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 four or more years ago.

“THE LADY OF THE LAKE” by Sir Walter Scott (first published in 1810)

A little under two years ago, early in 2017, we spent a week in Edinburgh as part of a longer journey. Of course we visited most of the places that tourists visit – the Castle, the Royal Mile, Holyrood House, the Burns memorial on the hill, the Scottish National Gallery and the gallery of Modern Art, as well as some fine whisky retailers, some excellent second-hand booksellers, a Christmas Market, a literary pub crawl and a good jazz show. I think about half my ancestry is Scots (a quarter Lowlander, a quarter Highlander, a quarter Irish and a quarter English) so I enjoyed most of this, but at a certain point I became a little melancholy. Old Edinburgh is basically a Georgian city, specifically designed a little over two hundred years ago to assert English dominance. The very names of the streets (Hanover, Princes etc.) tell you this; and much of the pipes-and-tartans pageantry comes from a legacy of taming and prettifying the Scots nation for English consumption and in the service of the British Empire. Let’s not forget that nearly all the supposedly “traditional” tartans were designed long after English dominance was assured.

My melancholy was at its height when we visited the Scots National Portrait Gallery. In the lobby there are what the curators presumably think of as Scotland’s three most illustrious literary figures. On the left there is a bust of Robert Louis Stevenson, in the middle there is a full-length statue of Robert Burns, but on the right there is a bust of Sir Walter Scott. Oh dear! Walter Scott (1771-1832), the man who did most to prettify Scottish history and customs for English readers (see my blog posting Truthis Beauty). His full-length monument dominates part of Princes Street, Edinburgh’s main drag.

As I’ve noted once before on this blog (see the review of The Bride of Lammermoor), there was a time in my callow youth when I thought Scott was a writer worth reading. But, feeling that I have the right to make this judgment after wading through nine of his novels over the years, I have come to the conclusion that he is an appalling writer with his pompous Latinate vocabulary and stiff prose, which was unwieldy even in his own day. His plots as raw plots are interesting, if very melodramatic, and hence have sometimes made great source material for movies and operas. But his characters, though vivid, are thin, his descriptions are pasteboard and his ideas limited. So this is his legacy – a writer whose huge popularity across Europe in his own time tells us something about Romantic nostalgia and the state of early nineteenth century civilisation; and a writer who fired up opera librettists more than anybody apart from Shakespeare and perhaps Victor Hugo (and in the process inspired operas such as Lucia de Lammermoor which are greater works of art than their literary sources). In other words, he is now interesting mainly as part of cultural history.

But it was that prettification-of-Scottish-history element that really got to me after my brief Edinburgh visit. So I recently sat down and read Scott’s book-length narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, to see if I had misjudged him from reading his novels only. Bear in mind that Scott first made his name as a poet and some of his shorter lyrics, such as “Proud Maisie”, have rightly earned their place in anthologies; although many of these lyrics originally appeared as part of his longer narrative poems. When The Lady of the Lake was first published in 1810, 25,000 copies were sold within the year. It was more popular than Scott’s earlier narrative poems The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion and his later one The Lord of the Isles. It continued to be a big bestseller right throughout the Victorian age until, by the earlier 20^th century, it ceased to be to anyone’s taste.

I will not irritate you by synopsising it in detail. It is enough to say that it is set early in the 16^th century, in the reign of King James V of Scotland, and its thematic focus is a contrast of wild highlanders and organised lowland authority.

Its six cantos cover six days. The highland chief Roderick Dhu, the lowland knight Sir James Fitz-James and the gentle Malcolm Graeme all vie for the hand of the “lady of the lake” Ellen Douglas, daughter of the clan chief The Douglas.

