings. This was the time of Orwell's own childhood, and while he makes it clear that life was in many ways harder in 1901 than 1939, he also makes it clear that it had something 1939 lacked: an inner peace that came from the belief that the world you lived in would survive you -- that everything you believed in and loved was in essence immortal, even if you were not. I could quote endlessly from the boyhood-young adulthood chapters of this book, passages on fishing, making mischief, cutting school, laboring in a shop, reading adventure stories, and so forth, but a single passage, in which George observes his mom making dinner, will probably be sufficient: "I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There's always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman -- a woman who really knows how to cook, I mean -- rolling dough. She's got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a kind of satisfied air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of course, that's exactly what she is. When she was cooking, all her movements were wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling pins did precisely what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in a world where she belonged...So far as meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything went like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It was more like a kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the table tomorrow morning in much the same way you knew the sun would rise...Our meals were ready on the tick. Enormous meals -- boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig's head, spotted dog and jam roly-poly, with grace before and after...Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the buzzing of the bluebottles on Sunday afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at about a quarter to six she'd wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the mantelpiece, and get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never late."

In addition to his past, however, George gives a swift if deadly assessment of modern (1930s) life in Britain -- a place ruled by anxiety over money and fear of unemployment, with the rich getting steadily richer while the middle class fight desperately to remain middle class while hanging over an abyss of poverty. The disillusionment of Bowling after he returns from WWI and discovers "nobody wanted to pay me two thousand a year to sit in an office with streamlined furniture dictating letters to a platinum blonde" turns into a kind of grim horror as he realizes jobs that pay even a pound a week are scarce, and that he will have to fight tooth and nail to get one, much less keep it. Yet the really astonishing quality of the novel is its unexpected, farseeing political angle. Fatty Bowling's view of the postwar future is terrifyingly similar to that of 1984, and shows how long Orwell was meditating on the idea of a totalitarian ultra-state (he didn't write the latter novel until 1949) -- a world of "slogans and colored shirts and voices over the loudspeakers and crowds screaming about how much they love the Leader even though deep down inside they hate him so much it makes them want to puke." Though this fear is in the background of the story and is not its focus, it forms a sort of shadow, like the shadow of the coming world war, which chills George and perhaps adds impetus to his desire to escape back into the warmth of the past.

I have tried in these last two blogs to give the reader a sense of George Orwell before he came to fame and immortality, when he was a struggling young writer often living in, or on the fringes of, real poverty. I have also tried to explain how his early novels are quintessentially English in character, and chronicle a class of people -- specifically a timber merchant, a clergyman's daughter, a failed poet and an insurance salesman -- who make up a strata of English society which many other "quintessentially English" writers ignored, or otherwise rendered in purely comic fashion. In doing so -- in tackling the anxiety and humiliation of poverty, and the things it drives human beings to do to themselves and to others -- Orwell managed to achieve something which Charles Dickens and Jane Austen did not: specifically, he managed to write about people who, rather than being fascinating specimens of an extinct era, occupy at once an entirely foreign and yet hauntingly familiar world.

Beyond 1984: Orwell's Other Novels (I)

George Orwell has never gotten his proper due as a novelist. That may seem like a strange statement to make about the man who wrote ANIMAL FARM and 1984, but the truth is that if pressed, most people would be unable to name any of his other fictional works. I have always regarded this as a minor tragedy, because many literary Anglophiles (and there are millions) have no knowledge that he is one of the most quintessentially English writers of his time -- perhaps of all time. As I have said elsewhere, Americans have an abiding fascination with England during the Victorian and Edwardian Eras -- that is to say, from 1837 until about 1914 -- probably because the peculiar atmosphere of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle is more or less constant during that period. It is an atmosphere, as it were, of oysters and brown stout, pipe-smoke and drawing rooms, officers in red coats and gold-crusted collars, and women in hobble skirts murmuring poetry over cups of black tea. It is an atmosphere based partially on fantasies of wealth, class status and complex social etiquette, and partially on the hard reality of the British Empire -- the military and economic superiority which allowed Britain to rule the world for so long that no one could imagine that rule would ever end. But it did end, and certain authors -- Siegfried Sassoon and Evelyn Waugh, for example -- expressed a distinct nostalgia for it in their own novels, which might be called "transitional" in that they are clearly written from the perspective of those who are looking back, and fondly, on the Victorian-Edwardian past. Orwell, however, looked at the British decline from an entirely different angle: the angle of the ordinary man buffeted by circumstance, and this is at once a clue to why his novels are less popular than those of the afformentioned, and why they are perhaps more important.

It must be said that Orwell stood for anyone or anything during his all-too-brief life (1903 - 1950) it was for the common man; yet at the same time he refused, unlike nearly all of his left-wing peers, to romanticize the poor or those he considered even worse-off than the poor: the "out at elbow, down at heel" lower middle class. Orwell knew only too well the coarseness, vulgarity and willful ignorance of Britain's professional soldiers, factory workers, farm laborers, clergymen's daughters, door-to-door salesmen, office clerks and suchlike -- yet he believed, and persuasively argued, that those struggling unfortunates possessed a basic humanity that was lacking in their social superiors -- as he put it: "At least they have blood and not money in their veins."

