Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

     “GENERAL LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT JR – Quite a talent for fighting” by Glyn Harper (Exisle Publishing, NZ$44.99)

 

Glyn Harper is one of New Zealand’s most skilled historians dealing with war and military matters. He has written 20 books for adults as well as books for children. On this blog you will find reviews of some of his books -  Images of War presented as “New Zealand and the First World War in Photographs”, Dark Journey, presented as  “Passchendaele, the Somme and the New Zealand experience of the Western Front” and The Battle for North Africa  his very even-handed account of the battles of El Alamein. All these are books that show a strong interest in New Zealand’s part in both the First and Second World Wars. But “General Lucian K. Truscott” is something quite different. This is the biography of an American general who might be quite unknown to most New Zealanders. Think of American generals in the Second World War, and most [older] New Zealanders would easily think of Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, perhaps Omar Bradley and perhaps Mark Clark. But Truscott? Who has heard of him? In his acknowledgments, Harper says that his book is one of a series called Great Combat Commanders, created to make known “lesser-known battlefield commanders” and to analyse their military leadership and success on the battle field.  

Glyn Harper takes us through all the development of Truscott’s soldiering. Truscott was a Texan born in 1895. He was unable to go to West Point, but towards the end of the First World War – in which he had not seen any fighting - he became a lieutenant and for a short time he was sent to a station in Hawaii. He learned to play polo. At that time, cavalry was still regarded as necessary for an army. But after the war was over, congress decided to limit the size of the army and bit by bit cavalry became less important. Mechanised weapons – especially tanks –  took over from horses. Truscott married. He and his wife had three children, who later were to see their father as fair but a little authoritarian  - in other words, like most fathers in the 1920s. By the 1920s Truscott had risen to the rank of Captain. In the Depression, in 1932, there was the Bonus Army that took over much of Washington D.C. The army was called to drive the protestors out. Truscott was one of the horsemen who harassed and dispersed the protestors – not one of America’s greatest moments. He did well at Command and General Staff School, became a Major and, from 1936 to 1940, an instructor. By 1940 he was Lieutenant-Colonel and became part of the Armoured Regiment [i.e. what now took the place of horses]. Knowing that war would come to America, Eisenhower organised war games in which Truscott was prominent.

Shortly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, America declared war against Japan and the Axis. Truscott was made full Colonel and was called to Washington D.C. Surprisingly, General George Marshall sent him to learn how British commandoes used amphibious raids on the coasts of Europe and elsewhere. Officially, Truscott worked with Lord Louis Mountbatten, whom he did not like [so who would?]. He became Brigadier-General and set up the group called the Rangers. Truscott was now transferred to General George Patton. Britain attempted to attack and take the French harbour at Dieppe. The outcome was a disaster and complete failure [leaving many dead Canadians]. Even so, Truscott saw the raid as “an essential though costly lesson in modern warfare”. More correctly Glyn Harper says “It presented incontrovertible proof how difficult amphibious operations were and the Allies were nowhere ready to invade France”.

Operation Torch was America’s invasion of the Western part of Northern Africa, relieving the British and Commonwealth forces who had fought against Rommel in the more Eastern part of Northern Africa. The Americans took over many beaches, took over Vichy possessions, turning them over to non-Vichy French [more or less], and moved on. But taking the beaches meant much loss of life and, as Truscott now knew, they learned that in amphibious raids they were still inexperienced. Truscott was promoted to Major General, Commander of the 3^rd Infantry and now under General Patton. Believing that the infantry marched at too slow a pace, he ordered the infantry to march far more quickly.

Next major event was the invasion of Sicily by American, British, Commonwealth, Polish and other forces in what was called Operation Husk. There was much training, and much information of the topography of Sicily, gained by air-force photos. Patton’s army was to march up the west side of Sicily and capture the city of Palermo, while Montgomery’s armies would march up the east side of Sicily to Messina, the town from which the Allied armies would be able to invade Italy’s mainland.  But, for the sake of his own prestige, Patton made his troops rush, recklessly, from Palermo to Messina, arriving a few moments before Montgomery arrived. As Patton’s subordinate, Truscott could not openly criticise Patton’s behaviour but in private he knew that Patton had behaved badly and unnecessarily put his troops in peril. General Omar Bradley, Patton’s superior, also disapproved of what Patton had done. Bradley said “For the sake of a favourable headline, Patton was placing the lives of many man in jeopardy”. Even so, Truscott still admired Patton. 

 

But Truscott’s greatest difficulty was with another General, Mark Clark. Now on the Italian mainland, Clark suggested that they could out-flank German forces. It took many difficulties to get men and tanks cross the Volturno river, especially because it was winter and Clark insisted on taking one of the many mountains that blocked the way. Then came “Operation Shingle” the Anzio disaster where there was an  amphibious landing but the beachhead went only part of the way intended. For months the Anzio landing was pinned down by German fire and German Panzers. Mark Clark left Truscott to take over the beachhead.  Glyn Harper calls this Truscott’s finest hour. Truscott managed to get an anti-aircraft system, look after the solders and raise their morale and gradually they pushed further and further into the original target. And all the while Truscott was ill and had laryngitis, making his voice croaky.