Ellen rescues Sir James Fitz-James, when he has lost his way during a stag hunt in the highlands, by taking him to her father’s island hideaway on Loch Katrine. He falls easily in love with her, but departs soon after his rescue without ever meeting her father. The Douglas is not yet sure whether he should pledge allegiance to the king. At a highland clan gathering, Roderick Dhu and Malcolm Graeme quarrel over Ellen. But the more important matter is the highland rising the fiery Roderick Dhu is planning against the upstart lowlander King James V, who has declared his intention to make the highlands his own domain and hunting ground. Roderick Dhu finds it hard to gather allies for his uprising, but can rely on the support of his own Clan Alpine. At some point in the story, there is a duel between Roderick Dhu and Sir James Fitz-James. The highland uprising (it is reported to us only in the song of a minstrel) is quashed. Roderick Dhu is killed. In the happy denouement Ellen gets Malcolm Graeme, the man to whom he father had betrothed her, and she discovers that the romantic knight James Fitz-James is in fact King James V himself, to whom The Douglas has already sworn allegiance. Highlands are now reconciled to lowlands.

As with his novels, Scott’s narrative poems are really sustained by picturesque set-pieces. They are begging to be incorporated into an opera (and indeed this poem became the basis for Rossini’s opera La Donna del Lago – the first of fully 25 Italian operas, by various composers, to be drawn from the works of Scott). Think of how the following events in the poem could be set to music as arias or choruses - the wild stag hunt and the knight’s horse falling down dead of exhaustion in the opening canto. The romantic meeting of the knight and the “lady of the lake” on the shores of Loch Katrine before she takes him to the island. In Canto Two the old bard who reminds fair Ellen of her family’s allegiances. In Canto Three the pagan hermit who speaks a prophecy as he sacrifices a goat. Not to mention Roderick Dhu’s burning of a fiery cross to summon the clans (sorry folks, but this really is where the Ku Klux Klan got the idea to do the same thing) and the highlanders rising as one man out of the heather. And the scene where the king reveals who he really is. Etc. etc. etc.  – all of them fitting subjects for illustrations in de luxe Victorian editions of this poem.

Scott also inserts songs and ballads into each canto – in Canto One “Soldier rest, thy warfare o’er”; in Canto Two “Hail to the chief who in Triumph advances” The famous dirge “Coronach” (“He is gone on the mountain / He is lost to the forest”) in Canto Three, and later Ellen’s hymn to the Virgin Mary; in Canto Six a very vigorous soldiers’ drinking song, almost as good as Robbie Burns writing in the same boozy vein. It is in these shorter self-contained lyrics that Scott’s poetry is at its best.

But what of the octosyllabic rhyming couplets that make up the bulk of the narrative? They do soon exhaust us with their jig-jog. Take the following specimen, where the knight James Fitz-James is falling asleep on the island refuge he has been given:

Then,—from my couch may heavenly might

Chase that worst phantom of the night!—

Again returned the scenes of youth,

Of confident, undoubting truth;

Again his soul he interchanged

With friends whose hearts were long estranged.

They come, in dim procession led,

The cold, the faithless, and the dead;

As warm each hand, each brow as gay,

As if they parted yesterday.

And doubt distracts him at the view,—

O were his senses false or true?

Dream’d he of death , or broken vow,

Or is it all a vision now? (Canto 1, Stanza XXXIII)

            The rhythm and rhyme-scheme are simply wrong for lines that are presumably meant to convery a sense of slightly melancholy reverie. Such rhythm and rhyme-scheme are, however, quite appropriate to the scenes of vigorous action.

I read somewhere (sorry, but I cannot locate the source) that when the First Canto, with its furious and galloping account of a wild stag hunt, was read to some of Wellington’s soldiers in Spain, where they were fighting what is now called the Peninsular War, they cheered lustily and declared it the best poetry they had ever heard. They were the right audience for this sort of poetic gallop. The swift movement of the verse also strikes me as appropriate to the following account of Roderick Dhu’s warriors arriving across the water (though we have to forgive Scott for his anachronistic reference to “tartans”) :

The point of Brianchoil they passed,

And, to the windward as they cast,

Against the sun they gave to shine

The bold Sir Roderick’s bannered Pine.

Nearer and nearer as they bear,

Spears, pikes, and axes flash in air.

