by Edward Champion

The Tyranny of Henry James: A Conversation with Dinitia Smith

I’ve had a long-standing Henry James problem. I believe James to be a literary tyrant. But Dinitia Smith — hot on the heels of a new book based on James’s The Golden Bowl — was kind enough to take some time to help a bald man in Brooklyn come to terms with Henry James.

I have read The Golden Bowl three times. I have read The Ambassadors three times. I have read The Wings of the Dove once. Despite these good faith reading efforts, I have detested Henry James — particularly late Henry James — with the force of a thousand suns. I find his interminable sentences to be tedious. I find his behavioral observations to be superficial. I would much rather be locked in a room with a garrulous chowderhead for a three-day weekend than deal with this hideous “Master” in any form.  In short, I cannot stand Henry James.

Unfortunately, I’m in something of a pickle. You see, because of my years-long Modern Library Reading Challenge project, I am fated to read those last three triple-deckers written by James at some point in the next few years.  And I am a man of my word.

And because I possess a highly stubborn temperament, I started contacting people who were obsessed with Henry James, hoping that they might be able to help me.

Thankfully, there was succor from an unanticipated source! When novelist Dinitia Smith heard about my Henry James problem, she swiftly offered to help me see the light. She had, after all, written The Prince, a modern day retelling of The Golden Bowl. What follows is a modest excerpt from our lengthy conversation, which occurred, rather fittingly, in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a point where nearly everyone in the world was in a moribund mood. The full podcast of my conversation with Smith (as well as my good faith efforts to overcome Henry James’s tyranny) will be released sometime in the next week.

CORRESPONDENT: So there are two reasons why I’m talking to you. First, and most importantly, I’m here to unpack your book. Second, I have a problem with Henry James. I have tried. I have read him repeatedly. And he just doesn’t stick. And maybe one good way of initiating this conversation is to discuss what the appeal of Henry James is for you and how you approached writing this book [The Prince] with the so-called “Master” – what a debatable label!– in mind?

SMITH: Alright, I’ll begin with why I chose to do this.  And I’ll discuss with you — or tell you my feeling about Henry James. First of all, Henry James — as his career reached a kind of end — his last three books were very, very difficult books. The most difficult was the book, The Golden Bowl, which is his last complete novel. And it is difficult. Now I read Henry James in a certain way. I read him almost as if it were poetry. Um, it’s not. I don’t see a linear form in this. The last three novels, actually, are told from the point of view of the characters’s consciousness. Mostly they don’t speak very much. So the appeal? First of all, the difficulty I admit. And there is almost no novel as difficult as The Golden Bowl. But what appealed to me about The Golden Bowl is that it is about secrets. James’s novel is about a wealthy family with terrible secrets and it fascinates me how they solve these secrets.

And from that, I took my own novel. I borrowed the outlines of James’s novel for The Prince. And I then transferred that story to the 21st century. And, by nature of having been a journalist, I write in what could be called ordinary English. So my novel was very different. The Prince, in style, is completely different.

CORRESPONDENT: Oh yeah. And I noticed that, in the first third of the book, you made this attempt to mimic Henry James’s sentences. You had the commas and the clauses and all that. But you were also mercifully brief. You didn’t have page-long sentences. And, as the book carried on, I noticed that you increasingly drifted away from this style. I’m wondering: Was this an attempt initially to write a pastiche? What happened here?

SMITH: Very, very good question. First of all, in The Prince, I wasn’t aware of mimicking his style. I thought the style — even at the beginning of The Prince — was fairly ordinary.  I do go inside the character’s head a lot. I tell you what he or she is thinking. We see that with the character of the Prince, for example, at the beginning of the book. But I will tell you that, in the past, when I have been reading a lot of James and doing my own work, his style infects me. And I have to stop myself. But here I was very conscious in The Prince of telling a story in our time. And I love a good story. And that’s what interested me about my own book.

But Henry James – early James — is much easier to read. Late James, you have to decide that you’re just going to read this like poetry. Meaning certain words and phrases will stand out buried in very long sentences and paragraphs.

And you pick those out. Also, in Henry James, in The Golden Bowl, there is this element of mystery. You’re looking for meaning in this. I really didn’t have that in my novel, The Prince. What was pushing the novel forward was an illicit relationship between an impoverished Italian prince and his old girlfriend, while he is married to a very wealthy woman, and what happens in this love affair. Because this woman who he eventually has an affair with marries his father-in-law. The novel is about what happens when these secrets come to the surface and how the family — the wealthy patriarch and his daughter — solve this problem and what they know.

One thing I borrowed from James was the whole notion of gradual awareness and not wanting to admit what you see. As as someone once said, love is about not knowing and acknowledging. So I used to write this novel.

CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, I actually did reread The Golden Bowl before this conversation. I spent two days rereading it. I nearly lost my will to live, but I did reread it. One criticism I have of The Golden Bowl is that these characters talk about nothing other than the marriages of the other characters. And it’s this incredibly annoying gossipfest.  Particularly with the Assignhams, who are just annoying as hell to me. I mean, just shut up! It’s like I’m stuck on vacation, listening to these people gabbing — with that terrible dialogue and those terrible sentences. They don’t have anything else going on with their lives!

But in your book, you have Federico, who’s the Amerigo of your book, playing music in a band. He’s smoking pot. You have Emily, the Maggie Verver of your book, talking about taking classes, signing up for Teach for America. There’s a prenuptial agreement. There’s some concern with the President speaking about North Korea. I have to thank you for making your book readable.  Unlike Henry James. Because it’s actually realistic — the so-called mystery. And then you have the father-in-law, Henry, checking out the, the Charlotte character, Christina. And it’s far more plausible when it comes to human behavior, as far as I’m concerned. It seems to me that you were aware that Henry James was a bit one-note when it came to the reality that people have lives other than gossiping. You know what I mean?

SMITH: Yes, I do. Because, rarely in Henry James, do you encounter a character who actually has a job. Very rare.

CORRESPONDENT: I know!

SMITH: And a lot of this is because James was a precursor of what we call modernism. So a lot of this takes place within the consciousness of the characters. But there is that element. There’s a muffled quality in his books. You do get a sense of these grand houses, but in my book I actually had fun in The Prince, creating these grand houses in more vivid terms.

CORRESPONDENT: And thank you for that. Because The Golden Bowl is anything but fun.  I would not call these muscled sentences. I would call them, “Hey, you can say this in one third of the length, buddy!” You know?

SMITH: Well, you know, Ed, you’re not in the minority here. There are very, very literary people who have trouble with that book. In fact, William James — Henry’s brother.

CORRESPONDENT: Yes! He’s much better.

SMITH: He hated the book.

CORRESPONDENT: William James. I love! I have no problem with him. I love Thackeray. I love Dickens. I love Tolstoy. I love all of these great pre-modern novelists. But it’s Henry James who just makes me want to asphyxiate something. I mean, the last time I reread The Ambassadors — I kid you not! — I had a nightmare in which I was strangled by the sentences of James and I woke up in a cold sweat. So how can you help someone like me who wants to like Henry James? And I do like the early Henry James. But late James? This guy is a drunk at a bar, except he’s a little bit more highfalutin. He’s rambling incessantly. For God’s sake, just shut the hell up!

SMITH: You know, you’re making me laugh very hard. First of all, you mentioned his class structure. This is relevant to my novel, The Prince. In his novels, as I said, nobody ever has a job. They always take place on estates or in grand houses or plots. They rarely take place in the United States. There are scenes in the United States, but usually they move to Europe. He was writing about maybe the second generation of the robber baron class — the antecedents of those people, the rough, tough people who built the railroads.

And then they had offspring who became more educated. Who began to collect art — much like the father figure in my novel, The Prince.  So there is that truth. And I had a background as a filmmaker, which made me more interested in scenes.

CORRESPONDENT: I went to film school myself. So maybe you and I can find a common point? How does a film mind grasp the portentous length of Henry James’s oppressive sentences?

SMITH: You’re making me laugh as I discuss this. And I want to tell you you’re not alone. Maybe people will read my novel, The Prince, to get a sense of what his novels were about.  Because what I borrowed from James is essentially the structure and the ideas. My character — the wealthy father — is a descendant of the robber barons.  But, at this point, he’s gone to law school and he’s very conscious of his wealth and he becomes a public interest lawyer and he does very good things. Although he moves like this, you the wealth is in the air. He birthed his daughter, who is one of the characters in my novel.

Emily is her name. She did go to a very good school. She is smart, but, in that environment, she has had to hide her intelligence to some extent. So she’s a certain kind of woman you find in that world. But this was part of my effort to give life to these people, that perhaps is lacking in James. Although I do love Henry James.

CORRESPONDENT: Clearly. It’s very clear reading your book that you are a Henry James nerd. And that’s great! But at the same time, you are also very honest about Henry James’s fallacies.

SMITH: Yes, I think I am. You have to understand that, in writing The Prince, I spent one year rereading The Golden Bowl taking it apart.

CORRESPONDENT: Wow! How many times did you reread it?

SMITH: Well, in this case, because I was looking at it with the idea of writing a novel, it was probably one reading.  But I went back to certain chapters. I sat on the couch and read through Henry James. I was examining it, thinking about what each chapter in my own novel, The Prince, could be.

Thinking about how I could make these characters. There are certain elements in The Prince that are a continuation of James. For example, many wealthy descendants of the robber barons.  Think of the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts. They collected art. They made art museums or started them.

And I put that into my novel. We know in Henry James that he is going to involve himself in art. So I was interested in how this would happen with the new generations — in regard to the Rockefeller family, which is a good analogy.

I know immensely wealthy people who are very private about their wealth.  But in the Rockefeller family, the newest generation — or the generation that’s in their sixties and seventies — they became doctors and environmentalists. They had to live with the weight of the original Rockefeller, who was not a very nice man.