British and American forces adjusted to “Operation Diadem”, which meant attacking German forces on two sides. But Mark Clark ignored part of the plan and took his troops into Rome partly, like Patton, for his own prestige and showing that he had been the first to “liberate” Rome. Again, though Truscott disapproved of what Clark had done, he still got along with him. By 1944, Operation Overlord was in progress, pushing Germans out of northern France [and Belgium and the Netherlands]. And at the same time, Operation  Dragoon, largely dominated by American forces, was pushing its way through Southern France and much helped by the [anti-Vichy] French army. Truscott and his Division moved up the Rhone Valley.  But he was promoted and sent back to the United States to organise the 15^th Army… after some time he was picked to return to Italy and he commanded the Fifteenth Army facing the last German aggression, holding the Gothic Line in what proved to be in freezing weather. With Mark Clark leading, and with Truscott heading the Fifteenth Army, they pushed the German armies further and further into the northern-most Italian mountains until they surrendered. Six days later, all German forces surrendered. By this stage, at last, Mark Clark admitted that Truscott was a great general, reliable, being able to get on well with the troops and above all understanding what would be the best ways of fighting to the best purpose. Clark described Truscott as having “a thorough knowledge and quick grasp of military problems, particularly in combat and makes sound and rapid decisions…. A quiet but forceful personality, coupled with obvious personal courage and determination, which inspires confidence and loyalty of all personnel associated with him.”

When the war was over, although Patton had done well and made headlines, he became very indiscreet in what he said to the press – especially about the Soviet Union. So Eisenhower told General George Marshall to send Patton back to America… but Patton died in a car crash . Truscott took over the Third Army that Patton had commanded. With this army, Truscott became a sort of military governor in Bavaria and part of Czechoslovakia, sorting out things in post-Nazism. He found that, post war, many of his soldiers became “an undisciplined mob” as they wanted to go home. Truscott also had the task of signing off death warrants for Nazis who had committed atrocities. Sometimes Truscott had misgivings about this, wondering how many Allies also had not played according to the Geneva Convention.

As a matter of course, Truscott had to deal with an army that was still segregated. Only in 1948 did Harry Truman de-segregate the U.S. Forces. In personal matters Truscott had a brief affair with the novelist, playwright and journalist Clare Boothe Luce, unbeknown to his wife in America. Truscott returned to America when the war and his work in Bavaria were over, and for a few years he worked for the C. I. A. Then he retired to Virginia, died in 1965, and was buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington.

How can he be rated as a “great combat commander”? His greatest virtues were keeping a steady head, knowing how far he could push the troops he led without exhausting them, being able to deal with his superiors, and not seeking personal glory – unlike Patton and Clark. As this book says, Truscott had “quite a talent for fighting”. In that respect he was brave;  but, in one oration he gave, he warned soldiers that war was not glory and “he would not speak of the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties”. A level head indeed.

 

 

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

     “FREE FALL” by William Golding (First published in 1959)

William Golding’s first novel Lord of the Flies told us that there is inevitable evil in the human race even if there are some saintly and reasonable people around. His second novel The Inheritors tried to explain how our evil came from our distant ancestors, homo sapiens sapiens. His third novel Pincher Martin in effect has an evil man finally having to admit the evil he has done [wherein the evil man finally faces God… even if the author wasn’t sure whether God existed or not]. But when we come to Free Fall, we have a long confession or self-examination, told throughout in the first person. In many ways this is a very complex novel and one that has baffled many readers. Not only is there much theorising by the narrator Samuel Mountjoy [often called Sammy or Sam], but the novel is not presented in sequence. We go through childhood and early adolescence; then skip to young adulthood; then go through full manhood; then back to young adulthood… and all the while Samuel Mountjoy theorises, justifies himself, and perhaps [but only perhaps] finally understands who or what he has become.

The only way I can navigate through this novel is by looking at it in four blocks.

First – Chapters One, Two and Three, dealing with childhood. Sammy is probably a bastard and it is suggested that his mother is a prostitute. He lives in a slum, not in London but in what is called the “Garden of England” – in other words, a rural area where there are both middle-class people and slum-dwellers. Little Sammy does not fully understand  how adults act and as a very little boy he is influenced by a girl, a little bit older than him, called Evie. She is clever. She spins him stories that he fully believes, even if the reader understands that these are made up. Golding catches exactly the moment when young children make up tales and/or believe them. They both go to an infants’ school, which is presented to us in all its rawness.         A little bit older, Sam goes to a junior  school and makes friends with Johnny Spragg, a bit of a tearabout who is obsessed with aeroplanes and leads young Sam into escapades around the nearby air field, sometimes getting into trouble as when they spy on peoples’ homes. This is open mischief. Quite different is a boy called Philip Arnold who is able to manipulate other boys, getting them into trouble without himself ever being caught. The destructive schoolboys have shades of Lord of the Flies. Philp Arnold, mocking the religion they are taught, gets Sammy to go into the church and piss in the chalice. Sammy is caught in the act. He is dragged off by the verger… and he now has ear-ache, a common affliction in the 1920’s…. He is put in a hospital ward. The deacon forgives him for his misbehaviour. There is at this time much discussion in the Anglican church about high- church and low-church. Sam is more-or-less adopted by the church and given a better home than the one he was born into… but even as a young boy he is very sceptical.

