Book Review for 8.7.24: Code of the West

Title: Code of the West 

Author: Zane Grey

Date: 1934

Publisher: Harper

ISBN: 0-06-100173-2

Length: 359 pages

Quote: "Georgiana May...on her way to Arizona to be cured...of a slight tendency toward tuberculosis and a very great leaning toward indiscriminate flirtation."

Whew. Define "testosterone poisoning" and give an example: Code of the West. Granted, the popular romances of the early twentieth century were all pretty terrible. When I read the kind of fiction that sold when my elders were looking for relationship advice, I'm not so surprised that so many of them earnestly advised my generation not to read novels at all.

But even against that field of awfulness, Grey's reaction to "feminine rant about equality with men" stands out. It's such an egregious example of Masculine Rant that it deservesd to be on high school reading lists. Classes could be marched out to the field, boys accused of excessive or non-consensual eyeballing could  be forced to read lines from the book aloud before being pelted with whatever the cafeteria staff know better than to try to feed the students, and all boys would then kneel down, place their foreheads on the ground, and repeat in chorus, "We're sorry. We're sorry., We're sorry., For all our lives we'll be sorry."

So little Georgie, who played kissing games at parties back in Erie, comes out to spread tuberculosis to Arizona. People did, back then. In a protracted and tedious beginning, Teacher Mary has a little fun with her recent graduates, leading them to believe the sister she's asking one of them to meet at the stagecoach stop might be ten years older than Mary is. Only Cal volunteers to do the decent thing; the other boys go out, though, to nobble his car. They all discover at once that Georgie is ten years younger than Mary. It starts to sound as if it was being written to fill up a minimum word count, but Zane Grey was better than that; he is setting up subplots for a man's version of a Romance. Cal falls n love with Georgie. She's seventeen; he's not much older. He's still the youngest in a large family of older brothers and cousins who have spet their lives Keeping the Child In HIs Place. He can relate to Georgie's adolescent rebellion.

Its most obvious form is being a fashion victim. In the 1920s, after the serious feminist demand for civil rights had gained serious ground came a generation of frivolous girls who thought that what they'd gained was the right to paaar-tay. Georgie's blonde hair is bobbed, and not only do her skirts show her knees but her stockings leave those knees bare to the cactus. That by itself wouldn't be so bad as the corresponding fad the Arizona boys have picked up, in the War: they don't drink alcohol, but they smoke cigarettes! But a generation's refusal to hear what women might actually have been saying had created a "code," according to which Georgie's conformity to unflattering fashions advertised... immodesty!

Modesty, the virtue of not calling attention to oneself, has always been hard to define. In a social circle like the school at Erie from which nobody even asks if Georgie bothered to graduate, modesty might have required that unflattering display of banged-up knees. Not that Georgie would have noticed; she really does lack modesty. What some people don't want to admit is that her lack of modesty does not by itself equal a lack of chastity. Georgie refuses to see any connection between bare knees and making unwanted babies. Well, there's not actually much of one, but if your house is not for sale you don't put  "for sale" sign in the yard.

Anyway Georgie moves in with Mary and is bored. Nobody would propose that a t.b. case would consider a job, but also, at this period, despite documentation that women did work, there was serious opposition to their being paid enough to live on. Mary was probably working twice the hours a man in her position would have worked, and taking home half the wages. Georgie has a serious issue to rebel against, but all she sees is a chance to rebel against the older generation's exaggerated ideas of modesty. She wants to teach Arizona teachers the "latest" dances, the "African" influence of jazz, and introduce makeup, and kissing games!

And of course everyone else is so stifled by those tattered shrouds of misguided "modesdty" that nobody can tell Georgie, in plain English: Kissing games weren't a great sin against chastity in Erie, but they were and are a sin against sanitation. Cal has a real crush on Georgie. Everyone gives it the status of True Love, which Cal might be capable of feeling some day, if he doesn't die of tuberuclosis first. The other boys who flirt, dance, and smooch with Georgie are thinking less of her for not latching on to Cal. Bid Hatfield, a big burly lout who runs with that crowd, has already "insulted" ("code" for groped, if not raped) one of Cal's sisters, and though the brothers haven't said anything to aggravate the sister's violated modesty they're not merely jealous of Bid's apparent attractiveness. Bid is the type who really might decide to "ruin" Georgie and introduce Vice to the little town of Tonto, Arizona. Wouldn't be the first place where lack of respect for women's rights allowed that to happen.

(Do we need a few generations of equal abuse for men? I hope not, but...hit the ground, boys. For all your lives you'll be sorry.)

Some days, Georgie rides around with Cal, learning why real country people always cover their kknees. (Daisy Duke was pure comic fiction.) Grey was on familiar ground, now, writing about the beauty of some parts of Arizona. He dwells on that theme whenever he gets a chance.

Funnily enough...I'm not calling Zane Grey a liar, because other people have photographed and painted all that scenic beauty in Arizona. But I have been in Arizona. Several times. It looked like this.

Mile after mile after mile. And there was always a general agreement that everyone wanted to get out of Arizona as fast as possible. I think one of the main selling points for the idea of air travel was the fear held by many people in Texas and California that YOUR CAR MIGHT BREAK DOWN IN ARIZONA...

But the settlement of Tonto, which does not exist as a town, may have been imagined as existing in what became the Tonto National Park, which is near a watercourse and is the source of many of those "scenic beauty of Arizona" photos.

So Georgie enjoys the scenery and the horses and being a useless pampered dilettante, and Mary is too kind to tell the poor little thing how badly Georgie is cramping Mary's life. The "code" forbids people to talk about things that matter. Money is not talked about. Work is seldom talked about. Sex is not directly talked about. Cal's older brother Enoch, however, wants a wife, and Mary wants a husband, and Georgie's in the way. Mary won't leave her alone; Georgie has no income and apparently no job skills, so she can't go somewhere on her own; Enoch doesn't want her living with him and Mary--so their marriage will just have to wait. 

So all the other young men go along with the dumbest practical joke they've ever played. Why should Cal feel "heartbroken" by the thought o Georgie kissing Bid? Is he afraid of Georgie? What he needs to do is give her a good scare! Get her on to his horse, ride fast to the house he's been spending his time building, bully her into saying "I do" in front of the "Parson," then let her have it: "Mrs. Cal Thurman, I want my supper!"

It works, sort of. Cal throws a screeching, scratching Georgie across his horse, rides fast, and realizes how stupid this prank was when Georgie bumps into an overhanging branch. The lads chortle that she's been adequately "scared" when, barely conscious, she gasps "I do," but Cal will always know she's concussed.

What makes the story worth reading is that Cal understands the situation of a man who has hit a woman all too well. Even incultures that denied women's civil rights, the law of nature has always been: If a man hits a woman while he is awake, for the rest of his life he will never be able to go to sleep with a reasonable expectation of waking up. Far from laughing about having "scared" Georgie, Cal lives in fear of her. Georgie agrees to stay on his little homestead, and do some of the work--there's enough for her to do. Work actually agrees with Georgie. She even starts growing again! She enjoys Cal's company as much as she always had. But he knows that she thinks he hit her, and he leaves his rifle with her and locks himself in an outbuilding, every night, as simple life insurance.

