Month: October 2018

C.S Forester (1899-1966)

This book is an early biography, written when Forester was in his mid-thirties.

Cecil was born in Cairo, Egypt.  He had two elder brothers and two sisters.  Two years after his birth the family moved back to England, leaving Mr. Forester in Egypt, as he was wrapped up in delicate negotiations having to do with the British military presence there.  Cecil’s first language was Arabic;  presumably the family displacement had something to do with raising the children in a European environment.  One of his earliest memories was seeing a wrecked ship on a sand bar, presumably at the mouth of the Thames.  They settled in Camberwell, south of London, where the two elder brothers attended school, and Cecil occupied himself by learning to read and write, more or less spontaneously,  at the age of three.  By the age of seven he was reading a book a day and in his spare time playing soldiers and inventing war games with his brothers whenever they happened to be home.  Cecil liked Thackeray, hated Dickens, and amused himself with Gibbon, Suetonius, Hudson, and other heavy-weights in classical literature.  In school he studied math, French and English grammar and became obsessed with gunpowder.  At the time a pound of gunpowder could be purchased from a local vendor for a penny.  After some experimentation, Cecil and a friend learned how to confine the explosive so as to produce a satisfactory bang.  But it took a while before they understood how to make fuses, which involved soaking cotton wicks in saltpeter- laden water for a couple of days. Eventually the time came for a practical trial.  The two pulled up a fence post in the back yard and filled the hole half-way with gunpowder and stuck the post back in, leaving the fuse lying on the ground.  They lit it and Cecil’s friend ran for cover while Cecil watched in satisfaction.  When the fuse was functioning as designed, he suddenly experienced a realization of sorts and bolted around the nearest house corner, looking back just in time to hear a tremendous explosion and to see the fence post vaulting into the air several hundred feet.  Windows were broken for a block around and the locals dashed out of their houses expecting to see an invasion or some sort of major disaster.  A large crater was visible where the garden used to be and the post landed some yards distant.  Cecil was happy but a little alarmed.  His mother made him fill the hole back up, and soon he was sent off to an academy for educational and disciplinary purposes.  The police didn’t bother him because they didn’t believe a seven-year old could have done it.

Cecil attended several schools, some on scholarship grants.  He was quite bright and due to his early reading was miles ahead of the other students in both literature and math.  And he learned better war games in the playgrounds and sports arenas.  He was pretty frank in his descriptions of disciplinary practices:  caning, beatings and such, but he evidently was not bothered very much by them.  In fact, he stated that without some pretty severe regimentation, he probably would have drifted into criminal activity or, worse, into some sort of business.

Cecil’s oldest brother graduated from Guy’s Hospital and made an impressive record in later life as a doctor and surgeon.  Cecil was headed in the same direction, and did well until he had to pass an Anatomy exam.  He shockingly discovered that in spite of his superior intellect and retentive abilities, he couldn’t master the 400 bones in the human body, together with all their little foramens and muscle attachments, each with a separate name.  So, after waffling about, chasing girls, playing bridge for a living, singing in the street for pennies, and unsuccessfully looking into other occupations, he decided to take up novel-writing regardless of what his parents and relations said about the inevitability of terminal starvation.

He wrote several novels;  the first was finished in two weeks and died a quiet death, but those written subsequently, mostly having to do with Napoleon and Josephine and the upheavals of that era, had some success.  Cecil also wrote articles and short stories for a broad range of magazines and newspapers, learning his trade through concentration and practice.  But he only achieved undeniable recognition when he began writing the Horatio Hornblower novels.  He acquired a boat and sailed it down the Loire in France, and read a three volume edition of Naval Chronicles that he’d run across in a used book store.  After a vegetative period, he wrote the first entry in what was to become a multi-book series:  “Beat to Quarters”.  Speaking of his writing methodology, he stated that his ideas were initially like a water-logged timber:  down in the basement of his consciousness, the sodden trunk lay inert in the mud while barnacles, allegorical ideas, gradually attached themselves until a point was reached when the entire assembly, barnacles and all, sprang full-blown into his mind, at which point all he had to do was write down what he’d suddenly realized.  What was important to Cecil in the process was the sudden gelling of the ideas into a comprehensive whole, in which unconnected elements cohered into a related series of events that made sense in a novelistic way, establishing a logical flow of narration that created not only the book, but the series of books.

Forester had a life full of travel and variegated experience.  He worked in Hollywood, toured the world more than once, sailed in the Caribbean, and was employed as an unofficial diplomat on several occasions.

