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MARK TWAIN

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Ron Powers (2005)

This biography encapsulates Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens’ life as he lived and was understood – a human being, a father, a writer, somewhat as a performer and somewhat as a thinker. It tells without delving into a comprehensive consideration of Clemens’ thinking and relating his total experiences . 

Ron Powers, biographer, did not read, understand and critique Huckleberry Finn. His failure to do so renders his biography to Twain inadequate. [Oddly, Ron Chernow, has a longer, newer biography of Clemens (2025), making similar mistakes and omissions.]

No one can understand Clemens without a full understanding of Huckleberry Finn. It is likewise obvious that no one can understand American literature without a full understanding and appreciation of Huckleberry Finn. Citing the opinions of other reviewers, authors and sages as Powers did, repeats mistakes of the past and repeats ignorance as current interpretation.. Indeed, both biographies are more lightning bug than lightening. Neither know the deeper meanings and features of Clemens’ existence and why he is laughing at American misunderstanding today. It is evident neither biographer knows the Bible. What part did religion have in Clemens’ life and writing? Clemens, himself, was comfortable citing and casually referring to biblical passages: “The British are mentioned in the Bible: ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth’.”

Huckleberry Finn is filled with overt religious references and tidbits without any explication, except for Chapters 1- 3 and 31. Clemens wrote during more religious times when no one was condemning Christianity for its support of slavery before the Civil War and racism afterward. Clemens used the modes of Southern Society throughout his work, writing and lecturing, presenting thematic material buried in nonsense. Huckleberry Finn attacks and tells shows that Clemens violently disagreed with religion as it was practiced, and how religion supported slavery, Southern culture and the lingering plague of racism. Religion provided no civilization to the South; the South was incapable of establishing civilization on its own, with or without religion. These analyses are finalized in the final chapters – after Chapter 31 – when most authorities, Ron Powers faithfully cited, say is the end of the novel.

As the driving force of Huckleberry Finn, religion is obvious and apparent upon reading the original manuscript. The first three chapters in Clemens’ hand have very few changes. One might wonder what are the spiritual gifts Huck refers to in Chapter Three. He got through Chapter 31 without much change. It took Clemens seven years to write  the novel..

I have written a critique of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Veritas whichinterprets the novel. It is being posted concurrently on WordPress with this review: Read both biographies, but don’t expect to understand the man writing the best novel in any language. Readers must read Huckleberry Finn, compare the text to unreferenced biblical passages and chapters, realize their significance and understand.

The Winter House

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inA female novelist rents a house in New Hampshire for the winter. On one of the first nights, she’s interrupted from sleep by a burglar, Jesse. She doesn’t take the gun downstairs to confront the younger man. He’s in the kitchen eating. Her motherly instincts kick in (although she knows he lying about everything). He says this house belongs to his parents. He’s just dropping by. She doesn’t ask all the questions. He doesn’t want to say why’s he’s come. She doesn’t want to explain why she’s there. She lets him sleep in the upstairs bedroom, next to hers. He leaves the next morning but returns at the some hour that night. Time to call the cops.

They hike and see the panoramic view of New Hampshire’s hills. She learns he once liked to write poetry but preferred drugs. He drinks a lot. He falls asleep on the couch. She puts a blanket over him.

DAY THREE: He’s chopping wood somewhere. She’s at home and is confronted by a goon, a large bald guy looking for Jesse. She appropriately fends of the goon, but doesn’t immediately tell Jesse the goon showed up, a huge coincidence: Remember Jesse had no connection with the house except he once attended a teenage party there. So goon is a character out of no where, but one wonders will Jesse ever confront goon?  As an unrelated plot point the viewers learn Jesse and goon were partners in a recent crime, unsuccessfully pulled off.

DAY FOUR: Jesse reads one of her novels and lands on a prosaic statement which he considers the most profound. She’s pleased, as though it’s the centerpiece of the story. He reads more. She sees the goon in town talking to three thugs. She returns home but doesn’t mention that. He gives a thoroughly bullshit analysis of her novel, which any novelist should be able to brush away. She’s too understanding. They get cozy. The goon and the three thugs show up in a pickup and leave the headlights shining. There’s no explanation but that quartet walks away, out of the movie forever. [Reality: This is a low budget flick and no one had the bucks to allow for broken windows and furniture, amid the bullet holes.] There’s sheet music (mostly sheets, no notes). In the morning the goon and thugs are gone; there’s no pillow talk. 

