From Page to Screen to Screen: Hemingway's "The Killers"

THE SOURCE:

"The Killers" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway first published in 1927 and is part of his series of Nick Adams stories.  Two men in trenchcoats walk into a lunch counter in Summit, Illinois, cynical, condescending men who talk circles around the owner.  They make Nick, who's eating at the counter, go into the kitchen, where he and the cook are tied up while the owner turns away any customers that come in.  They say they're there to kill a Swede named Ole Anderson.  It's nothing personal, mind you. There killing him for a friend.  When it becomes clear that Anderson isn't going to show, the killers leave.  George unties Nick who runs off to warn Anderson.  Anderson, a former boxer, clearly knows that the killers are on their way, but refuses to do anything about it.  Nick returns to the cafe and declares his determination to get out of this town.    

Like the other Nick Adams stories, the theme of disillusionment is major.  There's the cowardice of the cook and owner, the former advising Nick to not get involved at all.  The final lines of the story:  

[Nick Adams says]"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it.  It's too damned awful."

"Well," said George, "you better not think about it."

The story also relies on Hemingway's iceberg theory.  It's mentioned late in the story that Anderson "must have got mixed up in something in Chicago."  In the 1920s, the mob was a big deal in Chicago.  When law enforcement started cracking down, many relocated to Summit.  

Overall, this is an excellent piece of minimalist literature.

THE FILMS:

THE KILLERS (1946):

Director: Robert Siodmak

Runtime: 97 Minutes

The movie starts with a fantastic, nearly blow-for-blow adaptation of the original story.  The killers, played by noir character actors William Conrad (the fat man in "Jake and the Fat Man") and Charles McGraw, are sinister and distant in equal amounts.

Nick Adams (Phil Brown aka Uncle Owen from Star Wars) runs off to tell the Swede (Burt Lancaster in his first film role) that two men are out to kill him, but the Swede is resigned to his fate.  

Conrad and McGraw as the Killers

Enter Jim Reardon, played by Edmond O'Brien (The Wild Bunch, Oscar win for The Barefoot Contessa), an insurance investigator.  Nick Adams and the Swede were both employed by the same service station, which gives its employees a small life insurance policy.  While Reardon is going through the Swede's belongings, he finds a green handkerchief with a gold harp embroidered on it. This reminds him of something, but he can't quite put his finger on it.  At the morgue, he sees that the Swede's right hand is busted up, so he figures the guy must have been a boxer.  Thus begins his investigation.  

He discovers that the Swede's name was Ole Anderson, a boxer who turned to a life of crime.  The detective who arrested Anderson was once his good friend, and agrees to help Reardon figure out what happened.  Anderson fell in love with femme fatale Kitty Collins, played perfectly by Ava Gardner (Showboat, On the Beach) and took the fall for her when she was caught with stolen jewelry.  When he got out, he found that she'd gone back to her ex, crime lord Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker).  Along with two other established crooks, Colfax and Collins invite Anderson in on the score of a lifetime: A $250,000 daylight robbery. (That's over $3 million adjusting for inflation.)   

For reasons that will become clear later, I have to give away the rest of the plot.  If you'd rather watch the movie before finding out the ending (which I highly recommend), stop reading now, watch the movie, and come back.

Lancaster and Gardner

Reardon recognizes the handkerchief as the mask worn by one of the robbers at the Prentice Hat Robbery.  It turns out that Anderson, believing that the others were going to double-cross him, stole the entire score and, unbeknownst to the rest of the gang, ran off with Kitty, who then ran off with the money.  Reardon has a violent altercation with one of the other criminals, Dum-Dum Dugan (noir character actor Jim Lambert) who is trying to find where the money is and gets Reardon to admit Kitty ran off with it.

Reardon gets in contact with Jim Colfax, who's gone legitimate, and tells him what's happened.  He soon gets in contact with Kitty, who sets him up to be killed, but Reardon manages to get a drop on the killers (who we haven't seen since the opening) and escape.  Reardon goes to Colfax's house where Dugan and Colfax have just shot each other, and we get the final twist:  Kitty was working with Colfax the entire time.  She convinced Anderson to take all the money, so she and Colfax could have it without giving out shares.  

This is a fantastic noir film, with a great plot, solid pacing, and fantastic acting.  It was nominated for four academy awards, including directing and screenplay, but lost out to The Best Years of Our Lives on both.  

THE KILLERS (1964):

Director: Don Siegel

Runtime: 93 Minutes

We start with two mysterious men walking into a school for the blind, looking for a man named Jimmy North.  Someone gets word to North that two guys are after him and they mean to kill him, but North refuses to run.  The two men find North, who offers no resistance when they shoot him.  Or rather, they shake their guns at him, because apparently silencers mean there's no muzzle flash, shells, or any other thing one normally associates with a gun going bang.

We next see the men on a train out of town.  Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen) plays Charlie Strom, a grizzled veteran hitman with great screen presence, while Western character actor Clu Galager plays his partner, Lee, a living cartoon character.  

Clu Galager and Lee Marvin

Strom realizes three things.  1. He was paid $25,000 for this hit, when he'd never been paid more than $10,000 2. Jimmy North had been involved in a million dollar robbery and ran off with the money.  3. If North had the money, they would have been asked to lean on him, not kill him.  Therefore, whoever hired him has the money.  And maybe they just oughta get that money for themselves.   

It turns out that Jimmy North (Oscar nominated actor/writer/director John Cassavetes) used to be a racecar driver, so they go to his old mechanic for information.  Fourteen minutes into the movie, we get our first flashback.  The flashback lasts thirty goddamn minutes, and about half of that is driving footage with terrible greenscreen.

Yes, there's a go-kart scene.  No, it never makes sense.

