Anna Faktorovich
This set of reviews includes more novels, and recent auto/biographies because I completed my 18th and 19th century re-attribution series, and now I am searching for new genres to explore. I am curious to learn what types of fiction and non-scholarly non-fiction has won awards or has been published by mainstream publishers. Has mainstream literature slumped, or are there some treasures in it that can help me understand our cultural moment?
“Shelley’s” Canonical Poems Are Backdated and Ghostwritten by Dunton-Watts
Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, et. al., eds., The Poems of Shelley: Volume Five, 1821-1822 (London: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2024). Hardcover. 508pp. Index, facsimile. ISBN: 978-1-138-01664-4.
*****
“Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the… poets of the English Romantic period. This is the fifth volume of a six-volume edition of The Poems of Shelley, which aims to present all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between late summer 1821 and late January 1822. They include Hellas, a lyrical drama written in support of the Greek War of Independence, composed in September–November 1821 and published in February–March 1822, his unfinished tragedy Charles the First which he had been planning for several years, as well as important shorter poems such as ‘The Indian Girl’s Song’, ‘Autumn: a Dirge’ and his ‘Epitaph’ for John Keats. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines.”
My stylometric study, which is under review with publishers, re-attributed “Percy Shelley’s” verse Adonais (1821?) to Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914), as its backdating forger and ghostwriter. Watts’ B-Hand is used in “Percy’s” verse manuscripts, such as “The Sunset” and “On a Faded Violet”. And this same Hand-B is used in the lines from “Percy’s” Autumn: A Dirge that illustrates this volume of “Shelley’s” poetry. It is even more proximate to the Hand-B on “Coventry Patmore’s” “The Unknown Eros” (1877), and “Algernon Swinburne’s” “The Garden of Proserpine” (1860-1?). One detail in the blurb that supports the idea that these entire “Percy” notebooks were created decades later than stated and backdated by Watts is that Hellas is a puffery of the Greek War of Independence, which is claimed to have been completed within months of Percy’s death. The standard biographies report that Percy was deliriously sick with fever and other symptoms near the end, so he is not likely to have been coherent, if these are true. My interpretation of events indicates it is likely that Percy died fighting in this conflict, but this detail was altered in histories. The War also lasted between 1821-32, so it would have been clairvoyant to anticipate that it would be successful. If it had failed, it would have been labeled as a rebellion, a rising, or an agitation; and no pufferies would have been ordered. Such pufferies of “glorious” British assistance in foreign victories tend to be written long after such events, as part of the propagandistic effort. Thus, it would have been more logical if this drama was written at least a decade after 1832. These ideas came to me after looking at the facsimile. It is unusual for a canonical verse collection to include a facsimile of a manuscript; thus, this is a very useful feature.
Another useful feature is the inclusion of appendixes of relevant primary sources, which are curiously placed next to the poems they are assisting with explaining, instead of at the back of the book. This is a better placement for appendixes, as researchers can more easily turn between these pages. One of these follows “A Fresh Fair Child Stood by My Side”, which is a “Translation of Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto”, and this original Italian version follows for reference. The appendix is introduced with a clarifying brief introductory note. The lines are numbered to help find what changed during the translation process. The notes in “Shelley’s” translation are extensive, taking up around half of the page. In my experience, this is about the degree of annotation that is necessary to contextualize and define such complex texts. In my study, I speculated if Watts might have spent a significant amount of time in Italy, as his group includes a few texts in Italian, as well as such translations. Though most of the notes are comparing two versions, such as alterations in punctuation between them. Though this seems to be because the rest of the commentary is provided in the introduction to this poem. These notes explain where this piece appeared in the notebooks, where it was published, and comments on mistakes made by past editors, such as not realizing it is a translation (284). If I was using this book in my research, all of this would be very helpful. The complexity of these annotative and introductory pieces is the reason this series needed 6 volumes to fit “Shelley’s” not-that-numerous poetry.
Dialogues Between Faceless and Nameless
Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore (New York: Vintage International, 2018). Softcover: $19. 734pp. ISBN: 978-0-525-43576-1.
***
“The epic new novel from… author of 1Q84” (2009). This is a Japanese novel that does not satirize 1984 (as I assumed from its name), but rather is about events that take place in the year 1984, from which a character crosses into an alternate dimension; the main character being an assassin specializing in killing abusive men. The author of these novels is Haruki Murakami (1949-), who owned a jazz bar before beginning to publish best-selling and award-winning novels in 1979, with the serialization of Hear the Wind Sing, which is a modern novel that leaves its main character unnamed (Killing also has an unnamed lead), and digressively ponders about life.
In this new novel, Killing Commendatore, “a thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors… Of love and loneliness, war and art…” The concluding comment in this blurb is that it is a “homage to The Great Gatsby”. The Guardian’s review clarifies the relationship between these works: it is not imitating Gatsby’s parties, but rather simply the loneliness and wealth of the lead. Given these facts, a fair conclusion should have been that this novel does not research enough about Gatsby to imitate it, as the author merely seems to believe “Gatsby” symbolizes a sad rich guy. The Irish Times was fairer as it explained that as the narrator fails to find “his creative genius”, the book’s style devolves into what seems to be “the first draft”.
Killing begins with an attempt to put the readers into a deep sleep, as it describes a “faceless man” awaking from a “nap”. This is followed by a cyclical debate between this “faceless” guy and the “nameless” narrator. They argue back-and-force about the “faceless” guy demands that the “nameless” guy should draw him, as he promised. The debate ends with the “faceless” guy giving up for now, and threatening to return to try and convince the narrator to make the portrait some other time. After a section break, the “faceless” guy disappears, and the narrator returns to attempting to put the readers to sleep by repeating the word “dream” three times in two sentences cyclically. This “Preface” clarifies the point in the last paragraph: “Maybe someday I’ll be able to draw a portrait of nothingness.” In other words, this “Preface” was intended to be about nothing, or to say nothing, while wasting as many words as possible. The narrator then explains that the title of this novel is based on a “painting” of this name by “another artist”. Penguin explains on their website that this is a painting that depicts “Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni”, wherein Donna Anna’s father, or Il Commendatore (knights’ captain), is killed by Don Giovanni. The artist altered the setting from the original European setting to one set in 7th-century Japan. It is puzzling why this note does not credit the artist of this paining, as this was the simple fact I was searching for. When I returned to the blurb, I found the reference to the specific name of “Tomohiko Amada”; he is credited with this painting, and he seems to be a fictional character, but Penguin made it seem as if there was a real painting that was being referenced. At least this novel is not puffing a specific living artist called “Amada”.
Finally, some engaging descriptions begin in the first chapter, with a scene of common rains in the mountains, that seems to echo ancient Chinese black ink simplistic watercolor painting. There are also some interesting details about time passing oddly in the 9 months between his first marriage ending, and his second marriage to the same woman beginning (6-7).
Turning to a random page in the middle leaves readers again in nonsense: “I involuntarily gulped, and, still seated on the stool, slowly gazed around me. I couldn’t see anyone else there, of course…” He notices the “floor”, before hearing a pop song playing outside. Then, he begins questioning if he is audio-hallucinating these noises (202).
One chapter is called, “28: Franz Kafka Was Quite Fond of Slopes”, this again seems to be an attempt to elevate this book by associating it with classics. The first chapter describes the narrator “teaching” an “art class” simply by telling students to sketch people, and then having the students give each other pufferies. Only after this pointless exercise in flattery, does he, as the teacher explain “simple techniques for rough sketches.” Instead of in fact describing any “technique”, he defines two synonyms (croquis and dessan) by pretending there is a distinction between them, in that one is a “rough sketch” and the other “a blueprint” with “certain accuracy”. No age is given for these children, but they were told to specifically make “rough sketches” at the onset, and they were using “charcoal” and “soft pencils”, hinting that they are in K-3 (320). Everything about this scene is nonsensical and absurd, but it is drawing me inwards to understand what is happening and why.
This novel does not give me hope for the state of modern literature. But it is better than many other recent novels I have read. If a reviewer was only given some of the denser sections, I can imagine how this work was chosen for awards over others. Is this seriously what mainstream publishers and award-judges looking for? There are many pages throughout that are seriously designed to make it impossible for somebody to read this book cover-to-cover. These sections tend to directly refer to sleep: “‘Don’t you think you should get some sleep?’” This line is assigned to a rare named character: Menshiki (640). The absence of names throughout suggests that this might have been the result of AI writing a novel with Western names, and the author just deleting almost all names to fix this problem. I will keep searching for a great modern novel elsewhere. It is good to have this example in my collection, if I have to dissect it further to understand why sleepy critics prefer puffing and awarding a novel prizes, instead of struggling through the reading.
The Civil War as a Bias Prop
Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023). Hardcover: $28. 280pp. Illustrations. ISBN: 978-0-451-49333-0.
**
“…Story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds. In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives. The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.”
Phillips’ cover biography only lists the books she published and the fellowships and awards she won for them. Her Wikipedia clarifies that she received an MFA, and has been teaching creative writing at Ivy League and research universities since. She seems to have published her first short story collections with an award immediately upon completing the MFA. This information raises the bar for her novel because she should know better regarding the writerly craft as its teacher.
Problems with this novel begin in the absurdities in its blurb. A 12-year-old is committed in an asylum with her mother, and is allowed to serve as her “maid”? An asylum is a semi-prison, where the main job of the staff is to make sure nobody leaves without permission, and barring entry to anybody who hasn’t paid to be there is also a central job. Yet this girl manages to pretend she is a “maid” by repeatedly cleaning only her mother’s room, and not the usual set of dozens of rooms on a floor? Either she was allowed to stay because she is a dependent, or she had to have trained. The context suggested she was training to become a maid at 12… Timelines for women being allowed to nurse begin in around the 1850s, when Britain and other places began developing nursing training problems, such as the one in the New England Hospital for Women in 1862. They certainly would not have trained a 12-year-old, as they were working to establish the general legitimacy of nursing by members of the female gender.
Another puzzle is the phrase “freedmen and runaways”. The Civil War freed African American slaves. Thus, post-Civil War there were no “runaway” slaves… as they were free… So is this term applying to runaway children? If so, why are they contrasted with “freedmen”?
The “Contents” list chapters that jump between the post-War “1874” mentioned in the blurb, and the pre-war-end “1864”. Thus, this is a book about the Civil War that seems to not want to announce itself as such directly.
Then, the first chapter opens with a quote from Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbridge who explained that treatment in asylums is typically known to force those being treated “to leave their families” (3). If this doctor explained that children were not allowed in asylums, and this author knows this at the onset, why go through with this premise?
The chapter that follows is written in the first-person voice of a 12-year-old. This explains that the narrative structure is designed to allow the author to use an extremely simply voice, or to write with minimal descriptive effort. The dialogue is not separated with quotation marks: again seemingly because of the use of the narrator, or just because of the author’s laziness.
Then, the next chapter, back in 1864, thankfully is not written in the voice of a 2-year-old, but rather picks up a third-person adult voice. It is as if two different authors created this book, but only one byline was credited. Some sections in the first chapter are a bit denser, with descriptions such as the semi-racist “Mrs. Bowman’s solid black form. I thought of her tilting backward and crushing us both…” (29). This is a denser section… A similarly-dense variant appears in the third-person chapters. This an inconsistency, if the author was attempting to authentically separate the child and the adult’s voices. It is difficult to find clear dense description and narration, but it does occasionally appear, as in: “Cherokee, they called the West Virginian, for his use of herbs as charms and salves, his skill at fastening his long legs around his mount and riding slipped to the side, holding to her mane” (49). When there is psychology mentioned it tends to display a shallow feeling of totally detached depression from most characters: “He hoped for such himself if he was to die in the coming weeks, but a quick death looked more unlikely…” (48). The author seems to be deeply depressed by having to write this narrative, which keeps jumping from one disjoined idea to the next without fully painting a scene or a character.
A great novel is supposed to be a believable lie. One should be able to change the title-page from X: A Novel to X: An Autobiography without losing the readers belief in the authenticity of the story. A novel can confess that it is a lie by being called a novel. But it cannot give up on the idea of making characters and settings as precisely-described as they would be if the author had experienced these events and was reporting them exactly as they happened. Jumping between details, timelines, perspectives, and including inessential details are all very bad for making a readable autobiography. An auto-story has to capture interest with extreme situations, or there is no point for readers to stop and listen to hundreds of pages of babbling where nothing really happens. The first question a novelist should ask before starting a novel: is my lead somebody who has undergone something shocking that would make shoppers stop to listen in a mall? If the character is a “type”, or if the situation is a mimicking sub-sub-genre, how can this lead to an award? It is an atrocity to set out to describe the Civil War, and to be frozen in this description in colors of the characters… If choosing to write historical fiction, it must include historical research. If historical fiction lacks history; it is fiction that is pulling on basic modern biases and emotional strings tied to the “Civil War”, without actually exploring what happened. These are just some notes in case the author dives back into writing, or is teaching this craft to others.
Colonialization Through Forged Theological Propaganda
Sharonah Esther Fredrick, An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, August 1, 2024). Hardcover: $70. 368pp, 6X9”. Index, bibliography. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3675-3.
***
“…The first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru’s lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief… Fredrick… utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations… Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America… conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish Conquest.”
There is a problem between the sections of this blurb that I took out and the repetitions in both the “Preface” and the “Introduction”. One noticeable echo is the repetition between these sections of Jose Maria Arguedas’ quote regarding the similarity of the covered Huarochiri Manuscript to Popul Vuh of “Peruvian antiquity”. Both sections begin with this reference, but only the second attributes it clearly. Thus, those who read the “Preface” first are confused by this reference, and then notice they are seeing a replay in the intro. A semi-clear explanation follows in the intro. Seemingly both were apparently “Latin” Indigenous texts; this is a misnomer, as a text in the Latin alphabet is very likely to have been ghostwritten by colonists, and not by the natives. Popul Vuh is described as compiled by the Maya “mid-sixteenth century and disseminated two centuries later”. And Huarochiri was “compiled in Quechua at the close of the sixteenth century” in “Lima and disseminated in incomplete form beginning in the late nineteenth century”. Both are anti-native-religion, as they describe plots of gods with “cynicism”. “For Mayan and Andean spirituality, supernatural powers are neither always wise nor good.” All this seems to report a firm narrative that is not being recognized by the narrating historian. Fredrick has uncovered forgeries of anti-native theological texts that are likely to have been introduced by the Latin-writing Spanish colonialists, who successfully used these between the 16th and the 19th centuries to retain colonial control. If there are no pre-Latin drafts of these manuscripts; then, they are extremely unlikely to have been authentic native creations. Instead of digressing into pondering the rebellious sentiment of these texts, this historian really should have turned these manuscripts over for carbon-dating, and the like to check their years of creation, and authenticity. It is very difficult to review the rest of the contents of this book with these questions looming over it.
The beginning of the first chapter repeats some of these ideas, describing these manuscripts as showing “ambivalence regarding the idea of divinity”, and of their “heroes”, as they “mock supernatural omnipotence”. While these ideas are on the right track to understand the non-native perspective in these books. The end of this first paragraph digresses into the natives raising successful Mayan and Andean rebellions, in part because they shared this cynic view of all religion. The propaganda the colonists were spreading was the main weapon that enforced colonialism, as opposed to any military capabilities of these awkward and short-staffed conquerors. Theological propaganda was powerful because it led to very few rebellions against the colonists, by the Mayans and others. There wee a few brief rebellions by the Mayans in 1638, 1847, and a long Castle War of Yucatan (1847-1901), which resulted in a brief Mayan’s victory and the establishment of the State of Chan Santa Cruz, which was then ceded by Mexico by 1893.
Opening this book to a random page leaves a deep sense of the author’s confusion. On one page there is a description of the Hero Twins, before they are described as being slightly less fragmentary in the manuscript than two other characters “due to the nature of the Manuscript. Their identities seem to have been interrupted in mid-formation, so each one has a mysterious shadow self: the unnamed sister for Chaupinamca and the anonymous brother for Paria Caca.” Then the author digresses without clarifying: “Variations on the theme of ‘naming’ in the HM may have historical roots” (258). There are likely to be “historical roots” for everything in “history”, so this is not a useful comment.
This book needs to be thoroughly re-organized. There are some great ideas that surface, but then new ideas come up without tying them in a logical chronological or narrative order. There is valuable information that is just below the surface, but the author has failed to present it in a digestible format.
Dual-Biographies of Problematic “Scientists”, Linnaeus and Buffon, Who “Darwin” Plagiarized
Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (New York: Random House, 2024). Hardcover: $35. 410pp. Index, bibliography, illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-9848-5520-6.
****
“In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark? Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens, but he also denied that species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of their conflicting worldviews continued well after their deaths, as their successors contended for dominance in the emerging science that came to be called biology.” This book explores “the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon—as well as the groundbreaking, often fatal adventures of their acolytes—to trace an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.”
My recently-completed 19th century British canonical re-attribution study explains that Charles Babbage plagiarized “Charles Darwin’s” theory-of-evolution in Origin of Species (1859) from century-older French texts of Linnaeus and Buffon. Babbage even confessed this plagiarism in his own posthumous “Samuel Butler”-bylined Evolution, Old & New: Or the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck (1879). I learned a good deal of what I reinterpret with my stylometric evidence from this new study of Jason Roberts. I had learned about Roberts’ book in a mass-media source that advertised that Roberts was accusing Darwin of plagiarism, and requested to review it. But it does not explain these plagiarisms as much as the press suggested. The blurb for Roberts’ book indicates that the focus is on the errors Buffon and Linnaeus made. Stressing their mistakes repeats the standard anti-Buffon or anti-pre-Darwin propaganda that distorted earlier ideas, stressing their errors, and puffed “Darwin” as a superior “discoverer”, instead of acknowledging that he plagiarized these theories from these dismissed predecessors.