I discovered Hornblower as a young man and devoured the series.  They’re well-written and imaginative, and accurate in detail, as Forester was a stickler for research and authenticism.  There was a TV series made of some of the stories and is excellent as well.  Patrick O’Brien’s series owes something to Forester’s, i think, although the two are quite different.  And if a reader were to wade through one, i’d surely think that he would greatly appreciate the other.

William H. Davies (1871-1940)

Will’s intention was to take the train to Carmarthen in south-central Wales and to begin walking , initially, to Swansea, on the south coast.  He was 41 years old and possessed of a lifetime of experience tramping the highways of America and Britain.  As well, he had a start on a minor reputation as a poet and travel-writer.  He was familiar to, and with, some literary English figures: Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, G. B. Shaw, W.H. Hudson, Walter Sickert, and others.  He’d been published in a few minor magazines, but had never achieved notorious celebrity or anything close to it.  He was mainly admired for his verses on nature and issues connected with manual labor, and recognized for occasional bursts of vivid descriptions of seen objects.    His view of walking, or hoboing, was that it was a near-perfect attainment of freedom, without worries concerning money, social responsibilities, or legal strictures.

After spending the night in an inn on the main street of Carmarthen, he directed his feet toward Kidwelly, having inquired of a shabby-looking person riding a shabbier-looking bicycle the correct path toward said village.  But he got lost anyway, finding himself climbing slippery wet hills in the dank rain with his awkward gait and eventually settling for a more-or-less sordid room in a hostel in Llanelly.  Next morning he continued on through a dismal section of seedy cottages and wasted landscapes for 13 miles until he reached Swansea, a major port and industrial center.  Will noted the dirty unkempt children and pale, wasted-looking factory workers, the apparent products of the vast coal industry and associated corporate interests, and contrasted these with the occasional farming villages with their stout, red-faced farmers and clean, merry children.  In Swansea he was bemused to overhear the conversation of three retired sailors, grumbling about the new coal-powered ships with their stokers and engineers who never saw the water and who by no means could ever be regarded as real seamen.  They reminded him of his grandfather who was a deep-water sailor and had similar opinions.  Walking through Neath and Myrthr and Ebbw Vale, Will finally left the over-industrialized country and entered a hilly, wooded section, with well maintained houses, a clean, prosperous population, and a total lack of tin, copper, or iron works and mines.  One night he was privileged to hear a trio singers giving an impromptu concert in 3-part harmony (the Welsh were famous for their singers, especially tenors) and he over-indulged a bit with the local beverage and woke up in the middle of the night, startled by a strange apparition.  After a second, he realized the person he was attempting to impale with his walking stick was actually the bedpost.  Traipsing on toward Monmouth, he included vibrant descriptions of clean rivers with sparkling rapids and gentle cows browsing in the lush green grass.  The river Wye, silver in a green glade…  And then Tintern Abbey in full moonlight, with it’s ragged towers and ancient broken walls…

Before Chepstow, he paused for quite a while, listening to the local choir:  an unrehearsed performance of vocal music presented by a small herd of lambs, ewes and rams.  Stopping on the way to Newport, he stopped at an inn named the Rising Sun, but was driven out by navies.  Navies were road-repairmen who worked on contract, always traveling along the highways, fixing chuck-holes, slides, and repaving macadamized roads.  They lived on beer, onions, and bread and cheese.  Will hated onions and was over-powered by the fetor.  He was born in Newport, and stayed there for a while, visiting old acquaintances.  One of his friends reminded him of the story about the fastest runner in the world who lived in the area.  Gutto Nyth Bran, “the wind”, did a favor for his mother one day.  She needed a jug of barm(beer foam used to leaven bread), so, while she was chatting with a neighbor, he ran sixteen miles to the nearest tavern and back to fetch a bucket of it for her.

Dealing with trouble on the road, Will found it best to maintain silence in the face of hostility, or even unfriendliness…  But he discovered that, if beset in a social gathering, all he had to say was, “i’m a stranger here”, and no harm would come to him:  this formula apparently held true all over Wales.  Upon reaching Cardiff, he decided to take a train to Bristol for the final leg of his tour.  He became friendly with a traveling farmer en route until the train entered a 7 mile tunnel.  The lights went out for some reason and the man became anxious and violent, clutching Davies and wrestling with him and scrabbling around in the dark.  With the help of a porter, the man was subdued and when they got back into the light, he sat up and abused them for being so physical;  “All I was trying to do”, he said, “was close the window!”