Jesse turns himself in and the rest of the gang. He’s in the pokey. From the cell he sends a poem. I didn’t hear her read it: Leave poetry to the prose. This movie is nothing to write home about. I hope they don’t make a sequel.   

H.L. Mencken

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MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR

Salient in the life of this journalist with a name is asking what type of American he was. Mencken came from Germany and during World War One and World War Two he was pro- German and pro-Hitler. He lost his newspaper job with the Baltimore papers in 1941. Apparent German actions again other peoples were dismissed because they were not Germans. Carrying on with that antiquated thinking (feudalism or before) into the Twentienth Century makes Mencken an unexplained throwback, and given the quality of writing in the book, a throw away.

The book presents an autobiography of part of Mencken’s life. I have no idea how much he drank, womanized, or contributed to established art and literary politics. The book describes some of this editorial activities, but does not set human beings in business except to say this happened that happened and the reasons for any disagreements – the other person was Jewish, or was a woman, or would not do what Mencken advised. Mencken dismissed film and California completely without realizing it dramatized American short stories many times better than the writer could put it on a page.

The book was Mencken’s final writing effort with time qualities reflected in the writing. It tells its story sloppily, if at all. It appears Mencken chained himself to a typewriter and merrily typed. There is no sense a wordsmith was at work, edited or believed the manuscript needed further work. The book’s editor, Jonathan Yardley did his best, but elementary flaws flow throughout the writing.

A few observations early in the book should be noted:

“…I am convinced that writing verse is the best of all preparations for writing prose.
I makes the neophyte look sharply to his words, and improves the sense of rhythm and tone-color – in brief, that she of music which is at the bottom of all sound prose…” Page 5-6)

“Under the influence of my father…I emerged into sentience with an almost instinctive distrust of all schemes of revolution and reform. They were…only signs and symptoms of a fundamental hallucinations…the hallucination that human nature could be changed by passing statutes, and preaching gospels – that natural law could be repealed by taking thought.” (page 34)

“…my interest in Roosevelt 1 was always born of delight in the mountebank, not of belief in the prophet.” (page 34)

Work at home: “We … wondered why none of our colleagues had hit on the device of staying way for their offices…we escaped the burden of listening to countless visitors who infest such places – mainly authors trying to sell their manuscripts, not on the merits

thereof but by selling talk. Virtually all our business was done by mail, and it was thus possible for us to do it at our own convenience, and with expedition. On my trips to and from New York I read more manuscripts than the average editor could get through in ten times the time in his office. It was not until long afterward that I discovered that a number of English magazine editors had practiced keeping clear of their offices before we thought of it.”(Page 50)

Paying writers: The Saturday Evening Post’s “…editor…not only paid much higher prices for manuscripts…but he also paid off once a week. As a result [he] got first whack at virtually all the better fiction of the time…” (page 51)

Personal responsibility/memory: “After [Zoe Atkin’s] removal to New York, she let it be known that [Reedy] had not only discovered her but also seduced her, and in the course of time she pushed back this catastrophe back in time until in the end he was depicted as her undoing when she was but sixteen years old. This, if true, put it in 1902, when Reedy himself was forty.”(Page 68)

1920’s Greenwich Village: “…the Village, like the Paris Left Bank, was much less literary artistic than sexual, and most of its male denizens lived on women. The typical menage consisted of a widow or spinster from some small-town in the Middle West, come east to spend her dead husband’s or father’s money and see life, and a bogus painter or pulp- magazine fictioneer who let her feed, clothe and love him.”(page 95)

Any sort of writer putting together an autobiography would have given thought to organization. Little does Mencken’s story at the typewriter evince such expansive thinking – just put together antedotes loosely. What lacks is the potential for an authoritative description of the literary artistic scene on the East Coast i.e. the market Mencken was involved with. Mencken should have stepped back to write the Big Picture. But he could not escape his profession, journalism and its need to advance facts (and Mencken’s opinions) in detail without describing the setting, or telling any reasons. Influences (other than getting drunk), the environment (Mencken did not believe important) and competition (society) – did not writers know one another? As an editor did he not know writers talked and exchanged ideas, concepts and reactions?