So that interested me.  It was fun to create a world.  In The Prince, I borrowed the notion of a private island   It’s sort of primeval place, which was fun.  And I created a house for each of them. I actually researched the decor these houses might have had.  Because these houses are a lot bigger than my house!

CORRESPONDENT: I’m getting the sense that you actually did more research on the robber barons of the Gilded Age.  More so than looking to The Golden Bowl itself. Would that be safe to say?

SMITH: Absolutely.

CORRESPONDENT: That would explain why your novel is readable! And Henry James’s The Golden Bowl is not! (laughs)

SMITH: Well, thank you. For The Prince, I should tell you that my husband is an historian.  He wrote a biography of Andrew Carnegie. And from that, and discussions with him, I learned a great deal about the robber barons.

CORRESPONDENT: Oh yeah. Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan is great too.

SMITH: Yes! Oh my. Yes. Very, very. And there have been biographies of Frick.  None of these guys were very nice.

CORRESPONDENT: Well, you had to be a bit of a dick in order the hoard all that wealth, right?

SMITH: Not only that, but to gain the wealth.  When you think of Frick and the strike. The Homestead Strike, where, you know, he called the Pinkertons on these people.

CORRESPONDENT: Yeah!

SMITH: Some people died and Carnegie was a participant. I have met some descendants of the Carnegie family. They couldn’t be more different from him.

CORRESPONDENT: They actually had a heart. That’s good to know.

SMITH: Yeah. Right. It was fun to create this private island. I was outraged that somebody could have a private island that big in the middle of the Long Island Sound!

I used research about a place called Gardiners Island — this huge place that belongs to the Gardiner family, which I had visited. So in the middle of the Long Island Sound, which is filled with boats and with some pollution, there is this primeval place with trees, an old manor house, and beautiful wildlife.

And so this purity is analogous to the purity of my character, Emily, in her realization of what’s going on.  A lot of this novel — my novel and James’s — is about her growth. And the solution to this problem, which I’d rather not give away, is almost monstrous.

CORRESPONDENT: Going back to the whole Henry James problem, here’s the thing. Right now, I’m actually going through all of Edith Wharton. And I love her. I love her. I have no such problems with her. She’s amazing. The House of Mirth. The Age of Innocence. All those ghost stories. She depicts class far more intelligently and far more subtly and with far greater nuance than Henry James. And not only that. I have to ding Henry James for taking ten years to befriend her after Edith Wharton was saying, “Hey, Henry! I love you!” And then he takes ten years and does that false modesty thing. Please give me a reason why I should give Henry James another shot. You talk about the mystery and the ambiguity. I look at his sentences and honestly I see something that is completely on the nose. I don’t see characters here who have the great vivacity of Lily Bart from The House of Mirth or any of these other great classics of that era. You know?

SMITH: Well, you know, I have to agree with you in some bizarre way. I love Edith Wharton. Of course they were friends. They became friends. He was kinda snotty about her first short story. But they became very close. She admired him so much. But I think you’re right in some way.  With regard to The Golden Bowl, the only way to see it is as a mystery. But you have to go through these filaments of language and find the truth underneath it.  And you have to have a taste for it. And I happen to like being surrounded by the miasma of Henry James,  But Wharton is a great, great novelist.  She tells you a story in plain English that you can lose yourself in. And I think human beings love stories. They tell stories every day. And my primary goal as a novelist is to tell a good story. So let’s just say that Henry James is a hobby of mine that not everyone shares.

CORRESPONDENT: I know. And look, I want to cultivate this taste, Dinitia, but I am having incredible difficulty with this late period — especially these last three novels. To me, Henry James is the most offensive mansplainer in all of American literature. Am I just missing some DNA that will allow me to appreciate Henry James? Come on!  Stump for this guy for me!

SMITH: You make me laugh. I’ve learned as a novelist — and as a sort of literary person — just how many of my literary friends don’t like certain authors.

For example, I tend to not like a lot of contemporary novels, which are kind of postmodern, fragmentary, and usually about a woman with a husband betraying her.  Or who doesn’t like her children. I think we can all be forgiven for not liking these novels, which are very, very successful right now.

But I think we all can be forgiven. I might discuss books with my friends and discover. There are certain authors that they just can’t abide by and they are very talented. I’ve learned to forgive myself when I find the authors that I don’t like.  I suggest you forgive yourself and leave them alone and read Edith Wharton!

by Edward Champion

The Great War and Modern Memory (Modern Library Nonfiction #75)

Paul Fussell’s famous book on cultural developments that emerged from the First World War remains eerily applicable to today — particularly as we consider how present international affairs will disrupt human expression.

(This is the twenty-fifth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: The City in History.)

The men went to war. Their psyches were scarred and sotted by the sights and sounds of death and dreary dissolution — all doled out at a hellish and unprecedented new normal. Machine guns, mustard gas, the ear-piercing shrieks of shrapnel and shells, rats gnawing on nearby corpses. The lush fields of France anfracted into a dark flat wasteland.