Second -  Chapters Four, Five and Six. Golding skips over Sam’s adolescent years  and goes straight into his young adulthood. Sam, aged 19, is now an art-student in London. He aims to be a painter. He has a deep crush on Beatrice Ifor. In a way he is jealous of Beatrice. She is studying to be a school-teacher, she has polite manners, is somewhat prim, and regularly goes to “chapel” [the condescending term used by Anglicans when referring to non-conforming  protestants]. Sam tries to woo her, but he is inept and they remain “just good friends”. It is the 1930s. Communism is popular with the more naïve young men at that time. Sam signs on. The devious Philip Arnold comes back into his life. Philip is very sceptical of all ideologies and makes Sam a little less interested in the course. Sam is more desperate to make Beatrice his lover – to bed her… But she will not respond to his advances. He seems to love her, but sex is more and more what he wants from her. She fends him off. His frustration grows. Finally she submits on the promise that they will one day marry, and they bed. But soon he thinks that she doesn’t really enjoy sex. Using much self-justification Sam, looking at his painting of Beatrice in the nude, and on his way to becoming a popular painter, he decides he is bored with her… and he takes up with a free-lover Communist nicknamed Taffy, with whom he now sleeps. He moves to a different area and  Beatrice tries desperately to find where he is, with no success. It is now wartime. The bombs are falling on London. Though Sam and Taffy both have adopted the idea of a sort of “free-love”, they marry and Taffy has a baby. In this context, Sam justifies not caring for other people because, after all, the world is a dreadful place anyway.

Third – Chapters Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Golding throws us into a completely different environment. In the war, Sam has become an R.A.F. pilot. His plane has crashed. He is in a P.O.W. camp in Germany. Some English prisoners have escaped. The Gestapo suspect that Sam knows how they escaped and Sam is hauled into interrogation. The Gestapo man who asks the questions is Dr. Halde, a sophisticated man, in fact a psychologist. He knows more about Sam than Sam expected. Bit by bit, smoothly, Dr. Halde  attempts to break him down, but Sam insists that he knows nothing about how the prisoners escaped. Finally, to make him confess, Sam is locked into a small concrete room where no light can get in and where there is little space for him to settle…. In the dark, Sam remembers what it was like when he was looked after and more-or-less adopted by the Anglican priest Fr. Watts-Watt. Sam is scared of the dark and matters weren’t helped by the fact that the priest comes close to being a paedophile, though he never literately violates Sam  …In the space of the concrete-made cell in which he physically cannot manoeuvre, and in complete darkness, endless hallucinations, his theories about his body and how he might survive, torture him. He comes to loath himself…. He is let out of the cell, but he now gradually understands himself. He realises that his life has been narcissistic  -  he did not care for others and lacked empathy. He thought about the fragility as well as the purity of Beatrice whom he had tossed away. His friend and former teacher Nick Shales told him that Beatrice had a nervous breakdown after Sam had left her.

Fourth – Chapters Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen. Golding takes us back to Sam’s earlier days.  When he was a teenager at a co-ed school he was taught religious knowledge by a Miss Rowena Pringle. She was harsh, chastising and frequently punished Sam for his lack of studying. By contrast, his science teacher Nick Shales was open-minded and agnostic. This suggests a dichotomy – faith or science… but even though Nick Shales was the better teacher, it was faith that held Sam up when he was imprisoned by the Nazis … he remembers being taught by different teachers, going through puberty being tortured by sex, feeling inadequate, and knowing that he lusted after Beatrice… and later he remembers in full what eventually happened to Beatrice – after Sam had left her, she not only had a  nervous breakdown, but she was permanently confined to a psychiatric ward. Sam had visited her. She could not speak, she urinated in her clothes… and he discovers that another man is now with Taffy… the novel ends with deliberate ambiguity. The commandant of the Nazi prison lets Sam out of the cell and allows him go back to the camp. The commandant says to Sam “The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.” What does this mean? That Dr. Halde did not know how to deal with people? That the commandant was more humane? That they decided that Sam had nothing to do with the escape of some prisoners?  Who knows? I don’t.

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At this point you are shouting at me, because all I have done is to give you a synopsis without helping you to understand what the novel is really about. Bearing in mind that the novel is written in the first person, we have to accept that Sam is often an unreliable narrator – he frequently justifies himself and until the last moment he does not really take responsibility for what he has done in his life. On one level we could say that he was badly brought up, coming from a slum without real parents and moving on to following bad company when he was  youngster. But does this really explain how he became so narcissistic? This is not only a matter of his boasting about having some of his paintings in the Tate. In his quest for sex, he lacks any real empathy and ignores the deep fragility of Beatrice – and his marriage with Taffy is at best shallow  All the while, remember that he is examining himself. Nothing completely damns him. He seems to have some fortitude when he faces his interrogation  In his final thoughts he wavers between the religion of the (very flawed) priest and the (equally flawed) teacher of science… but in the end he needs faith.

