Tag Archives: wrtiing

FAT BOOKS

Posted on by

0

Non-Fiction: Read one, Jettison two.

This year I’ve bought or checked from the library three fat books. 

READ: Thomas Cromwell, Diamaid MacCulloch, presenting a detailed study of Henry VIII’s most competent and efficient advisor and Chancellor. From 1530-1540 Cromwell’s story as been hidden and marred behind the glow of persons who like Thomas More, chief proponent of the Church of Rome in England.  

Cromwell was an accomplished businessman whose excellent judgment and actions saved Britain from the upheavals centuries later which arrived in France and the remainder of Europe. He made Henry VIII the sole sovereign, and let institutions – Parliament, nobility, gentry, commerce, universities – begin whittling away the monarch’s power. Cromwell lost his head, but his family survived; 109 years later a relative, Oliver Cromwell, cut off the head of Charles II who wanted to restore Britain to an absolute monarchy and who conspired with foreign powers. 

This book is detailed to show that Cromwell was not only well-informed but also there not a person of significance whom Cromwell did not know, it seems. For literary persons there are passages in which Crowell recognizes the functionality and the efficiency of English as a language. He fostered learning in the language and its widespread use.

VALUE OF READING? Jefferson Davis, Felicity Allen, 570 pages, tells of the President of the Confederate States, 1861-1865, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of War and a soldier in the Mexican-American War. Except during the Civil War he was considered by peers as a competent manager of affairs.

Davis has all the deficits of a hate-spouting, fire-eating, slave-owning, ante-bellum Southerner, even after the South lost the war. (Grant took over one of his plantations around the Mississippi River in the middle of the War.) Davis could not compromise, he hated inferiors and intellectual superiors like Abraham Lincoln (also born in Kentucky), and he rode the crest of Southern Society until that was ended by the Civil War.

I gave the book, heavy lumber, and Jeff Davis 60 of 560 pages. Fortunately my cost was $1.00-2.00.

VALUE OF READING? None. The Day of Battle, Sicilian/Italian Campaigns, Rich Atkinson, Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy.

I read about the Sicilian campaign, about 170 pages. I had read a more detailed analyses of that Campaign. The only new fact I learned was Patton on two separate occasions, slapped two Americans in hospital tents. 

The Author, Rick Atkinson, gives a lot of gossipy facts that are not germane to the success of the American Army in Sicily. Attributed to Audie Murphy is the observation: “I’m a fugitive from the law of averages.” Those quotes are enjoyable and lend humanity to men fighting the battles.

Yet, many men were not quoted, or they did not survive. They were sacrificed. The Command structure was weak because Eisenhower was stupid and incompetent, along with Marshall and Eisenhower’s favorite inferiors. The plan for the Sicilian innovation was hastily made up; it was incomplete: Montgomery began fighting in the American sector without announcing what he was doing; he lengthened the fighting on Sicily two or three weeks, Atkinson admits. Note, from another source Montgomery always attacked the Germans with less than a division while the Americans were using complete divisions on the attack.

Sicily is an island, right? No one wondered how the Germans would leave Sicily. They all evacuated because Eisenhower and every advisor and lackey (British and American) in the planning never wondered what could happen to the Germans? Eisenhower did not want to use airpower to destroy port facilities or attack shipping. Those Germans were another 50,000 Germans to terrorize Italy and to contend with for the remaining two years of the War. 

Reading about the American performance in Italy is a waste. Everyone knows and knew, at the time, that the American Generalissimo Mark Clark, was one of the most inept Generals since George McClellan. But Clark was one of Eisenhower’s buddies. I refuse to read about one mistake after another. I note the Italian Campaign was the first time Japanese-Americans soldiers, once in American concentration camps, fought. Author-Atkinson does not mention Company 100 although heroism by those men was as professional and complete as in Division 442.

It is unlikely that Author-Atkinson will detail mistakes after mistakes by Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery in his third volume, the campaign against Germany following D-Day.