Mary is delighted that Georgie's eloped. Woen teachers' contracts in the early twentieth century often specified that the job would terminate if there were any suspicion of the teacher doing anything like dating. Sometimes things like being seen in an ice cream parlor with a brother were specfied. Enoch and Mary have been quietly eying each other for years. When they hear that Georgie and Cal have eloped, Enoch wants the wedding to be one week after Georgie's. Mary thinks one month after, during the school holidays, would be in better taste. 

So Georgie pretends to be happy with her farce of a marriage until Mary is safely married. Then she can think about her horrible future as a domestic servant in a town where few people can afford one, and she's known to have a Disease. Most of her wages will be paid in the form of "room and board." She will not be well fed. If she really needed to grow another inch, she won't have the chance. The small change that's saved up in her bank account will probably be paid directly to anyone she accepts as a husband. Then she can go on doing domestic drudgery, only without any claim on pocket change as wages. Yes. Women of her generation had more serious things to think about than short skirts and jazz dancing.

Why doesn't Georgie rush forth to embrace her fate? Why does she stay in a beautiful new house, cooking and cleaning and clearing brush, with the best pal she's ever had? Could it be True Love?

"No," the reader will growl, "it could not. They're not even full grown. It might, at best, be Puppy Love."

Well, it's not as if they have a lot of years to enjoy or suffer from it, anyway. Very few people who had tuberculosis in the 1920s survived long enough to be cured with antibiotics in the 1950s. If this story had a base in fact, Grey imight have felt free to publish it when he did after receiving the news that the model for Georgie had coughed up her lungs in, say, 1932.

But it's a romance. She'll have a blissful remission. Cal will convince her that her concussion was an accident, she'll have recovered without noticeable permanent brain damage--not that much she had much of a brain in the first place--and Cal will at least get to have sex with the vampire who's already draining his life. The other young men will enjoy a few good years of cigarette smoking and safe-in-the-sense-of-monogamous sex before they all start coughing blood, too. None of them will ever know why...

God. People. 

Book Review: Night and Day

Title: Night and Day

Author: Virginia Woolf

Date: 1919, 1971

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: none

Length: 471 pages

Quote: “It suddenly came into Katharine’s mind that if some one opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying them­selves.”

Katharine is one of six young single adults in her neighborhood. If they were alive today, this little group would probably be a polyamorous community; they’re all young and hormonal enough to enjoy sex with practically anything, or anyone, and any of them could obviously enjoy a night with any other of them—at least, in a heterosexual pairing. They’re so hormonal, in fact, that they don’t even care that at least four of them are cousins to each other. This detail puts me off the whole pack of them, but Virginia Woolf managed to write almost 500 pages about the difficulties these incestuous Brits have in restricting themselves to one formal courtship, leading to one marriage, at a time. What a scandal it is that Katharine and William, who announce their engagement first and break it off first, actually remain friends and help each other marry the people they really want to marry.

Pet names aren’t used in this crowd. The girls are Katharine, Cassandra, and Mary. The guys are William, Henry, and Ralph. Katharine’s and William’s engagement was favored by their elders at least partly because they stand to inherit more money than Henry and Cassandra, and much more money than Mary and Ralph.

I find this tasteful, yet hormone-driven, study of youth very tiresome. I tried to read the whole novel in the 1990s, gave it up, and have only just finished it. The book qualifies as a study of why modern-style dating displaced traditional-style courtship in the twentieth century, why the rules of nineteenth-century-traditional courtship served our six characters so poorly. As such, it subjects readers to levels of impatience almost comparable with those the characters suffer…so caveat lector!

If you like long-drawn-out novels of manners, if you’ve always wished Jane Austen’s novels didn't try to be funny but just went on twice as long, if you're into incest and appreciate that in real life Virginia Woolf knew something about taboo relationships even closer than with cousins, then Night and Day might be your cup of tea. If you’re making a study of Virginia Woolf, you’ll need to refer to this novel. For readers in these two categories Night and Day is recommended.

Woolf is sometimes considered an important writer. I'm not sure why. She wasn't the first representative of any group; Pearl S. Buck, Rose Wilder Lane, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, even Mary Roberts Rinehart were writing better books, and the subcategory "suicidal women writers" was much better represented by Sylvia Plath. Call me heretical but I suspect Woolf's place in the twentieth century literary canon, such as it was, was created for her by grieving relatives in the literary community. Now they're all dead and gone, and Woolf's fiction has my permission to go and lie down among them.

 

Book Review: Hiding Ezra and Wayland

Sad news, Gentle Readers. Goodreads is now hiding real individual book reviews just like Amazon. Amazon can get away with a little discrimination, because it's huge and commercial. Goodreads is neither.

Underwhelmed, to say the least, by typing in mini-reviews of these two novels-from-family-history, hitting "Post," and having the book's home page pop back onto the screen with a smarmy little message saying "Priscilla King, write a review of [the book I just did]!"--I don't like web sites that bark orders at readers, in any case...I'm going back to my own blog. Which Google, of course, will try to hide from people, and Goodsearch will try so hard to hide that it'll even redirect readers back to cached copies of the posts for which Blogjob paid. Goodheavens, the corporate would-be rulers of the world cried, we mustn't let people discover a blog that blows the whistle on sneaky corporate censorship on the Internet!

If the Internet doesn't pull a U-turn and require human review before even the ugliest porn images and hatespews can be censored, how long do you think it can last? Two years? Three? It's been fun, and I look forward to getting paid again for my special talent for creating decent-looking documents on manual typewriters...

Here, while it lasts, are full-length reviews of two short paperback novels. They can be read independently; they're best read together.

Author: Rita Sims Quillen

Title: Hiding Ezra

Amazon details:

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Little Creek Books (February 18, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1939289351

And the sequel: Wayland 

Amazon details:

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Iris Press (September 16, 2019)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604542543

I'm late to the Internet today, Gentle Readers, because I started reading Wayland and couldn't put it down. I already knew from Hiding Ezra that this author is not averse to making readers cry, so I had to find out what she was going to do with this study in Human Evil...

Rita Sims Quillen is best known as a poet. No worries for those who don't like poetry; these stories are not told in the sort of lush  prose that tends to be described as "poetic." Landscape descriptions like "She also loved to go to a cool, shady bend in the little branch [creek] below the church where the trees created a canopy like walls" are as "poetic" as it gets. These novels get full marks for clear, straightforward prose that's not wordy, sentimental, or difficult to read. In fact one reviewer has quoted the first sentence of Hiding Ezra as an example of a good opening line for a novel.

They read like family history. Hiding Ezra is in fact based on family history--an old journal kept by a soldier who deserted from the Army in order to help his last few friends and relative survive a set of epidemic diseases that swept our part of the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Wayland might easily be based on another old journal.

Hiding Ezra is about the oddly enjoyable summer Ezra Teague spends hiding in a cave, leaving game near the homes of people who leave bread and ammunition near the cave. It's also about his grieving sister Eva, his faithful sweetheart Alma, and all the other friends and relatives they lose to the epidemics. It's also about Lieutenant Nettles, a nettlesome outsider from Big Stone Gap who connects with his inner decent human being after exposure to the grieving and loving people of Wayland, Gate City, and Fort Blackmore.

