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David Stacton–THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT, A Novel about John Wilkes Booth

Mar 26th, 2015 by

“An actor had no repose.  He did not even exist, unless he kept moving, and the nature of his own existence was something he had never been able to face, even in sleep.  So he had a discontinuous mind…in which nothing had either cause or consequence…The whole world was one unique event, himself, and everything [in it] a play.”—John Wilkes Booth, on Good Friday, just before the assassination.

In 1963, author David Stacton was listed by Time Magazine as one of “the best American novelists of the preceding decade,” his name ensconced among luminaries like John Updike, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, and Bernard Malamud.  Stacton’s novel of The Judges of the Secret Court, the story of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath, had been published to great acclaim in 1961, when the author was only thirty-seven.  Only thirty-nine when he appeared on Time’s list, Stacton had been writing serious literary and historical fiction under the name of David Stacton for more than a decade, alternating his literary novels with potboilers and pulp fiction, many of them published under the name of Bud Clifton. His well-researched historical novels ranged in subject matter and time from early Egypt under Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti to the career of Wendell Wilkie in the early 1940s, while his potboilers ran the gamut from cowboy novels to murder mysteries set in the present.  A prolific author, whose Wikipedia page lists an incredible twenty-three novels published in the eleven years between 1954 and 1965, Stacton has now, sadly, almost completely vanished from American literary history.   He died in 1968, at the age of forty-four, when he was just getting started.

David Stacton

Now republished by New York Review Books Classics, Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court, the only one of his novels currently in print, provides readers with a sense of what they have been missing, unknowingly, all these years – and this novel is a wonder.  Filled with real characters acting like real people as they deal with the aftermath of the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, and the ensuing tumult, the novel shows through its characters the continuing resentments between the North and the South, as it recreates all the tensions and the growing horror of the times.   Several characters share their personal points of view to give verisimilitude throughout the novel.  When, just six days after Lee’s surrender, on Good Friday, twenty-seven-year-old southerner John Wilkes Booth shoots President Abraham Lincoln at Ford Theatre and escapes into the countryside, trying to reach the South where he expects to be celebrated as a hero, the reader understands why. The author provides much background for Booth, from an acting family, whose own father was mentally unbalanced – and, not incidentally, a bigamist.  Wilkes Booth’s older brother Edwin, the most successful actor in the family, had been the primary support of the family, and Wilkes was clearly jealous.  The author spends little time on the assassination itself, disposing with it in two sentences: “Opening the door, [Booth] slipped inside, took out his derringer, cocked it, and shot the President.  The time was 10:15.”

John Wilkes Booth

Part II begins as Booth, with broken bones in his leg after his leap from Lincoln’s box to the stage, works his way through the countryside, trying to reach the South.  As the limits of his plans become obvious, even to him, he reminds himself that he is an actor, and he must not be underestimated, no matter how injured or ill he becomes.  Everyone with whom he has any contact, no matter how innocent s/he may be, however, becomes a potential co-conspirator. The newly sworn President, Andrew Johnson, tries to maintain order during the emergency, but he must jockey for power with an unusually aggressive Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, whom we watch as he immediately establishes martial law, giving himself unprecedented powers to pursue the murderer and anyone he considers to be a “co-conspirator,” no matter how innocent.  As the search for Booth evolves and continues, the author develops all the characters and their backgrounds, leading to Booth’s final realization that he is trapped. “He was going to die.  This was not a performance… Did they not realize it had all been a game?”

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, his most famous role.

As Part III begins, Edwin Booth, Wilkes’s brother in New York, realizes that “it was the poor people down in Washington who had to bear the brunt of [the] guilt…Even if innocent, even if spared mere human malice, they were still caught up in the inexorable malice of events…It was less a process than a parable.  He could only watch.”  Stanton’s craven machinations, his determination to have show trials, to deny habeas corpus ( a tactic permitted during military emergencies), and to have military trials instead of civilian trials, all affect the reader’s understanding of what has happened.   The novel becomes more and more compressed and more involving as the action comes to its conclusion. Part IV is a moving commentary on military justice and the power of those in control.

The trials of several well-developed characters, innocently caught up in the swirl of events, people who have no real evidence against them and who would undoubtedly have been declared innocent if civilian trials were held, become victims of Stanton’s ambition, and readers would have to have a heart of stone not to respond to the predicament of a boarding house owner who is unwittingly caught in the action.

