Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited: The Secular and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
© 1945 Evelyn Waugh
350 pages

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

Some time ago after finishing off a season of Downton Abby, I queried Goodreads:  is there a Downtonesque book?  Its readers recommended, among others, Bridehead Revisited. After learning about it, of course,   I seemed to hear it mentioned incessantly and decided to give it a try.  Glad am I that I did, because Brideshead proved to be one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever taken on.  It is a sad, wistful novel, one man’s recollection of his time spent with a noble family in decline, provoked when his battalion is ordered to take over their home during the Second World War and he realizes he has tread this ground before.   Brideshead is a love story, but without the kind of resolution expected of one. The tale is saturated in beauty; characters linger over rich meals and fragrant brandies,   and bare their souls in sunlit salons and gilded smoking rooms.  The sensuality would please a Dorian Gray.  It helps that the narrator, Charles Ryder, is a painter of architecture and relishes it for its timelessness, a created work that combines the efforts of generations.

Beauty was the main attraction of Ryder to the Marchmain family, exhibited strikingly in the person of Ryder’s friend Sebastian and his sister Julia.  The Marchmains are the main source of interest to the reader, beside the writing, for Ryder himself has only a superficial presence.  Religion permeates the book, as the Marchmains are Catholics; their religion creates an identity for them as ‘others’ within England.  The religious sense is innate, not outwardly pious. The main characters describe one another as half-heathen,  even at their most cavalier there is a seriousness to their foibles, a sense of wonder. They may act merrily cynical, but there  are convictions at the root of their characters that have the ability to produce fruit at the right moment.  A sense of grace ties the two halves of this book together, separated even as they are by years. A tale of one character's slide into alcoholism, to his family's grief, and another tale of discovered love, are woven together by it.  While much of the story is sad, most of the characters find relief for their private burdens, and Waugh cuts the emotional intensity with comic scenes and descriptions.  Some of it borders on silly,  other mingles the laughs with some woe, like the description of a father greeting his son with “the usual air of mild regret”. There are surely depths to the story that can’t be plumbed in one read alone, but there will be others, for Waugh’s writing here, bordering on the lyrical, is beautifully arresting itself.

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“Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’
‘Why did she do that?’
“Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story.”

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

"Light one for me, will you?"
It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked  this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.

"Oh, Mummy, must I see him? There'll be a scene if I do."
"Nonsense, Julia, you twist that poor man round your finger."
So Julia went into the library and came out an hour later engaged to be married.

Related:
The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde.
A Seperate Peace, John Knowles

Last Call

Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition 
© 2010 Daniel Okrent
480 pages

"Law and order should not ruin the lives of law-abidin' people! Like that stupid law of Prohibition they had in the old days. Gangsters had to go out there and open up speakeasies, so's  decent people could raise a glass." - Archie Bunker

Prohibition ranks as one of the strangest and most romanticized periods in American history, a period of over a decade in which Americans earnestly sought to deny themselves a pleasure enjoyed by mankind since the first hints of agriculture: alcohol.  In Last  Call, author Daniel Okrent takes the reader back into time to find out how it happened, what it was like, and how it mercifully ended.  A history of Prohibition could easily descend into mythologizing about the Mafia, but this is an account with considerable more body than that. Indeed, Okrent  connects the rise  and execution of Prohibition to deeper political forces that make the general politics of the time more comprehensible. 

How on Earth did the American nation come to deny itself the pleasures of the bottle?  Excess didn’t help: prior to widespread sanitation systems, beer,  wine, and other kindred spirits were the safest source of water, and because they were also fun to drink, they were easily abused, and especially after distillation made chronic inebriation cheap. Various groups within the nation – worried wives, Progressive moralists, guardians of the family – all advocated for temperance, but attempts to convey this into political action were undermined by the fact that their associations tended to pick up other political causes as well, atrophying by distraction. When Prohibition passed as a Constitutional amendment, ratified by the majority of state congresses, it triumphed because of its skillful management at the hands of the Anti-Saloon League.  The ASL, hereafter referred to as the League, combined various groups into one coalition, focusing them all on one common goal and steadfastly ignoring any other social issue.