Now might you see the tartans brave,

And plaids and plumage dance and wave:

Now see the bonnets sink and rise,

As his tough oar the rower plies;

See, flashing at each sturdy stroke,

The wave ascending into smoke;

See the proud pipers on the bow,

And mark the gaudy streamers flow

From their loud chanters down, and sweep

The furrowed bosom of the deep,

As, rushing through the lake amain,

They plied the ancient Highland strain. (Canto 2, Stanza XVI)

            But again, the poetic form is out of place in the following lines, where a minor character (not mentioned in my synopsis) laments how he will probably be separated from his beloved after battle:

The heath this night must be my bed,

The bracken curtain for my head,

My lullaby the warder’s tread,

Far, far, from love and thee, Mary;

Tomorrow eve, more stilly laid,

My couch may be my bloody plaid,

My vesper song thy wail, sweet maid!

It will not waken me, Mary! (Canto 3, Stanza XXIII)

            And as the last extract I shall quote, consider the following angry words of Roderick Dhu when he has been taken prisoner by one of the king’s men and asserts that he is merely protecting all that is left of a birthright that has been stolen by “Saxons” (English and lowlanders). One could imagine this as a forceful piece of rhetoric, a genuine nationalist rallying cry, if it did not jig-jog along so:

The Gael beheld him grim the while,

And answered with disdainful smile:

‘Saxon, from yonder mountain high,

I marked thee send delighted eye

Far to the south and east, where lay,

Extended in succession gay,

Deep waving fields and pastures green,

With gentle slopes and groves between:—

These fertile plains, that softened vale,

Were once the birthright of the Gael;

The stranger came with iron hand,

And from our fathers reft the land.

Where dwell we now? See, rudely swell

Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell.

Ask we this savage hill we tread

For fattened steer or household bread,

Ask we for flocks these shingles dry,

And well the mountain might reply,—

“To you, as to your sires of yore,

Belong the target and claymore!

I give you shelter in my breast,

Your own good blades must win the rest.”

Pent in this fortress of the North,

Think’st thou we will not sally forth,

To spoil the spoiler as we may

And from the robber rend the prey?

Ay, by my soul!—While on yon plain

The Saxon rears one shock of grain,

While of ten thousand herds there strays

But one along yon river’s maze,—

The Gael, of plain and river heir,

Shall with strong hand redeem his share.

Where live the mountain Chiefs who hold

That plundering Lowland field and fold

Is aught but retribution true?

Seek other cause ‘gainst Roderick Dhu.’ (Canto 5, Stanza VII)

            So where are we left in assessing Scott’s “epic” verse? Let me not take one iota away from the industry and diligence of Scott, who wrote so many novels in such a short time and worked off great debts in doing so. A truly heroic feat. Let me not presume to say that he had no imagination, because he did indeed create memorable characters, even if they are mainly broad caricatures. Above all, let me not deny that he wrote some good short lyrics. But I cannot help agreeing most with William Hazlitt in his Lectures on English [sic] Poets, where he praises Scott’s best qualities but says that in the end his long narrative poems are “masquerades” as far as history is concerned – pretty, picturesque, but having little to do with real history. And, in a passage which (dammit!) I cannot specifically source at the moment, Hazlitt also said that to read Scott’s verse was like watching a troop of soldiers marching by – orderly, regular, neat and somehow lacking the spark of real poetic inspiration. In the end, much of his narrative verse is gifted doggerel.

            Finally, of course, I have to come back to that question about Scottish nationalism which I raised in the earlier parts of this rant. Consider how The Lady of the Lake ends. Those wild, brave, but uncouth highlanders submit to the lowland king. Yes, they are picturesque and romantic, but they have served their turn, so now real civilisation may come. We Anglophones are the bearers of real civilisation. So let us look on those mountain Gaels as an interesting artefact of the past, about whom we can write Romantic poems without bothering to consider how much we have despoiled them of their land and culture. It is all rather in the way that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha ends. Having featured as the hero of a long poem, at the end Hiawatha, with no fuss or protest, conveniently shuffles off into the mists of time to make way for the Paleface. And we don’t have to consider how we really took the land from the tribes whom we have romanticised. Thus does Scott in The Lady of the Lake feed his English fan base. 

