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

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.

Those of Damned Memory

Never meet your heroes.
-- Michael Bentt


When I was a boy, one of my favorite television shows was Tales of the Gold Monkey, an action-adventure saga set in the South Seas in 1938. The hero was Jake Cutter, a handsome, cigar-chewing ex-fighter pilot who was portrayed by Stephen Collins. Due to a conflict of wills between the show's hard-nosed producer, Donald Bellisario, and its network, ABC, the series was abruptly canceled after its first season, but I never forgot it, and when Tales was finally released on DVD a few years ago, I wasted no time buying it and revisiting the famed Monkey Bar on the fictional island of Bora Gora, where Jake could always be found, smoking cheap cigars and arguing with his one-eyed dog.

Cut to late 2014, when Collins' then-wife, the actress Faye Grant, who had met him on the set of Tales, handed over an audio tape to the LAPD in which Collins' could supposedly be heard confessing to a marriage counselor that he had engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with a female minor many years before. A nasty scandal followed, not leastwise because Collins had portrayed a paragon of fatherly virtue on the long-running television show 7th Heaven. One consequence of the scandal was that 7th Heaven was immediately pulled from the broadcast lineup on UP TV, a "faith friendly" network which relied on "7H" re-runs to pad its schedule. Another, on a strictly personal level, was that I received several private communications, not always tactfully put, from people asking me how I felt about the news. Did the allegations against Collins affect my feelings for Tales of the Gold Monkey? Would I continue to watch the show? Did I regret writing such a fabulous review of it on Amazon? How did it feel to know one of my childhood heroes had been portrayed by a man alleged to have sexually abused a minor right around the same time the show was being produced?

My answers have been consistent between then and now: No, my feelings for the show haven't changed. Yes, I would continue to watch it. No, I did not regret encouraging others to do so. As for the fourth question, the answer is direct and somewhat vulgar: It felt like shit. It felt like shit in October, 2014, and it feels just as shitty now, in July of 2016. But the questions themselves provoked a much more important question which still troubles me, particularly in the wake of the much larger and uglier scandal involving Bill Cosby, which is just now beginning to play out in the courts. Where, precisely, do we draw the line between the artist as a human being, and the art he creates? And what long-term risks are run when we place prohibitions on art because the artist himself has become tainted?

You will note above that I mentioned UP TV's decision to pull 7th Heaven from its lineup, and thus, in effect, remove Stephen Collins from public view.
A similar reaction took place in regards to Cosby Show re-runs on multiple networks, but there the reaction went deeper. An effort is actually being made to have Cosby's star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame removed, just as Penn State removed the statue of Joe Paterno in the wake of revelations that "Joe Pa" knew of, but did little to stop, sexual crimes being perpetrated by a member of his staff. The idea is not merely to prevent the show, or the individual, from being seen, heard or remembered, but to obliterate public references to them, to revoke their honors, to perform, in other words, what the Romans would have called damnatio memoriae -- a "condemnation of memory."

Damnatio memoriae was the somewhat Orwellian Roman practice of obliterating all public references to a once-powerful individual, so as to erase them not only from formal history but from human memory. Statues, murals, coins, scrolls -- anything which bore the likeness or the name of the damned person was defaced or destroyed, so that in a very short period of time it would be almost physically impossible, in an era where photography and audio recordings did not exist, to prove he or she had existed at all. It is safe to say that the banishment of Collins and Cosby from the airwaves, and the attempt to revoke Cosby's star and Paterno's statue, are part of our own version of Damnatio memoraie, but in all cases there is a deeper and somewhat less honorable motive at work than the desire to punish a wrongdoer for a shameful act. The real motive is to allow us, the public, to forget that we once idolized someone who is now in disgrace.

