Russell M. Lawson's Blog
August 8, 2019
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: An American Character
Philip Marlowe, as presented in Raymond Chandler’s novels, especially The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely, presents a distinctly American character.
Marlow has a personal moral code. It does not seem to be based on anything—authority, scripture, law code—besides his own experiences with life. His life as been a struggle: with success, with insubordination, with putting himself in difficult situations. He knows he will not find the truth unless he takes risks. And the truth is not a grand all-encompassing truth (at first glance) but a truth covering a specific issue in time and place. It involves someone, a nobody, being hurt. Marlowe himself is a nobody (as people keep telling him), trying to help nobodies, like war veteran and alcoholic Terry Lennox, or the dying, forgotten old man, General Sternwood, or a sleazy blackmailer who is killed, Lindsay Marriot, or other low-life’s.
Life is a priority to Marlowe. If someone’s life is taken there has been a basic crime against Marlow’s sense of morality. If someone is trying to lie, such as the authorities, he wants to find the truth. Truth, like life, is a priority. Self-respect is also part of his moral code. He is not Christian, but he clearly believes in “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” He wants people to treat him honestly and with respect, as he does others. He believes in hard work. He does not believe in handouts. He believes we deserve what we get—what we put into life we get back accordingly. Hard work leads to results. Laziness gets no results.
But as he lives according to his personal moral code, he struggles. With boredom, loneliness, anonymity, insufficient income—and he deals with it by self-medication with booze and cigarettes.
Sometimes his honesty gets him in trouble. No dissimulation with him. He tells it like it is and has to deal with the consequences. He wants honesty back, no matter how painful it is to hear.
Is he a representative of the American character? He has no birthright. He fights for what he can get. He is no nonsense. He believes in truth. He believes in honesty. He believes in work. He believes in minding his own business. He believes in treating others as he wants to be treated. He has an inherent sense of equality respecting the poor, racial and ethnic groups, the law, and justice. Equality applies to all—the only exceptions are the degenerate and criminal, and they still deserve justice. Justice is hard to come by; one must work for it. Do not give up. Truth, honesty, self-respect, justice, are all often out of reach. But they are still there; they still exist.
This is the moral point of view as formed by the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath. It is the moral point of view of 1776, the new nation, the American as Crevecoeur defined it, as De Toqueville defined it, as Lincoln annunciated it, as Wilson expressed it in appealing to Americans, and to the world, to fight for and defend it.
Mobsters, dirty cops, politicians, the wealthy, druggies, ideologues, degenerates, any enemy, cannot get in the way of this Americanness. Marlowe fights for the America that he believes in.
Marlow has a personal moral code. It does not seem to be based on anything—authority, scripture, law code—besides his own experiences with life. His life as been a struggle: with success, with insubordination, with putting himself in difficult situations. He knows he will not find the truth unless he takes risks. And the truth is not a grand all-encompassing truth (at first glance) but a truth covering a specific issue in time and place. It involves someone, a nobody, being hurt. Marlowe himself is a nobody (as people keep telling him), trying to help nobodies, like war veteran and alcoholic Terry Lennox, or the dying, forgotten old man, General Sternwood, or a sleazy blackmailer who is killed, Lindsay Marriot, or other low-life’s.
Life is a priority to Marlowe. If someone’s life is taken there has been a basic crime against Marlow’s sense of morality. If someone is trying to lie, such as the authorities, he wants to find the truth. Truth, like life, is a priority. Self-respect is also part of his moral code. He is not Christian, but he clearly believes in “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” He wants people to treat him honestly and with respect, as he does others. He believes in hard work. He does not believe in handouts. He believes we deserve what we get—what we put into life we get back accordingly. Hard work leads to results. Laziness gets no results.
But as he lives according to his personal moral code, he struggles. With boredom, loneliness, anonymity, insufficient income—and he deals with it by self-medication with booze and cigarettes.
Sometimes his honesty gets him in trouble. No dissimulation with him. He tells it like it is and has to deal with the consequences. He wants honesty back, no matter how painful it is to hear.
Is he a representative of the American character? He has no birthright. He fights for what he can get. He is no nonsense. He believes in truth. He believes in honesty. He believes in work. He believes in minding his own business. He believes in treating others as he wants to be treated. He has an inherent sense of equality respecting the poor, racial and ethnic groups, the law, and justice. Equality applies to all—the only exceptions are the degenerate and criminal, and they still deserve justice. Justice is hard to come by; one must work for it. Do not give up. Truth, honesty, self-respect, justice, are all often out of reach. But they are still there; they still exist.
