What Are You Reading

[Fading Fast]

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks originally published in 1961


Muriel Spark packs a little plot and a lot of ideas and philosophy into her short novel about a charismatic teacher in an upper-class girls school in Scotland in the 1930s.

Miss Jean Brodie uses her classroom as a pulpit to preach the ideas of Miss Jean Brodie, whom she self describes as being "in her prime." Being a progressive teacher for her day, she wants the children to think, not learn by rote, but really she wants them to think what she tells them to think.

In her first year, she identifies six, ten-year-old girls to be "her" girls, "the Brodie set." Until they graduate at seventeen, she continues to meet with and "mold" them.

While Miss Brodie presents herself as having a deep interest in their well being, it's really just a self-aggrandizing project where she's trying to raise little disciples devoted to Miss Jean Brodie. No humble person constantly describes herself, as MIss Brodie does, as "being in my prime."

All the Brodie girls play a part in the story, but it is really one, Sandy, who becomes the main focus of Brodie's ambitions. Sandy also, though, becomes Brodie's crypto antagonist.

Liberal Miss Brodie dates a bachelor (and sleeps with him!), but really pines away for a married Catholic art teacher who seems to love/lust after Miss Brodie. But Miss Brodie swears off him because he is Catholic and married.

Unrequited love is hardly special, but Brodie obsessively focuses on the married art teacher for years. As the girls enter their mid teens, she even tries to arrange for the prettiest of her girls to have an affair with the art teacher, while Sandy is supposed to report the progress of this scheme back to her. What? If it sounds pretty creepy, that's because it is.

Miss Brodie's oddness doesn't stop with sex, though, as she has a passion for Ancient Rome (nothing odd about that) and class struggle (par for a liberal teacher), but also for fascism (bam!). In pre-World War II England, she has a picture of Mussolini on her wall and nice things to say about Hitler.

Her fascist passions run so strong, she convinces a troubled seventeen-year-old girl to quit school to fight for the fascists in Spain. This unfortunate young lady gets killed on her way over. Later, it's obvious that Miss Brodie has washed her hands of the matter. She believes her advice was appropriate with the only tragedy being the girl never got a chance to join the fight.

While Brodie is playing demigod to "her" girls, the school's headmistress spends years looking for a way to oust this self-centered "free spirit" from her school. But as long as Brodie's girls remain loyal, the headmistress keeps running into walls.

(Spoiler alert) After graduation, though, very perceptive Sandy, who sometimes bought into, but also often questioned, Miss Brodie's ideas, finally sees the danger this egotist presents to young women.

(More spoilers) Sandy, in private, delivers the information - she teaches fascism you know - the headmistress needs to "retire" Miss Brodie. Miss Brodie spends the next decade before her passing trying to identify her betrayer.

When Miss Brodie finally succeeds, right before her passing, she feels she's had her epiphany moment, but sadly she lacks any such true insight as an epiphany moment for Miss Brodie would be if she saw the harm her arrogance caused to so many young women.

There are more characters, nuances and ideas in Muriel Spark's tightly written short novel, which argues for another read at some point. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has an echo of Winefred Holtby's 1936 novel South Riding, which is also about a free spirited young teacher shaking up the educational establishment, but this time, in Yorkshire. Iconoclast teachers clearly had a moment in 1930s England.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

John C. Calhoun, subtitled American Portrait, by Margaret L. Coit. Published in 1950. My copy may be from that year; I cannot find a more modern ISBN. Well-written, with copious notes, an insight to both a political leader and the transformation of the early US from a loosely-connected political alliance to an expansive nation with a more discernible national identity.
About one-third of the way through. Enjoyable reading.

Completely superfluous note: the names in Coit's introductory Acknowledgements read like characters out of novel. I am not making fun of them, it's just that the names seem to evoke an era from some generations back-

Dorothy de Santillana
Gaillard Hunt
John Perry Pritchett
Minnie Clare Yarborough
Mr. and Mrs. John C. Calhoun Symonds
Miss Eugenia Frost
Alexander S. Salley
Colonel Fitz Hugh McMaster
J. Gordon McCabe
Mr. St. George L. Sioussat (of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress)
Professor Hollen Farr (curator of the Yale Memorabilia Room)
Dr. Clarence Saunders Brigham
...and a ton more.