A World To Be Won,  Murray/Millet, in fewer words, gives more insight into strategic and tactic mistakes and successful plans than Atkinson seems capable of presenting.

 

A TRAVELLER IN ROMANCE

Posted on by

0

A TRAVELLER IN ROMANCE 

Somerset Maugham’s A Traveller in Romance discusses the nineteenth century novel: Style, subjects and topics, formats – all mostly apart from content. It makes for odd descriptions and overblown characters, and a lot of insignificant stuff that the twentieth century novelist dropped from manuscripts. 

Most nineteenth century connotations about the novel has lapsed or expired; there are adherents clinging to them today, wondering why the English language is moving from those expressions and disregarding their volumes. From what I inferred Ulysses and its structures based upon theology and doctrine from the Catholic Church is an expression of the Nineteenth Century. Reading Virginia Woofe, and many of her literary enthusiasts present lapses in truth, logic, reason, and anything to make her prolix novels comprehensible. 

From the other side of the literary world was a non-novelist who wrote the most splendid novels and terrific short stories: Youth and End of the Tether alone should make Joseph Conrad’s career. Every detail tells the story and builds without many literary artifacts derived from the Greeks, Romans, the Renaissance or from poetry. The stories define characters and actions. Hemingway does that in his more cryptic style. 

Maugham highly criticized Henry James – HORRORS! 

 The faults of English writing have always been diffuseness, verbosity, and in the novelists of my generation, anaemia. This anaemia..we owe largely to an American writer, Henry James. His influence on English fiction was enormous. Henry James never came to gripes with life. He was afraid of it, and knew it only as you might know what is going on in a busy street by looking out of an upstairs window. The problems that he examined with such scrupulous integrity were little social problems of no real significance. But such was his skill, such was his charm and such was the power of his personality that he led many of the better writers in England to turn their eyes away from the needs, passions and immortal longings of humanity to dwell on the trivial curiosities of sheltered gentlefolk.

  The verbosity of the English language…is due…to our love of words for their own sake, apart from the meaning they convey. (page 209)

Maugham’s comments about Herman Melville aroused my curiosity: “Good writing is a stylization of the common speech of the people. To my mind, the two great masters of prose the America has produced are Hawthorne and …Melville. Melville learned to write from his study of the great English stylists of the seventeenth century, and at his magnificent best he has a splendour, a majestic, resonant eloquence, that no modern writer has surpassed.” (page 209)

I remembered the antiquated style in Moby Dick. I reread. It is easy to recognize that book as an allegory, and once the reader keeps it in mind, neglect all else. Verbosity – why say in five words what can be said in twenty. Writers of English prose like to consider themselves as poets and sometimes playwrights. There are overblown passages. No one in English ever talks in the way that Melville has characters exchanging words. Thoughts of characters, the common person of the nineteenth century, did not consider Greek mythology or Biblical passages to consider, influence and control life, unless he was some egghead or bonehead living the simple life in the Massachusetts suburbs. But Thoreau did not think much of the Ancients – he was too busy counting tree rings.

Every early writer of English liked to consider themselves as poets. What is poetry, stylistically?

The best poetry is made up of nouns and their relationships with one another. Nouns are the medium. Nouns are the message. What is English prose, stylistically? The best prose depends on verbs. They make the language go; they take readers places. However, the longer the English sentence, the more likely readers will lose sight of the verb and lose their way, mired in words, prepositional phrases, wandering logic, roaming reason, dependent clauses with antecedents in independent clauses – before or after – four lines away, ample reliance on willing suspension of belief and exotic uses of grammar. Critics and others prize sentences, beautiful sentences – long and longer sentences. A modern English reader doesn’t give a hoot about sentences if they are unconnected to telling stories. Indeed, long and lengthy sentences lose most participants in conversation. 

While reading along the analogy in Moby Dick, a reader can avoid many nineteenth century pitfalls. Just know Moby Dick primarily tells about the United States, 1850. The whales are the North. The crew and Ahab (John C. Calhoun) are the South – the consummate power of hate. The ship is the nation.