Monthly Archives: November 2011

Book review: Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy

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Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy by Howard Jones. Not recommended.

In July 1839, a group of Africans that had been illegally imported into Cuba used violence to take over the Amistad while it was transporting them from Havana to Puerto Príncipe. In August, the Amistad and the Africans were seized off Long Island. These events set off a judicial, legislative, and diplomatic battle that would not be completely resolved until the Civil War ended slavery in the United States. Mutiny on the Amistad looks at the laws, issues, and people involved in this landmark case.

The key questions are: Who has jurisdiction over the case? Are the Africans legally slaves? If so, who has the rights to them? Are they “salvage,” like the Amistad? Will the case worsen the relations with Spain and strengthen Great Britain’s claims in Cuba? Will it become the catalyst the abolitionists need to give them and their cause credibility with the northern public? And how will Martin Van Buren’s administration deal with such a controversial case in a re-election year?

While the case attracted the attention of abolitionists like Arthur and Lewis Tappan and John Quincy Adams; the administration of Martin Van Buren and even those of some of his successors; and several governments, including those of Spain and Great Britain, Jones’s repetitive treatment of the story robs it of much of its drama. For example, he makes the declarative statement that the Van Buren administration’s focus was solely on re-election and ensuring the Amistad case did not interfere with that objective more than a dozen times. Some of the primary source quotes do not seem well selected to expand upon the contemporary view; in too many cases, quotes consist of one or two words, such as “gross injustice,” that are too out of context or are such common expressions that they become meaningless. The best quotes come, not from the case or the participants, but from the various southern, northern, and abolitionist publications; these headlines reveal contemporary perceptions, beliefs, and biases. As for the participants, the only voice that seems to express any passion is that of John Quincy Adams, who is clearly emotional about the abolitionist cause.

In the meantime, the voices of Joseph Cinqué and the rest of the Africans — the subjects of the entire controversy — are heard only rarely, primarily through letters to the abolitionists complaining about the poor conditions they are subjected to in prison. It is not clear if this is because their testimony was generally deemed irrelevant (they seldom speak for themselves) or if their feelings and thoughts are poorly documented because of the language and literacy barriers they initially face. Jones does try to interject them periodically, but during the long passages in which they are missing the reader feels as though the case has become an exercise in legal argument without victims.

Ultimately, it is not clear what the Amistad case accomplished. For many in the north, Cinqué and the other Africans are objects of both curiosity and sympathy, but it is not apparent that the Amistad case significantly advanced the cause of abolition — in itself an irony since Cinqué and company were never legally slaves (one point that the courts and even the district attorney agree upon). Jones asserts that the case raised public awareness of the conflict between natural law (such as man’s right to freedom and to kill to obtain it) and positive law (such as that enabling slavery and preventing slaves from rebelling). The scope of Jones’s research and quotations, save those from newspapers, does not support this; there is little presented to show that the case was discussed every day in ballrooms, parlors, and bars or that the general public’s perception was permanently altered. What is clear, however, is the racism that is prevalent throughout. Even some of the abolitionists, most of whom are spiritual leaders who find slavery an abomination against God, do not consider Africans their equals.

The facts of the case are all here, along with much of the background. Some of the conclusions seem incomplete. Throughout, one gets the impression this could have been a shorter, more succinct, and, more importantly, a more dramatic and tightly argued book had Jones or his editor cut the repetitions, redundancies, and minutiae and focused on a more cohesive discussion of the relevant specifics of the case and its effects on the public, the U.S. government, and policy. As it is, in Jones’s hands this case appears less interesting and less important historically than it probably was, and even the source of all this, Cinqué and his comrades, lose their three-dimensionality — their humanity, as it were. If you are interested in the Amistad case and in the story of the abolitionist movement, this is probably a must-read — but don’t stop here.

16 February 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

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Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum. Highly recommended.

Explaining Hitler is a misleading title, for the focus is primarily on the Jewish academic community’s attempts to explain Hitler — to put it in grossly oversimplified terms, this is somewhat like the prey explaining the motivations of the predator. The result is that, while Hitler remains a mystery, the academic and personal biases of the explainers are revealed. To each person’s theories and comments Rosenbaum adds his own analysis, finding the flaws with precision.