What is the Free Fall that names this novel? Possibly it could refer to Sam’s having to fall out of his plane… but more likely Golding is interested the “the Fall” of the Bible, the  original sin. We have free will but we often fail. As in his earlier novels, he insists that we human beings are very flawed.

I am interested in some of the names that Golding gives to his characters. Could the name Samuel Mountjoy suggest somebody who seeks for joy, as in looking only for personal gratification? Could Beatrice be like Dante’s Beatrice, chaste and pious but never fully understood? And for the record, the little story-teller Evie, who leads Sam along when they are tots, has the same name that Golding gives to a character in his later novel The Pyramid – she is a temptress.

 

 

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.      

                                      WHEN A BRIGHT STAR BURNS OUT                                

Recently my wife and I went to the local cinema and saw Mr Burton, a reasonably good film about the youth of the actor who became known as Richard Burton. Not a great film – it looked like the type of film that would be screened on the B.B.C. for late night cultured viewers - and it was shot in dim, muddy colours. But it was entertaining. It was the story of how the rough Welsh teenager Richard Walter Jenkins, son of an impoverished coal-mining family, was tutored by Philip H. Burton who made him into an actor. Mr. Burton legally adopted young Jenkins, who changed his name to Burton. Philip Burton was a single man, and there have been some whispers about his sexuality; but whatever it was, it had no influence on the young actor who was lifelong lustily heterosexual. The film has some brief moments where young Richard Burton is cuddling and kissing a young Welsh woman – presumably meant to be the Welsh actress Sybil Williams who became the first of Richard Burton’s four wives. And the film ends with the young actor getting a standing ovation for his performance in a Shakespeare play.

I wasn’t too impressed by this film, but it set me thinking about how a bright and charismatic actor like Richard Burton could burn out long before he died. I think about these things because for thirty years I was a film-reviewer when I wasn’t teaching. 

 

In the late 1940’s and up to the late 1950’s, Richard Burton was regarded as the great up-and-coming Shakespearian performer on stage, in the Old Vic, at  Stratford-on-Avon and in New York. He did Hamlet and Othello and Coriolanus and Henry V on stage and was widely seen as rivalling the likes of Laurence Olivier. These performances were not filmed and they were before my time, so I have to take on trust how good he was. He appeared in some films early in his career. [I can recall as a teenager watching on television one Sunday afternoon the first film in which Burton appeared, in a minor role in The Last Days of Dolwyn, made in 1947.] In the late 1950’s he starred in the film version of John  Osborne’s grumpy play Look Back in Anger, one of his best film performances. He gained a big audience in New York in the musical Camelot. He was nominated for the Oscar in 1964 for his role in Becket but didn’t win it. The following year he was nominated for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – and I am still angry that he didn’t win it, because I think it was the best performance he ever did on screen – though in fairness I should also say that he did very well in the film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and he still managed to record excellent readings of poetry by Shakespeare, by many other poets, but especially by his fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas, with his rich, rolling voice.

But by the early 1970s, I can remember one of my lecturers referring  to Richard Burton as just “a rich man with a loud voice”. What had happened? Of course he was ageing but, more depressingly, he was allowing himself to appear in films that were pure trash – cheap war films in particular… and if you don’t believe me, look up Where Eagles Dare and, worse, the abominable Raid on Rommel. He would do anything for the money. I remember him having a bit part in an American sit-com. It was cringe-worthy. Part of the trouble was his need for money, not only for his children but also for being sucked into the glam of Hollywood first when starring with Elizabeth Taylor in the overblown extravaganza Cleopatra. They did at least one good film together [Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ] but Hollywood gave him trash and he knew it. He was no more a “prince of players” [in the 1950s he had starred in a film called Prince of Players].  Well before he died in 1984, he was becoming a parody of himself. Richard Burton was not the only actor who allowed himself to star in rubbish (think of Laurence Olivier in The Betsy ; think of pompous old John Gielgud in the witless Arthur). But Burton was wasting his talent long before he could be called old.

…. My wife and I drove back home after seeing the film Mr Burton, and sat down in front of the television, went to Youtube, and watched as many interviews as possible Burton had given in his later years. He was good at telling anecdotes about his deceased parents and his early years in Wales. He was good at reciting some poems. Sometimes he mimicked a few other actors. But it was clear that he was well past his best years and no longer had his original charisma, even though he was not yet all that old . Pity. 

           

 

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.   

“Touch Screen” by Philip Armstrong (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “Sick Power Trip” by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30); “In the Hollow of the Wave” by Nina Mingya Powles (Auckland University Press $NZ 24:99)

            Rare it is to have a poet who could be called a true philosopher. The blurb presented with Touch Screen tells me that Philip Armstrong is a lecturer in literature, writing and human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury, but he might as well be called a philosopher as his poetry delves deeply into the problems that go with our species and humanity – where we came from, where we are going, and how we are or are not now being dominated by machines. Sometimes – but not too often – Armstrong uses recherche or specialist words, especially when he is dealing with very small creatures.

