And yet the story itself moves by no means as leisurely as the sentences that tell it; it’s an easy read, quick as well as satisfying, honeyed with little surprises. Pottermack, for instance, turns out to have a more checkered history than his easy workshop puttering and country gentleman’s leisure might suggest. It’s not giving away too much of the plot to reveal that he’s not always lived in his lovely English cottage. Or that his name is a made-up one—drawn, as it happens, from an American river.
It was in the Columbo TV series of some years back that the inverted detective story— where the murderer is revealed from the beginning—reached its heights. Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight, written half a century before, could have been its inspiration.
A Bell for Adano
____________
By John Hersey
First published in 1944
This is no garden variety war propaganda.
Appearing at a time when Allied armies battled the Nazis for Europe, and drenched in a nectar of democracy, decency, and respect for the Common Man, A Bell for Adano might be written off—rashly, it turns out—as mere propaganda. It takes little imagination to picture 29-year-old Time correspondent John Hersey being importuned by the War Department to work up a yarn for the home front on the evils of fascism and the glories of American democracy. Indeed, a previous book by Hersey had been cited as recommended reading by the Council on Books in Wartime, and A Bell for Adano itself became a book club pick and a best seller. Plainly, it told Americans what they wanted to hear about their country and why they were fighting, and served the nation’s wartime interests.
The novel is set in Sicily in the wake of the Allied invasion; the Americans have come and Mussolini’s town officials have run for the surrounding hills. Our hero is Maj. Victor Joppolo, the town’s civil affairs officer, who sets up shop in the town hall, the office of the deposed fascist mayor, Signor Nasta. To see Nasta, townspeople had had to make appointments weeks ahead. With the American major, they just drop by and speak their minds.
Soon they realize they can get justice from the man they call Mister Major, that he has their interests at heart, and can deliver what they need which includes food, clean streets, fairness, and a replacement for their golden-toned, 700-year-old church bell, carted off by Mussolini’s men to make cannon. Joppolo sets about getting one. Later, an American general, in a fit of pique at being delayed by a slow-witted Italian peasant and his mule, orders all mules out of town; Joppolo quietly countermands the order—a transgression which, despite snafus enough to resurrect every stereotype of American bureaucratic laxity, ultimately catches up with him.
All through the novel, Hersey contrasts injustices suffered under the fascist yoke with the fairness and decency of the Americans. Joppolo is serious about instilling in them American ideals. “Perhaps you do not know what a democracy is,” he tells town officials gathered around him. “I will tell you ...” And in a speech sure to bring chills to every civics teacher, he does.
Still, if this be propaganda, it’s propaganda with a twist. For one thing, Joppolo, this representative of all that’s solid and square about America, is no heartland small towner but a mustachioed first-generation Italian-American from the Bronx. And the villain of the piece is not one of Mussolini’s strutting minions but another American—an American general, no less.
What species of propaganda is this that depicts an American general with the brutish insensitivity of a Nazi storm trooper? Or that shows American GIs routinely failing to carry out their orders? Or lusting after the local girls instead of keeping their minds on wives and sweethearts back home? Or, quartered in Italian homes, drunkenly destroying works of antiquity left in their care? This is supposed to buoy up morale and rev up the folks back home?
So then again, maybe A Bell for Adano is not propaganda, or at least not only propaganda.
Or else, maybe half a century ago the gap between “propaganda” and how Americans saw themselves as a nation was not so wide as it is today. Maybe Americans back then had not yet grown distrustful of noble sentiments. Maybe, during what Studs Terkel has called “The Good War,” it was plainer than it is now that real differences existed between political and social systems, that those differences mattered, and that, compared to others, our system was a good one.
Sadly, the cynicism with which many readers are apt to greet Hersey’s story tells us more about today’s American than we may wish to know.
The Martian Chronicles
____________
By Ray Bradbury
First published in 1950
Martians inhabit Ray Bradbury’s Mars, but they’re apt to spark scant interest among readers of The Martian Chronicles. For in this classic, from the same flowering of post-World War II scientific talent that produced the likes of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, Mr. Bradbury’s focus never veers far from that noisy, violent, infuriating intergalactic species known as man.
The Martian Chronicles is a novel—actually a series of connected short stories—that recounts the exploration and colonization of the fourth planet by successive waves of earthlings. It is set in the concluding months of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.
The earliest explorers are treated by the Martians as ripe for the madhouse; even the continued existence of their spaceship after the impatient Martian psychologist Mr. Xxx has zapped them into nothingness fails to convince him they were ever anything but their own hallucinations. Later, a 16-man expedition is seemingly greeted by a whole town of loving friends and family, welcomed into their vintage 1926 homes—complete with bead curtains and Maxfield Parrish paintings—and then are quietly destroyed in the night by their mischievous Martian hosts.