So this book falls short in its organization and in its writing.

TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

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Diane Dempsey

The spiel on the back cover of this book describes openly what is wrong with this novel: “…Will Henley appears on the scene. With his good looks and Ivy League pedigree, he’s on the prowl for his next business acquisition” – a winery.

Apparently Old Will is destined to come the master vintner after a season or two. Good luck with that.

I once considered a career in the NBA. I did not go to an Ivy League school and don’t have that pedigree. Hence, I never made it to the NBA. But I know people who went into the Ivys, and they didn’t play in the NBA either.

When they send astronauts to Mars, they return, and none has radiation sickness and die during the trip or upon return, Too Close To The Sun may be worth reading.

THE FORGOTTEN DEPRESSION 1920-1921

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James Grant

James Grant is the publisher of the Interest Rate Observer, a highly-regarded Wall Street investment sheet.

Grant’s book adumbrates the Depression of 1920-1921, following the 18 month participation in World War One. From April 1917 to January 1922 is not five years. It was a boom and bust. In all of American history little supports this time as economically and socially significant, except war and peace their after effects and the advent of Prohibition. 

What were the United States like? It is a short book; Grant does not explain. He mentions 12 Regional Banks of the Federal Reserve, and in a few passages notes that interest rates vary among the Regions. Who knew that interest rates might vary that much, a half point or more, especially today when a decision is made centrally and that’s it. 

Grant’s book is written like many history books about economics, incidences which were separated by time and place. Each incident is not dispositive, and collectively it is difficult to know the interconnections, if there were any: Each seems power fading, misfortune and no loss in the departure. 

The only national effect was in the markets, where the stock market fell, commodities markets fell, real estate prices fell – all observable by some sort of national statistic.

The biggest historical fallacy in Grant’s book is his recounting, without correcting, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury for Warren Harding and Coolidge. Mellon was a big fan of Alexander Hamilton because Mellon mistakingly believed (as does Grant) that Hamilton was a small government and smaller debt person. FALSE! Hamilton was a BIG DEBT, FAT GOVERNMENT MAN. While Secretary of the Treasury and until 1803 Hamilton tried to weaken the Constitution (using, inter alia, the Alien and Sedition Acts); he supported a monarchial government and he proposed war with France. Mellon and Grant should read history, especially Grant who wrote John Adams: Party of One. Apparently Grant does not know that Adams said Hamilton was of the British Faction, which outraged the former Treasury Secretary.

Mentioning Mellon and Hamilton together detracts from anything Mellon did on his own, in response to events and circumstances before him. Mellon was not Hamilton’s clone. He was more akin to Jefferson and Madison’s Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin.  

THE FORGOTTEN DEPRESSION indicates how loose was national sentiment and communication. Something might happen in New York City and only be known in Montana two weeks later. Indeed, communications into the exchanges and markets were weak and inadequate. The experience of there being too many market orders and not enough people to process them was not realized until October 1929. Nothing in the country seemed connected. Entertainment was a nationalizing and unifying force, but little mentioned in the text. Automobiles and roads were just beginning. Dwight Eisenhower’s cross-country trip in the Twenties gave him the experience to propose the Interstate Highway System, begun when he was President. 

It was a disjointed United States. Many points are raised but not well put. Despite the change within America the experience that the people may do something without the government is a message that may be discerned, not fully or well, from this history. 

EMPIRE OF LIBERTY

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By Gordon Wood

The chapters and passages in Empire of Liberty about unpolitical, business affairs, social events and participating individuals are the strongest: Education, the arts, society, sociologies and cultural anthropologies of business, and the general thinking of Americans and their temper and mood. On that score the book is invaluable.

Exposition about the government, politics and the men is flawed. I observe in one Amazon criticism, the commentator states the book is episodic. To describe business and social activities, arrangements and the men by episode can make an accurate presentation. The actions and the individuals are usually isolated from one another.