Hitler explanation ranges from the deeply personal (abusive father, infection by a Jewish prostitute, mother’s painful death under the care of a Jewish physician) to the inevitable influence of historical forces (post-war inflation, depression). Rosenbaum discusses the personal in depth, including Hitler’s rumored Jewish ancestor and bizarre relationship with his half-niece Geli Raubal, the convolutions each theory takes, and the lack of facts or reliable information to support any of them. For example, Rosenbaum astutely points out the only real “proof” of the abusive father is Hitler’s own assertion and sarcastically suggests that there is reason not to trust Hitler’s word. One argument that immediately comes to mind that Rosenbaum only briefly alludes to later is that millions of people have abusive fathers, bad experiences with individual members of ethnic and other groups, and so forth, yet do not turn into war criminals responsible for the deaths of millions. In short, these theories might explain Hitler’s anti-Semitism, but not the results.

What is disturbing about so many of these explanations (some of which are advocated by such noted people as Simon Wiesenthal, who favors the Jewish prostitute theory), and more sophisticated ones that appear later in the book, such as George Steiner’s, is their insistence that a Jew or a group of Jews is responsible. In these theories, a Jewish ancestor, a Jewish prostitute, an Eastern Jew with a different appearance, or the Jewish “blackmail of transcendence” and “addiction to the ideal” is responsible for Hitler — implying Hitler is not responsible at all. Although the egotistical and monomaniacal Claude Lanzmann, maker of the documentary Shoah, is too self-centered and angry to clearly articulate the basis for his belief that Hitler explanation is inherently “obscene,” it could be because so much “explanation” has found a way to point a finger at the Jews, directly or indirectly, while minimizing Hitler. Perhaps for that reason, Lanzmann is interested only in how the Holocaust was accomplished, not with the motivations of Hitler or his followers. The major flaw is that Lanzmann has missed the point by dictating that his rule of “There is no why” must apply to all other individuals — and the irony of that.

As Rosenbaum repeatedly points out, no explanations for Hitler are acceptable that excuse him — that look to a bad experience with a Jew rather than to, for example, the influence of anti-Semitism surrounding him in Austria and Germany. Again, however, it can be said that anti-Semitic influence has surrounded many people (as Rosenbaum notes, pre-war France was more anti-Semitic than either Austria or Germany) who have not killed, let alone killed millions.

Rosenbaum’s approach is excellent, pairing individuals with complementary or opposing viewpoints, e.g., Lanzmann and Dr. Micheels, the theologian Emil Fackenheim and the atheist historian Yehuda Bauer in “The Temptation to Blame God.” Even revisionist David Irving is given a chapter. Rosenbaum saves what seems to be his preference for the last chapter — Lucy Dawidowicz’s belief that Hitler decided on The Final Solution as early as 1918, based on what he said and did not say over time, and on the “laughter” that is transferred from the Jewish victims to the Nazi victors. While this does not explain the origins of Hitler’s evil, it pinpoints the time frame and removes the notion that he was ambivalent or experienced a sense of moral ambiguity. Dawidowicz’s Hitler knows early on what he wants to do and lets insiders in on the “joke” he finds it to be. Presented in this way, Dawidowicz does seem to have come closest to the truth about Hitler. After all, how can one capable of ambivalence ultimately kill millions?

To me, one critical question is not why or how any one man became evil or chose an evil course of action, for the explanation could simply be that the capacity for evil in an individual may be higher than most of us are capable of realising or accepting. That is, everyday evil like John Wayne Gacy’s is accomplished in isolation and is therefore limited in scope. The intent and the desired scope given opportunity remain unknowns. The more frightening question is why and how so many chose to follow Hitler. I do not necessarily mean the German people, per se, but the thousands of bureaucrats, managers, and soldiers who physically carried out The Final Solution, knowing exactly what this entailed and what it signified. Hitler seized the opportunity offered by the political and social situation to institutionalize his personal evil. A single man may envision and desire genocide, but it takes followers and believers to carry it out. Explaining Hitler (or Stalin or Genghis Khan) is not enough to explain the scope of this particular human evil. Without followers, there are no leaders. And without followers, millions of Jews (and Cambodians and Indians and so forth) could not have died. The evil that is so hard to face goes well beyond Hitler to a place that no one could truly wish to discover.

18 January 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Woman Who Lives in the Earth: A Novel

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The Woman Who Lives in the Earth: A Novel by Swain Wolfe. Recommended.