This is the moral point of view as formed by the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath. It is the moral point of view of 1776, the new nation, the American as Crevecoeur defined it, as De Toqueville defined it, as Lincoln annunciated it, as Wilson expressed it in appealing to Americans, and to the world, to fight for and defend it.
Mobsters, dirty cops, politicians, the wealthy, druggies, ideologues, degenerates, any enemy, cannot get in the way of this Americanness. Marlowe fights for the America that he believes in.
May 28, 2018
The Shawl
The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick, is a small book combining a brief short story and a short novella that are connected together by the central characters, an event in the past, and a shawl.
This book has many themes combined together into the two stories. The essence of the two stories is that a young mother, Rosa, her niece Stella, and Rosa’s infant daughter Magda are Poles at the beginning of World War II who have been captured by the invading Nazis and brought to a concentration camp. The author provides no details in terms of dates, places, and events. The three females are starving, and Magda is close to death. Rosa hides her by embracing her under a shawl. Magda sucks on the shawl and stays quiet. Stella, jealous of Magda, takes the shawl from her, which causes Magda to run out into the ground of the concentration camp, where she is killed.
The brief story is of good v. evil, of moral choice, of the contrast of nature and humans, of the rudiments of life and death, of the contrast of body and mind.
Put in a situation of evil, of impending death, a person might choose self-preservation or altruism toward another. Stella chose self-preservation. Rosa chose altruism until the moment when Magda died, then she chose self-preservation.
We read about life and death hovering on the edge of time: one totters on the edge, then eventually goes over the edge. Stella, Rosa, and Magda are on the edge; Magda goes over.
Their bodies were disintegrating but their minds were alive: Magda was wide-eyed; Rosa heard the voices in the fence. “She felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air.” Like the realm of being, between soul and body.
The second, longer part of the book takes place thirty years later in America, specifically Miami. Rosa has lived in New York but abruptly destroyed her business and fled to Miami, where she lived in squalor and despair. She is haunted by the events of the past, and the loss of Magda.
It is a lost past and an empty present: a golden memory competing with a dismal present; as one ages a futile attempt to recapture youth, the body, the beauty, the potential of youth.
The story evokes images of the Madonna and Child: Magda the blessed babe, Rosa the Madonna; the child was sacrificed, died, but lives again, resurrected in Rosa’s crazed mind as a great university philosopher.
Rosa cannot escape from the evil that happened to Magda, and the greater evil that affected Poles in 1939 of their catastrophic destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets. Rosa was from the Polish upper class of Warsaw. Her family were Poles before they were Jews. When they lost their Polishness they became like everyone else, like other Jews.
Overall, this book is about time. It is about one moment in time, when, where, why is never described, but it burns itself into Rosa’s memory (“a blazing flying current, a terrible beak of light bleeding out a kind of cuneiform on the underside of her brain”), and she spends the rest of her life recalling it. This moment of time haunts her, from it she conjures up ghosts, memories that seem as real as the present, indeed are more significant than the present, for the past is more real to her, especially the one grand moment, not of her daughter’s death, but her daughter’s birth. In that moment it was like the Madonna and Christ child. It was an incarnation of a person, an idea, that became life. Magda’s death has seared her life, and her birth, upon Rosa’s brain as the most important event, the most significant event, that she knows of.
When this birth happened, life was good, she was betrothed, her Polish family living lives of harmony, sophistication, culture—all of which were subsequently rubbed out, or stolen, by the criminal invaders of Poland.
This book has many themes combined together into the two stories. The essence of the two stories is that a young mother, Rosa, her niece Stella, and Rosa’s infant daughter Magda are Poles at the beginning of World War II who have been captured by the invading Nazis and brought to a concentration camp. The author provides no details in terms of dates, places, and events. The three females are starving, and Magda is close to death. Rosa hides her by embracing her under a shawl. Magda sucks on the shawl and stays quiet. Stella, jealous of Magda, takes the shawl from her, which causes Magda to run out into the ground of the concentration camp, where she is killed.
The brief story is of good v. evil, of moral choice, of the contrast of nature and humans, of the rudiments of life and death, of the contrast of body and mind.
Put in a situation of evil, of impending death, a person might choose self-preservation or altruism toward another. Stella chose self-preservation. Rosa chose altruism until the moment when Magda died, then she chose self-preservation.
We read about life and death hovering on the edge of time: one totters on the edge, then eventually goes over the edge. Stella, Rosa, and Magda are on the edge; Magda goes over.
Their bodies were disintegrating but their minds were alive: Magda was wide-eyed; Rosa heard the voices in the fence. “She felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air.” Like the realm of being, between soul and body.
