He was obsessed.  If he did not discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be lost for ever.  He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with which to enjoy her.  He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue.  He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.  

Front cover of copy I read

In an effort to justify my mother's complaints that I am a snob and my father's fears that I am a dangerous reactionary who is putting his good name at risk, I have been reading T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry and about the St. Louis native and London habitue's early life (basically up to 1922 and the publication of The Waste Land.)  In Robert Crawford's Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land and in The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, mention is made of Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow as a controversial book that was "suppressed for indecency."  I've never read anything by D. H. Lawrence, and seeing that the novel was (apparently) full of sex and that the more famous Women in Love was a sequel to it, I decided The Rainbow would be a good place to start my D. H. Lawrence experience and tracked down a copy (Penguin 2007, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes) at the Baltigore County Public Library.  For what it's worth, this edition claims to be the closest ever published to what Lawrence intended.

The Rainbow is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, relatively prosperous owners of the farm known as the Marsh in or near the village of Cossethay on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a tale that runs from the mid 19th century to the first years of the 20th.  After a brief look at his immediate ancestors, we spend 100 or so pages with Tom Brangwen as our main character.  Though not the eldest, Tom succeeds to ownership of the Marsh, his older brother Alfred moving to Nottingham to take a job as "a draughtsman in a lace-factory."  After an encounter with a foreign gentleman, Tom becomes fascinated with foreigners and aristocrats—one of the themes of The Rainbow is of people who yearn to be more, to grow into something different, something bigger, or to have children who do so  These hopes are generally frustrated; for example, Tom's mother wanted her children to be educated, but Tom was a horrible student, "a hopeless duffer at learning," "a fool" who "had not the power to controvert even the stupidest argument...."

...and the back

Tom becomes enchanted with Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow with a little girl, Anna.  Lydia, the daughter of a landowner, and her husband, a physician, were forced to leave Poland because they were patriots and got mixed up in a rebellion against the Russians--her husband died of illness in London, leaving her and little Anna penniless.  Tom and Lydia marry, and we learn all about the joys and miseries of their marriage. Their marriage is contrasted with Alfred’s; Alfred cheats on his wife with an intelligent woman who lives in a house full of books with her father--Alfred and the woman read Herbert Spencer and Robert Browning together.

When Anna is eighteen, Alfred’s son Will moves near the Marsh to take up work himself as a draughtsman at a lace factory. Anna and Will, a sensitive sort who likes to visit churches and look at books of reproductions of church architecture and Christian paintings and sculptures (Ruskin has had a big influence on him), fall in love, and we get 100-something pages in which their marriage, the joys and miseries of which are even more extreme than that of Tom and Lydia's, is described in detail.

Lawrence’s book is focused primarily on psychology, on the characters’ inner lives and on their feelings, feelings mostly related to their sexual and family relationships. There is quite little description of people’s work or their relationships with other people in the community--we don’t get scenes of Tom haggling with customers over prices for his butter or beef or Will trying to get a raise from his boss, and we learn very little of the economics of managing a farm or the intricacies of designing lace patterns, we don't hear people's complaints about government trade or tax or foreign policy.  Again and again the characters eschew the outside world, shutting themselves up in the family:

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of motherhood....No responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her.  The outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really.  

.... 

And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors....

or themselves:

...she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things....she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.

The descriptions of people’s family relationships, particularly relationships between spouses, ring very true and are very effective. Just like in real life, everybody’s feelings are ambiguous, equivocal,  subject to endless revision, and Lawrence's character's emotions shift from one extreme to the other from one moment to the next.   Lawrence addresses, in detail, many of the challenges faced by married people: you can't live without your wife, can't imagine a life without her, she is the center of your being, but at the same time that you adore her and desire her, you resent her because of her power over you.  She makes fun of your hobbies, and it hurts so much you throw the woodcarving you've been working on for months into the fire!  (When this happened to Will I was reminded of scenes in Kipling's The Light that Failed and in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage in which women destroyed men's art work.)  Your wife criticizes your religion, your deepest beliefs, and you begin to doubt.  You love your husband and desire him sexually, but there is nothing more delicious than being alone at home while he's at work, and you can't get any sleep in the same bed with him, so you send him to another room every night.  Lawrence goes into all these things at great length, as well as into Tom's relationship with Anna and Will's with his and Anna's first daughter, Ursula.

She had to be capable of anything now.  When the surface of her life flowed on like rote--as it usually did--still the lower currents wandered among the stony surprises of an unknown stream bed.  