Wayland was the real name of one of the little rural settlements outside Gate City up to the 1940s, when it changed its name to Midway. Gate City had changed its name a bit earlier--in the nineteenth century it was called Estillville. Moccasin Gap, on the other side of the gap in the mountains formed by the Big Moccasin Creek, also changed its name, in the 1950s, to Weber City--spelled Weber, as in German, but pronounced Webber, as in English--after a radio comedy about a new subdivision: "The characters were having so much fun with their Weber City, we thought we'd have one too." In these novels place names are used as they were at the time.

When I read this novel, I enjoyed its dramatic climax, but wondered why the denouement was so long and so sad. A more tactful reviewer posted online that she wanted the story to be even longer, to resolve the new issues the denouement raises for the characters. Readers be warned. The last few chapters of Hiding Ezra are the trailer for Wayland.

In between reading the two stories, I cried. I won't spoil the denouement, I think, by explaining that I don't cry about fictional characters. No, but once when the words "rock hall" triggered a memory an 85-year-old great-uncle said, "My sister and sister-in-law used to take bread to the fellows that hid in the rock house." (Actually he used their given names, and one of them was still alive to confirm his claim.) My mother wondered if he was remembering the story she'd heard about my great-grandfather leading a party of soldiers to the nearby "rock house," a cave big enough for people to camp in. No, he said, this was in his lifetime...but he was weak and never had much to say at one time, and never mentioned the cave story again.

In my family the young spoke more frankly to the old, and asked more questions, than in some neighboring families. Still, I never asked for more details about feeding the deserters in 1918. I knew the cave was real; my brother and I had been shown how to find it on condition that we not try to get inside it. I knew Great-Aunt belonged to a pacifist church, and her sons were conscientious objectors, but her husband, Grandfather's brother, was exempt from military service because he was a minister. The great-uncle who first mentioned the story had one of those given names that commemorate a family friend's given and family names: Otto Quillen.That's all I can add to the facts behind Hiding Ezra.


What made me cry was that this story made me realize how lucky the elders were. My grandfather and eight of his younger siblings lived to ages between 75 and 99. Many of their generation did not. Physically and emotionally my elders survived by keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any friends they'd had as children...and even in the 1960s I still grew up hearing "Don't get closer to town children than you can help, don't go into town unless it's necessary, don't EVER go into a swimming pool, don't go to other people's houses and if you do don't eat or take off your shoes..." Two generations later, my extended family are still known as a stand-offish bunch. Possibly the elders' losses of friends to the epidemics had something to do with that. I've heard a lot of rot about possible kinds of "hurt" might have caused our family subculture to be so clannish, but this insight rang true. And it did hurt, briefly, wondering how many school friends my elders had buried...Grandfather was one of fifteen children, eight of whom lived to ages between 75 and 99. In another family of fourteen, six children born before 1940 were still alive in 1970.

Anyway: Ezra Teague survives his adventure, but the epidemic diseases and early deaths aren't over. In Wayland Ezra has left his daughter for his sister to raise. Eva has indeed married Lieutenant Nettles, who is now a nice guy but still insecure enough to be impressed by a stranger's show of respect. That insecurity places the Nettles family at risk when the lieutenant offers a job to a "hobo" who calls himself Buddy Newman. Newman's real name is Deel, as in Scottish "de'il," and his character is a study in Human Evil. He wants to set people against each other, ruin the reputation of a pious but sex-starved old lady, and do even worse things to little Katie Teague.

The suspense of the story is finding out whether Newman's schemes will be foiled, and how, and by which of the decent local folk. There is an interesting and thoroughly local delineation of the relative vileness of Newman, an otherwise likable hobo who has an icky relationship with a teenaged boy, a rude drunk, and a murderer. Newman is a bigot, a pedophile, and also a murderer, but his evil runs deeper than that. (The narration of his evil won't embarrass readers in front of their children but the single telling details, when they emerge, may upset children.)

Did an ancestor really keep a diary that narrated such events? At least they're not the local pedophile story I always heard: it would have been fifteen or twenty years later when the man I heard described as "an escaped mental patient" did some physical damage to a local primary school girl. And I was glad. I did not want that girl, who survived but never married, to have been the real model for Katie. (Katie is characterized as pretty much the perfect niece in Eva's diary, but aunts know to allow for another aunt's auntly perspective. I think each of The Nephews is pretty much a perfect child, too, in his or her own way.)

Once again, after the main plot has resolved itself, the last two chapters go on. I didn't cry while reading Wayland but I found the denouement somewhat sad. Others may like it but I think they'll agree that, once again, the last chapters of Wayland are a trailer for another story.

I gave both books five stars on Goodreads for Keeping It Real. These are not just another stereotype of "Appalachia," the whole mountain range, from Georgia to Nova Scotia and possibly also Britain, confused with old pictures of the coal-mining town. Anything looks grim in a black-and-white photograph. In these books we see Scott County much closer to the way it must have been, between 1917 and 1930, to have become what it's been in Quillen's and my lifetime. I'm delighted.

Book Review: Jeeves

Title: Jeeves

(Interestingly, Amazon reports that although several people claim to have some version of this edition, some date-stamped 1943, what some of them are actually selling is a reprint of the text scanned into a computer. What I physically have is a pocket-size paperback book printed in 1939. A computer printout might offer larger, clearer type; I'd have no problem with it but I do understand how it might disappoint someone looking for the original vintage book.)

Author: P.G. Wodehouse

Date: 1923 (U.K.), 1939 (U.S.)

Publisher: Doran (U.K.), Pocket Books (U.S.)

ISBN: none

Length: 244 pages

Quote: “Jeeves...always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life.”

Up to 1950, before telephones took over, living alone was almost unthinkable. Bachelors normally lived with parents or siblings; anyone with a steady income hired a “companion,” and anyone without an income could make “companionship” a job.

These relationships often went wrong. Ancestor-snobbery, the idea of a servant class who couldn’t possibly be fit to inherit property, had its base in the need to keep hired companions from murdering their employers. Though the whole hierarchy of hired companions, valets, tutors, nurses, butlers, housekeeper, ladies’ maids, and others, were at the top of the servant class, often well educated and (as servants went) well paid, they could still be “ruined” by a single false accusation.

But sometimes the relationships went right. Bertie Wooster, the rich, charming, witty, immature twenty-something “gentleman,” and Jeeves, the quiet, discreet, unctuously polite, older and wiser “gentleman’s gentleman,” are a comedic parody of the best-case scenario where the employer and employee become each other’s best friends. 

Jeeves and Bertie use very formal manners to balance the excessive intimacy built into Jeeves’ job. Jeeves calls Bertie “sir” and Bertie, who naively narrates all the social blunders from which Jeeves tactfully rescues him, doesn’t seem to know whether Jeeves has a first name. They know each other’s secrets and always act in each other’s best interests. In real life they would probably have disagreed about Jeeves’ wages and social life too, but in the stories they always disagree only about fashion; Jeeves always cooperates with hardly more than a reproachful look, and always gets his way—meaning he gets Bertie to discard a tacky-looking fad item—in the end.

