Showing posts with label Irwin Shaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irwin Shaw. Show all posts

24 September 2025

Seize the Day


I changed my regular morning take-out order the other day, after many, many mornings of exactly the same, and it reminded me, out of the blue, of the opening of Heinrich Böll’s postwar novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine.  The new guy in town, an architect, goes to the local café for breakfast, and since it’s his first time, orders something a little eccentric, trying to make an impression.  But this act of daring comes back to haunt him, because now he’s expected to get the same damn thing for breakfast for the next sixty years.  Böll also goes into a very funny sidebar about how Germans will never ask the price, when it’s not listed on the menu, for fear of embarrassing themselves.  And a common daily routine offhandedly becomes a reflection on the national character. 



Billiards at Half-Past Nine is in some ways an analog of Irwin Shaw’s novel Voices of a Summer Day.  Böll published his book in 1959, Shaw published his in 1965.  Böll was born in 1917, Shaw in 1913.  Both served in the war, Böll with the Wehrmacht, Shaw with the U.S. Army.  Both of them wrote about their experiences in the war, Böll with The Train Was on Time, Shaw with The Young Lions, and both had critical and commercial success.  (Shaw, of course, had enormous commercial success later on, with an extra helping of critical schadenfreude.)  Billiards at Half-Past Nine and Voices of a Summer Day are mid-career novels, the two writers stretching their legs but not showing strain, using a comfortable voice but not falling into lazy habits of mind.  Structurally, very similar, both books generational, but the narrative arc a single day, told in flashback and multiple POV.  In other words, very fluid and fluent, with a lot of grace notes - Dickensian, even, meant very much as a compliment, and not to imply cluttered.  The books are actually terrifically clean, tight and exact and effective, like a good pitcher in the sixth inning. 



Böll is also that generation of German writers who lived through Nazism and the war, and wrote what might be called stories of atonement, although the Germans call it die Trümmerliteratur, literature of the rubble.  Günter Grass is another – born in 1927, Grass was 17 when he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, an admission he made long afterwards – and German historical guilt is his subject.  Hans Hellmut Kirst, author of Night of the Generals, was born in East Prussia in 1914, and was not only in the military, but was a Nazi party-member.  Nobody wants to admit they’re in a club of murderers, he later said.  His books are often comically horrific, with fervent wartime Nazis effortlessly putting on sheep’s clothing for the gullible Yanks. 


 

I’ve talked about German “atonement” before.  We’d do well to remember that an entire generation of younger Germans wanted nothing whatsoever to do with regret, or war guilt, or the whole concept of collective responsibility.  They thought the Nazis were their parents’ problem, not theirs.  In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, when Baader-Meinhof was active, the young German Left accused the government of being riddled with Nazis – the chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, had in fact been a party member, so the Left wasn’t all that far wrong.  My point here, is that those kids indulged their own unexamined moral superiority.  We have a similar blind spot in white America about the legacy of black slavery.  The sentiment is expressed the same way, I was never a Nazi, or I never owned slaves.  It’s got nothing to do with me, in other words.  But white Americans are the residual legatees of slavery; we’ve benefited from a system of apartheid and class warfare.  And black Americans have carried the burden of Jim Crow and race hatred.  You can’t wish it away.  American writers like Twain and Faulkner have made the case that slavery is our Original Sin, and I think much the same can be said about the historical weight of Nazism.  Writers like Böll, and Grass, and Kirst have made it their central concern to put it front-and-center in contemporary German consciousness. 




Speaking of Baader-Meinhof – I’ve said this before, too - it’s a sign of maturing political health in the German social psyche, that the toxic hand-me-downs of that era, crocodile tears over the Red Army faction, the culture of betrayal encouraged by the Stasi, the self-satisfaction of bourgeois West Germans and their condescension to Ossis, is all fair game.  I was startled when the movie Downfall was released, about Hitler in the bunker, and even more so by The Lives of Others, about the brute surveillance regime in East Germany.  In a less reflective national mood, they never would have been made.  Germans aren’t much given to inner curiosity or self-doubt, any more than Americans are. 

Only the weak accommodate history.  The bold march on. 

16 August 2018

The Best Anthologies Wake You Up


The death of Harlan Ellison stirred up some old memories.  My first encounter with his work was from Outer Limits:  Demon With a Glass Hand.  I didn't know who the author was, and I didn't care - I was 10 years old, gobbling sci-fi by the yard, and a bit worried that I was some kind of demon seed myself, so the episode really hit home for me.

DangerousVisions(1stEd).jpgSkip forward 3 years and I read Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison's ground-breaking sci-fi anthology.  Now, I'll tell you straight up, Harlan Ellison's story in that anthology was perhaps my least favorite - but I loved his introductions and epilogues for each story.