I spent some time in Des Moines on my recent Thanksgiving travels, and found that the public library was selling books for five cents each! Among those I purchased for this cheap as free price was R. V. Cassill’s Pretty Leslie, a Bantam paperback from 1964 with an interesting red cover that proclaims it to be “the brilliant, moving novel of modern sexual life!”, complete with exclamation point! (The book first appeared as a Simon and Schuster hardcover with a repulsive cover in 1963.) The back cover text of my paperback suggests this 295-page book is about a horny chick whose horniness gets her in some kind of trouble; I guess we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Ronald Verlin Cassill was born in Iowa, and my copy of Pretty Leslie was once part of the Des Moines Public Library’s collection of books by Iowa authors. It is in quite good shape; evidently nobody found the sexalicious cover enticing  enough to actually sit in the library ("FOR USE IN LIBRARY ONLY") and read it. I guess it does look more like one of those "curl up all alone with" type of books.  But don’t think that I purchased Pretty Leslie in hopes it was a piece of pornography!  Not only did Cassill win various literary awards as well as the praises of the snobs at the New York Times and James Dickey (whose Deliverance I read about six years ago and am happy to recommend)--for two decades Cassill edited The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a perch of great power and prestige in the world of wordsmithery!  All the evidence suggests that Pretty Leslie, even if it is about a horny chick, is a respectable piece of modern literature!


Leslie Skinner (Skinner?  hmmmm...) grew up in the tony Long Island suburb of Manhasset, and then moved to Manhattan and worked at a famous magazine. As our story begins, Leslie is 27 and has lived with her husband, Ben Daniels, a pediatrician, for three years in Sardis, Illinois.  Leslie loves attention, and is a skilled liar and clever manipulator: “She could, and did, still make anyone she wanted to fall in love with her.  The tactics were exactly those that had worked in Manhasset High...."  She flirts with Ben's friends and the men at the ad agency where she works part time, and tells white lies to her female coworkers to get them to tell her their own secrets--these secrets she relays to her husband.  Leslie, Ben reflects, has a "contagious lust for drama."

The back cover of Pretty Leslie, with its handwritten quote from the title character's diary, had given me hopes that this novel would be a first person narrative from a nymphomaniac or someone with some other psychological problem, but it is in fact written in the third person omniscient form, and we follow several characters, learn their backstories, look into their minds, and witness events from their points of view. In the first of the novel's four parts we learn Ben Daniels' deep dark secret: As a child growing up in Kansas he cunningly murdered another boy, meting out rough justice for that boy's having tortured a dog. The murder was ruled an accident, and Ben and his stepmother moved to New York City to start a new life. Throughout his life Ben has wrestled with a dilemma: can he unburden himself of this weighty secret, tell anyone, even his wife, how he coaxed Billy Kirkland behind a car parked on an incline and then, oops, released the brake so Billy was crushed?

In Part Two we learn about Leslie's past: she was fat, which scarred her mind, making her obsessed with keeping off weight.  She developed a slender figure as a young adult, but she is haunted by a "Fat Girl" and at times of stress will quickly gain weight and resort to girdles.  Cassill's novel is full of Freudian mumbo jumbo: we not only learn about the childhood incidents which have caused the various characters' adult fetishes and hangups, but read all about their stupid dreams, and all the characters fling around goofy psychological analyses of each other. Ben, for example, thinks that when Leslie gains weight it may be because she subconsciously wants to be pregnant.

Did I say "fetishes and hangups?"  Leslie wants to be treated roughly by a man, dominated, or at a least part of her she isn't quite ready to admit to, even to herself, does. One of Cassill's recurring themes is personalities split in two, entities composed of two opposing or complementary elements.  Leslie is both the sexy sophisticated professional and the Fat Girl, while Ben is both the cunning assassin of a child and the devoted preserver of children's lives.

Leslie's desire to be roughly handled is all mixed up in her attitudes about race.  While she calls herself a liberal and was "madly for Adlai" during her high school days, she was sexually aroused when she heard a horror story from the South about a black woman who was gang raped by whites while held up against the fender of a car, and was also excited when she saw a cop on the streets of Greenwich Village beating Puerto Rican boys with his billy club.  That very same cop later tried to make the moves on her, and when she resisted he hit her with the very same club, a beating she found cathartic.

Ben has his own complicated views of blacks and Hispanics, which are all mixed up in his beliefs in superstition and "the uncanny."  Ben's father died in Africa where his parents were missionaries devoted to helping whom Ben calls "black idiots;" a "witch doctor" tended Ben's father on his deathbed and Ben's mother soon after went insane. Ben himself volunteers two days a week at a clinic in an Illinois ghetto, looking after "Negro" children.  In an early part of the novel Ben fails to save a black baby (the little boy ate lead paint chips and dies of lead poisoning) and the same day revives an apparently doomed white little girl; Ben conceives the ridiculous notion that the events are inextricably linked, that somehow the little Negro boy was sacrificed to rescue the Caucasian child.

I should probably note that animals also play a role in the novel (there is the aforementioned dog, for example, as well as a pet bird, some pet fish, and a recurring reference to a chimpanzee) and that these animals play a role in the novel similar to that of the numerous minor nonwhite figures--they are alien inferiors, and the way the three white principals treat them reveals something about their character.  

First edition; are those gummy worms or mitochondria?  Hideous!

