Hostile Books

 We've all had them, the books we just couldn't pick up. For whatever reason, it's a book everyone says you have to read that you just can't get through. Sometimes, you give them another try. Why's this a bestseller? Why is this a classic? 

I've run into it with Russian novels. I've found them hard to read in print. Then a friend of mine, who knew a Russian speaker and an actual Russian, said they don't really translate well. So I listened to Crime and Punishment on audio. Made a huge difference.

But what of books you just couldn't finish no matter what? I went through a list of classics that included Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain. It also included a book that gets highly praised: Portrait of a Lady. 

The book begins with Henry James doing his own literary criticism. Um...Aren't you supposed to let other people do the critiques? But Henry just had to provide a few pages reviewing his own book. Okay, fair enough. Stephen King sticks this stuff at the end of his because who wants to read the author's self-indulgent prattle? So I skipped it and moved on to the novel proper.

I'm aware books written before 1900 have a slower pace than those written since World War II. Hemingway made his reputation trimming the fat from his prose almost to the point where you wish he'd put words back in. (That said, The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and To Have and Have Not are masterpieces. Fight me.)

But Henry James spends twenty-five pages where bankers spend the whole time looking down on the common folk. By Page 10, I'm wondering why I'm supposed to be reading this. By Page 20, I hate everyone on the page so far. By Page 25, I throw the book across the room. 

But wait. This is a classic. Hey, I slogged through Moby Dick, and I'm glad I did. That story is imprinted on modern storytelling. It's in the DNA of two Star Trek movies. (First Contact is explicit about it when Lily yells at Picard. "Captain Ahab has to go fight his whale!")

So I did like I did with Crime and Punishment. I went audio. Now, I know there are people who think audio is cheating. Since they're wrong, I'm going to ignore that. Anyway, I made it a little farther before I realized the William James was the smarter brother. Without him, Freud's cigar would just be a cigar. (Wait...Freud did say that. Um...He'd have never invented his famous slip?) I not only hated the bankers, but the titular lady did nothing for me, either. I felt like my time was being wasted. 

I'd gone through this before. In high school, we had to read The Scarlet Letter. Also in high school, we read the Cliff's Notes to The Scarlet Letter because most of us hated that book. No Moby Dick. No Tom Sawyer, by America's greatest writer. We did somehow manage Tale of Two Cities. But The Scarlet Letter? By about halfway through the book, I was praying time travelers would gift the local indigenous tribe with a small thermonuclear device, maybe a neutron bomb. Now, let me qualify this by saying Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's greatest short story writers. That said, I don't like this one. But I love Stephen King, and I'm still angry about Cell.

 Currently, I have one book I've attempted to read over the years with little success on audio. When The Bonfire of the Vanities came out, I attempted to read it. Again, like The Scarlet Letter and Portrait of a Lady, I had to wade through characters I'd generally avoid in real life. Both times I attempted to read it, all I took away before I put the book down was that New York in 1985 was a miserable place to live. Wolfe's other famous book, The Right Stuff, had that can-do, go fever zeitgeist of the early space program. The Mercury Seven were fun to be around even at their worst. The only thing missing was Yuri Gagarin, who'd have fit right in with them.

I'm attempting Bonfire on audio. I think part of the problem is the inciting incident comes about 15% into the narrative. The paperback listed on Amazon is 702 words, so about 108 pages or so. The average novel is around 300 pages, so by page 100, we all know the characters and several major events have happened. It doesn't help the book as an early eighties Rolling Stone hip vibe, something I have even less patience with now than I did at the age of 20. I'm sticking with it, mainly because I listen to it in 100-page sips. I still don't like the people in this book, but eight years of Game of Thrones and five seasons of Succession have awakened my inner schadenfreude when these people manage to screw themselves.

 

The Strange Case of Charles Guiteau

Recently, I read Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, the long, strange tale of how James Garfield, who reluctantly went to the 1880 Republican National Convention, gave a speech, and accidentally got himself nominated for president. Meanwhile, a professional deadbeat named Charles Guiteau ingratiated himself with the Republican Party in New York in an effort to secure himself a consul position, "preferably Paris." Garfield won the election. Guiteau, believing it was all his doing, kept showing up at the White House for his reward. After all, he believed he had secured the White House for Garfield. Nobody from Garfield rival Samuel Conkling to Secretary of State James G. Blaine to Vice President Chester Arthur seemed to recall that happening.  