            Wisely, Armstrong divides this collection into three separate sections because each deals with different ideas.

First part is called Glass, kicking off with a poem called “The Advancement of Learning”, that being the name of Francis Bacon’s early17^th century speculations about knowledge and how humanity could advance via science. But do scientific advances necessarily make for a better world? Armstrong’s title “Touch Screen” refers to what is now available on computers. He questions how much we now rely upon artificial intelligence to make our decisions. His poems “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Personality Test” suggest a great sense of pessimism. “Uber-Ich” shows an annoyance at the way cars now tell us what to do and how we are supposed to drive.   Then there is a quirky, but intriguing, long poem “Immram”, a version of what navigation was like in ancient times, yet gradually beginning to rush along with great speed; and in a way being a version of the founding in New Zealand. And “at such speed we couldn’t tell what came between. / Skyline after skyline flickered past, / faster and faster and faster, / the way we forgave and still forgive / ourselves, over and over until / out fingers bleed”. In some of his poems, Armstrong feels stifled and makes reference to modern medical treatments. “Foreign Accent Syndrome”  fears the non-human languages that are being created on computers – “It makes you wonder what they might / be saying, smiling as they do with slightly / parted lips. Since meeting them in my dreams and my nightmares are identical. I wake / making confessions in a foreign tongue.”  But like any good poet, Armstrong is not stalled on one theme. Three poems – “My Life in Comics”, “My Own Goals” and “Anastomosis” -  tell us, very ironically, tales of his teenage days.

Excellent though these poems are, they are only the warm-up to Part Two Myth, wherein Armstrong looks at how we human beings began in the first place and whence we had evolved. “Humble Beginnings” gives us a sour version of our distant forebears. “Book of the Dead” is almost a dead-pan description of the ancient Egyptian burial customs, including nearly all the Egyptians  gods. In the end, the poem suggests that death is just the disintegration of particles – that after all we are merely dust. The poems “Drifters” and “Mere” combine ancient sages with modern technology – implying that we in some ways have not changed much. Most impelling of all in this collection, however, is the long sequence called “Life of Clay”, being 13 poems which deal in detail with not only evolution but with the fragility of human beings. Often Armstrong makes reference to Mary Shelley’s “monster”, made by Frankenstein, who was shaped by man, an appropriate metaphor given that, eons ago, our ancestors were more-or-less shaped out of clay. But the poem “Clay on the Rocks” again warns us that non-human forces (machinery, computers, touch screens etc.) are taking us over – “Now warming to the warming world / my pineal gland locates / two hundred and forty years of stalled / operating system updates. / Begins a monster download.” And the poem “A Branding Exercise” says “After two centuries / the power to galvanise dead matter has / been put into the hands of children”, conjuring up images of both technicians and teenagers fiddling with their computers and touch screens. The poem “The New, New Atlantis”, takes Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” to show how terrifying applied science has wrought . There follow poems about the ubiquity of [pocket] cameras, unwanted images and the loss of privacy. These are not in any way the ideas of somebody who does not appreciate modern science. They are the words of someone who intelligently critiques the down side of some applied modern scientific trends.

When we finally reach Part Three Dirt, we are in a different type of poetry. Yes, there is some speculation on how species have survived over the eons – for example the poem “Slow Stepper” which is almost a jolly account of what would happen if one were to be reincarnated as a tiny mite of some sort. But most of Dirt is made of descriptive versions of New Zealand ancient and modern. Hence there are poems about the explosion of Lake Taupo two thousand years ago; and about what is left of an abandoned goldrush town. Surprisingly poems like “Estuary Bay”, “Driftwood Sculpture” and “City Under Rain” come close to being a more conventional type of descriptive poetry, though Armstrong does make some biting comments on ecology and how it is often ignored. And, where pollution is concerned, consider the poem “Landfill” with its angry lines about “a rancid pile / of Feltex worn through / to the webbing, rolls / of an underlay stippled with black / mould, a tarp-wrapped trap complete / with decomposing rat, / car batteries, tyres, asbestos tiles: / back then there was nothing you couldn’t / offload: the landfill ‘reclaimed’ / territory from the mangroves…”

We human beings are very good at leaving messes behind us. And perhaps modern technology makes even bigger messes. 

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    Reading Erik Kennedy’s Sick Power Trip, I’m immediately on the side of poets and novelists who can blow their stacks with skill. Juvenal lashing out in all directions at everything that was wrong with ancient Rome. Jonathon Swift thumbing his nose at English politics. Any good satirist. Erik Kennedy -  American born, now New Zealander – is a very good satirist. But, as I suggested in reviewing his two earlier collections There’s No Place Like the Internet in Spring Time  and Another Beautiful Day Indoors, even good satire can sometimes curdle into carping.