 

[AmateisGal]

Just finished Flynn Berry's Northern Spy. Quite good.

Also reading Daphne Du Maurier's The House on the Strand. I'm in the mood for dark, gothic novels right now, so if you have suggestions, do let me know!

 

[clementishutin]

Lord of the rings

 

[Fading Fast]

Hollywood Victory by Christian Blauvelt "From the Turner Classic Movies Library" published in 2021


Hollywood Victory is more than a coffee-table book, but less than anything approaching a serious look at Hollywood during WWII. It mainly takes an anecdotal approach to revealing how the stars, producers, directors, studios (including the studio heads) and others connected to filmmaking contributed (or not) to the country's war effort.

If you approach this book like a survey - hmm, this is interesting, maybe I'll look into that particular subject a bit more - it's a fast, fun overview of Hollywood's war effort.

At its best, Hollywood Victory tosses in some neat stories like when German actor and staunch Nazi Emil Jannings uses his pre-war Oscar (the first Oscar ever awarded) as a talisman when Allied soldiers made it to his house at the end of the war. It worked; they were nice to him.

Another fun one is German-born and naturalized citizen Marlene Dietrich being called to the White House and told by FDR himself to cool it on her use of prurience in selling war bonds (she had been sitting in wealthy donors' laps at nightclubs to close the sale). Effectively, she was told, "we want your help and the sales, but not quite that way."

More seriously and jarringly, we learn that the military had expected such an outsized number of US servicemen casualties from the invasion of Japan that over five-hundred-thousand purple hearts were manufactured. Because Japan surrendered after the dropping of two atomic bombs, the invasion never happened. Every purple heart awarded since has come from this happily unused-in-WWII stock.

Away from these and a few other neat nuggets, Hollywood Victory is an overview of things most long-time fans of Hollywood already know.

In no particular order: Carole Lombard died in a plane crash on a war-bond-sales tour (she had bullied her way onto the flight that crashed); Clark Gable (Lombard's grieving husband) and James Stewart fought the military and studio bureaucracy hard to see real action (which they did) and Bette Davis led a sincere effort by many stars, including Rita Hayworth, to make the Hollywood Canteen a truly democratic place for servicemen (no officers allowed) to rub shoulders with genuine stars.

You also see how Bob Hope got his start - and kinda built a career around - entertaining troops, while (once again) German-born Marlene Dietrich and big-star-at-the-time Mickey Rooney, like Hope, took some real risks to entertain troops near the front lines.

Directors like John Ford and Orson Welles gave up large studio salaries to direct propaganda or informational films, while studio boss Walt Disney was an integral part of the "good neighbor policy -" the United States' attempt to woo Latin American countries away from Axis entreaties.

Being a modern book, it rightly takes a look at Hollywood's and the military's brutally unfair treatment of minorities with only some virtue-signaling wokeness creeping in here and there. Similarly, as always, it glosses over the true communist affiliations of some in Hollywood, but rightly doesn't shy away from denouncing the overreach and frightening intimidation of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Congress' effort to investigate communist activities in America.

Hollywood Victory does nothing more than surf over Tinseltown's efforts during World War II. Occasionally, it brings out a neat tidbit, but mainly it rehashes the stories most fans of the era are already, at least, somewhat familiar with. It does, though, on almost every page, have some beautiful pictures, including many that aren't the familiar ones.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Megan Miranda - Little Lies is sooo bad, believe me!

2/3 were totally boring and the rest is now halfway tense. Absolutely not recommendable.

Like so often, 200 pages would have been enough for the story!

 

[AmateisGal]

I'm reading three books right now.

A historical fiction time-travel mystery novel, Murder In Time (which is compelling enough to keep me reading, but not wonderful); Antisemitism in America by Leonard Dinnerstein, and Drawing Fire: A Pawnee, Artist, and Thunderbird in World War II

 

[Touchofevil]

The Man on the Balcony (1976) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

 

[Trenchfriend]

A german short novel (109 pages).