The four novels I intend to examine here were written between 1934 - 1939, a period when the British economy was stagnant, huge sections of the populace lived in abject poverty, and "the slump" -- the Great Depression -- still lingered, like the nagging effects of a terrible sickness, in the minds of the lower middle class, filling them with apprehension for the future. I propose to examine the first two here, and the following two in next Tuesday's blog.

BURMESE DAYS (1934): This semi-autobiographical novel is set in Burma in the 1920s. The protagonist, John Flory, is a lonely, embittered and deeply conflicted man. In public he plays the role of a "pukka sahib" -- the typical white capitalist-imperialist who guzzles whiskey, sleeps with colored whores and keeps servants who refer to him as "most holy god." In private, however, he is an eminent hater of British imperialism who admires Burmese culture, despises his fellow pukka sahibs and maintains as his best friend a black doctor. Trapped by the "code of silence" which binds all white men's tongues in the East, as well as the stultifying, zero-culture anti-intellectualism of his fellow whites, Flory longs to find a woman with whom he can share his seditious, anti-British thoughts and his love of native culture. When young Elizabeth Lackersteen, the lovely and seemingly cultured neice of one of his fellow sahibs, arrives fresh from Paris, Flory believes his moment has arrived. He aggressively courts Elizabeth, but is hampered by two separate obstacles -- a "native dispute" which embroils his friend the doctor and which forces him to choose whether he will abandon the man or break the pukka sahib code and be ostracized by his fellow whites...and the yawning gap between his soft-focus perception of Elizabeth Lackersteen and the much harder, crueler reality.

BURMESE DAYS is in many ways a remarkable book. Orwell wrote that Rudyard Kipling gave us our only real literary picture of British India during the late 19th century; he might have been surprised to realize that he himself may have given us our only real literary picture of that same place during the 1920s, by which time the bloom was off the imperialistic rose and Britain could no longer pretend (though in fact, it did try very hard to do so) that the Empire had any purpose except economic exploitation of colored races and their lands. Although it is a violent damnation of imperialism and the racism by which imperialism is justified, there is much more to DAYS than screed. Orwell explains in beautiful detail how imperialism seduces the poor and lower middle class Englishman (a person who, by rights, ought to side with the native against the exploiter) by offering him a lifestyle which would be as far beyond his reach in England as London is from the moon. At home, Flory would never amount to more than a dismal clerkship at £75 a year; in Burma he can live the lifestyle of a country squire, complete with whiskey, servants, horses, and even shooting excursions in the country. He can, in effect, jump classes -- something impossible in his own country, where his prospects are rigidly defined from the moment of his birth. All he must do in exchange is surrender his intellectual freedom and his conscience, knowingly participate in the robbery of the native peoples, and betray his "greasy nigger pals" whenever they come into conflict with a white man.

DAYS also explores the darker side of English snobbery in the form of Elisabeth, whose brief taste of the good life via an upper-crust boarding school attended during her teens has given her aristocratic pretensions she intends to achieve at any cost -- save that of acknowledging the "natives" are human beings. Indeed, some of the most stinging dialogue in the book comes either from Elisabeth or her equally snobbish aunt, who laments that the natives, increasingly restive under British rule, "are getting almost as bad as the lower classes back home." ("Surely not as bad as that!" replies her husband, in horror.) Orwell's thesis seems to be that snobbery is a form of racism within one's own race and ethnicity -- an artificial line drawn between those who rule and those who serve. This line, phony thought it may be, must be drawn because without it the position of the ruling class becomes morally indefensible. And if this is true, then the logical extension of snobbery, when coupled with imperialism, is racism: simply another way of justifying the exploitation of one group of people by another.

While by no means a perfect novel -- Flory, for example, seems to be almost pathologically stupid when it comes to Elisabeth's true nature -- it is probably his most vividly written, and, being semi-autobiographical, rings with authenticity throughout. In the end, BURMESE DAYS, though set entirely in Burma (save for a few brief flashbacks to London and Paris) is a superb commentary on how the English imprisoned half the world, not so much with cannons or cavalry, but with snobbery and racism -- and how that snobbery and racism often turned back upon them, chaining their minds and souls into a lonely and sterile silence.

A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER (1935): Orwell's second novel, though clumsier in approach than his first, is significant in a number of ways. Firstly, it features the only female protagonist in any of his books. Second, it is the first of his novels which deals directly with poverty, specifically the uniquely English form of poverty known as "shabby genteel" which sees "respectable" people of "good family" who have no money but retain their sense of social superiority even when staring economic ruin dead in the face. (It is also something of an expose, albeit a scattershot one, of other forms of poverty which Orwell himself had experienced firsthand -- that of itinerant workers, for example, and exploited schoolteachers.) Lastly, though set in the same year it was written, the book is quite timeless in its feeling: aside from occasional references to cars or buses it has an atmosphere which could belong to any year from about 1899 onward. Whether this was deliberate or not I don't know, but it lends to that timeless sensation which I mentioned above -- a feeling that the Britain of now is also the Britain of then -- and tomorrow as well.

