High Season

A week ago our great-grandsons from Kalamazoo were here with their parents, and this past weekend it was my sisters’ turn to visit from their homes in Illinois. Orchard crews are at last harvesting cherries around my old farmhouse (tarts are ready later than sweets), and though I think every morning that the black raspberry patches must be almost exhausted, that fruit just keeps coming on, with blackberries ripening farther afield. Meanwhile, in the garden, squashes are taking shape, and tomato plants (started from seed) are finally flowering. I’m still waiting on cucumbers but pulled out spent cilantro and transplanted butterflyweed seedlings in the space created. They look good so far.

 

It is summer. High season. 

Sunny Juliet and I got to Lake Michigan again, beating the crowds by going shortly after sunrise. Neither of us has gone swimming yet, though. I’m letting her get used to the Big Lake at her own pace, wading into and out of the gentle waves without urging her one way or the other. Summer here Up North is time for work and play and company. Twin great-grandsons and their parents, sisters, stepdaughters, friends. Some have been here, others yet to come. Sharing places I love is an important part of my life. 

 

Sharing books I love is important, too, and my latest happy discovery – for which all credit goes to the friend who sent me the book! – is Molly Gloss’s The Hearts of Horses, which is hands-down the horsiest novel I have ever read. I was disappointed when The Horse Whisperer turned out to be more love story than horse story; there is a love story in the Gloss novel, too, but horses predominate. – Which doesn’t mean there is any dearth of human interest! 

 

I’ve always wondered at the lack of readership for World War I history. The “Great War,” it was called back when people thought such a global conflict surely could not possibly happen a second time around. (The period between the wars fascinates me, too.) Well, lately WWI seems to be following me so closely it’s treading on my heels. Sarah Shoemaker’s Children of the Catastrophe takes place in the years 1908-1922 (Sarah was last week's speaker in the library Summer Author Series here in Northport); T. C. Corbett’s The Drums of War draws on his diaries from World War I; and The Hearts of Horses takes place in that period, also. Although far from the fighting, some of the farmers and ranchers in Gloss’s novel are swept up in a jingoism that puts their German immigrant neighbors in peril. There is also discussion between the characters of the fates of the thousands of horses shipped over to Europe to become cannon fodder or shell-shocked survivors right along with the soldiers. 

 

The main story of The Hearts of Horses, however, takes place out West. It is no longer open, fenceless rangeland, but big-boned teenager Martha Lessen is determined to lead as free a cowboy life as she can and rides away from home to offer her services “breaking” horses. Martha does not have much in the way of social graces, but, perhaps because she was so sensitive to the feelings of horses, she wasn’t bad at picking up cues about people’s feelings without having to have everything spelled out for her. 

 

…By the time she took work breaking horses for George Bliss, her method was to come into the corral with a little buggy whip and brandish it – she almost never had to touch the horse…. At the same time, Martha always acted as if there was nothing to get excited about, figuring the horse would eventually get the same idea; so she’d begin singing to him quietly….

 

And from a different moment in the story: 

 

It wasn’t clear to Martha how she could be any help to the Kandals, either of them, but she didn’t feel it would be right to leave. She stood a moment trying to think what else she could offer to do [she had fed the chickens and stirred up the kitchen fire already], and when her mind failed her she said, “I’ll just sit down with you, if that’s all right, until the doctor gets here.”

 

A simple story in many ways, The Hearts of Horses goes along in its steady way, documenting, if you will, the lives of fictional people in an isolated community until they are as real to us as our own neighbors. I am eager to read more of Molly Gloss, though I have to admit I hope there will be horses in her other books, too. 

Long, SURPRISING (to me) Postscript:

As I was in the midst of drafting this post, a woman brought in a box of old books she wanted to sell, and one of them was the second volume of a two-volume set showing "the World War," i.e., the one we call World War I or the First World War, in photographs. What are the odds? That war again!