Thriller "Kaltes Land" (2021) by Michael Tsokos

 

[Bushman]

Currently reading Capstick's Return to the Long Grass. About halfway through right now.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Big Laugh by John O'Hara originally published in 1962


John O'Hara has written better books, but The Big Laugh's look at Hollywood in the 1930s is a fun-enough read for fans of that era. While O'Hara isn't sparing in this unflattering look at Tinseltown, he saves his most poisonous arrows for the executives and money men who run the show. That's no surprise as creative types, like author O'Hara, rarely like the people who are tasked with turning art into cash flow.

Lead character Richard Hubert Ward was not a nice kid. Raised in the world of New England prep schools, which he kept getting tossed out of, he and his family parted ways after Ward had one scrape too many. As a late teen living in New York City and after writing a bad check to a friend whose apartment he was renting, he finds his way to summer stock as an escape from trouble.

He also found his future there as, now sporting the name Hubert Ward, he had a talent for being on the stage. His acting skills were adequate, but he had that "thing," that "star power" that audiences enjoy seeing. The next logical step for Ward was Hollywood, where he started out in okay roles, but he and the studio heads could see a brighter future.

Whether intentional or not, O'Hara pens Ward as a well-functioning sociopath by now. As a kid, Ward couldn't control his selfishness and immorality, but as a young man in Hollywood, he seems to understand how people expect him to behave, so he does so to succeed, but it's all a facade.

It's scary to watch Ward act properly on the surface, while we know that it's just calculation. It's not so much that he's evil, as amoral: he doesn't have any passion to be immoral, but will be if it suits his needs.

This approach to his career fits in perfectly with the studio bosses who are portrayed here as greedy men solely driven by money and power for themselves, which comes from higher-grossing movies.

For these moguls, "art," "an actor's passion," and other sensitivities are all things that either get in the way or, if the actor is a big enough star, have to be placated to get the movie made.

The actors, though, don't come off much better as they are seen as a calculating and manipulative bunch themselves always trying to improve their careers, image or paycheck, while almost everyone hops into bed with almost everyone else, sometimes as part of that career-advancement effort.

Hollywood's homesexuality is treated not with thundering condemnation, but with an amused derision as the insiders know which stars "escape" to underground clubs or overseas, from time to time, to drop the facade.

O'Hara appears to have more respect for the actresses as he pens a few women stars as less narcissistic and smarter than their male counterparts. These women almost have to be as their careers, at least their time at the top, are generally much shorter than the men's.

Ward himself is very smart, so as his star rises, he saves his money, doesn't succumb to drink or nightclubbing (which has finished more than one actor's career), isn't too demanding of his studio, is respectful to his "public," and marries a decent and smart woman - a marriage that helps his career until it doesn't.

Ward, an unlikeable person, is an atypical choice for a lead character in a novel as you don't enjoy his success, but then, there are no heroes in O'Hara's Hollywood.

The Big Laugh's title, itself, is a comment on Hollywood and its "successful" people all being part of the "big joke" where they think they deserve their success and riches. It's a bitter metaphor that condemns an entire industry, which seems to be O'Hara's point.


N.B. While The Big Laugh is an okay and fast read, for a better fictionalized, but equally condemning look inside Hollywood's Golden Era pick up Budd Schulberg's scathing What Makes Sammy Run (comments here: #8,663 )

 

[Turnip]

This below book to be opened tonight.
Having read the entire and very fab „Echolot“ series by Walter Kempowski, I’m curious what this is going to be.
Michael Wildt is a highly reputable historian and I read his simply superb dissertation so I think there can’t go much wrong.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Just finished The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalie Sanmartin Fenollera. Character's full name is Prudencia Prim, who answers a newspaper ad for a librarian for the resident of the small village of San Irene de Arnois (presumably in France?). The employer who placed the ad is looking for someone to arrange his personal library. What follows is a journey of self-discovery, by means of Prim's self-examination of her self-created social code. (The code is not that bad, by the way, but it could be a social style designed to keep one slightly sealed away from everyone else.)