DAUGHTER, as the title implies, is the story Dorothy Hare, the attractive but sexless only child of a snobbish country vicar whose mixture of arrogance and bad business sense have left their family, and the parish in which they live, on the edge of the financial abyss. The Rector, as he is known, is one of Orwell's best creations: an Oxford-educated man of the cloth who is also as thoroughgoing a bastard as you are likely to encounter. Viewing nearly everyone in his congregation as scum ("This is a valid sacrament," he seemed to be saying. "And it is my duty to administer it to you. But remember that I am only your priest, not your friend. As a human being I dislike and despise you.") he treats them as such, and harbors little affection even for Dorothy, whose devotion to God and her father are equally sincere. Indeed, Dorothy is introduced to us as being almost an indentured servant: she keeps house, handles the church's finances, runs numerous groups and committees, sees to the parish poor and sick, organizes town festivals and plays for the schoolchildren, bathes in cold water and jams herself with a needle every time she has an ungrateful thought. Indeed, she works so hard that she has a complete mental breakdown and wakes up in London, penniless, wearing a dirty dress and possessing no memories of her former life. This begins a long series of misadventures that initially see her picking hops in the countryside as an itinerant laborer, then living among the London homeless, and finally scratching out a living as a schoolteacher in a prison-like girls' school run by a pitiless widow whose only concern is extracting school fees from her pupils' parents. As Dorothy's memory slowly returns, she realizes that her deep religious faith has not returned with it, and that the scandal surrounding her departure may prevent her from ever returning home. She must try to find meaning in a world unsupported by her old pillars -- family and God.

As I said, this book has a rather clumsy structure, and there is a distinct, Victorian-like artificiality in some of the events which ruin and redeem Dorothy Hare: the end of the book is crippled by a tendency to rectify most of Dorothy's problems in a manner more reminiscent of Charles Dickens than George Orwell. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading. The sequences between the Rector and Dorothy in the opening chapter, which drive home the mentality of the shabby genteel -- in essence, "we" are better than "they," and therefore things like debts, a dwindling number of parishioners, or the fact the church is falling to pieces don't matter -- are a case study in the power of snobbery to blot out harsh reality -- in this case, that the Rector, despite his titled cousin (a baronet) and his Oxford education, is only a few years from the poorhouse. The chapter about hop-picking in the countryside is beautifully written and shows that the plight of migrant workers never changes, his device of writing the "homeless on the streets of London" chapter in play format is brilliant if unorthodox, and Dorothy's experiences at the girl's school are simply appalling: Orwell lays bare, as with a meat cleaver, the fraud of paid education and the snobbish motives which lay behind it. One walks away from A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER feeling not only as if one has seen the disgusting underbelly of English society in the 30s, but the suffering of those "respectable" people who, a generation removed from their money, still cling to their snobbery -- which, in essence, is all they have.

Next Tuesday (or before) I will wind up this analysis with KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING and what I consider Orwell's true masterpiece, COMING UP FOR AIR.

Book Review: Ernest Hemingway's "Winner Take Nothing"

Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.

Such is the dedication Ernest Hemingway wrote for WINNER TAKE NOTHING, a grim, cynical, occasionally black-humorous collection of short stories which, if they achieve nothing else, grant us an insight into the author's particular way of looking at the world. Hemingway had a racketing youth that took him all over America and Canada and later, Europe, and the extent of that experience -- as a reporter, an ambulance driver during WWI, a correspondent living in Spain and France, and as a glorified beach bum in Florida -- is reflected in these tales, some of which are now considered classics of American literature. There are some losers in this bunch, and a few more that never quite add up to the sum of their parts, but by and large this collection demonstrates why Hemingway's short stories are still considered masterpieces of observation on the human condition. Some of the standouts are:

"After the Storm" -- An American dockyard thug, having stabbed someone in a bar fight and then fled on a boat, encounters a just-sunken passenger ship after a violent storm and tries to perform a little impromptu salvage.

"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- A short, poignant tale about a drunken insomniac in Paris, and the two waiters who wish he'd just go home.

"The Sea Change" - A selfish young man tries to talk his pregnant girl into an abortion. (This tale is significant in that the word "abortion" is never used in the story.)

"A Way You'll Never Be" - This story, set in Italy in WWI after a bloody battle, introduces Nick Adams, a recurring character in Hemingway's shorts who was clearly based upon himself.

"A Day's Wait" -- A black-comic short about a boy who believes he is dying of fever.

"A Natural History of the Dead" -- One of Hemingway's finest short stories, it begins as a cool, almost scientific treatise on death and then deteriorates, quite deliberately, into a personal reminiscence about war.

Love him or hate him, Hemingway was one of the most important writers of the last few centuries, at least in the English-speaking world, if only because of his influence on modern language. Prior to his rise to fame in the 1920s, British-American prose tended toward a more ornate, almost baroque style that tended to favor those with education. Hemingway's own style, very carefully developed under the tutelage of Gertrude Stein, was friendly even to barely literate people, massively increasing his popularity, and his earthy, worldly, cynical take on life, and willingness to tackle subjects hitherto smothered in silence, fit the disillusioned mood of the period in which he found his fame. WINNER TAKE NOTHING is aptly named, because Hemingway's view of life was unremittingly bleak, though punctuated with coarse humor and just a tinge of sentimentality. It is the work of a man who believed that life broke the good and the bad impartially, and that while it may have punished vice, it seldom rewarded virtue. It is the work of a man who believed that victory was difficult to obtain and, having been obtained, inevitably rang hollow. In short, it is the work of a depressive misanthrope with a distinct taste for cruelty. And yet it must be said that Hemingway probably took more pleasure from life than his tough-guy code was willing to let him admit, and his fascination with what George Orwell called "the process of life" -- eating, drinking, fighting, hunting, fishing, traveling, making love -- is part of what makes reading him worthwhile. Man, he once said, can be destroyed but not defeated, and there is enough of that defiant attitude in WINNER TAKE NOTHING to make the reader take something positive away from it -- something, as it were, from Nothing.