The war was only supposed to last a few months, but it went on for more than four years. Twenty-two million lost their lives in the First World War. Many millions more — the ones who were lucky to live — were shattered by the experience. Their bodies were bent and their souls were broken. As Richard Aldington observed in his bleak comic novel, Death of a Hero, the trauma that the soldiers carried home became all too common, unworthy of commiseration and often received with scorn.

But, despite the scars and notwithstanding the cruel homeland rebuke, these men somehow sustained a culture during hard-won moments when they weren’t fighting in the trenches and when they weren’t watching their close friends mowed down by the newer and deadlier weapons. Their noble commitment, their fervent faith in some lambent hope plucked from the maws of a mottled landscape, forever changed the way we saw, heard, and expressed ourselves. As Paul Fussell nimbly argues in The Great War and Modern Memory, we are indebted to these soldiers in ways that most people today cannot appreciate.

* * *

While The Great War and Modern Memory doesn’t contain the intoxicating sweep and ambition of Frazer’s The Golden Bough in identifying the underlying rituals that have come to define the manner in which we reckon with disruptive and often inexplicable quagmires, it is nevertheless a remarkable volume, one quite essential in charting the trajectory of how humans expressed themselves through poetry, letters, fiction, and even postwar mediums. I first read this book in my early twenties — many years before I would stumble onto sound design as a method of communicating feelings often untranslatable through words — and, even then, I was startled by how Fussell identified early phonographic recordings as a liminal theatre sprinkled with sounds of attack. This was evidenced not only in the hit novelty records scooped up by supercilious aristocrats comfortably ensconced in cushy sacrosanct parlors without a care in the world, but further immortalized in such unlikely texts as Anthony Burgess’s underrated dystopian novel, The Wanting Seed.

There are so many bones baked into the silt of the Somme that human remains were still being exhumed in Fussell’s day. Forensic experts have continued to make efforts to identify skulls in more recent years. But beyond all these history-shattering casualties, there were also significantly influential linguistic precedents derived from these disfiguring events. The “us vs. them” vernacular that was to become a regular feature of all subsequent wars began with the Great War’s “we” and the xenophobia that was swiftly ascribed to the other side through epithets like “Boche,” as well as the cartoonish pastiches that no soldier in history has been immune from assigning to a mortal enemy. Germans were depicted as giants, memorialized in Robert Graves’s “David and Goliath.” Blunden’s Undertones of War described German barbed wire with “more barbs in it and foreign-looking.” Whether John Crowe Ransom explicitly derived his notion of the other from Blunden, as Fussell imputes, is anyone’s guess. But Fussell’s confidence and deep dive into phrases and terms of art is strangely persuasive. He has, unlike any other scholar since, made a vigorous and spellbinding examination of how language pertaining to division and the unshakeable sense that the war would go on forever influenced the Modernists (and even the postmodernists) as they rolled out their comparatively more peaceful masterpieces to the literary front lines in the 1920s.

Contrary to the cliches, life on the front wasn’t just about poetry and gardening. There was the unappetizing perdition of stale biscuits and Maconochie stew, a hideous tinned concoction (which at least one YouTuber has attempted to recreate!) involving bully beef that reminded the men of meals tendered to dogs. There were startlingly brave figures like Siegfried Sassoon, who not only took a bold stance against the war, but evoked the sordid memories of the trenches and a forgotten England in his Sherston trilogy (which dropped just as autofiction practiced by the likes of Dorothy Richardson and Proust was being quietly celebrated and, in turn, inspired Pat Barker to write her terrific Regeneration trilogy). The stertorous gunfire on the front was so loud that, as Fussell helpfully notes, even Pynchon was compelled to memorialize the idea of shells being heard hundreds of miles away in Gravity’s Rainbow. There was even a series of Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battlefields that made the rounds after the Treaty of Versailles. Fussell repeatedly points to maps as shaky palimpsests staggered with thick wavy lines and often wry notations, but the lack of tangible geography had to spill over somewhere. Poetry was fated to account for the ambiguity.

Fussell makes a strong case for a tectonic shift in expression being practiced even before the war began. Indeed, the war gave E.M. Forster’s famous “Only connect” sentiment some completely unanticipated momentum as the landed gentry attempted to reckon with the period between the two world wars. If the Great War had not happened, what would be the trajectory of literature? Fussell doesn’t mention Rebecca West’s 1918 novel, The Return of the Soldier, but this was one of the first Great War novels to explicitly deal with shellshock and one can read this book today as a fascinating glimpse into a period between frivolous prewar innocence and the stark and gravid sentences that were to come with Eliot, Hemingway, Woolf, and Fitzgerald. Fussell suggests that the young Evelyn Waugh was emboldened in his poetic and often brutal satire by much of the lingering language that the war had extracted from the patina of once regular summer comforts. The charred scenery on the front lines caused soldiers and servicemen to look upward into the possibilities contained within the sky — itself a predominant fixation within Ruskin’s Modern Painters — and not only did Waugh mimic this in the opening pages of his later novel, Officers and Gentlemen, but one cannot read John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” without being acutely aware of the “sunset glow” or the sky serving as an anchor for the poppies blowing beneath the crosses or the singing larks still “bravely singing” amidst the destruction.