The final section of the book held more descriptions of small adventures and observations of nature.  The umbrella man who cursed the sunshine and warm weather because it ruined his business;  the singer with the bad voice who earned pennies by annoying people so that they paid him to leave;  the man who reminisced about his time at Oxford, meaning the prison, not the university (awakening my memory of my grandfather’s story about going through Lawrence College:  meaning he walked through the grounds to get to work…).  Davies ended his walk in Reading, staying a few days in a group hostel,  which revived his dislike of crowds and their bickering and discontent.   Then on train back to London…

Davies’ writing is a lot like Defoe’s or George Borrow’s style, rather simplistic, but with a subtle rural charm and occasional  sparkly bits.  It’s fun to read and the experience is almost as good as walking along with the author.  I referred above to Will’s peculiar gait: when he was hopping a freight car in America, he slipped and had his foot crushed by a wheel.  His leg had to be amputated below the knee and he used an artificial leg after that, but it didn’t stop him walking.  He couldn’t afford a light metal one, and had a friend make a wood one for him;  according to one doctor, walking all those miles, lifting the extra weight, eventually caused heart failure…  Open to opinion, i think…

Carl Moritz (1757-1793)  Translated by Reginald Nettel

Carl’s father was a strict Lutheran and a regimental oboist.  He apprenticed his son to a hatter at an early age, but it wasn’t a acceptable position for the intellectual and curious young man.  He abandoned hats fairly quickly and joined a touring theater group.  Through contacts with other artists, he became enthused about the emerging “Sturm und Drang” movement in the German arts, which was influencing Germanic culture away from rigid Prussian ethics, and introducing psychological and spiritual complexities into the national zeitgeist.  After several years, Carl entered the University of Erfurt and graduated with a doctor’s degree in Philosophy.  Entering the teaching profession, he became entranced with English culture and decided to visit the country.  He left Hamburg by ship and was violently seasick during the 14 day trip.  Approaching the mouth of the Thames, he wasn’t reassured by the sight of ship masts jutting out of the water, marking the destruction of the latest vessel on the Goodwin sands.

Carl’s ship stopped about ten miles before London, as the water traffic was characteristically dense and made navigation difficult and tedious.  From that debarkation, he took a carriage the rest of the way.  He noted the many little villages with red walls and flat roofs, and the frequent advertising signs that stretched across the road from store to store, flaunting the qualities and availabilities of local services and inns.  Nearing London, the spire of St. Paul’s cathedral was visible above the fog and smoke.  London itself consisted of dark narrow streets, lots of traffic, light posts and spectators and an abundance of little parks populated by cows and birds.  He obtained a room for 16 shillings a week.  Carl noted the cleanliness of the people and their clothes, the stone houses, and the dense population.  He was warned to avoid certain districts because of the press gangs:  ship masts were erected near the river to attract inquisitive strangers, who, expressing interest in the local attraction, were kidnapped and shanghaied aboard naval or merchant ships.  Books were popular:  there were lots of book stores and most persons carried pocket editions around with them.  Brandy was a very common refreshment, possibly because it was regarded as a deterrent to the ongoing influenza epidemic.  There may have been other reasons.  The Britons seemed fond of boiled cabbage with a sauce of flour and butter.

Carl visited Vauxhall Gardens, a sort of fair grounds intended for general entertainment, where he was told to watch out for pickpockets and beggars.  He also went to Ranelagh Gardens, a large circular hall with an inside balcony used for people-watching and general socializing.  His visit to Parliament was notable for the amount of yelling and occasional furniture destruction that went on, especially after speeches by Burke or Fox.

Puffery was common:  pseudo-scientific cures for everything from the flu to the pox were advertised by word of mouth and by the aforesaid overhanging signs.  The ubiquitous noise was eliminated in the coffee houses, though;  they were quiet, contemplative places where a Dr. Johnson could have a conversation with his Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, or  other acquaintances.

Carl took the stage to Richmond at a cost of four guineas.  It was an “elegant” coach, seating six in relative comfort, and providing a safe ride against the possibility of being assaulted by footpads or highwaymen, both of which were common at the time.  The beauty of the countryside was astonishing, the grassy hills, clean water, and magnificent forests totally unlike the over-used German landscape.