Ford Theatre, Presidential Box

Ultimately, the reader is left with the thought that in this amazingly vivid saga of the aftermath of President Abraham Lincoln’s death, many of the real people involved were playing roles.  The author himself had changed his name legally from Arthur Lionel Kingsley Evans to David Derek Stacton, for reasons unknown.  John Wilkes Booth regarded himself as a hero, in the dramatic sense, after his assassination of the President, and was surprised when there was no great, climactic outpouring of support for him.  President Andrew Johnson inspires sympathy, especially when the extent of Sec. of War Edwin Stanton’s machinations are revealed, and Stanton ultimately becomes even more of a villain than Wilkes Booth in this real-life drama.  The author is careful to keep his well-researched details accurate, and the only “fudging” of the facts that I found came with Edwin Booth’s desire to keep a portrait of John Wilkes Booth by John Singer Sargent in his apartment after Wilkes’s death.  The only portrait I have found of Booth by John Singer Sargent is actually a portrait of Edwin Booth himself, not of his brother.  Sensitive and well-researched, this is a do-not-miss historical novel.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://richard-t-kelly.blogspot.com/

John Wilkes Booth’s photo is from http://www.nytimes.com

Edwin Booth, as Hamlet, is shown on http://en.wikipedia.org

The Ford Theatre, Presidential Box,  appears on http://www.nytimes.com

JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT: A Novel About John Wilkes Booth
REVIEW. Book Club Suggestions, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues, US Regional, John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln
Written by: David Stacton
Published by: NYRB Classics
Edition: Reprint
ISBN: 978-1590174524
Available in: Ebook Paperback

Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues, US Regional | No Comments »

Mario Vargas Llosa–THE DISCREET HERO

Mar 23rd, 2015 by

Note: Mario Vargas Llosa is WINNER of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1994, WINNER of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004, and WINNER of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

“The earth is round, not square.  Accept it and don’t try to straighten out the crooked world we live in.  The gang [of extortionists] is very powerful, it’s infiltrated everywhere, beginning with the government and the judges.  You’re really naïve to trust the police.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the cops were in on it.  Don’t you know what country we’re living in, compadre?”—Colorado Vignolo, to his friend, Felicito Yanaque.

In his most recent novel, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa returns to a simpler narrative style and plot scheme from what he used in his previous, more complex biographical novel, The Dream of the Celt, the story of Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, set in the Congo, the Peruvian Amazon, and Ireland in 1916.  In The Discreet Hero, by contrast, the author writes for the sake of the story itself and the lessons it provides – an old-fashioned story in that we read it to find out what happens to Peruvian characters with whom we can identify as they act like ordinary people solving problems which reflect the reality of their Peruvian settings – in this case, Piura, a village in the northwest corner of Peru, and Lima, Peru’s capital and major city.  The “story” here is actually two parallel narratives, running in alternating chapters and involving two characters, each of whom tries to be “discreet.”  In the first plot, Felicito Yanaque, the owner of the Narihuala Transport Company, manages fleets of buses and trucks which operate throughout Piura, a village near the Pacific Ocean in the northwest corner of Peru.  Felicito, fifty-five, takes great pride in his work, always remembering his father’s dying words: “Never let anybody walk all over you, son.  This advice is the only inheritance you’ll have.”  When he leaves for the office on this most important day, however, he finds, attached to his door, a letter demanding $500 a month for protection against “being ravaged and vandalized by resentful, envious people and other undesirable types.”  He must, of course, be discreet about the message.

At the same time, in Lima, Don Ismael Carrera, the owner of an insurance company, is meeting with Rigoberto, his assistant, who wants to retire three years ahead of schedule.  Ismael has a particular reason to want to delay Rigoberto’s retirement.  His two sons, twins, have not inherited the abilities of their father or grandfather and have lived lives of complete dissolution, involving car crashes, rape, debts in Ismael’s name, forged receipts, and even the emptying of the petty cash box. Ismael has paid off the sons and now plans to disinherit them.  The person who will inherit everything will be the woman Ismael unexpectedly plans to marry, at the age of almost eighty.  The bride is thirty-eight years younger.  Rigoberto will be a key to making all this possible, as Ismael needs a witness to the marriage after which he plans to take a long honeymoon to an unknown destination, and have Rigoberto manage the company and his sons – the hyenas – when they discover what their father has done.  He, too, must, of course, be discreet.