Telling of national politics and the men in episodes tells nothing, no story and little about the men and the issues that were changing. This approach weakens Empire. These men – Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington and others – knew one another well. They acted and reacted, playing games against strengths and weaknesses of the others. Madison excelled at the game playing. He set things up, stepped back and watched.

He may have been the Father of the Constitution, and the Father of American Politics and the Father of the Bill of Rights, but for eight years 1815-1823, there was little or no political opposition in the United States. That was Madison.

All historians, political scientists and others rely on Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention, 1787. Yet in 1789 and after when Madison was in Congress guiding Revenue Bills though, establishing Cabinet offices, advancing the Bill of Rights, setting the Capital site, working on the debt, Empire inaccurately describes the proceedings and a culminating result in the Grand Compromise of 1790. No one believes or relies on Madison. Empire is remiss in this omission.

Consider corporations [Charters of Incorporation], an issue of 1791. The American colonial experience was the king’s granting charters, thereby setting up monopolies. The East India Company of Tea Party fame was one such entity. Americans disfavored corporations. When Madison proposed during the Constitutional Convention to give Congress the power to grant charters(1787), it was rejected.

Empire presents the impression that charters of incorporation were well know and working in America. Its view is anachronistic, using law and facts of the 1880s. Two excellent attorneys/justices of the early Republic, James Wilson and John Marshall, dismissed the business form in the 1790s. A real go at incorporation was made by John Jacob Astor in 1807; it does not resemble anything presented in Empire. (See David Lavender, Fist In The Wilderness) [Note Abraham Lincoln studying law in Illinois during the 1830s found the corporate form new and interesting,
(David Herbert Donald, Lincoln)]

Note in Empire the text relies on the Dartmouth case (1819), 30 years after the first Congress. Chief Justice Marshall wrote the opinion but did not discuss the power to incorporate, or who had it. He interpreted the law, documents and contracts, and the Constitution.

Other errors in Empire suggest the author did not research and write the text, or he was exceedingly careless.
Page 446. George Mason, according to Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention, 1787, said almost nothing during debates. He did not favor the Council of Revision; James Wilson and James Madison vociferously supported this issue and suffered repeated defeats. George Mason wanted a Council of the Executive like the one existing in Virginia, to control the Governor. Mason had written the Virginia Constitution. At the national level such a Council would control the President.
After William Haller’s books about Puritanism, no historian should ever call anyone in New England a Calvinist, a European term. In Empire the text does. However, the text reveals Presbyterians and Independents (Cromwell’s sect) in the Dartmouth case. (Pilgrims were separatists.) Almost everyone else in the settling of New England was an Independent, to become known in the eighteenth century as Congregationalists.
Misquotes misrepresent Jefferson and Madison’s opinions of the Constitution. Empire uses early quotes. Both men evolved in their thinking, leaving earlier opinions, like Hamilton’s statements, historical additives and eccentricities. Indeed both Jefferson and Madison were willing to use precedent to sidestep Constitutional rigors. During the legislation and ratification of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), Rufus King wondered how they could change governmental power defined by the Constitution by using the Treaty Power. Jefferson and Madison merely used the same processes employed by the Federalists when they passed the Jay Treaty(1796). The same procedures were used at the end of the Mexican-American war (1848).
John Taylor of Caroline County (Virginia) is misrepresented. He is hardly the philosopher of the Republican Party. He had a father figure who lived close by, Edmund Pendleton, perhaps the best judge of the eighteenth century English world. Pendleton was known, respected and loved by everyone – Henry, Washington, Jefferson, Marshall. He was a confident of Madison’s. How prominent was Pendleton, other than being on Virginia’s highest court? In 1765 after it was discovered that John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, had embezzled public funds, mostly giving the money to prominent Virginians, Pendleton undertook the task of getting the money back. By 1803 the job was not complete; he died. He left the work to John Marshall. In 1798 Pendleton published in newspapers a letter critical of President Adams, his administration and the Federalists. No one came down the lane to arrest Pendleton for violation of the Sedition Act. This is all to say that at best, John Taylor was a puppet for the men (Pendleton and Madison) pulling the strings in the backroom.
It is anachronistic as Empire does to view “null and void” as Southerners did in 1830-1865. Jefferson’s draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, originally intended for North Carolina, was greatly changed by Wilson Cary Nicholas and the Kentucky Legislature. Jefferson proposed Committees of Correspondence in each state to communicate and to react to the Alien and Sedition Acts. (1798) What did Jefferson mean by “null and void?” He likely relied on the same definition used by that infamous radical/revolutionary, James Otis of Massachusetts (1764): “As the Acts of Parliament, An Act against the Constitution is void: An Act against natural Equity, it should be void; and if the Act of Parliament be made, in the very words of the Petition, it should be void.” The word, null, has no legal impact without its mate void.
P. 184. Empire praises Hamilton’s Pacificus essays, but they are difficult to defend. Facts deleted from Empire manifest Madison’s response (Helvidius Essays) destroyed Hamilton’s essays by citing The Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, against assertions Pacificus.