The climax of Part Two comes when Ben is down in Caracas, at a medical conference where he learns about the plight of Latin American children.  After a party at her boss's fancy house Leslie has a brief affair with a social inferior, Donald Patch.  We learn all about Patch in Part Three.  A short man Leslie doesn't even like, Patch is a loutish commercial artist and science fiction fan (!) whom nobody respects; he uses an airbrush to paint highly detailed and "garishly" realistic depictions of people, aircraft and military equipment (sophisticated people like Leslie prefer abstract modern art, even if they work at an ad agency which makes its money by offering clients Patch's realistic work.)  Patch is a serial womanizer, but he has only ever had lower class women, including many "Negro" women--white, educated middle-class Leslie is a major catch for him.  Patch seduces women by being dismissive and cruel to them (I guess nowadays people call this "negging") and he is a violent lover who hurts Leslie.  This selfish creep brings Leslie to orgasm, something her kind and gentle husband has never done!

Also in Part Three Ben returns from Venezuela, his contact with poor Latin American kids having fired him with the idea that he and Leslie (who have been unable to have their own child) should adopt.  But when he suggests this idea to Leslie over dinner at a fancy restaurant she isn't even listening to him--she's thinking of Patch!  Over the succeeding weeks various clues convince Ben that Leslie had another man in his absence.  He tries to be modern and liberal about it ("If someone had her on her back, what's the harm in it?  Who am I to rock the boat?") but the knowledge of her infidelity has terrible effects on his mind; he becomes impotent, for example.  Patch badgers Leslie into resuming the affair; she spends her days in Patch's crummy apartment and her nights in the house Ben bought her.  Cassill suggests that Leslie needs both gentle Ben and brutal Patch to achieve satisfaction, and even that Ben and Patch are different versions of the same person, shaped by different circumstances. The climax of Part Three is when Leslie discovers she is finally pregnant!

In Part Four Leslie flees west and Ben finally realizes what is going on and confronts Patch; he and Patch (it appears) die, while Leslie, sower of discord, moves on to another phase of her life.

There are some good things in Pretty Leslie; the sex stuff is more or less entertaining, and the uncomfortable race stuff, Leslie and Ben's powerful but condescending, ambivalent, and at times hypocritical feelings about blacks and Hispanics, is interesting.  I liked the character of Donald Patch, the brutish artist consigned to the edges of polite society.  I give Pretty Leslie a passing grade.  But there are also lots of problems--it is certainly not as "brilliant" or "moving" as advertised.  Cassill doesn't have a very engaging prose style, and he uses lots and lots of elaborate metaphors and similes.  Some of these work, but some just weigh down the narrative, expressing an idea with more words but no more clarity than a simple declaration would have.  Some of the longer metaphorical passages I found distracting and, as my mind wandered, incomprehensible.

The profusion of metaphors suggests Cassill is trying to produce a serious literary novel; he also assumes a level of cultural literacy on the part of the reader, including plenty of references to artists like George Bellows and Willem De Kooning and fictional characters like Circe, Madame Bovary, and Mrs. Miniver.  Cassill never uses Maugham's name, but makes it clear Patch thinks of himself as Strickland, the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence, an artist above the stifling strictures of bourgeois morality.

In the same way the overabundance of metaphors makes the book feel a little too long and too slow, there is a superfluity of minor, uninteresting characters who appear briefly and then never show up again; maybe Cassill could have combined some of them--how many friends and colleagues do the Daniels really need for the narrative to function?

A recent edition

The novel's biggest problem is probably that it is about a marriage, but neither the husband nor the wife is very interesting, and their relationship isn't compelling either.  Leslie and Ben Daniels are wishy washy--why should the reader be "moved" if Ben and Leslie themselves are so bland and hesitant, so ambivalent, about each other?  I can't remember why they even got married, what attracted them to each other in the first place, they never exhibit the kind of deep love or ferocious hate I want to see in drama. Don Patch, a man driven by big emotions who stands at odds with society, is the book's most interesting character--he acts and reacts, he feels things and he does things.  Leslie and Ben just go with the flow, they think and talk but can't make up their minds about what they feel and what they should to do, and end up feeling and doing very little.  Leslie and Ben are passive victims to whom things happen, and victims are boring--Patch is a villain or antihero who makes things happen.

A part of the problem is all that modern psychology jazz; it quashes the characters' agency as well as any romance or tragedy the story might have had, turning them into malfunctioning machines instead of flesh and blood people you can feel for.  The idea of people as deterministic machines may make sense as a description of real life, but it can ruin fiction, especially when the characters, instead of rebelling against determinism, blandy accept it.

Pretty Leslie wasn't a waste of my time, but Cassill lacks the sort of special something--depth of feeling, a beautiful style, a unique point of view, humor or a sense of fun, surprising ideas--that excites me about the "mainstream" or "literary" writers I really like, such as Proust or Nabokov or Maugham or Orwell or Henry Miller or Bukowski, so I don't think I will be reading any other of his numerous works.

God, the craziness, the futile insanity of war.  Damn that German cruiser, damn those German gunners, damn them, damn them, damn them!...But why should he?  They, too, were only doing a job--and doing it terribly well.