Photo of Piura, monument of La Pola, given to the city in 1870 by President Jose Balta

Vargas Llosa, author of seventeen novels and now approaching age eighty himself, is clearly having great fun as he develops these two story lines, and at times the stories alternate happily between farce and soap opera as complications arise, and unexpected twists and turns send one or both of the plots careening. Eventually, coincidences bring the two plot lines together.  Though the emphasis is on plot, almost exclusively,  the author does bring in issues of marriage, the “comfort” of affairs outside of marriage, and occasionally even love.  He spends significant time illustrating issues of parents and children – from Ismael’s “hyena” sons, to Felicito’s questions regarding whether one of “his” sons is really his, and to issues yet another character, Rigoberto, has with his son Fonchito, who is very bright – and maybe perfect.  Fonchito, however, is conversing regularly with a “devil” whom no one else can see. The moral complexities of living in a culture in which bribery and extortion are common practice add to the difficulties of survival, and the reappearance of Sgt. Lituma (from Death in the Andes [1993] and Who Killed Palomino Molero [1986]), and Captain Silva (from Who Killed Palomino Molero) adds to the fun for fans of Vargas Llosa’s work.  For those who understand Spanish, the discovery that the regional police chief is referred to as Colonel Rascachucha says it all.  (This name is translated within the novel, but I won’t spoil the fun by telling here.)

Lima, Peru.

Class differences also play a strong role in this plot.  Mabel, Felicito’s lady love, who has been set up in her own place, is pointedly described as “not a whore,” but a “call girl,” with her own house and certain privileged clients.  When Ismael decides to marry someone “below” him, not only is the world surprised, but so, too, is the prospective bride.  In the other plot,  Felicito has done the “honorable” thing as a young man by marrying his seventeen-year-old girlfriend who tells him that she is pregnant, but a few years later, he has  “found love” elsewhere, while remaining married; his wife tolerates the arrangement.  Ismael’s twin sons have managed to stay out of the newspaper only because the family has paid off reporters, and no one outside the family knows that one of them has run over a pedestrian in Miami, then fled to Lima while out on bail, something that a less wealthy son would have been unable to do.

Piura is in the upper NW corner. Lima is in the center, on the coast. Double click to enlarge.

Felicito’s decisions to challenge the extortionists make him a hero in Piura, but when he must deal with a bombing and a kidnapping, the complications raised by the extortionists are compounded.  His “exemplary” behavior, however, does provide him with an acceptance into the Club Grau, a group he’d given up on joining because he “wasn’t white.”  Vargas Llosa develops all the complications – then, unexpectedly and coincidentally, combines the two plot lines, bringing Piura and Lima together and happily resolving the problems.  The last scene, in which Rigoberto, his wife, and his son take off for a European vacation provides the final resolution and the final laugh in this novel written for the pure pleasure of writing it, an entertainment on all levels for a reader looking for pure enjoyment, a rare commodity these days.

Also by Vargas Llosa:  THE BAD GIRL, DEATH IN THE ANDES,    THE DREAM OF THE CELT, THE FEAST OF THE GOAT

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://portal.uc3m.es/

Piura, a photo by Edgar Peru, is found here:  http://www.panoramio.com/

Lima, on the Pacific Coast, is shown here:  http://www.itascacg.com/

The map of Peru appears on http://www.infoplease.com/ Double click to enlarge.

THE DISCREET HERO
REVIEW. Peru. Literary, Social and Political Issues, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Nobel Prize for Literature
Written by: Mario Vargas Llosa
Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 03/10/2015
ISBN: 978-0374146740
Available in: Ebook Paperback Hardcover

Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Peru, Social and Political Issues | No Comments »

Colin Barrett-YOUNG SKINS

Mar 17th, 2015 by

Note: This book was WINNER of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, WINNER of the Guardian First Book Award, and WINNER of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.”

“My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk.  A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits. The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near….I am young, and the young do not number many here…”

Colin Barrett, a thirty-two-year-old author from rural Knockmore in County Mayo, Ireland, sets his six stories and one novella in the fictional town of Glasbeigh, located near the Atlantic and “the gnarled jawbone of the coastline,” with its gulls.  In many ways Glasbeigh’s location resembles that of his own childhood in Knockmore, and his stories of the “young skins” who have been born and bred and probably will always live in Glasbeigh not only ring true but come alive in surprising and often darkly humorous and ironic ways.  His main characters, young men in five of the stories, and only slightly older in the last two, have the same urges and needs of all young people, but these youth are limited in their outlooks by the paucity of opportunities, and while some may have dreams, they are most often small dreams which they hope to achieve within their current constricted lives.