Forgotten Novels: The Sherston Trilogy

I think it's safe to say America has something of an obsession with English country life. From Jane Austen to Downton Abbey and back again, there is an intense interest in the English gentry -- their morals, their manners, their folkways, their elaborate sense of style, the complex and snobbish social courses they were forced to navigate in their daily lives. Given this fascination, it strikes me as odd that Siegfried Sassoon is not a household name in America. For it is Sassoon who gave us what might be the most evocative picture of the English gentry during their heyday -- the late Victorian and Edwardian Eras -- as well as the period which precipitated their downfall: the war years of 1914 - 1918. Indeed, given the notoriously anti-intellectual strain among the English gentry, their disdain for "cleverness" and "braininess" and the creative arts generally, Sassoon's depictions of genteel country life, which are based directly on his own experiences, may be the only realistic, non-idealized picture we have of that class in its halcyon days.

Sassoon, who won the Military Cross during WWI while serving in the infantry, is perhaps best-remembered even in his native land as a war poet rather than a novelist, and it is a fact that not only did he write some of the more memorable war poetry in the English language, he also inspired and mentored the man many feel is the One True King of that realm, Wilfred Owen. Throw in his contentious friendship with Robert Graves, who went on to write I, Claudius and Good-Bye to All That, and you have a towering literary figure...whose name means nothing to what seems like 99% of the reading public. It is the hope of shedding some light upon that darkness that want to discuss the so-called "Sherston Trilogy," the three autobiographical novels Sassoon wrote which cover the time period from the late 1890s until 1918: MEMOIRS OF A FOX-HUNTING MAN, MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER, and SHERSTON'S PROGRESS.

MEMOIRS is the story of "George Sherston" (Sassoon himself), an only child whose parents died before he could remember them and who was raised by his spinster Aunt Evelyn in her old-fashioned house in the English countryside. At a young age, Sherston is steered toward horses by the family's trusted and competent groom, Tom Dixon, and this begins a lifelong obsession - not only with horses, but with the lifestyle of the petty gentry of rural England - a life devoted entirely to horse-racing, fox-hunting, cricket, gambling, and the social gatherings stemming these activities. In particular, the complex ritual of the fox-hunt, with its combination of snobbery and savagery, comes to symbolize for George all that is good and worth preserving in English life.

Our protagonist is intelligent and sensitive, but also shallow, selfish and vain, and these traits persist almost to the end of the book, which, while weighing in at a modest 313 pages, reads very slowly, almost glacially, as if Sassoon were trying to communicate the "time has no meaning" feeling of this golden era. Though the family income is pretty respectable - George personally has an income of £600 a year, which in the early Edwardian Era was a considerable sum of money - he spends recklessly on horses, riding-clothes and other frivolities, and steadfastly refuses either to work or to advance his education past the point required for members of his class (a few years at Eton or Oxford). Sensitive to "keeping up appearances", George is constantly running up debts trying to appear wealthier than he really is, and spends much of the book in Byronian anguish that he cannot attract the attention of Denis Maiden, a superb horseman somewhat above him on the social scale. Indeed, when he discovers Aunt Evelyn has sold some of her jewelry to finance his lifestyle, he is grateful, but not very much - George takes it for granted that his life of racing horses and hunting foxes should go on forever. And indeed, the entire novel is redolent of thundering hoofbeats, port wine, pipe-tobacco smoke, gleaming leather riding boots, whickering horses, gambling, frivolous conversation, and frightful, empty-headed snobbery. Many of the people Sherston encounters are leftovers not merely from the early Victorian age, but of the 18th century - people who believe the "lower classes" are sub-humans fit only for labor and servitude, and that nothing whatsoever in life or the world matters but the "Ringwell Hunt" and its accomplishments and internal politics. The atmosphere of the book reminded me of George Orwell's quote about this time period: "There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world, a time when the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914 ... from the whole decade ... there seems to breathe forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kinds of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and creme de menthe and soft- centered chocolates--an atmosphere, as it were of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song."

And this, of course, is what makes some of MEMOIRS exasperating and, at times, a sluggish read. Notwithstanding the gentle beauty of Sassoon's prose, which unfolds like a rose petal, or the way he effortlessly reconstructs to its minutia the particulars of a fascinating and long-dead era, most of the book is devoted to shallow men enjoying hollow pursuits. Of course, it is true that Sassoon is very much aware that this is the case, writing that "All the sanguine guesswork of youth is here, and its silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of its tremendous trivialities." And it is also true that the closing chapters of the book find Sherston in the Army and marching off to the Great War - a war that kills not only most of his childhood companions, but also puts a sudden, violent, and inglorious end to what Oliver Edwards nostalgically called "the lazy country-house life" which Sherston equated with civilization. And it is these chapters which redeem and give meaning to the rest, by demonstrating the thoroughness with which the war destroyed something that, for all its vulgarity, silliness and snobbery, even the most democratic reader can't help but missing once it's gone. Coming home on leave from the Western Front in 1915 , George observes the empty stables, snow-covered fields, missing grooms, and shuttered houses, and realizing that he is witnessing the end of his own era while still shy of thirty, laments, "I wanted the past to survive and begin again."