Take some examples of Kennedy’s really cutting satire. Speaking of complaisance, consider “Individualistic Societies”, which opens the show by suggesting that you might as well give up “If a comet is heading for the earth, we must celebrate the ambition of the comet.” “Loneliness Studies” is a good satire on our human inability to get on intimately with other people “Humans are the only animals / that think they’re not animals. / Chatbot chimps programmed / to miss each other and / to miss missing each other.” There is deep irony indeed in “The Health Benefits of Winter Sea Bathing”. The collection’s title Sick Power Trip comes from the poem “I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself”, strongly mocking the idea that super-rich people are different from the rest of us. “DARVO”, meaning ‘deny, attack, reverse victim and offender’, reminds us that “The most powerful forces in the universe are / the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, / and the need terrible people have to believe / that they are the victims. The sun never sets on / the empire of grievances…”

All of these poems are doing the job they should do – that is, legitimate satire that alerts us to absurdity. BUT some of Kennedy poems turn to snarling at us, where “All Submarine Movies Are Christmas Movies” is angry at the whole idea of Christmas family gatherings. “Pacific Sea  Surface Temperature Anomalies” appears to be telling us that those who like swimming at the beach are “the clammy, suffering, sweltry, cynical , burned-out, / downhearted, vulnerable people go to the sea.”

Satire or snarling apart, Kennedy writes seriously about matters that concern him and should concern us. “Low Carbon Warfare” is a collection of statements that have been made by writers on current ideas related to warfare – mostly the statements are pro-warfare but some are opposed to the military-industrial complex. Putting this together keeps reminding us that some people ignore how existing weapons could nihilate all human beings on our planet. [Four pages at the back of the collection verify who wrote each of the comments that were made.] There are some poems that almost read as despair. “Everyone’s Trying on Their Old Nuclear War Poems” seems to suggest that such protest poems are old hat and “hating the bomb is assumed.” “Someone Put an Ancient Burial Ground Right Where a Hotel Needs to Go” is really a good lecture reminding us of the clash between pragmatism - wanting to go ahead with amenities -  and the value of preserving the ancient… but also noting that “archaeology is a destructive science. / What was excavated today can’t be put back tomorrow”. Some issues are really complex. Sometimes we are given not poetry at all but long prose statements, especially in “Bino” querying the value of heart transplants. Ditto “Soft Power” about the attitudes people have about animals other than us. Ditto “Pet Theories” which considers the relationship of pets and human beings.

Much of Kennedy’s work does have room for ambiguity : poems called “This Usually Represents a Desire to Achieve Greatness in Your Social or Professional Life” and “Enclosure of the Commons II” which suggests that if there were now commons [where people could graze their animals] the land would probably  be toxic and polluted with chemicals and therefore not worth grazing. “An Only Child Poem” suggests that only assertive people who are speaking in a public place are probably the type who were pampered as children. A kind of uncertainly is in the quasi-protest poem “Bystander Poem; or a Gaza Poem”, that is, chastising us for not caring about the situation but not taking sides.

If all this seems that Kennedy is deadly serious about everything, it’s worth noting that he can sometimes be nostalgic or even whimsical. There are a number of poems that are almost nostalgic -  as in seeing hippiedom as harmless nonsense (“Self-Defining Hippiedom Discourse”) ; and something got lost (“Gap in My CV”); and Dad’s interest in cars ( “Classic Cars Magazines”). “Bildungsroman” is concerned with growing up and “I’ve Been Huddling in Doorways” concerns being rootless in earlier years. “The Summer We All Called Cigarettes ‘Snargers’ ” could be read as criticising and poking fun at the way he behaved when he was younger… or nostalgia.

As for whimsy, there is the jump of imagination seeing moths and butterflies as if they were aeroplanes (“Magpie Moth vs Monarch Butterfly”). “Public Coughs” is deliberately doggerel in the Ogden Nash tradition with clunky rhymes. “A Nineteenth-Century Love Song” is also full of bouncily rhymes. “The Human Christmas Tree” is sheer surrealism. “We’ve All Been There” is both serious and witty when “I stored my plan for world peace / safely in my coat pocket, / and then I washed the coat.”

I’m chronicling all this simply as a means of saying that, though Kennedy is not only a skilled satirist, he is capable of writing in different tones. A very engaging collection.

·        *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.

 

            Born and raised in New Zealand but well acquainted with China and South-East Asia and now living in London, Nina Mingya Powles is obviously a poet with a very cosmopolitan outlook. In her second collection, she is often inspired by, or quotes, many poets and writers, mainly women, such as Virginia Woolf [from whom comes the phrase ‘in the hollow of the wave’], Sylvia Plath, Sin Chi Yin and others – poets who are very sensitive and who like to look at the small things in nature as well as the motions of the tides, the seasons and the preciseness of art. It’s important to note that this collection is a work of visual art as well as of poetry. The first section “A Woven Sea” could be read as a hybrid – art works [images of quilts etc.] sit next to Powles’ words. In much of her work, Powles is interested in textiles, and memory and the making of waves by the thread or the sea. Much later a section called “Spell of the Red Flowers” is free verse presented in neat square blocks of type, evidence of Powles interest in the visual impact of words.