Babbage is never mentioned in Roberts’ index, but it does include another ghostwriter: Joseph Banks. Banks led the forgery effort to plagiarize science from other European countries and backdate it to make it seem as if Britain discovered those things first. Banks major forgeries included “Newton’s” output. Banks died in 1820, so other ghostwriters took over these forgeries after him. Banks is relevant for Roberts’ study because Linnaeus was a favorite author that Banks puffed in too many of his own articles. And Banks used scientific “exploration” as the front to profit from slavery and colonialism, as these exploitative voyages could be forged under the disguise of science-gathering ones, following the explorations made by Linnaeus. Pages 286-7 present a brief biography of Banks that summarizes it too lightly to understand its implications. For example, when Banks hired his own Oxford botany instructor who he hired one of the only Jewish professors at Cambridge. There was then a strange intersection regarding the end of Linnaeus career with the publication of his last book, and Banks copying his categorization method in his following projects. And the claim that Banks paid “out of his own pocket to staff” his 1768 voyage misses the point that Banks could have sponsored a slave-trading, colonial, or piratical expedition to make a profit, and he would not have needed to share his accounting with anybody as he instead categorized the trip as a scientific exploration that was worthy of a “knighthood”. Most biographies puff Banks’ self-funding as a positive, when it strongly indicates that he was sponsoring extremely risky private trading ventures, while separately profiting from government funding without oversight of these ventures themselves. Such pufferies without questioning of British scientists appear in all modern science history books.
While I wish this book scrutinized the facts more closely, it is one of very few modern scientific history books that have raised questions of plagiarism among British foundational scientists. And the book’s style is a bit too conversation for a scientific history. For example, Chapter Six ends with ponderings about a scientists schedule being consistent for “fifty years”. “Far from seeming like deprivation, this rigorous cultivation of solitary focus ‘was my whole pleasure’”. A long quote follows that expands on this philosophy (66). What does any of this have to do with proving the Darwin plagiarism, or the differences between the science of the two central figures. This is basically a light scientific dual-biography that digressively reports with a bit of fictional interpretation what two scientists did across their lives. This partially corresponds to what was promised in the blurb. Though I wish it did far more. The authorial style is smooth, and with sufficient details supported with facts for this to be reasonably accurate source, though it should have far more specific citations for its information. The notes section only includes a couple dozen notes, with only a few sources per-chapter. Still this is a relatively good book that helped me to understand this subject when I read between its lines.
Anti-Monarchical-Fairytale Experiment
Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Gretel and the Great War: A Novel (New York: FSG Originals: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Softcover: $18. 214pp. ISBN: 978-0-374-61424-9.
***
“…Shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down—and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist. Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent… And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world—soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars—was one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?”
This novel’s cover is troubling, as it suggests a child is having an affair with an adult Nazi, as a ballerina’s foot is juggling an army helmet. Though perhaps the helmet is not affiliated with Germans. I am not going to look up the symbolism. There is also a problem with the premise that a doctor is reading nightly extensive stories to his patient. It would be extremely wasteful for a doctor to do such work, instead of a nurse. And such a request is just practically unlikely to have been fulfilled. If a doctor was willing to oblige this request, it might suggest he is attempting to have an inappropriate affair with a nonverbal patient.
The preface somewhat clarifies these questions, as it explains that this novel is not about what relationship formed between the patient and the doctor, but rather is most composed of these stories and accompanying medical notes. I mentioned in a previous fiction review that fiction’s job is to create the illusion that the narrative is an autobiography. And this perspective of describing the fragments as stories sent as part of a medical mysteries does somewhat address this note.
The first story, “A: The Architect of Advanced Age at Last Builds an Abode…” is difficult to dive into in part because it shows that this novel includes blank lines between paragraphs. This is an annoying formatting error that many writers make. It is frustrating that this book’s editor just left it in as-is. Line breaks are designed to separate section-breaks, so inserting them after every paragraph suggests disjointed pauses. It is a waste of trees to add to the length of a book by adding such blank spaces.
And while the title promises a scientific explanation, the story shortly digresses into “the littlest Princess” criticizing the construction (6). Apparently, this Princess is the only named-by-title character in this story. Meanwhile, instead of describing the science of architecture, the narrator offers nonsensical lines, such as when the architect offers a solution to an impasse that he would himself “provide a daily adornment of the façade through the judicious use of flower-boxes, which he himself, by means of a hydraulic lift, will hang beneath every window at seven in the morning, before the Princess has risen, and remove again at nine at night…” Basically, this is a variant on European classic fairytales.
In story, “H: The Hotelier Has to play the Happy hostess to hurt the man who hurt her husband…” the main named title-character is “the Duke”, who is described “as a young man” who “was not only a sybarite but also an egoist, a nihilist, and a wastrel, fond of amusing his aristocratic friends” with “cruel jokes at the expense of their inferiors, had occasioned the death of the hotelier’s husband…” (71).
Basically, this is an anti-monarchical-fairytale. This is a curious concept as an experiment. But it is extremely difficult to dive into reading this book. Thus, I do not recommend it for casual readers. But if somebody has a lot of free time, and is interested in digressive ponderings, this should not be a disappointment.
The Personal Lives of Lazy Spies
Edward Mickolus, Ed., Stories from Langley: A Glimpse Inside the CIA (Lincoln: Potomac Books: University of Nebraska Press, July 1, 2024). Softcover: $29.95. 408pp, 6X9”. Index, bibliography, 27 illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-64012-620-6.
***
“Applicants to the Central Intelligence Agency often asked Edward Mickolus what they might expect in a career there. Mickolus, a former CIA intelligence officer whose duties also included recruiting and public affairs, never had a simple answer. If applicants were considering a life in the National Clandestine Service, the answer was easy. Numerous memoirs show the lives of operations officers collecting secret intelligence overseas, conducting counterintelligence investigations, and running covert action programs. But the CIA isn’t only about case officers in far-flung areas of the world, recruiting spies to steal secrets. For an applicant considering a career as an analyst, a support officer, a scientist, or even a secretary, few sources provide reliable insight into what a more typical career at the CIA might look like. This collection of the exploits and insights of twenty-nine everyday agency employees is Mickolus’s answer. From individuals who have served at the highest levels of the agency to young officers just beginning their careers, Stories reveals the breadth of career opportunities available at the CIA and offers advice from agency officers themselves.”
If this book was properly executed, it would indeed solve a gap in books about the CIA. The books I previously reviewed about spies have mostly included information already reported in the news. It is rare to find a book that attempts to give honest and detailed information about just what a full-time spy would be asked to do in their job-description. Though the point of this book is to prove that only a small part of this agency is committed to espionage, while most of it does some other sort of “Intelligence”.
The “Contents” list did not bode well as almost half of this book is dedicated to describing jobs connected to the “Soviet” threat, including “Monitoring Soviet Military Capabilities”, and “Winning the Cold War”. Er… The “Soviet” threat ended three decades ago. Thus, if this book is attempting to give information to current applicants, it is not hitting this mark. The first of these sections begin with a chapter by Michael D. Flint and Boyd Sutton. This chapter begins by clarifying the dual byline for an autobiography: “In 1979-80, I—Michael Flint—worked in Soviet… Control…” A similar explanation is not given for what part of this narrative was written by Sutton… (57). In the second paragraph, he directly explains that his job was to design LAMM, “which provided unit-specific order-of-battle history (equipment, readiness, subordination, and location) for Soviet… forces (1960-2000)”. Curious, so he designed a database that could be used to look up military information. This is an unusually direct and specific opening for a chapter from a book in this genre.
This chapter clarifies why this book goes back to Soviet days: they could not disclose echoing database information on current operations, but because this database went out of use in 2000, it must have become declassified, allowing the author to give some details. It is important for government agencies to offer these types of explanations for what they actually do. The lack of transparency allows total misuse of funds to achieve almost nothing that is in the public’s interest.
While the data-collection account is relatively dense with facts, another two chapters I picked out of the middle are not. The first of these is chapter “24: First Tour Adventures: The Mysterious Case of the Missing Missionary”. The narrator describes that being sent to a “remote” outpost without even clearly explaining that he was sent there by the CIA, or just what his job was there. Immediately upon arriving, his confessed mission was to find a mate. He describes hunting for one among the American missionaries, and marrying perhaps his only option. The funny turn-of-events is that the agency took their marriage and her title-change to mean that the previous “missionary” had gone missing. Despite being in the CIA, this guy did not feel personally responsible for correcting this error, and instead jokes about it, noting that the Ministry of Justice might still register his wife as missing-abroad.
Then, the next chapter “25: Out of the Barn, into the Beltway” by Hazel Harrison describes extremely dull parts of the application process, without noting any of the details. For example, the questions in the application are not given, and instead the narrator focuses on worrying about having to make a phone call: an unusual thing for her. She leaves out the “unknown” destination where she was stationed after hire. Then, she describes getting to DC by bus. Then, she describes her difficulties learning to use a typewriter. And then, the conversation turns to her friendship with some girl, who took her shopping. Then, when describing just what the job was vague concepts are presented, like “new requirements, and unfamiliar responsibilities.” This reads as if a ghostwriter had been asked to write this section, and had failed to read the public job description for the role this author is supposed to have taken.
When she does mention details, they are very strange. She describes laboring to save the agency money by saving “broken fonts” and then repairing them by sending them to New England. She describes shipping “a dozen fonts each month” (231). This is absurd, as somebody would have to deliberately destroy printers to cause this much consistent damage. She notes she was saving the “agency thousands of dollars” by this. In exchange, not immediately, but “a year later” she “was honored to receive a monetary award in recognition of my efforts on this project” (232). They gave her money in exchange for her depriving their new type seller of funds, and shifting it to the repair shop?
After my interview with the FBI thirteen years ago I was asked not to reveal that I had interviewed with the FBI, but I think my secrecy time-limit has also expired. And I think that the reason they did not hire me for that job was because I would have objected to all of the above. I would have mentioned to the boss that an agent was having inappropriate relations with a missionary instead of focusing on his job. I would have objected that the accounting of the font-fixing scheme was absurd and suggested a likely fraud going on, and that the manager was probably in-on-it to give an award for this. And I would have questioned just how many people were credited with working on LAMM. The above section makes it sound as if one guy created it, but probably an entire department was being paid for “helping” with it, while they were going shopping, and drinking. This is a useful book for anybody else who wants to figure out if they are the type of person who would “fit” into an agency that is designed to do as little work as possible, or if they are the type who would be a conscientious objector to standard-procedure. For example, the percentage of this book given to reporting on the activities of USSR strongly suggests that basically there was one guy in the USSR, and one guy in the USA who were sending to each other data on military positions etc. And receiving this information counted as both CIA agencies on the two sides doing something, while they simply were disclosing their books to the other side. The only crime in this system is confessing this process, or failing to keep it secret, which tends to lead to espionage charges. I explain the details of how such government mis-funding works in my 18th and 19th century re-attribution series that explains double-sided ghostwriting.
How Advertising Becomes Literature by Adding a “Female” Byline
Sigrid Anderson, Land of Sunshine: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, July 1, 2024). Hardcover: $60. 206pp, 6X9”. Index, bibliography, 22 photographs, 14 illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-4962-2198-8.
****
“Although denied the right to vote, late nineteenth-century women writers engaged in debates over land settlement and expansion through literary texts in regional periodicals… Anderson uncovers the political fictions of writers Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Austin, Constance Goddard DuBois, Beatriz Bellido de Luna, and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), all of whom were contributors to the Southern California periodical Land of Sunshine. In this magazine, which generally touted the superiority of the West and its white settlers, women authors undercut triumphalist narratives of racial superiority and rapid development by focusing on the stories of hardship experienced by the marginalized communities displaced by white expansion. By telling stories from the points of view of marginalized peoples who had been disempowered in the political sphere and shaping those stories to offer solutions to land settlement questions, these women writers used literature to make a political point…”
As I explain in my new series, in Britain, there was a ghostwriting Workshop that created all canonical texts between the beginning of print and at least as late as 1934. Across this stretch, there was only a single female ghostwriter, who died in 1800. Thus, between 1800-1934 there was a spike in the number of female authors credited with harder genres, but women did not actually have the agency to write these texts, and could only purchase ghostwriting services. This explains why women who were “writing” failed to secure women the right to vote until near the end of this dark-period of female apparent access, but actual non-access to the press. Histories like this one attempt to glorify these female bylines, reinforcing the original fictional propaganda that women already had all the rights they wanted, thus keeping women from rising to in fact attain rights.
The “Introduction” explains that two white guys, who were corrupted because they were members of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Charles Dwight Willard and Harry Ellington Brook, founded the Land of Sunshine periodical in 1894. If one of them was the ghost-editor or ghostwriter of most of the texts that were published in its pages; then the perspective shifts entirely on why it regularly portrayed “marginalized peoples” as being “disempowered”, as it would have instead been propagating this disempowerment. The intro also explains that it was founded directly to solve the founder’s financial problems after the “1893… depression” in Los Angeles. In their first volume, they explained that the magazine was made to puff the region to bring in “new development”. Builders are likely to have been sponsoring this publication as a venue that advertised Los Angeles to potential in-migrants. This direct confession that they are an advertising-vehicle failed, so in their second year, they hired Charles Lummis as editor, who reshaped it into a subversive advertising-vehicle, which included articles that seemed to be scholarly, while they were indeed overly-elaborate advertising. Circulation statistics are given, but not the cost of the issues, which might have been distributed for free because it was sponsored by those who wanted to sell houses to newcomers. This magazine sold the idea of the “West” as a superior place by building a largely fictitious history of who the people of this region were, even as its demographics were being artificially changed by bringing in a wave of newcomers. Then again, I am able to gather these implied meanings because the author seems to share a similar understated opinion: “Although Lummis protested Native land dispossession, he simultaneously promoted rebuilding as tourist attractions the Spanish missions where Indigenous peoples were forced to labor, celebrated Native baskets and blankets as commodities for white collectors, and published articles exoticizing the Chinese immigrant communities” (1-3). If this Editor had credited all texts in this periodical to his own male, white byline, most readers would have realized these inconsistencies added up to him being on the side of dispossessing the Natives, and immigrants, just as he was advertising for immigrants to come and purchase the stuff they were selling. Though they were selling to wealthy migrants within the US, as opposed to outsiders; their circulation did not reach other countries. Anderson notes that the “local color literary works” in this “magazine, especially those by women writers… challenged” its “hypermasculine message about land development by white interests…” Families are made up of 50% women, so only including a “hypermasculine” perspective would have repelled that half, and would have failed to make land/house sales. By using token female bylines, this periodical managed to retain mainstream popularity, while they were advertising “violence established ‘Native land as free’” concepts (3).
In the body of this study, chapter “3: Indigenous Geographies: Mapping Mary Austin’s The Blue Moon and The Truscott Luck”, the latter novel is described as being about “the miner as pioneer” and yet also thief of Native knowledge. “The father’s knowledge about the location of mining sites is connected to a Native secret…” The rest of this paragraph attempts to philosophically or metaphysically understand this plot, instead of researching if there was any specific Native knowledge that was plagiarized in this exploitation. Though it ends with a good point: “white proprietors ‘discover’ a terrain that in fact was long ago mapped and inhabited by Native peoples” (68). The next paragraph also does explain how Native knowledge was plagiarized, as they took evidence from the Natives such as a diagram of “routes of travel through valleys, and over mountain ranges” or a pictoglyph that documented “a tribe’s history”, as in figure 26 on this page 69.
I believe there is much more this book could have said if it had considered the possibility of ghostwriting in place of female authorship. On the other hand, this is a thoroughly researched, and elegantly written study. The author questions the primary evidence with facts and not only with flighty theories. This is a good book for academic libraries to purchase, as there are likely to be a few graduate students researching related topics that have few other sources to employ.
Truths and Fictions on Life in Warsaw Between 1911-2011
Antonia Lloyd-Jones, translator; Helen Constantine, Ed., Warsaw Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). Hardcover. 252pp. Notes on authors, map. ISBN: 978-0-19-285556-5.
****
“A collection of twelve stories set in twentieth century Warsaw. Provides a chronological account of the city’s history, from 1911 when Poland was still part of the Russian Empire to the end of the century with its status as capital of an independent Poland. Contains work from twelve different authors, including Nobel prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk whose story Che Guevara has never been published in English before. Includes an introduction by Antonia Lloyd-Jones that explains the thinking behind the selection and recommends more literary works set in Warsaw
Warsaw Tales is an anthology of short stories and non-fiction set in the Polish capital. Beginning in 1911 with Boleslaw Prus’ Apparitions, the collected stories provide a chronological account of the city’s tumultuous and dramatic history. Each story captures a phase of Warsaw’s past, through the interwar period as a Polish republic, the Second World War and the city’s Nazi occupation, the post-war city in ruins and its rebuilding under the communist regime, and its new status as the capital of an independent Poland in 1989. With each story set in a specific part of the city, the collection becomes a guidebook to Warsaw’s temporal, spatial, and psychological geography. This collection features a wide variety of authors including Boleslaw Prus, Maria Kuncewiczowa, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Ludwik Hering, Zofia Petersowa, Marek Hlasko, Kazimierz Orlos, Hanna Krall, Antoni Libera, Zbigniew Mentzel, Olga Tokarczuk, and Krzysztof Varga.”