“The Clancy Kid,” which establishes the tone and the themes for the entire collection, opens in a pub, where the speaker, Jimmy Devereux is sitting with his friend Tug, whose real name is Brendan.  “Brendan” was the name of Tug’s older brother who died as a thirteen-month-old toddler.  As a result, Tug “was bred in a family warped by grief, and was himself a manner of ghosteen,” never able to shed the vision in the cemetery of “the lonely blue slab with his own name etched upon it in fissured gilt.” Overweight and sexually innocent, he keeps his hair almost shaved, and dresses in imitation of Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.”  Here the author’s use of descriptive detail to convey important themes and ideas is obvious, and when the reader then learns more about Jimmy Devereux, Tug’s friend, the conflict that will erupt in the story becomes clear.

Knockmore, the rural town where the author grew up. Knockmore means "Big Hill."

Jimmy Devereux claims to have an off-and-on girlfriend even though someone else got her pregnant last year.  She had the baby, just after Christmas.  Jimmy has recently run into her again at a club, which included girls with “explosively frizzed hair” and “donkeynecked boys…who wear their shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbows, as if at any moment they might be called upon to pull a calf out of a cow’s steaming nethers.”  Now she has appeared yet again, “and if it wasn’t for the acne scars worming across her cheeks she’d be a beauty, my Marlene.”  She is accompanied by Mark Cuculann, the father of her baby. When Jimmy and Tug depart the pub, they are about to deal with two very different situations, their actions showing how they both think and act under completely different circumstances, which lead the reader to understand them and see them both as human, despite their personal limitations. The story ends on a melancholy note which stresses all that is missing in their lives and contrasts them with children who still have chances to live a life of the imagination – or not.

In "Bait" Matteen has real skill as a pool hustler.

This perfect introduction to the collection shows the first of many characters dealing (or not dealing) with their lives and their environment on their own.  Most are, by nature, limited in their abilities to handle problems.  “Bait,” the second story, shows another pair of characters, the protective and thoughtful Teddy and his cousin Matteen.  Both are also lonely and looking for love.  As in the case of Jimmy and Tug, one character, Teddy, is the “minder” of the other, less thoughtful one.  Here, however, the characters’ roles change from what we see in “The Clancy Kid,” moving in ironic directions.  Though Matteen has a real skill as a pool hustler and is able to earn money, the girls they meet have devious and nasty plans of their own.  “The Moon,” a story about Val, a bouncer, and his right-hand man Boris, shows them as, through no fault of their own, they also come under the spell of women who have more insights into the world than they do.

In "The Moon," Val and Boris take Martina and Joan to the Mule River, shown here, to enjoy the scenery. Photo by David Medcalf, licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons License. See credits at end.

Fate and the accidents which occur as a result of a character’s choices, misjudgments, and lack of insight into his own limitations create unexpected twists and turns to the story lines, often leading the reader to feel sympathetic toward these characters even when they bring on their own disasters.  The story of Bat, a worker at a Maxol service station, in  “Stand Your Skin,” is the saddest of the collection, a man who by complete accident becomes a loner, hiding his face behind a motorcycle helmet and thick waist-length hair.  “Calm with Horses,” a ninety-page novella, has two main characters, Dympna and Arm, both minor dealers in marijuana, who get their supply from Dympna’s uncles,  who live in the most rural of areas and grow a particularly potent strain of marijuana in their basement.  All of the characters live on the edge, physically and emotionally. Here the reader gets to know Dympna and Arm as they act violently sometimes and with great sensitivity at other times – in Arm’s case, acting lovingly with his disabled son.  Again, it is an act of fate – or miscommunication – which leads to disaster, and in this story, horrific violence.  The final two stories, “Diamonds” and “Kindly Forget My Existence” focus on somewhat “older” people, in their thirties and forties, as they face crises in which they show their inability to deal with their lives’ changes.

In "Calm with Horses," Dympna's two uncles grow a potent variety of marijuana in the basement of their house, and Dympna and others are dealers.

