Why I Review Old Books Written by Dead Authors

Here's one reason to review old books written by dead authors: When the author doesn't like the review and starts posting nasty comments and demands that the review be taken down. Here's a post about what happened. Here's the review and the authorial melt down in the comments.

Graham Greene's England Made Me

As promised, I have now read Graham Greene’s 1935 novel England Made Me. England Made Me is the story of Anthony Farrant. Anthony is a ne’er-do-well and a rake who has been a failure at one job after another all over the world. Anthony has a very close relationship, which borders on incest, with his twin sister, Kate. Kate is the personal secretary and mistress to Erik Krogh, a wealthy Swedish businessman. Through Kate’s influence, Anthony obtains a job as Krogh’s bodyguard.

Krogh is ruthless and amoral in his pursuit of more wealth and power. A central theme of this book is internationalism. Krogh has no allegiance to any country. His only loyalty is to himself and his fortune. There is a good bit of talk in this novel about how nations and borders will be a thing of the past in the modern world with quick travel by airplane and instant communication by telephone and radio. In retrospect, the premise that nationalism is on the way out is kind of laughable for a novel published in 1935, two years after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and four years before the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. However, it's no more laughable than reading things published in the 1990s after the Soviet Union fell that opined that we had entered a new era of world peace and prosperity.

Krogh is engaged in all kinds of shady business deals to sell worthless stock and defraud shareholders. Krogh also lies to a labor union leader to avoid a strike and then frames the man for wrongdoing and ruins his reputation before firing him. Krogh’s closest thing to a friend is Hall, who has known Krogh since they were both poor young men. Although Krogh has treated Hall badly through the years, Hall is fanatically loyal to Krogh and would do anything for him. Just as Anthony and Kate’s relationship borders on the incestuous, Hall’s infatuation with Krogh borders on the homoerotic.

By far the the most interesting character in the entire novel is Ferdinand Minty, an expatriot Englishman who is employed as a reporter by a Swedish newspaper. Minty is wonderfully eccentric. He lives in a seedy tenement and wears a wrinkled old coat and suit. He is a sadist who tortures a spider by watching it under a glass until it dies. He constantly refers to himself in the third person and is a diehard Anglo-Catholic who is constantly praying to obscure saints. Minty is an alumnus of Harrow, the English public school. When he sees Anthony wearing a Harrow school tie and begins to ask him questions, Minty almost immediately recognizes Anthony as a fraud. Minty’s assignment from his editor is to report on Erik Krogh, so Minty offers to bribe Anthony to leak information to him.

Since this is an obscure 76 year old novel, I think that I won’t be hurting much by spoiling the ending. Anthony is appalled by Krogh’s amoral business practices and decides to leak the information to Minty and then return to England where he plans to have a true relationship with his current mistress whom, up to now, he has used merely as a sex object. When Anthony leaks that Krogh is planning to marry Kate, Krogh realizes that Anthony is about to ruin his reputation and wants to prevent Anthony returning to England. Hall engineers a late night poker game to attempt to have Anthony run up large gambling debts and be unable to leave Sweden. After being foiled in this plan because Anthony already has tickets to sail to England, Hall murders Anthony whose death is made to look like an accident. The End.

If the above plot summary seems lame, let me assure you that this book is just as lame as it sounds. This is not one of Greene’s better novels. In fact, I daresay that if Graham Greene wasn’t Graham Greene, this novel would be long out of print and forgotten. However, England Made Me is still of interest because of the view of the world it presents. In 1935 the world was in the midst of the Depression and no one knew that the world stood on the edge of the abyss of the bloodiest war in human history. This novel is also of interest because it is one of Greene’s early efforts which shows the master honing his craft. Like It’s a Battlefield, the technical execution of England Made Me is very good and there is some excellent writing in it in places. As a whole, though, it just doesn’t really work. Once again, I think that Greene was trying too hard to write a “serious novel” and it just doesn’t deliver the goods.

Book Blogger Hop at Crazy for Books.com

This week the Eclectic Reader is participating in the "Book Blogger Hop" at Crazy for Books.com.

As a condition of participating, I am supposed to write a blog post answering the question, "If you could physically place yourself in a book or series, what would it be and why?"

Here's The Bad Catholic's answer: If I could place myself into a book series it would be Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, because he gets to drink lots of shaken and not stirred martinis with lots of fabulously beautiful women.

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers

Anzia Yezierska (1881 - 1970) was the daughter of Russian-Polish Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 1890s. Her father was a Talmudic scholar who engaged in full time study of the holy books while her mother struggled to support the family. Yerzierska worked in sweat shops to put herself through Columbia University. Yezierska became a popular novelist and short story writer during the 1920s before slipping into relative obscurity during the Great Depression of the 1930s. She died in 1970.