By the end of MEMOIRS it's clear that the belated growing-up process of the protagonist has begun in deadly earnest. And in the mean time? I again quote Oliver Edwards, who was speaking of another author, but may as well have been commenting on Sassoon, when, he nostalgically recalled the world " ...of Atlas buses, of the hansom cab, of sulphurous fogs, of the lazy country-house life, of the long, lovely decade of the Edwardian age. No one, I think, has given us in fewer words all that we lost when that life vanished."

As MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER opens, we find George Sherston a changed and somewhat embittered young man. At 28 years old, he has finally come to grasp a horrible fact: that the world he left, and is ostensibly defending from the Germans, is finished regardless of the war's outcome. This realization is his first step toward maturity, and in a sense that is what this book is about: the belated transformation of a venal, callow, fox-hunting boy into a man who at first embraces and then bitterly rejects the war which made him a famous hero.

Like its predecessor, INFANTRY OFFICER is written in a meticulous, thorough, gentle English prose which is often slow but always attractive. Sassoon was a deeply thoughtful man, and relates the horror, indignity and black humor of war in a measured way which may disappoint those looking for a "hot lead and cold steel" battle story. At first enthusiastic about combat, he slowly comes to resent the civilians for whom he is fighting, as well as his blundering superiors and the British government. Called a hero for his exploits in No Man's Land, he begins to suspect that his heroism is being put to sinister ends. Convalescing from injuries back in England, he is jarred by the bloodthirsty, callous, exploitative, selfish attitude of those he left behind. No one understands what is going on at the front, and many do not care, so long as the champagne at the Savoy is still flowing. In one of the book's most effecting moments, he is even told by one of the titled snobs he used to admire (and suck up to) that since he is not an heir to a great name, his death in battle would be no great loss. In another, when he decides to come out publicly against the war, his close friend "David Cromlech" (alias Robert Graves, later the author of GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT and I, CLAUDIUS) informs him the government will shut him up in an insane asylum rather than give him the satisfaction of a court-martial. The destruction of all of his youthful ideals is painfully recorded, along with the futile assaults on the German wire and the deaths of his close friends and comrades. We sense, amidst all the gas and shell-fire, that it is not so much George Sherston's old self which is passing away, so much as the illusions of the Edwardian era itself. George Sherston the fox-hunting boy would never dare publicly question the war...but what about George Sherston, the man?

It's true that the book is not perfect. Sassoon is a gifted writer and a very intelligent man, but he is not a master storyteller. In addition to its occasional sluggishness, Sassoon never once mentions the poetry which he published throughout the war and which made him somewhat famous even before his well-publicized struggle with the British Army began - a notable omission, especially since Sassoon's fame as a poet is largely the pivot on which the third act of his real-life story turned. What's more, a thread of conflict runs throughout the entire book: Sassoon is clearly embittered by what he sees in the war, but is constantly qualifying every criticism he makes of society and his superiors, as if the etiquette he learned as a boy prevents him from venting his true feelings. The British use the phrase "he never lets rip" to describe a man with too much self-control, and this appellation fits Sassoon rather well. However, these flaws are largely canceled out by what he does well: description, character sketches, interior monologue, and - let's face it - prose-writing for the sheer joy of putting words together in an agreeable way. A very different book than its predecessor, INFANTRY OFFICER is still visibly cut from the same cloth. The arc of George Sherston's life continues, and while each of the first two books can be regarded as a stand-alone piece, together they make for a very satisfying journey.

The final act of the trilogy, SHERSTON'S PROGRESS, is a book of an entirely different mettle than its predecessors -- as terse as the other books were loquacious, and as humorous and rich in self-depreciation as they were in callowness and self-involvement. It picks up where the previous one left off, with Sherston leaving the mental institution at "Slateford War Hospital" having resolved to see the war through, despite maintaining it had outlived its original aims. It is a novel which reflects the deep and profound changes that occur when one lives not only through a brutal and stupidly-fought war, but through the end of a great era, the era of the fox-hunting man. To a certain extent it also answers the question raised by its thesis, to wit: What do you do when, at the age of 30, you have outlived your own time?

I should start by saying PROGRESS is much shorter than its predecessors, taking place over a single year which begins with his admission to Slateford War Hospital for "war neurosis" in 1917. There Sherston meets the man who will guide and shape the rest of his life: W.H. Rivers, the famous neurologist/psychologist/anthropologist whose job was to get Sherston to abandon his antiwar stance and return to the front. Once Sherston agrees, however, he finds himself not back in France but in mutinous Ireland, engaged in sophomoric shenanigans with other former patients of Rivers' which hark back to the more innocent first novel. The shadow of the war is long, however, and following a colorful and beautifully-written sojourn to Palestine, Sherston ends up in heavy combat once more in his old French stomping-grounds, is wounded once more under the most ironic circumstances imaginable, and returns to England, a man who has perhaps finally come to terms with everything in his life, including, it seems, the fact that the England he fought to preserve is now as dead as many of his former comrades in arms. Sherston finishes the series "ready to talk" to his psychiatrist, meaning, I suppose, that he is finally ready to accept that he has survived the war and must now survive the peace, in a country which has become alien to him.