Jimmy North falls for Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson).  His mechanic keeps claiming that Farr is bad for him, and she'll ruin his focus.  Well, North has a blowout and crashes, leading to a period of hospitalization.  He finds out that Farr is a kept woman, her benefactor being crime big shot Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan).  Now, at the 45 minute mark, we cut back to Strom and Lee, who we haven't seen for two-thirds of the screentime so far.  They find Mickey Farmer (Norman Fell), Browning's right hand man, who tells them what happened next.  This flashback takes another twenty. goddamned. minutes.  Basically, North is washed up, Farr gets him involved as a driver on a big score that Browning is organizing, and North double-crosses the group and makes off with the money.  Now, over an hour and ten minutes into an hour and a half movie, we finally see Strom and Lee again.  They confront Browning, and demand to see Farr.  They go to Farr's apartment, threaten her, and she has a flashback (a mercifully brief five minute one this time) about how she convinced North that the gang was going to double cross him, and how she and Browning took the money and shot him.  The killers leave the apartment building and are shot at. Lee is killed and Strom is hit.  Strom makes his way to Browning's house, where he shoots Farr and Browning before bleeding out.

My god, the pacing in this movie is a wreck.  The inexcusably long flashbacks destroy the pacing for the investigation storyline, and the constant driving scenes destroy the pacing for the rest.  Look, car chases can be fun and exciting to watch.  Driving, on the other hand, is not exciting at all.

There's only one good thing about this movie and his name is Lee Marvin.

Unfortunately, he gets practically no screen time.

THE BEST ADAPTATION:

THE KILLERS (1946)

In addition to a spot on direct adaptation of the story, Burt Lancaster is a solid Hemingway protagonist, the honorable tough man with big feelings.  While in the 1964 version, the sum total of the similarity is two hitmen kill a guy who doesn't resist.  

THE BEST FILM:

THE KILLERS (1946)

It's strange that the movie from the '40s has aged wonderfully while the movie from the '60s is so outdated.  The 1946 version is fantastic.  Pacing, acting, plot, aesthetics.  It's a great film.  The 1964 version?  It's plagued by terrible decisions.  Besides the aforementioned flashbacks and boring driving sequences, perhaps the most unforgivable is Angie Dickinson's character.  In the 1946 version, Ava Gardner is tough, she steals every scene she's in, and you never know where her loyalties lie, or if she even has any.  In both versions, there's a scene when the robbery is being planned.  The femme fatale and the future murder victim flirt, much to the chagrin of the fatale's current beau.  In the 1946 version, Big Jim Colfax threatens to slap Gardner.  Lancaster makes a move but Gardner tells him she can take care of herself.

In the 1964 version, this happens.

Angie Dickinson spends half of her screentime flirting with the male characters, and the other half getting beaten up.  All this does is make her a far less compelling character.  In fact, every character in this version is worse than the 1946 one.






NEXT WEEK:

It's a Hemingway double-header!

We'll look at the 1937 novel To Have and Have Not, and it's three film adaptations:

The Bogart/Bacall vehicle To Have and Have Not (1944)

The John Garfield crime thriller The Breaking Point (1950)

And the Audie Murphy action flick The Gun Runners (1958)

The Library of Babel

Borges' famous story/thought experiment is coming to life.

If you're unfamiliar with the story, stop what you're doing and pick up a copy of Ficciones right now. But assuming that's not feasible, a brief summary of the story/thought experiment.  Imagine a library that contained every possible book of a certain character length. There's no organizing principle to the library, the books are distributed randomly.  Every possible permutation of characters is present.  Everything that ever had been written, "Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."    But, mostly, it would be pure gibberish. Several  hundred pages of random letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. 

Writer/programmer Jonathan Basile has created libraryofbabel.info, which, though not yet complete    "[a]t present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books."  But this is not a mere random text generator.  "We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery."

Which means that, somewhere on this website lies code that will generate not only every sonnet ever written, but every sonnet that ever could be written. I'll leave the metaphysical questions aside to ask a much more pragmatic one.  Does Jonathan Basile now hold the copyright to every sonnet not yet written?  I guess this leads to a more technical question of whether or not code that generates a piece of text is enough to constitute copyright of that piece of text (I'm not a lawyer, and I'd hate to be the first lawyer to handle a case like this).  The Library of Babel is one thing as a thought experiment, but as an actuality it's, well, mindblowing.

Interview with George Saunders

If you haven't got around to it yet, check out some work by George Saunders.  He's quickly become one of my favorite writers (In Persuasion Nation is my favorite collection of his so far).  Here's him doing a reading from his most recent collection:

1952: The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

The Author:

            Thomas B. Costain (1885-1965), was born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  His writing career started in 1902 when he was hired by the Brantford Courier as a reporter.  He later went on to work for the Ontario’s Guelph Daily Mercury in 1908.  In 1910, he married Ida Spragge and was hired as an editor by the Maclean Publishing Company.

            In 1920, Costain moved to the United States to become an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. That same year, he became a naturalized citizen.  He remained at the Saturday Evening Post until 1934, when he became a story-editor for Twentieth Century Fox.  He published his first novel in 1942, My Great Folly, which, like the rest of his novels, was a piece of historical fiction.  Costain also wrote a lot of non-fiction volumes, most notably the Plantagenet series, about the Middle Ages dynasty of the same name.

The Book:

Length: 533 pages

Subject/Genre: Early Christianity/Historical Fiction

            The Silver Chalice takes place in first century Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem.  The novel’s protagonist is a gifted silversmith named Basil.  Adopted by a wealthy Greek merchant, Basil was wrongly sold into slavery by his adoptive Uncle after his adopted-father’s death.  But the quality of his workmanship gained the attention of Luke (as in, ‘the gospel according to’).  Luke buys Basil’s freedom and takes him to Jerusalem to work for Joseph of Arimathea.  After completing demonstrating his ability to Joseph (and impressing his Joseph’s granddaughter, Deborra), Joseph reveals to Paul and Luke that he has the Holy Grail.