It’s possible that Fussell may not have arrived at his perspicacious observations had he not gone through wartime and its preceding ablutions himself. In his memoir Doing Battle, Fussell notes that he could not have unpacked Wilfred Owen’s veiled sensuality had he not been smitten himself with the looks of boys in his adolescent years. He also writes of identifying strongly with Robert Graves’s sentiment that one could not easily be alone in the thronged throes of battle. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell sought to unpack irony and poetic elegy as it became increasingly expressed during the First World War. He claimed his study to be “an act of implicit autobiography” and “a refraction of current events.” In Fussell’s case, he had sickened of the Vietnam War’s overuse of “body count” and perceived perspicacious parallels between Owen’s “Insensibility,” a poem which suggests that expressing “sufferings” is simply not enough to understand real loss. One must have palpable experience of warfare’s devastation in order to reckon properly with it.

And perhaps The Great War and Modern Memory is more serious than Fussell’s “stunt books” (Class, which The Atlantic‘s Sandra Tsing Loh rightfully described as a “snide, martini-dry American classic,” and Bad) because Fussell could not find it within himself to betray his own personal connection to war.

Even so, Jay Winter, Daniel Swift, and Dan Todman have rightfully censured Fussell for leaving out or even demeaning the contributions of working stiffs. Make no mistake: Paul Fussell is an elitist snob and more than a bit of a sneering egomaniac. To cite but one of countless examples, Fussell overreaches and reveals his true colors when he suggests that all letters home from the soldiers adhered to what he calls “British Phelgm” (“The trick here is to affect to be entirely unflappable; one speaks as if the war were entirely normal and matter-of-fact.”). War censors certainly created a creative smorgasbord of workaround phrases, but, as someone who has reviewed World War I letters for research, this is an unequivocal load of bollocks — as a cursory plunge into the National Archives swiftly reveals. Fussell is much better tracking idioms like “in the pink” and using his mighty forensic chops to expose undeniable lexical influence.

As our present world moves ever closer to a potential third world war — with Ukraine standing in for a “trouble in the Balkans” — The Great War and Modern Memory reminds us that all the trauma on our shoulders — whether endured by soldiers or civilians — is destined to spill somewhere. We may not have five centuries of democracy and peace to give us the cuckoo clock that Orson Welles famously snarked up in The Third Man, but there are certainly plenty of unknown Michelangelos and da Vincis waiting in the wings to make sense of the ordeals of 2022 life. History, to paraphrase Stephen Dedalus’s famous sentiment, is a nightmare from which all of us are trying to awake.

Next Up: Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale!

by Edward Champion

Russia-Ukraine: The Eve of Destruction

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the greatest global crisis we have seen in decades and threatens to plunge many nations into a new world war.

Something like this occurred a little more than a century ago in the Balkans. And it is now happening again in Ukraine.

Explosions have rocked at least ten territories within the beleaguered nation. Missiles were fired before dawn by Russia. Russia destroyed aircraft and targeted military complexes. As of this morning, dozens of Ukrainians have been reported dead and a video circulated on social media revealed that Russian troops skirting the edge of Kharkiv, which is Ukraine’s second-largest city. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was forced to declare martial law. He begged Russia to stop. He urged his 44 million citizens to right back. Many Ukranians fled the capital in their cars. An endless stream of taillights, all caught in the maw of congestion, could be seen clogging Kyiv’s major traffic arteries. Others fled to the subway stations and hunkered down. Meanwhile, Sergiy Kyslytsya, the Ukranian UN Ambassador urged the peacekeeping international body to stop the war. While none of the UN members were sympathetic to Russia, there are two unsettling questions now lingering in the air: (1) What is Putin’s ultimate plan here? and (2) What cavalier actions from Putin will it take to drive other nations into war?

Putin’s merciless campaign to invade a nation — a 233,000 square mile region just southwest of Russia and just north of the Black Sea — has created an unprecedented geopolitical escalation that we have not seen in recent times. And because international law and the health of a shaky global economy must be upheld, there is now the very real possibility of a massive international melee that we have not seen in decades. Germany, which is heavily reliant upon natural gas from Russia, halted the certification of its Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not have a backup plan for how he will make up the energy shortfall. Even before the rockets rattled Ukraine in the predawn hours, crude oil prices spiked above $100 — a seven-year high. The global stock market was already operating on shaky terra firma and those once dependable lines dipped downward yesterday, with the S&P 500 — the fund for most retirement plans — plummeting nearly 2%. Russia holds nearly 5% of the global oil supply and about 24% of the global natural gas supply. By reducing the total global energy supply that is available to all, Putin’s actions have drastically shaken the delicate fissures upon which the entire global economy is built upon.