Dialogue dominates the book, with a great deal of philosophy discussed. Not a romance, not a polemic, but an interesting story with ancient authors, classic literature, and philosophies interwoven between sprinkles of Did he just flirt with me? and Did I just flirt with him? Recommended by my daughter.

 

[dubpynchon]

I’m reading through the shortlist for the Dublin Literate Award. I’m a bit late as the award was given a few months ago, but better late than never. In every shortlist there’s one novel that ‘eschews the traditional narrative format’ and it’s usually 800 pages long. That one’s up next!

 

[Turnip]

For a change:

Slightly aged to mildness but still John Waters.

 

[AmateisGal]

What am I NOT reading would be the more appropriate question. I currently am reading four or five books. But the one I'm enjoying the most is The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger. Her writing is so compelling...it's like you're sitting down and having a conversation with her. @Fading Fast have you read this? If not, I know you will LOVE it.

 

[Fading Fast]

Love With a Harvard Accent by Leonie St. John published in 1962


This "trashy" paperback novel about the love lives of the girls of Radcliffe with, mainly, the boys of Harvard in the late 1950s is page-turning fun for, yes, its non-stop prurience, but also, today, for its distorted, yet still-revealing look at college life before the late 1960s changed almost everything.

Author Leonie St. John is the pen name of the combined efforts of one former male student and one former female student of the two respective colleges. A book review from 1962 notes that many of the characters were recognizable roman-a-clef creations to those who had attended the schools in the late 1950s.

Even assuming exaggeration, clearly the days of girls waiting for marriage and college boys only seeking out townies and professionals for sexual adventure were over by the late 1950s.

In Love With a Harvard Accent we meet several girls who have no reason to take school seriously, so boys, dating and sex dominate their thoughts and conversation. The boys, at least some of them, do take school seriously, but like boys everywhere, they still find time to pursue girls and sex.

Despite its breezy attitude, some of the characters come alive like Heather Brooks, the pretty middle-class girl who had a summer fling in Europe before her junior year and is now deciding how serious she wants to be with her very serious Harvard boyfriend.

Heather comes across as the most modern of the girls. She could drop down in a college today, and while she'd be shocked that there is no longer any in parentis loco half-heartedly trying to control the students' sex lives (and identity politics would throw her a bit), she'd adjust pretty quickly to present-day attitudes toward casual sex and gender.

In Heather's clique you meet Ginny, the Wasp who hates her narrow-minded, bigoted parents so much that she only dates and sleeps with Jewish boys (boys of "another religious persuasion" as her mother scathingly refers to them) to shock, anger and alienate her parents. Not surprisingly, the boys end up as collateral damage in Ginny's mean-spirited game.

Also in Heather's clique is Sara who is having some sort of mental breakdown. You can feel society's wheel beginning to turn in favor of understanding mental illness. Sara, we also learn, is also a girl who needs to bathe more frequently.

The last in the clique is uptight Mary Ellen, the "I'm waiting until I get married" girl who looks down on her libertine friends until she has her first sexual experience. Later on, the college's old guard rallies itself enough to leave Mary Ellen the victim of a life-isn't-fair moment.

The boys, though, are given less time and, overall, come across as being, mainly, manipulative and moody jerks who drink too much and mistreet girls. The "gay guy" is neither treated sympathetically (today's bent) nor as evil, but as just another guy with an agenda, interestingly, kinda out and kinda accepted.

But the novel is pretty much about sex with, surprisingly, sometimes the girl trying to get it from a reluctant guy. Sure, the balance tilts heavily the other way, but the one-offs ring true.

Most of the girl's concerns - getting pregnant, being labelled a slut, disappointing one's husband by not being a virgin, getting caught by the school or their parents and the "should I only do it if I'm in love" question - are, today, either outdated or way down on the list of students' concerns, which contributes to the book's time-capsule value.

When they aren't having sex, the clothes (dressing appropriately truly mattered), food (including "exotic" cuisines like "Italian"), groups (the beatniks haven't morphed into hippies yet) and views of the administration (it still received a surface-deep level of respect) gives us a contemporaneous look into the era. And for fans of Boston and Cambridge, there's a lot of local color, plus many references to places still around today.