I definitely enjoyed SHERSTON'S PROGRESS -- especially the Palestinian passages, which feature some of his finest descriptive prose -- but I did think the novel, like the others, suffered from Sassoon's overly powerful sense of self-control. He writes everything, from battle to travelogue, in the same sedate, measured style, with the result that the entire novel never leaves its initial gear. Though it is as occasionally evocative as FOX-HUNTING MAN, it is also a description of a world which is palpably less attractive than the decadent silliness of Edwardian England: a world of mental hospitals, backwater garrisons full of recuperating men, crowded troop ships, snobbish staff officers and muddy trenches. War is of course an interesting subject in and of itself, but oddly enough, it is perhaps not the best subject for Sassoon, because of his oddly cool-blooded perspective of the world. We read about his anger at the waste, stupidity and insanity of his surroundings, yet there is no sense of passion in these paragraphs. Sherston's anger is intellectual, not emotional, and I began to wonder in this third volume if perhaps he hadn't gone to war to experience that emotion for himself after an incredibly shallow youth centered around nothing but horse races and fox hunts. The English, particularly in Sassoon's day, were notorious for their stiff upper lips and calm demeanor in the face of adversity, but as George Orwell once pointed out, a mask can twist the face that wears it, and it may be that the mask of haughty indolence worn by the young man could not be removed as an adult. A reviewer of this novel claimed that it was nothing more than an Englishman trying to rise above his own Englishness -- and failing -- and that seems rather accurate. And yet like all great works, its failures are at least part of its charm.

It's interesting to note that just a year after the war began, Sassoon -- not Sherston but the actual Sassoon -- famously wrote, "I want a genuine taste of the horrors, and then – peace. I don’t want to go back to the old inane life which always seemed like a prison. I want freedom, not comfort. I have seen beauty in life, in men and things ... The last fifteen months have unsealed my eyes. I have lived well and truly since the war began; now I ask that the price be required of me." In MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER he paid that price and then some, but I'm not sure that he sentiment about not wanting to go back was true. I think both Siegfried Sassoon and his alter-ago George Sherston were fighting for just that -- for "Atlas buses, of the hansom cab, of sulphurous fogs, of the lazy country-house life, of the long, lovely decade of the Edwardian age" Indeed, a better epitaph for his experiences might be summed up by his own comment that all he wanted was for the past to survive and begin again. And really, who can blame him? There is something about that era -- the horses, the top-hats, the cutaway coats, the pocket-watches, the walking sticks, the flowing skirts and pillbox hats, the oysters and brown stout, the coins with wonderful names (shilling, half-crown, threepenny bit), the racing newspapers, the marvelously overdone slang ("Coo! So ducky-duck!"), the drunken baronets and penniless lords, the steam locomotives whistling in the distance through the woods, that makes one's heart ache with nostalgia even though we have experienced none of these things ourselves. They are, in essence, part of our heritage as English-speakers, and the principal joy of the Sherston Trilogy -- especially the first book -- is that through them, the past does survive and begin again.

Knuckle Down: A Sneak Preview of my new Novel

The following is an excerpt from my second novel, KNUCKLE DOWN, due to be released on August 8, 2016. It is the second book in the CAGE LIFE series. CAGE LIFE currently holds a 4.20 out of 5.00 rating on Goodreads and a 4.90 out of 5.00 rating on Amazon. I will be scheduling a Giveaway of KNUCKLE DOWN in the next few weeks. In the mean time...this.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Romans had an expression for gladiators who made their plans in the arena.

It translates roughly into English as too late.

The only time I’d been legitimately whipped in a fight, I’d known little more about my opponent than his name. Dem’yan Suba, on the other hand, had plenty of video of me to study. He’d stepped into the cage knowing my fighting style like the back of his hand, while I’d been forced to improvise. The result had been a disaster.

Now the coin had flipped.

Hieronymous Bash was one of the most popular and successful fighters on the Cage Combat League roster. He was featured in video games, T-shirts, bobblehead dolls, instructional videos, fan expositions, and even online seminars. If you wanted to bone up on his fighting techniques, all you needed was an ethernet cable.

He, on the other hand, knew fuck-all about me.
How could he? The most recent tape of me was three years old. I’d been off the radar all that time, fighting on small untelevised regional shows or obscure foreign promotions, my style changing, refining, sharpening, becoming something entirely different, entirely more dangerous, than anything he was prepared for.
How do you like the blindfold, Hieronymous?

The flow of blood from his mouth tells me not very much.

Bash was stronger than I, and more experienced. His kickboxing skills were excellent and he had superb footwork. While it was not overly difficult to take him down, years of amateur wrestling had given his body an explosive power that made it nearly impossible to keep him there.

I knew all of this, but I knew something else as well.

Any strength can be turned into a weakness.

As Max Schmeling had once said: In analyzing a boxer’s style, the distance from which he throws his most dangerous punches is really the critical variable. Once this is known, he can be outmaneuvered by staying out of that range.

As they say in New Orleans: true dat.

He needed room to strike. I gave him none. Either I circled just on the end of his effective range or I leapt inside the arc of his fists and feet, then back out again, like a wolf fighting a bear.

Just like Alton had trained me.