I never cared much for Bill Cosby or Joe Paterno, but I did admire Stephen Collins with the sort of starry-eyed admiration only a kid can have for someone who portrays his hero, and the trouble with Collins does make me wonder to what extent the past can or should be be rewritten or even erased by the circumstances of the present. Does The Cosby Show become less funny or less culturally important because Bill Cosby may have been a serial rapist while it was being shot? Do Tales and 7th Heaven disappear into the Orwellian memory hole because Collins admitted to three "inappropriate" sexual acts with minors? Should Paterno's entire legacy as a coach be obliterated because of his failure to stop a sexual predator? The answer in many people's minds seems to be yes: the inconvenient past is subject to the condemnation of memory. But this only leads to another question: where does it stop? Stephen Collins had a role in the classic film All The President's Men; must we pull airings of that from the television, too? And what about the idea of rebooting "Tales," which went around Hollywood a few years ago? Out of the question now! It seems that nothing whatever can grow from the soil of which are retroactively tainted by the alleged crimes of their stars, despite the fact that the shows themselves, both as concepts and as entities, are entirely separate from the actors cast to star in them. It is evidently not enough for people to say, "I'm not going to watch that show because such-and-such did so-and-so"; it now seems that people must go a step further and say, "Liability extends to the show itself and not just the actor. If the actor is disgraced, the show is disgraced. If the actor is erased from history, then the show must be erased, too."

This frightens me in many ways, not merely because it is unfair to everyone else involved -- Malcom Jamal-Warner, who played Cosby's son on TCS, noted that by pulling it from syndication "they are taking money out of my pocket, too" -- but because of the implications for every other aspect of human life. It seems to me that the statement that the past is malleable, that its ugly or embarrassing aspects can be removed as easily as a wart, belongs, or ought to belong, more to the Oceania of 1984 than to the America of 2016. Because once this practice of toppling statues and prying up Stars on Boulevards starts, it may be impossible to stop, and the really frightful fact is that it
can be applied anywhere; to books, to paintings, to music, and, as Orwell repeatedly warned us, even to people and history themselves. At present, in this country, there is ongoing a systematic defacement of Civil War-era monuments, statues, plaques and so forth which is positively reminiscent both of the afformentioned ancient Rome and of the former Soviet Union circa 1991. Some would have you believe this is a de-glorification of the Confederacy, but as with any damnatio memoraie the true purpose is not the righting of a wrong but the destruction of unpleasant reminders and inconvenient -- or humiliating -- facts.

I myself will continue to watch "Tales" because I enjoy it, and because I can differentiate in my mind the actions of Collins the man from the doings of the fictional Jake Cutter. As Orwell said, the first thing you ask of a wall is that it stand up, which is a separate question from what larger purpose the wall serves. Well, the first thing we ask of television is that it entertain. This is independent of the larger question of whether an actor or a director is a despicable person or has committed despicable deeds. History shows us that many actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets and suchlike have been disagreeable, dubious or even monstrous human beings. Erroll Flynn liked his women young -- as in "statutory rape" young -- but I will never take less pleasure in Robin Hood as a consequence. Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite, but I won't switch off his music when it comes on the radio. Salvador Dali was a psychopath and a sexual deviant, but I won't hurry past his exhibits at the Getty or LACMA as a result. It is not a question of suppressing knowledge of their faults or of excusing those faults; quite the opposite, it is a question of placing one's admiration on the side of the creation rather than the creator. I think there are times when it is perhaps permissible to lump the artist in with his art, but by and large I believe we ought to differentiate the two. It should be possible for someone to say, "I love The Cosby Show -- I think it is funny and of enormous historical importance due to its groundbreaking portrayal of a black family as upper middle class rather than poor," while at the same time abominating the alleged acts of Cosby himself. The act of watching and enjoying his show is distinct, or at least can be distinct, from supporting the man.

The desire to destroy unpleasant reminders is as old humankind (who hasn't thrown away or incinerated photographs or letters from an ex?) but the habit of refusing to listen to music, or to read a book, or to see a movie or view a painting, simply because we dislike the artist rather than because we dislike his art, is relatively new one and has only been steadily gaining acceptability since about the time of the Russian Revolution. It began in large part because of the necessity for mental conformity among left-wing intellectuals who had to fall in line with Marxist (meaning Soviet) ideology. On the political right it seems to have begun somewhat later, during the Cold War. More recently it has seeped into all forms of thought, political or no, and can be found in people who have no political feelings whatever. It is a form of mental leprosy which is rooted in the belief that nothing anyone who disagrees with us or offends us says could be interesting or possess any validity. We see this diseased thinking most often in matters where someone's political or religious beliefs have been injured, but as the cases of Collins and Cosby (et al) show us, it also extends into subtler and more dangerous arenas. For what is more threatening to our own security than the idea of a malleable past, which can be reshaped, rewritten, sanitized at will? For anything to progress -- an art form, a person, a nation -- the past must remain objective and immutable, to serve as guidance for the future. It is by our failures -- placing trust in the wrong people, for example, or idolizing a human being we know to be as fallible as ourselves -- that we often learn the most painful, and the most valuable lessons.

REGENERATION: A War Movie For People Who Hate Them

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.
-- Siegfried Sassoon

Nobody much cares about World War One. The subject, like the war itself, is so depressing, so embarrassing to the human species, and such a vicious indictment of modern civilization generally, that few people can stomach any serious discussion of it. What comes to mind when you think of "The Great War?" Yellowish clouds of poison gas. Corpses rotting in nests of rusty barbed wire. Shell holes the size of tract homes, filled with dirty water. Rats, lice and influenza. Skulls grinning out of the mud. Not exactly heartening stuff. And neither is the 1997 film REGENERATION, but you are doing yourself, and the innumerable men massacred in that half-forgotten war, a grave disservice if you don't take the opportunity to see it.

REGENERATION, though based on a novel by Pat Barker -- a writer of much repute in Britain, though she is almost unknown in America -- is both a true story and a fairly accurate representation of the relationship between two of the most famous poets to come out of WWI. It takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1917, at Craiglockhart Hospital, a "loony bin" for shell-shocked British soldiers run by Cpt. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce). Rivers is a decent and dedicated psychiatrist who fights a ceaseless, exhausting battle to cure the mentally ravaged men brought into his care. The most difficult case on his roster, however, is actually the sanest man he's ever met, the poet turned war hero Lt. Siegfried Sassoon (Stuart Bunce), who has been sent to the mental hospital not because of an emotional trauma but because he has begun to publicly oppose the war. (Therefore he must be crazy, right?) Rivers is told by his superiors that "Sass" is not to be released until he recants his antiwar screed, so a flummoxed Rivers sets to work trying to convince the angry young hero that his duty lies in returning to the conflict he has come to abominate. As the two men engage in a clash of wills, Sassoon strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, fellow inmate and aspiring poet Lt. Wilfred Owen (James Wilby), and tries to convince the shy, sensitive young man, who takes refuge from his own trauma in his verses, to start writing about the war - a decision that led to some of the greatest poetry ever written. While this is going on, Rivers has his hands full with an even angrier patient, Lt. Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) who has lost both his voice and his memory following an incident in the trenches, and doesn't seem to want either of them back.

On the surface the film is ostensibly about Sassoon, but in reality he is merely a catalyst for events. Though Bunce gives quite a good performance in his rather limited screen-time, managing to convey inner conflict and outward anger, REGENERATION is really about the other characters, and all of them deliver. Miller's Billy Prior is a simmering mass of barely-contained fury, but it is not until the fury is partially released that we begin to understand how literally pathetic this young infantry officer is - self-doubting, grief-stricken, longing for fatherly guidance and feminine affection. Balancing this is Wilby's shy, almost naïve potrayal of Owens, who seems to represent everything good in humanity - gentleness, kindness, intelligence, appreciation for beauty. And then there is Rivers' cool, professional façade, disguising growing dismay and anguish - not merely over the war, but over his own role as a "mechanic" whose job is to repair malfunctioning pieces of war-machinery and return them to the slaughter. [I have seldom seen an actor deliver so subtle a performance; with every stammer, facial tick, strained smile and bead of upper-lip sweat Pryce manages to convey someone who is breaking apart both emotionally and physically yet unwilling to show it. It is the quintessential portrayal of the British "stiff upper lip" under full-scale assault.]

For a movie with very little depicted violence, "Regeneration" is almost incredibly brutal, and the images of that brutality stick to you like scars. A soldier calmly darns one of his socks while yards away, in a gray slime-filled wasteland, bullet-riddled comrades writhe in agony. Two men shovel what is left of a dead friend into a canvas sack, sobbing with grief and disgust. A party of British soldiers ties a disobedient 17 year-old recruit to a stake in no-man's-land knowing he will be shot by German snipers. But the worst brutality is in the hospital itself: Rivers, looking for ideas on how to cure his patients of mutism, attends a clinic that boasts a 100% success rate: the mute soldiers are strapped to chairs and tortured with electrical shock until their voices come back - as screams. Watching the film, one can well understand why Sassoon wanted to turn his pistol on the British parliament, who he viewed as nothing but a gang of avaricious war-criminals. This movie has been issued under several titles ("Behind the Lines" being one of the others) but it may as well have been called "Damage", "Wreckage", or "Consequences." It is, in the last analysis, about what happens to the soldiers after the shooting stops - or at any rate, while both sides are reloading. And just because a man isn't in the firing line doesn't make him any less of a casualty -- a grim fact which is as true in 2016 as it was in 1916, and is something to keep in mind with another Memorial Day just behind us.

Many movies deal with war, and the more romantically and stylishly the deal with its violence, the more popular they seem to be. REGENERATION does not approach violence romantically or stylishly; in fact it is far less interested in violence than it is in showing what violence does to the men who perpetrate and survive it. But it is not a self-righteous antiwar flick. Rivers' coolly logical pro-war arguments (even if he doesn't really believe them) and Sassoon's passionate but impractical antiwar screeds are both given respectful treatment, with the understanding, so rare nowadays, that sometimes, in an argument, both men can be right.

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
- Wilfred Owen

The Sun Also Rises; or, How to Enjoy Ernest Hemingway

"Everyone behaves badly -- given the chance." -- Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises

A frequent knock on Ernest Hemingway is that he was a terrific, even masterful writer of short stories, but a boring novelist. After reading about fifty of his short stories, I tested this theory by tackling A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and discovered I half-agreed with the assessment. Everything to do with the war itself Hemingway captured brilliantly and memorably. Everything to do with the romance between the main characters I found painfully shallow, dull and silly. Nevertheless I read the book on the first attempt. I can't say the same for THE SUN ALSO RISES. Over the course of about 30 years I must have made a half-dozen attempts to read this book through and always gave up out of sheer boredom after a half-dozen chapters. At the tender age of 42, however, I have finally succeeded in finishing it, and came to a small epiphany about Hemingway, to wit: the key to enjoying him as a novelist is to possess some degree of life experience, because not only will that help you grasp what his books are are really about, it will also give you the patience to endure some of his more tedious passages.

THE SUN ALSO RISES begins in Paris during the early 1920s. The protagonist and narrator, Jake Barnes, is a writer who works for a cable news service. During the First World War Jake suffered a wound which left him unable to have sex yet fully capable of sexual desire, and this places him permenently and uncomfortably in the friendship zone with his great love, Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful socialite who is just coming off an expensive divorce. Lady Ashley is rather a nasty piece of work: despite having already found herself a fiance of sorts, she frequently takes lovers, only to discard them as casually as cigarette butts, and then find new ones. This is the fate of Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish novelist on the cusp of fame who is naive about women and can't let go of the affair. Cohn's inability to do this creates increasing instability amongst the group of dissipate young exparriates with whom Jake runs: their unspoken code is to wallow in pleasure, take nothing seriously and above all, never admit to any genuine emotions. Jake must confront the damage Lady Ashely's selfish antics are doing to his own life and reputation while watching Cohn self-destruct. He must also come to grips with his own unresolved feelings for the woman he loves but can never have.

If this description sounds a little vague, that's because the book itself is vague. It has a simple plot, almost no character development, and a meandering structure which, I suppose, reflects its characters' somewhat meaningless lives. Much has been made of the quote at the beginning of the book, uttered by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway in conversation: "You are all a lost generation." She was referring, of course, to those who emerged from the terrible and utterly pointless slaughter of the First World War, alive but not necessarily physically or morally intact. They had no religious faith, no patriotism, no deep feelings or beliefs, not even much grasp of the actual nature of friendship, and THE SUN ALSO RISES seems to uses the group of Jake, Cohn, Lady Brett, Mike and Bill to serve as an analogy for that mentality. This is a book full of ennui, anomie and nihilism, masquerading as a good time.

The flaws of this novel and its strengths are very closely found up. Hemingway understood the expatriate crowd very well, being one of them in real life, and I'm guessing the book is quite accurate in depicting their facetious existentialism, their refusal -- at least publicly -- to take any aspect of life seriously. There are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle comments about the dark side of the human condition which make for great if tragic reading: like the Romans in Howard Fast's SPARTACUS, these are people so hollow they must contunually fill themselves with distraction -- with food, drink, sex, travel, and the simulacrum of excitement, just to feel even half-alive. Psychologically it's a fascinating picture of human dissipation, tinged with tragedy. It also paints a very interesting picture of Europe in the Jazz Age, something Hemingway did brilliantly and often subtly, by concentrating on small rather than large details -- how people amused themselves, what they talked about, what they spent their money on. On the other hand...well, who cares? The stakes of the novel are very low, because it's hard to give a damn about people this frivolous and blunted. Like the soap opera characters of my youth, those beautiful men and women whose tears were always trickling onto their money, the cast here is almost impossible sympathize with. Jake Barnes is a half-decent sort with some identifiable motives -- frustrated longing, jealousy, and a weak desire to do the right thing, whatever that is -- but Cohn is an awful, whiny snot, Lady Ashley is a psychopath, Bill and Mike are drunken, mean-spirited bullies, and to be honest, sometimes I wished someone would come along with a pistol and put the lot of them out of their misery. It's true that unlike, say, the characters in a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, these people actually have a reason to be jaded, but not having suffered through the mud, lice and poison gas of the Great War, I can't really relate.

Reading THE SUN ALSO RISES at 42, however, made a big difference to me. As a high-schooler or a twentysomething all I could see was the shallowness of the puddle that is this novel; I didn't grasp its potentially reflective aspects. If Hemingway was good at anything, it was making observations about life via his novels, and as we get older and become harder and more cynical, we often see resemblances between ourselves and those we despised when we were younger. Jake Barnes is not much of a protagonist, but in many ways I am not much of a man. On countless small points, and a few fairishly large ones, I have "sold out" -- which in practical terms never entails getting a paycheck, but rather precisely the opposite: a surrender of one's ideals to the dull, gray-faced gods of pragmatism. Somehow the ideals of or youth never survive contact with reality, and seen in that sense, THE SUN ALSO RISES is not simply entertainment. It is a warning. Exactly what you do with that warning is up to you.

Coming to Greif; or, The Power of Bad Ideas

When I was in law enforcement I had many occasions to wonder at the stupidity of human beings. This wonderment was later expanded to include human organizations, not excluding law enforcement itself. It struck me as grotesque, though undeniable, that in any bureacracy, there is a paralyzing inertia surrounding common sense, while stupidity -- manifesting in the form of bad decisions -- seems to possess irresistable momentum. When I began to work in the entertainment industry here in Los Angeles, I saw many examples of this in the form of inexplicably awful movies and television shows which had been produced at the expense of much better ideas. The cry of "How did this get made?" is not one uttered merely by audiences appalled by the stream of trash flowing out of Hollywood; it is heard over and over again by the people actually involved in producing that trash.

One can find hundreds of historical examples in any field which would prove the terrible, hypnotic fascination that bad ideas seem to hold for humans and human agencies. Everything from America's foreign policy to pug-fugly fashion trends like the man-bun owe their existence to this phenomenon, but there is one example in particular which not only exemplifies it, but offers insight as to how it may be avoided in our personal and professional lives.

In 1936, the Air Ministry of Nazi Germany issued an order for the development of a long range heavy bomber. Such bombers already existed in the air forces of Britain and America, and now Germany, which was rearming at a furious pace and developing a highly sophisticated and powerful air force under the cold and watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, wanted in on the fun. Competing companies bid on the project, and the contract was awarded to the Heinkel aeronatutics firm. Heinkel had no shortage of brains in its trust and perhaps the foremost of these, a man named Siegfried Günter, came up with a knife-edge design for what officially named the He 177 Grief (Griffin). The choice to name the big bomber after a mythological beast composed of several different animals was no accident, for Günter had combined a number of technological innovations in his design, including remote-control defensive armament and a surface evaporation cooling system. The conception was daring. Whether it was also good remained to be seen.

One of the key figures in the development of the Luftwaffe (air force) was General Ernst Udet. Udet was a remarkable man, a WWI fighter ace who'd spent the interwar years as a barnstormer and actor, and who'd been tapped by his old buddy Hermann Goering to take a key role in the development of the new German air force Hitler had created in 1935. Udet's vision for this air force was very different, however, than that of his opposite numbers in Britain and America, who believed in the power of heavy bombers to win wars. Instead, Udet was somewhat obsessed with smaller bombers -- much faster, much lighter aircraft with shorter range and smaller payloads, which, instead of attacking large fixed targets like factories, shipyards, and railways, would hover over the battlefield and serve as a kind of "flying artillery" for the army. Udet was particularly enamored by dive-bombers, and began to insist that every bomber Germany manufactured, regardless of size, possess the ability to dive so as to increase its accuracy. This was to apply even to the Griffin, which was so massive that there were already concerns that no existing set of engines in the German arsenal could actually get it off the ground. Indeed, the directive to make the Griffin capable of diving attacks required a strengthening of the airframe which increased the aircraft's weight still further, which in turn exacerbated the power problem. A vicious cycle had been initiated, and led to the second sign that the Greif would come to grief; trouble with the engines.

The Germans are rightly famous for their engines, whether mounted in aircraft, motorcycle or automobile, and they had some very good ones, made by Daimler-Benz, which would have been perfectly suited for the Griffin -- so long as the aircraft bombed from a horizontal position. Pressed into the dive-bombing role they would not work nearly as well, and burdened by Udet's directive, the designers offered a compromise. Instead of the conventional arrangement for a heavy bomber -- four engines driving four propellers -- they decided to use four engines to drive only two propellers. This was accomplished by welding the engines together and attaching them to a single drive shaft, which had the theoretical advantage of reducing the drag coeficient in a dive. It seemed fiendishly clever idea, but as with anything growing from a flawed concept, it turned out to be merely fiendish. The twinned engines were not only difficult to service mechanically, they had a nasty tendency to catch fire while in flight -- so much so that their unhappy crews soon dubbed the Griffin "the Luftwaffe Lighter," or, even more pointedly, "The Flying Coffin." And the vicious cycle got more vicious yet. The innovative surface evaporation system designed by Günter turned out to be insufficient to cool the troublesome engines, which necessitated the installation of conventional radiators which, in turn, added to the weight of the aircraft...which placed more strain on the engines, which caused yet more fires. But immolation while airborne was only one of the possible self-inflicted ends for such men. Because its structual issues had never been entirely resolved, rough handling of the Griffin could lead to disintegration of the aircraft while in flight even if the engines didn't catch fire. "Somehow the He 177 always conveyed an impression of fragility despite its size," noted an Allied test pilot who flew a captured model. Thus, the bomber which Udet had intended to be rugged enough to survive dives at a sixty-degree angle had to be flown even more gingerly than a conventional, level-flying bomber. The whole was considerably less than the sum of its parts.

By 1942 it was clear the Griffin had been an expensive failure. Nevertheless, the Luftwaffe's supreme commander, Hermann Goering, believed the project to be salvageable. He withdrew Udet's edict that the aircraft had to be capable of dive-bombing, and the engineers and designers at Heinkel dutifully reconfigured the entire aircraft and all of its systems. Substantial improvements were in fact made, if only slowly, but now something interesting else happened, something which demonstrates that there is perhaps no amount of elbow-grease which can salvage a bad idea, even after its worst elements have been surgically removed.

The point of a heavy bomber is, as earlier stated, to attack large fixed targets -- in other words, to cripple or destroy the enemy's capacity for war production. Failing that, it can be used as a weapon of terror, via the mass bombing of enemy cities. But after 1942, which was the year the Griffin went into mass production, Germany all but abandoned mass bombing by aeroplane, whether for military or psychological purposes. A shortage of trained aircrew, spare parts, and aviation gasoline, coupled with an increasing emphasis on fighter production -- to stop enemy air raids on Germany -- had led to a corresponding decrease in the use of bombers. And those bombers the Luftwaffe did tend to employ were the proven, reliable ones -- not the notoriously cranky Griffins. The truth was, after 1942 there was scarcely a need for Germany to manufacture any heavy bombers at all, much less ones which boasted a nickname like "Flying Coffin." Nevertheless, in that same year of 1942, some 166 Griffins rolled off production lines, and in 1943 that total rose to 415. In 1944, the last year in which figures are available, 565 more Griffins were manufactured. Not many of these monsters saw combat. Indeed, when Hitler briefly tried to resume massed bombing attacks against London in January of 1944, less than ten percent of the 600 aircraft ultimately employed were Griffins, and the operational performance of those that did participate was extremely poor -- on one mission alone, eight of fourteen bombers returned to base after suffering spontaneous engine fires. But the fact was that even if the Heinkel 177 had been a world-beater, by 1944 there simply wasn't enough fuel available to keep them in the air. In June of that year, all Griffin squadrons were withdrawn from Russia for lack of fuel, yet they continued to roll off the production lines. Albert Speer, Germany's minister of armaments and munitions, noted wryly in his memoirs that the insistence on manfacturing heavy bombers long after Germany had lost the ability to use them led to the grotquesque sight of freshly-manufactured aircraft being destroyed in the same factories which they were built, simply because there was no place to put them and no one to fly them.

All this demands a question: why, in a land of shortages like Germany, was so much time, money, manpower and material used on aircraft which served no purpose, which could not contribute to victory and which, in a sense, were actively contributing to defeat by robbing other, more successful weapons of those resources? Why wasn't the project simply terminated in 1942, when it became clear that the Greif caused nothing but grief? Why were almost 1,200 of these feckless beasts created, when a superb aircraft like the Heinkel 219, which had the potential to alter the air war in Germany's favor, reached a pathetic production total of only 294 units?

The answer as to why this is the case lies not within the complex tangle of the Nazi bureacracy but within human nature itself. For this example is one of thousands I might have given from any aspect of human affairs. Who among us hasn't doubled down on a bad bet, fought to stay in a dying relationship, slapped more coats of paint on an irredeemably ugly house, stuck it out an unsatisfying job, or poured still more money into a four-wheeled lemon when what we really needed to do was buy a new car? And there is no aspect of life, not even the largest-scale affairs, which are not subject to this strange tendency to stick with bad ideas to the bitter end. Why did John Travolta, at the height of his success in Hollywood, throw it all away by staking it all on an abysmal film like BATTLEFIELD EARTH? Why did the border state slave owners refuse Lincoln's offer of compensated emancipation in 1862, when it must have been obvious to the dullest among them that the only other alternative was an uncompensated abolition that would have -- and did -- ruin them financially? Why did a succession of American presidents dig us deeper and deeper into the morass of Vietnam when it was plain to anyone with a functioning brain that the underlying strategy for the war was faulty? Why did Mao cling to agricultural reforms that caused 20 million people to starve to death in a single year? Why did I once remain in an unhappy relationship for years when I knew not only that it had no future, but that its present was intolerable?

Logic would dictate that in life, successful behavior would be self-perpetuating while failure, on the other hand, would be repulsive. In practice however the exact opposite situation tends to obtain: success is seldom exploited, but failure is almost always reinforced, in a pattern of behavior we often refer to as "throwing good money after bad." We don't abandon ideas when we realize they won't work; in fact, it is at the precise moment we realize they aren't working that we begin to fully embrace them.

I have studied this problem from all angles and the nearest thing I can come to in regards to an answer is that human beings seem to have an innate need, a sort of genertic predisposition, to get returns on their investments. If a person spends X amount of sweat, blood, tears, time or money on a project -- any project -- they expect a proportionate reward, and if they do not get it, instead of calling the entire project a loss and chalking it up to a lesson learned, they redouble their efforts. The deeper the hole, the harder the digging. This applies everywhere, from romantic relationships to business investments to governmental policy to the practice of warfare. And what is truly grotesque is that by the same token, good ideas are seldom backed by anywhere near this much effort. As I noted above, the Heinkel firm produced a superlative twin-engined fighter aircraft, the He 219 "Eagle Owl," at the same time it was making the Griffin; yet in the year 1944, nearly three Griffins were produced for every Eagle Owl, and in the end the ratio of Griffins to Eagle Owls in the Luftwaffe was 4 -1. It seems that in a sense, success is its own worst enemy, for when a project is successful it requires no justification to continue, no extra resources or emergency meetings, no frantic burning of midnight oil. Human beings thrive on stress, and indeed -- as Sebastian Junger pointed out in his book TRIBE, though the moral has always been plain to anyone who has lived in demanding or dangerous physical conditions for any length of time -- that both depression and suicide rates plummet in times of crisis, because it is crisis that we find our métier. There is something about the possibility of disaster which spurs human beings to prodigies of effort, which is, of course, why our species has survived all of its trevails to date; but when possibility of disaster is replaced by the mere possibility of failure, of being shown up or embarrassed or proven wrong, the same instinct seems to prevail. Thus a good idea can starve while a bad one chokes on the fat of the land.

It seems to me that the only way to break this particular cycle is through twinned methods. The first is to train ourselves to recognize when an idea is fatally bad, which is not always as easy as it sounds, since most bad ideas come dressed as good ones. We can do this by understanding that a bad idea is full of dusty details, and the worse the idea, the worse the metaphorical dust. Thus, the more small problems we tackle, the less aware we tend to be of the larger problems, which are obscured by that dust. It is possible to appear to be making progress via a series of petty victories, when in fact those victories amount to nothing more than tightening bolts on a sinking ship. The crucial step lies in finding time to take the longer view. Extending my nautical metaphor, I would put it this way: tinkering with the boiler may be necessary, but unless someone is in the pilothouse, steering the ship, the possibility of reaching the destination is slim, while possibility of smashing into an iceberg is large. A fatally flawed idea is often easily spotted...provided someone is up there with spyglass in hand, looking for the damned thing.

The second, trickier yet, is to disengage from the bad idea once it is recognized as such, which is actually much harder than it sounds, since it entails overcoming both our ego, which refuses to recognize defeat, and our genetic instinct to draw a dividend from our labors. Because it is easier to recognize a bad idea than to abandon it, we must be constantly aware of our level of investment, so that we never reach the point where abandonment becomes emotionally impossible for us. The key word here is "aware." In our society awareness, and to some extent even consciousness, are increasingly difficult states of being to occupy. The flood of information and of noise which constantly batters our brains makes organization of thought extremely difficult. As I said above, the devil is really in the details -- rather, the devil is in making the details, the day-to-day, our only reality. Taking that long, spyglass-view of life requires very deliberate effort; acting on the knowledge the view gives us takes ten times as much. But it can be done.

The art of cutting losses is just that: an art, and like all arts it begins as a craft, a trade, something which requires study and practice and self-effacement. Elsewise, as with all those before us who were crushed by the power of bad ideas, we will ultimately come to Greif.

Note: in writing this blog I used a number of sources, including Captain D.H. Brown's WINGS OF THE LUFTWAFFE, Munson's GERMAN AIRCRAFT OF WW2, and John Killen's A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LUFTWAFFE, among others.