Writers who straddle the line between tragedy and comedy seem to live in greater numbers in Ireland than anywhere else that I know of, and it is rare that I become so enchanted by an author’s unique style and insights into big themes that I can hardly wait to get to the next story.  The novella, “Calm with Horses,” for all its violence, never abandons character, and the final story, about two men trying to decide whether to attend the funeral of a woman they both loved provides an appropriate ending and vision of hope.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.irishtimes.com/

Knockmore, meaning “Big Hill,” is where the author grew up.  See:  http://mountainviews.ie/

Matteen had skill as a pool player and regularly earned money at the pubs.  The photo is from http://sfxplorer.com/

In “The Moon,” Val and Boris take Martina and Joan to the Mule River to enjoy the scenery.  http://www.geograph.org.uk/ © Copyright David Medcalf, licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Dympna and Arm become dealers for Dympna’s uncles, Hector and Paudi Devers, who grew a potent variety of marijuana in the basement of their rural house. https://valetudocafe.wordpress.com/

Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, Psychological study | No Comments »

Ernst Haffner–BLOOD BROTHERS

Mar 13th, 2015 by

“The eight boys, [Blood Brothers], have spent the whole endless winter’s night on the street.  As so many times before: homeless.  Always trudging on, always on the go.  No chance of any shut-eye in this weather.  Day-old remnants of snow, the occasional thin shower of sleet, everything nicely shaken up by a wind that makes the boys’ teeth chatter with cold.  Eight boys, aged sixteen to nineteen…on their own.”

At last, a novel recently discovered in Germany and written in 1932, at the end of the Weimar Republic, presents a picture of Berlin as it really was, not as it appears in the sterilized portraits released by Hitler’s army and staff beginning a year later, when Hitler officially came to power.  Like many other cities recovering from a Depression, Berlin did have its seamy underside, along with the poor, the homeless, the street gangs, and the petty criminals dependent on pickpocketing and small thefts in order to eat.  Poor women, of course, had their own resources, with prostitution and the bar scene playing a big role in their lives.  Whole sections of the city were occupied at night by the wandering homeless, including young teens. The best that many of them could hope for, as they looked for a place to keep warm, seemed to be the temporary hostels, filled with smoke and the stench of unwashed bodies, where they could stay, and perhaps get some sleep, during brutally cold days.

Contributing books for a book burning: From the German Federal Archives: bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B0527-0001-776.

Ernst Haffner, the journalist who wrote this novel, uses a collection of individualized vignettes, connected by the overriding story of two of the young men, Ludwig and Willi, to show Berlin as it really was.  Little is known about Haffner.  The city registry shows that he was a resident in Berlin between 1925 and 1933,* and some speculate that Haffner, because of his insights into the nature of the lives of the homeless, especially the young homeless, might have been a social worker.  At the time of the book’s publication in 1932, it attracted considerable notice in Germany for its honesty and its insights, and it was well reviewed in German newspapers, but it was outlawed by Hitler the following year, and virtually every copy was burned in the Nazi book-burnings.  Haffner, according to the records, was summoned by the culture ministry of the Third Reich in 1938, after which he disappeared, with no record of his residence anywhere in Germany after that.  Not a single photograph of Haffner remains.*  Somehow at least one copy of the book survived, however, and in 2013, it was republished in Germany and released at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now translated into English by the esteemed translator Michael Hofmann and published by Other Press, it fills out the picture of life in Berlin by incorporating the lives on its fringes – its poor, its jobless, its gangs, and its homeless.

Cold, homeless boy, much like those in this novel, a photo which transcends time and place.

The novel opens on a cold winter day as eight boys, who consider themselves “Blood Brothers,” are waiting at a welfare office where it is warm.  They have been up all night, out in the cold, and as the number of people waiting there is large, they can sleep relatively undisturbed without being noticed.  When twenty-one-year-old Jonny, one of the “brothers,” arrives with cigarettes, the group, awakened, knows that he has money and that they will get food that day.  Leaving in groups of three so that they do not attract attention from the authorities, they go out to find breakfast at a bar that is as close as they can get to “home.”  There they can get broth, liver sausage, rolls, and potato pancakes, and then smoke and snooze some more.  Another bar serves for the evening meal.  On this particular night, Jonny has arranged for them to spend the night in a dark warehouse, as long as they are out before the work crew arrives the next morning.  The author’s descriptions are depressingly specific – the crates, the straw they sleep on, a boy’s jacket used as a pillow, the mice, and the uncertainty each feels as no one knows what tomorrow will bring.  Their interdependence is their only way of surviving.