Other issues of error and misrepresentation appear in Empire. One chapter is a mundane discussion of points of Judicial Review, a power given the Courts by the sovereign. In the 1780s Massachusetts abolished slavery within the state by Judicial Review (opinion and judgment). In Virginia the Court of Blair, Wythe, and Pendleton accepted the power; it was taught in law courses. John Marshall grew up knowing it, read the Constitution and participated in the Virginia Convention (1788). He further discussed all legal issues with Madison and Pendleton and others and was influenced long before the opinions of Marbury vs. Madison and other cases.

Err in Empire of Liberty distorts the politics and the economics, and a complete view of the 1789-1815 period; each wrong has not been set forth. In Empire men of the Early Republic are unknown to one another. Legislation and proposals are isolated and presented as surprises, oddities and ineffective efforts to accomplish their purposes. No man was correct all the time, but the sense that Hamilton is correct, is wrong. e.g. He was instrumental in his party’s loss in the election of 1800, once again those facts being omitted from Empire.

A LONELY LIFE

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Betty Davis 1962

This autobiography is surprising for its unparalleled excellence and seeming honesty. Davis has represented her life in a well-written little book. She speaks well of everyone she worked with in film including industry rivals, Joan Crawford. She passes on providing long comments regarding Barbara Stanwyck.

Of course, the book tells about acting: stage, screen (silent – talkies), modeling, fame, being a glamour puss. Davis knew she was not the typical 1930s actress – beautiful, lanky or seductive but she was blonde. Davis suggests and I believe she rose on talent and merit alone. The more involved the part the better the performance – two years toward the beginning of her career, 1936 and 1939 Davis received Oscars for best actress. She was dedicated to excellent projects and to excellent performances. She ran into the buzz of the Warner Brothers demanding she do mediocre projects. That legal dispute ended in London before World War Two began for the Americans. Olivia de Havilland broke the studios’ system.

Her movies of the Forties and the early Fifties all had substance for her. She never mentions a western, but early on Bette Davis from New England was typecast as the Southern girl and the Southern lady. Motherhood, marriage and living reduced the number of films she was in. She was not always in Los Angeles but lived on the East Cost. She tells trying to be the best mother, when she wasn’t always around, her understanding of intimacy from work and from husbands, and the shortcomings in the men she encountered and those she eventually married. [The first was always at home but did not work at home and little out of it; the second died young; Gary Merrill, fellow actor, had work but did not like the comforts of a joint home.]

Bette Davis had help with children and with the house; she had capable assistants. Davis expresses gratitude. But she felt isolated from exchanging intimacy, touching, sensing another human being, and caring in full devotion. [Note in the text Davis describes these attributes as handled by a performing actor, but says they are not transitioned to or that acting did not fulfill the needs of a human being living in reality.] This distinction between acting and reality is how she conveys she was lonely, and hence the adjective in the book’s title.

Two remarkable chapters in the book are the first and the last. The first doubts whether anyone, including herself, should write an autobiography. Davis beats out the words in spades. The last chapter deals with the status of a successful woman, running into unsuitable men, earning more than most people, and handling fame, professionalism, being alone, and where all that leaves the woman: Her state of mind. It is an excellent description of explaining the world that might become more matriarchal. Sex alone changes nothing. Couples should be mates and their efforts should complement one another.