From Richmond, Carl decided to walk to Windsor and Eton, both to experience England close at hand and to save money.  After being lost in Richmond itself, he successfully  found the correct road and trudged along at about three miles per hour.  There were lots of other peasants and beggars on the highway, because of the advances in industrial development and the new laws enclosing lands that had previously been occupied by small farmers and laborers.  The latter had been ousted piecemeal and turned out to wander the country in search of food and employment.  As a result, most pedestrians were shunned by the townspeople, and often attacked and insulted.  Carl had this happen to him quite a few times;  he slept under a tree more than once because no inn would accept him.  At one inn, the maid kicked him out and to add insult to injury, two Hanoverians sneered at him.  Intrigued by a tall mast-like pole on top of a hill, he side-tracked his way up it, only to discover that it had been placed there so the locals would have something to laugh at travelers about.  After passing through Windsor, low in spirits, he met a fellow walker, a clergyman, who accompanied him all the way to Oxford, and provided a room for him to stay in.  He visited many of the tourist attractions, including the Bodleian Library and some of the colleges.  He met a poet, Tom Warton, who was fixated about shooting ducks, and was to be elected Poet Laureate in 1785.

Carl took a coach to Birmingham before resuming his walk, in order to avoid the hassles he’d endured in his walk to date.  On the way, they stopped briefly in Stratford to honor Shakespeare.  Carl said the Avon was a muddy slough, Shakespeare’s house was a dump, and Shakespeare’s chair (that he was supposed to have sat in while creating) had been chipped away by souvenir-seekers until there was hardly anything left.

In Birmingham, Dr. Fothergill, to whom Carl had letters to deliver, had died eight days previously, so Carl walked on to Lichfield, where his reception was so antagonistic, that he went around it so as to avoid meeting anyone there.  From this point, into the more hilly districts, people began to be more friendly, and he had less trouble finding room and board.  Passing through Bakewell, he met a saddler who quoted Homer, Vergil, and Horace at him;  eventually he arrived at Castleton and toured the”Devil’s Cavern”, an extensive  series of large caves situated in a mountainous environment created by underground rivers in the limestone matrix.  Making his way toward a large gaping black hole in a looming cliff, he met an old ragged menial who offered to guide him through caves.  Accepting, he was picked up and carried across a stream by this rural Charon, who led him into a village actually inside the cave entrance.  The inhabitants made their living by making rope on very large wheels that were rotating on axles in the gloom.  Presumably the work was carried on in that location because of the even temperatures.  Anyway, the tour lasted some hours, including crawling through muddy holes and creeping under boulders and climbing subterranean mountains.  Stalagmites and stalactites were common as well as ribbons, shelves, and towers of limestone.  The guide led him up a steep cliff to a viewpoint, while he went back down and crossed another creek and lit a candle:  a tiny speck of light in the vast, overweening dark.  Finally, upon returning to the open air, Carl tried to pay the poor ragged man, but he wouldn’t accept any pennies, as the local lord had appointed him official guide and supported him, although he didn’t receive any salary.

Carl continued touring the area, climbing up Mamtor, another prominence composed of shale that was continually sliding down hill and forming another hillock at the base.  And he visited Eldon Hole, in which he dropped a pebble and caused a sigh, a rumble and a hiss to be projected back at him.

Finished with his rambling, Carl returned to London via coach and foot, bypassing many of the places he had planned on visiting, mainly because he had developed a cough from being in the cavern, and needed to return to Germany for various reasons, including money and his pedagogic responsibilities.

I quite liked Carl:  he seemed sensitive and alert and good-natured;  his letters (the book was presented in an epistolary format) were well-written and he had an eye for beauty and landscape.  He was an excellent example of a civilized person managing to survive in the undeniably difficult and dangerous 18th century.  Although he didn’t for very long:  he died at 36;  i wonder if it was that bug he picked up in the cave…

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

Harry  Coningsby was the son of Lord Monmouth’s youngest son, whom Monmouth  hated;  Monmouth had two sons:  the eldest hated him.  The Lord was extremely rich and spent most of life in foreign countries, usually Italy.  As a consequence, he delegated the raising of Coningsby to a political hack, Rigby, who was a hanger-on and follower of the Lord, and represented his interests in Parliament and the Tory party.  After an insulated childhood in Coningsby Castle, and through the manipulations of Rigby, Coningsby was admitted to Eton, arguably the most famous public school in England and populated entirely by the sons of rich and influential families.  He made friends with Henry Sydney, Oswald Millbanks, Eustace Lyle, and others, important associations that would be of great assistance in his later life.  Harry was studious , developing interests in literature, politics, philosophy, and was well above average in the field as well:  horse-riding, cricket, and various other sports.  But he had never met his grand-father.  When he became fourteen, Rigby arranged for Lord Monmouth and Harry to have a meeting at the Lord’s townhouse in London.  Harry was overwhelmed by the grandeur and splendor of the Monmouth edifice, to the point that when he was ushered into the room in which his grandfather was waiting for him, he burst into tears.  Not being a gentle or unselfish person, Monmouth told Rigby to get rid of him.  But the two, after several days, became adjusted to each other and became more friendly.  In fact, Monmouth, although not the loving sort, became quite attached to Harry, principally because Harry, being unusually bright, perceived the necessity of agreeing with everything that Monmouth expressed an opinion about.

Years passed, and Harry, after attending and graduating from Cambridge, was exposed to and became familiar with the privileged and and affluent existence lived by the very highest classes in London.  He was interested in politics, and was regarded as a potential member and possible candidate for parliament for the borough of Dalford, the county in which Lord Monmouth’s principal residence lay.  Because of his interest in social classes and curiosity about the Reform Act (1832), Harry toured northern England to observe first-hand the conditions under which the workers lived.  For the most part, he saw squalor, dirt, inhuman conditions, and dire poverty.  But one of the towns he visited, Millbank, founded by Oswald’s father, was entirely different.  The workers were housed in clean, bright circumstances, worked reasonable hours, and had access to libraries and schools.  And the elder Millbank seemed personable and intelligent, and possessed of an overt desire to maintain his employees in a civilized state.  And he had a daughter, Edith, who was to play a major role in Harry’s later life.

Caught by a rainstorm, Harry takes refuge in a local inn, and meets a mysterious rider with an Arab horse.  No names are exchanged, but the stranger is a young sophisticated member of the upper classes, with years of travel and study behind him and Harry is awestruck with his knowledge and opinions, and, not inconsequentially, with his wealth. Among other topics, they discuss the “Great Man”  theory:  the idea that political change is often the result of exceptional individual leadership  rather than the product of partisan manipulations.  Here, Harry first asks the question about the Conservative party, which becomes an important theme at a later date:  “What do they want to conserve?”.  The answer, as he discovers over time, is wealth and power.

Several years pass, and the Millbanks purchase an estate adjacent to the one that Harry grew up at:  Coningsby Castle.  As it happened, Lord Monmouth had eyed the parcel for years, hoping to add it to his own property.  That it fell into the hands of the Millbanks became a source of resentment and jealousy for him, and his anger at the intruders was beyond reason.  In attendance at a party thrown by the interlopers, Harry falls deeply in love with Edith Millbanks, and, in the absence of his grandfather, invites Oswald and Edith to stay at the Castle, as a friendly gesture and as a mark of appreciation.  Eventually, though the Lord discovers what he regards as Harry’s disloyalty, and is irate.  Harry undertakes a European tour for a year to escape his rancor.

Upon his return, he is alienated from Edith and his grandfather both, and is somewhat at a loss about what to do next.  After a period of partying and visiting, Lord Monmouth decides he wants Harry to run for parliament in the county of Darford.  Not feeling enthused by the prospect, Harry refuses, and Monmouth makes the offer to Rigby instead.  He gives the London town house to Rigby, alters his will to cut off Harry without a penny, and moves to Richmond, another of his houses.  Meanwhile, in London, Harry meets the man he had met after visiting with the Millbanks in northern England and finds out that his name is Sidonia, one of the most powerful and richest men in the world.  They converse at length, and Harry determines to take up the study of law.  He moves into rooms at the Temple(where most of the legalists live in London), studies, and achieves a few minor successes

Lord Monmouth dies and leaves all his money to Flora, his illegitimate daughter.  Harry seems caught in a situation well below his expectations, and is feeling isolated and friendless, when…

Well, observing the spoiler advisory, i’ll omit the events of the last fifty pages, and cease with the assurance that Harry does rebound and achieves the recognition he merits.

I’ve read most of Disraeli’s novels with appreciation for the most part, and this one was pretty good.  It’s critically regarded as one of his best efforts, but i thought it fell below that standard a bit…  It’s quite long and the plot is rather hazy, frequently switching locales and introducing characters that, like particles in the quantum world, vanish unexpectedly without ever reappearing.  It seemed somewhat autobiographical, also, depicting Benjamin’s conversions and political identities as they transpire in the person of Harry.  I should add that Disraeli was a complicated and brilliant strategist in his career as parliamentarian and prime minister(twice), and was personally responsible for some of the government’s most laudable achievements in the fields of foreign relations and domestic agitations.  As well, he was a master wordsmith.  He wrote with the authority of a conductor of an eighty-piece orchestra, never at a loss for the perfect word in exactly the right place.  Two of the century’s most significant figures in politics and finance, Robert Owen and Nathan Rothschild, seem to have been the inspirations for the characters of Millbanks and Sidonia.

I did like the book, even though it didn’t have the explosive finale of “Vivian Grey”, one of the most extraordinary finishes i’ve ever read…  i’d recommend it to any reader who has the time…  (either book)