 

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.

WORDS TO THE REALLY WISE

            It is not usually my practice to comment on a new book in this “Something Thoughtful” section, but Exisle Publishers recently sent me a copy of Mark Broatch’s enjoyable Word to the Wise ($NZ 25:99) and I thought I could be sneaky and comment on it here, as it deals with matters upon which I have frequently expressed opinions – viz. matters of language and correct (or at least acceptable) usage.

Word to the Wise is subtitled “Untangling the mix-ups, misuse and myths of language”. After an introduction, with tips on clear writing, it becomes essentially an explication of words commonly confused with one other, and of words that are commonly misused. Very occasionally the confusion comes from pronunciation (as when Americans say “Ado” for “Adieu”.)

There are many old favourites here. I believe they would confuse few people with more than a rudimentary knowledge of English, but they could confuse people just beginning to learn English. “Comprise” / “compose”. “Dual” / “duel”.  “Immanent” / “imminent”. “Imply” / “infer”. “Sewage” / “sewerage”.  “Luxurious” / “luxuriant”. “Metal” / “mettle. “Alter” / “altar”. “Pray” / “prey”. And surely only the hoi-polloi would confuse “hoi polloi” with “hoity-toity”.

I really do wonder which people would confuse the following pairs, all included by Broatch: “Acrimony” and “alimony”. “Eccentric” and “eclectic”. “Miasma” and “milieu”. “Malinger” and “philander”. “Emancipated” and “emasculated”. “Ersatz” and “erstwhile”. Really, how often have these words been misused, one for the other? Has Broatch included them simply for the fun of it? And even if they understood the meaning of either, in what circumstances have people misused “iatrogenic” in place of “idiopathic”?

Some of the mistakes Broatch points out are cases of sheer illiteracy, the perpetrators of which will one day face the severest penalties when they are brought before my Court of Linguistic Correctness. (“Bias” instead of “biased”; “brought” instead of “bought” etc.). I am not sure that Broatch’s exposition concerning the correct uses of  “that” and “which” really clarifies matters; and I am still unsure how to distinguish “predilection”, “proclivity” and “propensity”, even after his definition of each. He does raise some issues I’d never considered, such as the American and the British uses of “backward’ and “backwards”; and I was unaware that Americans are apparently adopting the habit of using “nonplussed” to mean “indifferent” or “bored”. I am quite nonplussed by this information.

So to a list of controversial matters raised and my responses to them. On the “alright” and “all right” controversy, I would say that the two forms now have two different meanings and the form “alright” should be accepted – even if one of my publishers once insisted that I turn my “alrights” into “all rights”. As for “crapulence” and its derivatives – I would either reserve them for drunkenness or not use them at all (Broatch rightly notes that they are often used wrongly). In the same way, I insist that “noisome” means smelly rather than noisy (although, of course, a fart can be both).  I agree with Broatch that we must uphold the difference in meaning between “uninterested” and “disinterested”. People who confuse these words will be executed after trial in my Court of Linguistic Correctness. Unlike Broatch, however, I would return “crescendo” to meaning a gradual increase in sound, and not the final climactic blare. Likewise, I would rein in the use of “decimate”. I oppose the gradual “creep” in this word toward being a synonym for general destruction. Even if (as Broatch says) we no longer punish every tenth soldier, the word still means to sustain serious, but not decisive, losses. A decimated army is still an army that can offer battle. I differ from Boatch in that I would always use “different from” and I regard “different than” or “different to” as illiteracies. I would be wary of using “enormity” in such a way as to suggest that it refers to size. I am pleased to see that Broatch cautions against using “less” when you mean “fewer”, but my Linguistic Agents are now classifying him as a Person Of Interest for endorsing the loose use of adverbs such as “hopefully”, for encouraging the use of  “impact” as a transitive verb and for defending the non-literal use of “literally”. I further caution that my hired investigators will soon be purging the staff of the OED (cited by Broatch) who suggest that the absolute term “unique” can be modified with words such as “very” or “quite”. Finally, if you are going to include a definition of “Procrustean”, why not include a definition “Draconian” [as the two terms both fall refer to great severity]?