Boy races to the train, a way of escape.

Gradually, the reader comes to know some of the characters individually, especially Ludwig and Willi, who become the main characters, their stories alternating with those of the majority of the gang.   Willi has escaped from “the institution,” and the unsophisticated Ludwig has fallen for an old scam and ends up in jail, gulled by an older man.  The description of how Willi rides the rails to Berlin by hanging on the axle under a train car carries the ring of truth, and shows how the young and naïve learn from older, more expert homeless youth who share their knowledge.  Ludwig, on remand in prison for something that was the result of his gullibility, receives a package of treats from the gang, something that makes his predicament more bearable.

Ludwig’s time in prison, which seems interminable, changes his perspective.

In a scene that illustrates the conflicts these young people have, Ludwig is transported to serve his short prison term by a kind man who treats him as a human being, someone who is not interested in publicly humiliating him.  Ludwig is grateful, but when he gets the chance to escape, he is so desperate he cannot resist hurting the only official who has ever been kind to him.  When he later runs into Jonny by accident, his pleasure at returning to the gang and his appreciation of the gifts they have for him are immeasurable.  Later, his accidental meeting with Willi affects his future life.  They both feel that the gang is changing and becoming more preoccupied with the unearned fruits of their labors as pickpockets of the poor and as petty criminals, and Ludwig and Willi decide to look for a new direction.  Their way is not smooth, and many difficulties arise as the novel continues.  Both make mistakes.

Bluts-Bruder, the German edition.

The fates of other individualized characters from the gang show the fickle nature of fate and the difficulties which groups acting as gangs can create from within: The influence of peer pressure and group action leads to a loss of individuality and the loss of a sense of responsibility for the actions of the group.  The importance of having the right papers and the limitations placed on those who do not have them are also problems for the boys.  Ultimately, Haffner creates a full picture of about dozen young people and the lives that they have chosen or had thrust upon them as a result of their poverty and lack of opportunity.  His depiction of this sector of Berlin’s lower life is real, clear, and uncompromising, far different from all the Nazi photos of clean-cut, well-pressed blonde youth celebrating the arrival of Hitler.  An important and realistic book that adds to the true picture of life in Germany in the early 1930s.

* This information comes from  http://www.nytimes.com/,
an article by William Grimes

Book-burning, 1933: from the German Federal Archives: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / CC-BY-SA, from May 11, 1933

Photos, in order: Collecting books for a book burning:  From the German Federal Archives: bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B0527-0001-776. http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de

Cold, homeless boy, much like the boys in this novel, a photo that wrings the heart:  http://www.travel-studies.com Photo from 1935.

Racing for the train: http://www.travel-studies.com/

Hands in jail:  http://akarpinski.hubpages.com Source:  http://www.eji.org/

Book-burning: from the German Federal Archives:  Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / CC-BY-SA, from May 11, 1933. http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/

ARC: Other Press

BLOOD BROTHERS
REVIEW. Book Club Suggestions, Germany, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues
Written by: Ernst Haffner
Published by: Other Press
Edition: Michael Hofmann, translator
ISBN: 978-1590517048
Available in: Ebook Paperback

Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Germany, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues | No Comments »

Helen Macdonald–H IS FOR HAWK

Mar 9th, 2015 by

Note: This book was WINNER of the Costa Award for Biography in 2014, and was also WINNER of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction award.

“Walking in a foggy ride at dawn, you turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target.  A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more.  Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”

Devastated by the sudden death of her father when she is in her early thirties, author Helen Macdonald finds herself lost, overwhelmed, and dealing with a “kind of madness.”  She and her father were especially close.  They had loved walking for hours in the woods of Hampshire, where she had always loved seeing the falcons and hawks.   Her parents, sympathetic, had even allowed her, after much pleading, to accompany a group of falconers, hunting with goshawks in the field, when she was only twelve. As her parents drove off, however, she was suddenly terrified, “Not of the hawks: of the falconers.  I’d never met men like these.  They wore tweed and offered me snuff.”  She “pushed her fears aside in favor of silence, because it was the first time [she]’d ever seen falconry in the field.”  Within the first twenty minutes, she sees an enormous goshawk kill a pheasant, an event which draws her to the site of the kill, where she picks six coppery feathers free, holding them in her fist “as if I were holding a moment tight inside itself.  It was death I had seen.  I wasn’t sure what it had made me feel.”

Now, much older, she understands. Following her father’s death, she says, “I felt odd: overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with something like microwaved aluminum foil, dinted, charred, and shorting with sparks.”  Her instinctive reaction is to go to “the broken forest” to see the goshawks, “things of death and difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets.”  Though Macdonald had eventually owned and trained smaller falcons, and had once worked at a bird-of-prey center on the border of England and Wales, she had never before been interested in owning or training a goshawk.  Now, in the summer after her father’s death, however, she begins to think that owning one is inevitable.  The secret to a well-behaved goshawk, she has read, was to “give it the opportunity to kill.  Kill as much as possible… murder sorts them out.”  Angry and upset and at loose ends, she feels a kind of kinship with the goshawk as a species, and since she has “no partner, no children, no home and no nine-to-five job,” she decides to use the summer to train the ultimate hawk, the wild goshawk, a job which will make her face her fears and her talents in new ways.

Mabel.  Photo by the author.

Ignoring the advice of an old friend, who told her “Don’t do it.  It’ll drive you mad,” Macdonald acquires Mabel, a young goshawk from Northern Ireland, then sets out to train her, the goal being to let her eventually fly free to hunt, then return to Macdonald’s gloved hand.  Her guide in this task is author T. H. White, who, in addition to writing The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King, also wrote The Goshawk, a book about his own attempts to train a goshawk in the early 1930s.  Macdonald tells the story of White in parallel with her own.  Both authors were suffering from emotional problems when they were working with goshawks, but both were devoted to the task, a huge undertaking involving near seclusion with a fierce and independent animal requiring full-time attention.  Training the goshawk takes on symbolic meaning for both authors, with success never guaranteed.  In alternating narratives of her own discoveries and those of White, Macdonald describes the taming and training –  the “manning” of the hawk – eventually going in her own direction in the belief that White made some serious errors with Gos, his hawk.

T. H. White’s book, written in the early 1930s, was not published until 1951.

In the vocabulary of the “austringer,” a person who trains hawks, Macdonald explains the equipment she uses – jesses, anklets, creances, hoods, and bells for the hawk – and  each milestone is a cause for celebration, not just for the author but for the reader.  Comparisons in the waiting time for the hawk to obey are made with the waiting times for the perfect photograph, which Macdonald says her father endured as a professional photographer. Psychological transference and projection between trainer and goshawk become big issues, and for much of the book Macdonald is unsure whether she is the trainer or the one being trained. She says that “there was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning [to hand]” and admits that “I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand.” Her identification with Mabel during training becomes almost total.  “Out with the hawk, I didn’t need a home.  Out there I forgot I was human at all.”

Hunting with Mabel, however, teaches Macdonald some important lessons, climactic moments here.  “Hunting…took me to the very edge of being human…yet every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back from being an animal into being a human again.”  Mortality and death, constant presences in hunting, create, for Macdonald, a sadness for the mortality of the animals killed by Mabel.  Eventually, she learns that “The wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

Goshawk capturing prey over water.

During her eulogy at the memorial service for her father, in late summer, she finally realizes that the two hundred people who listen to her share her feelings – that she is not as alone as she has felt – and she concludes that “falconry is a balancing act between wild and tame, not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the falconer.”

In this brilliantly described and vivid depiction of the meaning of life and death, Macdonald connects with readers in unique ways, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who will not be changed by this incredibly moving work:  “In my time with Mabel, I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known…what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.”

Hawk with jesses – and bell.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.independent.co.uk/

Mabel, a photo by the author, is shown on http://www.theguardian.com/

This edition of the T. H.White book of The Goshawk was found on https://stancarey.wordpress.com/

The goshawk capturing prey over water is from http://www.desk7.net

The goshawk with jesses on its legs appears on http://www.crownfalconry.co.uk

H IS FOR HAWK
REVIEW. Autobiography/Memoir, Book Club Suggestions, England, Literary, Psychological study
Written by: Helen Macdonald
Published by: Grove Press
Date Published: 03/03/2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Available in: Ebook Paperback Hardcover

Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Autobiography/Memoir, Book Club Suggestions, England, Literary, Psychological study | No Comments »

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