Most mainstream-media mentions of “Warsaw” refer to its captivity by the Nazis. Thus, it is a positive that this book sets out to paint a multi-dimensional cross-period perspective of this city. It is an advertisement of “Warsaw” as a tourist destination. But at least it does not really hide this tourist-guide purpose, as it includes colorful photographs and other elements that out it as a guide. Though even its table-of-contents also includes a photograph of an impoverished child. Thus, it mixes realistic detailed accounts with puffery of this modern city.
The “Introduction” similarly mentions the Nazi-associated stereotype, before mentioning that Warsaw was also invaded by the Swedes in the 18th century. A brief history of its major uprisings and the like follows. Curiously, its Polish name is “Warszawa”: folklore indicates this is a grammatical combination of “Wars and Sawa” (x). The latter is a “mermaid” with whom a fisherman called “Wars fell in love” (xi). Some facts follow, such as that it contains “the sky-scraping, 237-metre Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin’s gift in 1955… Only the EU’s highest building, the 310-metre Varso Tower office block, completed in 2022, is taller” (xiv).
The first story inside this collection is Boleslaw Prus’ “Apparitions” (1911). It begins with some specifics, as a man describes trying to find a safe place to live, where he would not be robbed. Though it disintegrates into insults: “the square is crammed full of stalls, with crowds of Jews at them, on the pavements and in the entrance halls, and there’s a palpable stench… No decent man would want to rent rooms in such a place…” (2).
The next story is about the “Zoo” in 1938. There is a mention of avoiding the “bloody whip”, before a horse is whipped, to “teach” it. This is followed by the philosophical claim: “The ZOO is a bourgeois luxury, it’s culture on a Sunday, its caring about our brother-wolves…” Curious turn. Eastern European stories tend to include such statements, which are more fun to read than typical western propaganda.
Then, there is a story called “Icarus”, written in 1945, which recalls events during the War from 1942-3. A Gestapo van stops to accost a boy who was reading in the middle of the street. H “was refusing to get into the van.” Then, he was pushed inside. Nobody else looked like they noticed this incident other than the author (35-6).
This is a worthwhile effort to preserve strong examples of Polish writing in translation to make it accessible to the international market. The stories are logically structured, and carry a point, and present details to describe the scenes and tensions from this foreign perspective. Academic libraries should purchase this book, as I have not seen a similar collection of Polish stories previously in English. Though there must be some others out there. These stories are so well written, it is difficult to indeed separate true autobiographies from the fictions.
Plagiarizing the Anti-Final-Philosophy Philosopher
Andrew Janiak, and Catherine Conybeare, The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman: Emilie Du Chatelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). Hardcover. 290pp. Bibliography. ISBN: 978-0-19-775798-7.
****
“Provides a new history of the birth of modern philosophy. Shows how Émilie Du Châtelet played a key role in the early development of the Enlightenment. Chronicles how the most famous writers of the era, including Diderot, Voltaire and Kant, sought to disrupt Du Châtelet’s influence, and also how she fought back. Sheds light on the deliberate erasure of a key female thinker of the Enlightenment era. Suppressed for centuries, the ideas of French philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet’s are ever relevant today… Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous: she was read and debated from Russia to Prussia, from Switzerland to England, from up north in Sweden to down south in Italy. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. While the men in her milieu like Voltaire and Kant sought disciples to promote their ideas, Du Châtelet promoted intellectual autonomy. She counselled her readers to read the classics, but never to become a follower of another’s ideas. Her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker, rather than a disciple of some supposedly ‘great man’ like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. And that made her dangerous. After all, if young women took Du Châtelet’s advice to heart, if they insisted on thinking for themselves, they might demand a proper education—the exclusion of women from the colleges and academies of Europe might finally end. And if young women thought for themselves, rather than listening to the ideas of the men around them, that might rupture the gender-based social order itself. Because of the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories. After she achieved immense fame in the middle of the eighteenth century, her ideas were later suppressed, or attributed to the men around her…”
The British ghostwriting Workshop, which I just finished writing two series about, plagiarized many elements from Parisian intellectuals, who are also likely to have been led by a Workshop of ghostwriters, as proven by the Alexander Dumas confessions. As in France, in Britain there were some salons that exclusively allowed men, and others that allowed both genders. Chapter “1: The Rise and Fall of Emilie Du Chatelet” describes the Café Gradot near the Louvre as one of these meeting-places in Paris that was only accessible to men. The author explains that one of the common visitors was Pierre-Luois Maupertuis, who tutored Chatelet. This builds up to the anecdote that Chatelet stormed into the Café before this rule against women was broken. Since the author points out that there is no documented proof of her in fact going into this male-exclusive café, this story only shows how the myth that women have previously gained rights in the sciences and humanities is essential for modern scholars, who can present it, instead of addressing continuing sexism that is still blocking women with a ceiling to access. As the next section explains, Chatelet was born into an aristocratic family, so she simply had the funds to purchase ghostwriting services, and chose to put her name on a genre that was typically foreign to women. But perhaps I am too cynical without testing Chatelet’s texts. Maybe she was an authentic author, and truly a leader in the female enlightenment.
An explanation follows that Chatelet started her own college by hiring the best tutors to tutor her. And then she expanded this concept by moving into a country chateau attached to a farm, and calling it her academy. She hosted intellectuals, who taught there, but it seems she was still the only student. One frequent guest was Voltaire, who needed a retreat because he had been expelled from Paris. If there was a Workshop in France, it would have been happy to be hosted at this chateau and to have their expenses covered. This academy is credited with fostering the publication within a few years of Voltaire’s Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738) and Chatelet’s Institutions of Physics. In my recent study, I explain that “Newton” was a fictional scientist that seems to have been entirely fabricated or forged and backdated by the British Workshop decades after the stated years in his publications. And Montagu forged at least some of Voltaire’s English texts, such as a letter from “Voltaire” to British aristocrats. In 1776, after the death of her husband, Montagu spent 3 months in France to fabricate a staged-literary-battle between “Shakespeare” and “Voltaire”. Chatelet died in 1749, so a text could have been attributed to her byline in the 1770s without perhaps much notice. Though these were not originally written in English, and there is no direct entanglement with the British Workshop, so this is a very unlikely theory. Either way, Montagu is likely to have been inspired by the 1740s to start her own salons by hearing about Chatelet’s “academy”.
This is a very pleasant book to read through, so I have gotten pretty far into the narrative before realizing I have been pulled in. To focus the rest of my review, I decided to search for the term “plagiarism” across this book to report related findings. I utilized some fragments from this book about the plagiarism accusations against Chatelet in my study. One of the fragments I had found to use in my study is the curious case of contributors to the French Encyclopedia, Formey, Diderot, and D’Alembert, plagiarizing extensive content from Chatelet’s in their paid-for entries, without properly citing her work. Apparently, there is some mention of her for these plagiarisms to be noticed, but blocks of text that are entirely hers are not in quotations, etc. The author of this study attempts to explain that back in the 18th century, taking another’s ideas was not a theft of “intellectual property”, because there was no legal enforcement of copyrights. Generally: “plagiarism” was “formulated in the Enlightenment”, as “Diderot himself was accused of plagiarizing Bacon’s ideas for the famous Prospectus to the Encyclopedia; he and D’Alembert were accused of stealing Chambers’s ideas from his Cyclopaedia; and Diderot, in turn, accused his friend Condorcet of stealing his ideas about perception” (139-40). The 18th century workshops engaged in mass-plagiarism to create enormous numbers of texts that were near-copies that they could sell to contractors as unique titles. A single ghostwriter has a limited number of hours to create new content annually, but only slightly re-writing this content takes a lot less time. After a long explanation about the uniqueness of 18th century norms, the author points out that some anonymous articles include “an incredible 87%” of its content that is plagiarized from Chatelet (142). Most of the other mentions of plagiarism occur in this book’s notes. One of these mentions that Samuel Konig had in turn accused Chatelet “of stealing his ideas”, and also “charged Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, with plagiarizing the ‘principle of least action’ from… Leibniz”. As I explain in my study, the British Workshop plagiarized Leibniz’s notebooks by slightly re-writing, forging and backdating them with an assigned “Newton” byline. Since Maupertuis was a “Newtonian” (230), texts assigned to him might have also been backdated, together with this and other accusations of plagiarism that the Workshop created to be ahead of any actual critics in the public who might have raised this objection. Curious information.
I then searched for one of the terms that was used in the blurb that I could not grasp was relevant to this case: “autonomy”. What did this “female” author’s output have to do with this concept? A section I found that mentioned it on page 180 rephrases the blurb without giving a quote from her text that would support this idea. Another passage explains that to be non-autonomous was to side with a group such as the “Newtonians”, or to join “any School”, or to follow “the authority of a ‘famous name.’” Chatelet apparently used her preface to advise readers not to follow or be “disciples” of “great thinkers”. She argued: “no philosopher has seen everything”. Thus, one should avoid following a puffed author because truth does not have a finite point (193-4). This is good philosophy: I agree with it.
This is generally a great book to browse through for inspiration. My research has explained most of what is said in these pages from a very different perspective. But with the available information, these authors have crafted a great scholarly book, though it is occasionally too digressive or philosophical. This book is suitable for purchase by academic libraries, as there will be some students in most schools who are interested in such reflections.
Muddock’s Orlando: On Multi-Gendered Ghostwriting
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Softcover: $9.99. 236pp. List of names, illustrations, notes, index. ISBN: 978-0-19-164610-2.
*****
“A new edition of Woolf’s fictional biography of a cross-dressing hero/ine whose experiments with genre and concerns with sexuality have ensured its popularity in the twenty-first century. The Introduction draws on the latest scholarship and considers questions concerning fame and posterity, the contemporary publishing context, the nature of biography, history and historicization. The notes provide essential contextual background and identify the literary allusions and self-reference. Up-to-date bibliography and full chronology.”
The chronology provides two columns for events in Woolf’s life, and in historical and cultural background. This chronology notes that Woolf studied at King’s College London from 1897, when she was 15. Doing some research, I discovered that this college became a pioneer in the higher education for women when it began admitting female students in the 1870s. Oxford first admitted women in 1878, but it first allowed them to complete a degree in 1920. Cambridge first admitted women in 1868, but first granted degrees in 1948. While Woolf was at King’s, her brother Thoby went to Cambridge and formed connections with Woolf’s future husband, Leonard, and other members of what later became the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf had her first breakdown when she was 13 after her mother’s death, and her second at 22 after her father’s death, right before she was credited with her first book, and began teaching once-per-week at Morley College, London. Woolf was regularly traveling for leisure across her youth, so it seems her ennui was mostly from boredom. If I was checking the attributions of Woolf’s books, this chronology would have been very helpful for my understanding of her authorial life, to grasp if it is authentic, or has hints of inauthenticity.
This new edition includes a new “Introduction by Michael Whitworth” and a “Re-set text, and original illustrations placed closer to their original position in the text.” The blurb continues by quoting a line from Woolf’s autobiographical reflections about this novel: “‘I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books… I want to kick up my heels & be off.’ Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and of his/her struggle to find fame and immortality not through actions, but through the written word. At its heart are the life and works of Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic home of the Sackvilles. But as well as being a love letter to Vita, Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history, teases the pretensions of contemporary men of letters, and wryly examines sexual double standards. This new edition discusses Woolf’s stylistic aims, the biographical parallels, and the work’s literary context, and includes the original illustrations.”
I did not add Woolf’s texts to my corpus in part because she did not publish any texts pre-1900, and in part because I am too attached to the concepts presented in her Room of One’s Own to have risked learning that it was ghostwritten by a male Workshop member. I ran a brief test on “Thoreau’s” Walden Pond, and it matched Emerson’s philosophy, and the timeline indicated Thoreau could not have been the ghostwriter between them. I have spent the last 7 years in semi-retirement living in a tiny rural house on my own because I believed in their concepts of self-reliance, and independence. Yet, at the end of this contemplation, I discovered that at least one of them was doing the opposite to what his texts were arguing for. I do not want to find out as much about Woolf. Though her suicide at 59 supports the idea that she lacked agency over her writing. If she was busy writing, she surely would not have wanted to end a life of progressively improving creativity. The only Workshop member that ended his life especially early was Dodd, who was convicted of forgery; his actions were semi-suicidal, but his attempts to free himself by faking his death indicated it is very unlikely that a professional writer would ever get bored enough to end it all. Either way, when I saw that Orlando was available for review, I wanted to take a second look at it from this new perspective.
My curiosity got the better of me though, and I checked the manuscripts of “Woolf’s” Orlando, Voyage Out and some related texts, and they seemingly are in Hand-G, proving they are likely to have been ghostwritten by Muddock in his final years, when he seemed to be mostly writing pop detective fiction. This match is especially apparent on “Woolf’s” Lighthouse holograph that has been digitized by “The Society of Authors as the Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf”. This credit explains there was a direct connection to Muddock, whose agent was “William Morris Colles” (1855-1926), who was credited with founding and directing The Authors’ Syndicate (1890-1926), which was in a partnership until 1898 with the Society of Authors; Muddock’s handwriting matches “Colles’”, so it was Muddock who was monopolizing publishing through this Syndicate/Society. If this Society of Authors retained copyrights to “Woolf’s” manuscripts, it is obvious that Muddock held these copyrights because these were some of his final novels. Though the manuscript of Orlando (1928) held by the National Trust is also in Hand-G, so it might have been sold to a collector. These novels utilize a casual, rushed variant of Hand-G that is especially similar to “John Mill’s” Autobiography (1924). This new edition never mentions Muddock, Colles or the Syndicate/Society.
If Muddock’s perspective is overlayed on Orlando, it becomes a late confession of a professional ghostwriter, accustomed to writing under both female and male gender identities, as bylines change. In the “Introduction”, the editor ponders on the anti-plot or anti-formulaic elements of this novel. Muddock would have been pulled to write this anti-formulaic treatise because most of the novels he was succeeding with selling in his final novels were highly-formulaic detective-fiction. Writing hundreds of novels with the same plotline would push anybody to just digressively want to lie about a truth closer to their own life-experience, by calling a work Orlando: A Biography. Then there is a mention that Woolf’s brother-in-law was Clive Bell: this might be significant because I found that the Bell publishing family was a major sponsor of the Workshop, for whom the attributed books, such as in the initial bylines of the later “Bronte” books. An extensive biography of Woolf’s aristocratic background follows.
“Woolf’s” “Preface” begins with a confession that Muddock is likely to have borrowed fragments from Orlando from deceased fellow ghostwriters: “Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them…” Then, he changes this perspective by adding, “yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in debt of…” He lists several of the Workshop’s canonical outputs. While this list does not include one of Muddock’s own bylines from classics, Orlando does mention some of Muddock’s bylines elsewhere, including: Browning: “‘ah! my dear lady, the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison—those were the heroes. All, all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!’”
The only other major relevant mention of one of Muddock’s bylines is “Queen Victoria”, for whom he worked as a secret-secretary. Two queens appear as characters in Orlando: Queen Elizabeth falls in love with Orlando as a beautiful male youth, and then after Queen Victoria’s death, he sees the dead Queen visiting him. Chapter 5 includes a mention of the puffed “statue of Queen Victoria”. As time passes, the narrator observes: “Queen Victoria is on the throne and not Queen Elizabeth, but what difference…” In Chapter 6: “It would no doubt have been different had she lived all the year round with him as Queen Victoria recommended…” This suggests that Victoria was directly giving the narrator cohabitation advice. Then, the narrator finds a whole in a royal sheet, and contemplates that it was there because so many “kings and queens”, including Victoria, had slept there. Muddock gained a monopoly over British publishing because he was Victoria’s propogandist, and he continued to puff Victoria, while expressing a lack of interest in the new monarch in this late novel.
I read the Voyage Out cover-to-cover before as part of a class, but I do not recollect if I similarly read Orlando. Being assigned to read the Voyage was extremely depression-inducing, as the character’s suicidal philosophy keeps repeating until she finally succeeds in killing herself. This suicidal ideology might have convinced Woolf to kill herself in the end, but for Muddock, this was a study of mad women and how they are driven to this suicidality by maddening others in their lives. This was an experiment in plot-lessness, as was Orlando. Both have been canonized as classics of modern literature, and mimicries of this plot-less depression-inducing structure are echoed in most recent award-winning novels. It is as if literature is stuck in 1930, at the best Muddock could do when he was in his 90s and near-death. While in his senility, he might have just wanted to write plot-lessly… Shouldn’t we now let go of this concept, and write with sober and useful new plots and new formulas that reflect our current moment with its cultural needs?
But if readers ignore all of that, this is a classic of world literature, and folks must at least attempt to read it to learn what is wrong or right with it. Thus, I recommend this novel for the purchase by all public and academic libraries, and private buyers (even if they haven’t been assigned this impossible task in a class). I strongly encourage instructors to avoid assigning Orlando and Voyage as obligatory reading in classes because these novels are made as experiments in forcing readers to give up before reaching too far into them.
The Mystery of How Britain Conquered India with Anti-Thug Propaganda
Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug: The 1839 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). Softcover: $13.99. 559pp. Glossary, explanatory notes, map, bibliography. ISBN: 978-0-19-885464-7.
