Born in 1842, Bierce came out of the Civil War with a distinguished service record in the Union Army and went on to a career as short story writer and journalist. In 1913, at the age of 71, he left for Mexico, presumably to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. He was never heard from again.
In The Devil’s Dictionary (originally The Cynic’s Wordbook), Bierce leaves us with a taste of our species sour at best. But to those not inclined to take him too seriously, and willing to forgive his more outrageous ethnic slurs, his legacy will seem more charmingly eccentric than darkly evil. Sometimes he makes you snicker, sometimes laugh outrigh; sometimes he embarrasses you with the truth of his insights.
Bierce feels under no compunction to offer each of his thousand or so definitions in the same form. Some, for instance, are epigrammatic, as:
Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Some amount to brief, barbed essays, as in a disquisition on the word “inadmissible” which argues that the world’s religions are all based on evidence inadmissible in any court, while many of history’s horrors, like the trial, conviction, and execution of witches, were “sound in logic and in law.”
Bierce illustrates other definitions through imagined bits of doggerel by imagined poets and imagined names—Orphea Bowen, say, or Lavatar Shunk. Or Hassan Brubuddy, who adorns this definition:
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
with this verse:
Done to a turn on the iron, behold
Him who to be famous aspired.
Content? Well, his grill has a plating of gold.
And his twistings are greatly admired.
Other verses, meanwhile, are lengthier as one, accompanying the entry for “a male,” that begins:
The Maker, at Creations’ birth,
With living things had stocked the earth.
From elephants to bats and snails,
They all were good, for all were males.
Or Bierce will treat us to fictional dialogues—like one, between an insurance agent and a homeowner, illuminating his definition of “insurance,” which he pictures as a “game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.”
Snide? You bet.
Funny? Quietly.
True? That, also.
Mein Kampf
____________
By Adolf Hitler
First published in 1925
Hitler, wrote his translator in a note to an American edition of Mein Kampf, seldom pursues any logic inherent in the subject matter. He makes the most extraordinary allegations without so much as an attempt to prove them. Often there is no visible connection between one paragraph and the next ... His style is without color and movement.
True enough, but would any other author be so excoriated by his own translator? To the modern mind, Hitler has become such a symbol of hatred and cruelty, so much the incarnation of evil, that even normal editorial courtesies are, in his case, suspended. It has become difficult to see him as human, much less the formulator of ideas or the author of a book.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) while in prison, after his abortive putsch of November 1923. It is, all at once, political manifesto, historical treatise, propaganda manual, autobiography, and an account of the origins of National Socialism, the whole lardered with raw hate.
What, exactly, does Hitler say? As artless and crude as his style is, he is not ambiguous, if only because he repeats himself.
He says that it wasn’t battlefield ineptitude that led to German defeat in the Great War and the ignominious surrender terms of the Treaty of Versailles; it was a stab in the back delivered by the Marxists and the Jews.
He pictures “The Aryan” as culture creator, “The Jew” as culture destroyer; for Hitler, race, not economics, is at the core of national life.
He extols the spoken word, not the written, for reaching the masses (and regularly recounts his successes in doing so).
He equates a nation’s strength with its territory, in effect setting forth a policy of national conquest.
He devalues intellect, holds up physical strength, obedience, and “will” as more essential to the new Aryan man.
He calls for culling out the weak and the infirm from German’s racial stock.
Mainly, Hitler hates. He hates Jews, parliamentarians, freemasons, the liberal press, Marxists, Social Democrats. He displays open contempt for democratic processes, for intellectual “objectivity,” for the masses he proposes to lead, and for any of his followers inclined to take a more accommodating, less bloody road to power.
One does not read Mein Kampf today for its political or racial theories, or as a contribution to human thought, or for pleasure. One reads it as a reminder: Tempting though it might be to see Hitler as a once-in-a-millennium aberration, and hence outside the human pale, he was not. He was, truly, one of us; he had a mother and father. He wavered, as most adolescents do, over choice of vocation. Before he was Der Fuehrer, he was a penniless painter, trying to make a go of it in pre-War Vienna. He was a common soldier. He had youthful dreams, convictions, ideas ...
And, at the age of 34, he wrote a book, an uncommonly frank one at that, in which he spelled them all out:
The National Socialist state “must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called ‘freedom of the press.’”
“The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil ... Therefore in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one.”
“The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole correct movement.”
The National Socialist “movement is antiparliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.”
And always the primitive, pornographic anti-Semitism: “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [Aryan] girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.”
Vicious, evil, whacko stuff? Yet in 1933 Hitler was named chancellor and legally came to power in Germany.
Nana
____________
By Emile Zola
First published in 1880
Nana is a man-eater, a French courtesan of the glittering Second Empire who gives herself to counts, bankers, actors, boys and men, with equal abandon, worms into their psyches only to devour them, robbing them of their dignity and their riches. Capricious, unthinkingly cruel, she is the sexual monster every Parisian man desires; at her house in the Avenue de Villiers, they literally line up outside her bedroom. Her flesh offers delight, her soul corruption.