 Other social issues were at play, however.  The coalition included nativist groups like the KKK, for instance, which saw the increasing population of Jewish and Catholic immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe as a threat to both Protestant religion and the American way of life. The League, as its full name indicates, had an especial grievance against saloons, which were not merely watering holes but the nucleus of immigrant communities. 70% of saloons were owned by first-generation Americans, and their halls were host to political organizations that gave new citizens a stronger voice in the public arena.   Prohibition’s rise is even more interesting, however, connected as it was with both the women’s suffrage movement and a landmark step in the growth of the Federal government, the income tax-establishing 16^th amendment.  The amount of female leadership within temperance and prohibition movements gave many suffragists their first experience in political organization and agitation, and the income tax amendment was a necessary first step for the war against booze. Without taxes on potable beverages, even the relatively small national government of the belle époque couldn’t fund its services. Soaking the rich, which politicized mobs liked the idea of, would provide enough revenue to only compensate for the decline in liquor taxation, but allow the government to reduce its tariffs to boot -- a boon for the working man. Prohibition was thus a cocktail of political causes. 

The execution of Prohibition itself, of course, is a legendary failure.  Had the brewers and distillers realized that the League was a serious threat, they may have rallied to stop it. But what massive business could be seriously threatened by some locals running around in bedsheets, or a crowd of campaigning women?  Despite its passage, Prohibition trimmed off at most a third of the overall consumption of alcohol. Individuals were subverting the law from the moment it went on the books., moving alcohol into the states from outside by plane, train, automobile, and a flotilla of rum-running speedboats.  Consumer markets quickly created products that would allow people to produce homemade alcoholic beverages --  a kind of grape concentrate, for instance, that if were supplemented with yeast, sugar, and a few weeks of peaceful darkness, would turn into wine.  Beer kits were also available, and completely legal within the law.  The amendment depended on enforcement by the states, but making a law isn’t quite as easy as enforcing it.  The fact that so many people were willing to blow raspberries at the law made widespread investigation and arrests prohibitively expensive, and some states never bothered.  Those which did  were undermined by networks of corruption that kept police wallets and the speakeasies full. Even when corruption wasn’t a problem,  the amount of people being hauled into court was.  Rather than wasting an enormous amount of time plodding through a trial, judges simply levied fines – and the bootleggers absorbed them, just as they would a tax had alcohol been legal. They even managed to buy their cars and speedboats back if they had been seized by the state.  None of the presidents at the time were strict enforcers – Harding was wishy-washy, Coolidge had no interest in meddling in other people’s business, and Hoover was slow to spend money. By the time the Federal government did begin intervening, the new sanctions proved to be too much, too late.  Tipplers were outraged by the fact that the government had abruptly decided to take the issue seriously, and as the Great Depression loomed, popular support saw the wisdom in creating more jobs and generating more revenue by uncorking alcohol once again.

The Last Call finishes as a superb history of the period; the author’s emphasis on political and social movements provides insight into the period in general, understanding that would have been missed had he simply dwelt gratuitously on the Mafia.  There’s a great deal to learn here, not only about the era but about the absurdity of the government attempting to manage people’s lives, including their spending habits.  Say what you will about the human race, we're an adaptable species that knows the truth of "where there's a will, there's a way".  

Related:

• Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, Iain Gately
• Drink: A Social History of America, Andrew Carr.

Behind the Mask of Chivalry

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Klan
© 1995 Nancy MacLean
336 pages

           

I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birch,

and I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church 

 -- and I ain't even got a garage, you can call home and ask my wife!

("Uneasy Rider", Charlie Daniels*)

Nancy MacLean’ Behind the Mask of Chivalry examines the Ku Klux Klan at its most insidious: the opening of the 1920s. Using its activity in Athens, Georgia, as a case study, she probes its tactics, its composition,  its worldview, and its impact.   She demonstrates that the Klan’s lingering horror stems not from its penchant for burning homes and whipping people, but that the most respectable castes of society could hide behind its robes. Viewing the Klan essentially as a reactionary, populist socio-political movement, she offers an intriguing comparison between it and the fascist movements in Italy and Germany, which were on the rise as well. Though not a serious rival to The Fiery Cross as far as Klan history goes,   for the reader only interested in the Klan at its modern height, it should serve fairly well.  It has limits, however, in that the author uses the history to scratch an itch against male privilege. This is essentially a feminist history of the Klan that sees a war between the sexes at every turn.