Originally self-published, The Woman Who Lives in the Earth is the type of work that likely would not have been published otherwise, as it is odd and lacks in popular or market appeal. The setting is a drought-stricken world (pre- or post-Apocalyptic Earth?) inhabited by people whose minds have dried up and cracked along with the land on which they live. The smaller the collective mind of Henrytown, the longer the drought lasts.

Outside the town, uninfluenced but not untouched by its poisons, live a farm family: Aesa, Ada, and their daughter Sarah, soon joined by great-grandmother Lilly, ironically driven from her own home elsewhere by flooding. Even as their well is dying, they hold out hope that the world will right itself and that balance will be restored.

The town is represented by the hairless Lizard Woman, whose McCarthyesque role is to seek evil and explanation in others. She is assisted in her pursuit by Kreel (authority), Greyling Eyes (terror), and Henkel (documentation). To these shriveled people, it must be the different that is causing the drought — the girl, Sarah, who saves a fox from the cruelty of the town children (appearing to bring it back to life, surely an act of evil!).

Sarah, who has been endowed with intelligence, imagination, and sensitivity by her great-grandmother Lilly, becomes the focus of fear for the townspeople and, unknown to them, their source of hope. She meets what appears to be a fox, Marishan Borisan, whose questions and riddles guide Sarah toward insight about the self and who enables her to experience the existence of other things — and gain empathy with them. The fox prepares her for her role. When Lizard Woman and the Triumvirate overhear Sarah describing the fox’s riddle about an egg to Lilly, they hear it as something completely different:

One part was fed with a spoon
One part was filled with fear
And the last was blind and . . . had . . . no . . . mind.

The Woman Who Lives in the Earth is a fable of those who reach out in fear and those who look within and then reach out in curiosity and hope. Without the latter, the former would dry and die or immolate themselves. Although Sarah is a child, this is not a children’s story; the consequences for those who come to deny her as evil and to accept her for the child she is are quick, harsh, and irrevocable. The Woman Who Lives in the Earth is a mystical, magical illustration of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous inaugural quotation, “. . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” for “the weaver who lives in my soul weaves a story that is hidden beneath all your thoughts and dreams.” This is an alien tale whose fantastic elements may in time seem all too real.

3 January 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

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The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Highly recommended.

I was unaware that Edith Wharton, known for such insightful novels as The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome (as well as the popular movies these novels inspired), had indulged in writing ghost stories other than “Afterward” until I found this collection. In Ghost Stories, Wharton reveals her mastery of the psychology of horror — where ghosts terrify through their oblique influence on the human mind and emotion — and where these human foibles create their own horrors.

Wharton’s ghosts take many forms — from the loyal retainer in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” to the loyal retainers of a different sort in “Kerfol”; from the guilt behind “The Eyes” to the guilt recognised “Afterward”; from the mysterious “Mr. Jones” to the ghostly and ghastly “Miss Mary Pask.” Some of these visitations are not seen, or, in the case of “Kerfol,” even heard. They fulfill various functions: To protect the secrets of the past, to bring the secrets of the past to light, to warn the present about the future, and to remind the living of the dead.

Like the best ghost story writers, Wharton begins each tale with a scenario that seems ordinary enough. Early on, she drops subtle clues that build from a feeling that something is somewhat amiss up to a sense of fractured reality that shatters one’s assumptions. Wharton masterfully creates ironic twists (“Miss Mary Pask”), innocent victims (the wife in “Afterward”), and nontraditional ghosts (“The Eyes,” “Kerfol”). In many cases, the reader is one step ahead of the narrator or protagonist (Hitchcock’s definition of suspense), creating a delicious sense of inevitable, unavoidable doom.

If you are looking for the gore and thrills of today’s tale of horror, you will not find them in Wharton’s work. If, on the other hand, you appreciate the subtle, growing sense of terror that M. R. James insinuates into The Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, you’ll discover the same feeling of the fine line between this world and another that can manifest itself at any time and in any way when the need arises. These are stories to be read, savored, and read again — alone, of course.

28 December 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Life in a Medieval Village

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Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies. Recommended.

Life in a Medieval Village is one of a series, including Life in a Medieval City and Life in a Medieval Castle, written by Frances and Joseph Gies. This series rarely touches upon the great people and events romanticized by Hollywood and numerous fiction writers (and perhaps even a few historians), but focuses on the basics of everyday life for the average person or even the average lord or cleric. The Gies use a number of primary and secondary sources, the latter of which reveal how the historian’s view of the medieval village has changed in the 20th and 21st centuries and how flexible historians must be in interpreting the evidence.