If Jeeves had been real, everyone would have wanted to know him, even after his natural life expectancy was over. Eighty years after his “birth” as a mature man in this novel, one of the first reliable search engines was called “Ask Jeeves.”

And this is where it starts. Jeeves begins with an episode that was also published as an independent “short” story (although it’s not very short), in which Jeeves not only spots the jewel thieves at the hotel but recovers the stolen jewels, and continues through several similar adventures until Bingo gets married. I read most of the other Jeeves, Blandings, and Psmith stories before I found this one. Knowing with whom Bingo was going to live happily ever after did not spoil the comedy of Bertie’s reluctant participation in Bingo’s love life for me.

That would be enough to say about this novel if I hadn’t found reason to disagree with the introduction to the reprint I have, on two points. Few people have read all of Wodehouse’s books—there were 97. I’ve read more than half of them, and I believe they contain evidence that Wodehouse became a target for political persecution because his first great comic character (based on a real person) made himself memorable by a political joke. I’m positive they contain evidence that Wodehouse was able to write clever, funny, lovable female characters who might have been played by Lucille Ball.

Wodehouse wrote several stories that grew into series of books. The one that launched his career was Mike and Psmith, in which Wodehouse expanded “Mike,” a sports story, into a comedy series by giving Mike a dorm mate who sought distinction by adding a silent P at the beginning of his name. Psmith introduced himself in an unforgettable scene that included the classic line, “I’ve become a socialist. It’s a great scheme. You work for the abolition of private property, and start by collaring all you can, and sitting on it,” as he staked his and Mike’s claim to the best “study” in the house. Young readers would probably have bought one of those endless series, like the Bobbsey Twins, that would have kept Mike and Psmith at school forever; Wodehouse let them grow up, and spun off their series into the Blandings Castle and Jeeves stories. The characters in these stories are part of the same fictional world and know each other slightly, but each appear as major characters in their own series. Wodehouse thought of most adventures for the large family at Blandings Castle. It’s possible that, having based Psmith on a real teenager he knew slightly, Wodehouse simply couldn’t imagine a long adult career for him—but, considering how long Wodehouse kept other characters young and how many other characters shared Psmith’s kind of cleverness if not his effrontery, it seems unlikely. I suspect Wodehouse was advised to abandon Psmith, then punished later for having written him, anyway, because Psmith summed up socialism so unpardonably well.

From time to time Wodehouse tried working a different comedic vein. There was a series of short stories told in a club restaurant where tellers and listeners are identified by their orders as “Eggs,” “Beans,” “Crumpets,” etc. There was a working-class character, Mr. Mulliner. Wodehouse wrote several stories about golf. He was also attracted to the American crime fiction genre; he wrote several comic crime parodies. The crimes mostly involved stealing paintings and jewelry, the criminals were sympathetic goofs, and although in theory Wodehouse’s criminals spoke U.S. criminal jargon with a few fashionable British slang words they’d learned from movies, while his British aristocrats spoke upper-crust British English with a few fashionable bits of criminal jargon they’d learned from movies, in practice they all sounded more like Wodehouse than like other members of either group. In any case the golf, crime, restaurant, and Mulliner stories sold, but never so well as the adventures of the British elite group that included Psmith, Bertie, and Blandings. Wodehouse kept going back, by popular demand, to that improbably extended, improbably sunny, summery prewar England where the biggest problems on people’s minds were whether Bertie ought to wear purple socks and which of the Earl’s nieces and nephews had misplaced which Blandings family treasure on purpose to manipulate which of his siblings into agreeing to what.

By and large Wodehouse’s characters paid less attention to politics as their fictional world faded further into the nostalgic past, every year. Jeeves and Blandings stories don’t mention years, but the slang and fashions and other details suggest that, just as it’s always summer for these characters, the year is probably in the 1920s, surely no later than 1940. Hostility about Psmith’s summary of socialism, however, died hard. Wodehouse was no fan of Mussolini—he made fun of an unsympathetic character who did admire Mussolini in one of his novels—but he got stuck in Italy while Mussolini remained in power, and was forced to state on radio broadcasts that, though held prisoner, he was being treated well. There was a war on. Wodehouse was banished from Britain as a traitor, falsely accused of being the person who'd broadcast really anti-British propaganda as "Lord Haw-Haw," and forced to immigrate to the United States, which his fans tried not to make too much of a hardship for him. He stayed in the U.S. after clearing his name and died old, rich, and famous, but always scorned by some people because he hadn’t jumped on the socialist bandwagon.

Later a complaint arose that he didn’t like women characters. This complaint was based on selective reading of his best-selling novels only. There’s no question that Wodehouse, having gone to all-male schools and all-male clubs, made fun of those male-bonding sites more effectively than he made fun of happy families. Bertie’s pal Bingo Little, the commitment-phobic social butterfly in Jeeves, reappears as a comically clueless but happily married minor character in both Jeeves and Blandings novels. Part of Bertie’s comic ineptitude is his fear of women. Bertie is, for all practical purposes, married to Jeeves. Wodehouse used several versions of a story in which some other young man, less afraid of women generally but still shy about approaching the one he wants to marry, heeds a bit of bad advice found in pop culture of the period: “You must take her in your arms and say, ‘My mate!’” Despite this handicap all the more competent Wodehouse heroes married.

There are even a few Wodehouse heroines. Wodehouse seems to have liked the name Sally; he gave it to at least three characters who combined Jeeves’ presence of mind, Psmith’s cheekiness, and whatever style of prettiness was in fashion that year. The Sally stories made me laugh too. One Sally became the main character in a book. But other authors wrote about girls like Sally and men like Mr. Mulliner. However much he liked writing about those characters, Wodehouse did like money. He kept going back to his male-bonded upper-crust Englishmen. He was working on a novel that didn’t seem planned to end the series, published posthumously (incomplete) as Sunset at Blandings, when he died.

Wodehouse was more justly criticized for writing, or rewriting, frivolous unoriginal stories that aimed for hilarity at the expense of Literary Merit. There's no real suspense about a Wodehouse story; you know nothing very bad is going to happen to anybody, some characters are always going to be incompetent, others are always going to have all the answers, people who are especially tiresome are going to be embarrassed, everyone will laugh and make up at the end, and three-quarters of the plot in one story may be the same as three-quarters of the plot in another story. You don't read to find out what happened, but strictly to laugh. Writing this way can be defended as a separate art form but Wodehouse didn't write, and can't be read, in the way Shakespeare, Mark Twain, or even Dave Barry wrote and can be read.

Wodehouse’s “genius” contemporary, Charles Williams, whose weirdly mystical novels show a repressed sense of humor, had a character explain uncontrollable giggling with “It’s Jeeves...it comes in a book.” Possibly Williams envied Wodehouse’s gift of literary clowning; or perhaps he wanted to avoid a pun that seems obvious to anyone who majored in English Literature. Medieval English writers did not make a clear distinction between wood, meaning wood, and wode, meaning demented. The character’s giggling when strange and alarming things are going on raises suspicions...No fear, Gentle Readers. Laughing out loud physically relieves pain and the long-term effects of stress, and if you Choose Laughter to prevent becoming wode in times of stress or pain, this long-gone author can help.