Finally, though, colonization efforts succeed, and men and women begin settling Mars just as earlier pioneers settled the old American west, displaying all the greed and plundering instincts of their predecessors. “They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns.” Mr. Bradbury writes of them. “They were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all. But a government finger pointed from four-color posters in many towns. ‘There’s Work for You in the Sky: See Mars!’ and the men shuffled forward.”
In the year 2003, the settlers “brought in 15,000 lumber feet of Oregon pine to build Tenth City... and they hammered together a clean, neat little town by the edge of the stone canals... It was as if... a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars to set it down without a bump... “
This, in fact, is just how Mr. Bradbury handles bigotry and book burning, environmental desecration and war: He has transplanted them all to Mars and “set it down without a bump.” The new Martians build towns, operate hot-dog stands, experience the loneliness of the frontier, bicker among themselves and bristle at the encroachments of the Feds back on Earth. They inhabit Mars, yet remain earthlings.
What raises all this above the Midwestern flatness in which Mr. Bradbury was raised, and for which he plainly feels a nostalgic tug, is the poetry of his prose. “Full grown without memory, the robots waited. In green silks the color of forest pools, in silks the color of frog and fern, they waited.” Or, “The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine. What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind.” The Martian Chronicles are full of such stuff—lyrical, dreamlike, ethereal.
Just as they’re full of a chill, cackling terror that pops up at the oddest moments. As when Capt. John Black guesses that his older brother, whom he thought long dead, is actually a Martian-conceived figment of his dreams. He slips away from the bed they share. “Where do you think you’re going?” his brother says, his voice “quite cold.”
Or as when Walter Gripp, the last man left on
an abruptly depopulated planet, finally meets the last women, Genevieve: “Her face... was round and thick, and her eyes were like two immense eggs stuck into a white mess of bread dough. Her legs were as big around as the stumps of trees, and she moved with an ungainly shuffle... She had no lips at all.”
No, Martian setting or not, this is not really science fiction. Indeed, grubby scientified details about the hostile Martian atmosphere or rocket payload seem to worry Mr. Bradbury not a bit. They would worry the reader equally little except that curiosity about them occasionally threatens to waylay interest in the story itself. On the other hand, the stories don’t risk growing out-with every new cyber-marvel or NASA space extravaganza.
But something else does date them. Though set at the turn of the twentyfirst Century, Mr. Bradbury’s stories reek of the postwar period in which they were written: The rapacious prosperity... early stirrings of black discontent... the intolerant stupidity of the McCarthy years... the recurrent nostalgia for an America that depression and war had destroyed. All these ride Mr. Bradbury’s rockets to Mars, weighing them down with cultural baggage. After all, the Deep South general storekeeper incensed at the uppitiness of plantation blacks is not so familiar a character anymore, and his ranks diminish with each passing day. Dated characters like him detract from these stories in a way wholly imagined ones—green-eyed, antenna-sprouting Venusians, say—never would.
The Martian Chronicles suffer the way a ten-year-old automobile does: Too old to gleam with its original sparkle, too new to qualify as antique. A few years more will age them to perfection.
Gentleman’s Agreement
____________
By Laura Z. Hobson
First appeared in 1947
A writer gets a magazine assignment for a series of articles on anti-Semitism. His first reaction: How can he make the subject interesting and relevant to his readers? How avoid the customary recitation of wrongs, the preaching, the moral smugness, that the subject so readily provokes?
For 63 pages of Gentleman’s Agreement, the writer agonizes, trying and rejecting one approach after another. (For this glimpse into the creative process alone, the novel deserves a reading.) Finally, one evening as he’s pacing his room, the solution sneaks up on him: He’ll be a Jew. “Six weeks, eight weeks, nine months—however long it takes. Christ, I’ve got it.”
The writer is new to New York, the novel’s setting; he knows hardly a soul. His name, Phil Green, marks him as neither indelibly Jewish nor not. And so, with the blessing of his editor, he sets out upon his journalistic adventure...
When Phil remarks that he’s made an appointment to see a Jewish doctor, his mother’s physician lifts an eyebrow, then concedes that Dr. Abrahams is “not given to overcharging and running visits out, the way some do... “
A journalist friend starts to ask Phil whether or not he’d been for Franklin D. Roosevelt, then interrupts himself: “Sure, you would be... “
Little things: “That’s all these first days had given him,” Phil thinks. “No yellow armband, no marked park bench, no Gestapo... But day by day the little thump of insult. Day by day the tapping on the nerves, the delicate assault on the proud stuff of a man’s identify... “
He is denied a room at an exclusive resort. His son by an earlier marriage is kept out of a street game. Phil becomes sensitive to the slightest shade of a slur, ultimately taking on what some gentiles see as Jewish “oversensitivity.”
He comes to see how some Jews might seek money or fame as a defense against the indignities of an anti-Semitic world.
A goody-two-shoes of a novel, fit only for National Brotherhood Week observance?
Well, the novel of ideas and its cousin, the message novel, are literary genres peculiarly susceptible to being made awful. But author Hobson escapes the trap. Her story races along, sustained in part by a real love interest; Phil falls for his editor’s high-toned niece. There is rippling dialogue, Manhattan post-war gloss and sophistication, even some mildly erotic scenes.