I don't really read much bestselling mainstream popular fiction, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, that sort of thing.  Maybe P. G, Wodehouse, W. Somerset Maugham and James Dickey (I read Deliverance right before I moved to the Middle West) qualify as mainstream popular fiction, though I like to think of those writers as "literary figures." When I worked at a bookstore in northern New Jersey in the mid-90s all the bestsellers seemed to be either about lawyers and serial killers chasing each other, or knock-offs of Bridges of Madison County.  Those sorts of things do not interest me. What does interest me is British military history, and so the obvious exceptions to my aversion from popular mainstream fiction would be all those Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell I read as a teen, and the 15 or so Aubrey and Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian I read in my thirties.  It was also my interest in British military history that led me to dip my toe again into the mainstream fiction pool this week with a novel by Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone.

I never thought about reading anything by Alistair MacLean until, at the Des Moines Salvation Army earlier this month, I stumbled on a crumbling 1957 paperback edition of H.M.S. Ulysses, its cover adorned with a sturm und drang depiction of British sailors manning Oerlikon and pom-pom guns in defense against what I guess are He-111s.  Informed by the advertising text on the first page that Scotsman MacLean actually served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, I decided to read H.M.S. Ulysses in the same spirit in which I read Sapper's No Man's Land, with the presumption that reading fiction about a military campaign by a person who actually served in that very campaign would be worthwhile.  

H.M.S. Ulysses, first published in 1956, starts off with 15 lines from one of those poems everybody likes, Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses," a cool map of the voyage described in the novel, and a cool diagram of the fictional light cruiser on which the novel takes place.  Then we get down to the novel, all 319 pages of it.

H.M.S. Ulysses chronicles the week-long voyage between Scotland and Russia of a convoy bringing to the Soviet Union Canadian-built tanks, fighters, fuel and ammunition for use on the Eastern Front; nearly all scenes take place on the flagship, the light cruiser Ulysses.  MacLean seems to be the kind of writer who deals in superlatives.  Ulysses is the best ship in the world ("She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world"), with the best captain in the world ("Among naval captains--indeed, among men--he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone"), and its crew have been charged with the toughest duty faced by any servicemen anywhere in the world ("The Russian convoys, sir, are something entirely new and quite unique in the experience of mankind.")  Because she is indispensible, Ulysses has been going on more convoy missions than any other ship in the Royal Navy, and under the strain some members of the crew, just before the novel began, staged a little mutiny.  As a result, Ulysses has to redeem itself on its next trip from Scapa Flow to Murmansk.

A theme in military fiction is that those officers superior in the hierarchy to the main characters are stupid and corrupt.  (In fiction in which the main characters are top commanders, it is the politicians above them who are stupid and corrupt.)  I haven't served in the armed services myself, but I suppose it is possible that real military personnel think their superiors are all unethical jerks--everybody I meet in civilian life thinks his or her boss is a corrupt idiot who is running the organization into the ground and doesn't appreciate all the hard work he or she does.

Novels and movies about military men often have a scene in which one of the guys who has been in the trenches doing the real fighting gives a speech to one of the guys who has been maxing and relaxing back at HQ, a speech about how hard the real fighting men have it, and how the jerks in HQ do not appreciate them.  MacLean fits one of those scenes into the very first of the novel's 18 chapters when the ship's doctor yells at the Admiral sent from London to investigate the mutiny.

Military (and police) fiction is also full of scenes in which some officer has to tell somebody his or her spouse or father or brother or whoever got killed in action. MacLean also fits one of those scenes into the first chapter.  Talk about efficiency!

You may recall that I interpreted Sapper, in his book about the Western Front in World War One, to be praising the British soldier, denouncing the German people, and arguing that the rigors of war could have beneficial effects on individuals and societies.  MacLean in H.M.S. Ulysses takes the opposite tack; far from glorifying war, the novel is one grisly horror scene after another.  And it doesn't glorify the British people or their institutions, or condemn Nazi Germany or its citizens, either.  Sure, there are brave and skillful and decent British characters, but there are also evil British characters and British blunderers, and the Germans (who are only ever seen at a distance, from the deck of the Ulysses) are universally depicted as courageous and clever.  In fact, the Germans outwit the British again and again over the course of the book, and if the National Socialist German Worker's Party's genocidal racism and monstrous tyranny are ever mentioned, I missed it.  Instead Maclean tells us that German flying is "magnificent," German gunnery is "fantastic" and the like.

When I started the book I expected the convoy to suffer some losses, of course, but I thought Ulysses and most of the convoy would get to Murmansk and drop off a big shipment of war material to the grateful Bolshies.  Instead, the mission is a disaster! Of 32 ships that left Scotland and the New World, only five get to Russia, and the Ulysses is not among them.  Only a handful of people from the Ulysses, which starts with a crew of over 700, even survive the mission!  This is partly because the sub rosa purpose of the convoy is to lure the German battleship Tirpitz out into the open sea so a Royal Navy battlefleet can attack it, but the Tirpitz doesn't take the bait!  The Ulysses, and with it over two dozen other British, Canadian and American ships, is sunk for nothing!

Four topics fill up the lengthy narrative as the Ulysses and the rest of the convoy travel for 18 chapters through Arctic waters, enroute to Uncle Joe's worker's paradise in the teeth of German resistance.  These topics all reinforce MacLean's themes of the horror and futility of war and redemption through suffering and death.