To buy Jeeves online, send $10 per bound paperback book (with "25 cents" on the cover, yes) or $5 per samizdat printout, plus $5 per package and $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address as explained on the Payment Information Page. At least seven and probably eleven books of this size will fit into one $5 package, so feel free to browse for additional books to fill the box...if you choose books by living authors, we send them money to encourage them.

Book Review: Emil and the Detectives

Title: Emil and the Detectives

Author: Erich Kästner

Translator: May Massee

Date: 1929 (Doubleday), 1965 (Scholastic)

Publisher: Doubleday, Scholastic

ISBN: none

Length: 160 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Walter Trier

Quote: “The train this coach belongs to travels to Berlin. And probably in this compartment, in the next chapter, strange things will happen.”

Well, yes, actually in real life it is unusual to have your money stolen on a train, though television might have given us the impression that it’s commonplace. Anyway, this is the story of how a very nice little boy, travelling alone for the first time, not only gets robbed but recovers his money and proves the thief guilty. He has some help, of course, from grown-up police detectives, and from other children—a gang of allegedly 100 boys who’ve organized themselves to help visitors rather than bully them, and his girl cousin, who is called Pony though “her real name is something quite different.”

With its period-perfect drawings and politically correct plot elements (children work together! city people are nice! the girl is as tough as any of the boys!), Emil and the Detectives was all set to win prizes even in translation, so the good news for kids must have been that it was as “exciting” and as funny as adults claimed. Kästner addressed the very young but, if you’re an adult reading it for the first time, you don’t absolutely have to find a child to whom to read it aloud. It’s only more fun that way.

I think I’d read this book, and dismissed it as merely a boys’ story, when I was seven or eight, but I thoroughly enjoyed it when I was about forty and The Nephews were between the ages of three and ten. Even the members of that group who is/are, in real life, actually niece/s enjoyed it as a family read-along.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen (or use the Paypal button when I make the time to put it here). Emil and the Three Twins would fit into the package and you might even have room for Lisa and Lottie. 

Book Review: Through Charley's Door

Title: Through Charley's Door



Author: Emily Kimbrough

Date: 1952

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 273 pages

Quote: "To be economically independent is the only way I know for a woman to become mentally independent."

Emily Kimbrough's mother was saying that in 1923 as she encouraged young Emily to get a job, even though Emily was embarrassed by "the sentiments I knew were hers and hers alone." She might have been even more embarrassed when her mother "in private...expanded...that though I would be fed, housed, and clothed, whatever I wanted or needed above the bare necessities--and very bare, she inevitably stressed--would have to come of my own providing." And, of course, the most embarrassing part of all must have been that when Emily and her school friend, Cornelia Otis Skinner, tried acting, the daughter of once-famous actor Otis Skinner had some success, but Emily had none. It would have to be an ordinary, non-glamorous job.

Luckily, Emily Kimbrough's glib, easy writing style happened to be what the Marshall Field department store was looking for, and her ability to shoehorn poetry into advertising slogans even seemed fresh in 1923. So young Emily entered the store "through Charley's door," the most fashionable side of the store, and became a successful ad writer.

Although Through Charley's Door contains some social commentary and lots of amusing anecdotes, libraries classified it as a business study; Kimbrough was greatly impressed by the way her employer did business. Those familiar with the stories of stores that went national or international during this period (Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penney, et al.) will notice a certain common thread in all these stories, as in the more recent Wal-Mart success story. Some hardworking entrepreneur with a fanatical dedication to customer service built a single store into a huge corporation. Later the entrepreneur retired or died, the company had grown too big to offer comparable dedication or service, and reminiscences of the store's early days seem bitterly ironic to anyone who's had to do business with the store as it has become...

Through Charley's Door still has good business advice to offer today's hardworking entrepreneurs, and may also interest those studying women's history. Both Emily Kimbrough and Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote several volumes of memoirs and observations, separately and together. Skinner was the source of the memorable one-line observations. Kimbrough's independent work lacks one-liners, but makes up for it in historical details and amusing anecdotes. Skinner was the city sophisticate; Kimbrough wrote as a wholesome Midwesterner who happened to have gone to college. Their collected work makes an interesting study in social history and in friendship between women who appreciated, and cultivated, very different styles.

As a story, Through Charley's Door could be classified as "chick lit": no life-and-death suspense, not even a romance, although the dedication page suggests romance offstage; suitable for reading in bed when you want to get up on time in the morning.

It's a collector's item, though. Unlikely to be reprinted, yet of interest to some book collectors, it's currently available from this web site for only $15 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. Three more books of this size will fit into one $5 package, if that's any consolation to you, and you're free to let them be books by living authors who can at least be encouraged by the Fair Trade Books system...

Book Review: Nods and Becks

Title: Nods and Becks

Author: Franklin P. Adams

Date: 1944

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

ISBN: none

Length: 242 pages

Quote: “What worried us the first day of school was how everybody but us in the room appeared to know the words and music of these songs. Was the world, we thought, frightened to dizziness, like that? Was everybody to know more than we? And that, Dr. Freud, is a fear we never have been able to overwhelm.”

Thus Adams accounts for his long career as a news writer and trivia expert, star of a radio quiz show called “Information Please.” 

Although this book contains some fun facts, it’s not as rich a source of trivia as might be hoped. It’s a souvenir collection, containing several tidbits of fact, opinion, and whimsy from F.P.A.’s humor column “The Conning Tower.” ("F.P.A." was his newspaper byline, and when he printed books with his full name on them his readership were motivated to buy them by seeing the initials in parentheses beside the name.) It includes a whimsical (yes, whimsical) obituary for a fellow humorist, reminding readers that Adams’ generation were of necessity more comfortable with the thought of human mortality than ours is.

It’s also a period piece, containing a comic speech called “Women Can’t Play Poker” (specifying “in my club”) that addressed women in an adult audience as “girls,” and dialect jokes that poke fun at dialect jokes by deliberately mixing up the dialects parodied, and sympathetic comments on smoking, and other offenses against modern taste. The position of this web site is that we need to preserve more of the books that contained these things. As Adams says on page 64, “Students and professors of journalism should study the differences between the ethics, or at any rate the common practices, of forty years ago and those of today.”

So here is Adams, growing old gracefully in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. He was loved by many of his contemporaries, and several printings of his book were made. I think it looks best in the format “in compliance with the government’s regulations for conserving paper.”