I should note that Broatch ends his volume with lists of words often mispelled (or misspelt), common social media abbreviations, unusual plural forms and clichés. I should also note that he has a tendency to label (in both his introduction and his text) more fastidious users of English as “traditionalists”, but then he is manifestly not an advocate of a linguistic free-for-all. If he were, he would not compose a book such as this one. Likewise he often labels as “literary” words, such as “erstwhile”, that are only a short distance from everyday speech. Kingsley Amis’ enjoyable style-guide The Kings English is labelled by Broatch as “archly sticklerish”. This is ironic because I have now placed Broatch’s Word to the Wise on my shleves next to my copy of The King’s English.

We all know how annoying it can be when people question our own use of language. Recently, a reader called me to account for referring, in a book review, to people as “straight-laced” ( = correct, proper, perhaps prudish). The reader pointed out that it was spelled correctly “strait-laced”, and gave an etymology of the phrase to prove his point. I did a little research and found that the etymology is disputed and the term may legitimately be spelled either way. Likewise I remember once how annoyed a journalist became when a reader called him out for using the phrase “begging the question” as if it were a mere synonym for “raising the question”. (To “beg the question” means to assume the truth of an argument without proving it, usually by circular reasoning). Some matters to do with grammar and the correct use of words will always raise eyebrows and controversy. This status quo prevails even after reading Word to the Wise. But it is enjoyable to canter through it, and it will be of help to many.

For the record, you may find on this blog my own opinionated witterings about language and usage in earlier postings here Awareness of Language and How to Diminish It and here Grumpy Old Man Mode and here Passionate Impacts on your Behalf and here Um.

Something New

REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY. 

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

“THE SOUND OF BREAKING GLASS” by Kirsten Warner (Makaro Press, $NZ35)

            “We can’t escape history”, some wise person said many years ago. No matter how distant we think we are from our parents’ and grandparents’ experiences, we have been shaped by what they suffered or endured, and this influences the way we think and react to the world.

            Kirsten Warner’s lively and imaginative novel The Sound of Breaking Glass may not have been written to this thesis, but it’s a perfect illustration of it anyway. It is the story of a woman whose mind is stressed, torn and angst-ridden as a result of past events in her own life and in the lives of her parents.

            The novel is narrated in the first-person by Christel who, in the 1990s, is somewhere in her 40s and is working in Auckland as a researcher and deviser of formats for “reality” television. She has a pleasant blokey partner, Ted, and two amiable little children, Maisie and Jim, but they do not play a great part in her narrative. Instead the focus is on what happens in Christel’s mind. No matter what she does, she is addressed by a voice in her head called Big Critic, who tells her that she is a loser, or that she is wasting her life, or that she is not being aggressive enough in addressing others and building a career. Big Critic is sometimes male and sometimes female, and seems a clear dramatisation of Freud’s super-ego – that horrible policeman in our brain, nurtured by our upbringing, who keeps barking moralistic orders at us. We are at once intrigued by the question of how such an aggressive voice has come to dominate this woman.

            Other characters also haunt Christel’s mind – real people who have had some traumatic effect on her. Karate Man, a Frenchman who mistreated her badly when she was a young teenager; Teacher, who betrayed her trust when she was at high school; and Artist, whose drugginess seemed to show the way to Nirvana when she was a university student. Somehow, each of these people has disappointed or hurt Christel in a major way. Collectively they appear to have stripped her of an innocence which she now misses.

