Travels with Huxley: Thoughts on "Jesting Pilate"

My current work in progress takes place in a lost world, a time and place I have never been and never will be, of which only the dimmest, rustiest shadows remain, almost all of them at the bottom of the dark sea.

I am well challenged. I’m trying to imagine myself in the minds, the skin and clothes and time of others who are not much like me at all, a Waspish white male and baby boomer (and outsider in his own tribe).

I’ve been told repeatedly that I should write what I know and only what I know. But where’s the challenge in that? But the world has read plenty of O’Neill, Cheever and Updike, and I’m neither driven nor inclined to add another provincial saga of white-male bourgeoisie decline. (Oh, sure you might shed a poignant tear, but you’re more likely react as I do when I reach page fifty: yawn and then send in the black helicopters, guns blazing. A guy can only grow up so much.)

Research into the 1920s carries me afar. I skim here, read closely there, mining, dredging facts, then wring them through the sieve of my imagination. From there, I slowly--very slowly with his book--weave the strands into colorful, picturesque (sometimes grotesque) exciting narrative—hopefully stitching is so skillful that I fool us both into thinking I was there, ninety years ago.

With you right there alongside my imagined self, the smells of salt air, coalsmoke and oil filling your mind, as you brace yourself on the swerving deck, leaning against the cold wet wind, as storm rises ahead, as white froth breaks upon the black sea.

“Hark! Gunfire from the bridge! A pirate ship on the horizon! Mutiny below! And who’s that fair gal beckoning me through her cabin door . . . ?”

It all beats exploring the dusty corners of my living room or detailing my war against the fruit flies clouding my tiny kitchen, the one the size of a ship’s galley.

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Among my towers of research sources are travel books written in the early part of the twentieth century, written by those who were there; or at least passed through.

Only in the last hundred years or so has travel become “fun”, or a source of intellectual, personal or spiritual growth, at least in the West. Before then, most traveled only out of necessity. Primitive, rough, uncomfortable, and dangerous, to travel was to take your life in your hands, a voluntary venture only for the rough and ready (This excludes the countless enslaved ones who wouldn’t call their experiences “travel” at all.)

Starting in the late nineteenth century, thanks to technological and economic booms, travel became safer and with safety, pleasure was added like frosting. So it came within reach of the mass of Westerners and the genre of travel writing moved beyond the scope of Marco Polo and Lewis and Clark.

“Travel is cheap and rapid,” writes Aldous Huxley in Jesting Pilate (first published in 1926) said by some to be the first of the “modern” travel adventures. “The immense accumulation of modern knowledge lies heaped on every side.” (He should live so long, especially now.)

Huxley is best remembered as the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, which is one of the first personal accounts of psychedelic usage (that other kind of travel).

Huxley was a pioneering thinker of his times: a socialist, atheist, pacifist whose influence is still with us (though he seems to have sloughed off his atheism in later years in favor of an Eastern spirituality). Much of his fiction is satirical, a genre out of fashion in our age of self-serious novels.

Huxley also suffered from poor eyesight for most of his life. But that didn’t stop him from writing three travel books. Pilate, the first of them, tells of a year-long journey through India, Burma, Malaya, and Japan, before winding up America, to which he would return to live out his life, dying the same day as C.S. Lewis and President John F. Kennedy, his final request an injection of LSD.

The cover of my copy (Paragon House, 1991) depicts a sportily dressed English tourist lounging on a spindly chair, suitcase by his side, his feet up on the clouds (as only the English seem to be able to do). Far far in the distance, across an expanse of water, in the lower corner, sits the Taj Mahal, an image almost like a tchotchke made for a doll house.

The cover turns out to be an apt picture of what’s inside, a journey through a world from afar. Mr. Huxley is still a great writer and thinker. His observations on his travels are detailed, thoughtful and undoubtedly well-meant and you’ll find eloquent pleasures on every page. His opinions are strong, witty, articulate . . . and maybe even sometimes spot on. The observations he makes

I got a special kick out of his razor-sharp takedown of popular Hollywood filmmaking of the 1920s, and how American movies grossly, absurdly misrepresent the West to Asian audiences. He makes the highbrow conservatism that seemed oppressive in my anything-goes youth seem refreshing and rebellious in this age of musclebound, muscle-headed Marvel Superheroes. (Maybe I will write about that cloud of flies hovering around my sink after all! Make them a Metaphor for Everything! Nobel here I come!)

But I can’t pass too much judgment on Huxley’s opinions, except to wonder how much the world he passed through then has changed in ninety-years. He was a man of his time, seeing through his own poor eyes as I see through my better ones. And modernity was still shiny and new. Air travel had not even begun.

Still, Huxley makes his judgments. In fact, opinion is what we mostly get for a large part of this trip (for one, he despises the Taj Mahal down to its foundation; and don’t get him started on Indian politics!). Huxley is not always a descriptive or detailing writer. Except for the constant oppressive heat and tropical greenery, I only occasionally got a vivid visual sense of his journeys (for example, during as voyage down Burma’s Irrawaddy River). I sometimes encountered a great gulf between observer and observed.

Modern readers whose politics are delicate will find Huxley insufferably English, a snobby son of the Empire, down to his wellies. He tends to carpet his sensibilities over the sweltering poverty of the world he travels through. Instead of the greedy craven Capitalist, we have the totalitarian Socialist, equally sure he knows what’s best for these people.

Me, I didn’t really mind (which may also be cause for alarm). The writing is so wonderful throughout, so acute, every sentence perfectly pitched, his opinions failed to goad me much either way, even if I didn’t capture much in the way of palpable detail, but for an incident of attempted murder by a ship’s crew member while passing through Malaya (now Indonesia).

Though I didn’t get a strong-enough sense of the world Huxley traveled through, I got a strong feeling for one man’s mind in his time, a peek through another door of perception, into another time, another space. Useful enough.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Go Set a Watchman" by Harper Lee

Go Set a Watchman is the debut novel by a young southern writer named Harper Lee.  Written and set in the middle-1950s, it tells the story of Jean Louise Finch, a woman in her mid-20s who returns to her sleepy little hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, after spending several years in wide-awake New York City.

Maycomb has not changed much, but Jean has. Though she seems unaware of it, her years beyond the small rural southern horizons surrounding—over the edge of the earth—have made her a modern woman, broadened her already big heart and mind and added fire to her high spirits. And because of this, she sees her town and its people anew.

The one she sees most anew is her beloved father, Atticus Finch, Maycomb’s most prominent lawyer and the moral touchstone in her life, the one she looks up to most of all, and a god. He’s always been the “watchman” of her conscience.

But the scales must fall (especially when we grow up). And fall they do like a house burning down when Jean Louise (known as “Scout,” her childhood nickname) suddenly—very suddenly—discovers a monster in the basement of her father’s life, a room she somehow missed during her golden years as a mischievous youngster in a small town in the heart of Dixie Americana.

The monster in the basement is Atticus Finch’s racism. Not the redneck kind, all beer-bellies and shotguns on the rack of a pickup truck, the antennae ornamented with Klan hoods, but the genteel, educated, eloquent sort, spouting pseudo-wisdom about how “. . . our Negro population is backward…”—nonsense never worth considering, but taken very seriously during the years leading up to the 1960s (and not only in the South, as my own dining room table memories in upstate New York remind me. No, the South was never that separate a country, was it?).

How Jean Finch faces and deals with her disillusion regarding her father while struggling with her love for him and others, (while learning to become her own watchman) constitutes the core of this lumpy, bumpy novel.

Go Set a Watchman starts out nicely as Jean returns to Haycomb, dipping into it like an old swimming hole or a strolling a garden from long ago. The best parts by a country mile are Jean’s flashbacks to her Halcyon childhood in Maycomb: Rollicking episodes in which she frolics in and out of mischief with her brother Jem and best friend Dill, all under the watchful eye of Calpurnia, their black maid and real mother (their biological mother long since passed away). These are warm, funny lyrical memory vignettes that cast a charming poetic glow, winning portraits of the best side of rural life.