Researched and written for the layperson, Life in a Medieval Village is more accurately about life in an English medieval village, with most of the detail coming from the records of Aethelintone/Aethelington/Adelintune/Aylington (Elton) in Huntingdon, one of Ramsey Abbey’s manors. The Gies provide a history of the village concept and its definition; its role in the manorial system (contrasted to the seigneurial system); a description of its people, physical structure, buildings, administration and administrators, judicial system, family and spiritual life, and work; and the background behind its decline.

The world of Elton and similar villages is not found in movies or novels. Social and economic statuses are not always clear cut, economic upward mobility is possible primarily through acquisition of land, and even the distinction between “free” and “unfree” is not distinct. Life revolves around the manor and the villeins’ and cotters’ obligations to the mostly absent lord and the manor, which come in the form of work, rents, fees, taxes, and fines. The administrative structure of the manor is somewhat like that of a modern corporation, with the lord as CEO of multiple manors (and primary consumer of goods) who “wanted the certainty of rents and dues from his tenants, the efficient operation of his demesne, and good prices for wool and grain.” His steward, or seneschal, serves as senior executive, while the bailiff, reeve, beadle, woodward, and others are the manor’s day-to-day managers and supervisors.

As the villagers acquire surnames (from where they live, what they do, the offices they hold, and personal characteristics), patterns emerge from the records. Some families become dominant economically and politically (e.g., holding many offices such as reeve or juror many times); others decline; while yet others show a propensity for violence and petty crimes. Such infractions are punished primarily with fines rather than corporal punishment; the stocks and hanging are resorted to only in the most egregious cases. The judicial system is often compassionate (or at least practical); many fines for minor trespasses are lowered or forgiven by the court because “she is poor.” When laws are broken, a jury hears the case, but the entire village decides.

The Gies also provide an excellent overview of the passing of the medieval village, which began with a sustained famine and the Black Death. The labor-intensive manorial system simply could not survive the depletion of workers, the increase in expenses, the onerous taxes brought on by wars, and, perhaps more importantly, the sense of change and discontent that began to pervade the villein class.

The challenge for the Gies as authors is to take the minimal material available (ranging from books about estate management written for lords and stewards to court and ecclesiastical records) and to bring the village to life from these records. What emerges are people who live in fragile houses; are rarely well fed from a nutritional perspective and whose food supply is always in doubt; work hard and are not above trying to wheedle out of work; who drink and fight and are sometimes brutal; fornicate (primarily a woman’s crime but not a particularly reviled one); vandalize; commit petty crimes against the lord and their neighbors; and in short live lives of struggle every day without the expectation or vision of change in the future.

The Gies focus on Elton, with supplemental material from other English villages, so the reader who is interested in village life on the continent will need to explore other works to flesh out the picture. Because the mostly illiterate villagers themselves left few personal records, it is up to the thoughtful reader to discern the village’s character and personality and to conceive of what day-to-day life must have been, based on the little that is known — to put oneself into the worn shoes of the working villein and to imagine his or her thoughts, feelings, and aspirations. Life in a Medieval Villageis a good beginning.

30 October 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Theodore Rex

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Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris. Highly recommended.

Theodore Rex (from the dubbing given Theodore Roosevelt by author Henry James) is the second part of a trilogy-in-progress by Edmund Morris but is easily read on its own as coverage of Roosevelt’s presidential terms. This installment covers Roosevelt’s life from the day of McKinley’s assassination and his swearing-in to seven years, one hundred sixty-nine days later, when he departs Washington, D.C., by train and “did not show himself [at Baltimore], as if to emphasize to a small, wistful crowd that he was no longer public property.”

Roosevelt’s partial and whole terms are set during a time of unsettling transition — rapid developments in military technologies and abilities, influx of immigrants from Slavs to Japanese, growing global trade and interdependencies, spreading racial violence, uncontrolled combinations and trusts and corporate greed, and an increased awareness of the mismanagement of and need to conserve natural resources. In Theodore Rex, reflecting the logistics of Congress and the waning powers of a president not returning to office, the shorter first term covers more pages than the full second term.

