Nazi Misrule (Grunberger: The 12-Year Reich)

Richard Grunberger The 12-Year Reich (1971) A carefully assembled and somewhat selective description of daily life under Nazi rule. With every fact property documented, there’s not enough data about ordinary people’s actual feelings. Still, it’s a good overview of how ideological fantasies distort government and everything it touches. The overall impression is how the growth of totalitarian Gleichschaltung (alignment) suppressed common sense and humane values in small increments until the frog was boiled. And of how the near universal desire for a quiet and orderly life can lead people into a ceding control to the tyrants.
    About the only cavil I have is Grunberger’s obvious reluctance to admit the good things that sometimes resulted from bad motives. For example, the concerts arranged for factory workers were prompted by a belief in the superiority of Aryan art, and had the aim of lifting the lower classes to the Aryan heights. The audience comments quoted show that the listeners liked the music and ignored the motivation for presenting it. But Grunberger is I think clearly correct when he suggests that the Germans’ pride in their culture was intricately mixed with a sense of its superiority, which made it easy for the Nazis to spread their cult.
     Recommended. ***

Lynn Truss on courtesy in speech and writing.

 

Lynn Truss Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss is seriously annoyed by rudeness. Not the rudeness of ignoring merely fashionable etiquette, but the rudeness of ignoring other people’s rights, especially the right to be treated with respect. Her reaction is to stay inside and bolt the door. Maybe escaping rudeness can make for a more peaceful life, but it will be lonely one.
Truss’s six reasons for staying inside are:
* Was That So Hard To Say? (about Please and Thank you)
* Why Am I The One Doing This? (about downloading customer service onto the customer, etc)
* My Bubble, My Rules (about being a good guest, among other things)
* The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
* Booing The Judges (about fake egalitarianism)
* Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of course her remarks go beyond my simplistic summary phrases. She’s well worth reading, more than once, which I intend to do. ****

Lynn Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Truss’s first book. Her defence of good punctuation has, I hope, done some good. But she doesn’t go far enough: Punctuation is the (inevitably inadequate) method for signalling syntactic structure. The title demonstrates this admirably. But Truss doesn’t follow through. She discusses the conventions very well, and provides wonderful examples of what happens when writers ignore them. But her explanations of the rationales are too often misleading. For example, her differentiation between ; : . These marks correspond to the subtle signals in speech that there’s more to come, with some hint as to how it’s related to what’s just been said. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark, but a spelling mark, as are the diacritic and the hyphen.

      I guess I want more conceptual rigour. But that’s nit-picking. Truss has done us all a service, and she’s done it with grace, humour, and nuanced awareness of how we differ in our pointing preferences. Buy this book, follow its advice, and read it at least once a year. ****

Sam Drake, early version of Lew Archer: Trouble Follows Me

 

  Ross Macdonald Trouble Follows Me (1946) Trouble doesn’t follow Sam Drake, the narrator, he looks for it. This early Ross MacDonald (first credited to Keith Millar) already has all the ingredients we associate with him: the sleazy underworld, corruptions in high places, police subservient to money and politics, losers chasing the American Dream, and repeated confusion about what is and what is not important in life. And of course attempts to preserve self-respect by concealing or lying about crucial facts.
     Drake is on leave, attends a very boozy party, and is on scene when a woman’s body is found swinging at the end of a rope. He’s dissatisfied with the inference of suicide, and after many and mostly plausible plot twists as well as several dollops of violence, he discovers the truth: An evil female has murdered her friend to conceal her own crimes.
     It’s war-time, and as far as I can tell, MacDonald gets the ambience right. I don’t know how many unpublished novels or stories MacDonald wrote before this one, but he’s mastered characterisation well enough that we care about the principals and ignore the cardboardiness of the secondary players. The tough-guy style wobbles a bit here and there, but it’s as least as good as Hammett and Chandler. A good enough entertainment for the pulp fiction audience it was written for. **½

Hillerman's Memoir Doesn't Disappoint

 

Tony Hillerman. Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir (2001) Hillerman is one of my favourite writers. His police procedurals set in Navajo country integrate plot, character and setting better than most fictions. Because of them, I want to visit that part of America, but I doubt I will make it there.
     This memoir begins with his childhood on a hardscrabble farm in Oklahoma, where his mother taught him to have low expectations, because then he would be seldom disappointed. But the dominant attitude here is gratitude for all the breaks that came his way: his luck in surviving the war, benefitting from the GI Bill, learning how to tell a story as reporter, and a happy marriage and family life. The war damaged him both physically and psychologically, damage that he plays down. But that damage also encouraged his gift of imaginative empathy. The narrator of the novels has the same voice as the narrator of this memoir. I like this man.
     Footnote: Hillerman’s memories of his war add to its history in the best way: the point of view of those that actually fought it.
     Recommended. ****