Artist's recreation

Joseph wants Basil to craft a silver chalice to house it.  This will require Basil to travel and meet the apostles so he can sculpt them.

            This is by no means the first time I’ve said what I’m about to say, but I feel like I need to say it again.  I was clearly not in the target audience for this piece of Christian historical fiction.  What I’ve found reading a bunch of these, is that they start with the assumption that anyone who reads it is already going to feel very strongly for Christianity.  If you don’t start with this viewpoint, the character’s emotional and spiritual growth doesn’t seem particularly reasonable because it acts as if there is only one possible spiritual/philosophical response.  Which, if you start with a foregone conclusion, isn’t a problem, but otherwise it falls apart a bit. 

            As I pointed out in the bio section, Costain was also known for his non-fiction histories.  From what I’ve found, the detail in The Silver Chalice (and there’s a lot of it) is very well researched.  In his attempt to capture the ancient world, Costain, like Lloyd C. Douglas, decided to use prose that mimics a scriptural tone. For example, “The oil merchant, gasping for breath and slightly purple of cheek, stepping inside to escape the sun, which was beating down with all the fury of the fires of atonement.”  The frequent use of archaic grammar (“purple of cheek”) and over-the-top religious metaphor seems a bit pompous, honestly.
 

            It wasn’t incidental that I mentioned Lloyd C. Douglas in the previous paragraph.  The Silver Chalice was frequently compared to The Robe, which is also the bestseller for the second time in 1953.  Religious fiction and historical fiction have been perennial favorites in American popular literature.  Likewise, one of the best ways to get on the bestsellers list is to have previously been on the bestsellers list.  Costain appeared on the top ten annual bestsellers four times in the 1940s, reaching the number two spot in 1947.  As with most of the bestsellers so far, The Silver Chalice was made into a film.

            The 1954 film is notable for two things: Being Paul Newman’s first feature film role (he played Basil) and being so bad that when it was going to air on TV years after its theatrical release, Newman took out an ad apologizing for the film. 

            Like with a lot of the books I’ve read so far on this list, The Silver Chalice is not bad, but it’s not very good.  It’s pretty understandable why it’s no longer famous.  If you enjoy religious/historical fiction, you’ll probably like The Silver Chalice, but there’s no particular reason to seek out this novel, specifically.


Also published in 1952:

Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Edna Ferber - Giant
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano
E. B. White -Charlotte's Web

Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribners. Supplement 7 (1961-5). Print.
Costain, Thomas B. The Silver Chalice. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. 1952. Print.

1950: The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson

The Author: 

Henry Morton Robinson (1898-1961) was born in Boston, the oldest of eleven children.  Upon graduating high school, Robinson served in the U.S. military for two years.  He then attended Columbia University and began publishing poetry, his first book, Children of Morningside, being published in 1924.  That same year, he received his M.A. and went on to teach at Columbia.  

He produced volumes of poetry, novels, and non-fiction works in the following decades.  In 1944, Robinson and Joseph Campbell released "The Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake."  The Cardinal, published in 1950, was Robinson's most successful work.

The Book:

Length: 579 pages
Subject/Genre: Catholic priests/religious fiction

The Cardinal follows the story of Father Stephen Fermoyle, a priest from a working class Boston family, from his first assignment through his rise to the position of Cardinal.  

I've read several books about priests or religious professionals so far on this list, and while Robinson's prose may be the nicest, I'm not that fond of the story for a few reasons.  I'm going to compare this to a couple other novels I reviewed, 1913's The Inside of the Cup and 1941's The Keys of the Kingdom.  The Inside of the Cup deals with its protagonist coming to reexamine and reinterpret his faith.  While Father Fermoyle has challenges thrown at him, there's (at most) a little uneasiness on his part, but he learns a valuable lesson and moves on.  Generally speaking, Stephen Fermoyle is a good guy who cares about everybody and wants to make the world a better place.  The same is true of the protagonist in The Keys of the Kingdom, but the protagonist of that novel is not always able to overcome the obstacles set before him and, because of this extreme honesty and kindness, does not climb higher in the church.  The big problem I have with The Cardinal is that Father Fermoyle doesn't really face much resistance. Things just work out because he's a nice guy.    

Of course, that may be the point.  When doing research on the novel, I usually saw it referred to as "inspiring."  Assuming this isn't just a case of the phrase 'inspirational literature' being synonymous with 'religious literature,' it's easy to see why people liked it. It's a story about a good man who, through being good and honest, succeeds.  It's an affirmation of the values we are told to cherish.  More than a few of the reviews I read included people saying that it made them want to be a priest when they were kids.  

There is a sense of nostalgia running through The Cardinal, and not just because it's set in the first half of the 20th century.  It's clear that Robinson had a love for the church and this shows in his writing.     

While I've not been able to confirm it, the claims that Stephen Fermoyle is at least partly based on the cardinal Francis Spellman seem reasonable.  At the risk of going on a weird little tangent, there's a pretty vicious letter that Hemingway wrote to Spellman after Spellman had a bunch of seminarians break a gravediggers strike in 1949.

My Dear Cardinal:   

In every picture that I see of you there is more mealy mouthed arrogance, fatness and over-confidence.   

As a strike breaker against catholic workers, as an attacker of Mrs. Roosevelt, I feel strongly that you are over-extending yourself.  It is very bad for a Prince of the Church to become over-confident.

I know that you lied about the Spanish Republic and I know why you lied.  I know who you take your orders from and why such orders are given.  You are heading a minority group in the United States, to which I was a dues-paying member, but you are heading it with arrogance, insolence, and the fatness of a Prince of the Church.

The word in Europe is that you will be the next, and first, American Pope.  But please disabuse yourself on this and do not keep pressing so hard.  You will never be Pope as long as I am alive.