            Then comes the crisis point for Christel. As a television person looking for a good story, she gets involved with a group of women called WASP (Women Against Surplus Plastic) – an ecological group protesting the council’s plans to dispose of plastic by incinerating it. To help publicise their cause Christel, in a moment of inspiration, constructs a big man made out of plastic milk bottles. But in no time Milk Bottle Man takes on a life of his own and becomes yet another character in Christel’s ongoing psychological theatre. Benign or malign, he is something like a jolly giant gone awry, sometimes lashing out at her enemies and sometimes winking conspiratorially at her. In fact he’s a bit like the Golem, that protective and destructive figure of medieval Jewish folklore.

            Which brings us to the other major figures in Christel’s mind – her parents Conrad and Stella. Sometimes bellicose, sometimes bluntly truthful, Conrad is a devoutly atheist Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who brought his New Zealand-born daughter up on indelible, and indelibly horrible stories. As The Sound of Breaking Glass works its way to the cleansing of Christel’s spirit, we understand that her connections with her parents’ often traumatic experiences are what have had the greatest influence of all upon her. Indeed once I understood this, I guessed that the name Christel could be intended by the author as a reference to the Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when the Nazis went berserk and smashed up Jewish shop windows as part of an organised pogrom. This would relate it both to the  title’s “breaking glass” and to the fragmented state of Christel’s mind, although the name is explained differently in the novel.

            And here I have to invoke two laws in reviewing.

            ONE: My “not-being-a-swine” rule, which I have mentioned often enough on this blog. Not being a swine means not giving away every twist and turn of a newly-published novel. Novelists work hard to plant surprising or unexpected events in a novel, and it is not my intention to frustrate their effors. Suffice it to say that I have here given the most basic set-up to what this novel is about, for there are many detailed incidents in the stories of Karate Man, Teacher, Artist and Christel’s parents which you would prefer to discover for yourself. And some of them are very dark indeed and some involve explicit sexual details.

TWO: My “remember the genre” rule. The Sound of Breaking Glass is a novel and not a work of sheer autobiography. Though written in the first person, and though the author occasionally butts into the narrative to comment on her own writing, this is not the “confessions” of  Kirsten Warner, even if the names Kirsten and Christel are so close. Much of it is the product of a very fertile imagination. And yet there is clearly a very strong autobiographical element to it. As the blurb reminds us, Kirsten Warner’s father was the late Gunter Warner, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and survivor of the Holocaust. Like Christel, therefore, Kirsten Warner is a Second Generation product of those traumatic times and there is no way that this novel cannot reflect at least some of her own experiences.

But I am judging it as a novel, not as autobiography.

Most impressive is the way Warner is able to juggle a number of different time-frames without confusing the reader – there is the “present” (1990s Auckland), the narrator’s memories of adolescence and student days, and the past of her parents’ earlier lives. On top of this, there is what Christel recognises as literal reality, and what she knows are the products of her own mind. Despite her stress and all the characters who invade her brain, we know that she is essentially a reliable and intelligent narrator who is self-aware enough to separate the imagined from the physically real. Another obvious point is that Christel’s imaginings give the novel a rich strain of daunting and sometimes surreal imagery – a visual dramatisation of mental states.

If confronting inherited trauma is the main theme of The Sound of Breaking Glass, there is also a strong thread of satire. It’s especially evident in the sections that deal with Christel’s work in television. (We note here that Kirsten Warner herself has worked as both journalist and television researcher). Darts are thrown at the whole concept of “reality” televsion, with Christel directed to chase up stories which, in effect, exploit non-media-savvy interviewees. (Christel rudely refers to her immediate boss at the television outfit as the Fat Controller). We also see how even good causes can be corrupted by the medium in which they are presented. Possibly some of the women in the WASP collective are sincere in their ecological protest. But, as often happens in stage-managed protests, exhibitionism and self-promotion take over, not helped by the fact that Christel is, after all, intent on making an audience-grabbing programme out of it. One member of the collective, called the Rock Star by Christel, takes over as spokesperson for the WASP women and knows how to play the media with sound bites that will enhance her own profile.

The childhood and adolescence scenes ring true – memories of listening to “pirate” radio and going on anti-Vietnam War demos – as do the references to what Auckland was like in the 1990s.