That format allows him to skip from subject to subject with just a row of asterisks between the pieces, which appear in no order and skip back and forth among twenty-five years of columns, newspaper and magazine “fillers,” speeches, and full-length articles. On pages 14-15 are printed a reminiscence abut “Information Please,” a quatrain about boredom, a sonnet about talkative children, a short rant about clichés, and an aphorism defining an optimist and a pessimist. On pages 52-53 we get a definition of middle age, a couplet about taxes, the beginning of a song parody about a tax on maple syrup, a reflection on interest in one’s work, a gloomy rhyme called “Valentine,” a wisecrack about anti-intellectualism, a search for the origin of the phrase “New Deal,” and a search for the origin of the phrase “Say it ain’t true, Joe.” Pages 190-191 contain reflections on writers’ pay, signs of winter, newspapers that have ceased to exist, a retort to a phrase in one of President Hoover’s speeches, puns on the names of colleges, and thoughts on job hopping. I suspect Adams would have enjoyed compiling Link Logs.

The more you’ve read of other books from this historical era, the more you’ll chortle. Some of Adams’ jokes are just plain funny; some are funny if you catch their references. Like Will Rogers’ comedy, Adams’ may be best shared with a grandparent, but sometimes readers would have to smile if they didn’t recognize a single celebrity name.

Well, I enjoy this book...but I was greatly blessed. Early in life I discovered F.P.A.’s short pieces in older relatives’ old books, and instead of being told, “Ooohhh, don’t read that, it was before your time, here, quick, read something you already know all about,” I could ask, “Who was Secretary Ickes?” and be told all that my relatives remembered, and share the joke with them. So I was able to laugh at lots of things that were, technically, before my time, from “Pogo” back through F.P.A. and several of the friends and colleagues mentioned in this book. This blessing expanded: I learned to look things up, and became able to laugh at Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.

If you, too, appreciate a lighthearted look at the news items of a bygone time, you’ll enjoy Nods and Becks. It’s clean, subtle, generally polite humor. Adams didn’t preach to his contemporaries, “You don’t need outdated stereotypes of other demographic groups to make a story funny,” and he probably couldn’t even have imagined the need to preach to today’s so-called comedians, “You don’t need vulgar words and gross-out content to make a story funny.” When you have real comedic talent (like Dave Barry, or like either Scott or Douglas Adams) you can just be funny without those things.

F.P.A. is probably best remembered for a rather glib reworking of a traditional rhyme, “‘Tobacco is a filthy weed.’ (I like it.) ‘It satisfies no natural need.’ (I like it.)...”, which is not reprinted in Nods and Becks. Perhaps he and his editor thought he deserved to be remembered by a comment on Socialist Realism:

“Let us then be down-and-outers,

Knowing we can’t fight our fate;

All defeatists and misdoubters,

Learn to belabor and to hate.”

Or perhaps by the things he learned by writing for newspapers: “That many newspaper men ought not to be in the business...That the best and the best-paid reporters don’t get paid half of what I think they deserve...That anthracite is a noun, and only a noun.”

Although this review will appear online in the morning, I am writing it late in the evening, and while that little black-and-white movie of How a Young Reporter (as Might Be Played by Charlie Chaplin) Learned That Anthracite Is Only Ever a Noun is playing in my mind, I think I’ll turn in. Comedy is a delightful way to relax before bed.

Nods and Becks was popular in its day and has not reached collectors' prices as outrageous as might have been expected; lots of copies are still floating around. Send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, to order this book as part of a package to which you can add three more books of similar size, including some by living authors whom we can encourage by sending percentages of the payment.

Book Review: More than Wife

Title: More Than Wife

(Amazon has a page for this book, but no picture.)

Author: Margaret Widdemer

Date: 1927

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

ISBN: none

Length: 310 pages

Quote: “I know that you had what seemed to me an irrational terror of being made into an adjunct of your husband, knowing yourself as forceful and as talented.”

Yes. That’s the way Widdemer’s characters talk. But first a bit of historical rant, which is common knowledge for baby-boomers but may be new to the young:

Up into the early nineteenth century, although most people worked, few people commuted. Both men and women usually lived very near where they worked. During the nineteenth century a gender split, first visualized and publicized by the French Socialists, took place; more men began to commute to jobs “outside the home,” while women stayed with the childen all day. Not only schools and crop fields, but stores and offices, gradually began to be built more than a five-or-ten-minute walk from the workers’ homes. The mass marketing of automobiles allowed really exploitative employers to assign people to jobs in completely different cities from home.

As individuals began to adjust their lifestyles to all this commuting, bickering arose about who ought to do what. The French Socialists and Humanists embraced a strange new idea that women had a sacred duty to preserve the home in a pristine pre-industrial state. In order to do this, women needed not only to be protected from the sexual temptation of mingling with men in schools and workplaces, but also to be spared from the emotional burden of having any adult responsibilities at all. By remaining as ignorant and sheltered as children, women were supposed to sustain some sort of mystical emotional atmosphere that would revive the burdened spirit of the middle-class working man. In feudal France women had been denied the right to inherit titles and property; the Socialists and Humanists wanted to revive this system of sexist discrimination and make it stronger. To a surprising extent, these anti-Christians succeeded in spreading the strange gospel of modern sexism through Europe, Britain, and America.

Poor women were not expected to be full-time permanent “angels in the home.” Though denied education, property, and the vote, poor women (and children) were usually paid less than their men, but not necessarily assigned lighter tasks. Affluent women were, however, barred from “competing with men” for jobs anybody was likely to want.

By 1927 many Americans believed the easily refuted claim that the Bible teaches that women should not have jobs of their own outside the home.

In fact the Bible does mention that women were banned from the regular army—and were accepted, and admired, in most of the “career roles” that existed in ancient Israel. Proverbs 31 rather plainly says that the ideal wife is not the prettiest or the most charming (“Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain”) but the most enterprising. At first, when the family are young, “she seeks wool and flax, and works willingly with her hands,” to clothe the family first. When “all of her household are clothed in double garments,” “She delivers a garment to the merchant.” With the profits from that venture “She considers a field, and buys it...she plants a vineyard.” Solomon was considered a wise king, not because he was a great preacher or philosopher, but because he built up the wealth of Israel, and in the books associated with his name the ideal woman is wise in the same way.

Nevertheless, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries competition for good jobs was real and earnest. Many universities simply refused to admit female students; many employers simply refused to hire women. When women persisted in becoming competent doctors, engineers, etc., they were solemly told that they would now be regarded as freaks,  outcasts, heartless greedheads who were competing against their own husbands. And who’d hire them? Women architects? Whoever heard of a woman architect?

This is the context in which More than Wife, which I’m encouraged to hope many young readers will find bizarre, was written. Silvia, we are told, loves being an architect, and is a good one, though we don’t see her actually being one in this story. She marries Richard. Does she have to give up her work to be married? At this period it was normal for marriage to be synonymous with retirement for clerks, waitresses, and schoolteachers, but an architect could work partly at home...I’m sure Widdemer was inspired partly by newsreel coverage of Lillian Moller Gilbreth, an engineer who drew some inspiration from also being the mother of twelve children.

What readers can like about More than Wife is that Silvia is not bullied into “choosing” to be a full-time mother and leaving that architect’s job open for some hypothetical veteran. Silvia and her family a “modern” and sophisticated and avant-garde enough to agree that a woman can be competent on a job even if she takes a few years off to have babies.