During his presidency, Roosevelt adds the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, begins the Panama Canal after nudging Panamanian independence, supports the liberation of Cuba, resolves a Moroccan crisis, prevents a German-Venezuelan war and all that would imply, settles the Russo-Japanese conflict and wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, balances capital (much to its chagrin) and labor, rebuilds the U.S. Navy and solidifies the U.S. as a world diplomatic and military leader, and preserves an unprecedented amount of land (including five national parks, thirteen national forests, and fifteen national monuments — the Grand Canyon and Muir Woods among them).

Morris shows, through personal and family writings, the letters of friends and enemies, speeches, newspaper accounts, commentary (especially that of “Mr. Dooley” — Finley Peter Dunne), and other contemporary sources Roosevelt’s intelligence, erudition, strength of will, personal conviction of righteousness, foresight, and uncanny ability to manipulate everyone from the media to senators and diplomats. He is a man who knows what he wants, that what he wants is right, and how to make what he wants happen. His determination and conviction lead to greatly expanded executive power — which in his mind is not incompatible or inconsistent with democracy. He has his weaknesses, too — most notably, an utter lack of understanding of business, finance, and the markets.

Although Roosevelt achieves much that directly benefits the public (such as settling the United Mine Workers strike and passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906) and earns popular support bordering on adulation, neither he nor his wisdom is perfect. Morris darkly hints that Roosevelt’s enemies may have found their privacy compromised, for examples, senators who find their correspondence has already been opened by the Secret Service, although he later casts doubt on Roosevelt’s involvement.

More importantly, he discusses the Brownsville (Texas) incident at length, which reveals what can happen when democracy is subverted and power is abused. Roosevelt orders three entire companies of black soldiers — including at least one career soldier with whom he had served in Cuba — dishonorably discharged and banned from the military for life based on an incident that may have been fabricated by resentful white townspeople. Morris writes, “Brownsville had been proof to many, and perhaps even a warning to himself, of the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum.”

Morris succeeds in bringing not only Theodore Roosevelt and his compelling personality to life, but those of many others as well: wife Edith Kermit Roosevelt; daughter Alice; son Quentin; House Speaker Joseph Cannon; United Mine Workers president John Mitchell; Cabinet members such as John Hay, Philander Chase Knox, Elihu Root, and George Cortelyou; long-time nemesis Mark Hanna; successor William Howard Taft (“who must have been a very pink and white baby,” according to Kate Carew); and confidantes such as Captain Archie Butt.

Theodore Rex is not limited to political life, however. Roosevelt is portrayed not only as a writer, reader, hunter/sportsman, adventurer, hiker, swimmer, and athlete. He is shown as a difficult father to Alice (who resents his silence about her own mother, the late Alice Hathaway Roosevelt), didactic disciplinarian to Quentin (along with his “White House Gang” of friends), and favourite uncle to broods of Roosevelt clan children at his Sagamore Hill summer retreat in Oyster Bay, New York. Even in his family relations, however, Roosevelt is always mindful of his image and that of his progressive platform, hence, his “posterity letters” — seemingly personal letters to family and friends, often signed with his full name, he uses to document his viewpoints for posterity.

Morris is clearly passionate about Roosevelt, and it shows in the life he brings to events that are more than one hundred years old. Whether you are interested in American history, the U.S. presidency and its holders, turn-of-the-century events, or Theodore Roosevelt himself, Theodore Rex is not to be missed for its honest portrayal of a complex man in changing times and for the light it throws on today’s political climate and workings. Be sure to read the notes, which contain many anecdotes, quotes, and other material.

18 October 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust

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Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. Highly recommended.

Miss Lonelyhearts, set on the East Coast in New York City, and The Day of the Locust, set on the West Coast in Hollywood, are the two grim but brilliant gems of Nathanael West’s too-brief writing career.

In Miss Lonelyhearts, the title character — who has no other name to either the reader or the book’s characters — is an advice columnist subsumed by the countless letters of despair he reads every day. His editor is named Shrike, appropriately, for the species of bird that impales its victims on thorns. While he seeks escape from “Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband”: in the idealism of Religion, Art, Sex, and Nature, Shrike is always there to puncture his every attempt.

Miss Lonelyhearts’ trouble precedes his career, however. During his college years, he tries to participate in a ritual sacrifice of a symbolic lamb (Religion) that is transformed into a cruel butchery and finally into a mercy killing. Later, Miss Lonelyhearts returns again and again to the image and idea of Christ, “the answer,” whose figure he has removed from its cross and nailed to the wall at the foot of his bed (taking over the sacrifice from Romans and history and making it his own).