            Powles tells us first that her grandfather used to stich quilts. There was a sewing machine and her grandmother was also into crafts; and “the machine belongs to memory and to a different time. / The machine belongs to the house, which still exits and also doesn’t exist” – introducing us to the persistence of memory, one of her continued themes. Later she tells us “memory is a house with scraped white walls. / I step inside and choose what to take, what to leave behind.” Our memories are always edited ones. She moves on to connect the thread of quilts and texture to the movement of water and the sea, giving examples of the process in making a quilt – cutting, layering, binding, patterning. This interest in craft-work is carried over in her poem “At the Metropolitan Museum, 1990” where she saw “two women strolling through a dark navy blue room filled with Chinese and Japanese silks, jade and red and blue embroidered with birds, leaves and pagodas, everything shimmering in low light. The women reach out to touch the fabrics, forgetting they are behind glass.” Elsewhere she speaks of a gown that can change the colour of a harbour. Again, the fluorescent nature of both water and silk are identified as one. So indeed are what is beautiful in nature.

In other poems, while often referring to South-East Asian crafts [batik etc.], she does occasionally  make nods to the reality of poverty in villages. And yet, what hands have made are also beautiful. In a poem called “A gown is a glacier, receding” she writes “a gown is a rocky slope / a gown is a glacier, receding / a gown is a slow accumulation / a gown is an edifice that forms around an opening / a gown is a fissure where molten rock material emerges” and later “a pleat is a faultline / a pleat is a form of architecture / a pleat is an abrupt geological formation / a pleat must lie outside the borders of gender / a pleat is a sentence written by hand on folded paper.”

The last section of this collection introduces her interest in animals – particularly dogs – and she looks at how preparing food can also be a delicate skill. Her final poems here are about the tides, phases of the moon and the moods they conjure up. 

If I were to categorise the type of poetry Powles writes, I would call it post-modernist romanticism. This is not intended as a slur. Powles writes with delicacy, has an eye for what is beautiful and values the skills of those who can produce tactile art.

 

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

                  “PINCHER MARTIN” by William Golding (First published in 1956)

Some years ago I wrote on this blog a critique of William Golding’s second novel The Inheritors. I made it clear that Golding’s first novel Lord of the Flies was so well known that I would be talking to the wrong audience if they did not already know the novel or had read it. Surely most high-school English teachers have set Lord of the Flies as an essential text. [I should know because I was one of those teachers.] Regarding William Golding (1911-1983, Nobel Laureate), his early novels could basically be called allegories or fables. To make it clear, Lord of the Flies is about the way even children can become violent savages if they are given the opportunity. The boys in the novel ignore the more level-headed ones among them and literally turn to murder. We human beings have many flaws built into us – jealousy, violence, envy, deceit etc. – even if we are intelligent, reasoning creatures. The Inheritors tries, allegorically, to understand why we human beings became so flawed. In this case, Golding sees our distant ancestors, homo sapiens sapiens, as violent creatures who kill a more primitive species of homo sapiens, presumably Neanderthals. In both novels Golding is suggesting what Christians would call “original sin”. Though we were made in the image of God, there was “the Fall” when we fell out with God. In Lord of the Flies the boys land on what at first seems an island paradise. The Neanderthals in The Inheritors live as if it were the Garden of Eden. Both are destroyed by homo sapiens sapiens.

Pincher Martin is one of Golding’s shortest novels [nearly all of his novels are short] but I personally found it one of the most difficult to read. A synopsis might show why this is so. 

Golding was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy in the Second World War and knew how treacherous the sea could be – a very dangerous place. He never encounted German U-Boats but he knew that they targeted British ships. Christopher Hadley Martin (nickname “Pincher” Martin) is a petty officer in a destroyer. A U-Boat torpedoes it. As the destroyer sinks, Pincher Martin is thrown overboard. He cries for help, but none comes. He kicks off his seaboots and starts swimming. With great effort, he reaches a small rock sticking up in the vast Atlantic ocean. He is able to, painfully, drag himself onto the rock. He is alone and there is no rescue in sight.

  And this is where the reading can become difficult. The first three chapters give us  minute details of how Pincher Martin climbs up onto the rock – the difficulty of getting on to the rock; the limpets and mussels and barnacles and green smears of seaweed; the waves that push him and pull him back; the slippery surface of the rock making it hard to climb; the coldness; the pain of crawling along rough rocks. Golding appears to be stopping time by noting every possible detail. Time is not happening as we think it should.

Pincher Martin is alone. He often talks to himself. He is enterprising. He works out how to feed himself on the available mussels and crayfish. We at first see him as an heroic person, surviving in an appalling situation. But soon delusions crowd his brain. For amusement, he names different parts of the rock as High Street and the Red Lion, and he piles up stones in the hope of being seen and rescued… but he begins to see the pile as looking like the shape of a man. He calls it the Dwarf. And the whimsical naming of streets reminds him of places he remembers. He recalls many things in his life. And at this point we understand that Pincher Martin is not a hero but he is a truly evil man.  He was formerly an actor who did not do very well in his profession– so he signed on to the navy. Not only did he often cheat people but he raped a woman, cuckolded a friend and was planning to murder one of his fellow seamen. There are flashbacks to conversations he had with colleagues and friends. His life has been opportunistic and narcissistic and potentially murderous. Later, when he says “I am alone”, he is not only referring to the loneliness of being in the middle of an ocean, but he is admitting to himself that he has never really had friends or loved them. He is cut off from the human race… like Cain.

