RussellinVT’s Comments (group member since Apr 11, 2024)

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Robert wrote:
"For God and King Charles
Pym and such Carles
To the Devil Who Taught Them
Their Treasonous Parles."

Not one on I knew! Parles was apparently in regular use back then.

AB – Yes, quite right, excellent organization by the NSDP.

Scarlet – Very interesting, thanks. You’d never think Polish speakers would opt so heavily for Prussia/Germany, which confirms the reality of the religious divide.

AB - That article by Timothy Tilton on The Social Origins of Nazism is an excellent piece of work. It’s amazing what you can find on the internet. It puts beyond doubt that the main Nazi voting bloc comprised the rural areas that were northern and Protestant. But, as he acknowledges, exactly why they “stampeded” to the NSDP is still a difficult question, especially as the economic crisis on its own afflicted all parts of society, not just the farming communities. Out of the myriad possible explanations, the crux of it seems to be this:

As the 1920s unfolded, the rural people came to see the Weimar system as the tool of the Social Democrats who used it to harass religious education, channel benefits to urban workers rather than farmers, and permit what they regarded as decadent cultural phenomena.

AB76 wrote: "Michael Frayn was a writer i heard about but never read, until i pitched into his ouevre with The Russian Interpreter which i loved..."

You make his novels sound very tempting. I only know his plays. Like a million other people I saw and enjoyed Noises Off. I expect you know the equally famous Copenhagen, since controversial for lending credence to the idea that Heisenberg actively sabotaged German progress towards atomic weapons. I’m thinking of re-reading it because as it happens I’m well into a book called The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton (a professor at Johns Hopkins) which is supposed to be about a convergence of Heisenberg, Borges and Kant on a particular view of reality but so far is almost entirely about how quantum physics developed, and thus, while readable, not that easy to retain! The very interesting last chapter, which I read first, covers the same ground as Copenhagen, plus Heisenberg’s post-war interrogation.

AB76 wrote: "Clarendons history of the war was something i looked foward to but found it far less enthralling than Macauleys volumes on the same period and after..."

Some of the older histories can be just too long. Macaulay is brilliant but for me even he got too much into tedious detail in the fourth volume on the politics of religion in the 1690s.

Similarly I ground to a halt in volume four of Froude’s Reign of Elizabeth where, after several graphic set-pieces (e.g. Darnley’s murder-by-explosion) he loses the reader in an endless account of the Anglo-Spanish diplomatic correspondence.

Clarendon unabridged would I think be a test, and I was happy to read just the wonderful portraits of the major actors helpfully gathered in the Selections put out by OUP (still not short, at nearly 500 pages).

David Hume’s History of England is another I haven’t finished, getting no further than the unholy mess of competing warlords in the 7th-8th century. Perhaps I should give him another try in a much later volume - the Civil War.

I finally got to the end of Reprobates by John Stubbs, an overlong study of second-order cavalier writers – Thomas Carew, John Suckling, William Davenant. I did come away with a better idea of the temper of the times, from a largely royalist perspective, than I remember getting from CV Wedgwood’s histories, which are necessarily more taken up with leaders and campaigns and parliamentary battles. Along the way there were quite extended portraits of better-known figures – Jonson, Donne, Milton, Clarendon, Aubrey and numerous others. But he could have done it all in half the space.

Next up in this context is Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade by Alice Hunt, which has been well reviewed.

Robert wrote: "On the Greek and Roman world: ..."

Thanks for that guidance, Robert. I would never have thought of The Golden Ass. Suetonius I have here and will get to, with your prompt. I loved the two Robert Graves Claudius books years ago - perhaps it's time for a re-read. The Yourcenar I read not so long ago - quietly impressive, I thought.

AB76 wrote: "hi russ, i will re add the link..."

OK, tks, got it now and will read it.

AB - I was coming back to read that piece on voting in Schleswig-Holstein, and it has disappeared. Could you re-post it (unless there was a reason for deleting it).

Gpfr wrote: "Like AB76, I've been in Egypt, but during WWII, with Olivia Manning's The Levant Trilogy. After re-reading The Balkan Trilogy, I wanted to re-read this next...."

I've meant for ages to get into the Balkan trilogy. I didn't realize that the Egypt scenes in The Fortunes of War TV adaptation belong to a second trilogy. I remember the look and feel of the events in Rumania, and the disharmony between Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh (in real life as well, it seems), but more vivid in my recollection are the later scenes, with a very young Rupert Graves in the desert.

AB76 wrote: "i'm entering a curious phase of my reading life,especially of classic novels where the stinkers seem to have vanished, this could be short lived or it could be a sign of a greater reading maturity,..."

You have a good grip on your excellent/stinker ratio. Without putting a figure on it, I think I’ve done quite well in avoiding absolute clunkers, but after nearly 20 years of catching up on all the classics I failed to read before, I am beginning to sense that I am close to running through the greatest examples of British and European fiction. (Some gaps remain, e.g. Conrad.)

So as I explore further afield and I tackle less reliable authors, my strike rate may well get worse. One vast area I have no more than skimmed is the classic literature of the Greek and Roman world, so that may be where I go next.

On the other hand, it may be high-end popular fiction! I’m looking forward to the new trilogy from Pierre Lemaitre when it is complete. His previous trilogy was on the period between the wars out of which he creates a vivid panorama, if occasionally over-dramatised. This one is on the post-war trente glorieuses.

I think what I look for has remained fairly steady. Certainly like you I appreciate a good writing style, and have little patience with those modern authors who treat it as a secondary value, or who (as you say) want to demonstrate their cleverness (step forward China Miéville). I also remain faithful – can’t help it – to a good love story of any age.