*****
“This new edition is based on the original 3-volume first edition from 1839 published by Oxford University Press, which is now extremely rare. One of the most important novels of British India, and comparable to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Two original sources carefully transcribed as appendices further explore the Thuggee. Introduction, comprehensive annotation, select bibliography and chronology of the author. ‘You have given a faithful portrait of a Thug’s life, his ceremonies, and his acts’. Often overshadowed by Kipling’s Kim or Forster’s A Passage to India, Philip Meadows Taylor’s forgotten classic, Confessions of a Thug (1839), is nevertheless the most influential novel of early nineteenth-century British India. This was the first dramatic account to expose a European readership to the fantastic world of the murderous Thugs, or highway robbers, who strangled their victims and who have ever since been a stable of Western popular culture. Writing in the voice of a captured Thug, Taylor presents an Orientalist fantasy that is part picaresque adventure and part colonial exposé. Confessions of a Thug offers a unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how the British imagined themselves to be omniscient and in complete control of their Indian subjects. This unique critical edition makes available a fascinating and significant work of Empire writing, in addition to excerpts from the original colonial texts that inspired Taylor’s narrative.”
Because Muddock claimed to have started his ghostwriting career as a shipmate and engineer in India, it intuitively seemed likely that “Taylor’s” (1808-76) Confessions of a Thug is a backdated forgery, and indeed a manuscript of “Taylor’s” undated letter to Henry E. Doyle “asking for permission for copies to be made of some pictures in the National Gallery to be sent to a nobleman in Hyderabad” (NLI) seems to be in a typical Hand-G. Thus, this edition of the “1838” edition is a study of the backdated edition, when the authentic one is likely to have been written after Muddock became active in around 1859. These British novels about India were part of the propaganda that assisted Britain’s continued colonialization of India across Muddock’s ghostwriting career. In this case, showing Indians as “murderous thugs” distanced them as villainous others, to keep the British public from sympathizing with the plight of the Indian population. As I explained in my series, the East India Company was sponsoring “Oriental” verse with payments such as £3,000 made to Moore. Thus, it is possible that only “Taylor’s” letter was forged by Muddock, while this novel was authentically written and first-printed in 1838, as part of that earlier propaganda effort that led to India’s colonialization in 1858. The note in the blurb that the British are shown to be “omniscient and in complete control of their Indian subjects” indicates that this novel was used to convince British investors and voters that the colonialization effort was working smoothly, and it was safe to invest and to support this effort, when there were mutinies, rebellions and other unrest that argued the opposite. It is important for us to read such texts of “Empire writing” today because they explain how colonialism was artificially designed by such propaganda. If we do not study these cases of successful disenfranchisement, we can return to these follies in our present, as seen by the successes in anti-abortion laws.
The “Introduction” begins with a quote that summarizes in its final lines that Thug is about “the deeds and adventures of Ameer Ali, the Thug”. It is possible that Muddock is reporting autobiographical events if this is his work. The editor offers this summary: “As a young child, Ameer Ali was adopted by the same Thugs who murdered his parents and in due course he became a skillful strangler himself before he was eventually caught by the British and ended up as an informant.” Muddock suggests a similar life engineering trains or perhaps robbing highways in his youth, before being caught could have forced him to become an informant who might have helped the British establish its rule over India. The Editor gives this useful caveat to readers believing claims that this novel is an authentic account of Indian crime:
“There is, however, one problem with that narrative: Ameer Ali was almost entirely a figment of Taylor’s imagination and a product of his literary skills. Rather than providing a panoptic access to Indians and Indian society, Ali’s confession was an elaborate act of colonial ventriloquism. Just as the Thugs were said to deceive their victims, so too did Taylor dupe his readers, both past and present.”
The Editor then reports the more authentic history of these “thugs”, who had been in the Indian military before British colonialism forced them out, and into banditry activities. The highway robbery was more organized and designed to not be noticed. There was a religious purpose in these gangs that especially turned them against Brits. Detained thugs “spent the rest of their lives either restaging their former exploits before thrill-seeking European tourists or divulging further information to curious officials.” The two tested books that were published in Calcutta were in the B and I groups. Ghostwriter-I was Thomas Thomson (1768-1852), and he was the relevant rhetoric ghostwriter who is most likely to have ghostwritten the first-half-of-the-19th-century Indian propaganda. Thomson’s hand is suggested in one of the books the editor cites: William H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs, with an introduction and appendix, descriptive of the system pursued by that fraternity and of the measures which have been adopted by the Supreme Government of India for its suppression (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1836). There are no novels in Thomson’s I-group, so a ghostwriter who specializes in fiction, such as G, would have had to re-write Thomson’s attempt at a thug autobiography to create this Thug novel. The editor ends this section by stressing the extremely negative perspectives on these “Thugs” that were presented in British Periodicals across the 1830s. The editor notes that this novel was “unscrupulously pirated by others”, as in “E. Thornton’s” Illustrations of the History and Practice of the Thugs (1837). However, if Thug was backdated; then, it was “Taylor” who pirated this from Thornton, as opposed to the reverse.
I have once again become too engaged in the front-matter. I will now attempt to begin reading this novel itself. Thug was first-printed by “Richard Bentley”, who was also credited as the publisher of the backdated “Charles Dickens” novels. One of the instead possibly authentically dated “Dickens” novels was the one that matched Muddock as its ghostwriter and was published instead by Chapman and Hall was Tale of Two Cities. Thus, this credit to “Bentley” as the publisher increases the odds that Thug was backdated. The novel begins with an “Introduction” addressed from the editor, or from “Taylor”. This is followed by “Chapter 1” from the perspective of the “Thug”. He reports that he is held in “bondage” in the “service of Europeans”. He adds that he used to lead a band of these thugs, who are now mostly either dead, or will shortly be apprehended with his help. I wish I had the time to read this novel cover-to-cover as what I have learned about it so far promises that it would be a lot of fun. Thus, I strongly recommend the purchase of this novel to casual readers who want to enjoy an adventure that has some hints of history. Just remember the editor’s warnings that most of what is reported is British imperial propaganda. As long as a reader does not buy the intended anti-Indian message and instead just enjoys the author’s fantastic capacity at extensive lying, it should be a fun experience. Libraries of all types should also acquire this title, which they are not likely to have, as it was rarely previously included in the canon by Oxford.
Correspondences of Two Modern Foreigner Novelists
Shirley Hazzard; Donald Keene, Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, October 22, 2024). Softcover: $22.00. 160pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-231214-45-2.
***
“For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Brought together by the death of a mutual friend in the late 1970s, they discovered a profound connection built on mutual affinities for literature and culture and common values of humanism and cosmopolitanism… Both left behind their countries of birth… Hazzard, who departed from Australia as a teenager without completing her formal education, led an expatriate life in New York and Italy as she attained literary fame. Keene, a pacifist who served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, devoted himself to the literature and culture of Japan, where he became revered.”
The body of this book is broken into sections by-decade between 1977-2008. The “Introduction” begins by explaining how these two met. I have not seen many such contemporary epistolary collections. They were common in the 19th century, but I have not seen any equivalents for the covered years from two puffed bylines. Their correspondence begins and continues with each of them puffing their adopted countries. They have a “devotion” for their “chosen land”. One writes that upon entering Naples: “I became joyful… really for the first time I knew what joy was.” This is apparently the acceptable manner in which an immigrant is allowed to view their new country. If I had written letters where I expressed how disappointed I was with America after moving here… it probably wouldn’t have sold to a mainstream press. After including these pufferies of places, the editor finally mentions who these people were, noting that Hazzard died in 2016, after winning the National Book Award. Then general pufferies of Hazzard’s novels follows that phrase them in general terms, without offering clear summaries to ground the reader in what they are about. This “Introduction” goes on for too long, and most of it fails to deliver useful information about these two relatively obscure, from the perspective of an average-reader, authors.
The second letter from Hazzard to Donald on August 17, 1978, notes that they were also talking over the phone. They began corresponding when letter-writing was still relatively common due to the relative expense of international phone calls, and the newness of phones. This might be the reason there are so few such epistolary collections for post-80s generations. As was typical in the 19th century, most of these letters are mutual pufferies by these writers of each other’s works. Donald’s letter on September 6, 1978, thanks Shirley for the puffery of his Barren Years that she had sent to him previously. Most of the letters are travelogues that puff the places these writers are visiting separately. There are some curious details, such as that Donald on November 26, 1980 writes that he is “writing… from my room in a building overlooking the sea.” He Bought a tiny apartment on the ninth floor”. He reports purchasing it with the knowledge that “seismologists have predicted that the next major earthquake in Japan will be here.” And he apparently “knew” this before buying it.
All the letters I glanced through included some curious details that explain the lives of writers in these distant foreign lands. Thus, current writers in all genres are likely to benefit from casually reading these letters. Few of us receive song extensive reflections from our friends today. Thus, we can all benefit from reading such friendly correspondences, even if they are not addressed to us. Libraries of all types can also benefit from purchasing this book, as while these writers were obscure to me, their novels were popular enough for them to be at least partially represented in most collections.
A Banker Confesses Secrets Through Others’ Histories
Paolo Zannoni, Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World (New York: Columbia University Press, June 11, 2024). Softcover: $29.95. 320pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-231217-13-2.
*****
“Where did modern banking come from—and how does this history help us understand financial crises? In the twelfth century, Pisa was a thriving metropolis, a powerhouse of global trade, and a city that stood at the center of medieval Europe. But Pisa had a problem: Money came in the form of coins, and they were becoming scarce. In the face of this financial and monetary crisis, the foundations of modern banking were laid… Banker, executive, and historian Paolo Zannoni examines the… relationship between states and banks that has changed the world” in “seven case studies: the republic of Pisa, seventeenth-century Venice, the early years of the Bank of England, imperial Spain, the Kingdom of Naples, the nascent United States during the American Revolution, and Bolshevik Russia in 1917 through 1923. Zannoni also tells the story of how the Continental Congress established the first public bank in North America, exploring the roles of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton… at the heart of these institutions is an intricate exchange of debts and promises that shaped the modern world…”
The “Introduction” opens with Zannoni’s confession that he is a banker, and thus has biases towards the flaws of this industry. He explains that it has been part of his job to study the history of banking to make wise investing decisions in our present. He briefly summarizes that he abandoned academia after completing a Yale education to work at Fiat in 1979, rising to “run Fiat head office” by 1985. Then he was “president of Fiat USSR in Moscow” during “the collapse of the Soviet Union.” This collapse must have gotten him fired, as he was then employed by Goldman Sachs. Though he has now left direct administration of banks to serve “as Chairman of the Board of Prada”, while still helping as the “International Advisor” of Sachs. The rest of the intro summarizes the book’s chapters. “Chapter 3” is about the founding of the Bank of England in 1694: this was the beginning of banking in general in England, as this was the only bank for a while, until rules were loosened. “Chapter 4” describes how the Kingdom of Naples developed “banking charities… to help the poor”. This seems to be a misnomer because banking is also unfavorable to the lender, like a casino. The guy who developed micro-loans has been given a peace prize recently, but these loans are really designed to drain funds out of the poor, just like typical high-interest short-term loans. I turned to this chapter to learn more. Zannoni begins this history with the story of a Pope: “Franciscan charities would collect coins from the wealthy and pious and would lend them, free of charge, to the deserving poor, those who had fallen on hard times, the old, the disabled and the sick.” When demand for these charitable loans was greater than the supply, “the Fifth Lateran Council… allowed to charge the borrowers of the coins a small fee.” This began the Catholic Church’s legalization of lending, which continued to be termed as semi-illegal usury across the following centuries. The Franciscans created a loophole initially by terming these fees as a “rent paid by the borrower to the Monti for the temporary use of the coins”, and not the illegal “interest”. I explained in my BRRAM study, that during the British Renaissance these loopholes were taken to the extremes as the ghostwriting of plays became a vehicle for making high-interest loans that were labeled as “payments” for writing services, and investments.
Turning to a random page in the middle of this book, I found curious information as well. A section on “The House of Hancock” briskly and thoroughly summarizes how the Revolution was banked. “In 1775, John Hancock” became the “president of the Continental Congress” in Boston, and then used what he “had learned as” a merchant “dealing with English banks” to turn this knowledge to Americans’ favor. There were no banks in the Colonies at this time. Nations hostile to Britain were used by Hancock and his supporters to find lenders other than Britain for the rebels during the Revolution. They sent one of the Founding Fathers, Silas Deane, to France in 1776 for this purpose. Then, the more famous Franklin showed up to push this effort over the finish-line.
This is just a great book. If I had not already finished my re-attribution study, I would search these pages for some useful information. Though it might not have been of any help, as it does not only fail to mention Banks and 19th century ghostwriters, but also the giant Barings Bank or the members of that banking family. Though these ghostwriters had a subversive influence on British and international banking. If any of them were mentioned in textbooks such as this one, they would have been failing in their tasks of keeping their personal names out of incriminating histories.
This is a book that should be in most libraries, as such thorough information about the facts of banking is very rare. Too many books brush over the philosophy or theory of banking without diving into these types of specifics that truly explain how we arrived at the present dramas. This history is exactly what helped this specific banker rise to the top of this profession, so others who want to reach this goal should probably read it cover-to-cover.
How Artists Fail to Make It in New York City
Marin Kosut, Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, July 2, 2024). Softcover: $26.00. 272pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-231216-13-5.
****
“Why do people choose the life of an artist, and what happens when they find themselves barely scraping by? Why does New York City, even in an era of hypergentrification, still beckon to aspiring artists as a place to make art and remake yourself?” In “the margins of the professional art world,” it is “populated by unseen artists who make a living working behind the scenes in galleries and museums while making their own art to little acclaim… Marin Kosut reflects on the experience of dedicating your life to art and how the art world can crush you. She examines the push toward professionalization, the devaluing of artistic labor, and the devastating effects of gentrification on cultural life. Her nonlinear essays are linked by central themes—community, nostalgia, precarity, alienation, estrangement—that punctuate working artists’ lives. The book draws from ten years of fieldwork among artists and Kosut’s own experiences curating and cofounding artist-run spaces in Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chinatown. At once ethnography, memoir, tirade, and love letter, Art Monster is a street-level meditation on the predicament of artists in the late capitalist metropolis.”
While the threats that this will be a metaphysical philosophy in the blurb were frightening, the opening of the “Author Statement” cheered me up as it addressed perhaps the greatest enemy of New York City artists: the rats in the walls. “How could their lashing bodies, tails, and legs pinned in cheap traps not be a metaphor?” The statement then digresses into the writer’s block the author had as she tried to start writing. Concluding with the note that she has assigned “pseudonyms” to the “artists” that she mentions in this narrative. This is problematic… As any fiction can be attributed to fictitious bylines.
The first chapter “Other Art Worlds” adds that this is not a book that attempts to offer advice on “the realities of living an artist’s life”. It goes on to state the obvious point that I also recently came to understand from a new perspective: “The chances of becoming an artist recognizable beyond the art world is statistically improbable, like trying to live off lotto scratch-offs.” Kosut goes on to point out that “hundreds of thousands” come to New York City annually to “try to become professional artists.” Obviously, most fail. This frank writing style makes me think about my own post-college experience. My longest-lasting roommate at UMass was called Sarah Gosselin. I roomed with her in my freshman year, and she immediately majored in art, despite having a self-reported near-perfect SAT-score. She was bringing in various art-projects that confirmed this was indeed her interest that showed promise in their experimentations. I was extremely jealous of Sarah’s decision. My art was chosen to hang at the Framingham library back in high school, but one of the main things I decided on when I started college was that I could not major in something unprofitable like art, and instead had to focus on something money-aimed such as Economics. I then added Eastern European studies, and Politics as a major and minor. I learned afterwards that “Economics” did not equate to Accounting, which was the actual profitable choice because to become a Finance Bro took having family connections in this industry. Thus, I ended up studying Comparative Literature, and then finally completed an English literature PhD, after realizing that if I did not do something I liked, I was not going to do it. Meanwhile, I have spent 7 years now retired from teaching college in a tiny house, mostly making a living of something that has kept me going since 2010 really: artistic design and formatting of books for my independent Anaphora Literary Press. I was recently invited to do a solo presentation on my re-attribution findings at the American Library Association conference. A new dental implant expense meant that I could not attend ALA, and instead spent this time finishing my study. Unexpectedly, ALA’s organizers got to me to check on why I had not registered, telling me that 29 people had signed up for my session. I did my best to still attend by finding an Anaphora author to sponsor an exhibit table and my trip (light on expenses by sleeping in my car on this 18-hour trip etc.) But during the negotiation, they refused to allow me to purchase an Artist Alley table (which was still available unlike the booked press tables), saying that I am not an “artist”. I had digitally drawn the cover of the sponsoring artist, and I tried to defend my status as a professional artist, but they did not even respond to this point. I am pretty sure that I unintentionally became a professional artist when I first decided to design my own journal, and then agreed to design books for other authors when they began querying me with submissions, without me even posting a call for books, or that I was in fact running a publishing company. Meanwhile, Sarah moved to Cambridge after finishing college (1 ½ years later than me because I finished early in 2 ½ years) to become an artist, and convinced some cafes to hang her art, but so no takers, as she instead began working as a teller in a bank. Some years later, I accidentally was hired by the Cambridge chronicle to write an article about a fair in Cambridge, and I might have told Sarah about it, because she rented a part of a table. I spoke with her, but deliberately avoided mentioning her in the article to avoid any conflict-of-interest. I think that was the last time I spoke with her… When I last checked, I might have seen that somebody of this name who attended UMass might have died a few years ago, after raising a family. I think I am still managing to survive as a professional artist and writer because it’s what I have continued to keep doing non-stop regardless of profits, or their lack. The problem seems to be with the lies we are all told about just what a professional artist or writer must be doing daily to make a living. There are some jobs called “Artist” or “Writer”, but those are entirely different to what art history suggests about the lives of the great “Artists”. Thus, it is a very good idea for Kosut to inject some concrete reality to counter these imaginative narratives.
Kosut goes on to say that “none” of the artists she interviewed “are full-time artists… because they haven’t been formally granted artist status via the market economy or selected to join a gallery roster…” I think I have been a full-time artist without pondering about this for the past 12 years as my press has been my main income-source. I guess this book is not about me… But I don’t recall anybody letting me into a “gallery roster”, though I guess I have been warmly invited into the book “market”. She goes on to explain that she focused on the workshop assistants or artists who assist the creation “of art that bears the signature of someone else.” Then, she absurdly comments that “1 percent… will make it into the annals of art history”… It is far, far fewer than 1%… There might be a few hundred recognizable artist names across most of human history. So the odds of becoming one of these is like 1 in 4 billion.
Chapter “2” is called “Somewhere Else”. Aha! This solves the mystery I have been pondering: I have managed to just be an artist to make a living across the last at least 7 years because I did it “Somewhere Else” than New York, or by cash-purchasing a tiny-house in Texas by using the entirety of my English lecturer salary at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley back in 2016-7. I could use the full sum because my publishing business was enough to pay for all expenses during that year. I would imagine that all New York City artists could similarly make a lot more art that is enjoyable if they lived anywhere else. Though I misunderstood the intended message, as this chapter instead begins with a description of an artist who followed the traditional route and managed to get into collections and museums while living “in a downtown penthouse” in New York City. Kosut comments: “You found out that Eddie, your pretentious studio mate at MICA got picked up by a Lower East Side gallery. Eddie, that hack, got a write-up in the New York Times… In your objective opinion, Eddie’s work was total bullshit.” Then, this hypothetical jealous rival attempts moving to the City hoping to meet with similar luck, ending up: “while working on an art moving truck and picking up side jobs as a freelance art handler. Your left knee keeps swelling up. When you poke it, you recall you have no health insurance. The concluding point is: “Making art in New York City is a victory. All your heroes lived in poverty and obscurity at some point—that’s when they made their greatest work.” In my re-attribution research I learned that canonical British “authors’” biographies are almost entirely fictitious, as small Workshops with only 6-12 people per-century were doing the actual writerly labor, while they were deliberately crediting impoverished bylines to help sell their work as uniquely sympathetic. Most credits to these impoverished bylines were made after these impoverished people (non-writers) were dead and did not take a portion of the royalties. Thus, anybody following these examples is chasing after ghosts.
Chapter “4: Will You Listen to the Problems of a Stranger” presents the curious story of Ray, who attended community college before transferring into a BFA program, and then was inspired by fairytales about Parisian artists and trued moving there: “cellulitis wormed into Ray’s legs” from sleeping on “the streets of Paris” and “washing in fountains” for “a month”, so he ended up in the “emergency room” and then returned to Nashville. After years of labor in a bakery, he finally finished a BFA and then an MFA in Brooklyn. “After art school, Ray didn’t make any money from his art…” The “discovery narrative” is a fiction, he learned, as nobody gets spontaneously discovered by a gallery without connections. One artist who made it without working his way upwards is mentioned, without an explanation regarding just what top collectors saw in him. It is likely there were some corruption in this deal; if this case is extremely rare and no logical explanation is apparent. Though even stories about those who work in an art store or the like until their 50s before they are discovered are unrealistic. I generally have come to believe that all arts have been corrupted, and everything in art and literary biographies is a fiction. Then, some reality is mentioned, as Ray then was accepted into Yale’s MFA program. Artnet has reported that over “a fifty-year period, Yale’s Graduate School of Art pumped out nearly 10 percent of all successful artists in their study.” Yet despite these puffed odds, “Ray couldn’t find a dealer, and his work never hung in a gallery”. Art school thus seems to be a scam. The way folks did it before was that an artist would apprentice with an artist for room-and-board, or by paying a small fee, and after working on art in this workshop for around 7 years between 14 and 21, one would either take over as the lead-artist of their own workshop, or would move on to doing some adjacent job in the arts or crafts that was profitable, such as becoming a goldsmith, or a printer, or a wall-painter. All these jobs were valuable alike, as fictional artist biographies had not been part of the academic curriculum. Ray instead worked in an art-supply store for years before he finally moved back to Kentucky to live with his family. The chapter ends with Ray’s one success of selling a sculpture of a telephone. What kind of sculptures was this guy doing all those years if his opus was a telephone covered in clay or the like? Did he seriously deserve to be accepted into Yale’s top program? If so, just why do their graduates make up 10% of top artists…? Much to ponder.
It is a great book that makes me digress and ponder. I wish this book was more organized, and focused on reporting chronological facts. And I wish real names were used, so I could research these careers to figure out what is untold between these lines. But as it stands this is a solid attempt to describe the art profession as it is. Thus, all artists who are in this rat-race should read this book to avoid the pitfalls it details.
A Puffery of a “Woman” Who Made It as a Screenwriter Because Her Husband Was Famous
J. E. Smyth, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter (New York: Columbia University Press, September 3, 2024). Softcover: $30.00. 320pp. Index, bibliography, maps. ISBN: 978-0-231215-28-2.
***
“A screenwriter, novelist, labor leader, Hollywood insider, and feminist, Mary C. McCall Jr. was one of the film industry’s most powerful figures in the 1940s and early 1950s. She was elected the first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild after leading the fight to unionize the industry’s writers and secured the first contract guaranteeing a minimum wage, credit protection, and pay raises. Her advocacy was not welcomed by all: To screenwriters McCall was an ‘avenging goddess,’ but to studio heads she was, in the words of one Hollywood executive, ‘the meanest bitch in town.’ And after a clash with the mogul Howard Hughes in the blacklist-era 1950s, she disappeared from the pages of Hollywood history. J. E. Smyth tells McCall’s remarkable story for the first time… She explores McCall’s life and work, from her friendships with stars such as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney to her authorship of the hit Maisie series about a working-class showgirl’s adventures. Analyzing McCall’s deft political maneuvering, Smyth offers new insight on screenwriters’ struggle for equality and recognition. She also examines why McCall’s legacy is unrecognized, showing how the Hollywood blacklist and entrenched sexism obscured her accomplishments…”
“Chapter 2: The Pirate” attracted my interest first. However, sadly, this chapter begins by crediting this woman’s rise to her love affair with a powerful man: who merely played a pirate in a movie. There was a 16-year difference between them, so she sold her body to enter the film industry, and thus to eventually “make it” as its temporary monopolist. “Chapter 3: It’s Tough Being Famous” explains that her marriage made her instantaneously-famous, and her birthing their first child increased this fame. By the end of this chapter, she has leisurely written some stories, takes a break, and then returns to the “typewriter”, after deciding on an “open marriage”. And then they decided to divorce. They were married between around 1927-32; though they might have continued to be open-married; that part of the story was not clearly delivered. “Chapter 4” begins with the claim that she was living frugally between her stories being published, ignoring the large allowance her divorce settlement would have granted her. This was during the Depression, but a movie star was hardly this period’s victim. Meanwhile, “50 percent of screenwriters made less than $4,000 a year”. Then, her husband (new or old) got a new top job, and brought her with him back to Hollywood. Meanwhile, she called a producer who was a contact to query about adapting one of her short stories. He instead asked if she “had ‘anything in the trunk to suit a blonde girl named Jean Muir.’” This Muir happened to be “a fellow alumna of the Dwight School of Englewood”, who was a Broadway and Hollywood star. McCall happened to have written an “unpublishable” story called The Lady Surrender that was “a perfect antidote to Wallis’s censorship woes in the post-Code era. Wallis initially offered her $2,100, but she raised it to $3,000 and had him hire her at $300 a week in April and May…” In other words, because her husband was famous, she managed to sell an “unpublishable” story, and was paid more than over 50% of writers at this time. This is a very depressing story, and I have to exit this review at this time. I know this is pretty much the only way a “woman” has “made it” in Hollywood, and why I didn’t… But I don’t really want to know much more about this prostitution of femininity.
Classic of Magical Realism: Turning Mayan Theology into Revolutionary Propaganda
Miguel Ángel Asturias, Men of Maize (New York: Penguin Group: Classics, September 10, 2024). Softcover: $22.00. 384pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-40-2.
****
“…Epic of ecological devastation, capitalist exploitation, and Indigenous wisdom, now available again for its 75th anniversary with a new introduction and with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar. Deep in the mountain forests of Guatemala, a community of Indigenous Mayans—the ‘men of maize’—serves as stewards to sacred corn crops. When profiteering outsiders encroach on their territory and threaten to abuse the fertile land, they enter a bloody struggle to protect their way of life. Blurring the lines between history and mythology, Nobel Prize winner” in 1967 “Miguel Ángel Asturias…” (1899-1974) “offers a prescient warning against the loss of ancestral wisdom and the environmental destruction set in motion by colonial oppression and capitalist greed.” Asturias is part of the Mexican magical realism fiction movement, or one of the only Mexican genres that has been recognized by major international prizes, and canonized. At the end of his career, he worked as the Ambassador for Guatemala. This novel was copyrighted in 1949 in Spanish, and was first-translated and published by Penguin in 1993, decades after the author’s death, but just late enough to accept a novel as being old enough for it to be a classic.
Unlike the densely annotated and introduced new edition of Orlando, there are relatively light introductions in this novel. The “Foreword” begins with an abstract summary of the “Indigenous heritage” being a “mystery” to outsiders. Then, it returns to reality by confessing that his “mother was a store cashier, my father a parking lot valet”. The “I” that this “Foreword” is written from is not Austurias’, but rather Hector Tobar’s; he also won a Pulitzer Prize, and is a professor at UC Irvine. The editor of this volume should have put Tobar’s byline directly under this “Foreword”, as otherwise readers might assume Austurias’ family were impoverished.
The following “Introduction” argues that this novel is unique in its “ambitious” scope in the description of life after colonialization. This novel is claimed to rival the “Maya Genesis” Bible, or Popol Vuh, which was mentioned in another study in this set of reviews, “which existed long before the Spaniards arrived.” As I explained in the previous section, since only a Latin version of this Bible has survived, it seems very likely that it was forged by Spaniards as part of their conquest-propaganda. This “ecological” Bible relates that “gods of prehistory created animals before human beings” and tried to make people out of different substances before succeeding in making “them out of maize”. This reference explains the title. This novel was published during a period in the middle of the Guatemalan Revolution that lasted between 1944 and 1954, which was attempting to make “agrarian reforms” after centuries of colonialism. This novel’s style is to weave together random fragments. “writers had been banned from publishing novels during the three hundred years of Spanish rule”. Colonialism worked because the colonists had complete control of the press and could spin all events in their favor by outright lying about history. Dictatorial rule that followed was from these foreign monopolists retaining indirect power, even if they left direct control. Meanwhile, Asturias was credited with translating Popol Vuh while he lived in France.
A separate section offers a synopsis of the novel. First, Maya Indian tribesmen guerrillas struggle for independence from the forests: this is set at the end of the 19th century. Because this novel is anti-capitalist, it seems to have been pro-Revolutionary propaganda of the socialists, being published in the middle of that revolutionary struggle. “Communal Indigenous territories” are juxtaposed against “capitalist agriculture”. Then the next two parts happen 7 years later, the rebellion has failed, and families fight to hold on to their land with minor rebellious acts. The editor mentions that the history of capitalist-socialist struggle is not directly mentioned in the text, so I turned to the novel itself.
Chapter “I: Gaspar Ilom” begins, as explained in a note, with a structure that includes “repetition of one half of a sentence followed by the elaboration of a metaphorical chain in the other”; this “is characteristic of primitive litanies or spells”, as in the “Maya codices”. By starting with these author is confessing he is consciously attempting to create a new puffed mythology of the Maya (304). An example of a sentence from this opening: “To deny, to grind the accusation of the earth where he lay sleeping with his reed mat, his shadow, and his woman, where he lay buried with his dead ones and his umbilicus, unable to free himself from a serpent…” (5) The mention of the serpent suggests an attempt to convince Christians this myth might be about them as well. When this mythology is not put in quotation marks, the narrator is still repetitive and overly mythological: the sun almost set fire to the maize-leaf ears of the yellow rabbits in the sky, the yellow rabbits in the forest, the yellow rabbits in the water…” A drumbeat of Mexican mythological keywords echoes without making much progress regarding just what this story is about (6).
If somebody is extremely high on acid, they probably would have an amazing trip trying to read this novel cover-to-cover. But anybody who is sober is not likely to make it far before giving up. My theory was supported by the line: “He felt his head, full of liquor, like a gourd hanging from one of the wooden uprights of the rancho.” Though the next paragraph clarifies that this “was” not the typical “liquor” but rather the “water of war”. “He drank to feel himself burned, buried, beheaded, which is how you have to go to war if you want to go unafraid: no head, no body, no skin” (8).
Well, if this was propaganda, it might have been anti-revolutionary, as it seems to be convincing revolutionaries to escape into drunkenness during battles. If any side was drunk, it was not likely to win. But it is typical for revolutionaries to intoxicate the soldiers, as it tends to be difficult to explain warfare to sober people. If the author was attempting to give the impression that a great Mexican writer was a drunkard… it seems to have succeeded… Or if he was just trying to give readers an authentic sensation of what a drunkard feels and thinks like: also succeeded in this regard. I cannot keep reading this novel because it has run into my time-limit and patience. But if reading over this commentary, you want to brave it; then, I recommend you proceed. Perhaps a drunk reader would be more receptive of its rhythm. Most libraries of all types should have a copy of this novel because it is a classic. I am glad to have it in my library, especially if I am ever asked to deliberately write a digressive magic-realism novel.
A Brazilian Attempts Touristing into the Heart of the Amazon
Mário de Andrade, The Apprentice Tourist (New York: Penguin Group: Classics, April 4, 2024). Softcover: $17.00. 224pp. ISBN: 978-0-143137-35-1.
****
“A Brazilian masterpiece, now in English for the first time: a playfully profound chronicle of an urban sophisticate’s misadventures in the Amazon. ‘My life’s done a somersault,’ wrote Mário de Andrade” (1893-1945) “in a letter, on the verge of taking a leap. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, and almost fifty years before Bruce Chatwin ventured into one of the most remote regions of South America in In Patagonia, Andrade, the queer mixed-race ‘pope’ of Brazilian modernism and author of the epic novel Macunaíma, finally embarks on a three-month steamboat voyage up the great river and into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world… Featuring more than a dozen photographs… fish-out-of-water account of the Indigenous peoples and now-endangered landscapes of Brazil that he encounters (and, comically, sometimes fails to reach), but also traces his internal metamorphosis: The trip prompts him to rethink his ingrained Eurocentrism, challenges his received narratives about the Amazon, and alters the way he understands his motherland and the vast diversity of cultures found within it.”
There seems to be a pattern that these popular Latin American writers are also politicians, as Andrade “served as the founding director of Sao Paulo’s Department of Culture” and organized Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in 1922, which popularized modernism in Brazil.
As I started reading the brief “Introduction”, I was still unsure if this an autobiography about a trip the author took, or if this is a fictional novel. The editor does clarify the former is the case, as he quotes from Andrade’s letter to a friend that reports his preparations for this expedition, and the surprise obstacles he began immediately encountering. The first of these is that he had been promised that many socialites would attend, but only one lady and her two friends also came as a tourist. Then, there is an explanation how Andrade’s poetry differed because he used the authentic language spoken in the streets. “As European artists drew inspiration from the ‘primitive aesthetics of the tropics, their Brazilian colleagues were driven to do the same—the key difference being that their inspiration came from a rediscovery of their own land.” The reality of the enormous challenges Andrade finds during this “rediscovery” is contrary to what Europeans had been writing in their books about the Heart of Darkness or other wild places because “Conrad’s” version was ghostwritten by Sir Francis Burnand, who studied at Cambridge before becoming a periodical editor, without hardly any experience traveling outside of Britain. The Heart of Darkness avoids mentioning any specifics about the wildlife on the Nile, and instead expresses the narrator’s horror of such foreign places. Andrade has instead been convinced by such tales that such exploration is a romantic endeavor, and he ends up coming out with a matching horror of wild travel to Burnand’s. It might not be helpful to cultures in Latin America to buy into the myths that were told about them by Europeans: or that their culture is Mayan folklore, and jungle-life. Mainstream novelists define what the culture of a place is for the world, and perhaps the economy of Brazil would profit if its novelists presented it as a modern place with industrialized tastes, as opposed to presenting its peripheries or the impoverished rural communities as its main culture. There are plenty of poor rural people in every country: in America they are ostracized under categories such as “poor white trash” or “hillbillies”. The British Workshop made a lot of money by selling adventure narratives into wild, foreign lands. It would be logical for people who live in these places to similarly profit from such adventure-fiction, but, as Andrade proved, if you actually attempt to experience adventure in the wild by living in it, you are not likely to write the same type of light surface plot-driven account.
As the editor explains, Andrade had previously written Macunaima using a similar outsider strategy as the Brits used. He briskly churned it out while staying at a friend’s farm, and without venturing into the “rainforest”, where he takes his “shapeshifting Indigenous (anti)hero”. This lack of direct research let to it being “de-geographized” or a “hodgepodge of flora, fauna, slang, historical figures, and landmarks from all across Brazil, almost nothing placed where it ‘ought’ to be.” He initially wanted to take this trip to the Amazon to revise these mistakes in the forthcoming-for-publication Macunaima. The described trip out of Sao Paulo took place between May 7, 1927, and August 15. If there are any details in Heart of Darkness, Burnand would have plagiarized these out of other ghostwriters’ actual travelogues. Similarly, as the editor observes, some of the details in Andrade’s account “is shot through with allusions to previous chronicles of tropical Brazil, from Jose de Alencar to Pero Vaz de Caminha to Euclides da Cunha, and dotted with a similarly ‘de-geographized’ array of references to everything from Dante to Bocage.” He appears to have been distracted from recording precisely what he was seeing by love entanglements or “flirtations with women”, which he mentions “throughout the book”.
The “Note on the Translation”, by Flora Thomson-Deveaux, explains that “Andrade’s prose is unfailingly radical”, as he “favors a deliberate colloquiality”. There are so many oddities in the usage that the translator was frequently frustrated: “As I translated, I’d often find a phrase peculiar, throw it into a search engine, and discover that it seemed to be the only registered occurrence in written Portuguese.” This obviously meant that the translator had to invent a definition for it himself based on context, and then figure out what would be an equivalent word or phrase in English. I have seen some awful translations of Gogol into English, where the translator just ignored the use of folk-slang, and misspellings, and other oddities, and instead translated it as if it was a children’s book by using the simplest dictionary-translation, if the spelling errors were removed. This translator’s note regarding her sensitivity to this problem gives hope that he avoided this pitfall.
Apprentice was first-published in Brazilian in 1928, and a new edition was released in 1943, as indicated by a “Preface” from the author from this year. The first entry on “May 7, 1927” opens with Andrade expressing a stereotypical “fear of Indians”, to guard against who he has brought “an enormous bamboo cane”, which he soon learns was “silly”. He almost seems to be writing anti-Brazilian propaganda in the second entry on May 8th as well: “I find Rio an awfully ugly city, but people do say it’s beautiful…” Though this is a frank perspective that I appreciate. I have found all among the many cities I have visited to have been ugly… no matter the continent. It is as if builders make more money by maximizing the ugliness.
The first entry as they set of becomes dense with enticing details: “The water moans, oily and leaden, lazily throwing back the frisky lights from the beaches.” While the intro explained that he was only accompanied by the women, they are soon joined by “Swiss naturalist, Professor Hagmann”, and others. Hagmann is “teaching” them “about Amazonia” by May 14, by “saying the most obvious things.” They enter the Amazon on May 19, after going through a developed agricultural region. Before getting of this luxurious boat he has been on, he comments: “We take pride in being the only great (great?) civilized country in the tropics…”
Since the first days were very pleasantly touristy, I turned to page 61, which covers the June 8 meeting with “The Tribe of the Pacaas Novos”. In the middle of this description there is an explanation that this tribe habits are unique. “When they feel it is their business to do their business, they do it wherever they please and in front of whoever may be there, even on the feet or legs of others, without the slightest hesitation, as naturally as our country folk hawk and spit.”
On June 23, he reports “the guide” had “teeth” that “were black from chewing coca.” But the villagers begin to wear the same clothing as them, and they sleep in a large house. Then, on July 16, they visit “The Do-Mi-So Indians”. The opening sentence against seems to be an anti-Brazilian propaganda: “they believed only in evil gods. They had no good deity to speak of. Their mythology was a downright demonology, perverse as the devil.” He assesses that they seem to have a pessimistic language that lacks a phrase for “I am full”. It is puzzling how he could have done a serious linguistic study, and a dictionary during this brief interaction. Did he have a translator with him? Was one of the locals bilingual? Did he sit down for the entire stay and attempt to create a dictionary of this isolated language? He does not explain how he gathered this data. He only cites a couple of terms for friend/enemy, and having grasped this distinction he concludes that they are referring to him as a “peculiar enemy of an inferior race, hence worthy of scorn.”
If I had the leisure to stop and read a book cover-to-cover for fun, I would read this travelogue. Thus, I recommend it to those who are seeking a strange adventure travel narrative. Just don’t believe that it is wholly or largely true. As the introduction explained, much of the contents that are detailed are borrowed from other travelogues. Most travelers who attempt to venture into such jungles are likely to experience shocking and horrifying events that cannot be anticipated. Some might catch malaria, or other tropical diseases. Some might be attacked by a deadly spider or snake. Some might, apparently, be violated by natives who use the restroom on their foot. Or as the narrator comments on July 17: “The first mate explains to us that he’s very rich, his parents are dead of malaria or something, and he lives on his own in the rubber plantation.” Okay. Who knows what can happen. There must be some truth among the lies here, and it is mostly hilariously told, even if to the detriment of the Brazilian travel industry. This is a deserved classic, so libraries of all types should purchase this book to make it accessible to casual and researching readers alike.
A Rare Case Where a Title Should Have Been Censored
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (New York: Penguin Group: Classics, November 12, 2024). Softcover: $19.00. 288pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-16-7.
*
“…Story centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos-era Philippines… Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines’ late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive. A wildly disparate group of characters—including movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines—becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.”
Jessica Hagedorn is a San Francisco-raised author, who has won many awards, and has had much popular success in many genres, including not only poetry, and novels, but also music and films. The first edition of this novel was copyrighted in 1990, and this edition includes a new 2024 introduction by Patrick Rosal.
Rosal’s intro is unhelpful as it takes on a conversational tone, chatting about Jessica’s and Rosal’s families across its first section. The next section attempts to explain the novel, and begins with the abstraction that there are many voices, or “the book is haunted.” The characters are inhabited by at times “mythological figures like the Filipino kapre”, or “colonizers”, or “radio voices reflecting our own desires for love and blood”. A few paragraphs later, Rosal gets to “the book’s plot, if we’re to call it that”. “…A political assassination and Joey Sands himself sees the violent event…” But it is not about the event, but rather “the disparity between witness and testimony. It is about the nature of attention…” Er… I think I’m not going to like this novel, as it seems the narrator’s point is his lack of attention… and this tends to leave to nonsensical narratives… The next section entirely gives up on figuring out the plot and characters, and instead puffs its “slang-mouthed symphony” that is an “elegy” (i.e. lament for the dead?), “urban pastoral, and serenade… recording all the sounds that pass through our rooms…” That’s not good. A novel really should pick some of the sounds, instead of all of them. We can all just listen to the sounds in our rooms if we wanted reality. If we choose to spend time with a novel, we really want the author to choose which of the sounds are the significant ones, and focus on those.
The “Acknowledgements” are addressed from the author, who explains that unlike most Penguin classic authors she is still alive (1949-): “What a joy to have Dogeaters published as a Penguin Classic in my lifetime.” Her Wikipedia page explains that she has a small fraction of Chinese ancestry, which makes the title slightly less offensive. This made me curious to learn just why this novel is using a Chinese slur in its title, so I searched for “Chinese” and found these mentions. On page 53: “his square-jawed, unsmiling face and pretty Chinese eyes heavily made up…” Then, on page 55 we learn: “Captured by Chinese guerrillas and executed for aged war crimes…” Page 57: “Uncle’s no peasant—he’s a city man, born and bred in Manila. Busy with schemes and hustles, his various transactions with the Chinese and the cops, he functions in an opium haze, most days.” “Chinese” is used here as a synonym for Chinese-gangs, which is a pretty culturally-insensitive perspective. Then there is an innocuous visit to a “shabby Chinese restaurant” (68). A discussion about Chinese food follows in the next few pages. Then, another slur, as a character notes “we can’t live in Greenhills”. And another character echoes “with authority”: “Too many Chinese.” Then there is a spotting of a “Chinese mestizo”, or mixed-race person (166). And after more talk about Chinese foods, a more specific mention of “a Chinese-Filipino” (232). Then, the narrator finally reflects about themselves (seemingly), commenting: “my paternal great-grandfather’s name, or my great-grandmother’s. I’ve been told she was Chinese from Macao, that Uncle Cristobal burned the only photographs of her so there is no remaining evidence” (263). And that’s it: these are all the mentions of “Chinese” in this novel. This novel begins with a chapter called “Love Letters” by describing a prestine “American tableau” puffed scene of the “Hollywood’s version of a typical rural Christmas”. Then, the characters move to “the popular Café Espana”, where children with Latin first names are playing after seeing the Americana movie. It ends with an “Ave maria” prayer for “revenge”, which mentions “mangos” and other fruits, as if it is artificially combining Christian theology with Latin American-associated items. The plural term “dogeaters” is never used in the body of this novel outside of the title. The singular “dogeater” is mentioned on page 52: an employer is shouting for Pedro to finish cleaning the toilet, and mop the floors: “Andres shouts improvised curses at the janitor: Pedrong Tamad, Pedrong Headhunder, Pedro the Pagan Dogeater with the Prick of a Monkey and the Brain of a Flea.” Previously, on page 50, there’s a reference to Pedro as somebody who “eats dogmeat”. And in a later scene a narrator sleeps in “a squatter’s hut… I sleep right next to chickens, pigs, goats, and dogs” (57). And many other dog-insults follow.
I cannot read any further into this slang-laden insult-festival. Why did whatever this is win so many awards? The American public tends to cancel people for wearing black-face makeup, and yet this degree of race-based insults is okay because the author is of a mixed race? There is little technical moral difference between eating a dog and a cow, but using a food-preference or a poverty-driven food preference to abuse people who are working for a living, or stereotyping people of a race as being gang-members is pretty-much everything that is wrong with modern hatred. The point of such insults seems to be to devalue the labor of others, and it in practice has allowed women to continue to be paid at $0.80 on a man’s $1. I cannot imagine why Penguin published this novel…
The Dullest Hollywood Fame Story Ever Told
Kristian Nairn, Beyond the Throne: Epic Journeys, Enduring Friendships, and Surprising Tales (New York: Hachette Books, September 24, 2024). Softcover: $30.00. 272pp. ISBN: 978-0-306834-89-9.
**
“Beyond the Throne is the first memoir to share behind‑the‑scenes stories of the perils and triumphs of Game of Thrones—from beloved performer Kristian Nairn, who played Hodor and became one of the most recognizable figures of the global television phenomenon. The story of an unlikely hero who fulfilled his destiny… From his unlikely audition to his on-the-job training as an actor to his ascendance as one of the… pivotal characters on the show. Nairn details the camaraderie that develops as the actors face the elements on set, not entirely unlike the ones their characters must endure on screen… Nairn’s personal story—raised by a single mother during the Troubles in Ireland, coming of age as a gay man in Lisburn and Belfast, navigating intolerance, and seeking out his scene—is an epic, often rollicking, sometimes heartbreaking journey all its own. Nairn finds his voice and his confidence performing as a drag queen called Revvlon, and eventually DJing at the legendary nightclub Kremlin.”
The “Introduction” records the most dull conversation with an agent imaginable. Instead of just delivering a new role, there is a delay of the news, as they babble about nothing. Then there is an account of an awkward audition, which is sprinkled with internal slang. Then, a puffery of fame and the series follows. He is shocked to have been chosen over others as he has been a drag-queen with “delusions of grandeur”. He keeps saying he is anxious and nervous, as he reports dull conversations that do not really explain just why exactly he was chosen over others with a lot more experience. It is written as if the actor cannot “blab about the… discussion”, and so it was written by somebody who was not there and thus cannot disclose what actually happened, and delivers fluff that sounds like what an audition for this role might have been like. In the conclusion of this chapter, they ask him if he would be willing to appear naked, and after a hesitation over his “naked body” being shown “to a million-plus”, he agrees. His hesitation seems to have been over the fact that as a drag performer he has gender-dysphoria, or feels that his visible gender does not conform to the gender he feels that he is; exposing his male genitals would have thus been psychologically damaging. But he does not say this directly and instead mentions related abstractions (18).
“Chapter 1: Lisburn” is a bit denser, including some more specific descriptions. He describes stuff he is watching on TV, and puffs female superheroes. Several pages later, he is still talking about his Mum and a farm house, with sudden shocking revelations, such as that his Mum has been “raped” (68). “Chapter 11: Freak Magnet” is a bit more interesting as it mentions the application of makeup. But then again there are pop-culture pufferies, and mentions of a shooting of a famous politician, and general fears associated with being an out gay person in Belfast or London.
I do not like this book. This is the type of book I might see in a nightmare. The blurb’s promise made it sound great. I imagined a dense account of all the corrupt dealings I saw when I was in Hollywood that kept me from getting in, but from the perspective of somebody who just says “yes” to the steal. There could have also been a sincere description of how gender-dysphoria develops, as surely one does not simply see pretty female superheroes in films and decide one would rather be a woman. I would have been interested in reading about just how one in fact makes money as a drag-queen. Or perhaps there could have been a description of how one studies for an audition, or prepares for a scene. Instead, it’s just a guy repeating lines with slight dramatic effect, and he’s chosen and then just goes through the motions. It is difficult to imagine how this book could have been written any more badly. It’s a puffery of fame, and an advertisement of a franchise, which fails to disclose this intention. For example, there’s a mention that “Revvlon Miguel” worked “as a door whore at the gay superclub Heaven”, but then the term is revealed as a joke, as he reports that he was “handing out leaflets” and other dull activities. If you’re going to hint you worked as a prostitute, just go there, or if you are uncomfortable with this direction, why hint at it… (124)
If you have been reading this review, and you think it sounds interesting, go ahead, and buy this book. But if dull surface descriptions are not appealing, I recommend readers stay away.
Sympathy-Grabbing by an Overpaid Hollywood Insider
Tim Matheson, Damn Glad to Meet You: My Seven Decades in the Hollywood Trenches (New York: Hachette Books, November 12, 2024). Softcover: $30.00. 384pp. ISBN: 978-0-306832-93-2.
**
“…From the… Hollywood actor, Tim Matheson. For the past seven decades, Tim Matheson has been… on-screen… in Hollywood. In his debut memoir, Tim takes fans behind-the-scenes of his illustrious career, and reveals what it was like to learn from and work alongside the greats, including Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, Steven Spielberg, and Aaron Sorkin. Tim also talks about how he transitioned from acting to directing, the role in The West Wing that nabbed him two Emmy nominations… Insight via ‘film school boot camp’ sidebars…”
A first glance at the first chapter, “Fade In”, promises this book is an echo of the no-content style of the previous title in this set. While the lines are similarly short, and most of it is empty dialogue, the contents in the opening paragraphs are a bit surprising, as the author confesses he is having troubles: he is newly divorced, “the two TV networks I’m currently working for are suing me”, and he is anticipating bad medical news. The doctor through tells him he is fine, and has only had a “panic attack”. Instead of focusing on the negative, I decided to search for key terms that promise some interesting content within this book. The first term I search for is “lawsuit”. In “Marrying My Sister”, he explains that his “creditors responded with lawsuits”, after his Universal and other contracts had been “canceled”, and he was attempting to pacify creditors “with a $10 check” (85). He repeats that two studios were threatening to sue him, but does not clarify why. It seems a miscommunication between his “acting agent and directing agent” caused this. Both studios “were threatening to sue me for millions if I didn’t make myself exclusive to their show.” He apparently double-booked despite an exclusive contract because he was attempting to double his money “postdivorce”. The threat was that if he didn’t end one of the jobs, he “would never work at their networks or studios again”, despite 50 years in the business (314). This seems like a rich-person problem, as just quitting one of the shows surely would have immediately ended this turmoil. Then, he notes the studios are surprised when a phone calls solves scheduling issues. He promised both studios to pay for their expenses associated with this double-booking and this allowed him to work at both. This is a ridiculously over-hyped problem that was just instantly deflated after being built-up across this book. I was hoping to read about a Hollywood actor being dramatically sued into bankruptcy…
Then, I searched for “Lucille Ball” and mostly found mentions of her in lists of puffed actors. One exception is a brief mention of “appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show” in a “scene… with Lucille”, which was “terrifying”. No details about this encounter follow (125). Mostly he just keeps mentioning her when he needs to prove that he was an expert at acting because he worked with this antique celebrity.
I searched for “Spielberg”. There’s a mention of a call from Spielberg. After a puffery of Spielberg, the first thing he says is an invitation for the author to be in his movie. Spielberg gives a brief spiel about his movie. He adds that he has two different parts, and he wants the actor to chose one, which he does. Spielberg does a presentation for him of the storyboards: the author puffs himself: “I was being courted by the wunderkind—the new king of Hollywood.” Then, he is surprised to learn that he would be paid the same amount for this lead role, as he was paid for a supporting role in the previous film. He learns that “Spielberg… couldn’t care less about playing games with actor-salary negotiations” because he was offering the lowest possible rate, and was threatening a take-it-or-leave offer. He might have called most Hollywood actors with this type of a “I have two roles for you” deal that basically categorized actors into male-old vs female-young etc.
While this is somewhat curious. It really says the bare minimum about the realities of life in Hollywood. And the pufferies of those in this industry are deeply annoying. Thus, I do not recommend this book.
Anecdotes of the Threats of Fentanyl Addiction
Ryan Hampton, Fentanyl Nation: Toxic Politics and America’s Failed War on Drugs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, September 24, 2024). Softcover: $29.00. 304pp. ISBN: 978-1-250288-93-6.
***
“A passionate call to abandon ineffective drug-war policies, reframe addiction as a public health issue, and end the Fentanyl crisis. The American overdose crisis has reached record-breaking heights; preventable overdoses are now responsible for more annual deaths than traffic accidents, suicide, or gun violence. Fentanyl—a potent, inexpensive, and easy-to-manufacture synthetic opioid—has thoroughly contaminated the drug supply, and while it frequently makes front page news across the country, it remains poorly understood by policymakers and the public. Why, despite all of our efforts to raise awareness and billions of dollars of investments, does this emergency keep getting worse? Recovery advocate Ryan Hampton separates the facts from the fiction surrounding Fentanyl, and shows how overdose deaths are ultimately policy failures. Instead of investing in education, harm reduction, effective treatment, and recovery, we have doubled down on more police, more incarceration, and harsher penalties for those caught in the grip of addiction. Yet history has shown time and time again that it is impossible to arrest our way out of a public health crisis; the government used the same strategy to fight the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 80s and 90s, and it only resulted in racially disparate policing and the destruction of marginalized communities…”
The “Introduction” opens with an unusual perspective of Officer Chris Green, who is exercising at the gym when he is called to the scene. A precise description of the town follows, and then a description of the scene of a guy covered in a white powder being arrested by Green without gloves. After they reach the station, the drug addict begins suffering symptoms of withdrawal. A bit of science is offered: a few hours without fentanyl can bring on withdrawal, unlike with other related drugs, because it has a shorter half-life. As the officers call an ambulance for the addict, they notice a white smudge on Green’s uniform, and he shortly starts “feeling a little strange”. “Within minute, the athletic, healthy officer was falling into the door.” He was shocked that he was “overdosing”. While this narrative is told with short words, and with choppy paragraphs, it relates a good deal of useful details and does so in a dramatic format that is likely to be digestible for casual readers.
Other perspectives follow, together with statistics for 2022: “109,680” Americans died in 2022 from overdoses. Chapter “1: Mainstream Fear” presents Dr. Ryan Marino, who decides to research strange patterns in overdoses that are not coming up in drug-tests in 2021. His resume is summarized. Then, a simple explanation is presented for the 3 waves of the opioid crisis, beginning with the one manufactured by Purdue Pharma between 1999-2010, then a second wave when this problem was acknowledged and over-prescribing was criminalized and doctors drastically decreased their prescription rates starting in 2010, and this led to users going into the illegal heroine market. And then the third wave began in 2014 when Fentanyl was introduced to meet the demand for a cheaper and stronger drug.
This book is basically a casual, conversational lecture about this crisis written for an average newspaper-reader, as opposed to for academics or specialists in this field. Real stories are presented with commentary regarding what is going wrong, and why these problems have not yet been fixed, despite them being common-knowledge. I reviewed some books on drugs, but they were denser in research. Though in total this book might deliver more information, despite seeming to be lighter per-paragraph at a glance. I would have recommended that it be edited down. For example, one paragraph reads: “It feels like grief. Or maybe, heartbreak” (23). I get the feeling that as this book continues there is more hot-air, and less concrete details.
This is a useful book that might get the message across to the public that would not be willing to read any book that is too smart-sounding. Because this book has the density of a science-fiction novel, readers might have an easier time getting into these stories to be educated about this problem. It is really a problem of a lack of education. The “just don’t do it” lesson must be accompanied by the facts regarding the precise side effects and threats that follow, instead of mere symbols of eggs-frying, etc. Thus, those who have a family member who is sliding into lighter forms of addiction, or libraries that serve this population would probably benefit from lightly reading this book.
Unreadable Diatribe on Bribers as Villains, and Bribees as Victims
Casey Michel, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, August 27, 2024). Softcover: $30.00. 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-250286-05-5.
**
“A stunning investigation and indictment of a segment of the United States’ foreign lobbying industry, and the threat to end democracy. For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they’ve not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they’ve secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself. These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and many of them spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous, repressive regimes in the process. These foreign lobbyists include figures like Ivy Lee, the inventor of the public relations industry—a man who whitewashed Mussolini, opened doors to the Soviets, and advised the Nazis on how to sway American audiences. They include people like Paul Manafort, who invented lobbying as we know it—and who then took his talents to autocrats from Ukraine to the Philippines, and then back to the White House. And they now include an increasing number of Americans elsewhere: in law firms and consultancies, among PR specialists and former lawmakers, and even within think tanks and universities… After decades of installing dictators and corrupting American policy…”
I did not read this blurb closely enough when I requested this book. This is not what I expected, or a type of book I have seen before. American lobbyists as a threat to democracy? This is all too conspiratorial for a book published by St. Martin’s, and I’ve just finished two hyper-conspiratorial series… The book opens with some need statistics on “Foreign Agents”. Apparently, there has been a 43% decline in “staff overseeing foreign lobbyists”, an 86% decline in audits, and only 3 convictions of lobbyists in the 50 years pre-2016. Doesn’t the latter statistic basically mean that there has been almost no proof of illegal activity by these lobbyists? Then, there is the odd statistic that 114 Congressmen became foreign agents between 1990-2016, as reported by Politico in a 2016 article. American politicians have certainly profited from having so many spies courting them, as lobbyists have spent $4.1 billion since 2016. Apparently Chinese and American lobbyists have had an oversized increase of 476-584% between 2017-21. It was recently in the news that Trump was bribed with a $10 campaign donation by the Egyptian government in 2016 in exchange for him freeing billions that had been locked up over human rights violations after a tyrant seized power in a coup. There were also stories that US sanctions are at an all-time high. There are 38 countries with current active sanctions, including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, but also Congo, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, West Bank, and Ukraine… It seems that the US is overusing sanctions because they profit US businesses, especially when other countries have to also bring sanctions and this means less international competition for American goods. So, China and Russia have been forced to increase these donations because they are responding to tariffs and sanctions in a manner that seems to be the only way to convince US politicians: by bribing them. But US politicians have learned that if they keep sanctions/ tariffs in place while collecting bribes, they can make 500% more money… Perhaps this is just where the trend was headed, and it reached a fever-pitch in Trump’s term… but I think it has kept moving forwards since Biden took over. Senator Bob Menendez was found guilty of taking bribes from Egypt as an unregistered foreign agent just a few weeks ago, in July 2024. He was initially charged in 2017 (these charges were from a 2015 case where a Florida eye doctor tried to buy his influence with vacations, campaign contributions), but the June 2022 raid uncovered new bribes in the gold bars etc. And Clarence Thomas had been receiving donations from Crow in 2011, and a vacation to the “Greek Islands” in 2007, a private jet trip gifted by Crow in 1997, though there was a spike in luxury-trips Thomas received between 2017-9, and there was at least one other trip during Biden’s term, as Crow sponsored an October 2021 trip to New York City. If Thomas did not report any trips in 2023 it might be only because of media coverage of this corruption that began appearing.
There are many great ways to have written a book on this subject. These would generally involve accusing nearly all American politicians of being corrupted by bribes from not only foreign but also domestic influence-paddlers. My new re-attribution series explains this problem began in Europe in the reign of monarchies. Specifically, in Britain, the monarchy managed to survive by holding complete control over the press without clearly disclosing this control. There were 6 active ghostwriters across the Renaissance, 11 in the 18th century and 12 in the 19th century, who were the only people who had access to expressing themselves in print. And they censored each other’s content to be maximally profitable to the monarchy and their capitalist monopolist donors. Britain is still ruled by a monarchy, but when some voting was allowed to bring in chosen by-the-people politicians, the choices they made were manipulated from the onset with bribes. It took bribes to win power, and bribes to keep it, and thus one wanted bribes in exchange for engaging in this corrupt system. Britain retained this exclusive Workshop until at least 1934. Public education had become available in around 1900, and people gradually become literate enough to be able to question the accuracy of reported propaganda. While before complete corruption of government allowed for such inhuman activities as slavery and colonialism, such corrupt political decisions could be criticized in the 1930s with the emergence of a bit of free press outside of the government’s control. The tensions between tyrants wanting to retain complete-control, and a suddenly conscious public gradually exploded in the two world wars. The winners of these conflicts were corrupt officials, because only they could have approved atomic bombing etc. What has changed is who is bribing who, why and with how much. The system of pay-to-play, or pay-for-policy, or pay-for-power, or pay-for-contracts has remained as it was in the Renaissance. No competitive scientific progress, or industrial innovation, or pro-human policies that help protect us from extinction can happen while this systemic corruption rules the world. Instead of describing how all this works in detail, this book is full of nonsense that seems to be designed as counter-propaganda. By making the anti-corruption activist author character seem unhinged, the message might be contradicted subversively.
The “Prologue: Bad Business”, describes Ivy Lee’s questioning by the US Congress just before his death in 1934 over his work in Germany for IG Farben. Lee had been protesting his company’s use of Nazi propaganda, while indirectly advising the Nazis, including Hitler, on adjusting their propaganda tactics. Instead of explaining this, the chapter digresses into philosophical ideas on “decorum”, the struggle between wealthy clients and “the masses”, and buried “controversies”. There are general mentions of unrelated American oligarchs that Lee also assisted. Farber is mentioned for the first time at the bottom of the first page. Some clarity is achieved on the second page. He had advised the Nazis to “establish closer relationships” or to bribe the “American press correspondents located in Germany” to manipulate them to communicate a softer translation of the Nazis’ propaganda that was digestible to the US audience. This section ends with the strange suggestion that something about this testimony killed Lee, but he died of a brain tumor at 57, which he might have been aware of before making this self-incriminating confession to Congress.
The next section picks up decades later, in 1986, with Jonas Savimbi. Again, the description is about how he looks and about communist philosophy, instead of just explaining what he was accused of doing. Though after a couple of digressive paragraphs about his “beard”, there is a report that he was guilty of placing women in “sexual slavery”, and crimes such as beating “to death a rival’s wife and children”. Paragraphs follow about the philosophy of him deciding to bribe Americans to oversee these crimes. There are some details about his bribes succeeding in him being welcomed at major news sources, and being created with a banquet by the American Conservative Union during his image-rehabilitation tour. In exchange for subversive bribes, American media changed the narrative and puffed his character, forgetting their own previous reports of his murders etc. But instead of explaining the facts of just who he bribed, with how much, and what specific media reports were positive, there are general ponderings about “American democracy” and “polite society”.
This is an unreadable book. Somebody must find news reports about each new name mentioned and read them before returning to these pages, as otherwise they would be constantly confused regarding just who is being accused of bribing officials next. The author seems to be very passionate about political philosophy of “kleptocracy” etc., but seems to fail to understand that readers just need the facts to reach these conclusions, instead of most of the text being taken up with propaganda without supporting evidence that cannot be found in common news reports. I do not recommend for anybody to read this book unless they are specialists in this field, and already know something about those accused. They might milk some useful information between the lines, and might be used to this avalanche of political rhetoric. I do hope somebody in the future will manage to write a coherent book on this subject, as it is indeed very much needed.
Was the Woman Who Led to a King’s Abdication a Chinese Agent?
Paul French, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, November 12, 2024). Softcover: $30.00. 320pp. ISBN: 978-1-250287-47-2.
****
“…The early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor—her one year in China. Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl ‘Win’ Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China. In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her ‘Lotus Year,’ referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics… But that ‘Lotus Year’ would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment. The British government’s supposed ‘China Dossier’ of Wallis’s rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. Instead… Spencer” was “a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war.”
A few references are made in this blurb that need clarification. The memoir cited was Wallis’ (1896-1986) The Heart Has Its Reasons (1956). The blurb semi-suggests that this book is an edition of her memoir, whereas it is instead a critical biography that is based on this memoir, comparing it to anti-Wallis propaganda. The abdication of King Edward VIII took place in 1936, or only 6 years after Muddock’s death in 1930; Muddock might have had an indirect influence on the monarchy that might have prevented this abdication if he was still alive, but his absence might have provided a void for foreign actors to manipulate events, after centuries of Britain’s monarchy sleeping, as the Workshop labored on controlling its press.
The “Introduction” explains that most of the accusations that Wallis had “learned in a low Chinese brothel” how to perform sexual favors to influence King Edward lacked any documented evidence to support them. For example, a dossier was mentioned that “did not exist”. Though the author does not clarify what contrary evidence exists, as he seems to instead be trusting the propagandistic view of Wallis’ side.
French narrates that in 1924, Wallis was 28 and took a US Navy transport ship to Hong Kong. Her husband was stationed in the military there, and so she eventually decided to join him to work on their marriage. He was abusive, so she divorced him, and then spent a year traveling across China. Where would she have had the funds for this travel without a divorce settlement? Then, she met the Prince of Wales in 1931, “becoming his mistress a few years later”. They had a relationship for 5 years until 1936 before their affair was publicized, when he became the king upon the death of his father King George V in January 1936. Edward abdicated on December 11, 1936. They were still unmarried during this announcement, and only got married on June 1937.
The center of the facts of what happened in China, after Wallis left her husband, begins to be reported in chapter “5: Twenty-Four Hours in Typhoid Town”. She reports that when she briefly stopped in Tientsin, there was “a local war… in progress, trains were being raided daily.” Between the typhoid and this little war: why didn’t she take the next US Navy ship back to the States? I spent 4 months in China before I was so sick I was forced to resign and return to the States. If she had the funds to live in China for a year, she must have had enough to travel back. What could have driven her to stay? She was traveling with an American friend and on the US SS Shuntien, so it should have been an easy exit. A description follows of warlords that were ruling this region, and adding additional risk to life. French proposes the theory that Wallis was there despite these risks because she was carrying “important documents on behalf of US naval intelligence”. Does that make sense? She arrived there on a Navy warship. All the navy crew on that ship would have been more suitable to deliver such documents, as opposed to a woman traveling as a tourist with a friend. And there is a note that she was not yet officially divorced. “There was certainly nothing else of interest in Tienstein—no friends, no shopping, no particular sights of interest… The city was frozen, diseased, and a potential powder keg of Chinese warlord violence” (104). The rest of this book attempts to prove this general argument of her being a US agent.
This book is dense with descriptions of places, politics, culture, people, and dramatic international incidents. I am not sure if Wallis or those who accused her were in the right, but I am sure that the evidence for either should be found in this well-researched book. Thus, I recommend it for casual readers, and for researchers of related subjects alike. And all types of libraries should include it in their collection, as it can be of spontaneous interest to their patrons.
Puffery of a Civil Rights Activist Who Became a Career Politician
David Greenberg, John Lewis: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, October 8, 2024). Softcover: $35.00. 704pp. ISBN: 978-1-982142-99-5.
****
“…Biography of Civil Rights’… John Lewis… drawing on interviews with Lewis and approximately 275 others who knew him at various stages of his life, as well as never-before-used FBI files and documents. Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died… Traces Lewis’s life through the post-Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South.” Then, the “story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta, and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the ‘conscience of the Congress.’” With “long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships…”
John Robert Lewis (1940-2020) served in the US House of Representatives for Georgia between 1987-2020. He held some type of political office between 1963-2020, or since he was 23, so he is an example of an early barrier-breaker.
The biography explains that back on July 15, 1962, Lewis “had to limit his Selma speech to then minutes”, because he had to then travel to Maryland to handle an ongoing riot that had the National Guard called against it (148). Then, there were agitations in Selma itself (169). In one incident in September, Lewis was marching behind a sign for, “One Man, One Vote”, when the sheriff focused on his group, before “Lewis fled” the threat of arrest. “He evaded the weapons, but was forced with others onto a bus and driven to jail.” There was press coverage, as Lewis sat in jail on Freedom Day (169). He was freed and carried on with other protests. The incident where he failed to avoid a beating in Selma occurred a bit later, in 1965, during another voting rights campaign. The Alabama State Troopers ordered them to disperse, and they instead stopped to pray, so the police release tear gas and attacked them with nightsticks, causing Lewis’ injuries (225).
I was curious how Lewis began to be elected to public office, so I searched for the term “elected”. An early mention is that he protested his failure to become the “rightfully elected chairman” of the SNCC. So he “felt betrayed and hurt”. Lewis attempted to leave the SNCC with his friends afterwards, or to pressure a “revote” in response to “a non-democratic ploy” (267). He seems to have gone as far as to threaten “the death of SNCC, of the movement”, but refrained from taking it this far (269). Lewis spent the following years actively designing “educational programs to help newly elected” black “officials”, and generally helping blacks to win public offices (323). There are some philosophical questions if “an elected official’s color” should “matter more than his positions” (334). There is a brief description of Lewis on the campaign trail, and broad promises, and some specifics, such as that he observed during his campaign, “peddlers of drugs and hot stolen merchandise” and hoped that the community could influence these hooligans by making them “embarrassed” of this criminality. This type of rhetoric succeeded in winning for Lewis “a slew of endorsements, including from the Constitution, and coasted to victory with 69 percent of the vote” (368), and he was off and running in his following non-stop political career.
There are too many abstract claims made in this biography without clear citations of their sources. And too much is unexplained. Just what is the relationship between Lewis creating a platform to support black politicians, and this platform being used specifically to help his own very early-starting career reach such meteoric success? Why was he threatening to overthrow the movement, if he was not granted power over it? Are these moral decisions? This book seems to be a puffery of Lewis that does not consider implied negatives. Despite these problems, it is important to document biographies of recent American political figures. Figuring out if they did something wrong, or right begins with a record of just what it is that they did. Most of the sources cited in the notes are newspaper articles, with a smaller percentage of interviews with associates. A successful politician is likely to have been manipulating what the press reported about them, as apparent from his endorsement by the Constitution at the defining early stage. Thus, it would have been a fairer biography if somebody other than these publicity-feeding or associate-driven sources had been consulted to check how the opposition perceived Lewis. There are no saintly white politicians, so it is suspicious when a book presents a saintly black politician. Then again, it is an incredible narrative of success despite the odds, and of a struggle for rights. And such stories are especially needed today: even if they are skewed towards the victory of justice, when in truth justice has mostly been losing.
Profiteering from Failing to Reach the North Pole
Buddy Levy, Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (New York: St. Martin’s Press, January 28, 2025). Softcover: $32.00. 304pp. ISBN: 978-1-250289-18-6.
****
“…Polar exploration via airship… Arctic explorer… Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship. American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook was the first to claim he made it to the North Pole in 1908. A year later, so did American Robert Peary, but both Cook’s and Peary’s claims had been seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian explorer extraordinaire Roald Amundsen—who’d made history and a name for himself by being first to sail through the Northwest Passage and first man to the South Pole—picked up where Walter Wellman left off, attempting to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, the engineer Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, launching one of the great rescue operations the world had ever seen.” This is the “tale of the men who first flew the most advanced technological airships of their time to the top of the world, risking and even giving their lives for science, country, and polar immortality.”
The “Prelude” refers to events that happened between 1900-3. It explains that in the early days of “free-floating balloons” rich people were paying as much as “100,000 francs” for the engineering of ships that could fly as few as seven miles in 30 minutes. Meanwhile, the Wright brothers were developing their flying vehicles by 1903. The “Prologue” reports it is describing events that took place on September 2, 1907 in Danes Island, Spitsbergen. But then recollections jump back to events in 1897. Wellman’s connection to President Roosevelt is puffed. There is a description of Wellman’s flight that took place in 1907, which was designed to be a 1,500-mile flight, despite this being this balloon’s “maiden voyage”. Apparently, when a Brazilian won the 100,000 francs prize in 1901, Wellman began planning this 1907 voyage on a “motorized airship” In “Part One: The Pioneer: The Remarkable Walter Wellman”. Wellman is described as an “American journalist” who “boarded the airship America at Danes Island in 1907… to fly into… polar exploration immortality…” Information about where Wellman was born and details on the expedition follow. He had been “obsessed with being the first to reach the North Pole”, taking expeditions northward between 1884-1907. Initially, he tried taking a ship. In the first attempt, “his hired ship the Ragnvald Jarl was crushed by giant fangs of ice and sunk”. After two months of desperate travel, they were rescued by a Norwegian sealing vessel. Then he took a trip in 1898. He had left two sailors in their base camp, before setting out to explore. While they were away, one of these two died, and the other slept with his dead body in his hut for 2 months. After burying the guy, despite his wishes not to be buried to avoid being eaten by animals, Wellman finally set out on a 700-mile “trek for the North Pole”. On this trip he “fractured his leg in an ice crevasse”, so he had to be “carried on a sled” for weeks. They only reached the inhabited “camp at Cape Tegetthoff”, after all that effort, where they stayed at a furnished house, with the main fear being that Wellman’s foot would be amputated. He had so far achieved absolutely nothing new, as he had not gone further than well-trodden paths. He had the money to keep at this absurd attempt because he had profited from starting The Penny Paper in Cincinnati, Ohio in his 20s, later selling it at a profit.
In my research into British ghostwriting, I learned that most travelogues of early British exploration were fictions that were written to “conquer” territories before it was actually feasible for merchants to venture into them. For example, after puffing “Dampier’s” voyages, investors and migrants could more easily be found with this travelogue to in fact settle in the described places. Many travelogues with nature-exploring themes were covering for slave-capturing or colonial missions or piratical or privateering captures of enemy nations wealthy-laden ships. There tended to be some hidden investor who would sponsor the ghostwriting, publication, and advertising of such travelogues, who profited from puffing the specific narrative being glorified. This is how the Brits “discovered” and put a flag on most of America centuries before they even traveled across most of it. Thus, I am very skeptical regarding just how this Wellman was profiting from these trips, and just why he kept trying or reporting to have tried.
Wellman had $250,000 ($8 million “in today’s currency”) in funding for his 1905 airship attempt. His main funder was Lawson, a Chicago Norwegian-language newspaper publisher, who invested $75,000. The rest came from “telephone inventor Alexander Bell and the National Geographic Society” (28-9). The ship was built and he attempted a failed voyage (after at least one self-destructing explosion) in 1907. He tried again without new funding in 1909, and was again stopped by mechanical failures. By Part Three, events take place in 1927-8. This got me interested in the money of it all, so I searched for “$”. Wellman had fired his “original hangar… on Danes Islands” after he had engineered much of the expensive ship. This designer, Alexander Liwentaal, was publishing critical articles about Wellman in the Parisian journal, so Wellman filed a libel lawsuit against him in 1907 (71). Wellman needed to crush all criticism because he was being promised enormous sums for a puffed narrative of discovery. Specifically, in 1910, the “editor of Hampton’s Magazine” was offering, if Wellman succeeded “$75,000 to $100,000 for world rights to the magazine story….” And all together up to $1 million (100). Wellman was conning most of the folks he met out of money, talking an Ohio father into investing $85,000 (129). He spent most of this money on just purchasing a ship, instead of spending more money to build it himself; he had tried just firing an engineer and not paying him fully on the previous occasion, but that had not worked out, as it seems his libel suit was unsuccessful. This is pretty much all the mentions of money in this book. But if there had been more, this would have been a book about the great scammer who managed to keep convincing investors who give him money. He seems to have deliberately made impossible goals, which nobody was surprised failed. He didn’t have to try too hard in these attempts, since investors would have no recourse to argue given extreme risk. He could have been intentionally spending time at the nearest village without trying to reach the North Pole, and collecting millions for trying. Perhaps, he insured some voyages and then deliberately drove ships into icebergs to give a return to investors who were otherwise failing to see a profit from these. I just don’t believe the surface claims of this narrative, and I think something very suspicious was going on.
That said, this is a fun read, as both the surface and the subversive versions are outrageously adventurous, as the characters take on strange challenges, and take unexpected actions. This is a good book both for researchers and casual readers. And various types of libraries should welcome it into their collections.
A Woman Who Succeeds in Politics Is a Feminist
Heath Hardage Lee, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady (New York: St. Martin’s Press, August 6, 2024). Softcover: $32.00. 416pp. ISBN: 978-1-250274-34-2.
****
“Pat Nixon… was voted ‘Most Admired Woman in the World’ in 1972… She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and ‘plastic’ in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June of 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974, forging her own graceful path between the protocols of the strait-laced mid-century and the bra-burning Sixties and Seventies. Pat was a highly travelled First Lady, visiting eighty-three countries during her tenure. After a devastating earthquake in Peru in 1970, she personally flew in medical supplies and food to hard-hit areas, meeting one-on-one with victims of the tragedy. The First Lady’s 1972 trips with her husband to China and to Russia were critical to the detente that resulted. Back in the US, Pat greatly expanded upon previous preservation efforts in the White House, obtaining more art and antique objects than any other First Lady. In the domestic arena, she was progressive on women’s issues, favoring the Equal Rights Amendment and backing a targeted effort to get more women into high level government jobs. Pat strongly supported nominating a woman for the Supreme Court. She was pro-choice, supporting women’s reproductive rights publicly even before the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973. When asked to define her ‘signature’ First Lady agenda, she defied being put into a box, often saying: ‘People are my project.’”
The “Prologue” opens by attempting to elicit sympathy for Richard Nixon’s wife because she felt distressed as her husband was giving his resignation address on August 9, 1974. This book attempts to imagine a “Mrs. Nixon” who did not exist in “her media-constructed persona”. The idea seems to be for the narrating author to imagine that while Pat looked stoic, she was in fact feeling deep feelings. This author is going to narrate what he imagines she was feeling, and thus create a new fuzzy propagandistic ideal of Pat’s character… The blurb mentioned that she was pro-women’s rights, but proving she was a women’s rights activist would take an entirely different set of facts, from proving that she was a fuzzy, warm person. The first section takes yet another attempt at re-branding when it labels her as a “farmer’s daughter”.
I searched this book for the term “abortion”. It seems to appear for the first time in the last quarter of the book. In 1968, at a “press reception at the Nixon Chicago campaign HQ”, “Mrs. Nixon” was suddenly surprised with “queries about abortion, the Vietnam War, Watergate…” Instead of at least answering the question in favor of abortion, she “tried to field all the questions neutrally”, or avoided answering it as well as others, and briskly left (322). Then, the Roe v. Wade decision passed in 1973. Lee notes: “Though Pat did not believe in ‘abortion on demand,’ she was strongly in favor of women making their own reproductive choices and publicly supported their rights to do so. She ‘was the first First Lady to use the word ‘abortion.’” The latter was a quote from Nixon Library curator Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s article, “Pat Nixon, Stealthy Feminist?” She said these words in 1972: “I think abortion should be a personal decision” (328). While this is hardly revolutionary for any woman who personally reached a point when it would be unhealthy for her to have children; this quote is significant in the present absurd anti-abortion Republican environment. If Republican women were aware of Pat’s view on this today, they might also more heavily lean in favor of abortion. Though this quote is taken not from a media interview that was published in a mainstream newspaper, but rather in psychology professor Lester David’s The Lonely Lady of San Clemente (1978; p153). I searched David’s book for “feminism”, and found that the main association was that Pat was assisted during her husband’s campaigns by the famous feminist Gloria Steinem, who puffed Pat and her staff in a 1968 article in the New York Magazine: “In Your Heart You Know He’s Nixon.” Steinem wrote that Nixon had put in a “totally new” staff “since” his previous 1960 campaign. Though it does not seem flattering that she observed that instead of discussing “policy” in briefings, these young “top aides” discuss “programming the candidate” with a “merchandizing and sales approach”. And this was when Steinem still had “goodwill” as a member of “the women’s press”, but this will began “diminishing” by October, and in parallel “Pat’s Patience” with “their silly questions was wearing thin.” Steinem’s comments appeared in an article called “Patricia Nixon Flying”, which stressed Pat’s impatience by asking difficult questions and then reporting on Pat dodging them. Steinem commented that she interviewed Pat on Nixon’s campaign plane. Pat “had put” “other interviewers” “straight to sleep” by giving “bland answers”, though the questions were also bland having been plagiarized between prior journalists (224). In a later interview, Steinem gets Pat to give a bit of details by challenging her: “I had to work my way through college… I worked in a bank while Dick was in the service…” In another interview, Pat is offended when her factual note that some women are “bankers, presidents…, bank lawyers” was interpreted by West as meaning she is supporting “Women’s Lib”. She replies: “I wasn’t doing that for Women’s Lib. Just for accuracy.” This is pretty much as anti-feminist as a comment can be.
The interesting detail in this discussion was the note that Pat had held a job. An early chapter explains: “After her high school graduation, Pat began working for Artesia First National Bank… Her job was to post the checks each day and to help with the bookkeeping.” It was a “mostly female” staff. She was once a victim of a bank robbery, handing the robber the money in a friendly fashion, before helping to convict him in court. After “Pat was relieved of the burden of nursing” her father when he died of tuberculosis in 1930, “Pat enrolled under the name Patricia Ryan at Fullerton Junior College in fall 1931 while still working at the bank” part-time. She won the “lead role in the school play Broken Dishes” later that first year. But then, “Pat did not return to college in the fall of 1932”. Oddly, she chose to work as a private driver an elderly couple who needed somebody “to drive them from California”, apparently with only an unused bus-ticket home as payment. She found a job on the East Coast at the Seton Hospital treating “tuberculosis patients, as the head of the X-ray and pharmacy departments.” This is strange? She was head of x-rays without a degree? But then she accepted a “secretarial job” there. The author seems to have made a typo somewhere in this passage. There is a note that Pat was “even training as a radiology technician.” She violated hospital policy by “sledding with patients”, who were infectious and could have infected her, leading her to infect others. Another oddity was that Pat, as a mere clerk, was asked to represent the Hospital at “a medical conference held in New York City at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel”, where she met “President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt”. After working at the hospital for 2 years, she was admitted to USC on a research scholarship, which included “working twenty hours a week for a USC psychology professor” in exchange for tuition, and a living stipend. And “she took another part-time secretarial job.” She seems to have used her work experience to receive a “Special Credential”, which I believe is below a BA or a mere certificate, but the author believes was equivalent to a modern “master’s degree”. She used it to receive a teaching certificate, and to find a business teaching job at the Whittier Union High School in Whittier, California in the fall of 1937. By the end of that academic year, Pat had met Richard Nixon through one of her evening shorthand classes. While this is not exactly the trajectory of a radical feminist, it does explain why her answers regarding women’s right to find equal pay for equal work and the like were not following the standard suppressive script.
Most of this book is propaganda about what Pat was thinking, but these types of details are revelatory regarding what is behind women in politics who might not reveal their character in words to the press, but can be understood by following their resumes. Thus, if you have read through this review, and want to read more, this book is for you. If you have not got this far, it clearly is not. Libraries do need to have a copy in case the female Republicans will naturally want to read about how one becomes a Republican First Lady.
A Lawsuit Absurd Enough to Win Women a Right
Melissa Ludtke, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, August 16, 2024). Softcover: $39.95. 350pp. ISBN: 978-1-978837-78-2.
****
“While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, 26-year-old Sports Illustrated… Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge’s order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media. Locker Room Talk is Ludtke’s gripping account of being at the core of this globally covered case that churned up ugly prejudices about the place of women in sports. Kuhn claimed that allowing women into locker rooms would violate his players’ ‘sexual privacy.’ Late-night television comedy sketches mocked her, as newspaper cartoonists portrayed her as a sexy, buxom looker who wanted to ogle the naked athletes’ bodies. She weaves these public perspectives throughout her vivid depiction of the court drama overseen by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal bench. She recounts how her lawyer, F.A.O. ‘Fritz’ Schwarz, employed an ingenious legal strategy that persuaded Judge Motley to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in giving Ludtke access identical to that of her male counterparts.”
The “Prologue” adds that when she was reporting in the 1970s, she “was the only woman in the nation doing this job full time, though a few other female writers dipped in and out.” She accepted this full-time job in 1974, and the lawsuit was filed “a few years later”, in 1977-8. She had been “barred… from the locker rooms at the 1977 World Series.” The case was filed on her behalf by her corporate boss at Time Inc. She argues that her lawsuit helped to open Major League Baseball to women at all levels, including in operations, in management and coaching, as well as broadcasting. One option she mentions in this intro is that both men and women reporters could have been barred from interviewing in the lock rooms. One of the reasons I did not attempt competing in or writing about sports is because changing in front of others, or being somewhere while anybody is changing makes me dizzy and sick. I have seen a few documentaries recently that explain that locker room is where orgies happen among wrestlers and in other over-puffed sports. Allowing male reporters in these spaces is likely to be inviting them to join in these orgies to corrupt their reporting in favor of certain teams or players. Thus, there should have been a lawsuit to block this possible corrupting point of influence. Ludtke notes that there has not yet been a female umpire, and she does not name many examples of women in charge of sports today. Her case did not really change the situation much. More useful cases might have been the recent women’s soccer lawsuit for equal pay that won $24 million in 2022. This lawsuit began in 2016. Though the actual pay discrepancy appears to have remained high after this win, as in 2023 during the Women’s World Cup, women were making “25 cents for every dollar earned by men”, according to CNN. Though the gap was even wider in past years: 7.5% in 2018, 4% in 2014, and 2.5% in 2006. Ludtke is likely to have been banned initially from the locker rooms because women are not as easily tempted or corrupted by sex as male reporters. It would have been a gross, but bearable annoyance for her to be in that room, while she asked difficult questions, whereas male reporters might have joined in on a fraternity-atmosphere. When she won access after the character-assassination publicity campaign against her, it made it seem as if she was desperate to join the frat-party, instead of fighting for a better space to ask difficult questions. I want to be with Ludtke, but it is difficult for me to fully see this issue with her as the “Joan of Arc” that she objects she was labeled erroneously as in comedy sketches about her.
One such criticism was Smith’s January 9, 1978 column called “Another View of Equality”, which “titled toward the sexual nature of my endeavor”, by arguing that she “could not cover the World Series for a weekly magazine unless she could watch Reggie Jackson undress.” She corrects Smith by arguing that Kuhn had died her “access to my sources” (19). She points out: “For the record, I never went on a date with any ballplayer, coach, or manager.” With her “closest” being when she had “a lunch… with Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench in a New York City hotel dining room in July 1977.” This was a public meeting that was sponsored by her publication, as it was part of a major story. She adds that the other side was the opposite from her in this regard. She noticed this in reports about at the 1973 New York Baseball Writers Association of America gala, where the keynote speaker was “Casey Stengel, the former manager of the Mets and the Yankees”. He had previously “advised ballplayers”: “It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in”, instead of “being with a woman all night”. Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, “showed up in spring training with a bevy of his ‘bunnies,’ Strengel joked” and challenged the bunnies to engage in a sexual competition with him and the teams, as if it was a “stag”, and not a “prestigious… association” speech. This 1973 meeting was exclusively for men-only, but Stephanie Salter got a ticket and attended to challenge this exclusivity. Salter only managed to eat “her fruit cup” before “the headwaiter told her to leave. She refused.” She refused a few more times until security told her to leave, and then she left, threatening to sue. This story was also treated as a joke by Newsday, who titled it: “Writers Block a Damsel at the Plate”. Salter had believed Time Inc. “would back her” lawsuit against BBWAA. Time sent a letter, but was internally resistant with taking the case to a lawsuit. Back in 1971, there was a petition signed by “female editorial employees”, which cited “seventy alleged gender discrimination incidents related to practices at Time Inc. publications.” Time responded by faking concern without taking actions, and they did the same for Salter, but changed this policy for the far more surface-absurd Ludtke locker room-access case (58-9). They might have agreed because they had assumed the case would fail, after garnering similar jokes as Salter received when she complained. But they were probably surprised when the jokes came with a decision in Ludtke’s favor. The mention of the “stag” atmosphere between the press, sports and sex-workers strongly supports my own interpretation that women were barred from locker rooms because they would have been against these corrupting interactions. If Ludtke’s case had seemed serious when it was first-filed, it is more likely that Time would not have invested in filing it in the first place. Thus, women can at least be happy with their accidental victories. A step towards equality is a good step.
I recommend this book for women who are considering sports or sports journalism as a career. Libraries should also purchase it, so it is accessible to such women. And it would be good for me to consider the women’s perspective as well.
Anaphora Literary Press 