This is an excellent autobiography; it benefits from being short and well-thought out. Also, this autobiography became the first feminist tome of the modern era. The Feminine Mystique was published two years later in 1964. If Betty Friedan believed it was the problem that has no name, she was unacquainted with Bette Davis’ Autobiography.

MAIN STREET

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Sinclair Lewis

This worthwhile book has some flaws but many remembrances of times when human beings relied on one another. Trustworthiness, honesty and reliability had different meanings and importance in society. When human beings were apart, there was no communication. Telephone and telegraph lines could send messages but most news was one, two or three days late. Gossip slanted the news in town.

The novels establishes this complete setting in spades for a town, Gopher Prairie (3500 population). Town folk have nothing but one another to pick on and gossip about. The heroine, Carol, tries to remain apart from the settlement and its people, airing attitudes which town people attribute to her being city born and bred. Carol is married to home town boy who is the best doctor around.

Almost every limitation and opinion Carol has about the town is substantiated and correct. Her reactions to simplicities, ignorance and misguided loyalties are mostly justified. She is not always courteous, and not political. The Doctor’s position and stature protects his wife from her complete vilification. She wants the town and its people to improve – beautify the place, toss around a little architecture, and the citizens to uplift themselves with social and intellectual activities and conversation. She expresses much enthusiasm for her outside thinking.

There is a cheat in the story. Carol is not the woman she believes herself to be; she has enthusiasm but no skill, no talent and no education. She puts together a group for a play, but she has never directed; she’s never acted. She complains about hard-nosed church goers (as though going to church is the sin itself), yet she doesn’t go to church much herself. Her education is in librarianship but her efforts are a void there. Carol is not unlike any woman who complains about a new environment but lacks training and experience in psychology, sociology, history, politics rudimentary business, or any other practical discipline to do anything about the new place.

Carol wants people to be receptive to words, visions, poetry and music – anything to shift people from their stupor. What Carol faces is expressed well by Miles Franklin in My Brilliant Career: Sybil is confronted by her mother and the daughter responds (paraphrased), I wish I were born low with common desires. That I never learned. I never asked why. If I were born and lived like an idiot, I would never fear for lack of company. I would be among my people. Sybil’s mother believes her daughter is going to hell.

That attitude and adjusting to it is what Main Street is about. And Sinclair Lewis has Carol get through various scenarios: Attractive, artistic young man arrives in town; Carol befriends him. Town folk believe their love is hot and heavy. Nope, but after 150-200 pages, young man leaves. Carol later learns he is in New York City not Minneapolis; he’s changed his name and is acting in movies. An enlightened school teacher, fresh from the city, goes to a dance with a town ne’er do well, the son of a hard-nosed church goer. The son buys liquor and tries to assault the teacher repeatedly; she beats him off, repeatedly. The mother accuses teacher of corrupting her son. Everyone in town knows it’s a lie, but the teacher resigns rather than being fired. Carol loses a friend. She loses another friend when death takes his family.

Carol leaves Gopher Prairie and ends up during World War One working in Washington D.C. The War ends; she works for Women’s Suffrage. She has her son with her. Her husband at home remains steadfast and loyal to the marriage. Carol likes the work and independence, but there is a true grind: True work and effort result in uncertain accomplishments and outcomes. Life and work in Gopher Prairie and Washington D.C. are not that much different.

An older woman in the leadership of the Suffrage Movement befriends Carol, after meeting the husband. She gives the best advice about work in the public sector that I remember reading. The older woman believed Carol, a fine advocate and valued worker, does not have the correct mindset to ultimately succeed: Carol is sensitive and worried about criticism or strong feelings directed toward her. The woman says (paraphrased) You cannot be sensitive. Most people don’t know about the work I’m doing and whether it truly affects them at all, if they know about my efforts. When they hear of successful outcomes, they grumble. The older woman makes Gopher Prairie palpable. Indeed, when Carol returns home a few changes have been made and more are planned.

The power and force of the writing of conclusionary confrontations between characters (young man – Carol:Doctor) (school teacher: Carol:Prominent town’s people) (Suffrage: Carol:Older woman) surpass the issues of 1916-1920. Some of those events and words happen and are uttered today. Sinclair Lewis earned his money when he wrote and published Main Street.

SHERLOCK – Season 4

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This series has begun the slide into fantasy and surrealism. Points are blocked out and seemingly follow one another. But do the blocks make sense? A headline from Favorite Internet Site leads to Sherlock and Watson to follow a line; a note discarded in the Underground on the other side of London stirs them in other directions.

The cartoonish coincidences of blocks mock the whole Sherlock idiom. Most of Season 4 is taken up with the future crimes predicted by past bad guys, James Moriety, killed in Season 2. Note that a few years or more have passed by Season 4. The dead man has joined forces with Sherlock Holmes brilliant sister, who supposedly has not been released from confinement for 30 years.

According to the cartoon story she knows everything. She’s more brilliant than either of her brothers, although she is severely mentally retarded. She keeps that handicap in check while having her brothers jump through her hoops. Episode three of Season 4 is not good science fiction, science fantasy, detective fantasy, etc. It’s more like a pseudo-psycho story with gaps, and the audience is to fill in the blanks while trying to follow improbable actions: A cross between Survivor and Alien [the original].

The Sherlock Holmes idiom presents a man who is different from other human beings. Note that Sherlock is not in a different setting. In the settling that is known to the audience, what delights readers and viewers is Sherlock’s observations of the unknown and unnoticed. When Sherlock pursues criminals, he does not leave reality, the setting the audience is in. When using fantasy leaps, grand coincidences and changes of setting in SHERLOCK – Season 4, the Sherlock idiom is lost. [Robert Downey Jr. movies came close but did not cross this line.]

What the audiences and the writers lose? Nobody cares about Sherlock or how the crimes are solved. Most of the crimes are obvious {cereal (serial) killer}and solvable by the cops; Sherlock isn’t needed. SHERLOCK – Season 4 lost its strongest human being when Mary, John Watson’s wife, is unnecessarily killed. If the truth be known the original Terminator movie has more human beings in it (including Arnold) than SHERLOCK – Season 4.

WINCHELL

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Neal Gabler

Winchell was an entertainer, and primarily uninteresting. During the 1920s he came up in the newspaper world (columnist) and made most of his money and notoriety (not fame) in radio. Winchell never had the substance, education and discipline of an Edward R. Murrow or a William L. Shirer.

What Winchell had was gossip, “making smart chat,” initially about persons involved in Broadway plays and shows extending to Hollywood, New York City, crime, and into politics. A fact is found this biography telling about Winchell’s wife, June:
“She read novels, saw movies, listened to records and radio
programs for Walter and delivered her opinions, which then
became his opinions.” (p. 357)
Apparently Winchell great observer, critic and commentator did none of those things. He collected and organized gossip, having a string of runners whom he usually did not pay. Much of the slang he developed and used then does not live today.

Winchell had no background for what he was doing. He was an empty suit. At the end of his life he wrote an overlong autobiography (in manuscript) pulling no punches, punching down, kicking shins and elsewhere else. It is hinted, though, that therein Winchell told the truth.

The author quotes a member of the Smart Set: “If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow” that would help establish the decade’s tenor, “and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter in the least. What concerns me alone is myself and the interest of a few close friends. For all I care the rest of the world may go to hell at today’s sunset.”(p. 47) This book tells the relationships and activities of Walter Winchell and a few close associates and colleagues who lived in New York City and Washington D.C.

At the end of life Winchell was defeated and bitter. His family’s life had collapsed: A daughter had died when young; his wife (somewhat estranged) saw him a week or two a year; she died before him. A daughter with grandkids was unhappy and not productive. A son had committed suicide. For the final fifteen (15) years of life (60-75 years) his health was no good. All the while his professional career of gossip was disappearing. His was a name many knew, but he was from a profession and a time that no longer existed. He was a hanger-on, has-been, once-was.