Nana takes place in the same Paris, in the days leading up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, immortalized by the French Impressionist school of painting. In the big racetrack scene, Nana cheers a horse named Nana, while the Comte Xaver de Vandeuvres, one of her sexual slaves, tries to recreate his Nana-decimated fortune through a rigged betting scheme ... And all the while bright bonnets and gay, colorful dresses shimmer in the sun, straight out of Degas.
The reader realizes from the first, though, that this is no comedy of manners, no polite, pretty look at Parisian high society: “The rumbling of carriages stopped short, doors slammed, and people entered in little groups, waiting at the barrier before climbing the double staircase behind, where the women, their hips swaying, lingered for the moment.” Carriages rumbling, doors slamming, hips swaying: All of Nana is like that—rough and gritty, devoid of delicacy. The novel begins with the premeir of a new show, The Blonde Venus. Someone starts to congratulate the theater owner: “Your theater...” He shoots back: “You mean my brothel.”
&nbs
p; Nana is a vulgar creature of low estate, a product of Paris’s seedy Goutted’Or district—a fact of which Zola repeatedly reminds us. For while Nana stands by itself as a novel, for Zola it was but part of a 20-novel saga, written over 22 years, collectively called The Rougon-Macquarts: The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire. In it, Zola assumes the role of scientist, bent on methodically portraying through fiction the effects of heredity and environment on one multi-branched family. Nana, needless to say, is from the bastard side, the Marcquarts.
Her fortunes follow wild gyrations, from gutter to chateau and back again. We see her first on stage, as the Blonde Venus; she can neither act nor sing, but her stage presence is awesome, at least in the nude. She rises to become the toast of the Parisian demi-monde, sinks to streetwalking. Always she is the sexual vulture, preying on the men of Paris—save only for one interlude of genuine passion, when she falls for an actor.
She is not the stereotypical prostitute with the heart of gold. But she is not unremittingly evil, either. She can yell and scream and cruelly taunt, yet in the next breath, seeing her victim suffer, coo him back to glad-heartedness.
Throughout Nana, grotesque contrasts abound—the glow of French society against the moral putrefaction underneath. No one exemplifies this better than Muffat, the Catholically upright count, enormously wealthy, chamberlain in the Emperor’s court, who is only too glad to be led around with a leash by Nana—toward novel’s end almost literally so. Indeed, virtually all the characters in Nana are obsessed in on way or another, some by the Church, some by gold, some by spectacle, most all by women’s flesh.
Nana has its defects. Among them is table conversation that sometimes drags interminably. And if one of the novel’s strengths is Zola’s raw view of the underside of French society, with all its vulgarity and seediness, that is its weakness, too—that no character is granted a noble sentiment, that all that seems fresh and pure, in all this sordidness, is Nana’s magnificent young body.
Ten Days that Shook the World
____________
By John Reed
First published in 1919
“My sympathies were not neutral,” John Reed admits in the preface to Ten Days That Shook the World, his firsthand account of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In these pages, foes of the Bolsheviks emerge as stubborn impediments to the onrushing tide of history while Lenin, Trotsky and their proletarian partisans are held up as noble representatives of a higher humanity, aglow with a sense of historical mission.
Some critics at the time complained, as did the London Times, that Reed had “swallowed the Bolshevists' propaganda en bloc.” Yet others lauded him, in the words of one, for a “restraint which practically vacuum-cleans the book of any mere rhetorical passages.” Indeed, seen, then, against a swirl of contradictory contentions that the Bolshevik Revolution meant the Millennium, on the one hand, or the Apocalypse, on the other, John Reed's work can indeed be considered “restrained.” For while he made plain his sympathies, he was enough of a reporter to record facts, and to represent views at odds with his own.
The Harvard-educated Reed, in fact, was considered one of the crack reporters of his day. Fresh from chronicling the 1917 Mexican civil war, he went to Russia where, earlier that year, the czar had been overthrown and a provisional government under moderate socialist Kerensky installed. All the while, the Great War raged. While its armies suffered in the trenches and food ran short in its cities, Russia trembled with the choice of just what sort of a revolution it wanted, teetering this way or that with each report from the front or shift in the bread supply.
A tactical dispute as early as 1903 had split Marxists into two factions--the Mensheviks, or minority wing, and the more radical Bolsheviks, or majority. Now, 14 years later, these groups, along with a confusing welter of other parties, struggled for power in the streets and assembly halls of Petrograd and Moscow. Reed was there, to record it.
The scene: The Petrograd Soviet, the hub of revolutionary ferment, following the overthrow of the Provisional Government. It “was tenser than ever...The same running men in the dark corridors, squads of workers with rifles, leaders with bulging portfolios arguing, explaining, giving orders as they hurried anxiously along, surrounded by friends and lieutenants. Men literally out of themselves, living prodigies of sleeplessness and work--men unshaven, filthy, with burning eyes who drive upon their fixed purpose full speed on engines of exaltation.”