He notices that, in all the time he has been on the rock, he has never once excreted. He also notices a red lobster swimming in the sea. There is no such thing as a red lobster swimming in the sea [they turn red only when they are cooked]. It now dawns on him. He is not only hallucinating. He is really already dead. He argues with God. Curses. Curses himself.

His body is washed up on a beach in the Hebrides. A naval doctor examines the corpse and, in the last words of the novel, he says “He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots.” In other words, he was dead by the time he was thrown off the sinking destroyer. The whole novel was what passed in Pincher Martin’s brain in a split second.

Some readers have suggested that Golding was mainly concerned with the old question of what we might think in the last moment before we die.  The best-known tale going in that direction is Ambrose Bierce’s short-story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Perhaps Golding was thinking about that idea, but it is not his main interest. Golding was not a conventional Christian. His father was an atheist. Golding went to, and taught in, Anglican schools but that was mainly pro forma. Often Golding said he was an atheist. But like it or not, he did use Christian concepts in his early novels and – as you will see – he adopted some specifically Catholic ones in his third novel Pincher Martin. I say this because, researching this novel,  I caught up with a B.B.C. interview he gave in the late 1950s, when his fourth novel had just come out [you can look it up on You Tube, as I did]. Golding said Pincher Martin is “a novel about a dead man” and goes on to say that, though he wasn’t Catholic, he wanted to write a story about Purgatory, the Catholic idea that there is, between heaven and hell, a possible cleansing for the sinful. Also, in another interview, his daughter said that her father told her that Pincher Martin had to be read as an “unredeemed wicked character”. Hence Pincher Martin’s cursing God.

Just a few side comments – the novel was presented in England as simply Pincher Martin. But when it was published in America it was presented as Pincher Martin – The Two Deaths of  Christopher Martin. Maybe American readers have to have things spelled out for them. Then there’s that odd nickname “Pincher” Martin. Just as in English slang, “Dusty” Miller meant somebody old fashioned, and “Snobby” Clark meant more-or-less a pretentious person, especially lower-middle-class people like clerks; so “Pincher” Martin meant somebody untrustworthy, because he pinched [stole] things… and the main character of this novel.is certainly untrustworthy.

Final comment – if you want to, you can search out [once again on You Tube] a “Cinematic Opera” based on Pincher Martin by Oliver Rutland. It is surprisingly very good but, like the novel, it is gruelling.

Something Thoughtful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.     

                                    MY FAVOURITE PIECE OF ART

When I was a young teenager, and even before that, I frequently went to, or was taken to, the Auckland City central art gallery.  Inevitably there were some paintings that became my favourites, although some of them now seem not so great; but I still like them simply for the sake of nostalgia. The art gallery has naturally changed over many years. Some works of art have been replaced, some have been put into storage, and the layout of the gallery itself has changed radically.  But this year, carrying my pocket phone, I visited the gallery and decided to look at those works of art I once admired. [Forgive my wonky photos]

Of course I laughed a little at the 18^th century version of two tigers coming into their cave, neatly framed by the cave itself. To me they looked like domesticated puss-cats.

 

I was still awed by the violent seascape as a mighty ship is toppled into the fierce waves.    

I was still amused by the woman being duped by an old palm-reader as two other characters smirk or are confused.                       

 

And naturally I delighted in Henry Fuseli’s melodramatic version of Macbeth and Banquo meeting the witches, the two men looking more like naked Greek statues than Scots warriors. [BTW, this image was not in the gallery when I was a kid – I think it was a more recent acquisition. ]

 

But the one piece of art that I loved the best, man and boy, was Jacob Epstein’s sculpture which was labelled as “Rock Drill”. As a boy, I understood that it was not a literal image of something living, but was created by the sculptor [and as a boy I hadn’t yet learned the words “Modernism” or “Cubism” or “Vorticism”]. What I saw looked like an elongated helmet of the sort that would have been worn by a medieval knight, and yet in the lower part of “Rock Drill” there were softer images which seemed to me to be like babies or children who were trapped inside. I wasn’t afraid of it, but I was intrigued by it. 

 

 

Only much later, on my more recent visits to the art gallery, did I find a placard explaining the sculpture. “Rock Drill” was made by Jacob Epstein in 1913-15. It originally was a larger piece of work standing atop what I saw… but Epstein removed this upper part as his ideas changed when the (First) World War came along, leaving only the torso that was left; so it is now properly called “Torso from the ‘Rock Drill’ ”. I understand that the “Torso” in the Auckland art gallery is a cast that was made in 1961. I still admire it and am still intrigued by it. And the last time I went to the gallery, and as I left, I said to the good people on the front desk that it was the best thing there was in the gallery.    

Footnote: Sadly Jacob Epstein’s works are rarely seen in New Zealand, most being in England or in American art galleries. But at least I can say that, aged 11 and travelling with my parents and three siblings, I was able to see Epstein’s formidable “St. Michael’s Victory Over the Devil” on the wall of the renewed Coventry Cathedral. It was made in 1958