For sex, he tries (unsuccessfully) to subdue the “virginity” of Shrike’s wife (named Mary); takes on the offering of “an admirer,” Fay Doyle, “unhappily married [sacrificed] to a cripple”; and finally sacrifices the real virginity of Betty, whose order and sureness were “based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.” Until she encounters him, she is not a candidate for a Miss Lonelyhearts column, but he and his “sickness” make her likely to become one. Throughout, Shrike is there to tell him, “Soul of Miss L., glorify me. Body of Miss L., save me . . .” In the end, Miss Lonelyhearts finds humility and calls on Christ, not in his illness, “but in the shape of his joy.” When he is happy “and the rock had been thoroughly tested and been found perfect,” when he gives up his humanity for Christ-like beatitude and detachment, he sacrifices himself.

In The Day of the Locust, set designer Tod Hackett has entered the world of Hollywood, where nothing is real, where even everyday clothes consist of personality-altering costumes (“the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office”). Here, the slopes of the canyon are lined with “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles.” Two types of people populate this set: the “masquerades” and those who “had come to California to die,” whose “eyes filled with hatred.”

Tod himself leads an unreal life as an unwanted extra in the love life of Faye [fairy — unreal] Greener, daughter of Harry Greener, who manages to make his own death seem no more than an act — and not always a good one.

After Harry’s death, Tod and Faye’s lives connect through two men who can be considered “masquerades”: Earl the cowboy with his two-dimensional face and Miguel the Mexican, as well as Homer Simpson, a man who thinks he has come to California to recover his health and who doesn’t realise he has come here to die.

Faye teases Earl, lusts after Miguel, and holds Tod at bay while living with Homer in a nonsexual business arrangement designed to keep her clothed, fed, and living well until she gets her big acting break, which, like all else in Hollywood, is an act and an illusion.

As Homer falls for Faye, she resents both his simplicity and his sincerity. Only when Homer finds her with Miguel (after mistaking her moaning for sickness) does he realise the truth of what Tod has told him: “She’s a whore!” Like the Hollywood she wants to be part of, she is empty and bored — an illusion that cannot last. Even when Earl fights Miguel over her, the conflict is less real than that between two of Miguel’s cocks, during which the weaker bird dies a harrowing, bloody, and genuine death that evokes more compassion and sympathy than Harry’s final act.

Throughout, Tod sees the masses finally turning to apocalyptic violence, which he portrays in his painting-in-progress, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” Faye, naked and smiling, chased by the mob, is a bird released and in flight.

The violence comes, however, when a nearly catatonic Homer attempts to leave this never-never land and to return to Wayneville, Iowa, on a night when the crowd has gathered for a movie premiere. Finding himself under attack by a bored neighbor child, he finally strikes back in a murderous rage, giving the crowd the impetus it seeks.

It is not “The Burning of Los Angeles,” but rather a fusion of Art, Sex, Religion, and Violence. Here, West returns to Miss Lonelyhearts and the attempted ideals of Art, Sex, and Religion ending in violence; he says of the womb: “Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands” — an exact parallel to the idealist scenarios Shrike creates for Miss Lonelyhearts, only to puncture them with the fury of his cold, emotional violence.

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are short, beautifully crafted masterpieces in which nothing is wasted. West captures Hollywood perfectly, where, in 1939, there were already New Age cults like that of the “raw-foodists”: “We eat only raw [vegetables]. Death comes from eating dead things.” In today’s world, where millions turn to the Dear Abby columns and to Oprah, and where the cult of the celebrity is built on movies featuring easy sex and special-effects violence, Nathanael West might feel right at home — in time and place.

6 October 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: On the Rez

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On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Highly recommended.

If you are looking for structure and pat solutions to contemporary Native American problems, you won’t find them in On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Like the reservation life and stories it reveals, On the Rez is rambling and spontaneous.

