A Feast of Snakes

Flannery O'Connor famously said that "Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."

A Feast of Snakes (1976) by the late Harry Crews (1935-2012) is truly a grotesque novel.  However, it is rooted in reality.  And some of the more grotesque elements of this novel are the most realistic.  A Feast of Snakes is a sordid little tale about a former high school football star who, because of his lack of academic ability, is trapped in a nowhere life in a nowhere town in South Georgia.

Harry Crews (1935-2012)

I have known a lot of people who are not far removed from Crews grotesque caricatures.  Without frugal working class parents who sacrificed to give me a college education, I would probably have been one of Crews' southern caricatures.  As a practicing lawyer in Southwest Georgia for over two decades I have met many people who resemble the characters who populate Crews' fictional Mystic, Georgia.

A Feast of Snakes is the story of Joe Lon Mackey, former star of the Mystic High School football team, The Rattlers.   As the head Rattler Joe Lon gets to date the head cheerleader, Beredine.  Beredine is the daughter of the local doctor.  Joe Lon is the son of the local bootlegger.    At the end of high school, Beredine goes off to college at the University of Georgia, while Joe Lon is trapped selling bootleg whiskey for his daddy.

After Beredine leaves Mystic for college, Joe Lon gets a girl, Elfie, pregnant.  Now he lives in a mobile home with Elfie and their two infant sons.  Elfie is losing her teeth and her looks have been ruined by repeated pregnancies.  Joe Lon's daddy is not only the local bootlegger but also raises pit bulls to fight.  Joe Lon's sister went crazy after discovering her mother's suicide and now sits in bed all day and watches television.

And that's just Joe Lon's messed up family.  The local sheriff, who lost a leg in Vietnam, arrests black girls for the sole purpose of getting them in jail to have sex with them.  As a matter of fact, the black characters in A Feast of Snakes seem to be the most sane.  Although one of the Sheriff's victims will suffer from a mental illness brought on by the trauma of being raped and will gain sweet revenge.

The backdrop of the novel is the traditional rattlesnake roundup which has become a large regional tourist attraction.  In traditional agricultural communities in South Georgia, the community would get together in the fall and winter and try to eradicate poisonous snakes to avoid attacks on people and live stock in the summer.  As a matter of fact, I live about 20 miles from a town that has a yearly rattlesnake roundup which has become a tourist attraction.  It may be the inspiration for Crews' novel.

Other reviewers of  A Feast of Snakes have seen it as some sort of tale of redemption.  I don't see any redemption in this at all.  It appears to me to be coming from a totally nihilistic world view.  Although it has some comic elements to it,  I found A Feast of Snakes to be very dark material.

To wrap up, I don't think I can summarize A Feast of Snakes any better than Professor James C. Cobb's description in his fine book Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2005):  In his fiction Crews presented a southern poor-white netherworld inhabited by characters whose desperation, depravity, and grotesqueness went well beyond anything Erkine Caldwell had dared to offer.  Crews's    A Feast of Snakes emphasized the widening chasm between the caricatured, commodified representations of regional culture currently in fashion among upwardly mobile white southerners and the grim realities of life facing those for whom upward mobility did not exist.  The novel is set in "Mystic," a small South Georgia town whose traditional rattlesnake roundup has exploded into a major tourist attraction.  The protagonist, Joe Lon Mackey, is a former high school football star who was considerably more adept on the gridiron than in the classroom.  Unable to pursue collegiate stardom, he descends into a miserable, hopeless existence, drinking incessantly and living in a mobile home with two smelly kids and a pitiful, long-suffering wife with rotten teeth.  Joe Lon finally erupts in a murderous shooting spree and is thrown by an angry mob into a pit of writhing reptiles, rising to his feet for the final time with snakes hanging from his face."

Although I don't really recommend it, A Feast of Snakes is worth reading for the warped "Southern Gothic" atmosphere.  If you are depressed this is not the novel to read because nobody in Harry Crews' South lives happily ever after.

Viper's Tangle

The only good thing about having pneumonia and being bed ridden is that it gives one time to read.  After many years of staring at me on the shelf, I have finally read a novel by Francois Mauriac.

Mauriac was reportedly one of Flannery O’Connor’s favorite authors.  He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1952 and he is supposed to be one of the greatest Catholic novelists of all time.

Francois Mauriac (1885 - 1970)

The novel I just finished, Viper’s Tangle (1932), is the story of a miserly old lawyer, Louis.  Nearing the end of his life (at the ancient age of 68!) Louis begins writing a letter to his wife to explain why he hates her and their children and does not intend to leave them any of his vast fortune.