Only a few days before, Putin had declared that Donetsk and Luhansk — two separatist regions sympathetic to Moscow — as independent regions. Weeks before that, he installed 150,000 troops at strategic points along the Ukrainian border. He has proven to be immune to diplomacy. These are, in short, the actions of a dictator.

President Biden is expected to make a statement today at noon. Last night, he talked with President Zelenskyy. Republicans — led by Senator Jim Inhofe — have seized the opportunity to paint Biden as a 21st century Neville Chamberlain. Biden did issue a brief statement last night suggesting that further economic sanctions against Russia, in coordination with other nations, were forthcoming. He had previously issued a first tranche of sanctions targeting banks and Russian oligarchs. There is also the question of whether NATO forces will become involved in an armed struggle and whether America will find itself involved in a long and costly war — this after pulling out from Afghanistan. Putin knows very well that he holds all of the cards here and that getting away with a wanton invasion means that he can not only embarrass the United States, but do so with impunity. He has initiated a game of chicken and has dared the rest of the world to join in.

There will be a significant refugee crisis because of Putin’s actions. There will be a great loss of life. Putin’s actions may embolden other nations to make similar moves. The old rules of peacekeeping no longer apply.

Energy isn’t the only economic factor here. Russia is also the largest global exporter of wheat. And the missile strikes against Ukraine have already affected wheat prices. This could likely exacerbate a growing world hunger crisis.

China has refused to outright condemn Russia’s actions. In a parallel reminiscent of a sordid Facebook relationship status, spokeswoman Hua Chunying insisted that the Ukraine issue was “very complicated.” Israel has rebuked Russia after staying silent.

But it’s clear that Putin hopes to drag other nations into this conflict. It’s clear that, even with Western support, Ukraine is undermatched and outgunned in military force and that Putin is determined to annex the territory. That the fate of the world hinges upon the actions of one megalomaniacal man is a dark irony as we try to find some light that will take us out of the COVID tunnel.

Make no mistake. We are now on the brink of world war.

by Edward Champion

Brené Brown: The Susan Collins of Podcasting

Brené Brown is an opportunistic “thought leader” whose “I was against it after I was for it” stance against Joe Rogan reveals her true moral duplicity.

I’ve long suspected Brené Brown of being a disingenuous corporate sellout. Over the past twelve years, she has shrewdly branded and marketed herself as a “thought leader” (that upmarket term we now use to describe superficial thinkers serving up syncretic self-help malarkey), dispensing her platitudes to fawning and uncritical crowds while amassing vast wealth. She spoke of “shame” and “vulnerability” much in the way that sociopathic C-level executives speak of “team building” and “synergy.” In short, Brown was, and remains, a first-rate huckster. An impressive grifter preying upon the national hunger for emotional intimacy.

But now we have something of a smoking gun clearly outlining why Brown cannot be trusted.

You may recall Brown’s January 29, 2022 decision to pause her podcasts on Spotify. This was, of course, over the Joe Rogan imbroglio, a soap opera that seems peculiarly apposite for 2022’s promisingly bleak trajectory. Brown took a firm stance against Rogan’s pandemic disinformation and anti-trans rhetoric. A laudable step forward in solidarity with Neil Young and company from someone who was putatively in a position to make waves.

Except that she didn’t. And Brown’s history with Spotify further delineates that she’s not much more than a craven team-playing bobblehead.

Here we are — not more than two weeks later. Brown has now backpedaled big time with a “Podcast Update” revealing just how stupid and gullible she perceives her audience to be and how self-serving her intentions truly are.

Let’s not mince words here. In May 2020 — months into the pandemic and when it was abundantly clear that Rogan was a disinformation king who played dumb about his complicity every time he was called out — Rogan signed an exclusive $100 million deal with Spotify. In September 2020, Brown — who was surely somewhat cognizant about the Faustian bargain she was agreeing to — signed an exclusive deal with Spotify. She said nothing then about Joe Rogan, presumably because the money was too good for her to object to a know-nothing meatball poisoning the minds of 17 million listeners.

Now, a year and a half later, Brown is attempting to rewrite the narrative to serve her own ends. She claims in her blog post, “I first shared concerns with the leadership about Rogan’s content in 2020.” She now speaks out against Rogan’s anti-trans remarks and his misogynistic chortling with Joey Diaz — as if these were completely unknown factors in September 2020. Far from it. In June 2020, The Independent ran an article about the Diaz incident. As did The Sun. And it was widely criticized on social media. Earlier in the year, Bernie Sanders faced criticism for appearing on Joe Rogan’s show specifically because of Rogan’s transphobic remarks. In fact, during the month in which Brown signed the deal, Caitlyn Jenner called Joe Rogan a “transphobic ass.” Additionally that month, Spotify employees duked it out with top brass over Rogan’s transphobia.