The captions to the photographs are heartbreaking. The soldier sitting in a bombed-out wall opening (second of four above) is writing home from the battlefield:

 

‘JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE MOTHER”

“Somewhere in France,” begins the letter which Clarence E. Ford, Company C, 308^th Field Signal Battalion, 83^rd Div., is writing home, Sept. 1, 1918. “Somewhere in France” was a shell hole in a garden wall at Chateau-Thierry.

 

Following that photograph is one of the First American Army assembling, and below it a detail showing the horses. The caption to a photograph of captured German prisoners (not shown here) has a headline reading: “HATE IS A MANUFACTURED INGREDIENT ON BOTH SIDES.”

I do not focus on the horses for lack of concern for the men. In fact, more than one photograph of a destroyed village notes that the laughter of children is no longer heard there. But since it was a conversation about horses that brought the war home to Molly Gloss’s characters and her readers, I noted particularly any of the war photos showing horses. The last one here is entitled “GASSED HORSES” and reads as follows:

With their ribs sticking out as in death and white mucous [sic] coming out of their blind eyes, these gassed horses are being brought back for inspection. For many of the suffering beasts inspection will seal their death warrant. 

And what can I say after that??? Except, how can human beings do such things to horses -- and to each other, when the world we have been given is so very beautiful? 

No, I do have a more cheerful closing today: Tonight’s guest, the fourth and last in the Summer Author Series (sponsored by the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library), will be Soon-young Yoon, whose book is entitled Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the UN. I highly recommend her book. It contains short, readable essays on various projects with which she was involved around the world, and it is full of hopeful stories of people making differences in all manner of good ways. That's 7 p.m. at the Willowbrook Inn on Mill Street in Northport.

Flying For His Country

Curtiss Aeroplane Company WWI production facility

[See additional photographs here.] 

 

Imagine: It’s over 100 years ago. You are 18 years old, maybe 17, you are an Irish-American, and your country has just entered the “Great War” (as it was called before a second world war came about) as an ally of England, Ireland’s old enemy. You are not enthusiastic about being on England’s side, but you love the U.S.A., so when your draft number is called, you sign up for and are accepted into pilot training, fully expecting – and prepared -- to die for your country. 

 

So begins the story of T.C. Corbett’s experience of military aviation, edited by his son, Wiilliam, and drawn from his father’s journals, written stories, and an unfinished novel. T.C., or Cy, worked for the Chicago Tribune, in various capacities, for over two decades, and retired to Michigan in 1944, where he lived until age 80.

 

Cy Corbett’s fatalistic expectation of dying as a pilot was not unrealistic. Bill Corbett tells me that one out of 20 U.S. Army trainees lost their lives in flight school accidents, so a flyboy didn't have to go overseas to die, although the odds did not improve all that much with training completed, with one source giving the rate of trained pilots killed in crashes as one in eighteen.

The Standard was a biplane with a too-large wing spread. Struts separated the wings vertically. And crossed guy wires lifted up slightly from the body in a thing called a dihedral, and for safety there was an inch or so of play in the rigging of the wings to the fuselage. Planes today are monoplanes with no struts or guying and have an immensely stronger structure with steel longerons. The old Standard with its low horsepower and high wing spread could be buffeted about like a leaf in a storm. And often was. It was a scary machine.

 

I am only setting the stage here for you to read Cy’s story yourself from the beginning. A young man but a serious student and excellent writer, his own words make the long-ago days of the young man he was, with all the emotions of youth in any era, come alive again on the pages, deepened by thoughtful reflections of the mature man looking back on his life.

 

I was drawn into T.C. Corbett’s story despite the fact that I am roughly midway through at least three other books, so I know others will be, too.

 

The Drums of War: An Autobiography

by T.C. Corbett, 1917-1924,

ed. by William A. Corbett

Mission Point Press, paper, illustrated 

$16.95

For thoughts on my recent (often random) reading, click here. For images and more personal observations, this is the place.

Tragedy and Comedy in the Life and Writings of Thomas Mann

I came across something interesting the other day in a biography of Thomas Mann that I picked up to read alongside one of Mann's novels. Well, naturally, there were interesting facts on every page, but a couple of passages in Chapter 25 jumped out at me, perhaps all the more since the ideas addressed there were not elaborated on or discussed at length.