Guiteau was a strange man in a very strange time. Republicans were fractured three ways between Secretary of State John Sherman (younger brother of war hero General William Sherman), James G. Blaine, and former president Ulysses Grant. Sherman turned to Ohio Congressman James Garfield to make his nomination speech. And had Sherman not asked him, he'd have stayed home on his farm in Mentor, Ohio. By the time it was over, he clinched the nomination despite pleading with the convention not to do this. 

Charles Guiteau

Meanwhile, Charles Giteau made plans. He wanted the consul position in Paris. After all, it was his speech that got Garfield elected. (In reality, twisting Roscoe Conkling's arm got Garfield elected. That was more Blaine and John Sherman than anything else.) Once Garfield was ensconced in the White House, all Guiteau had to do was show up at the White House to collect the spoils.

Only...

Until McKinley was assassinated, presidents did not have Secret Service protection. And the White House was not as locked down as it is now. Ulysses Grant often sat in a hotel lobby for some quiet time. Once, while walking back to the White House, a pedestrian fell in step with him and struck up a conversation. The stranger mentioned he did not think much of President Grant. Grant agreed and said he never that much of him, either. This was the world in which Garfield became president. On the downside of this, anyone could drop by the White House and ask to see the president. Guiteau felt this would get him the office he sought.

Only Garfield implemented some controls over the system, limiting hours and having his personal secretary act as gatekeeper. Frustrated, Guiteau felt God's will was being thwarted. Then it occurred to him that maybe God wanted him to kill the president.

So he found himself at a train station as Garfield prepared to leave town, briefing Blaine and War Secretary Robert Todd Lincoln as he made his way toward the train. Giteau shot him in the back.

Here's where Guiteau differs from other presidential assassins and would-be presidential assassins John Wilkes Booth clearly killed Lincoln. Leon Czolgosz put a gun in McKinley's belly. Conspiracy theories aside, Oswald sat in that book depository. And John Hinkley? He'd just like to forget shooting Reagan. But if any of them denied shooting the president, they would say they it was someone else. Guiteau? He said he didn't kill Garfield. His doctors did. He was right, but he pulled the trigger. However, if Reagan had been shot in 1881, he'd have been a goner. The technology needed to save him was either too new or not invented yet. Garfield in 1981 would have been back to work in a couple of days. Not the least reason that doctors in the 1980s took germ theory as a given. The problem was Dr. DW Bliss appointed himself Garfield's doctor and rolled over other physicians, one because he was Black (despite having a far better reputation and track record) and another because she was a woman. Bliss insisted on sticking his finger in Garfield's wound, compounding the infection. Garfield did not die of a bullet wound. He died of sepsis. (I've had sepsis. Not fun.)

So no, James Garfield need not have died for Charles Giteau's sins. One quack doctor the a massive ego and an inability to try anything new (He even flubbed Alexander Graham Bell's new metal detector by limiting him to the wrong side of the body.) killed the president. Bliss's reputation and practice never recovered. Flash forward 20 years. William McKinley might have lived, but the technology was bleeding edge. Would the X-Ray machine hurt him? (Having had several, I can say no from personal experience) How would electric lights interact with the ether of the operating theater? So things we now take for granted had too many question marks. Harding would die of natural causes. Kennedy would die by a Marine marksman's bullet (all conspiracy theories aside.) Reagan benefitted from modern medicine and a near hermetic bubble presidents have traveled in since JFK died. And the shooters? Booth actually had a plan going in, and more importantly, a day job. He was the only "smart assassin" among presidential killers, and I include John Hinkley's failed attempt. On any other day, Charles Giteau, Leon Csolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Hinkley would be hitting you up for change on a street corner. They just blundered through the net. 

And Booth might have been tactically smart, planning a decapitation strike on the government at a time when security was a polite suggestion. From a strategic point of view, he managed to commit treason against both the United States and the Confederacy before getting shot in Mudd's barn. Good job, Johnny. How'd that work out for you? Oh. Right. The Army shot him when they found him. His co-conspirators were hung, and Andrew Johnson flailed his way through four years, becoming the first president to get impeached. How'd that help the South again, since they'd already lost the war?