From gossip around New York City in the 1920s, Winchell moved toward circles in Washington D.C. New York City might tolerate the fluff, insults and revelations. Almost everyone would not hold grudges. However, Winchell held grudges for years or decades to the point of being vile and evil. I had to rethink Ed. Sullivan who adamantly opposed Winchell for a quarter century. Sullivan was not intimidated. Unlike the person most Americans remember, Sullivan was very athletic when young. Winchell did not want to tangle with him.

The Washington D.C. world pegged Winchell, and held him to his words. He was initially anti-Nazi and against racial discrimination. He was on “the New Deal” team and opposed to conservative forces in the Democratic Party. He was B.F. F. with J. Eager Hoover – died two months apart in 1972.

Those persons and organizations presented forces and influences on Winchell that he could not handle and did not have the ability to dismiss. Personally, he was a raving lunatic when it came to his column; He mostly had the blessings of his sponsors of his radio broadcasters, but not his employers. Everyone liked the expanse of exposure and advertising Winchell provided, but there were no controls, no discipline, no education and no restraints on Walter Winchell. He was a master and manipulator of his world, gossip.

His failure to recognize and abide by limits, to observe times were achanging, and to be introspective brought failure. Josephine Baker entertained in New York City and dined at the Stork Club, owned by a good Oklahoma friend of Winchell. The unstated policy at the Club was no riffraff and no minorities; the place was for white snobs only. In the early 1950s Winchell was in the restaurant when Baker and her guests were served drinks but left for a movie premiere. Baker later was not served the dinner she ordered. Everyone wondered what Winchell thought. He did not explain the facts as he knew them and next say he was awaiting the results of the Civil Rights investigation. Instead, Winchell treated the incident like it was part of his column, an item of gossip where he did not have to take responsibility for missing or added facts. He tried to protect the Oklahoma friend and the Stork Club, although he disagreed with the policy. As the sides hardened, Winchell attacked Baker for several years. It is wrong to say Winchell was a racist, but it is right to say he was an idiot bordering on imbecility.

Winchell was anti-Communist, and once again he got caught up on the extremes of Washington D.C. and a national issue. Winchell backed Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn (whom he introduced to the Senator). The grand finale which Winchell did not perceive coming or realized while it happened on television, was followed by Winchell trying to protect McCarthy and slamming organizations and individuals as communist-oriented, leaning left and pink. In the 1960s Winchell still called John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy communists.

Would anyone ever believe Walter Winchell could be so uneducated, ignorant and thick? He never understood, When the horse is dead, get off. He had to opportunity (like Ed Sullivan) to make the transition to Television, but did not fully understand the medium. [This thinking came from a guy who was in vaudeville for a dozen years and never forgot stage work.] Apparently, his life was so perfect – none of it was – that he was incapable of change. A New York celebrity dined with Winchell at the Stork Club, and opined in his diary, “Winchell was a bore, a vanity of all vanities.”(p. 257) Late in life he got a press pass and observed the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention street riots. Like most reporters Winchell did not and could not know the full story, but he chose anyway.

The strength of this biography tells the life and times of the man, how he fit in and his methods of surviving. The surprising fact is that Winchell did not change. In the end he sought television exposure, a further failure of business opportunities accompanying bad health and a disintegrating family. The times of Walter Winchell are not as complete as they can be because primary sources are likely not yet opened or available.

If the biography has problems they are absence by inference. Winchell’s shortcomings. It is a New York City behavior revisited on the American people every week now. He was usually nonsensical and unmeritorious on the attack, always blundering through trivia; the points made were off-point, scattered and offensive. That was Winchell’s doing in his column and on the radio. And now Americans have to hear that sort of tripe, petty, crybaby stuff everyday.

Winchell was not a celebrity. He received no respect and no love during his lifetime and afterward. He did not deserve it. Winchell preyed upon people’s fears until the last decades of life when opponents began beating Winchell up with their words. Winchell was notorious, an outlaw to entertainment and to society, one of the sorts of figures today who get arrested before a concert tour as part of a publicity campaign.

A final point: The Burt Lancaster movie, Sweet Smell of Success, (1957) was representative of Winchell’s career and life. Winchell was the target. It is an ugly, dark movie and a classic. But His Girl Friday is also about Winchell. Gary Grant, editor, plays Winchell. The character and the target share a first name, Walter.