Lenin: “A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin....Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange, popular leader--a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached.”
Yet Lenin, Trotsky and the others appear here more as political stick figures, uttering pronouncements and advancing lines of argument, than as fully drawn personalities. The events Reed reported from Russia were, after all, primarily political--debates, proclamations, party caucuses, negotiations. And like politics in more staid settings, the tugging back and forth for Russia's destiny often grew tedious.
Reed makes little effort to spare us the dreary details. Two early chapters supply historical grounding. And a prefatory “Notes and Explanations” section guides us through the committees, councils, unions, and cooperatives that was Russia in 1917; the conscientious reader finds himself repeatedly flipping back to learn that the Vikzhel was the influential railway workers' union, or that the Maximalists were an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
None of this, let it be said, is artfully handled. A more sophisticated narrative might have let Reed introduce names and groups only as needed, and to better sift the wheat of historical significance from the chaff of only transiently relevant detail.
Of course, this is journalism, not history. We hear the Duma in debate, read the latest poster from the Committee for Salvation, stand midst the tumultuous crowds in the Petrograd Soviet as Lenin lambastes the Mensheviks. Ten Days may be all it could be, and even all its author intended. Yet the best part of a century after the event, readers may want something more, may miss precisely the kind of insight that only history, and the distance of years, can grant.
Native Son
____________
By Richard Wright
First published in 1940
It’s hard to imagine a less-appealing character than Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black ne’er-do-well from the Chicago slums who murders the daughter of his high-minded white employer, decapitates her and stuffs her body into a coal furnace. Later, he literally beats the brains out of his girlfriend with a brick and throws her down the air shaft of an abandoned building in which he is hiding from police.
Bigger is the creation of Richard Wright, a novelist hailed as “the most impressive literary talent yet produced by Negro America,” born on a Mississippi plantation in 1901. “The day Native Son appeared,” wrote critic Irving Howe, “American culture was changed forever.” Wright dares to deliver his powerful social message not through a warm, sympathetic victim of injustic, but a “victim” who, by every outward sign, is a brutal killer bereft of human feeling. Understand even Bigger Thomas as the harvest of pervasive racial oppression Wright so much as says, and the black condition in America generally can likewise be understood.
Native Son is not stylistically elegant. Like its central character, it is brutal, nervous and crude. Some of its scenes verge on melodrama, and its concluding pages, where a brilliant left-wing lawyer makes Bigger’s case before the jury, reads less like novel than social polemic. But the book’s overall effect is so shattering, its point of view so relentlessly etched into the reader’s consciousness, that it leaves its mark as indelibly today as when it was written almost 60 years ago.
As the nearly 50 translations and foreign editions appearing in the wake of its first printing testify, its significance was widely recognized then. While rightly decrying it for melodram
atic and propagandistic excesses, one critic after another admitted these were more than outweighed by its sheer power. The book was frequently compared to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. And, again, to Theodore Dreiser: “Native Son does for the Negro,” wrote Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker, what Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy did a decade and a half ago for the bewildered, inarticulate American white. The two books are similar in theme, in technique, in their almost paralyzing effect on the reader, and in the large, brooding humanity, quite remote from special pleading, that informs them both.”
It takes nothing from its significance as social document to report that Wright’s book is, as a reading experience, thoroughly engrossing—especially if you go for blood, gore, decapitations, authentic dialect, flight and capture. Compare it to Dostoyevsky and Dreiser all you like, but Native Son is, for much of the 396 pages of one of its early Modern Library editions, a real thriller.
“Brrrrrriiiiiiiing! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room,” the book opens, and from that to the final working-out of Bigger’s relationship to himself, his lawyer and his crime, the book simply won’t be put down. True, as in other thrillers a notch or two down from Olympian literary heights, you sometimes feel manipulated. And all those pages in the close company of psychopathic murderer Bigger Thomas, as he stalks the streets of Chicago killing and running, desperate and fearful, can scarcely be termed enjoyable. Still, Native Son is one classic you never feel you’re dutifully slogging through.
For all the antiquity of its slang, for all its dated cast of characters—the red-baiting police chief, the “Front Page” era reporters, the left-wing dogooder, the aristocratic racist—you come away feeling immersed in a world as current as the morning paper. True, the years have wrought changes, from Brown vs. Board of Education and Black Power to Martin Luther King, Jr. and an evergrowing black middle class. Yet Native Son remains sadly applicable to at least one slice of black experience—and to white understanding of it. Yes, it’s hard to imagine any novelist creating the likes of Bigger Thomas today; but that’s because the novelistic challenge Wright tackled first has been taken up by many other writers since, and not because of any dearth of truelife models from which to draw. Bigger Thomas is alive and running scared in the run-down black ghettos of every American city. And just as persistent are the conditions which spawned him.
Vintage Reading Page 5