Being a religious novel, The Cardinal does take up some controversial topics, most notably abortion.  Specifically, abortion when giving birth would definitely kill the mother.  Putting aside the rest of the debate on abortion, and just focusing on this specific circumstance, it's clear how it would be a morally contentious point with no easy answer.  Unless, of course, you're Stephen Fermoyle, in which case the answer is unquestionably to let the mother die.  This view plays a major part in an important plot point.  I don't mean to get hung up about it, but the issue is not handled well in the novel at all.  

That bit of unpleasantness aside, the book kept selling, and was the #4 best seller in 1951.  A film version was released in 1963, starring Tom Tryon (I've never heard of him, either).

The Cardinal is well-written, and if you're looking for a religious, inspirational story, then this should work for you.   

Also Published in 1950:

Isaac Asimov - I, Robot

Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

Ford Madox Ford - Parade's End

C. S. Lewis - The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Sources: 

Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner. Supplement 7: 1961-1965. Print.  

Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Scribner. 

      1981. Web.   

Robinson, Henry Morton. The Cardinal. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1950. Print.

1947: The Miracle of the Bells by Russell Janney

The Author:

Russell Janney (1884-1963) was born in Wilmington Ohio.  His career was mainly as a Broadway producer, putting on nearly two dozen plays between 1916 and 1943.  And that’s pretty much all I can tell you about Russell Janney.  

Perhaps I should explain how I write the author bio sections of my reviews.  It starts with a trip to Wikipedia, where I find some basic biographical data (e.g. year and place of birth, major works, etc.).  Afterwards, I find a biography of the individual and/or consult a biographical dictionary, to confirm the details from Wikipedia.  If I include information not on the Wikipedia page (and its linked sources, as the case may be), I cite the biography in the ‘sources’ section at the end of the post.  I have been unable to find any sources to even verify the scant information on Wikipedia.  I could find no biographies of the man.  I’ve consulted about half a dozen biographical dictionaries of American writers, and have turned up nothing.  My copy of The Miracle of the Bells doesn’t even have an ‘about the author’ page.  If you are truly interested in learning more about Russell Janney, I hope you have better luck than I have.


The Book:

The Miracle of the Bells tells the story of Broadway manager extraordinaire Bill Dunnigan and the young movie star Olga Treskovna.  The novel opens with Dunnigan bringing Olga’s body back to her home town, a small Pennsylvania coal mining town known only as Coaltown, in accordance with her wishes.  From there, the novel switches between the present in Coaltown and Dunnigan’s flashbacks of the events leading to Olga’s death.

            The title refers to an event near the end of the book, but what’s worth mentioning is that the titular miracle is not a miracle in the classic sense.  A large number of people believe it to be a miracle, and that belief is beneficial to the protagonists. But unlike some of the other religious bestsellers of the 1940s (especially, The Robe, The Keys of the Kingdom, and The Song of Bernadette), The Miracle of the Bells is not primarily concerned with religion in and of itself.  It also is one of the first novels on the list so far to take a stance on the big city vs. small town debate, and land firmly on the side of the big cities.  While Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street did this, the book was largely focused on being an indictment of the small town mythos, while Janney’s novel is less consistently explicit.  The big city perspective is largely part of the background, not the central feature.  It is also the only bestseller on my review list from the 1940s that is not historical fiction.  Besides Strange Fruit, it is the only one from the 1940s to take place in the United States (over 60% of the bestsellers on my list prior to 1940 take place in America).  The most immediately apparent reason for this would be the Second World War.  Events and personages in Europe and Asia were of immediate importance for the average American.    

            The novel itself is part romance, part Hollywood-dream-come-true story.  It got its own film version in 1948, with Frank Sinatra playing the Coaltown’s priest. 

The novel fell into obscurity.  I haven’t been able to find evidence of any printings after 1973.  It’s by no means the worst book I’ve read so far, but it’s by no means the greatest either.  If you’re looking for something sentimental and light (not that light page-wise, although at only 500 pages, it’s a lot shorter than some of the other books I’ve reviewed) and you happen to have an old copy lying around, you’ll probably enjoy The Miracle of the Bells.

Also Published in 1947:
Ray Bradbury - Dark Carnival
Italo Calvino - The Path to the Nest of Spiders
Thomas Mann - Doctor Faustus

Sources:
Janney, Russell. The Miracle of the Bells. New York: Prentice Hall. 1946. Print.

1941: The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin

The Author:

           Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Dunbartonshire, Scotland.  His father died when he was seven, and he and his mother lived with his maternal grandparents before eventually moving to Glasgow.  At the University of Glasgow, Cronin became a medical doctor, serving as a medical officer in the first world war and later as a general practitioner in small towns in Scotland and a mining town in Wales, before being appointed Medical Inspector of Mines.  At the university, he also met Agnes Mary Gibson, whom he married in 1921.  They had three children together and they were married for nearly sixty years.

            He was laid up with an ulcer in 1930, requiring six months recuperation, during which time he wrote his first novel, Hatter’s Castle, which was an immediate success.  He wrote several books before, in 1937, publishing The Citadel.  The Citadel is to the British National Health System (NHS) what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is to the US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Not only a huge critical and commercial success, The Citadel established Cronin’s as an important literary figure of his time.

            In 1939, Cronin and his family moved to the US, settling in places as disparate as Bel Air, California and Blue Hill, Maine.  He remained a prolific writer for the rest of his life, and spent the last years of his life living in Switzerland.  He passed away in Montreux in 1981.

The Book: 

          The Keys of the Kingdom tells the life story of Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic priest, from his childhood to his old age, focusing largely on his thirty five years spent in establishing a mission in Pai-Tan, China. Chisholm is an extremely sympathetic character, and, like most of the supporting characters, is written with a good amount of depth.  The characters are the greatest part of this novel.