1) The weather: MacLean spends lots of time talking about how cold it is, how windy it is, how the seas are rough, and how this can incapacitate the ships and the men. Several ships get damaged by storms and sent back to Britain, and people regularly freeze to death or have the skin ripped off their bodies when they touch cold metal.  In Chapter 6 the Allied sailors face the most severe storm in human history!  ("It was the worst storm of the war.  Beyond all doubt, had the records been preserved for Admiralty inspection, that would have proved to be incomparably the greatest storm, the most tremendous convulsion of nature since these recordings began.")  I didn't keep track of how many pages were devoted to the weather, but I felt like maybe the Weather Channel was sponsoring this novel.  Enough with the weather already!

2) The captain is sick: Captain Vallery, the world's finest captain, is always tired, always coughing up blood, etc.  This reminded me of the captain of the Space Battleship Yamato.  Maybe I'm supposed to feel bad because this dude is on his deathbed, but MacLean doesn't make him realistic or interesting enough for me to feel bad; besides, this is the middle of the most devastating war in history, in which are participating two of the most evil regimes in history--people are getting murdered in death camps and blown up in battles all over the place, why should I cry over this particular guy?  Hell, this very book is full of people getting killed in a dozen horrible ways!

Vallery, it turns out, is a Christ figure.  In the middle of the book he staggers through the ship, giving everybody a pep talk that raises their spirits as if magically, and in the end of the book he gives a speech over the PA system and dies a moment later.  Vallery's speech and death energize the British sailors, giving them the strength to fight on and redeem themselves.  I'm not a Christian so I might have missed this if a character on page 318 hadn't thought, "Vallery would have said, 'Do not judge them, for they do not understand.'"  I don't mind when the author makes it easy for us dummies in the audience.

3) Morale and mutiny: The stress faced by the crew, who are, after all, on the most stressful endeavour in human history, leads to trouble.  Most of the trouble is triggered by misbehavior by cruel officers, but there is also a rating, a career criminal, who is the ringleader of the mutinous sailors.

4) Attacks by the Germans: This is why we are reading this book, right?  The human and technological struggle between the RAF and the RN on one side, and the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine on the other, is one of the great dramas of human history!  Since I was a kid I've been fascinated and thrilled by radar, asdic, depth charges, hedgehog, torpedoes, the Hurricane, the Spitfire, the Bf-109, the Wellington, the Bismark, Window, Flak towers, the Dambusters, all that business.  When I read about this stuff I cheer on the British and their allies, and groan when something bad happens to them.  And I never feel any sympathy or guilt when I read about a U-boat being lost with all hands or an entire German city being reduced to ashes--my attitude is, "Take that you bastards!"

(Maybe that is the kind of thing about myself I shouldn't be putting on the internet for all to read.)

Anyway, the attraction of a book like this, for me at least, isn't hearing about the way ice on the deck can overbalance a ship or how some guy is coughing up blood from TB, it is hearing about naval warfare.  I have already suggested that MacLean's project in H.M.S. Ulysses is not to express patriotic sentiments or denounce Nazi Germany and celebrate its destruction, so I was doing a lot more groaning than cheering over the course of this novel.  When it comes to portraying the variety of naval actions experienced by sailors in the Second World War, however, MacLean really delivers--he unleashes on the poor doomed convoy and on us readers just about every type of German attack you can think of.  A midget submarine.  A drifting mine.  Condor reconnaissance planes.  A Hipper-class heavy cruiser.  The "largest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war."  Bombers that drop all matter of ordnance: flares, glider bombs, torpedoes, and just garden variety bombs.  The fighting is so prolonged that for the first time in the history of the Arctic convoys the naval vessels run out of depth charges.

The fighting doesn't get that repetitive, because MacLean presents a variety of scenarios, many different problems the British sailors have to try to solve.  They fight in the dark, they fight with radar , they fight without radar, they hide in a smoke screen, they have to figure out what to do when a burning oil tanker is illuminating the convoy, etc.  

There are over thirty ships in the Allied convoy when it gets underway, crewed by thousands of sailors, and MacLean describes in graphic detail all the horrible things that can happen to them, all the different ways a ship can be crippled, sink or explode, and all the horrible ways people can be burned up or drowned or frozen to death or blown to pieces.  MacLean's dwells on the horror of war: the horror of men floating on the surface of the icy ocean amid a burning oil slick or paddling for their lives away from the murderous propellers of an approaching ship, and the horror of the men on intact ships who have to watch helplessly as these men, in their hundreds, perish.  We hear all about people being burned to skeletons, frozen solid, blasted to shreds, shot full of holes.  There are lots of mistakes and friendly fire incidents, and plenty of euthanasia, and lots of guilt-ridden men who commit suicide or sacrifice themselves to assuage their guilt.  Several ships and airplanes are destroyed crashing directly into enemy vessels, so that the bodies of Allied and German servicemen are intermingled.

Did I enjoy this novel?  Can I recommend it?

On the one hand I was surprised that the mission described in the novel was a tragic disaster instead of a triumph for justice and democracy.  Even though I was a little disappointed, I have to admire a book that holds genuine surprises.  We are used to adventure stories that start with some guy saying "It's a suicide mission!" and end with our heroes coming home safe after accomplishing the mission, so it was interesting to have a story in which the characters go on a suicide mission and it turns out to really be suicidal.