The plot of Love With a Harvard Accent is about the fate of several relationships, but this book wasn't read then and shouldn't be read now for its trite plot. It was read when it came out for its near scandalous account of the sex lives of Ivy League students. Today, it's read for its fun and enlightening time travel to two colleges in 1950s America where it's easy to see the early markers of what would become the 1960s sexual revolution.


N.B. There's a revealing scenes where a couple of college students, who are spending the weekend at a motel so that they can have sex, go to the nearby drivein to see a "college movie" and mock the rah-rah innocence of its bobby sockers and football heroes. Fans of Classic Hollywood are familiar with how college movies, well into the 1960s, seemed to stay oddly wholesome, even when other movie genres where becoming more realistic.

 

[AmateisGal]

Finished this remarkable book last night. I can't recommend it enough.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Colossus of Arcadia by E. Phillips Oppenheim originally published in 1938


E. Phillips Oppenheim was a popular author in his day who, while all but forgotten now, turned out successful book after book, with one of his later efforts being The Colossus of Arcadia.

With elements of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Agatha Christie and even Ian Fleming, The Colossus of Arcadia is a fun read, slow in parts and not in the class of the aforementioned authors (Christie aside), but still an entertaining time-travel trip to Monte Carlo in the late 1930s as the winds of war swirled over Europe.

Like Fitzgerald, Oppenheim's book is set amongst the rich, in this case, the rich who party in the elite resort principality of Monaco. Like Christie, he brings a mix of characters together, including a poor Whartonesque young woman of limited means, Joan Haskell, who wants to live amongst the rich.

Oppenheim then drops a murder right in the middle of this eclectic clique. But instead of the murder being the main focus, it sets off a Fleming-like tale of international espionage with a super spy stalking events throughout the story.

It's 1938 and the rich are partying in Monte Carlo when one of two Germans, who have just fled their country, is killed in Monaco and the other, a very wealthy, young and handsome German banker, Rudolf Sagastrada, takes refuge in the principality.

The de facto ruler of Monaco, Baron Domiloff, provides temporary sanctuary for Sagastrada, which puts Domiloff at the center of a quiet but potent international incident.

The Germans want to get Sagastrada back for a show trial, but will settle for an assassination if they can't; the French and English are pressuring Domiloff to protect Sagastrada as they want to use the incident to push Germany to start the war early as the French, in particular, are confident their Maginot line will hold and that, along with England, they can quickly defeat Germany. (Clearly, they didn't know what we know today.)

All that geopolitics plays on in the background as half the fun of The Colossus of Arcadia is seeing the Fitzgerald-style partying, opulence and canoodling of the rich and bored. The men, married or not, are all intrigued by the pretty young American, Joan Haskell, new to their group, while the women, married or not, are all intrigued by the wealthy, handsome, erudite and somewhat fragile Sagastrada, also new to the group.

Amidst the many champagne cocktails, caviar meals, late-night parties and games of tennis and golf of this small clique of the rich and their hanger-oners, a few shadier characters - German assassins, an English diplomat and the aforementioned spy - play their more deadly game.

Amping up the tension is Monaco's own tenuous status as a protectorate/independent country without a military at a time when the world has other things on its mind than guarding the playground of the rich.

Oppenheim is a good storyteller who creates engaging characters; although, his narrative sometimes slows down a bit too much. Still, there is enough action, love, lust and geopolitics that, along with a fun climax, makes it easy to see why his books sold well.

You also see how many predicted the inevitable war that was coming, but of course, they could not anticipate the way it would ultimately unfold and engulf the world. Today, The Colossus of Arcadia is still an entertaining story, but the real kick for modern readers is the time travel to a rich enclave of an on-the-brink-of-war Europe.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The 39 Steps by John Buchan, pub. 1915. The 1935 film version is quite different from the book. First person narrative about an international plot to provoke a world war (we figure out that the story begins just before the outbreak of The Grear War). Richard Hannay, a mining engineer from South Africa visiting London, inadvertently becomes part of the effort to quell the plan. The book is largely Hannay's adventures while on the run from the villains and the law.
Buchan writes with excellent detail to setting, and moves the action forward at a brisk pace. Recommended.