         From the beginning, we know that Chisholm is not your dogmatic, stiff, hellfire-and-damnation cleric.  The first chapter takes place when Chisholm has a vocation in Scotland in his old age, and is being investigated by the local bishop (the rest of the novel is chronological, starting from his childhood).  He had complaints against him for saying things like, "Atheists may not all go to hell. I knew one who didn't," and "Christ was a perfect man, but Confucius had a better sense of humor."¹  This is a trend I've been finding in a lot of the books on this list: pro-religion via being anti-dogma.  That is to say, many of these books argue that reliance on dogma is not only bad, but directly detrimental to religion, arguing instead a form of what is essentially Humanism based on Christianity.  The first book I reviewed, The Inside of the Cup, dealt with a priest discovering this.  This trend continued.  There were the good preachers in Elmer Gantry, Dean Harcourt in Green Light, and Casey in The Grapes of Wrath.  Whereas a novel like Elmer Gantry tried to combat what Lewis saw as hypocrisy by exposing a negative figure, the others I've listed focus mainly on presenting a good preacher, an example of what religious officials should be. (I don't think it's a coincidence that the good preachers in the novels listed above rarely achieve any high status, as opposed to the Gantry-like characters.)

     Chisholm's life is one long attempt to make the world a better place, which he does, to the extent that he is able.  Other characters, often within the clergy, stand in his way, but this opposition is not generally due to malice or greed, but rather people who are more concerned with the number of baptisms at the missions than with the number of people who benefit from the mission.  The amount of philosophical and theological monologues alone suggests that Cronin is using Chisholm to state his own religious views, which seem to be humanistic.  Chisholm argues that the church should argue pacifism in times of war.  He argues that good works, regardless of religion, are paths to salvation.  Basically, he argues for human decency and kindness.

      Like pretty much every book I've read here so far, this one was adapted to film:

      The 1944 film starred Gregory Peck (who also played Pa Baxter in the film adaptation of The Yearling).  It seems, though, that Cronin is better known outside the U.S. Most of the search traffic for his name comes from India and the U.K.,² which is probably in no small part due to the importance of The Citadel in the U.K.

     I wouldn't try to stop anyone from reading The Keys to the Kingdom, and it is certainly an enjoyable book.  I don't feel that it's one that you need to go out of your way to read, though.

Also published 1941:
James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce   
C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters 
H. A. Rey and Margret Rey - Curious George 
Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children

1. Cronin, A. J. The Keys of the Kingdom. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1941. Print.
2. Google Trends page

     

Public TV Interview with Ray Bradbury

1938: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The Author: 

            Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) was born Marjorie Kinnan in Washington D.C.  where her father worked in the U.S. Patent Office.  She began writing at a young age, winning a $2.00 prize from the Washington Post at the age of eleven.  After her father’s death in 1913, Rawlings and her mother and brother moved to Madison, Wisconsin.  She attended the University of Wisconsin as an English Major in 1914.  Upon graduating in 1918, she moved to New York City to work as an editor with the YWCA.  She married Charles Rawlings, whom she had known in Wisconsin, in 1919, and moved to Charles Rawlings’ hometown of Rochester, New York.

            From 1920 until 1928, she wrote as a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Rochester Journal-American.  Despite her attempts, Rawlings was unable to get any fiction published at that time.  Professional stress for bother her and her husband, combined with increasing tension within the marriage, prompted them to buy a farm in Cross Creek, Florida in 1928.

            She sold her first story in 1930, and published several more before her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933.  It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and selected for the Book-of-the-Month club.  Her marriage ended later that year. 

            She published The Yearling in 1938, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and establishing her literary career.  In 1941, she married hotelier Norton Baskin and moved from Cross Creek to his home in St. Augustine Florida.  Her novel, Cross Creek, was published in 1942.  Zelma Cason, a friend from Cross Creek, sued her for $100,000 for libel (the suit was later changed to ‘invasion of privacy’).  The case was not settled until 1947, after a very publicized trial in 1946 found in favor of Rawlings, the Florida Supreme Court reversed the decision 3-4, requiring Rawlings to pay a token settlement of $1 to Cason, and to cover Cason’s legal fees of over $1,000.

            She published a couple more novels before her death in 1953.

The Book:

            The Yearling takes place over the course of a year in the life of a family living in the wilderness in Florida.  The family consists of twelve year old Jody Baxter, and his parents, usually referred to as Ma and Pa Baxter.  Over the course of a year (a year sometime in the late 19^th century), Jody faces the challenges of life in the wild and of his own impending adulthood.  This is a coming-of-age story that really gets you into the mind of the protagonist as his role in the world changes. 

            The setting and life style that the Baxters lead is at times appealing or appalling.  The majesty of nature as Jody and Pa hike through the practically undisturbed forest is offset by the gore and terror of the hunting dogs ripping into a bear, all of which is rendered in vivid language. 

            As much a portrait of the setting as it is a tale about people, The Yearling makes the two inseparable.  The deep connection the characters have with the land and their way of life permeates all the events in the story.  Perhaps that’s why a book describing a way of life so alien to most of us can still connect with us emotionally.  In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows.  It’s a story about youth and innocence, and about adulthood and experience.  It’s a story about people, and it’s a story about a specific time and place in America.

            The Yearling well-received by audiences and critics, winning the Pulitzer for fiction in 1939.  A film version was released in 1946, with Jane Wyman and Gregory Peck as Ma and Pa Baxter. 

The film won two Oscars and was nominated for several more and, though it maintains a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, has faded from popularity.  Maybe Where the Red Fern Grows has cornered the market for wilderness-family coming-of-age stories.   

            If youthful-boy-moving-towards-adulthood stories aren’t something you can enjoy, this wouldn’t be the right book for you.  Otherwise, it’s a nice story with a strong emotional current.

Also published in 1938:  

Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book 
Ayn Rand - Anthem
Thornton Wilder - Our Town

Sources:
Bigelow, Gordon. Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
         Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. 1966. Print.    

Rawlings, Marjorie. The Yearling. 1938. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1967. Print.

Flash Fiction Friday: The Hangar

The Hangar

            Harvey was insane, but he wasn’t hurting anybody.  He took up a lot of space, but it was space no one wanted and they were happy that someone found a use for it, even if that use was crazy.  It was a derelict hangar half a mile from an abandoned army base, an empty cracked concrete block with weeds thick as cockroaches and cockroaches sprouting up like weeds.  Say what you will about Harvey, but he cleaned her up.  His first week there, he pulled all the weeds and stomped all the cockroaches under his old cracked leather army boots.  He used a hoe and a hose to mix cement in a wheelbarrow and filled in all the cracks.  He filled in the windows, too, and any openings, except the big hangar door that the planes used to taxi through before the base closed. 

            I only met him a couple of times.  No one in town has spent much time with Harvey, or even visited him in his hangar more than a handful of times, with exception of Ike, who volunteers with the V.A. in his spare time.  No one knows if Harvey was a vet, not even Ike knows for sure, but Ike says that he can tell, deep down in his gut, that even if Harvey never served, he’d definitely seen something like a war.  He told me that when we were on our way to the hangar.  Harvey had been living there for five years by that point, and hadn’t stepped out of that building once.  Every week, someone would bring him food, usually Ike.  I was fifteen, that first trip. I think every teenager was brought out at least once, like some rite of passage.  Some people see a shaman, some see a rabbi, some go on a hunt or a vision quest; we saw Harvey.

            The hangar was five minutes from the highway, out over the hard-packed light brown dirt.  Ike parked his SUV off to the side of the hangar, and we got out.  He opened the trunk and we grabbed a bunch of grocery bags and walked towards the gaping entry to the hangar.  Harvey never closed that door, left it open night and day, in good weather and storm.  The concrete near the door was coated in a layer of dirt.  Dried leaves lay scattered throughout the structure, piled in corners, skittering and clattering whenever a gust of hot wind blew in.  A small campsite was set against the wall farthest from the entrance.  A patched gray one-man tent and a little propane stove.  Harvey crawled out of the tent as we approached, a man at least sixty years old with ghost-white hair and sand textured skin.  His clothes were worn and threadbare, a light shirt that was once blue or black but now seemed a dull gray and jeans sun bleached almost as white as his hair. 

            Ike and I walked to the tent and put the food down.  I noticed several empty grocery bags scattered around the place, some half mulched.  I didn’t say anything, and wasn’t going to until Ike nudged me in the ribs with his elbow and said, “You can ask him.  He won’t be offended.”   Harvey waited patiently as I put the words together.    

            “Why do you live out here?”   

            Harvey told me.  He said he was waiting.  The universe works according to certain principles, certain laws of physics.  Diffusion.  Particles tend to move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.  If he waits long enough, the area inside the hangar will become a microcosm of the world in its entirety.  “Who wouldn’t want their own world?” he concluded.    

            I only saw him twice since then.  Once, a few years later, when I dropped off some groceries because Ike was sick.  And a couple years after that I saw his picture in the local paper, with a brief passage about how his heart gave out and he probably didn’t suffer.  Since then, the hangar’s been torn down.  You can still tell where it was by remnants of the concrete foundation, but even that’s fading now.

1935: Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas

The Author:
            Lloyd Cassel Douglas (1877-1951) was born in Columbia City, Indiana, the son of a Lutheran minister.  He became a Lutheran minister himself in 1903 and married Bessie Porch in 1904.  Between 1903 and 1911 Douglas preached in Indiana, Ohio, and Washington D.C. From 1911 through 1915, he was director of religious work at the University of Illinois.  After that, he preached at various churches around the United States and Montreal, retiring from the ministry in 1933.

            His first successful novel was 1929’s Magnificent Obsession.  He remained extremely popular for the rest of his life, appearing on Publishers Weekly’s  top ten annual bestsellers list thirteen times from 1932 to 1953, taking the number one spot four times. 

The Book:

            Green Light starts with the stock market crash in 1929, signalling the beginning of the Great Depression.  The protagonist, a doctor named Newell Paige, is preparing for surgery with his friend and mentor, Dr. Endicott.  The latter, shaken by his financial loss, makes an error in the surgery, resulting in the death of the patient, one Mrs. Dexter, with whom Dr. Paige had grown close over the preceding weeks.  Dr. Paige, hoping to save Dr. Endicott’s reputation, takes the blame and runs off under an assumed name. 

            There are two major plotlines and a few subplots.  The other major plotline deals with Mrs. Dexter’s daughter, Phyllis, who falls for Dr. Paige, meeting him under his assumed name.  But both major plots and almost all the subplots are tied together by Dean Harcourt of Trinity Cathedral, whose philosophy and advice spur on the novel’s other characters. 

            His philosophy is frequently treated by the other characters as a groundbreaking revelation.  This philosophy is essentially just a rephrasing of Boethius’s philosophy in regards to free will and divine providence*, which Douglas, having spent decades as a minister, would be well aware.  While this philosophy would certainly help console the millions of readers who lost everything they had and were struggling just to stay afloat, I find it a bit disingenuous that Douglas would so heavily borrow from Boethius without so much as mentioning the philosopher’s name anywhere in the novel.

            But the philosophy is like mortar and the characters bricks.  It keeps everything connected but is not as substantial.  The characters are, generally, relatable yet pretty superficial.  Dr. Paige’s decisions at the beginning of the novel are perplexing, to the detriment of the whole, but eventually are more understandable, and relatable in retrospect.  Unfortunately, the characters don’t seem to develop as much as instantly change, as if Dean Harcourt had flipped a switch when he talked to them.  This complete 180 in terms of how the characters think and behave is one of the least relatable aspects of the novel.

            I was, however, impressed by the structure.  It drifts between the main storylines with their subordinate subplots, tethered together by Dean Harcourt and his philosophy.  Douglas manages this frequent shifting without seeming unfocused which is not an easy task. 

            It’s well structured, but everything else about it seems pretty average.  Don’t construe this as an insult, as it puts Green Light above many other bestsellers (and leagues above The Eyes of the World).  Its success was largely a matter of the time in which it was published.  There’s a reason the title of the work of Boethian philosophy Douglas uses was The Consolation of Philosophy: it attempts to put the troubles of the individual in perspective, as part of the necessary greater good, which, during the Great Depression, would strike home with a lot of people. 

            But this philosophy wasn’t unique to Douglas, and there wasn’t much to keep this work relevant (although I’d be remiss not to point out how little dated it seems).  In 1937, a film version of Green Light was released, starring Errol Flynn as Dr. Newell Paige.

If you’re wondering what impact the film had, suffice it to say that it’s not present on Netflix, Hulu, or Rotten Tomatoes. 

            I wouldn’t say that Green Light is a bad book, rather it’s thoroughly ok.  I wouldn’t try to dissuade anyone from reading it, but it’s not something I would be quick to recommend, either. 

*Specifically two of Boethius’s answers to age old theological questions.  The first being “Why would bad things be allowed to happen to good people and vice-versa?”  Boethius’s answer (and Douglas’s Dean Harcourt’s) is that the perils a person is faced with offer the person a chance to develop more fully, to improve.  The second, more metaphysical question, is “How can there be an omniscient deity and free will?”  Douglas doesn’t mention the omniscient deity part, but uses essentially the same answer: Humanity is being drawn towards progress.  While the fate of the individual may be negative, the fate of the whole is moving in the right direction.  In Boethian terms, the overall scope of human progress towards some goal is the divine plan (Douglas’s Harcourt calls it “The Long Parade”).  This is, of course, a drastic oversimplification, in part due to the limited space here, and in (larger) part due to my own fairly limited knowledge of the subject. 



Also Published in 1935:

T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral
George Santayana - The Last Puritan
John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat

Sources:
Douglas, Lloyd. Green Light. 1935. New York: Avon. 1972. Print.

Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth Century Literature: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern 
            Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.

'Cloud Atlas' as a Record of Literary History

If you haven't read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, you're missing out and you may find spoilers in this essay:

            The stylistic differences between the sections of Cloud Atlas are immediately apparent.  The first section is a travel journal from 1850, the second is a series of letters from 1931, the third is a mystery-thriller set in 1975, the fourth is a humorous memoir from the present day, the fifth is an interview from some centuries in the future, and the sixth is a story told orally from the distant future.  Each section is received by a character in the succeeding section (with the exception of the final section).  I posit that the stylistic differences, in addition to fitting with the theme of cyclical history, are representative of the several major movements in fiction across the last few centuries.  

            The first section, The Pacific Journal of Patrick Ewing, is the journal of a notary from San Francisco, travelling from Sydney to California.  This section represents the pre-romantics, specifically in the 1700’s.  Here’s why: 

            First, the popularity of travel books in the 18^th century. Not only were they incredibly popular, but some of the best known literature from that time period was written in the form of travel literature: Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example.  That’s of course ignoring factual works, many of which were written by important authors (e.g. Goethe, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft, etc.), and the popularity of journals of famous explorers like Captain James Cook. 

            Like Gulliver’s Travels, The Pacific Diary of Patrick Ewing focuses on philosophical and sociological matters: the nature of good and evil, the ethics of slavery, the path of history, etc., all of which the narrator is led to ponder due to his experiences on the voyage.  The writing style is also reminiscent of that time and genre:

            “It is pleasant merely to breathe the cooler air.  One loses one’s eye in lanes of sea
             phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens” (Mitchell 38).

            Robert Frobisher, the narrator of the second section (Letters from Zedelghem), after finding the first half of Pacific Diary, has this to say: “Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity – seems too structured to be a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true…” (64).  When Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, he didn’t publish it under his own name.  The credited author was none other than the eponymous Crusoe himself.  It was marketed as a true story.  And while no one would believe that the events in Gulliver’s Travels actually occurred, the novel is structured exactly as a maritime diary.  Frobisher would be familiar with those fictional accounts formatted as truth.

            The second section of the Cloud Atlas, Letters from Zedelghem, takes the form of a series of letters from Robert Frobisher to his ex-lover, Rufus Sixsmith.  Whereas the issues dealt with in Pacific Diary are largely a matter of ethics and philosophy on one hand, or the day to day troubles of voyage on the other, Letters focuses on Frobisher’s emotions.  This section is representative of the Romantics.  Story-wise, the connection to the Romantics is self-evident.  The young man, in a series of letters to a former lover, details his affair with a married woman and subsequent infatuation with her daughter.  Not only that, but the sentimentality and emotional interjections characteristic of Romantic literature are heavily represented in this section. 

            “Summer has taken a sensuous turn: Ayr’s wife and I are lovers.  Don’t alarm yourself!
             Only in the carnal sense… When one unlocks a woman’s body, her box of confidences
             also spills” (68-9).

The contrast, stylistically, between Letters and the following section is almost jarring.

            The third section, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, follows the investigative journalist, Luisa Rey, as she looks into a possibly corrupt nuclear power plant.  This section of Cloud Atlas stands out from the rest for two reasons: It is  the only one written with third person narration and it is the only piece received in the succeeding section as a work of fiction.  Half-Lives represents the Modernists.

            As opposed to Romantic literature, Modernist literature is seen as the literature of disillusionment, its heyday coming on the heels of World War One.  Stylistically, the modernists were less florid than the Romantics.  It is common in Romantic literature to find passages such as “Weep, heart full of love, youth, and life!  Alas, would that I could weep like you!” (Dumas 669).  While not void of Mitchell’s excellent descriptive powers, Half-Lives’s style is much more matter-of-fact than Letters and without the philosophical digressions of Pacific Diary.

            “Luisa Rey glances back.  The guard’s back is turned, so she continues on around a
             corner and into a grid of repeated corridors, chilled and muffled by humming air coolers”
            (Mitchell 104).

            The name, “Luisa Rey,” pays homage to the important modernist novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which, like Cloud Atlas, consists of several connected stories. And, like most modernist literature, holds true to this quote by Luisa Rey:

            “We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe – but only our toes” (95).

            As opposed to the post-modernists, whose work embraces a “predatory, amoral, and godless universe,” the modernists are, by and large, less willing to embrace chance and disorder as aspects of fiction (or, at least, with the same playfulness as the Postmodernists).  Of course, Modernism is best seen in juxtaposition to Postmodernism, as exemplified by The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. 

            The Postmodernists embrace chance more than the Modernists.  The major developments in Half-Lives result almost exclusively from the actions and ambitions of the characters; chance plays little part in what they do and how they fare. Not so in Cavendish, where the narrator has a chance to meet his old love due to staffing problems for his train to Hull (162), he signs the custody papers at Aurora house because he accidentally got high in a bathroom near a train station (170), and his escape is hampered by an unpredictable medical emergency (181).  Cavendish takes these events as they come, with the playfulness one would expect from a Postmodernist.

            One distinction frequently made between modernist and postmodernist literature is the latter’s use of references to and reliance on popular and consumer culture.  In the first half of Half-Lives, there’s a reference to Alfred Hitchcock.  In the first three pages of Cavendish, we see “Prostitute Barbie,” an “Ingersoll Solar” watch, “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Penguin Biscuits,” “Ground Control to Major Tom,”  “Time’s Arrow” (popularized in Hawking’s A Brief History of Time), “John Sandoe’s of Chelsea,” and a quote from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (145-7).  While both Half-Lives and Cavendish include details like references to historical events (e.g. the bombing of Hiroshima, the Watergate scandal), Cavendish deals heavily in popular culture, a trait seen in many other Postmodern works (e.g. the paintings of Andy Warhol, the Cat in the Hat’s bid for the presidency in Coover’s A Political Fable, etc.).

            Metafiction is another tool popular amongst Postmodernists.  Within the first page of Cavendish, the narrator directly addresses the reader ( “should you inherit one, dear Reader, sell it, don’t live in it.”) and acknowledges his role in the story (“Tim Cavendish the Disgusted Citizen exclaimed to the offenders…”) (145). That is not to say that there is no self-awareness in Half-Lives.  The very name “Half-Lives” references the structure of Cloud Atlas, in which we get one half of the story now, and the other half later on.  The name “Luisa Rey,” as homage to The Bridge of San Luis Rey, also addresses Cloud Atlas as a whole.  But Cavendish, and the Postmodernists in general, utilize self-awareness, both of form and of the inherent falsity of fiction, to a greater degree than the Modernists.

            Like metafiction, irony and sarcasm are certainly prevalent in the Modernist literature, but these tools are employed with more gusto in Postmodernist works.  It’s important to note the frequency of florid language in Cavendish.  Even the title of the section, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, is rife with ironic embellishment.   The phrase “ghastly ordeal” is an example of the faux eloquence throughout this section.  For example, Cavendish states:

            “I fought with all my might, but my sphincter was no longer my own and a cannonade
             fired off. Amusement or condescension I could have borne, but my tormentors’ pity
             signified my abject defeat” (155).
 

            This type of prose, which appears frequently throughout this section, would seem at home in the 19^th century (or in Letters), but in the context of the present (as Cavendish is), it is ironic.  To see how this relates to Postmodernism, we need look no further than The Literature of Exhaustion, John Barth’s famous essay on Postmodernism:

            “[I]f Beethoven’s Sixth were composed today, it would be an embarrassment; but clearly
              it wouldn’t be, necessarily, if done with ironic intent by a composer quite aware of where
             we’ve been and where we are.”

            The writing style in Cavendish is fraught with outdated language, “done with ironic intent.”  And with Cavendish, we are brought up to the present. 

            The fifth section, An Orison of Sonmi~451, takes place in the future, and is a recorded interview, or “orison,” with a Fabricant (an enslaved human clone).  The previous sections represent literary movements up to the present, so what does Orison say about the future?

            Cloud Atlas focuses on progress and regression and the cyclical nature of history.  This extends to its coverage of literary history as well.  An orison, we later discover, is a holographic audio/visual recording.  Orison, therefore, is the first section not originally recorded in writing.  Furthermore, Orison is the first case in which the protagonist (the term narrator is not accurate in this case, as although Sonmi~451 provides much of the text for this section, the archivist interviewing her is no less a narrator than she is.  It could be said that this section has no narrator, but is itself an objective recording of an interview, much like the orison) receives the story of the previous section in a non-written form.  Sonmi~451 receives the film adaptation of The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.  The name Sonmi~451 is likely a reference to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  Whereas Bradbury’s novel focuses on the death of reading and literature, Orison is a step towards a regression to oral storytelling as the predominant form of literature, as evidenced by how Cavendish was received in Orison and  in the final section, Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After.

            In Sloosha, the narrator, Zachry, is an old man recounting a story from his childhood.   While other sections have utilized idiosyncratic or otherwise nonstandard spelling (Pacific Diary replaced all ‘and’s with ‘&’s; Letters abbreviated ‘very’ as ‘v.’; Orison spelled words beginning with ‘ex’ with just an ‘x’), this is the first written in dialect:  “Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what the fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me…” (239).  Oral storytelling would, of course, be told in the accent of the storyteller.

            Oral storytelling, as the oldest form of storytelling and predecessor of literature, is a fitting place for the novel’s storylines to not only build to, as in the first half of the novel, but grow from, as in the second half of the novel.  Cloud Atlas is about, among other themes, progression and regression.  Oral storytelling is the root from which all literature has progressed.  Should the written word regress it is oral storytelling that would become, once again, the dominant mode of fiction.


Works cited:  

Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion.  Web.
Dumas, Alexandre. The Three Musketeers. 1844. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. Print.
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.