Over the course of this confession, we find out that Louis moved into a separate bedroom and stopped loving his wife over thirty years ago because she admitted to him that she had once loved another man.  Convinced that his wife, Isa, could only have married him for his money, Louis becomes a hateful miser.  When a beloved daughter is sick, Louis refuses to allow a specialist to be called because it will cost too much.  The daughter dies.

All through his life, Louis has attacked Isa’s conventional Catholic religious beliefs.  Although he allows a seminarian to come in as tutor to the children, throughout his life he ridicules Catholic faith and morals.  On Fridays and other fast days, he insists on eating a steak cutlet in front of the rest of the family who are fasting from meat.

Through the years, Louis has been unfaithful to Isa and has had many mistresses and has even fathered a bastard son with one of his former criminal clients.  While Louis is away in Paris trying to make arrangements to give his entire vast fortune to Robert the illegitimate son so that his own children and grandchildren will not get it, Isa has a stroke and dies.  After Isa’s death, Louis gives his entire fortune over to his children and finds that he is much happier.

Although Louis was a spiteful and hateful man for most of his life, we see that he was the happiest when he allowed himself to love others.  The death of little Marie, who offered her death to God for her father’s conversion, devastated Louis.  Louis also loved his sister in law and, Luc,  the son she died in childbirth having.  When Luc came home from leave from the First World War, Louis tried to give him a large amount of gold coins.  Luc refuses saying there is nothing he can do with them at the front.  Luc is reported missing in action and dies in the war.  All of Louis’ vast fortune can do nothing to save those he loves from death.

In the end, Louis loved Isa deeply and we see that the hate he harbored for her all those years was really a kind of affection.  After her death, Louis finds fragments of letters which Isa tried to burn which she exchanged with a priest asking how to forgive Louis.

Louis says that the “tangle of vipers” is his heart.  But the “tangle of vipers” is probably also the greedy children and grandchildren who are only interested in Louis’ money.  The “tangle of vipers” is sin on all its many levels.  In the end, Divine Grace breaks through to Louis and he is able to see that God’s Grace was there all the time if only he had let it in.

Ian McEwan's SWEET TOOTH

Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) is a spy.  Well, actually she’s a glorified secretary who works for the British intelligence agency MI5 during the height of the Cold War in the early 1970s.  Serena, the daughter of an Anglican Bishop who didn’t force his religion on the family, is assigned to operation Sweet Tooth, a top secret project to recruit and pay writers who will produce novels with an anti-Communist bent.

Serena, who is posing as the employee of an arts foundation, is detailed to recruit Tom Haley, a college professor and aspiring young novelist.  When a stunningly beautiful girl walks into his office and offers him a fellowship, Haley is smitten.  Soon, Serena and Haley are lovers.  Sleeping with the target exceeds Serena’s orders from headquarters.  She loves Tom and wants to tell him the truth but how can she blow her cover?

This is the first work which I have ever read by the prolific and popular Ian McEwan.  Sweet Tooth is an intelligent novel which has as much to do with the seduction of the reader by literature as it does with spies and Cold War intrigue.  Sweet Tooth is a beautiful novel with a great ending.  Highly recommended.

Ian McEwan

Rumpole Misbehaves

According to Wikipedia an Anti-Social Behavior Order or ASBO “is a civil order made against a person who has been shown, on the balance of the evidence, to have engaged in anti-social behavior.  The orders, introduced in the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, were designed to correct minor incidents that would not ordinarily warrant criminal prosecution.  The orders restrict behavior in some way, by prohibiting a return to a certain area or shop, or by restricting public behavior such as swearing or drinking alcohol.”  To Sir John Mortimer (1923 - 2009), who was famous for being a civil rights lawyer as well the creator of the fictional lawyer Horace Rumpole, the ASBO was an outrageous assault on the historic civil rights of the English people.  Hence, in his last completed Rumpole novel, Rumpole Misbehaves (2007) (published in Britain as The Anti-Social Behavior of Horace Rumpole), Mortimer uses his favorite creation to attack and parody the ASBO.

Actor Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole

Rumpole’s first client is twelve year old Peter Timson who has an ASBO issued against him for disturbing the resident’s of a posh neighborhood by playing football (soccer) on their street.  Rumpole’s second client is Graham Wetherby, a young government bureaucrat who is accused of strangling a prostitute.  The relationship between these two seemingly unrelated cases provides fine reading in the great Rumpole tradition.

Horace and Hilda (Leo McKern and Marion Mathie)

Of course, it would not be a Rumpole story without hilarity.  The fun really starts when Rumpole’s neighbors in Chambers at Number 4 Equity Court take out an ASBO against Rumpole for drinking alchohol in Chambers, eating in his office in violation of office policy, and smoking in the building.  Rumpole’s nemesis on the bench, Mr. Justice Bullingham (or as Rumpole calls him “Mr. Injustice Bullingham) still has the hots for Hilda and threatens to break up the Rumpole marriage.  She Who Must Be Obeyed has decided, once again, that she wants to read for the bar and Rumpole finally decides that he will apply to “take silk” as a Queens Counsel.

Although the earlier installments of the series were much better written than this, for fans who can’t get enough of Rumpole this is great fun.  Sadly, although Rumpole never retired and stayed, apparently ageless, in his early to mid seventies for thirty years, with Mortimer’s death in 2009 at age 85, Rumpole has finally argued his last case.  But, just like Holmes and Watson will always be waiting for a new client at 221 B Baker Street, Horace and Hilda will forever bicker at the Froxbury Mansion Flat and Horace will perpetually irritate his colleagues at No. 4 Equity Court.

  

Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

A respected Pakistani doctor living in England is arrested and imprisoned on the suspicion of being a terrorist.  Citing national security concerns, the government refuses to release any specific information to the accused’s attorneys regarding the particulars of the evidence against him.  The case appears hopeless and it is almost certain that the accused will remain incarcerated indefinitely without trial.  The accused’s desperate wife turns to an experienced criminal barrister for help.  What will happen next?

When the experienced criminal barrister is Horace Rumpole we can expect hilarity along with a painless lesson in the highest ideals of British Justice.  Published in 2006 when Rumpole’s alter ego and creator John Mortimer was 82 (Mortimer died in 2009 at age 85) this novel was Mortimer’s criticism of the anti-terrorism laws passed by the government of then Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Author John Mortimer with the latest installment of his most famous creation.

Rumpole, who has been about age seventy something since the mid 1990s, never changes.  Neither does his wife Hilda and the entire cast of characters who practice law at Number 4 Equity Court.  In this outing Hilda buys a laptop computer which she hides away in a spare bedroom while she writes her memoirs.  There is a lot for Hilda to write about since Judge Bullingham, who Rumpole calls “The Mad Bull,” is actively pursuing Hilda after divorcing his wife.

Rumpole, of course, still doesn’t even know how to turn a computer on and takes notes with a fountain pen.  The Shakespeare and Wordsworth quoting barrister has what the government considers to be quaint notions about the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.  Witness Rumpole’s exchange with the “New Labour” Home Secretary:

‘Let me ask you this, Mr. Rumpole.  How do you take notes in court nowadays?’

‘I use a pen and my notebook.’  I gave him a truthful answer.

‘A pen!’  The Bristol accent rose to a high pitch of contempt.  ‘Would that be like . . . a quill pen by any chance?’

There were laughs from the audience, but I put him right.

‘No.  It’s a fountain pen.’

‘Really.  How very professional.  So you’re not computer literate?’

‘I’m literate.  I know very little about computers.’

‘That’s the trouble with your sort of lawyer, Mr. Rumpole.  You can’t move with the times.  Things like jury trials and the presumption of innocence may have been all very well in their day.  But times change.  History moves on.  We need quicker and more reliable results.  Modernize, Mr. Rumpole.  That’s what you need to do.’

Needless to say when it comes to the sacred rights guaranteed to Englishmen since King John issued Magna Carta, Rumpole will never compromise.

Irving Wallace's THE MAN

What if a black man had become President of the United States in the late nineteen sixties?  This is the plot of Irving Wallace’s 1964 political pot boiler The Man.

“The Man” is Douglas Dilman, an obscure black junior Senator from a Midwestern State. As a token gesture to quell racial unrest in the country,  Dillman is appointed President Pro Tempore of the Senate.  Shortly before The Man begins, the Vice-President has died of a heart attack.  When the novel begins, the office of Vice-President is vacant.  (Before the passage of the 25th Amendment there was no legal mechanism to fill a vacancy in the Vice-Presidency).  When the President and the Speaker of the House are killed in a freak accident, Senator Douglas Dilman is thrust into the Presidency.

An illustration from the Readers' Digest Condensed Book version of "The Man"

Dilman has been a “yes-man” to the leadership of his political party. (Although the novel never expressly says so, it appears that Dilman is a Democrat).  At first he falls into line with the wishes of the party leadership and the former President’s advisors.

In addition to Soviet incursions into Africa (remember this novel was written at the height of the Cold War) and racial unrest at home, Dilman has plenty of personal problems.  Dillman’s dead wife drank herself to death as a result of depression.  Dilman’s daughter is living in New York and passing for a white woman.  Dilman’s son is a member of a radical civil rights organization which is ready to use violence to achieve racial justice.

An illustration from the Reader's Digest version: 

Black Radical Students protest President Douglas Dilman

Everyone is shocked when Dilman stops being a yes man and vetoes a major entitlement bill, the Minorities Rehabilitation Program (MRP), which has almost universal support among members of the party.  Now Dilman is disliked by nearly everybody: racist whites hate Dillman because he’s black, liberals hate Dilman because he vetoed the MRP, and radical blacks hate Dilman because he’s “an Uncle Tom.”

President Douglas Dilman survives an assassination attempt.

All the stereotypes you would expect are here: the racist Southern demagogue Congressman who leads the effort to impeach Dilman; the black radicals who want try to assassinate Dilman; and the ambitious Ivy League educated Secretary of State who wants to replace Dilman.  Near the end of the novel, a cross gets burned on the front lawn of the White House and a race riot breaks out in Washington.

The Old Guard Washington insiders plot against The Man.

This being an Irving Wallace novel, there is, of course, sex.  The Secretary of State, the debonair Arthur Eaton, who is estranged from his wife, becomes involved with the emotionally unstable daughter of a powerful Southern Senator.  Eaton recommends his mistress, Sally Watson, as the White House Social Secretary.  Ultimately, Sally becomes Eaton’s spy inside the White House.  When she is caught spying by the President, she falls back on the tried and true method of accusing the black man of sexually assaulting her.

Secretary of State Arthur Eaton becomes cozy with Miss Sally Watson

Ultimately, Dilman is impeached by the House of Representatives on trumped up charges.  When The Man was written there had only been one impeachment trial in American History, that of Andrew Johnson in the 1860s.  In light of the Clinton impeachment the comments Wallace makes are very interesting:

His firm belief was that the House members, having enjoyed the catharsis of vituperation, would now realize the historic gravity of the decision they faced.  They would realize that an impeachment in modern times was unthinkable, that the legal instrument of reproof and discipline in the Constitution had become obsolete.  In fact, just the other night, unable to sleep, Dilman had come across the words of an eminent political scientist who had characterized impeachment as a “rusted blunderbuss, that will probably never be taken in hand again.”  Surely, the more judicious of the House members would see that, would think twice before signifying aye or nay.  

Ultimately, like President Andrew Johnson, Dilman is saved from impeachment by a single vote.

The real Man: President Barack Obama

It was fun reading The Man as a time capsule.  Everyone in the novel smokes.  The big foreign policy issue is containing Communism.  President Dilman visits Cape Canaveral to inspect the new Apollo program.

Although Irving Wallace did not write great literature by any stretch of the imagination, reading a Wallace novel is like eating potato chips: once you have a bite it’s hard to stop.  Wallace was a good writer who carefully constructed stories and knew how to sink the hook into the reader.  I enjoyed reading The Man a great deal.  While Wallace was not a great novelist, when a 48 year old out of print novel can still entertain a reader,  I am prepared to say that Wallace was a great story teller.

The prolific Irving Wallace (1916 - 1990)

Thanks to the blog Today's Inspiration for the illustrations from Reader's Digest.

Legal Laughs

Judge Henry Cecil Leon (1902 - 1976), who wrote under the pen name Henry Cecil, served as a County Court Judge in England from 1949 until 1967.  Judge Leon was a very prolific author turning out one comic novel after the other about lawyers, judges and the legal system

The book which I just finished, Brief Tales From the Bench (1968), is a collection of comic short stories told from the first person perspective of a County Court Judge.  Of the eight stories in the collection, four are said to be “Embellished but based on an actual case.”  The remaining four are fiction.

“Contempt of Court” is about how the Judge can hold a man in contempt of Court for saying the exact same things about the Judge that the Judge’s wife says about him.  Another involves a student whose father refuses to pay the schoolmaster tuition because his son has learned how to be a criminal at the school.  In “Perjury” “Judge Cecil” has to determine which witness is lying.  “Chef’s Special” involves a guest suing a hotel for breach of contract when he receives the “Fawlty Towers” treatment.  “Retrial” involves a convicted shoplifter suing the store which prosecuted him for damages for liable.  “The Hidden Money” involves a man who tried to hide assets from his wife during a divorce.  “The Truth” is another case in which the Judge must determine which witness is truthful.  “Made To Measure” involves a man with very eccentric tastes who refuses to pay for a custom made suit.

Judge Henry Cecil Leon

Here is my favorite quote from the book: “People are so very polite, not to say obsequious to judges that there is a danger that a judge may think he is just as important out of court as he is in court, when in fact he is not.  It is the office which is important, not the man.  This is easy to state, but not always so easy, for an average person like myself, to remember.”

The humor (or should I say “humour”) is very British.   The stories are very amusing and this provides light entertainment with a lesson.  The Bad Catholic gives Tales From the Bench three gavels out of five.