My favorite story was Philip K. Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers", in which the hero discovers that there really are drugs in the water - but everyone in the world is having the same hallucination.  It's the anti-hallucinogens that create different realities for everyone.  That alone made me sit up and look around.  But what really stuck with me was this quote from Mr. Dick in the epilogue:
"The last word, however, on the subject of God may have already been said: in A.D. 840 by John Scotus Erigena at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald. "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." Such a penetrating—and Zen—mystical view, arrived at so long ago, will be hard to top; in my own experiences with psychedelic drugs I have had precious tiny illumination compared with Erigena."
THAT still rings through my mind regularly, like a deep hum, like the cry of a peacock, like a distant bell.

It also caused me to start reading history.  Who were those Frankish kings?  What else did Erigena say or write?  Who influenced him?  Why was a Celt at the Frankish court?  All damn good questions that launched me - after a wildly improbable twenty years or so - into becoming an historian.

A good anthology will rattle your cage for years, which is why I don't let go of them when I find them.  (My copy of Dangerous Visions is tattered and brown-paged by now, but still readable.  It will see me out.)

There's 1962's "The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, 11th Series" edited by Robert P. Mills.  Among the great stories:
    Kurt Vonnegut 1972.jpg
  • The fabulously written Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, which introduced me to Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind stories, and the idea of the Underpeople, derived from animals, who are given human form, speech, and intellect but have absolutely no civil rights.  If they make any mistake, they can/will be destroyed.  Something else that make me look at what was going on around me.
  • Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, about a world of enforced equality - to the lowest common denominator of everything.  
  • And the mystical, fabulously beautiful, The One Who Returns by John Berry, which gave me a new view of what a Yeti might really be.   
A more recent mystery anthology in my library is 1993s "More Murder Most Cozy", edited by Cynthia Manson, which has P. D. James' Adam Dalgleish uncovering a truly cold case - a Victorian May-December mesalliance that led to murder - in The Boxdale Inheritance.  Wonderful.  I also reread Melba Marlett's The Second Mrs. Porter every once in a while to try to figure out how she pulled off the most unique gaslighting I've ever heard of.

And then there are the weird collections you find in the antique stores.  A Treasury of the Familiar, chock full of poetry from the 19th century, Bible quotations, Washington's and Lincoln's political speeches, Edgar Allan Poe, Victorian songs, Spartan defiances, a little bit of everything.

The Holiday Reader, 1947, edited by Bernard Smith and Philip Van Doren (which instantly makes me think of Dorothy Parker saying, "I put myself to sleep counting Van Dorens"...)  This tome is divided into sections:  Stories (Hemingway to Hecht), Humor (Beerbohm, Lardner, Benchley, Parker, etc.), Travel (including Thomas Wolfe, Rachel Carson, and both D. H. and T. E. Lawrence),  Poetry (everything from sonnets to E. E. Cummings), and Eating and Sleeping (worth it for M. F. K. Fisher's Madame is Pleased) and Mystery Fantasy & Murder.

Whistle and I'll come to you illustration.jpgEspecial shout-outs to E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (which only gets more timely every year), M. R. James Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, (scared the bejeezus out of me) and Raymond Chandler's I'll be Waiting.   Imho, one of the best in this collection is Irwin Shaw's Search Through the Streets of the City, which is about as noir as you can get without a murder.

BTW, long ago I made a grave mistake and gave away a paperback collection of 50 Great Short Stories which included a story about a man whose male friends successively date this woman who is beautiful, intelligent, just amazing...  And she cares so tenderly, lovingly, for each of them as they contract this or that fatal illness.  And then he gets sick and she comes to take care of him...  Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Another great find was the 1957 "A Treasury of Great Mysteries".  I don't know how they got the rights to all of these, which include Christie's Murder in the Calais Coach, Du Maurier's Rebecca, Ambler's Journey Into Fear, and Chandler's The Big Sleep.  That right there made it worth the $2.00 charge.

Also a number of truly great short stories by most of the icons of 1950s mystery writing, including Inspector Maigret, in Maigret's Christmas, Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason in The Case of the Crimson Kiss (a pretty severe lesson in choosing roommates), and the original short story Rear Window (William Irish).

But my personal favorite is Rex Stout's Instead of Evidence.
"Archie Goodwin," she said.  "You think I'm terrible, don't you?  You think I'm an awful woman, bad clear through.  Don't you?"
"I'm not thinking, lady.  I'm just an errand boy."
The funny thing was that if at any moment up to then I had made a list of the ten most beautiful women she would not have been on.  
You can't get much more noir than that.