Despite the Klan’s association with ‘white trash’,  more than half of the members of the Athens group were independent business owners, managers, or small freeholders. They were the very stock of citizenry, in fact, including in their ranks mayors and pastors.  While there were a few unskilled workers in the Athens organization, the majority were men of some accomplishment – if nothing else, then masters  at a trade. They were diverse and largely successful, far from being the bitter and dispossessed ex-soldiers of the 1870s who sought revenge against their imagined enemies in the form of "northerners and Negroes".   Their concerns and fears were diverse, but the Klan would unite them in one simple message:  old-fashioned America was in peril. Its menaces were both economic and social, both real and imagined.  The United States had only entered the Great War for a year, but it would be enough to radically alter the nation: the wartime agricultural boom led to failing farms after Europe began to recover, for instance. Other social consequences of the war were a renewed sense of resistance from black soldiers who discovered there was more to the world than institutional racism, and increasing control by the government of every aspect of life.  This was an age of industrial concentration, of department stores like A&P out-competing smaller firms. Fear of business conspiracies abounded;   with so much capital being controlled by so few hands, takeovers by a corporate elite were a common object of dread. The transformation of society by science, government, and capital had completely outpaced the moderating hand of tradition, leading to drastic changes in social customs.  A family's move from an agricultural homestead to wage-warning in the city, for instance, disrupted some of the ties that bound children to the care of their parents. Instead of working around the family farm, young people were paid pages that they felt a sense of individual ownership over. Emboldened by this, they explored the new world of the growing city, and all of its temptations -- like dance halls and pool clubs.
.
In answer to all this stress and fear came the Klan, assuring parents and citizens that their fears were justified,  that true Americanism was under attack and needed defenders.  This was an age of civic and fraternal organizations, far more active than they are today. The Klan had all of their attractions, plus the costumes and rituals of older societies, and it promised to do something about the problems faced by concerned traditionalists.   Racism is the Klan's home territory, but MacLean's research indicates how broadly the Klan's sheets billowed: over half of the recorded violence done by the Athens klan, for instance, had white targets, and this was from an area  bound to be more racial than most.  The Klan attacked blacks who questioned their subordination under an elite, yes,  but they also attacked men accused of not supporting their wives. They were footsoldiers of Prohibition, leading the fight against  purported moral decay even though their leaders were known to knock a few jugs back. (Hypocrisy seems to be endemic to the human condition.)   The klan functioned on many levels: first, it offered a forum for concerns to be voiced and encouraged;   it knit members together with socials and consumer-based activism, in which Klansmen only patronized the stores of other Klansmen; and, when it occasioned, offered a sanctified use of force to take down those deemed malefactors.   The klan was more than a criminal gang: it was a tribal-civic religion, combining Christianity with racial purity -- a rebirth of paganism, almost, with a binary focus on the Tribe and its god, both supported by willing warriors.

 The religious aspects of the Klan combined with its embrace of violence invites comparison to the Fascist movements in Europe, which also not only defended tradition against modernity, but combined it with an absolute worship of the Nation and its symbols. MacClean points to the Nazi's party's success during periods of economic depression, and and the Klan's own decline after America recovered from the postwar bust, to suggest that both were  born of and sustained by severe socio-economic stress.   Had the United States endured as long a downturn as Weimar Germany, she muses, the Klan might have well brought fascism to the United States, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.  Given their success in the midwest (practically taking over Indiana), that may have been a possibility, but as MacClean notes most Klansmen had a serious ideological animus against dictatorship. Their hatred for the Catholic church, for instance,  fixated on the notion of papal authority.

As useful as MacLean's work into the Klan's demographics is, indicating how popular it became by masquerading as a civically-minded fraternal organization,  MacLean's sexual hangup presents serious baggage.  Not only does she dismiss the entire concept  of honor as one of male ownership over women, but she reduces male bonding rituals to suppressed homosexuality.  Seeing sexual undertones in every relationship is one of the more tiresome aspects of the modern mind, and does not serve this history well. MacLean also seems to place blame on the subjects' concerns, rather than than their actions:  how dare parents be concerned about their children risking their health and futures in premature sexuality? Bring on the STDs and abortion, baby, it's time for liberation. She also uniquely targets white men as being the reactionaries, as if their wives (enlisted in a Women of the KKK) or black men didn't share those concerns about their children's futures.  Granted, the villains here are white men, but MacLean singles out the concern, the very act of judgement. Moderns don't like to be judged, but  evaluating events as good or ill or some balance of the two, is how humans exist.