I learned some things I hadn't known about Royal Navy vessels: for example, I had never even head of the Kent screen, and I also had not know the Boulton Paul gun turret was mounted on ships.  That was good.  Hearing about the multitude of ways things can go wrong on a ship was also interesting.

On the other hand, there are some problems with the book.  It is too long, for one thing.  How many pages of weather do we need?  And how many guys who sacrifice themselves?  This happens again and again.  There are also so many characters and so many ships that it is not easy to keep track of them, and MacLean will not talk about some of them for a hundred pages, then they suddenly take center stage while they are getting killed.  It is hard to care about people you've never really been introduced to until they are getting immolated or disintegrated just like a bunch of other guys did a few pages ago.  This reminded me a little of the Iliad.  It's been a long time since I read the Iliad, but I seem to recall guys we never heard of before getting extravagant death scenes in which Homer laments that they will never see their wives or participate in their favorite hobbies again.

Another of the problems with H.M.S. Ulysses is that MacLean doesn't let you decide, and doesn't require you to figure out, how to feel about the characters; he tells you how to feel about them on the first page you meet them.  Captain Vallery is a unique man, an authority on music and literature who is deeply religious, hates war, volunteered to come out of retirement the first day of the war, but never brags about any of this (we readers know he is the best thing since sliced hard tack because of the omniscient narrator.)  Sublieutenant Carslake "was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system....he was a complete ass."  Chief Petty Officer Hartley "was the Royal Navy at its best."  The mutinous stoker Riley "had at a very early age, indeed, decided upon a career of crime...his intelligence barely cleared the moron level."          

In my last blog post I talked about Mikhail Lermontov's novella "Princess Mary." Because "Princess Mary" has a first-person narrator who is deserving of skepticism, and all the characters act irrationally and are driven by their emotions, we have to figure out how to feel about every character based on their words or actions and our own moral and ethical sensibilities.  This generates a level of mystery and tension for the reader, and forces the reader to think, and means different readers will have different reactions to the novella, some identifying with or sympathizing with characters that other readers might condemn or dismiss out of hand.  The characters in "Princess Mary" also change as the story progresses, which may force readers to rethink their earlier assessments.

H.M.S. Ulysses lacks that mystery and tension, and does not provide the reader space to think and decide, because MacLean tells you immediately how to feel about each character.  With a minor exception, I don't think the characters in MacLean's novel evolve, either.  

Despite these problems, its vivid depiction of the world of the Arctic convoys, its gruesome catalog of horrors and the wide variety of naval engagements it presents make reading H.M.S. Ulysses a worthwhile experience.  Fans of military and nautical fiction, especially fiction that eschews patriotism, unrealistic heroics and happy endings, should check it out.

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The final three pages of my edition of  H.M.S. Ulysses contain ads.  Two indicate that the people at Permabooks expected MacLean's novel to appeal to history buffs.  I often see the advertised hardcover American Heritage volumes in used bookstores and antique stores.

If I'm going to read Veus Eruopesnl or Olnuzle, I'd prefer to read the original unabridged texts

The third ad is for Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  My mother's mother, whom we kids called "Nana" and whom we saw often (multiple times a week before I started school, then every weekend when I was older) had a bunch of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and piles and piles of the Reader's Digest magazine.  (The magazine is actually mentioned in passing in H.M.S. Ulysses.)  I would often look at the pictures in the books and magazines, and read the little jokes in the magazines, but I don't think I found them very funny (perhaps just because I was too young to get the jokes.)

I do find something funny about this ad-- the drawing that accompanies it. For whatever reason, the people that put the ad together decided, instead of showcasing one of their most popular or exciting volumes, bursting with real life bestsellers, to include a picture of a book so generic that the titles on the spine are not real, and in fact are not even real English words.  I'm not even sure all the characters are real English letters!  A strange choice whose rationale I am unable to conjecture.

London!  Mile after mile of mean lonely houses, let off in flats and single rooms; not homes, not communities, just clusters of meaningless lives drifting in a sort of drowsy chaos to the grave!  He saw men as corpses walking.  The thought that he was merely objectifying his own inner misery hardly troubled him.  His mind went back to Wednesday afternoon, when he had desired to hear the enemy aeroplanes zooming over London.   

During my ill-fated pursuit of a doctorate in History I had a class on Modern Britain.  The professor was an expert on the press and publishing industry, and one class session was devoted to George Orwell.  I read Down and Out in London and Paris and Road to Wigan Pier for this session, both of which I heartily recommend for being well-written, interesting, and fun.  (I'd read 1984 and Animal Farm in junior high, and remembered them well enough that I thought I could wing it in class if the prof asked me about them.)  A woman in the class mentioned Keep the Aspidistra Flying, warning us all it was very bad and nobody should read it. Inquiries as to why it was so bad yielded no details--"It is just bad," she assured us.

This exchange stuck in my mind due to its mysteriousness; why did this student object so heartily to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and with so little specificity?  Years later, I guess in the early 2000s, I read the novel myself, and developed theories as to what about the novel had inspired her distaste.  I found the novel quite good, and recently decided to reread it.  Last week, during rare moments of solitude on a cross-country road trip, I read an old hardcover university library copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company and printed in the USA.  The novel first appeared in 1936.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is one of those novels in which an artist or writer has no money and is struggling to survive and achieve recognition for his art.  There are lots of these out there; Henry Miller's oeuvre comes to mind, as does Charles Bukowski's. There's also Knut Hamsun's Hunger.  Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage also includes some of this kind of material.  Even though these books are pretty thick on the ground, I tend to fall for them; there is something about the idea of the down and out writer, railing against society and counting his pennies, unsure of what tomorrow might bring, that appeals to me.

Prefacing the text proper of Keep the Aspidistra Flying is half a page of Bible verses, I Corinthians xiii, with the word "love" replaced with "money" (e.g., "abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money"), a childish sort of joke that gives us a foretaste of the book's theme.

Gordon Comstock, our hero, is an unsuccessful poet, "aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already," consumed with envy of those with money, and convinced that everything worth having--charm, love, sex, a successful career--is the product of access to money:  "It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write.'  He clung to that as an article of faith."  "All human relationships must be purchased with money.  If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you...."  The first two dozen pages are full of lines like that, as well as descriptions of Gordon toying with the coins in his pocket and fretting because he can't afford as many cigarettes as he would like to smoke, and so has to ration them out, resist smoking some today so he won't have to face a day without tobacco on the morrow.

One of the things I enjoy about Miller's and Bukowski's stories about down and out artists and writers is how the protagonists are total and absolute jerks.  They may rail against the evils of the world or capitalism or society or whatever, but they are no better-- they steal, they abuse women, they take advantage of friends, and so on.  This sets up dramatic tension, as the reader has to wonder to what extent the impoverished artist is the victim of our allegedly horrible society, and to what extent he has made his own bad luck.  (It also matches the reality of writers and artists I have met, a disreputable and snobbish lot who are always taking advantage of people, taking temporary jobs at art supply stores or bookstores so they can steal supplies, and moaning that the taxpayers should subsidize their decadent lifestyles because the art-buying public is too obtuse to voluntarily part with their lucre--which the artist himself of course has contempt for--to buy their paintings and sculptures.)

Gordon Comstock fits comfortably into this mold; he hates everybody and everything, from the advertisements pasted on the walls, to the books in the bookstore and lending library where he works, to the customers of the store, who come in two types; the educated snobs he hates for their money and polish, and the middle-class and lower-class readers of thrillers and romances whom he despises for their lack of taste and refinement. Comstock even hates Greta Garbo and Arthur Rackham!  He is so angry at the modern world that he looks forward to the inevitable mass war that will see bombers blasting civilization to rubble!  Gordon's seething hatred, his inexhaustible store of criticisms, complaints and calumnies, is amusing; some specimens of his spleen are funny in their own right, and the sheer volume of off-the-wall complaints creates, in Gordon, a laughably absurd, but still quite real, character.

"We have a very small number of adults trying to raise a very large number of you into a culture that we just made up, one we don't have any emotional attachment to ourselves."

On the cover of my 1992 paperback edition of John Barnes' 1991 novel Orbital Resonance, Orson Scott Card compares Barnes to Heinlein, and on the back cover Poul Anderson compares Barnes to Heinlen.  Inside, on the "Praise for" pages, various SF periodicals do the same.  Well, I like Heinlein, so I thought I'd give Orbital Resonance a chance.

The year is 2024 and the Earth has been totally effed up by biological warfare, climate change and AIDS!  The only people to survive the catastrophes were those willing to do anything to survive.  Once these ruthless survivor types were in charge they came up with a scheme to save the Earth--space stations made from asteroids where things can be manufactured without damaging the Earth's environment, and where a new society of social-minded humans can be developed!

Our narrator is Melpomene Murray, thirteen-year-old daughter of a psychologist on the council ("CPB") who has played a major role in developing the new generation of communitarian people.  They live in Flying Dutchman, an asteroid in an orbit between Earth and Mars.  Melpomene is writing the book we are reading after having been enlisted by the CPB to produce propaganda that will help Earthers understand what life is like in space and convince them to think well of the space people.

The comparisons to Heinlein are quite apt--much of Orbital Resonance reads like a pastiche of "Menace from Earth" and the various juveniles, with a teenage girl as first-person narrator, describing her life in a space colony (we've got no room, no privacy, variable gravity, and we like it!) and teenage relationship dramas (a bully is mean to the new kid from Earth, girls worry about their figures and about boys liking them, Melpomene's brother is broken hearted because he is bad at computer programming class, there is a rift between Melpomene and her best friend Miriam because Miriam is paying attention to a boy, etc.)  The story also addresses philosophical issues that Heinlein often wrote about, like the tension between individualism and duty to society, when it is appropriate to obey authority and when it is appropriate to rebel, and the forms family and erotic relationships will take in the future.