What I didn’t like about More than Wife is that Widdemer fails to convince me that Silvia is an architect. In The Fountainhead we’re not convinced that Howard Roark is a really good architect, that we’d want to live in a house he’d built, but we are convinced that Roark is...inspired by published interviews with Frank Lloyd Wright. In More than Wife we don’t see Silvia studying, drawing, planning, or building. I find myself looking up and thinking, “Likely Widdemer didn’t know any architects and made Silvia one because, in real life, she was talking to, for, and about a woman with some other sort of vocation.” And, of course, Silvia’s lack of passion for architecture admits debate: “This character could be a full-time mother, or a short-order cook, instead of an architect; all she’d miss would be the money and prestige.”

Nevertheless, if (as the publisher put it) you’re in the mood for a clean, wholesome romance, More than Wife is one. If I can’t quite suspend disbelief that Silvia has a real talent and future as an architect, I can suspend disbelief that she and Richard were based on a real couple. More than Wife was probably never on anyone’s short list for Novel of the Year, but for train, waiting-room, or bedtime reading it’s adequate. (And, of course, for those who buy any "antique"-looking book as a decor item, it's excellent.)

More than Wife has not been reprinted. Currently the best I can do online will be $10 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment; three other books would fit into one $5 package along with this one if at least one of them was thinner. In real life I can offer a better bargain on a more antiquey-looking copy.

(Does this post need some kind of photo link? Why not...Lillian Moller Gilbreth was not an architect, but her idea of "the efficiency kitchen" happened to overlap with Frank Lloyd Wright's. Here are two different books than the ones linked to their names, above.)

Book Review: The Chinese Parrot

Title: The Chinese Parrot

That's what I physically have. Amazon isn't showing copies available online, although you can get one from this web site for an appropriate collector's price. For readers not willing to pay collectors' prices, there's a reprint:



Author: Earl Derr Biggers

Date: 1926

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

ISBN: none

Length: 316 pages

Quote: “Detective-Sergeant Chan, of the Honolulu police...Charlie left us to join the police force, and he’s made a fine record there.”

Charlie Chan was one of several fictional characters that were created to express Anglo-American good will toward People Different From Us. Smart, tough, funny, he solved mysteries “with the patience of his race,” helping to break down the stereotypes that had been based in real hate and fear while building up the more benign kind based in mere ignorance. He was very popular in the early twentieth century. (By the time I came along, a cartoon spin-off series was popular on television; I never watched the show but had a “Chan Clan” cartoon lunchbox decorated with scenes showing Charlie Chan’s ten children.) Before the movies, there were the novels, at first rather cheaply produced hardcover novels...and this is where it starts. Although the hardcover binding is not in very stable condition, what I have is a first edition of The Chinese Parrot, printed in 1926.

It’s a classic detective story. Much more than that I can’t say without spoiling the suspense, but I will say that although the psychology is dubious and the police procedure is at best long out of date, it’s a fun read.

Part of the fun is in Biggers’ attention to words. Charlie Chan does not enjoy clowning—“shuffling,” playing the stupid laborer who knows only a little pidgin English, although he does that in some scenes; he’s proud of his English vocabulary. At a period when silly “Confucius Say” jokes were in fashion (“Confucius say: one who sits on tack is better off!”), Detective-Sergeant Chan always had a real proverb, some even translated from “Kong Fu-Tse” (older transliteration style throughout). At the same time his English remains the sort of English we expect to hear real educated foreigners speak, with each word recognizable, but not necessarily used in the same way a native speaker might use it. Most of the time audiences were laughing with Charlie Chan (or just trying to solve mysteries with him) but then again, once or twice in each story, they got to smile at him.

For vintage movie watchers, another nice touch about the book is that it’s not as sexist as you might have expected. Of course the young woman is kept on the sidelines and referred to as a “girl,” but then the young man is likewise called a “boy,” throughout. At least “girl” Paula isn’t stupid, weak, or helpless; she’s a distraction for “boy” Bob from his adventure with Charlie Chan, because she has her own job to do; she does need to be rescued, once, along with an older woman and an older man who—oh, read the book, but suffice it to say it’s not because Paula faints at the mention of danger.

For protective parents, an additional nice touch is the low level of violence (by grown-up detective story standards). Fictional detectives can almost never solve one murder case until the murderer commits a second murder, but in this book...solve it yourself...there aren’t as many murders as we at first suspect, and the only murder we “see onstage” is that of the parrot.

To buy a copy here, send $5 per (reprint!) book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address--$10 for this book only, $25 for the first four Charlie Chan novels, to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or $11 for this book or $26 for the first four to the e-mail address salolianigodagewi @ yahoo will send you.

Book Review: Oscar of the Waldorf

Title: Oscar of the Waldorf

(This image is of the reprint edition; it may be a copy of a paper dust jacket that my book no longer has, but it's not the first edition, which is what I have for sale in real life.)

Author: Karl Schriftgiesser / Oscar Tschirky

Date: 1943

Publisher: Dutton

ISBN: none

Length: 238 pages

Illustrations: several black-and-white glossy plates

Quote: “Being a hotel man has been more than my job. It has been my profession...my life.”

Who was Karl Schriftgiesser? Why is this biography of Oscar Tschirky, copyright by Oscar Tschirky, written in the third person “by Karl Schriftgiesser”? Was Oscar of the Waldorf vain enough to invent a biographer in hopes of sounding more modest...or was he prudent enough to hire an assistant whose native language was English in order to produce a well-written book in English? It hardly matters now, because this is not the story of Oscar, personally. It's the story of his hotel.

Oscar and the Waldorf Hotel flourished in the “Gilded Age” between 1890 and 1930, a time when Marxism flourished as a reaction to the extravagance of the obscenely rich. Money did, of course, trickle down in its slow inefficient way. “Wealthy Willy” Waldorf Astor built his luxury hotel on the site of his father's home, in the hope that his own name would displace his father's name from history, with a mission of making himself famous by operating the most extravagant luxury hotel the world had ever seen. He succeeded, possibly because he hired a sturdy Swiss immigrant away from Delmonico's and basically put that immigrant, Oscar, in charge of stocking the hotel with the people William Waldorf Astor wanted for friends. Oscar and a full crew of cooks, waiters, cleaners, messengers, even live elevator operators, profited from Astor's dissipation of his inheritance. If they didn't become rich in the sense that Astor was rich, Oscar, at least, had no worries about retirement.

Oscar didn't chatter at the customers, he tells us. He was not the head chef, but the head waiter, or as they say in Europe the maitre d'hotel. Over the years, because he gave good service and wasn't chatty or gossipy, he did come to seem like a friend to some of the hotel's patrons. Sometimes he heard things. Once, he says, once in his lifetime, he was able to tell some of them something important enough to make him break his rule and speak before he was spoken to. Oscar had his small part in the design of the Panama Canal.

Celebrity gossip is of course the main attraction of his memoir. Most of it is bland, amusing, newspaper-style gossip. John “Bet-a-million” Gates, an early patron, wagered a hundred dollars that one raindrop would reach the bottom of a window ahead of another one (he won). Lillian Russell couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted cantaloupe or ice cream for dessert; Oscar gave her half a cantaloupe with ice cream in the center and named this dessert “cantaloupe a la Lillian Russell.” Horace Fletcher, an eccentric medical researcher who believed in eating very plain food very slowly, frustrated Oscar by ordering bread and water for lunch. When a Barnum & Bailey employee turned eighty, still on the job, the company paid Oscar to make a banquet for 400 mostly famous people into a literal circus, with trapezes overhead. Early in his career Oscar had published a book of recipes he'd collected from New York's best chefs, with the result that people thought he was a chef himself; he continued collecting recipes and encouraging chefs to invent new ones, and his “war cake” recipe appears on page 173, but most of the recipes he collected were for enormous amounts of food—and one of his favorite finds, he says, came from a prison chef and could have been officially named “Clam Chowder a la Sing Sing.”

By the 1940s, when friends urged Oscar to write this book, it appears that he had become a somewhat nostalgic and querulous old man, always missing and reminiscing about an era that had passed. In the early twentieth century conservation laws forced him to stop offering endangered wild animals as main courses. Then the World Wars forced him to curb the extravagance and comply with “shortages” and “austerities.” Prohibition forced him to ruin, in his own mind, his terrapin soup by making it alcohol-free. The Depression took all the fun out of being extravagant, and eventually his beloved hotel closed down. It reopened on schedule, but it just...wasn't...the same.

Not that he was bitter. Having invested his whole life in the hotel had its benefits. At seventy-five, Oscar could probably have retired in any place and style he might have fancied...and he chose to move into the “new” Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where he was allowed to work part-time as a greeter for as long as he wanted. (His wife, whom he doesn't embarrass by mentioning more than three times in the book, moved in with him.) That the children and grandchildren of the “old” Waldorf's early patrons kept coming back, among other things to see the institution Oscar had become, gives his memoir a happy ending.

Oscar Tschirky had no problem with extravagance, snobbery, or inflated prices, and it probably wouldn't bother him at all to know that his memoir has become a collectible book. If you don't demand the first edition, of which I can't guarantee I'll find more than one, a copy of Oscar of the Waldorf will cost $30 per book plus $5 per package (four books of this size can fit into a package) plus $1 per online payment.  

Book Review: An Untold Story

Title: An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park

Author: Elliott Roosevelt

Date: 1973

Publisher: Putnam

ISBN: none

Length: 327 pages

Quote: “Some people may feel that I have revealed too much of the...complications that beset the lives of these two.”

In Genesis 9:20-27, Noah of ark fame passed out drunk after brewing some unexpectedly potent wine, and his children and grandchildren found him in an embarrassing condition. Ham and Canaan laughed at him; Shem and Japheth quickly covered his nakedness. When Noah learned how his heirs had behaved, he said, “Cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

Whatever this story tells us, it's not that Africans were doomed to slavery by Noah's curse. Canaanites looked and talked very much like Israelites. That's another story. 

Writers have traditionally identified the sin of writing about family secrets as “the sin of Ham.” If charged with that sin, Elliott Roosevelt's defense would have to have been that his parents, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, were famous enough and had been dead long enough that they could no longer be said to have secrets. He tells us more about them than we may have wanted to know.

Some of the family secrets disclosed in this memoir are of course favorable to the memory of the former President and First Lady. FDR didn't want it to be known that he never quite “outgrew” the wheelchair he used after a well publicized bout with polio. In hindsight it seems touching and heroic that a polio survivor could be a tough, even dictatorial War Chief without ever recovering the ability to walk a mile. Before he'd done it, FDR thought he had to deny his disability and “pass for normal,” believing the nation would not accept a wheelchair-bound President. This may still be true. 

What obviously did more damage to young Elliott's little psyche was that, after producing five children, the Roosevelts finally remembered that they were cousins. “Never lived together as man and wife” is Elliott's phrase. Well, five children should be enough for any couple; they weren't getting any younger, and FDR had that bizarre case of polio as an adult—most adults don't come down with polio, and those who do usually don't survive. But it wasn't hard enough on a little boy to know that his parents had finally started living together as the cousins they were, in big houses full of children, employees, and other relatives. FDR had long, apparently overt, relationships with select female staff members. 

Little Elliott writes of his father's secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, as a regular part of the family; FDR, like a feudal monarch, could live with two “wives” in one house. Missy died young, though, and her place was reclaimed by Lucy Mercer, whom Elliott—and Eleanor Roosevelt—apparently found much less congenial. Ohhh, the harem intrigue. LeHand, who didn't photograph as the kind of secretary who gets hired for her looks but didn't exactly look the type who is seriously concerned about the filing either, explained everything with a gushy note telling FDR she wished she could address him as “Your Majesty.”

There are nicer vignettes in this memoir of the Roosevelts at home in the 1920s and 1930s, of course. The family had a dry, spare sense of humor, and we share inside jokes like FDR's classification of Washington status seekers' hospitality as “salon, saloon, or Salome.” Eleanor, a late Victorian lady, might have been happier with fewer social obligations even to the salon type. FDR made fun of hosts who could only attract guests with sex or alcohol, but like most politicians he appreciated those types' tendency to be campaign donors. 

Elliott Roosevelt remembers lots of wholesome family-bonding efforts that, for him, somehow failed to bond the family. FDR spent much of the 1920s sailing, swimming, and sunning in the warmest waters available, for therapeutic purposes. Never giving up his lifelong dream of being President like Uncle Teddy, he rewarded reporters like Frances Perkins for describing Roosevelt family scenes that Elliott thought were ridiculously wrong. Eleanor Roosevelt didn't like travel, warm climates, or beaches, and seemed glad to leave her husband alone with LeHand, who sat on his knee in front of his children.

The surprising thing about both Roosevelts always was that, in spite of all the many Very Bad Things that had happened to them, in spite of their natural restraint and parsimony and imperfect health, they didn't come across as unhappy people--not even to Elliott. They had plenty to be sad or angry about, and according to Elliott they felt sad and angry...and then they got over it. They were cheerful people, eupeptic, brave, adventurous. If the "Happy Days Are Here Again" theme tune sounded worn-out and tinny at times, and even to them it did, it wasn't because the Roosevelts themselves ever stopped tapping their toes and singing along. If there was a hint of relentless pursuit of fun--and Elliott's descriptions read as if there was--their pursuit of fun was still successful. No matter how much you disagreed with their politics, and at the time many people did, you had to admire the Roosevelts as human beings.

Elliott managed to betray his parents' secrets, call attention to the weak points in their character, and leave readers admiring them as much as ever. 

An Untold Story could have been shorter but I didn't find it dull. (Then again, if I'd tried reading it in 1973 I probably would have found it dull; I think this one is for adults, college-age readers at the youngest.) Its focus is mostly on the years before FDR became president, when most of the events in the family's life weren't reported as news. It contains family stories and witticisms. If it's not as lively as Cheaper by the Dozen or as intimate as Bring Me a Unicorn, neither is it as superficial as Selfish. You can buy it cheaper from other online sources, but if you send this web site $5 per book, $5 per package (two if not four books of this size would ship in one package), plus $1 per online payment, you'll be getting your $10 or $11 worth of history and entertainment.