The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock by Frank O'Reilly

This is the definitive book on The Battle of Fredericksburg. Incredibly detailed, exhaustively researched, and vivid in its description of the horrors of war. In a lot of ways, it’s the ultimate anti-war book. I can’t imagine reading this and thinking the carnage is cool. Although it delves deep into the minutia of troop level movements and battle strategy, Frank’s writing style keeps you completely engaged, and his extensive use of directly quoted accounts from the participants brings a real humanity to this 150 year old battle. Also, if you are ever in Fredericksburg and have the opportunity to take a tour of the battlefields led by Frank, don’t skip the chance.

One Vast Anguish

I read Madame Bovary because of de Maupassant and I read de Maupassant because of Maugham. I was not disappointed in Bovary. I’m not sure if everything of Flaubert’s is like this but Bovary was everything I hoped it would be and some things I didn’t expect. Some observations.

Madame Bovary is a surprisingly modern novel in that it identifies a problem familiar to modern readers. It’s about an unfulfilled woman, a woman who yearns for some kind of actualization but, denied this, seeks it instead first in fantasy, in “emotional affairs” and then in outright physical adultery. You can argue all you like if Emma Bovary does this because she is stupid or cruel, fed by romantic notions, confusing material affluence with intellectual and spiritual achievement or if, as I see it, her time and place, 1800s France, left her no options – Emma’s choices are to become a nun or a wife, and the maker of a modest home at that. Her husband, Charles, spends his days as a country doctor traversing the land helping people and being a figure o f importance. Emma sews.

Not the kind of plot I usually dig, but what really kept me turning the pages is what usually keeps me turning pages: the language. My God, the language! I don’t know how Flaubert reads in his original French but in the English translation of Lowell Bair it is…

Not too beautiful. It’s clear, has a nice flow, is relatively simple, makes terrific use of observation, of detail, of what I think is called le mot juste, “the right word.” Isn’t that how it’s done, whether you’re Flaubert or anyone else, whether you’re producing capital-L Literature or advertising copy? At times it is plain, at times soaring, Flaubert simply puts it together in a way that I love. He describes Emma:

Accustomed to peaceful sights, she was drawn to scenes of contrast and unrest. She liked the sea only because of its storms, and verdure only when it was scattered among ruins. She had to be able to extract some kind of personal benefit from things, and she rejected as useless anything which did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic and she sought emotion, not landscapes.

Again, with just the right detail, he so perfectly captures her character and state of mind:

Her carnal desires, her longing for money and the melancholy of her unfulfilled passion merged into one vast anguish, and instead of trying to distract herself from it she concentrated her attention on it, stirring up her pain and always looking for a chance to suffer.

It’s also wonderfully erotic in that restrained 19th century way. This is among its sexiest passages:

The bed was a large mahogany one, shaped like a boat. Red silk curtains, curved at the bottom, hung down very low from the ceiling beside the flaring headboard; and there was nothing in the world so lovely as her dark hair and white skin against that crimson background when, in a gesture of modesty, she brought her bare arms together and hid her face in her hands.

I think I also didn’t expect the book to be so wise. It’s full of knowing observations about the world and the psychology of its characters.

What next? An investigation into Zola. Then, perhaps, more Flaubert? More de Maupassant surely? And who are Flaubert’s great–grandchildren? Who is continuing to turn out prose and stories like that? Maybe what’s on display are the principles of writing and storytelling that I enjoy in anyone’s hands.

Faulkner As Is

I have a well thumbed copy of the Collected Stories of William Faulkner, Vintage edition that I have spent time with sporadically for years. Every time I pick it up I read a little more, always planning to spend more time on Faulkner, explore the novels beyond As I Lay Dying, which I’ve read twice, and never quite getting to it. Time to change that.

I guess my appreciation of Faulkner’s stories has grown with each reading and, in the case of many of these stories, re-reading. I think most of us think of Faulkner as a great “Southern writer” most known for setting much of his work in the same continuum – the recurring characters and lineages of the fictional Yoknopotophaw County, in Mississippi. But he’s so much more than that; he’s the Nobel-winning author that made significant contributions to literature in time, pace, setting, psychology and character – and this, too, obscures him, for at the one end of appreciation he is too small and at the other too big.

What you need to get under you is just that these stories are so damn good, by themselves. For starters, there’s the language. Always, the language, the prose, the ability to make great sentences. Here’s one that blew me away the other day, from “Victory:” “The dark earth bites into the sun’s rim.” A sentence like that, you can hold in your hands. More:

The sun is setting. The village rises in black silhouette against the sunset; the river gleams in mirrored fire. The bridge across the river is a black arch upon which slowly and like figures cut from black paper, men are moving.

Faulkner puts his words together the way a poet does, he selects details a poet would notice that convey a world of meaning and upon which entire scenes and experiences hinge.

So he’s a great writer. But he’s also very accessible. That’s key, I think. My most recent re-readings have driven home to me that though Faulkner is a giant among literary figures, his works are also entertaining and readable and, dare I say it, good examples of Virile Lit. For he writes stories about thieves, con artists, tough men, stories that wouldn’t be out of place in the Western or crime genres. He has here a number of amazing stories about war and about a fictional tribe of native Americans – read “A Courtship” for a story that could have walked out of the pages of a 1930s adventure serial.

I’m not saying they’re all adventure stories, but he maps the human heart the way James M. Cain does. Ostensibly, Cain’s work is “crime fiction,” but that’s just Cain’s particular perch, from which he navigates the terrain of his characters, and often the crimes Cain portrays are not transgressions against the law at all – they are the crimes of basic humanity, greed, emotional violence and manipulation. Faulkner is the same way – you’ll just never find them together on the same shelf in the book store.

What I think Faulkner achieved, what I will read more of to find out, is a perfect balance between literature of great artistic merit, heavy language, and work that is enjoyable, even thrilling. If so, it’s no wonder he is numbered among our greatest writers – but don’t let the fact that he is canonical keep you from appreciating him just as is. That’s my intention.

More thoughts on Bond.

For most of my young life I was a chronic hero-worshiper. I have been half-heartedly trying to determine if I was excessive in this and if I am still prone to it. Naturally, my heroes these days are more diverse. But when I was young they were fairly common and shared a number of traits in that they were all strong, erudite and principled men. These days, I number my mother, my wife and my children among my heroes, as well as men and women that are very simple in their heroism in that they don't conquer worlds so much as behave with consistent kindness, love and endurance.

I've written about this in the past but when I was a teenager I was madly in love with the idea of James Bond. As I said, I wanted to be like Bond - except for the womanizing part; I wanted to be admired by women and have relationships with a woman but not prolific in my use of them the way Bond was. Maybe it's because I've been making a lot of "your 15 favorite" lists on Facebook but I thought I'd dash off a few more thoughts about what for me was an important influence and what remains a beloved literary figure.

The Bond novels are all delightful and present a more complete and complex picture of the cardboard god the movies have made him out to be. If you're only going to read one Bond novel to get a feel for these works I'd have a hard time narrowing it down. My finalists would include You Only Live Twice because it captures almost everything one loves about them - the sense of getting inside the foreign and exotic that Fleming brought so naturally to the setting, the sex, martial arts and gunplay, the bizarre (perennial bad guy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is in his element here as a reimagined Japanese warlord on a private volcanic island of poisonous flowers) and the tender (the novel's coda in the fishing village is Fleming reaching beyond pulp into artistry). I'd also have to consider On Her Majesty's Secret Service for the same reasons and the depth it brings to Bond through his association with the woman he would actually marry, Tracy (she's gunned down shortly after) and The Man With the Golden Gun because it is a tight, well characterized tough guy novel with Fleming;s gift for characterization and character background amply displayed. I'd also have to throw in From Russia, With Love for its cleverness (Fleming unfolds the tale with multiple perspectives, Bond's but also the Soviets and the femme fatale, Tatiana Romanova).

But for the movies, for my favorite, I'd settle quite comfortably on the film version of From Russia, With Love. I must have watched this on VHS a hundred times when I was a kid, always consciously (and hopelessly) copying Sean Connery's stride and attitude. I had an enormous crush on Daniella Bianchi, who played Tatiana. Most people when they pick a favorite Bond film quickly realize the Connery years were among the best and zero in on Goldfinger because it was seamless and nearly perfect as a Bond movie - and with good reason. But I'll take the ambiance and darkness of From Russia over the slickness of Goldfinger any day - I think without From Russia, With Love, there'd be no Portishead (no doubt this band also loved the Len Deighton novels and movies and more, too, but you get my point).

The Moore years were wasted ones and the years that turned the Bond movie franchise into a ridiculous mess, although my attitude toward Moore has softened - he recognized the Bond silliness for what it was and played it for laughs, appropriately; they become clever self satires in his capable hands. But the other Bond movie I liked and watched a lot as a teenager was The Living Daylights. For one brief moment there the movies looked like the novels. Everything about Timothy Dalton, Maryam D'Abo, the setting, the soundtrack (The Pretenders!!) was right.

I haven't been blogging, but I have been reading.

I suspect many of you have been anxiously wondering why I haven't updated the blog in a while. I mean, with everything going on in the world and your life, no doubt one of the priorities in your thinking has been, That guy that blogs excessively about spy novels and sports stories, what is he up to? I must know!!

A bulleted list, if you don't mind, of a few things in my stew.

-As titled, I haven't been blogging but I have certainly been reading at my usual voracious clip and in the usual genres, spy novels, adventure tales, history and sports.

-Robert Littel, the spy novelist. I'm not sold on him after Legends but I will give him another try with The Company or other work. One annoyance: why does the protagonist of Legends get recognized at every airport he goes to? Intrigued by this writer, though, great plotter, interesting characters, terrific realism; I'm not liking him as much as, say, Charles McCarrey, though.

-Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire, which certainly would be a no brainer for a reader like me in that this historic fiction about the battle of Thermopylae is on a list of required reading for the Marines and other branches of the military, thrilled me in some ways but seemed long winded to me in others. Maybe coulda been tighter for me personally, but otherwise a very good read, very good.

-John Irving. Sadly, I put down A Prayer for Owen Meany after a hundred some pages because I just couldn't get into it, couldn't get into the characters, couldn't muster the enthusiasm for the story. This is surprising to me for a number of reasons. One, I read The World According to Garp at least twice, loved it. Also The Hotel New Hampshire. So why couldn't I get into Meany? Is it Irving's changing style in this one of his later works or is it me, as a reader? I suspect the former. Two, I was surprised at this because Meany frequently makes people's short lists of Irving's great works.

-Bo, autobio of U of M football coach Bo Schembechler co written with Mitch Albom. Great read - I'm not normally an Albom fan - and an excellent companion to another great read, John U. Bacon's co-written, with Bo, sports/business book, Bo's Lasting Lessons. Everything you want in a sports book. But, you know, as I read it's a reminder about why sports is such a great creator of literature and content. Longer post on this later but sports as a lifestyle, a past time and as literature provides a ready made context for the conflicts that drive men; men in short love to compete and sports gives them a context that's safer to do it than war. The language used by men like Bo and OSU coach Woody Hayes, on display in this book, is couched in terms of warfare, but the critical difference, obviously, is that in football when you "kill 'em," they get back up and do it again. It's safe. I'm not knocking this - I'm a fan, too - I'm just pointing it out, probably redundantly for most of you.

More to come, got to get back into the habit of regularly blogging for all seven of my loyal readers.

The Biggest Jump in Baseball

Jim Bouton's Ball Four, a diary of his 1969 season in the majors and minors, was at its time a notoriously candid sports book that broke new ground by being honest about playing, drug use, women, and the personalities of the players. It reads a bit dated these days but is nonetheless fascinating to the fan of the sport or genre. For me, it's an anxious read, as Bouton is constantly evaluating himself as a pitcher in light of his most recent performance and lives in constant fear of being sent down, called up, traded, or fired.

There’s nothing like walking into a minor-league clubhouse to remind you what the minors are like. You have a tendency to block it. It was cold and rainy in Tacoma when I went there to meet the Vancouver club and the locker room was shudderingly damp, small and smelly. There’s no tarpaulin on the field, so everything is wet and muddy and the dirt crunches on the cement. The locker stalls are made of chicken wire and you hang your stuff on rusty nails. There’s no rubbing table in the tiny trainer’s room, just a wooden bench, and there are no magazines to read and no carpet on the floor and no boxes of candy bars. The head is filthy and the toilet paper is institutional-thin. There’s no batrack, so the bats, symbolically enough, are stored in a garbage can. There’s no air-conditioning and no heat, and the paint on the walls is peeling off in flaky chunks and you look at all of that and you realize that the biggest jump in baseball is between the majors and Triple-A. The minor leagues are all very minor.

There’s no end to the humiliation. The kid in the clubhouse asked me what position I played.

"Why Foreign Girls Make Better Wives and Lovers"

That erstwhile publication, Art of Manliness, has a great piece up today on vintage men's magazines. "MARCIANO IS SCARED OF ME says Archie Moore." "Sex Can Be Fun!" "Hooked to a Killer Shark." And so much more.