Behind the Mask of Chivalry is serviceable if limited. Its foray into the demographics of the second klan is more extensive than The Fiery Cross, but that work held its own in that respect and offered reams more substance with less editorializing. 


* "Uneasy Rider" is a highly entertaining song about a long-haired peacenik wandering into a redneck bar and escaping from a fight by accusing one of his antagonists of being a long-haired hippie, guilty of voting for McGovern and hired by the FBI to infiltrate  the KKK.  

Hanging Curve

Hanging Curve

© 1999 Troy Soos
272 pages

St. Louis, 1922. Babe Ruth reigns as the king of baseball. Mickey Rawlings is no king, not even a prince, but he is at least in the peerage: a utility infielder for the St. Louis Browns.  This season, though, there’s more than  baseball on his mind. A man has been murdered, and his death may plunge the city into bedlam.  The story started when Rawlings,  desperate for a chance to play baseball instead of sitting in the dugout, accepted an intriguing offer to play one game between two local clubs  -- one of them being part of the Negro Leagues.   Professional white  ball players are forbidden from taking the field with black players by MLB management, and Mickey  was eager to test his skills against such obvious talent.  Crawford pitched magnificently, humbling the opposition, and then – days later – he was found lynched, hanging from the stadium’s walls.  There had been a fistfight at the game, and members of the Klan hovered about, but – would anyone murder for a baseball game?   With little else to do on the bench, Rawlings digs for answers.  His search casts a light on the simmering racial tensions in  Missouri, the widespread influence of the Midwest Ku Ku Klux, and a prenatal Civil Rights movement.

The golden age of baseball was not a golden age for its black fans.  Segregation flourished in early 20th century America, especially as southern blacks streamed northward in search of jobs. Rising racial tension led to a burgeoning Klan, and not only in its old home of the South:  the 1920s Klan was strongest in the midwest, practically taking over Indiana.  Racial unrest is the backdrop of Hanging Curve;   five years before its start, labor riots turned into a race war, leaving areas of East St. Louis utterly ruined. The death and mayhem of those hours haunts the memory of those who remain, but matters are rapidly deteriorating once again, apparently instigated by a baseball team. After Rawlings plays his match against members of the Negro League,  matters go awry. He played  unsuspectingly, with a team sponsored by an auto dealership, and many on it held an association with the Ku Klux Klan.  First a black player is hung, then beatings and arsons follow in reprisals and counterstrikes.  Those who survived the riots on both sides know where this is going, and it isn't a road  anyone wants to go down.  Blood feuds can take on a life of their own, though, and Rawlings has to work overtime to find a way to nip this one in the bud. He works closely not only with one of the dealership's Klan members, but with a NAACP lawyer to investigate who killed Crawford...and why. These budding relationships introduce Rawlings to two worlds which he had been otherwise blind to: the widespread popularity and influence of the Klan, and the segregated existence of America's black citizenry. Although the courts maintained segregation as separate but equal, not until Rawlings struck up a friendship with a black lawyer did he realize how factually bankrupt those claims were. In St. Louis, for instance,  the streetcars maintained two seperate lines,  but alloted so few cars and conductors to the black line that passengers were forced to wait far longer than their white counterparts. The Klan, too, was a surprise:  Rawlings thought it just a gang for roughneck racists, not suspecting the organization had a more sinister attraction on the respectable, masquerading as a civic organization.  The pieces of the puzzle indicate to Rawlings that the true motive for that first murder are just as hidden in deception as the Klan members who hovered around the game.

Hanging Curve is one of the most interesting  mysteries I've ever read, with a setting that invokes both warm, sentimental nostalgia for the lovely game of baseball and the sad reality of racial tension in America. Consider: the St. Louis Browns, who played in a city a stone's throw from Ferguson, are these days better known as the Baltimore Orioles. But as Rawlings discovers in Hanging Curve,  there is more to social dramas both in our day and in his than mere racism.  Rawlings was able to tease out the truth,  but will we?