Head movement? It doesn’t help you if your opponent keeps striking to the body – jabs to the solar plexus, hooks to the ribs, kicks to the outside and the inside of the thigh.

Superb footwork? It’s hard to move your feet properly when two hundred and five pounds of Irish-Italian badass is stomping on them every time you clinch. Harder still when leg kicks are demolishing the capillaries in your legs, causing the blood to draw the
flesh over the muscle as tight as drumskin.

Explosive power? Use it, Hieronymous. I want you to. When I go for the double-leg takedown and plant you on ass and elbows, don’t stay there in the guard where you might catch your breath. Instead, escape back to your feet like you’re shoving a broken pillar off your body. Now do it again…and again…and again. Keep doing it until you’ve exploded yourself hollow.

His eyes made for interesting reading.

At first they showed nothing but that haughty, superior glint. Then, about halfway through the first round, I thought I saw confusion shallowing in their molasses-brown depths. Things were not going as planned. The Mickey Watts in front of him was not the Mickey Watts he’d seen on tape, getting choked unconscious by Dem’yan Suba and submitted by Wilson Kreese. His expression began to bear the look of a schoolyard bully who had gone to collect some lunch money and found himself spitting teeth onto the playground asphalt instead.

When the ship’s bell clanged the end of the round, Bash hesitated. He was breathing hard, and there were ugly reddish wheals on his ribcage, his bicep, the exposed areas of his thighs. I returned his stare.
Then I dropped him a wink.

I won’t lie. The ceaseless movement, the necessity of utilizing speed and of being constantly aware of distances, was using up a lot of my gasoline. It’s no easy feat to cut fifteen pounds in four days, and even after the weigh-ins, when sweet liquids had coursed plentifully down my throat and solid food made a welcoming bulk in my shriveled belly, I could tell I lacked my normal firepower. But nobody ever goes into the cage at a hundred percent physically and mentally. There’s always a drag coefficient.

I would simply have to fight through it.

The bell rang again. A clear, powerful sound; I could feel it in my sternum. Bash roared out of his corner grimacing so ferociously I wondered if he were going to bite clean through his mouthpiece. His foot was a blur – faster than I could dodge. But I didn’t have to match his speed. Alton’s videotaped reconnaissance had discovered that Bash’s gym-built muscles tensed visibly in the instant immediately before he released a high head kick. The moment I saw that tension I brought up my elbow to shield the left side of my face. His foot struck it like a freight train plowing into a mountainside. I felt the impact all the way down to my heels…but I also felt a bone in his foot give way, and saw the pain register in his eyes.

Speed, meet timing.

I drilled him hard with a lead right to the chest and another to the side of his head that sent a glittering spray of sweat into the air. He staggered, so I helped him along with a push-kick to the belly, and he slammed into the cage hard enough to make the chain-link shiver. I could see that he was hurt, but he wasn’t hurt enough. So I didn’t follow him in.
Instead, I waved him at me.

The crowd loved it.

Five thousand voices took up the chant:

Mick-ey! Mick-ey! Mick-ey!

Hieronymous accepted the challenge.

A front kick sought out the pit of my stomach; an overhand right whistled toward my jaw. I was just within the range of his foot and I elected to take the shot, knowing it would propel me clear of his much more dangerous fist. His momentum carried him after me, but his injured foot, even numbed as it undoubtedly was by adrenaline, was dragging like a muffler sprung loose of its undercarriage. Putting all that weight on it was more than it could handle and his knee buckled.

As it did, I slammed my own knee into the point of his chin.

Bash hadn’t risen as high as he had in the light heavyweight division carrying around a glass jaw. The blow rocked his head backward, but he still had his senses. Enough of them to swing his arms around me as he pitched forward.

A couple of years ago I probably would have fallen right on my ass with him on top of me. But that was a couple of years ago. I’d added dimensions to my game, and one of them was judo. I twisted my body as he smashed into me, turning a drunken slide-tackle into a crude hip throw. He hit the mat as if he’d just chugged a fifth of vodka, and before he could rise, I’d turned and let fly with a kick into his ribs, one so hard I could feel the pattern of the bone against the van of my foot.

That should have ended it there. Against the caliber of opponent I’d been fighting recently, it would have.

Unfortunately, Bash was a lot more than a mere opponent.

He rolled with the blow, and ended up in the butt-scoot position; on his back but with his legs and arms positioned to protect his body, daring me to jump into his guard. Instead, I slung a kick into his thigh; he retaliated with a hard heel-strike into my solar plexus. I countered with a downward punch into his belly, and caught a fist to the lip in exchange.

That set the tone for the next three minutes – three minutes that felt like three years. I attacked again and again from my feet, but it was like trying to fight an anaconda. All my blows came at a price – tit for tat. And all the while, I could see in his eyes an expectant, predatory look. He knew I was tired, and he was waiting for me to get sloppy, to leave a foot or a fist where he could trap it like said snake trapping a rat in its coils. Trap it and crush it.

I said his face made for interesting reading, and it did. There was still confusion there, and now frustration and anger, too; but no resignation. He hadn’t lost a fight in years. He didn’t think he was going to lose now. Scratch that – he knew he wasn’t going to lose. And his certainty was unnerving. It mingled with my growing physical exhaustion to leech yet more strength out of my muscles. For a moment, standing over him, gasping, one hand clutching at his waving feet, the other cocked above me like a stone in a sling, I flashed back to the moment in the Suba fight when I realized he’d beaten me.