Ten years after the end of the war [WWI], French troops were still occupying the Rhineland, and reparations payments were still outstanding. In August 1928, Stresemann [German chancellor] finally persuaded France to consider early withdrawal and to authorize a new review of reparations. In February 1929 an American banker, Owen Young, headed an international board which in August submitted its assessment to a conference at The Hague. The plan was to give the German economy a chance to expand by allowing reparations to be spread over the next thirty years, and the date settled for the evacuation of the Rhineland was June 30, 1930. [Hayman, p. 391. Italics are my emphases.]

I was always told — and maybe you learned it this way, too — that Germany’s motives in supporting Hitler and launching a Second World War stemmed from the burden of reparations exacted on them from the First World War. And I’m not saying that isn’t part of the story. But what of this plan to ease the burden? Further down on the same page of the Mann biography came another event from the same year that seems to have exacerbated greatly economic conditions in Germany. 

Streseman died early in October 1929, and at the end of the month the Wall Street crash precipitated an international crisis. During the winter, unemployment in Germany reached the point at which the state’s insurance scheme could no longer pay benefits. …Mein Kampf was selling a steady fifty thousand copies a year. With unemployment rising, morale sinking, extremist demagogues and uniformed thugs active in the streets with truncheons and collecting boxes, membership in the Nazi party rose from 120,000 in 1929 to 800,000 in 1931. Members were contributing 300,000 marks a month, which few of them could afford, to a party that was acting less in their interests than in those of the large-scale capitalists, some of whom were helping to finance it. [pp. 381-382]

I draw no general but at least two minor conclusions and questions from this story. First, perhaps it was not necessarily reparations alone that broke Germany’s spirit and drove its people to desire revenge. Had an international financial crisis not been set off by the crash of Wall Street, who is to say that the new terms for payment of reparations would not have been a solution, allowing time, as the international board in The Hague hoped, for the recovery of the postwar (post-WWI, that is) German economy? In addition, note that the National Socialist party, while “socialist” in name, was not a grass-roots workers’ movement but was largely financed by “large-scale capitalists.” The object of their support, of course, was to hold communism at bay.

Long after Thomas Mann and his wife had moved to the U.S. and taken American citizenship, and after World War II finally came to a close, the novelist had this to say about his native country: 

‘There are not two Germanies, a bad one and a good one, but only one, in which the best qualities have been corrupted with diabolical cunning into evil. . . . The evil Germany is the good one in misfortune and guilt, the good Germany perverted and overthrown.’

Hayman, his biographer, notes Mann’s undying resentment over what Germany had allowed itself — and been allowed by others — to become: 

His biggest grudge against humanity was that the civilized countries hadn’t merely failed to scotch the growth of Nazism but had encouraged it. ‘My resentment about this I shall take with me to the grave.’

Our reading circle, initiated back in 20xx to read and study James Joyce’s Ulysses together, is meeting soon to discuss Mann’s The Magic Mountain — hardly a book to be absorbed on first reading or adequately considered in a single evening’s conversation, but 2018 is running out, so we’ll do what we can now and maybe come back to Mann later. He is a fascinating writer, not only for his novels but also for the way he wrote (longhand, about a page and a half a day), the time he spent on a work (The Magic Mountain was begun before World War I and not finished and published until 1924), and the way his beliefs and commitments altered with the passage of time and events in Europe. A “reactionary” in the First War, a man who declared he “hated democracy,” he came around to working for the survival of democracy and freedom and doing all he could to support refugees from the nightmare of Hitler’s Germany. Initially, worried that his novels might be banned in Germany and that he might lose his German citizenship (fears that were, unsurprisingly, eventually realized), he hesitated for a long time to speak out against the Nazis. What to say, when to speak, and how -- these were questions that tormented him. He finally made a public statement against Hitler after six years of living “in exile,” and his biographer comments, “A braver man than Thomas might have come out into the open sooner, but Hesse never came out.” 

The Magic Mountain, however, begun before the First World War, was finished and published in 1926, some time before the rise of Hitler. The Magic Mountain is the first work of Thomas Mann’s that I have ever read, and coming to it with little idea of what I would find, I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud in later chapters, even given some of the book's heavy themes of death, decay, and corruption. When you look at a portrait of Mann, he hardly looks like a humorist (and I don’t mean to suggest that he was some kind of German Mark Twain — hardly!), but he found much in human life and civilization ridiculous. When spiritualism overtakes the residents of the Sanitorium Berghof, for example, or when the charismatic Dutchman Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn (modeled in part, at least physically, on the author’s friend Gerhart Hauptman) holds forth at a picnic by a thundering waterfall, declaiming and gesturing to an audience that can’t hear a word he is saying, a reader feels that Thomas Mann was having a wonderful time poking fun. If you’re a traveler, you may be interested in this New Yorker piece about other travelers making a pilgrimage to find the setting of the novel.

All in all, I’m very glad to have read this novel by Thomas Mann and expect to take his advice and read it a second time. It also occurs to me to mention, in light of current world events, that Mann and his German-Jewish wife were immigrants to the United States. 

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann: A Biography

by Ronald Hayman

NY: Scribner, 1995

Sometimes Reading Makes Me Dizzy

It happens when I’m reading three or more books at the same time – not during the same moments, but going from one to another for several days or weeks, as I’ve been doing since reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.

I’d heard of Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates before someone at our reading group mentioned it, so that was my first post-Stowe book. Very heavy going but speaking from deep in the heart, this black American father’s “letter” to his teenage son is called “required reading” by Toni Morrison. Coates pulls no punches, sugar-coats nothing. Yes, it should be required reading, but I’m afraid it is the kind of required reading too many white Americans will either avoid or set aside quickly. The truth hurts.

Next I picked up Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film and was immediately transfixed. Discovering anything that documents one’s family’s past, whether letters, photographs, or home movies, cannot help astonishing the finder, all the more when the existence of what is found had not been suspected beforehand. In this case, Glenn Kurtz found his great-grandfather’s travel films from 1938 and 1939, including three minutes of footage shot in a Polish village immediately prior to the beginning of the Holocaust. The book is the author’s story of trying to piece together the life of that village, to put names to the living human beings in the film whose lives were soon to end.

Three Minutes in Poland is unlike any other book I have ever read. Aside from the compelling particulars, I took two general messages from it. The first has to do with the ephemeral nature of physical memory storage, the second (not a new realization) with the dismaying human propensity, when the chips are down, to categorize some human beings as Other.

Between the World and Me and Three Minutes in Poland were such intense reading experiences that I needed something else right before sleep each night. For a while, the lighter reading at bedtime was Laurie Lee’s The Edge of Day: A Boyhood in the West of England, originally published in England as Cider with Rosie, but even lyrical memories of boyhood in rural England contain dark episodes. Another “escape” book was The Girl at the Lion d’Or, by Sebastian Faulks, a book that held my interest but left me confused at the end. Was that the end, or were pages missing?

And all along, alongside those four books, I was slowly making my way, a couple pages at a time, through Northern Border, a festschrift volume of research on the Upper Peninsula (and one paper set in Detroit’s factories). Although Coates and Kurtz had the most painful truths to tell, in the book of U.P. history, there was much poverty and violence, and characters in the Faulks novel were haunted by World War I, as was true of people in Laurie Lee’s memoir, too. Last night my dreams were strange.

This morning, awake in the wee, dark hours, I turned to an old stand-by, The Haunted Bookshop. Yes, World War I is in the background there, too. Yes, there are German spies. Yes, violence lurks in the shadows. But the story is a familiar one that I have been re-reading for decades. Interesting how one’s perspective on a book shifts over the years – but that’s another story.

Tonight is the last big bookstore event before the Labor Day weekend, summer’s unofficial end. Northport’s own Steve Gilbreath and his sister, Susan, will be presenting Dignity of Duty, a book of their great-grandfather’s military memoirs, edited by Susan. Another family, another war, the family now connected to yet another village: Northport. As is true of people, sometimes all books seem connected.

I hope that many of you will be able to join us tonight at 7 o’clock.