Frazier uses his sometimes problematic friendship with Le War Lance, a Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota whom he meets in New York City, to explore Pine Ridge life today along with past and present injustices. Le seems to have no home, no permanent job, no wife, and no children. He does have family on the reservation — as well as a bottomless taste for inexpensive beer. Frazier recounts their many days spent together, whether it’s watching TV while drinking beer, driving around the reservation looking for people, or facing a propane leak and potential explosion — and death. Frazier is genuinely fond of Le, but not of his drinking, and he repeatedly says how much easier it is to be around Le and his brother Floyd John once Floyd John undergoes rehab and gives up drinking. Alcoholism, diabetes, fatal car accidents, and more are part of day-to-day life on Pine Ridge.

Frazier also devotes several chapters to the life of SuAnne Big Crow, an Indian high school basketball star who led Pine Ridge’s Lady Thorpes basketball team to a state championship and traveled to Europe and Australia as part of an Indian all-star team before her death in a car accident. SuAnne serves as a uniting force between Indians and their often-prejudiced white neighbors, between the lingering Red Cloud and Crazy Horse factions, and between American Indian Movement (AIM) traditionalists and “goon” progressives on the reservation. Through her athletic feats, fame, and sheer force of personality, she becomes bigger than life.

Between describing the day-to-day adventures he has with Le, Floyd John, and their family and friends and SuAnne’s career and influence, Frazier turns to history in a broad sense to put life on the rez in perspective. He discusses the rivalry between Red Cloud and Crazy Horse (which lives today); the conflict between AIM, led by Dennis Banks and Russell Means, and then-tribal chief Dick Wilson and his “goons” (which Wilson turned into “Guardians of the Oglala Nation”); and the U.S. government’s still-unresolved theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux. He covers topics as wide ranging as Iroquois history and Mohawks as high-rise construction workers to the storied past of famous Indian bars. He covers the rise of Indian casinos and their current status in legislative limbo.

While many Americans comfort themselves for the wrongs perpetrated against Indians — from physical violence and culture destruction to land theft — with the idea that the white man rescued the Indian from primitivism and stagnation, Frazier points out Native contributions to Europeans, such as a host of agricultural riches (failing to mention the medicinal wonders being mined in South America by ethnobotanists such as Dr. Mark Plotkin).

More importantly, Indians passed on to settlers seeking escape from European political, religious, and economic tyranny their “all-around skepticism about who and who was not great” along with some basic principles of democracy. Today, however, Frazier says, “The freedom that inhered in Powhatan, that Red Cloud carried with him from the plains to Washington as easily as air — freedom to be and to say, regardless of disapproval — has become a luxury most of us can’t afford.” The Indian influence could not prevent the reinvention of Europe — “early American was European culture reset in an Indian frame.” Frazier quotes Thomas Jefferson: “It will be said, that great societies cannot exist without government. The savages, therefore, break them into small ones.” Where Frazier errs is in being too broad — while the free-ranging Sioux of the plains valued individual freedom, less nomadic groups such as Powhatan’s and the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy placed more emphasis on leadership. Powhatan’s freedom was that of a leader, while Red Cloud’s was that of a Sioux.

Today, there is Le War Lance, representing Trickster — cunning, dishonest, unpredictable, selfish, manipulative — a freedom-loving survivor. There is, or was until her death, the Indian hero SuAnne Big Crow, to whom nearly every inner-city and suburban teenager and adult alike can look — sports legend, academic star, role model for peers, and point of unity among a disparate people, even today through “Happytown, USA” — the SuAnne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center founded in her memory by her mother, Chick Big Crow.

Then there are the rest of the Sioux — struggling with poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, disease, and a host of social ills that cannot be fixed through this program or that legislation. They, like Le, are survivors.

I recommend that you read On the Rez in conjunction with American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa and edited with an introduction and notes by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. Zitkala-Sa was a turn-of-the-century Sioux educator, musician, writer, and activist who addressed many of the same issues Frazier raises — nearly 100 years ago.

13 September 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Virtuous Woman

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A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons. Not recommended.

In A Virtuous Woman, Kaye Gibbons tells the story of the daughter of Southern gentry, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes; her tenant farmer second husband, Jack Stokes; and those who affect their lives most — Burr, his wife Tiny Fran, her delinquent son Roland, and their daughter June.

Gibbons uses a technique of alternating chapters, with the first written by Jack, the next by Ruby, and so on, until the last chapter. Chapter sixteen is written in the third person omniscient, with characters’ thoughts sprinkled throughout in italics. This method is effective in the beginning, where Jack talks about his reaction to the news that Ruby has been diagnosed with lung cancer and her silent, selfish request for a cigarette, while next she talks about her response to his reaction and her own motivation. Further into the plot, however, this method loses its impact as the reminiscences become more random and less structured.

Although the idea of alternating chapters, most flashbacks except Jack’s chapters toward the end, lends itself to a more dynamic approach to time, Gibbons keeps it virtually linear, from Ruby’s youth and disastrous first marriage to a drunken, controlling migrant worker named John Woodrow and his death to her marriage to Jack, the notable events of their lives, Ruby’s death, and Jack’s life after Ruby.

A Virtuous Woman is well written and in a few instances somewhat insightful. The characters, however, often seem to lack interest or depth; some, like Woodrow, Tiny Fran, and Roland, are little more than stock rural characters (no-good man, no-good teenaged girl, no-good bastard). They appear primarily to fulfill a standard a role and have little interest — they exist only to explain such things as Ruby’s path toward Jack and the Stokes’s unusual interest in Burr and Tiny Fran’s daughter June. When Woodrow is critically injured in a drunken brawl, the wives of the other migrant workers feel Ruby should “stand by her man” no matter what, which also seems to perpetuate a type rather than offer any real insight.

Above all, A Virtuous Woman feels forced and unnatural. It is out of character for a barely literate man like Jack Stokes to document his memories, including quoted conversations, in such detail and with such care. This would have been a stronger story if presented as an oral history rather than a written one.

The unlikely love story and marriage of Jack Stokes and Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes has potential, as do the characters. Unfortunately, Gibbons does not have the depth as an author to uncover it.

19 August 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Virgin and the Gipsy

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The Virgin and the Gipsy by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

Discovered in France after D. H. Lawrence’s death and never finalized by the author, The Virgin and the Gipsy is the fairy tale-like story of Yvette Saywell, a 19-year-old rector’s daughter chafing against the moral “life unbelievers” that make up her family.

Although the “virgin” of the title, Yvette is no demure maiden. She is temperamental, strong willed, and aware of her father’s “degrading unbelief, the worm which was his heart’s core” — just as her fallen mother was. She enjoys being contrary and openly contemptuous of her middle-class, overtly moral, covertly disturbed family. Her every exposure to life leaves her harder; “She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.” She loathes the rectory “with a loathing that consumed her life.”

The most hated person in the Saywell family is the rector’s ancient, blind mother, called “The Mater” or “Granny.” Yvette hates her. Her sister Lucille hates her. Their aunt Cissie hates her. She is compared to a toad, a reptile, a fungus. Like the toad that snaps its jaws on all the bees exiting the hive and devouring all life around it, The Mater, who gave literal life to the family, absorbs the entire family’s energy and life force. The gardener smashes the toad with a stone in oblique foreshadowing of The Mater’s fate.

Yvette is keenly aware of her status as a “moral unbeliever” (like her mother, who ran off with young man when Lucille and Yvette were children) and her virgin power. When she finds herself in the company of a virile gipsy man and his “lonely, predative glance,” she finds herself in his virile power, “gone in his will.”

The gipsy represents her “free-born will,” which separates her from the rest of the Saywells. He is an outsider, “on an old, old war-path against such as herself . . . Yes, if she belonged to any side, and to any clan, it was to his.” Under the influence of the absent mother, an adulterous couple she encounters, and the defiant gipsy who “endures in opposition,” Yvette is forced into a confrontation with her sneering father — a confrontation that brings out his hidden evil and self-righteousness.

The Virgin and the Gipsy is an odd novel, much of it written in the style of an adult fairy tale. “The Mater could be a variation of “The Wicked Queen,” while “She-who-was-Cynthia,” the “white snowflower” of a myth or tale, blooming in perpetuity, could be the prodigal Princess whose transformation into a degraded nettle threatens the self-satisfied and lethal stability of the Saywells. The deluge that puts an end to this uncomfortable status quo is at first mysterious in origin, purging the world as it does on a clear, sunny, rainless day. The gipsy could be the Prince or the traveler, come from afar and finally fulfilling his role in the tale as rescuer — literally and figuratively.

Lawrence was known for rewriting and editing many times over, and clearly The Virgin and Gipsy lacks his revision. Yet its themes of female sexuality, male power over it, the immorality of conventional morality, and the sacredness of vitality that are explored in depth in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Women in Love, are here presented in a beautifully distilled form — perhaps more haunting for its very simplicity.

18 August 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf