A Certain Slant of Light

John Ibson’s The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men is not the book that I expected it to be and also not great at being the book that it actually is.

I expected it to be a book about the abrupt shift in the understanding of masculinity and male intimacy in America following World War II. During the war, servicemen were encouraged to form powerful bonds with their fellow soldiers. The armed forces actually distributed a pamphlet called “My Buddy Book,” in which you were encouraged to record your buddy’s name, home address, height, weight, hair and eye color, favorite sports, hobbies, etc. (I am absolutely using this in a novel if I get a chance.) After the war, society basically decided that this whole “buddy” thing was very gay, which left a lot of soldiers unable to share or even internally acknowledge their profound grief over the loss of their buddies, because having such deep emotions about another man was suddenly suspect.

And it is about that… kind of… around the edges. But of his five chapters, Ibson devotes two to John Horne Burns (gay novelist, mostly forgotten today, perhaps because his treatment of homosexuality in his books ranges from ambivalent to hostile) and one to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. (I really ought to read Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar at some point, but in the one thing I read by him, a book introduction, he came across as completely insufferable, like a gay Clifton Fadiman.)

Then Ibson focuses his coda on John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, ending his discussion of that novel (and his book!) with the comment, “He places his characters in the closet, joined them in there, and shut the door.”

Wow! Wow! Look, I enjoy the queer reading of A Separate Peace as much as the next person, but it’s eminently possible to read it as a story of an intense and troubled friendship. Sometimes people write about friendship because friendship is what they want to write about! Sometimes an intense friendship is, in fact, a friendship, and the participants aren’t banging and don’t want to bang!

I felt that in his heart Ibson was only interested in buddies who were actually lovers, and the book would have been stronger if he had admitted that and tightened his focus ever so slightly. (Most of his material is about that anyway, so it wouldn’t require THAT much work.) Or, perhaps, if he had admitted outright, “I think American culture was wrong to judge these men harshly for it, but you know what, I agree with the postwar cultural assumption all intense emotional attachments between men MUST be sexual! The US Army in World War II was the Theban Band! How do you like them apples?”

He never does say this outright, but the implicit belief animates many of his analyses - like his reading of A Separate Peace. The book only makes sense to him if you read Gene and Phineas’s relationship as a romance.

And to add insult to injury, he has this horrible tendency to write pages and pages of minutia. For instance, he quotes from every single contemporary review of almost every book that he discusses. It would probably be possible to do this in a way that is both interesting and instructive, but here it's just an endless list with a light sprinkling of shallow analysis.

There is some interesting stuff in here: I enjoyed the chapter about photos of men, which notes the persistence of affectionate buddy photos through World War II, and their total disappearance just a few years later during the Korean War. But I came here for the buddies and it turns out that Ibson is not, in fact, interested in buddies at all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

For as long as I knew the sky and the clouds, we lived in our white stucco house in the Armenian quarter of Azizya, in Turkey, but when the great dome of Heaven cracked and shattered over our lives, and we were abandoned by the sun and blown like scattered seed across the Arabian desert, none returned but me, and my Azizya, my precious home, was made to crumble and fall and forever disappear from my life.

David Kherdian’s The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl, the 1980 Newbery Honor winner, is sometimes shelved as biography and sometimes as a novel. It’s based on Veron’s memories of fleeing the Armenian massacres as a girl in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and told in the first person as if narrated by Veron, but given that Veron’s original narrative only filled eleven pages, her son must have added to it considerably.

Still, it’s a fascinating book, and very informative if (like me) you didn’t know a whole lot about the Armenian genocide. I was particularly distressed to learn that smaller massacres continued for years after 1916, which I’ve generally seen listed as the end date for the genocide. Veron nearly dies in a massacre in Smyrna in 1922.

There are definitely distressing parts of the book, but overall I didn’t find it a distressing read. As one of Veron’s teachers tells her, Veron is blessed with a good disposition, which gives her the ability to focus on whatever is good in the current situation instead of dwelling on the tragedies of the past.

I continued the Newbery Honor theme with Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. I know lots of people love Raskin’s work (particularly The Westing Game, so I was hoping that this book might prove my entry point into her oeuvre, but alas, I still find her writing style distancing. This book is trying to be whimsical and serious at the same time and the balance just doesn’t work for me.

Old Yeller I didn’t expect to enjoy, but actually I quite liked it! It tells you right on the first page that the hero’s going to have to shoot the dog in the end, which I feel is a good place to give readers a chance to bail out, and I enjoyed all the adventures where the hero and his folks nearly get killed by one wild animal or another. (As littlerhymes and I have remarked many times while reading the Little House series, it's amazing anyone survived the nineteenth century.)

Moving off the Newbery theme (this week has been a bonanza of books), I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. It has certain charming and Snyder-typical qualities (the California setting; the imaginative heroine), but I can see why it’s not one of her better-known books, because ( Spoilers )

Last but not least! I finished Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, a rollicking, tongue-in-cheek adventure novel with a plucky heroine and an EXTREMELY 1920s romance, with a hero who is repeatedly compared to a caveman. Nothing says “I love you” like the possibility of thunking your girl over the head and dragging her off to your cave, I guess! Normally I find these romances aggravating, but here it was oddly charming, perhaps because Christie seems perfectly aware that it’s ridiculous and is revelling in the ridiculousness of it all.

Although about half the book takes place in Rhodesia, our heroine Anne Beddingfield informs us rather warmly that there will be NO local color in this book, and she’s absolutely right; there’s a whole entire background revolution in which the book has no interest at all. My impression is that this is and remains about par for the course in Christie’s handling of race throughout her career, so I may henceforth confine myself to her books about people dying in that most deadly of English customs, the country house party.

What I’m Reading Now

Approaching the end of Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad. This week in petty Nazi fuckery, when the Nazis realized that they were about to lose the battle, they gave their soldiers one last chance to write home - then destroyed the letters. The only reason Beevor can quote the letters at all is that they were originally quoted in some bureaucrat’s “We should destroy these letters! They’ll be bad for homefront morale!” report.

Once the battle was lost, the Red Army captured twenty-two German commanders, including one who had ordered his soldiers to fight “to the last cartridge but one” (the last bullet of course is meant for the stalwart warrior to kill himself at the last: death before surrender!). The other generals are ribbing him about it and he’s all, well I tried to kill myself but my chief of staff prevented me. SIR. Do you think the stalwart warriors of old let their chiefs of staff get in the way?

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m coming up on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan on my Newbery list. Do I need to read A Wizard of Earthsea first? (I tried to read A Wizard of Earthsea in my youth and Did Not Care For It, but I suppose by now I might have outgrown that aversion.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve got kind of a World War II theme this week, although the first book is not only set but was written before World War II. Kathrine Kressman Taylor’s Address Unknown, published in 1938, is an epistolary novella consisting of letters between friends and business partners Martin Schulse and Max Eistenstein, sent between 1932 and 1934. Martin and his family have just moved back to Munich; Max remains in San Francisco, running the art gallery that he and Martin built together. I can’t believe I’d never heard of this before. Short, brilliant, a gut punch of a book.

On a more upbeat note, I finished A. J. Pearce’s Yours Cheerfully, the sequel to Dear Mrs. Bird. A feel-good novel about friendship and love and people pulling together to support each other.

And finally, I finished Gordon Corera’s Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe, which is about the British pigeon operations during World War II, during which the British dropped homing pigeons in France and Belgium (mainly) with directions for locals to send back messages about civilian morale and if possible enemy plans or fortifications. I was particularly delighted by the bit after the war when they’re discussing whether pigeons deserve war medals, and one of the pigeon people writes indignantly that of COURSE pigeons out to get medals, the fact that so many didn’t make it back alive (only one out ten, apparently!) shows the fortitude and valor of the pigeons who battled through.

What I’m Reading Now

I have almost finished Flight of the Heron! I am fairly sure that what awaits one of the characters is DOOM, but I intend to remain in denial about it right up till DOOM drops down like a lightning bolt.

What I Plan to Read Next

My new novella is set in 1927 and I’ve realized that I can make the heroes Golden Age mystery fans, like you do, so of COURSE I have no choice but to read some early Christie.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Many books! I’ve reached the part in Honeytrap where I need to write Investigation and Menace and an Evil Kidnapping Congressman getting hit on the head with a frying pan, much of which will hopefully be cathartic but none of which is really my forte, so I took a couple days break to catch up on my tottering pile of library books.

First, Susanna Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses, which was all right, but not so much that I’m planning to check out other Kearsley books. I thought the ending, in particular, was quite abrupt: suddenly evil plots!

Second, Constance Reid’s Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory, which as the title suggests is a memoir about two women working in a bomber factory in World War II - I’m a sucker for stories about women’s work in World War II and this one is particularly fun because it was written contemporaneously (published in 1944) in that breezy, wise-cracking forties style that’s so much fun. And! It’s got illustrations, courtesy of Reid’s buddy in bomber factory work, Clara Marie Allen, who taught art at the high school where Reid taught English. (That’s why they only spend the summer at the bomber factory.) (I picked up this book because troisoiseaux recommended it - here’s the review that won me over.)

Third, Mario Giordano’s Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna. I was on the fence about continuing the series after the first book, but now that I’ve read this second one - in which Auntie Poldi acquires a detective gang, Padre Paolo and Signora Cocuzzo (a.k.a. the sad signora, who runs a little cafe and never smiles) and her nephew, the narrator, bows to the inevitable and agrees to be her Watson, I intend to continue. A detective series is all about the recurring cast, after all!

Naturally, the third book is not out yet, so this decision is practically meaningless at this moment. But eventually it will bring me more reading material.

And finally! I am one novel short of finishing my quest to read all of Shirley Jackson’s novels, having completed The Bird’s Nest, her 1954 novel about a young woman with multiple personality disorder (which I believe has been renamed, but it’s probably best to keep in mind that the book was published 70 years ago and is presumably working off the understanding of multiple personality disorder current at that time).

Is it psychologically accurate? Hell if I know. Is it a pretty darn Shirley Jackson book? Yes, very much so. Clearly Jackson heard about multiple personality disorder somewhere and realized that this meant she could create four different characters so enmeshed that they’re actually the same person and went to the races with it.

What I’m Reading Now

Tamara Allen’s The Road to Silver Plume, which is the first of an m/m series. There’s an investigation plot: the main characters are a Treasury employee and his criminal-going-legit-maybe partner who are investigating counterfeits in 1890s America, SIDENOTE, I have long yearned to read a book in which 19th century counterfeiting plays a large role, so glad someone is finally taking it on. But the main emotional weight of the story lies with the romance, and I’m curious to see how that works over multiple books, because it seems pretty clearly that it is one romance in multiple books and not a series of connected romance books with overlapping cast but different protags (which seems to be the main format for romance series).

What I Plan to Read Next

Marie Brennan has a new novel out! Or coming out soon, I’m not sure which. It’s a spinoff of the Lady Trent series called Turning Darkness into Light and… actually I looked no further than the fact that it was a new Marie Brennan novel with dragons on the cover. Bring it to me, library!

Paul Roland’s Life after the Third Reich is a brisk overview of life in Germany in the aftermath of World War II - and to a lesser extent throughout Europe, as it’s impossible to discuss the situation in Germany without reference to wider events. It’s a workmanlike book that does what it says it will do, but it never goes beyond that, which makes it oddly unsatisfying.

I think the trouble is that, going by the facts presented here, you come away with the impression that denazification was basically a failure, and I suppose depending on your standards in some ways it was. It didn’t manage to expel all former Nazis from public life or even put everyone personally involved in atrocities on trial, because there were simply too many of them, because it’s the nature of a totalitarian regime to demand active complicity from as many people as possible. The Allies could neither process that many people through the legal system, nor staff the schools and hospitals and industrial plants without them.

(Having said this, the industrialists still got off infuriatingly lightly. Maybe they couldn’t get every single floor manager, but you’d think they could at least snag the top bosses at the companies that used slave labor.)

But by the standard of “Did Germany go on yet another rampage twenty years later?” then denazification was a resounding success. In fact, it’s been nearly eighty years and Germany still hasn’t tried to conquer anyone! And if your only source of information was this book, it would be a total mystery as to why, because the Germans sound just about as sullen and unrepentant as they at the end of World War I.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Zac Bissonette's The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, which I read on a whim and enjoyed very much. It's a svelte, lively read, which digresses often - I particularly enjoyed the forays into the history of the stuffed toy industry (did you know that the founder of the Steiff teddy bear company was a polio victim who started out hiring mainly disabled people?) - without ever losing sight of its two main plot lines: the beanie baby craze itself and the life of Ty Warner, the man behind the plush company that makes beanie babies.

He sounds like a terrible person. This is apparently not uncommon in the plush industry - Bissonette notes that an industry joke is that people go into plush because they're "too mean for the garment district." Zing! - perhaps in part because plush tends to attract people who had terrible childhoods.

Warner himself had a terrible childhood. In Bissonette's telling, he comes across as an unhappy, controlling, lonely man who warps the lives of the people who love him: particularly his two successive girlfriends, who were both integrally involved in the company but had no formal role and thus no financial stability of their own. The end result is a portrait that is - I'm trying to think of the best way to word this - sympathetic without being forgiving, perhaps. Warner's life is clearly very sad, and I really did feel for him at times, but there's never any sense that this excuses his rotten treatment of others.

What I'm Reading Now

When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II, by Molly Guptill Manning, which is about U.S. programs in World War II to get books to the G.I.s, particularly the Armed Services Editions - A.S.E.s - lightweight paperback books specifically printed so soldiers could carry them around to have something to distract them from their misery in foxholes or read while they convalesced or what have you.

It's a book about the ability of books to provide escape and relaxation and even healing: some of the most touching passages in the book are letters from soldiers who were suffering from an emotional shutdown until they read, say, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or a selection of Hemingway's short stories or what have you, and it helped them feel again and now they're writing to the author to say thank you. I mean, how inspiring.

I've been thinking about what I want to do with my life - because if I don't come up with some sort of plan, I'm just going to while away my life as a Starbucks barista, which doesn't sound appealing. And what I keep coming back to, the thing I have always felt passionate about, is books and literacy and the joy of reading: I felt that I was doing something that mattered the year that I tutored for the Minnesota Reading Corps.

...Going back to school to become a teacher also doesn't sound that appealing, but I guess you've got to start somewhere.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have no particular plans for once.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Lev Tolstoi was right when he dreamed of being put in prison. At a certain moment that giant began to dry up. He actually needed prison as a drought needs a shower of rain!

All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I...have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation:

"Bless you, prison for having been in my life!"

(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is all very well for you to say that - when you came out of it alive!)

This quote is from the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and illustrates, I think, one of the animating tensions of the books. Solzhenitsyn sees adversity as a great testing ground for morality, something that not only proves but can also strengthen character (although it can also ruin character - although not, in Solzhenitsyn's view, as badly as unconstrained power does), but he's also keenly aware that deadly adversity is, well, deadly, that many people don't come out of it alive, and for those who died of it - even if they didn't die badly; if they died without betraying their own beliefs, or anyone else - it is an unalloyed evil.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm on the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago. Right now I'm reading the bit about prison escapes, which is much easier going than the hopelessness of the second volume. Admittedly, the prison escapes are mostly hopeless too, in the sense that the prisoners rarely stay free for long, but at least they haven't yet consigned themselves to a miserable death.

Also reading Annie Jacobs' Operation Paperclip, about the American program to bring German scientists to the US after World War II. Right now Operation Paperclip and the War Crime Commission are dueling over who's going to get a certain aviation engineer who conducted human experiments on prisoners on Dachau. Spoiler alert: Operation Paperclip is going to win.

It's an excellent book, and I can even sort of if I squint a lot see where the Operation Paperclip people are coming from (I wouldn't want Stalin getting his hand on biological weapons experts either), but man, I feel like turning some of these people over for trial and hanging would have kept them out of Stalin's hands just as effectively.

I'm also reading Sarah Rees Brennan's Unmade. Brennan is trying to depict a town under the sway of evil rulers who have cowed most of the local populace into submission; juxtaposing her book with The Gulag Archipelago really highlights the flaws in her depiction. She tells us the townsfolk are scared, but I'm not really feeling it. So far, all of Kami's friends have stayed staunch, and none of the people cooperating with the sorcerers seem to be doing so out of crushing terror instead of either lust for power or weak wills.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have a book called The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute on hold at the library. Because who doesn't want to read about the dark side of cute?

And hopefully it will be a bit of light reading after all these gulags and Nazis.