One minor reservation: The Sound of Breaking Glass seems to be wrapped up a little too neatly. Christel never reaches what is now often called “closure”. The past that has shaped and, in a way, controlled her, is still very much part of her being. But she is able to come to terms with it, put it into perspective, and cease accusing herself of faults or feeling so guilty all the time.  In the last 25 pages of the novel this is made clear in straightforward prose rather different from the flights of fancy that elsewhere dominate. It may reflect accurately the author’s resolution of uncertainties in her own life, but it does make for a major change of style and tone.

But as I’ve said, this is a very small reservation.  The Sound of Breaking Glass is an imaginative, vivid and heartfelt novel. That its style and approach are offbeat make it a more exciting read than other novels that have approached similar ideas.

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 four or more years ago.

“NUMBER ONE” by John Dos Passos (first published in 1943)

            Twice before on this blog, I have dealt with books related to the life of the contentious and populist 1930s Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long (1893-1935). One was T.Harry Williams’ exhaustive (and very long!) biography Huey Long. The other was Robert Penn Warren’s famous novel All the King’s Men, with its protagonist “Willie Stark” quite clearly modelled on Long, right up to his assassination by a doctor who had a personal grudge. All the King’s Men is still regarded as an American classic.

About the same time I read these two books, I came across a third  book related to Long. It was a novel by a writer who, at the time, was regarded much more highly than Robert Penn Warren, and whose novel was in fact published three years before Penn Warren’s. This is Number One by John Roderigo Dos Passos.

Number One is the story of a political hack and PR man Tyler Spotswood (“Toby”), employee and speechwriter of Senator Homer T. (“Chuck”) Crawford. Homer Crawford is observed fighting his opponent Clyde Gailbraith for his party’s presidential nomination and lining up Governor Steven Baskette to support him. Tyler Spotswood takes a sentimental fancy to Crawford’s wife Sue Ann, but the novel generally shows him sinking into self-pity and booze, his venal political career contrasted implicitly with his little brother Glenn Spotswood, an idealist who died in the Spanish Civil War. This novel does not end with Crawford’s assassination, but with Tyler Spotswood being made the fall-guy in a senatorial investigation into Crawford’s shonky “Every Man a Millionaire” Corporation. The novel ends with  Tyler Spotswood resigning from the Crawford machine, and going to another political hack and speechwriter Ed James, with the implication that they may now work to bring Crawford down.

            Even more than Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, this is clearly a hostile caricature of Huey Long. It may be set in the late 1930s – with its mentions of the Spanish Civil War – whereas Long was assassinated in 1935, before that war began. Even so, the likeness in unmistakable. “Number One” is Crawford’s self-promoted nickname, just as Long liked to be called “Kingfish”. The hack Ed James helps him to write his campaign book Poor Boy to President, just as Long got a hack to ghost-write his campaign book My First Days in the White House. Crawford’s “Every Man a Millionaire” movement echoes Long’s “Every Man a King”. I even wonder if Dos Passos’s choice of the name “Crawford” was meant to echo the Southern “Crawfish” as an allusion to “Kingfish”. Specific events in the novel are taken from the historical record. Within the first few pages, Crawford is offering hillbillies advice on how to eat their greens – just as Long used to win over mountain audiences with folksy advice on cooking. But secretly, of course, Crawford is very cynical about hicks. At one point, Crawford threatens to expose the fact that one of his political enemies has relatives in an insane asylum (Long used the same sort of blackmail). He becomes involved in an unseemly brawl in a nightclub and comes away with a black eye – shouting he wishes he had his “sandwiches”, which was apparently slang for a loaded firearm. He is a thug.