Fables of Brunswick Avenue (Govier)

 

Katherine Govier. Fables of Brunswick Avenue (1985) Sixteen stories, sixteen people who win some and lose some. Govier’s tales tend to gloom and faint despair. Most of her characters are or were young women hoping to make a career in some art or craft. Govier tells of how they came to settle for something less than they expected, of how love and marriage demand compromises and accommodations that are rarely apportioned equitably. But losing the game doesn’t equate to defeat, a paradox that elders like me have come to understand only too well. Something like self-respect can be reconstructed from the salvaged bits. And at the very least, there’s new insight, which sometimes is worth the cost.
     Govier writes well. Throughout, there’s the feeling that she writes from experience. Like Alice Munro, she shows us how people’s characters define or limit their choices. But her portraits are kinder, like photos taken with a soft-focus lens to hide the wrinkles.
     Recommended. ***

Three by Tey: Inspector Grant at Work

Josephine Tey: Four Five and Six by Tey (1959)

    The Singing Sands (1952, published posthumously). Inspector Alan Grant convalesces, at his cousin Laura’s home in Scotland, from a severe case of claustrophobia. As he detrains, he comes upon a dead man in an adjoining compartment, and subconsciously picks up his newspaper. The dead man has scribbled a verse about the Singing Sands which catches Grant’s attention; and that’s the beginning of a nicely convoluted investigation into an almost perfect murder.

     Along the way we learn a good deal about fishing, Scottish legends, explorers, Grant’s childhood, megalomania, and assorted other bits and pieces. Tey allows herself room for digressions that add to character and ambience, and refer the reader to what were then current events, and current notions of British nationhood. She also delivers herself of definite opinions on the current state of civilisation, usually inserted into the remarkably civilised conversations between her characters. The result is a novel threaded onto a crime investigation, and a very satisfying one. ***

 

Young and Innocent is based on A Shilling for Candles. Available on YouTube.

     A Shilling fo Candles (1936) Christine Clay, a famous film star who has worked her way up from a factory girl,  turns up drowned on a beach in Kent. Grant is called in because a couple of small details and an implausible alibi flummox the local police, and Grant and Williams, too, when they take over. A couple of well-done plot twists extend the tale to novel length. This is Tey’s second Grant and fourth novel: she manages to insert the digressive illuminations of character and ambience that make her books such a pleasure to read. The title refers to a phrase in Clay’s will (which also drags a monstrous red herring across the trail). Well done. ***

     The Daughter of Time (1951) Grant lies in hospital waiting for his broken leg to heal. He’s bored. Very bored. His friend Marta Hallard suggests that he work on an unsolved mystery. A few chance remarks about Richard III and the two princes in the Tower stir his interest in a portrait of the king. The face does not, in Grant (and Williams’s) estimation belong to the kind of man who would murder two nephews. With the help of Brent Carradine, a nice young American that Hallard sends to help out (he’s besotted with one of the actresses in her current play), Grant resolves the puzzle to his satisfaction: Richard III did not arrange for the murder of the two princes; Henry VII did. How he arrives at this conclusion is beautifully told. That it’s found to be a widely held opinion doesn’t detract from Grant’s success.

     The opening scenes allow Tey to give a few neat observations on hospital care, fashionable novels, the problems of boredom, the “tandypandy” of popular notions of history, etc. Tandypandy refers to an historical legend that completely contradicts the known facts. The Canadian “freedom convoy”, trumpism in the USA (and elsewhere), and the rise of ultra-nationalist far-right groups everywhere, show that tandypandy can have very nasty consequences.

     A beautifully written novel. ****

 

Footnote: Many of the radio and TV dramas and audiobooks of Tey's novels are available on YouTube.

Simplicissimus: German Satire from the 1920s and 30s

 

Stanley Appelbaum. Simplicissimus. 180 Satirical Drawings... (1975). The satirical weekly Simplicissimus was published from 1896 to 1944, but its years as Nazi propaganda rag from 1933 on were a sad comedown from its heyday as one of the most thoroughly moral weeklies. It attacked everything and anything that its editors found objectionable. The hypocrite, the poseur, the indifferent capitalist, the militarist, the fashionable people and faddish ideas of the day, all these and more were mocked in its pages. Some drawings were gentle jokes, others savage attacks. The quality of the art ranges from pretty good illustration to astonishingly evocative art. Some, like those by Käthe Kollwitz, merely represent reality. Others use conventional imagery to signal the social types and classes on display. Most artists have mastered the expressive line that can show us anything from rage to languor.

Dover Publications commissioned this selection of drawings. Appelbaum wrote a potted history of the magazine for it, as well as brief bios of the artists. The cover illustration’s caption reads, “Why do we [men] need suits when the women wear almost nothing?”

Out of print, but worth a search. ****