To the look on Anne’s face when she told me it was over between us.

To the blinding sting of Don Cheech’s blood spattering into my eyes, and then the sound of my cousin pleading for his life as Nicky Cowboy stood over him with the silenced pistol: No no no no no Jesus no!

To the sound of Wilson Kreese breaking my arm.

In that instant, I could feel my confidence sliding away from me, as suddenly and decisively as if it were crockery on an upended table

What do you do in that instant you see it all heading for a crash?

Dig, my old man had said. But I was afraid to dig, to go into that last, darkest corner of my heart and retrieve what I knew was buried there. I knew only well the damage it could do.

There had to be another way.

Bash lashed out again. His foot struck my collarbone and sent a shockwave of pain rippling all the way to my toes. I stumbled backwards. A grimace exposed his mouthpiece, giving him a savage, feral look. He shouted something and waved me in – urgently, frantically, furiously. Come on!

The crowd loved it.

Bash! Bash! Bash!

Less than a minute to go in the round, and the tide was turning. He had awakened now, inflamed himself; I was sagging. I needed inspiration, and I found it in the strangest place. Not in some traumatic memory but in a place so prosaic I’d almost forgotten it existed.

My own home.

In my apartment stood a trophy case of sorts; the disjecta membra of my amateur fighting career. Ribbons. Medals. Trophies. I had once been very proud of those baubles, but in recent years they had taken on a different meaning. It had become evident that nothing I had won had ever really mattered. Olympic gold had eluded me. Hell, the Olympic team had eluded me. And in all the years I’d been plying the dark trade of mixed martial arts as a professional, the only belt I’d ever strapped around my waist was the one I cinched around my jeans.

Mikhailis had said it best: The brass ring’s been playing hide and go seek with you your whole life, hasn’t it?

Yes.

And in more than one way.

I realized then, as Bash issued his challenge, that the things that really mattered, personally and professionally, had not been denied me by some superior, external force. It wasn’t my cousin Clean or Gino Stillitano or Mikhailis Morganstern who had steered my life to shipwreck.

It was me.

My own decisions had led me to ruin.

When I chose to hit Tommy Battaglia all those years ago in a Manhattan nightclub, I unleashed a tidal wave of events that had destroyed my relationship with Anne, swept me away on an avalanche of crime, and buried me in an abyss of debt I’d found possible to pay only by making more and more destructive choices. I’d felt powerless, a pawn being shuttled round the board by fingers not my own. Even when I chose to break free, I had insisted on playing by other people’s rules. But there were no rules in this life; only choices. Responsibility and reward. Rule and ruin. Success…or failure.

Mine to choose.

So right then and there, half-deafened from the noise, running with sweat, quivering with exhaustion, I did just exactly that.

Bash wanted a submission?

I’d give him one.

I threw a hard right to his mouth, and then, pretending to lose my balance, let my hand fall to the ground beside him.

He seized it hard and fast with his left, a crushing grip on my wrist that sent a shiver of pain all the way to my elbow. I felt rather than heard his opposite foot plant itself on the mat behind me. He pushed up with his hips onto his left forearm and slung his right arm beneath my chin and over my left shoulder. In two seconds he would have a kimura-lock in place, whereupon he could pop my arm out of its socket as easily as a cork out of a champagne bottle.

I didn’t give him those two seconds.

I took them.

Wrenched myself upward at the exact moment he tried to close the lock. Shoved him flat on the canvas with my hips on his waist, neutralizing his legs, trapping his arms at an awkward angle where they could no longer defend his face. A classic transition attack, designed to bait-and-switch an opponent into beating himself by making him think he’s got you beaten.

Not at all difficult if you practice it a few times.

Say…five or six thousand.

I was in full mount with half a minute to go.

So I used it.

A fight to the eye socket. A left to the forehead. An elbow across his cheekbone, and then, as that elbow completed the arc of its rightward movement, another elbow on the opposite side of his face.

Lather, rinse…repeat.

I didn’t have much energy left. What I had, I crammed into each shot. His head was so hard it was like punching granite, but I kept it up, and in seconds, his face was a glistening crimson mask through which a single eye – its twin was puffing shut – glared up at me in helpless, disbelieving rage…until at last it began to go glassy, to lose focus, to flutter and roll as its owner slipped into unconsciousness.
Hieronymous went limp.

My fist hesitated over the bloody mess that was his face…lusting to drive itself down for one last, vindictive blow…

…then slowly unclenched. Desire knelt to discipline, the monster to the man. The referee pulled me away.

I honestly don’t remember much of what happened afterwards. I was almost as limp as Bash when Alton picked me up like a straw dummy and carried me victoriously around the cage; when the fireworks burst red, white, and blue over the ship, their reflections spreading out over the black waters of the Hudson; when the announcer in his Liberace tuxedo shouted to the exuberant crowd that I had advanced into the semifinals; when the two gorgeous ring-card girls strutted into the cage carrying a novelty check for a hundred thousand dollars damn near the size of a bedsheet. Mainly what I remember is the music, blasting out over the crowd, raising waves of goosebumps on my scuffed, sweat-slick flesh, whose refrain seemed to sum up everything I had been taught -- in school, on the streets, in the ring and now, finally in the cage:

The smile of God is victory.