The second, longer part of the book takes place thirty years later in America, specifically Miami. Rosa has lived in New York but abruptly destroyed her business and fled to Miami, where she lived in squalor and despair. She is haunted by the events of the past, and the loss of Magda.
It is a lost past and an empty present: a golden memory competing with a dismal present; as one ages a futile attempt to recapture youth, the body, the beauty, the potential of youth.
The story evokes images of the Madonna and Child: Magda the blessed babe, Rosa the Madonna; the child was sacrificed, died, but lives again, resurrected in Rosa’s crazed mind as a great university philosopher.
Rosa cannot escape from the evil that happened to Magda, and the greater evil that affected Poles in 1939 of their catastrophic destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets. Rosa was from the Polish upper class of Warsaw. Her family were Poles before they were Jews. When they lost their Polishness they became like everyone else, like other Jews.
Overall, this book is about time. It is about one moment in time, when, where, why is never described, but it burns itself into Rosa’s memory (“a blazing flying current, a terrible beak of light bleeding out a kind of cuneiform on the underside of her brain”), and she spends the rest of her life recalling it. This moment of time haunts her, from it she conjures up ghosts, memories that seem as real as the present, indeed are more significant than the present, for the past is more real to her, especially the one grand moment, not of her daughter’s death, but her daughter’s birth. In that moment it was like the Madonna and Christ child. It was an incarnation of a person, an idea, that became life. Magda’s death has seared her life, and her birth, upon Rosa’s brain as the most important event, the most significant event, that she knows of.
When this birth happened, life was good, she was betrothed, her Polish family living lives of harmony, sophistication, culture—all of which were subsequently rubbed out, or stolen, by the criminal invaders of Poland.
June 9, 2016
Uncle Tom
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is superb, unlike what I expected; the book is not just a polemical treatise against slavery, but a moving, dramatic tale that showed how slavery enslaved everyone, Whites as well as Blacks—and indeed, the memory, and continuing effects of slavery on American culture, still entangles everyone regardless of race or color.
Over time in America, beginning a few decades after the publication of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," a pejorative term emerged, Uncle Tom, for the Black who kowtowed to Whites, who like the stereotypical Sambo would do whatever was necessary to fit into to the dominant White culture.
The Uncle Tom stereotype, however, seems in no way to be based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book.
Uncle Tom in the book is anything but a cowering, subservient Black dedicated to ingratiating himself into White culture. Indeed, I find his character to be quite the opposite.
Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a heroic figure, a person whom I wish I could be like, a person who will do right no matter what the cost, who is good in all ways, who has not allowed an evil institution to drive away the divine spark of goodness and righteousness within him.
Often over the years, slavery has been interpreted by scholars as a total institution that would, like Nazi concentration camps, attempt to make the slave a childlike blithering idiot whose only goal was to please his/her master.
Subsequent scholarship has shown this was far from the case, as Harriet Beecher Stowe knew, for her Uncle Tom has been able to rise above the total institution of slavery to keep his dignity and humanity.
It would be nice if there was a new stereotype of Uncle Tom, to represent self-sacrifice, for doing what is good and right, for Christian virtues, for love of fellow humans.
Uncle Tom was able to see that all humans are children of God, that all lives matter.
Over time in America, beginning a few decades after the publication of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," a pejorative term emerged, Uncle Tom, for the Black who kowtowed to Whites, who like the stereotypical Sambo would do whatever was necessary to fit into to the dominant White culture.
The Uncle Tom stereotype, however, seems in no way to be based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book.
Uncle Tom in the book is anything but a cowering, subservient Black dedicated to ingratiating himself into White culture. Indeed, I find his character to be quite the opposite.
Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a heroic figure, a person whom I wish I could be like, a person who will do right no matter what the cost, who is good in all ways, who has not allowed an evil institution to drive away the divine spark of goodness and righteousness within him.
Often over the years, slavery has been interpreted by scholars as a total institution that would, like Nazi concentration camps, attempt to make the slave a childlike blithering idiot whose only goal was to please his/her master.
Subsequent scholarship has shown this was far from the case, as Harriet Beecher Stowe knew, for her Uncle Tom has been able to rise above the total institution of slavery to keep his dignity and humanity.
It would be nice if there was a new stereotype of Uncle Tom, to represent self-sacrifice, for doing what is good and right, for Christian virtues, for love of fellow humans.
Uncle Tom was able to see that all humans are children of God, that all lives matter.
April 8, 2015
Rescuing the Past with Narrative History
Narrative History is...