The supporting characters, to be sure, conform to type—the oh-so-principled editor; the glib, love-starved career woman; the smarmy hotel clerk so silken in his anti-Semitism that Phil is left with nothing tangible to grab onto.
But Phil and his girlfriend, Kathy, are fully realized characters, and the mingling of the larger theme with their increasingly rocky love affair enhances interest in both. As one critic put it when the novel first appeared, Hobson “put something much more human than synthetic sawdust inside [the characters’] skins and pumped in real blood.”
Dated? Insofar as Gentleman’s Agreement’s subject is anti-Semitism, perhaps. By almost any standard short of outright eradication, anti-Semitism is not the pressing problem it once was in America; it exists, but not with its old virulence.
Yet for this very reason this novel is worth reading: It is reassuring to realize that a great social wrong, however entrenched it may seem need not endure forever; that what so recently was bad can, in so short a span of time, be made good.
On the other hand, it is difficult to read Hobson’s novel today without applying it to social wrongs not yet made god. Indeed, one scene bears an eerie harbinger: His charade at last revealed and “I Was Jewish for Eight Weeks” safely set into type, Phil asks jokingly what his next article assignment will be: “I Was a Woman for Eight Weeks?”
VII
“But I Know What I Like...”
On Aesthetics and Style
The Ten Books of Architecture — Vitruvius
The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian —
Architects, Painters and Sculptors — Giorgio Vasari
The Seven Lamps of Architecture — John Ruskin
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form — Kenneth Clark
The Elements of Style — Strunk and White
_________________________________
In architecture, sculpture, painting, and language, what makes for the sublime and the beautiful? Don’t know, the unseasoned, unformed parts of all of us sometimes rise up to say, but I know what I like. And yet, over the centuries, writers and thinkers have grappled with such questions and sometimes rooted up some answers. Herewith a few fine examples.
The Ten Books of Architecture
____________
By Vitruvius
Written circa 25 B.C.
Sand mixed with mortar to form cement should be mostly free of dirt. To check, sprinkle some on a white garment, then shake it off. If the garment stays clean, the sand is suitable.
So advised Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the first century B.C. Roman architect and military engineer whose Ten Books of Architecture powerfully influenced the Renaissance. Generations of architects followed his prescriptions, sometimes slavishly—in part because of his practical knowledge, in part his authoritative tone, in part his sheer comprehensiveness.
“I have observed, Emperor,” writes Vitruvius in his introduction to Book IV, addressing Augustus, “that many in their treatises and volumes of commentaries on architecture have not presented the subject with wellordered completeness.” This shortcoming he meant to correct.
Vitruvius offers a primer in the architecture of temples, theaters, public forums, baths, private houses. He discusses principles of harmony and proportion. He ranges over terrain as varied as the layout of rooms in private homes, the design of siege weapons, the building of retaining walls, and the finding of underground springs.
An architect, says Vitruvius, should know enough about music to properly tune the bronze vessels then used in theaters to resonate with an actor’s voice. He should know enough history to explain that caryatids—sculpted female figures in flowing robes that serve as columns in some Greek buildings—originally marked the punishment of the Peloponnesian state of Caryae for siding with the Persians, the sculptures commemorating the slavery of its women.
Vitruvius’ ten books do not merely set out general principles; they are full of numerical proportions, specific advice, injunctions. In a temple whose arrange
ment of column s follows the diastyle pattern, the space between columns, we learn, must be three columns wide. To make a blue pigment, grind together flowers of natron with sand, then mix in coarsely grated bits of copper, roll the mixture into balls and place them in an oven. “As soon as the copper and the sand grow hot and unite under the intensity of the fire, they mutually receive each other’s sweat ...[and] are reduced to a blue color.”
Vitruvius advises that the architrave, which rests upon the columns, should be disproportionately larger than the longer columns supporting it—onetwelfth the column height for columns of 25 to 30 feet, but only a thirteenth for columns 15 to 20 feet long. “For the higher that the eye has to climb, the less easily can it make its way through the thicker and thicker mass of air.”
Such would-be scientific explanations might reasonably undermine our confidence in the architectural precepts of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. Still, Renaissance architects like Alberti and Bramante, Michelangelo and Palladio, drew inspiration from him, and followed his advice. And they hardly disgraced themselves.
Architects in quest of ancient wisdom, however, should not be the only ones to read Vitruvius. “The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves and droves, and lived on savage fare,” begins a chapter on the origin of houses. And while his architectural knowledge was the product of eons of civilization, he was still 2,000 years closer to “men of old” than we are now. Reading him, then, takes us back to a time when the built world was not so taken for granted; when a brick was not a standardized 30-cent building material, precisely defined by long-established engineering specifications, but could still get a chapter devoted to the best clays with which to make it and the best times of the year to fire it ...
Vintage Reading Page 14