            The portrait is extremely hostile. There is no nuance about it, and no sense that Crawford has (or even originally had) any good intentions. This is very much in contrast with biographies of Long, which show that he began his political career with some honest reformist impulses, and with Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, where Willie Stark begins honestly but is corrupted by power. Dos Passos’s Crawford is no more than the cynical hillbilly bully taking the suckers for a ride. Through the characters of Spotswood and Ed James, Dos Passos even suggests that any eloquence or legal knowledge Crawford has is written for him by others. It is interesting that the perspective is that of a hired intellectual becoming disillusioned with his political boss – as is the case of Penn Warren’s Jack Burden in All the King’s Men – but Spotswood is shallower, boozier and more desperate than Jack Burden.

            In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was one of America’s best–known novelists, especially with his USA trilogy. Certainly on the Left, he was regarded as a radical and an experimentalist. Politically, and in the eyes of many critics, things began to go wrong for him in the Spanish Civil War. Like Ernest Hemingway, he visited Spain in 1937. Unlike the blowhard Hemingway, he was concerned about the way Communists, in what remained of the Spanish Republic, were waging war on the non-Communist left, and thus weakening the republic’s ability to resist Franco. (See on this blog my review of Nicholas Reynolds’ Writer, Sailor,Soldier, Spy, with its incidental comments on Stephen Koch’s The Breaking Point.) Seeing no real solidarity on the left, Dos Passos began a long political journey to the right. By the 1960s he was writing speeches for Richard Nixon and the very conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Much of this helps to explain why he has been shunned by critics in a way Hemingway, with his cheery, naïve, Hollywood leftism, hasn’t. (Historical note: At first Dos Passos was so much better known than Hemingway that he had the accolade of a Time magazine cover devoted to him years before Hemingway was thus noted.)

To return to Number One, this novel is the middle third of what eventually became Dos Passos’s District of Columbia trilogy. The first novel, Adventures of a Young Man (1939) was about idealistic Glenn Spotswood fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and falling foul of Stalinists who regarded him as a Trotskyite. Though Dos Passos was beginning his journey rightwards, he still had many of the agitprop and newspaper cut-up techniques he had been using since his USA trilogy.

            Each of the five long chapters that make up Number One is preceded with a portrait of an “ordinary” member of the public (a farmer; a mechanic; a miner etc.) so that Dos Passos can affirm who the “real” people are, and how different these sturdy toilers are from the conniving politicians who claim to represent them. This feature reminded me very much of the montages that used to appear in propaganda films of the day – but that may be where Dos Passos got the idea. It is surprising, however, to see the scorn and disdain with which the novelist  treats the hillbilly dialect. [Or maybe not so surprising – see on this blog my review of Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash for ideas on the contempt even America’s left intelligentsia express for poor whites.]

One “experimental” feature Dos Passos displays in this novel is a very irritating one. He has the habit of writing, as one word, two words that would usually be hyphenated or written as two separate words, thus “Spanishstyle” “cocacola” “cigarettecase” “dinnerparty” “expensivelooking” etc. I’m glad this particular affectation did not catch on.

            In my reading diaries, I jotted down just two passages from this novel which clarify where it stands.

In Chapter One, Chuck Crawford says “It’s my profound belief, Senator, that there’s more radical economics in the Holy Bible than those Roosian Reds ever thought of.” This shows that Dos Passos was aware of Huey Long’s Bible-inspired “Jubilee Year” ideas about having a year to cancel debts.

Then in Chapter Five, eventually disillusioned with Crawford, Tyler Spotswood declares to Ed James “We can’t sell out on the people, but the trouble is that me, I’m just as much the people as you are or any other son of a bitch. If we want to straighten the people out we’ve got to start with number one, not that big wind… You know what I mean. I got to straighten myself out first, see…” This gives the novel’s title a double meaning and also shows Dos Passos bidding farewell to collectivism. The individual has to reform before society will improve. This seems to be the moral drawn by somebody who has heard “the people” invoked once too often in left-wing rhetoric – and perhaps is belatedly becoming aware of original sin. The final words of the novel are “the people are the republic – the people are you”.

Regrettably, despite the acuteness of Dos Passos’s idea, this still has the ring of a propaganda slogan.

In the end, Number One is an historical artefact, but not a novel that lives in its own right, as All the King’s Men does.