Kids on the asteroid station are conditioned and hypnotized (Melpomene's father uses words like "designed" and "programmed") to fear breaking rules, to fear leaving Flying Dutchman, and to enjoy working in teams.  A math test, for example, is like a team sport; each student is given different problems, and the good students take time out to help the poor students because each student's score is affected by everybody else's score ("In Pyramid Math, your score is half your own plus one quarter the average of you and your partner, plus one eighth the average of your foursome,  and so forth....") If there is a fight in class every student gets punished.

Basically, the kids have been programmed to be a bunch of commies (Dad says "Individualism is dead because it didn't work,") but over the course of the book we see signs the programming is starting to break down.  The aforementioned bullying wasn't supposed to happen, for example, and an immigrant from Earth who cracks cruel jokes, Theophilus, starts everybody speaking their minds in antisocial ways ("'I've always thought things like that.  I bet other people have too.  We just never used to say them until Theophilus came up.'")  And when Melpomene realizes that so many of her attitudes and emotions, which feel totally natural, may be the result of tampering with her mind, she rebels.

Her rebellion, which occurs in the last seventy or so pages of the book, consists of hacking into CPB computer files with her boyfriend and eavesdropping on Dad.  She learns that she is, without her knowledge, being groomed to be ruler of the asteroid! Her brother is being manipulated into being an artist!  (He isn't really a bad computer programmer, the teachers just give him impossible problems so he will turn to his art. They also sabotage his sports career!)  Melpomene's boyfriend is being groomed to be the Flying Dutchman's captain!  The CPB also plan to outlaw labor unions and abolish elections soon.

Melpomene stops all the individualistic nastiness started by Theophilus (Winston Smith style, in the end Theophilus cheerfully joins the collective--he was just reenacting the cruelty he learned on Earth and now sees the error of his ways.) Melpomene also convinces the CPB to abandon all their manipulations of the kids as well as their plans of getting rid of unions and elections.  In fact, the adults who were born on Earth agree to leave the asteroid and move to Mars (which is in the process of being terraformed.)  Life on Earth with its violence and individualism has made the adults unfit to rule, so like Moses who lead his people to the promised land but could not enter it, they are leaving the space-born teenagers they programmed to run The Flying Dutchman without them!  

I wanted to like this book more than I did; its milieu is interesting and Barnes has interesting ideas, but Orbital Resonance is just too long (218 pages) and repetitive. The little Stakhanovs play sports all the time, so we get many long detailed scenes in which various low gee sports are explained to us; these are followed by long detailed scenes in which we follow the course of a match. I never watch sports if I can avoid it, and I don't read about sports either, and my eyes glazed over a bit during the sports scenes, and these scenes are legion.  (I should have kept track; I swear a third of the novel takes place in gyms and race tracks.)  I didn't care who won when I had to watch my wife's nieces and nephews play soccer, so I'm not likely to care if high school kids who aren't even real win or lose at sports that aren't even real.

(Jack Vance in his Alastor books and Demon Princes books has speculative sports scenes, but in the former the sport, hussade, has bizarre erotic overtones, and in the latter the sport, hadaul, is a blood sport, and in both series the sports directly serve the plot and are played for high stakes.  The sports are boring and the stakes are low in the sports scenes in Orbital Resonance.)

The scenes of relationship drama can also get repetitive.  There are numerous sexual relationships, teenage friendships, and parent-child relationships depicted in Orbital Resonance.  The kids on the Flying Dutchman, I guess thanks to their "programming," are really into expressing their feelings, and so all these relationships involve lots of hand holding, hugging, and crying.  I should have kept count; I swear somebody cries or gets a hug every five pages--usually both.

I like the kind of tragic love stories we read in Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust, and I liked the teenage relationship drama in Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover, but the soap opera suds in Barnes's novel didn't interest me.  As with the sports stuff, I think this is partly because the stakes are low.  In Maugham and Proust people's amorous relationships result in lives being ruined; scenes of twelve-year-olds having crushes and pawing each other in a dark corridor or arguing with their parents have little emotional impact because we know even if they are crying today over a slight or a rejection they'll be over it tomorrow.

Another weakness of Barnes's novel, at least when comparing him to Vance, Maugham, and Lee as I just have, is the style.  Barnes's style is not bad, but it is bland. The novel inspires very little feeling.  One reason Lee's teenage relationship shenanigans pull at the heart strings while Barnes's just sit there is because Lee has a compelling, affecting style, and Barnes does not.  


I'm scoring Orbital Resonance as marginally positive/acceptable: I certainly don't like it as much as Card, Anderson, or the many other people who did their part providing the novel with over three pages of ecstatic blurbs.  What do they like so much about it?  Maybe after two decades of the New Wave some were happy to see an old-fashioned semi-realistic "life on a space station" story.  Maybe some approved Barnes's criticisms of our individualistic society (we don't hug and cry enough and we aren't doing enough about climate change and AIDS.)  Maybe some liked the stuff about teenagers groping each other and masturbating.  Orbital Resonance has virtues, but for me it is hobbled by a bland style and excessive length; my lack of interest in sports and computer hacking, and my devotion to the cult of the individual, also didn't help.