In other words, even if you were remotely familiar with podcasting in September 2020 (when Brown signed her deal), it was fundamentally impossible to not know who Rogan was and what he represented. She claims now that she “didn’t have the option of pulling my work from the platform.” But if she truly cared about trans rights and disinformation and possessed genuine moral scruples, she would never have signed onto Spotify in the first place. Did she stand in solidarity with the brave Spotify employees who demanded editorial oversight? There is zero evidence of this. (A Twitter search turns up nothing.) Brown jumped onto a fashionable cause, received some attention for it, and is now recanting her stance — probably because she’s received a few calls from her corporate overlords.

Brown’s stance is really no different from Senator Susan Collins, a loathsome and unprincipled turncoat who has been ridiculed for years (e.g., The New Yorker‘s Andy Borowitz) for expressing similar “concerns” shortly before voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice or to block voting rights. That Brown uses the word “concerns” shows that she is either willfully clueless or, more likely, taking a page from the Collins playbook to save her Janus face. Because in late-stage capitalism, if you can spin the story to serve your own ends and tell a lie big enough for the rubes to nod back in admiration, you’ll be a resounding success! Call it Neoliberalism, American Style! And find someone on the level of the Ron Hicklin Singers to belt out this anthem to promote shameless and solipsistic corporate fealty!

Here’s a TikTok version of this article:

@finnegansache

#greenscreen #brenebrown #joerogan #spotify #podcast #susancollins #deal #protest #money

♬ original sound – Edward Champion

by Edward Champion

A High Wind in Jamaica (Modern Library #71)

Decades before Village of the Damned or Lord of the Flies, Richard Hughes broke the 1929 literary taboo of depicting children as anything other than innocent. This impeccably written masterpiece still packs something of a jolt today.

(This is the thirtieth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A House for Mr. Biswas.)

Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is the wild and bracing corrective to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (forthcoming at ML #41) that I never knew I needed. Truth be told, the two books I am least looking forward to revisiting during the course of this ridiculously ambitious and time-consuming project are J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye (forthcoming at ML #64) and Lord. Both novels meshed with me when I was an impressionable high school kid who didn’t know any better, but I have assiduously avoided rereading both volumes as an adult — much in the way that you hang down your wiser and more mature head over some of the dodgier cartoons you advocated as a child. (For the record, in my adulthood, I still abide by The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, the decades-long catalog of Warner Brothers cartoons, and — if you get me on the right day — Robotech and Star Blazers.)

Thankfully, I had no such qualms with High Wind; in large part because, unlike Golding, Hughes isn’t so obsessed with plugging in values — the novel as a Sudoku puzzle? — to uphold his Great AllegoryTM (and thus literary posterity). The older you get as a reader, the more you welcome the fresh shock of the visceral: those exotic and sometimes unsettling voices you may not encounter in the real world.

Hughes was twenty-five years ahead of Golding when it came to writing a novel about children losing their civilized patina as they travel deeper into the wild and aberrant vales of anarchism (in this case, by dint of a ragtag gang of pirates). But his exquisite command of atmosphere shows that he was arguably more subtler than Golding, permitting the transformation of his children to become something of a shock in part due to the great care he took with his prose. High Wind was one of only four novels that Hughes wrote. (And aside from High Wind, I especially recommend In Hazard.) He was more of a playwright, a poet, and a journalist than a fiction writer — in large part because the lapidary approach he took with his sentences significantly slowed him down. But despite his bradykinetic progress, High Wind proved to be such a literary sensation that it turned Hughes into a notable figure saddled with controversy, literary renown, and even a modestly burgeoning financial cushion.

The novel’s setup involves the Bas-Thornton children, who flirt with feral wonders in the Jamaican wild when not relishing their privileged comforts at a plantation named Ferndale. A storm devastates their idyllic paradise. And as they sail back home to England, the children are scooped up by pirates.

When the pirates do board the ill-fated Clorinda (complete with Captain Narpole sleeping through the whole imbroglio, saving face later with a devastatingly bleak letter of lies), Hughes is crisply fastidious about describing these interlopers against type:

With this second boatload came both the captain and the mate. The former was a clumsy great fellow, with a sad, silly face. He was bulky; yet so ill-proportioned one got no impression of power. He was modestly dressed in a drab shore-going suit: he was newly shaven, and his sparse was pomaded so that it lay in a few dark ribbons across his baldish head-top. But all this shore-decency of appearance only accentuated his big splodgy brown hands, stained and scarred and corned with his calling. Moreover, instead of boots he wore a pair of gigantic heel-less slippers in the Moorish manner, which he must have sliced with a knife out of some pair of dead sea-boots. Even his great spreading feet could hardly keep them on, so that he was obliged to walk at the slowest of shuffles, flop-flop along the deck. He stooped, as if always afraid of banging his head on something, and carried the backs of his hands forward, like an orangutan.

Much as Knut Hamsun seemed to anticipate the hardboiled existential feel of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain in 1890 (thank you also, late and great translator Sverre Lyngstad!), so too does Hughes depict the professional working-class criminal just before the gaudily garbed grunt became a staple of noir. These pirates do make a perfunctory effort to look presentable (the captain — later revealed to be a Danish German-speaking ruffian named Jonsen — has gone to the trouble of shaving and pomading what is left of his hair), but they are also makeshift in their sartorial choices. Hughes’s beautiful choice of “dead sea-boots” suggests something vitiated and unholy at work here. (Indeed, one of the buyers who unloads the booty is a vicar, described as “less well shaved than he would have been in England.” Later, a warped nativity play is performed to entertain the pirates. Even later, the song “Onward, Christian Soldiers” is evoked in creepy fashion.) And Jonsen’s desperate attempt to keep his fancy bespoke slippers on — coupled with the telltale pocks of his aloof hands, which resemble a spastic animal — is just one of many examples of the dry exacting comedy that Hughes doles out gently throughout this deranged adventure tale. There’s also a mysterious first-person narrator serving almost as a cosmic god offering mordant asides. Indeed, the standoff between Marpole and these thugs reminded me of the “civilized” exchange between Barry and the highwayman in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. (In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick also had a sardonic narrator in the form of Michael Hordern’s arch commentary, which also dished up bone-dry asides on how we are all barely disguised animals beneath the human sheen. Was Kubrick familiar with Hughes? We may never know, although it is worth noting that a young Martin Amis did appear as one of the kids in the 1965 film adaptation of Hughes’s novel.)

Yet the look of these pirates is enough to ignite a modest crush within Margaret, one of the children, who marvels at their beauty. In an age in which television shows like Euphoria and high school cinematic classics like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are heralded for using transgressive behavior to depict teens as “adults” (one can likewise see this approach nimbly executed in Megan Abbott’s more recent novels, which have used this storytelling device by framing kids through the subcultures of ballet, cheerleading, and hockey), it’s impossible to overstate the big risk that Hughes took here in 1929. During the hurricane that plagues Jamaica, Hughes also foreshadows how living in a state of nature can inevitably subsume anyone — even a child — by having a domesticated pet named Tabby ruthlessly chased by wildcats.

You will, alas, have to contend with the novel’s appalling and off-putting racism (“there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a favorite cat,” writes Hughes when both die after a hurricane and there is a cruel treatment of a monkey on the high seas, which suggests an unsettling metaphor). But the sheer weirdness that forms the backbone of this sweeping story swiftly atones for these hoary and horrendous “cultural values.”

High Wind is also the first recorded instance of the Hangman’s Blood, a cocktail later favored by Anthony Burgess. Seventeen years ago, I persuaded a bartender in the Upper Haight to make me this famous libation. It was, I am sad to report, quite ghastly. I never tried it again. Hughes himself also understood what a hideous mix it was, describing it as possessing “the property of increasing rather than allaying thirst, and so, once it has made a breach, soon demolishes the whole fort.”

Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals — why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis?

The children adapt to their new life much like many of today’s bored kids stare into the vacuity of their digital screens for constant stimulation. When one of their number dies, Hughes eerily notes how quickly accustomed they become to an empty bed. When Jonsen withholds the “three Sovereign Rules of Life” on the basis of their youth, Edward replies, “Why not? When shall I be old enough?” Indeed, reading High Wind in 2022 is rather eldritch, particularly in the shock of recognizing such everyday behavior among children today. Hughes does not shy away from how boredom can turn kids unruly and mischievous quite fast. Margaret speaks “with an eagerness that even exceeded the necessities of politeness in its falsity.” When the first mate attempts to inveigle the kids by mentioning a famous pirate named Rector of Roseau, the children quickly see through the superficiality of the apocryphal origin story, puncturing the first mate’s plot holes faster than the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. And the children strike back, with Hughes even describing a corporeal awakening among Emily.

I certainly don’t want to spoil how the kids transform. But it is subtly disconcerting, with a clever nod to the Flying Dutchman. We are left to wonder whether this particular group of kids was fated to turn out this way, even if the pirates had never kidnapped them, or if feral circumstances shaped their transmutation. Hughes, to his credit, lets the reader off the hook somewhat with this aside, pointing to how children are regularly underestimated:

Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances nil.

Given how problem children have been a pain in the ass for so many parents over the years, it’s rather surprising that it took so long for literature to point this out. Hughes’s immaculately written masterpiece — complete with its alligators and earthquakes as odd forms of fierce incitement and its wry asides about our assumptions about children — was one of the first major works of fiction to interrogate this discomfiting truth. And, even today, A High Wind in Jamaica is a bold and welcome reminder that kids are not to be underestimated. In an epoch in which moronic milquetoasts ban Maus from classrooms for the most arbitrarily intransigent concerns (just read the meeting minutes), High Wind — complete with its chilling final sentence — is a swift kick in the ass to the cowardly and unadventurous sensibilities that prevent us from being honest about what anyone is capable of becoming and how so many of these disturbing possibilities hide in plain sight.

Next Up: Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet!