Vintage Reading (18 page)

Not to worry: ahead is Pottermack’s impossible dilemma, furtive midnight treks into the woods, a coroner’s inquest, and the final confrontation between the protagonists. Along the way, we meet some of England’s finest pickpockets—and one of Egypt’s most revolting mummies.

Traditional roles blur here; the detective is, as usual, relentless and shrewd, if a little too dryly cerebral. It’s the killer who’s the sympathetic character— admirable save only for having killed a man and tried to get away with it. And besides, he loves the widow Mrs. Bellard; his love is pure and—secret revealed!—goes back years. Indeed, the novel’s suspense lies not alone in whether the killer will be caught, nor in how the sleuth will catch him, but in Pottermack’s precise fate - which comes to matter more to us than that justice be served or that Thorndyke get his man.

Throughout, our travels with author Freeman through England’s quiet country lanes are a delight. His language has an old fashioned charm not seen much since Ernest Hemingway changed how people wrote. Nor is he shy about occasionally intruding into the story, being perfectly capable of observing, say, that “Readers who have followed this history to its present stage will have realized by this time that Mr. Pottermack was a gentleman of uncommon tenacity of purpose.”

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.

____________

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.

____________

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.

____________

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.”