Cycles I do often take my time over. After a break of a year or more I am starting on the very last of the Rougon-Macquart sequence, Le Docteur Pascal. Zola dedicates it to his late mother and to his dear wife, and calls it “le résumé et la conclusion de toute mon œuvre.” Even though it is generally accounted one of the lesser works, I already feel myself under the pleasurable spell of a great master.

I recently picked up a period piece from 1948 called Love among the Ruins by Angela Thirkell, of whom I knew nothing but the name. It turned out to be one of thirty-odd novels she set in “Barsetshire”. The Wikipedia entry says she borrowed frequently from other novels without attribution.

This example of her work is long, unhurried, competently written, and quite entertaining in the comedy-of-manners mode. It gives a good picture of life in the country in the straitened peacetime of the 1940s. It’s probably quite realistic in having all the county types sound off about being regimented by the Labour Government.

There are some Trollopian echoes, but nothing particular in the plot lines. It’s more a case of names carried forward a couple of generations (Grantly, Thorne, de Courcy, etc). It’s not just Trollope either. There are brief appearances from a Mr Carton and a Mr Wickham.

The gentry families, one of the them titled, are mostly impoverished. They live in the servants’ quarters, and the main house, after being requisitioned in the war, now becomes a prep school. They visit each other on Sunday afternoons, coming impromptu round the back, and taking tea on the terrace. The mothers look out for good marriages.

The lower classes are present in supporting roles – cook, gardener, cowman, pigman, garage mechanic (no actual farm labourer or factory hand is ever in sight) – and in this book they often have poor morals. One woman has a succession of children with no known father. She names a son Poyntz, which strikes everyone as an improbable choice. She says it came to her because she had no points left in her ration book.

The cast list reaches fifty or sixty. Not so much three or four or families in a village, more like ten or twelve. At a certain stage you give up on who’s related to whom.

Interestingly, this was a time when it was still possible for an author to write, “He appears to like little boys” without it carrying the faintest shade of impropriety. Nowadays it means only one thing.

I had thought the title must be the origin of the phrase, and then discovered that – true to form - she got it from a short poem by Robert Browning: mysterious lover in a mysterious ancient landscape - the Roman Campagna? It does have some application to the story, except that the love element here is all rather restrained, with just a single moment of dramatic tension, about half way through. It hardly needs saying that the man who has been damaged in love, years before, is a Captain in the Navy.

I imagine this was the sort of book that filled the shelves of a Boots lending library. Today it’s probably unpublishable, and though I quite enjoyed it, one will be enough for me.

AB76 wrote: "For Russell, re Junger

a diary entry i read last night includes reference to "burning and disposal of notes and papers" suggesting self censorship..."

Yes, as we thought. But then... if all the alternative names could fool you, what chance would the Gestapo have?!

scarletnoir wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "One thing I think we can be sure of is that it won't be a satire in the style of Jonathan Coe. The times seem too serious for that."

I'd say that Coe's books are serious, despite their humourous content. ..."

I’d be impressed if someone can do it. To me it feels as though we’re beyond satire.

AB76 wrote: "...it will be a very tricky novel to write,we havent had many covid era novels yet either but with Trump i would imagine most will hide their heads in the sand and ignore it..."

My thought too. One thing I think we can be sure of is that it won't be a satire in the style of Jonathan Coe. The times seem too serious for that.

Thanks for the new thread, GP.

I've been wondering how long it will be before we have a novel set in today’s Trump world. In the public sphere there is almost too much to digest, and too little that is reliably steady, the changes are so swift. Perhaps authors will disengage and retreat into private situations, or prefer the distant future and the distant past.

I finished Emma by Alexander McCall Smith. As a stand-alone modern novel, it would be perfectly acceptable – 360 pages of amiable prose and light social observation. As a re-telling, you wonder what the point is. It borrows all the names, characters, situations and plot, but apart from the one passage about James Weston no one should read it expecting any illumination of the great original. You also have to imagine a world in which Emma calls her father “Pops”.

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "The War Journals of Ernst Junger( 1941-45) are just superb ..."

He is very careful with names throughout...

Really interesting, AB, thanks. What we read is so often from the perspective of the French (or the British or the Americans in France), a thoughtful German view not so much.

I think I'll have to get it from the library. It's available to buy, but it's not cheap. It looks as though it never came out in paperback.

AB76 wrote: "The War Journals of Ernst Junger( 1941-45) are just superb, i see them as a Tuetonic version of Sartre's diary of the phoney war..."

Very interesting, AB. Did you get any sense that he was being guarded with his comments? There must have been some danger in keeping extensive journals expressing criticism of the German leadership, even if it was more implied than overt. Regardless, it’s clearly one for the TBR list. In a similar way, I’ve been meaning for ages to read The Nemesis of Power by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, about the failure/inability of the Army generals to exert any control or even restraint over the Nazis once they were in power. A friend in college recommended it decades ago.

scarletnoir wrote: "...I haven't read Steiner (since I much prefer FD to Tolstoy, I wasn't tempted though maybe that was a mistake). I did read Dostoevsky by André Gide, though - a long time ago - and found it very interesting, though I felt it told me as much about Gide as it did about FD. Certainly, he put his own spin on things."

The Steiner is good value, not academic and careful but big and sweeping, though it can be quite a demanding read as it does assume familiarity with all the texts. He sees T and D as part of a panorama, picking up influences and parallels across a huge range of classic authors.

I remember enjoying the Gide too, despite the style being far less punchy. He is one who had very little to say on Stavrogin.