Bread Givers (1925) is Yezierska’s most well known novel. Bread Givers is the story of Sara Smolinsky, like Yezierska, a Polish Jew whose family has immigrated to the United States and are living in poverty in a seedy tenement in New York City. When the novel opens, Sara is about twelve years old. Sara is one of a family of four daughters. Her father, a rabbi, spends all of his time either praying at the synagogue or studying the Torah. The mother and the daughters are expected to work and then turn their wages over to their father to support him in his holy work. Therefore, the women are the “bread givers” of the title.

Sara watches as each one of her sisters in turn brings home boyfriends whom her father rejects. Reb Smolinsky then arranges marriages for each of Sara’s three sisters which turn out to be disasterous. Upon receiving a little money from one of the new son in laws, Reb Smolinsky immediately wastes it in a business deal where he is taken advantage of by a con man. Finally having had enough, at age 17 Sara leaves home and strikes out on her own. Her father is, of course, outraged since he expects Sara to work to support him until he decides that it is time for her to marry when he will find her a husband.

Sara works long hours in a laundry and goes to night school until she is able to apply to college. Yezierska shows the struggle to survive of a young woman on her own in New York City in the early years of the twentieth century. Landlords are reluctant to rent rooms to single women. In cafeterias the men are given larger portions and the best cuts of meat. Finally, after much struggle, Sara is able to leave New York City and go away to college. Once again she has to work long hours in a laundry and a canning factory to support herself. As a poor immigrant she is an outsider who is ostracized by the other students.

Finally Sara graduates and returns to New York City to work as a public school teacher. Just when things are looking up for her, her mother dies. Reb Smolinsky marries a widow who lives upstairs who is only interested in him because of the insurance money he has gotten after his wife’s death. When the life insurance money runs out, the new wife becomes a nag.

Eventually, Sara becomes engaged to her school principal, another Jewish immigrant named Hugo Seelig. Hugo asks to study Hebrew with Reb Smolinsky and invites him to live with him and Sara. Sara is the first of Reb Smolinsky’s daughters to bring home a boyfriend that their father approves of. Hugo tells Sara “As for your father, I know just the kind of an old Jew he is. After all, it’s from him that you got the iron for the fight you had to make to be what you are now.” So after spending years trying to escape her father, Sara and her new husband will honor him and take care of him during his last years.

Bread Givers is a beautiful book. Since the novel is semi-autobiographical, the descriptions of the life and culture of the Jewish immigrants is very true to life. This is a short novel (297 pages in the Persea edition), but very quickly one feels totally immersed in the life of Sara Smolinsky and her milieu. The book is emotionally very powerful and the reader is carried along with Sara during her struggles. Bread Winners is a classic novel which is still well worth reading.

Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield

According to Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends, Graham Greene’s 1934 novel It’s a Battlefield is the only thing written by a member of Waugh’s set which took the politics of the 1930's seriously.

During the Great Depression, if you considered yourself to be an intellectual, it was the “in thing” to be a Communist. Greene alludes to this when one of his characters says in response to the statement that a former friend has become a Communist, “It’s fashionable.”

It’s a Battlefield is about Jim Drover, a bus driver and member of the Communist party, who has been sentenced to death for killing a police officer. Actually the novel is not really about Drover so much as it is about the impact of Drover’s death sentence. Drover’s imminent execution not only affects his immediate family but also the highest levels of the British government. Drover himself never really appears as a character in the novel. He is glimpsed at a distance in prison by officials and is discussed by his wife and brother, but never actually appears as a character in his own right.

Because this is a “serious novel” about the lives of the English lower classes during the Great Depression, there is a lot of misery and despair. Drover and his wife Milly go to a Communist Party rally which turns into a riot. Drover stabs the policeman to stop him from hitting Drover’s wife with a nightstick.

Greene intentionally draws parallels between the life of the inmates in the prison where Jim Drover is confined on death row and the life of the workers in a match factory where Drover’s sister in law, Kay, works. Because this is a Graham Greene novel, there is a lot of illicit sex which just makes everybody more miserable and nobody seems to enjoy.

The Home Secretary wants the Assistant Police Commissioner, who is never identified by name but is “the Assistant Commissioner” throughout the novel, to find out if it is better for the government politically to go through with Drover’s hanging or to grant him a reprieve. The leaders of the local Communist Party want Drover to be hanged because it will give them a martyr. Milly wants her husband’s life spared but is despondent because if he is reprieved he will serve a long prison sentence away from her. Drover’s brother, Conrad, is in love with Milly and wants to be with her. Conrad wishes that Jim would be hung so that he could marry Milly and be happy with her. Milly’s sister, Kay, has a dead end job in the match factory and her only consolation is to hop from the bed of one man to another.

Milly eventually goes to bed with Conrad. After committing adultery with her husband’s brother, Milly is miserable, which then makes Conrad more miserable. Conrad is already miserable because of the pressure of his job as the chief clerk in an insurance company. Because of Conrad’s low social status, he is always having to look over his shoulder because the middle class boys he supervises are always trying to take his job. Conrad was always jealous of Jim, so he buys a gun and attempts to assassinate the Assistant Commissioner. Conrad is mortally wounded by the police and dies shortly thereafter. Drover’s sentence is commuted to 18 years in prison. Knowing that his wife will never be able to remain celebate for 18 years and will cuckold him, Jim attempts to commit suicide. The Assistant Commissioner wishes that he was still a police official in India where life was a lot simpler. And they lived miserably ever after. The End.

In his immediately previous novel, Stamboul Train (1932), Greene had set about to write a pot boiler in order to make money. Stamboul Train was a success and saved Greene’s career as a writer. As a popular thriller, Stamboul Train is fast paced and entertaining, with interesting characters and situations. In fact, Stamboul Train is everything that It’s a Battlefield isn’t.

Throughout most of his career, Greene divided his long fiction into what he called “entertainments” and what he considered to be his “serious” novels. As opposed to the “entertainment” Stamboul Train, it appears that Greene was trying much too hard to produce “a serious novel.” Whereas the reader is sitting on the edge of her seat throughout Stamboul Train, the reader is mostly bored out of her skull throughout most of It’s a Battlefield. By the end of the novel, I actually came to hope that His Majesty’s Prison would go ahead and hang poor old Jim Drover on schedule and put him out of his misery. None of the characters in this novel gripped me to the point that I cared one way or the other what happened to them.

Although there were also a lot of characters in Stamboul Train, Greene did a good job of tying their stories together so that the reader cares about what happens to them. It’s a Battlefield, on the other hand, seems to have no real cohesion. We get to hear about Kay’s dalliances with the head of the Communist Party, who makes love to Kay underneath a portrait of his deceased wife who was a celebrated artist, and about Conrad’s lust for Milly and jealousy for Jim, and Milly’s misery that she knows that she will go on running around on good ol’ Jim while he’s in prison. We are placed inside the Assistant Commissioner’s brain for page after interminable page where he wishes that he were back in India where things were simple and he didn’t have to get involved in politics or make decisions about “Justice.” Although Graham Greene is one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, this book just doesn’t seem to work. It has some good episodes, and there is a lot of good writing in it, but all together this is definitely one of Greene’s lesser efforts.

COMING SOON: Continuing our travels in Greeneland, the next stop will be Greene’s 1935 novel England Made Me.

Borders Goes Bust

Since I get most of my books on line, I don't really care that Borders is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is closing many stores across the country. Let's face it, except for used book stores and coffee shops, the big box brick and mortar book store is probably headed for extinction. However, it appears that many of Borders problems could have been solved if their management had been more competent. Read the full story from the New York Times.

Graham Greene's Stamboul Train

I was going through withdrawal, so I thought it was high time for a return to Greeneland.

After his first moderate success with The Man Within, Greene wrote two other novels which he thought were so bad that he consistently refused permission for them to be reprinted. After this failure, suffering from a shortage of money during the early days of the world wide Depression, Greene set out to write a popular pot boiler.

The result was Stamboul Train: An Entertainment published in 1932 (published in the United States in 1933 as Orient Express). This was the first book which Greene labeled “an entertainment” to distinguish it from what he felt was his serious fiction.

As the title implies, Stamboul Train is a thriller about a group of travelers aboard the Orient Express which ran across Europe from the English Channel to Istanbul, Turkey. The descriptions of Istanbul are based upon a visit which Greene once made during a vacation cruise. Short on funds, Greene could not afford to make the full trip aboard the Orient Express but bought a third class ticket for the trip across France. At the German border, he was granted a free pass to Cologne because he was a writer. The rest of the descriptions are based upon guide books and imagination.*

As an ensemble piece, Greene invented a diverse group of characters. Coral Musker is a dancer in her late teens or early twenties who is traveling to Istanbul to take a job as show girl. Carleton Myatt is an Jewish businessman. Dr. Richard Czinner is a Yugoslav Communist Revolutionary who has been living in hiding in England and is making his way back to his home country to foment revolution. Mabel Warren is an English reporter stationed in Germany. Janet Pardoe is Warren’s paid companion and lesbian lover. Josef Grunlich is an Austrian thief who is fleeing after killing a man in a bungled burglary attempt.

This book is full of the stereotypes and attitudes of the early 1930s. Myatt is described in unflattering anti-semitic terms throughout the book. Mabel Warren is the stereotypical predatory masculine lesbian with an unsatiable desire for pretty young girls. Dr. Czinner is the proverbial radical intellectual. The really chilling thing about reading this book was Greene’s editorializing, on the eve of the Holocaust, that Western Europe was now enlightened and above hatred of Jews which was sure to be a thing of the past.

The plot in a nutshell: (WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS!):

The wealthy Jewish businessman Myatt has a stateroom all to himself. When the attractive young Coral Musker, who could only afford to travel second class, falls ill, Myatt purchases her a first class ticket and allows her to sleep in his compartment. In gratitude, Coral loses her virginity to Musker the next night. Musker actually falls in love with Coral, however, and plans to set her up as his full time mistress. (After all, a rich Jewish boy like this can’t be expected to marry a lower class girl like Coral).

Mabel Warren is escorting her lesbian lover Janet Pardoe to the train station where Pardoe is to take the Orient Express to meet her aunt and uncle in Constantinople. When Warren finds out that the popular novelist Quin Savory is traveling on the Orient Express, she uses her press pass to get on board. Warren loses interest in interviewing Savory when she recognizes Yugoslav Communist leader Dr. Richard Czinner. Czinner, who is a wanted criminal in his own country, has been in hiding in England and is traveling under an assumed name. Warren discovers that Czinner is headed back to Belgrade to lead a revolt. After crossing the German frontier it is discovered that Czinner’s fellow Communists launched the revolt early and have been defeated. Warren also decides to try to make Coral Musker her new lover.

Leaving the train in Vienna to call in her story to her paper, Warren’s handbag is stolen by Grunlich who is fleeing from the police after murdering a man during a burglary. Grunlich then uses Warren’s money to buy a ticket and board the Orient Express. Having no money and no ticket, Warren is not allowed to reboard the train.

Meanwhile, the Yugoslav authorities have gotten word that Dr. Czinner is on the Orient Express. At the frontier, the Yugoslavian Army stops the train and arrests Czinner. They also arrest Grunlich for carrying a gun and poor Coral Myatt for conspiracy because she is carrying a message which she was handed by Czinner just prior to his capture.

After a summary court martial, Dr. Czinner is sentenced to death, Grunlich is sentenced to one month in prison, and Coral Myatt is ordered to be deported back to Britain. Myatt, in love with Coral, gets off the train and hires a car to take him back to the border to look for her. Grunlich, Coral and Dr. Czinner manage to escape but Dr. Czinner is shot. Coral drags Dr. Czinner into a storage shed where he eventually dies. Grunlich is rescued by Myatt and denies that he knows anything about the whereabouts of Coral. In despair, Myatt rejoins the train and continues on to Constantinople.

Coral is eventually rescued from the Yugoslav Army by the timely arrival of Mabel Warren. Coral, who apparently had a weak heart, collapses from exhaustion and is last seen lying in the back seat of a car being taken care of by Mabel. Unless she dies from her heart trouble, we can only assume that Coral now has the honor of taking Janet Pardoe’s place as Mabel’s “companion.”

Arriving in Constantinople, Myatt discovers that Janet Pardoe, who is half Jewish, is the niece of his new business partner. Although she had started a relationship on board the train with the novelist Savory, by the end of the novel, Myatt has come to an understanding with Janet's uncle for an arranged marriage with Janet which she is happy to accept. The End.

If that summary seems really sappy, let me assure you that Stamboul Train/Orient Express is a lot better than it sounds like it should be. After all, this is a Graham Greene novel and Greene is a master story teller. The book is very well written and well plotted and holds the readers' attention from start to finish. We even see glimpses of the “Catholic novelist” who is yet to come. There is a fairly lengthy section where Dr. Czinner, the now Communist and Atheist, remembers his Catholic boyhood and regrets the loss of his religious faith. There is a very humorous section where, knowing that he is about to be killed, Dr.Czinner wishes to go to confession. Seeing an Anglican Minister wearing a clerical collar, Dr. Czinner seeks to confess his sins to him, but all the Protestant Minister, Mr. Opie, can talk about is Cricket and Freudian psychology.

Stamboul Train became a best seller and saved Greene’s career as a writer.** Although it is 78 years old, like all of Greene’s novels this is entertaining and has to rank as a classic.

Coming Soon: The Eclectic Reader’s next stop in Greeneland will be Greene’s 1934 political drama It's a Battlefield.

*Carpenter, Humphrey. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) p. 227.

** Ibid. P. 228.