* Factual (not imaginary) account of real people and real places in the past
* Account of sequence of events over time restricted to actual sources or implied events
* Use of historical imagination to recreate a particular episode (if consistent with sources)
* Quotes from writings as a replacement for dialogue
* Plot (theme, point of view) not manufactured or imagined but echoing what really happened
* Recreation of scenes based on actual experience (visiting the places)
* Events and sources guide the imagination and storytelling (not vice-versa)
* Honesty the key (honest use of sources, honest presentation of past, honest evocation of human experience)
How to prepare to write a narrative history...
* Interest: the person/story must intrigue you; you must wish to relive it, recreate it
* Research: sources to help you relive and recreate the past must exist
* Understanding human nature: supplements the sources so that you can make sense of a past time and place, past people
* Imagination: the ability to imagine the past, imagine what happened, imagine the people, then conform the imagination to the sources, what “really” happened
* Empathy: as you research and imagine, visit places, you must feel, sense the past, empathize with those who once lived
How to engage in a personal dialogue with the past...
* Mixture of subjective (feeling based on imagination) with objective (reason based on sources)
* Getting to know the person: their habits, feelings, thoughts, interests, aims, emotions, accomplishments
* Dealing honestly with the past: honest appraisal of person by not imposing your point of view, your preconceived notions, on the past, which is anachronistic
* Empathizing with the Past: to feel the past, you must feel the present. To understand the life of a past person, you must understand your own life.
* Your life helps you write the story of the past: your feelings help you understand past feelings; your thoughts help you understand past thoughts; your experiences help you understand past experiences.
* Narrative history/biography is the story of two lives, one life explicitly told (the past person) and one life implicitly told (your life)
* Factual (not imaginary) account of real people and real places in the past
* Account of sequence of events over time restricted to actual sources or implied events
* Use of historical imagination to recreate a particular episode (if consistent with sources)
* Quotes from writings as a replacement for dialogue
* Plot (theme, point of view) not manufactured or imagined but echoing what really happened
* Recreation of scenes based on actual experience (visiting the places)
* Events and sources guide the imagination and storytelling (not vice-versa)
* Honesty the key (honest use of sources, honest presentation of past, honest evocation of human experience)
How to prepare to write a narrative history...
* Interest: the person/story must intrigue you; you must wish to relive it, recreate it
* Research: sources to help you relive and recreate the past must exist
* Understanding human nature: supplements the sources so that you can make sense of a past time and place, past people
* Imagination: the ability to imagine the past, imagine what happened, imagine the people, then conform the imagination to the sources, what “really” happened
* Empathy: as you research and imagine, visit places, you must feel, sense the past, empathize with those who once lived
How to engage in a personal dialogue with the past...
* Mixture of subjective (feeling based on imagination) with objective (reason based on sources)
* Getting to know the person: their habits, feelings, thoughts, interests, aims, emotions, accomplishments
* Dealing honestly with the past: honest appraisal of person by not imposing your point of view, your preconceived notions, on the past, which is anachronistic
* Empathizing with the Past: to feel the past, you must feel the present. To understand the life of a past person, you must understand your own life.
* Your life helps you write the story of the past: your feelings help you understand past feelings; your thoughts help you understand past thoughts; your experiences help you understand past experiences.
* Narrative history/biography is the story of two lives, one life explicitly told (the past person) and one life implicitly told (your life)
March 26, 2015
The Sea Mark
See the interview about my new book, The Sea Mark, at http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/s...The Sea Mark: Captain John Smith's Voyage to New England
March 25, 2015
Talking about "Bang the Drum Slowly"
I will be talking about "Bang the Drum Slowly" by Mark Harris Thursday Oct 26 at the "Let's Talk About it Oklahoma" session at Connor's State in Muskogee.
"Bang the Drum Slowly" is an offbeat, book-within-a-book about dying: the duration of life; the anticipation of death; the impact that death has upon life, self, and others; and how a set period of time, in this case a baseball season, provides a metaphor for the entire experience of life.
"Bang the Drum Slowly" is an offbeat, book-within-a-book about dying: the duration of life; the anticipation of death; the impact that death has upon life, self, and others; and how a set period of time, in this case a baseball season, provides a metaphor for the entire experience of life.
February 2, 2013
new review of book
The American Historical Review reviewed my 2011 book, Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap, and the American Revolution. It was an ok review. The reviewer pointed out that the book recreates the lives and thoughts of these two men. But the reviewer believed it was not sufficiently scholarly, as I did not discuss current books by scholars and integrate my book into scholarly literature. My question is: does a book have to conform to current scholarship and play the academic game to be a good read?Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap and the American Revolution