But when Atticus’s secret crashes like a meteor through the ceiling in the present, the narrative and drama turn both jagged and lumpy. Jean and everyone leap upon their soap boxes, hollering at the top of their lungs. The rhetoric flies thick, fast, and all but incoherent. There’s a whole lotta smoke, a whole lotta noise, but not much fire.

Like many readers, I dislike political grandstanding in fiction—I still believe non-fiction and journalism to be better, more effective “message delivery systems.” But occasionally good writing can slide past my objections, provided the debating turns into something like real drama, where the characters and the context of what they believe, the world in which they believe, almost weaves and shimmers.

Not in this novel, though. The angry arguments between Jean and various other characters are like watching a bunch of incompetent swordsmen hack away at each other without ever landing a real blow. They stereotype each other and themselves.

Jean is shocked shocked to find her father and lifelong friends are racists, is unable to find the core of what they and she believe. The dialogue in these scenes is terrible, sounding ripped from overnight opinion columns and fulminous letters-to-the-editor. The question of what might make people racist and why they hang onto prejudice in the face of overwhelming evidence and moral sense—things that fiction is good at revealing--remains out of reach.

The book feels inchoate as though Lee is too close to her subject to get perspective on it. The problem of loving people with terrible flaws is one of the great themes of fiction, but here it seems unresolved in the author’s soul and at the surface. The risky decision she makes would be understandable and admirable if it didn’t feel so slapped on, a sudden reversal out of lesser fiction.

Atticus Finch seems a pasteboard of attitudes plastered together. He's in no way a unified character. (For what I believe a more rounded portrait of the bigot as a human being and vice versa see All in the Family).

And so, Go Set a Watchman is like a lot of first novels I’ve read: lumpy and bumpy. But I still recall an old saying from long ago: Anyone can write a first novel. It’s the second that really counts.

Don't be surprised if Ms. Harper Lee's second novel turns out to be the charm.

(Re edited 8/24/2015)

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Longmire by Land, Hansmalch by Sea

JOHNSON BY LAND, LANGDON BY SEA

Dry Bones, by Craig Johnson, is the second Walt Longmire novel I’ve read (following Hell is Frozen, discussed a couple years back). I know comparatively little about the 13-novel Walt Longmire universe, but I still liked Dry Bones even better, if for different reasons.

Here, Walt, the compulsively erudite sheriff of Absaroka County in Northern Wyoming, is called in to pull the corpse of Danny Lone Elk, a Cheyenne rancher, from a reservoir on his sprawling property. Lone Elk ranch also happens to be where the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on record was recently discovered, the ancient past uncovered by the human present.

The T-Rex’s bones are being picked over by several competing interests: the fractious Lone Elk family; the High Plains Dinosaur museum, the dino diggers who actually discovered it; the Cheyenne Conservancy , a tribal land-trust organization; and the U.S. Government, represented by an ambitious, but intellectually barren U.S. district attorney, name of Trost.

It’s up to Sheriff Walt to maintain a certain peace among these contenders while he investigates Danny’s suspicious death and its connection with them dry bones.

In the background, Walt has family problems to deal with when his daughter’s husband meets a bad end in the bad Big City, a crime he suspects was committed by an offender whom Walt locked up some novels back.

Sorry I can’t be more specific. The fact that I’ve read only a couple of the Longmire novels left me clueless now and then. I caught a couple of seasons of the Longmire cable series, before A&E dumped it off its schedule (leaving Netflix to rush in for resuscitation). But the novels, to me, seem to exist quite apart from the series, which has been markedly more serious and solemn in the manner of prestige cable series (and being that we’re still grazing on cable at the Bar T&E, we won’t be catching up to the herd too soon.)

Hell is Frozen was an action-packed, over-the-top high country chase epic with a pleasurable dash of the supernatural—which I liked for those very reasons. Dry Bones reads quieter, almost like a cowboy cosy, concerned with the small things of rural life.

Walt’s wisecracks seem less forced less this time and I like the annoying way he wears his book-readin’ like his sheriff’s arm patch. He’s not too good a good guy. He seems happily resilient in the face of it all, not one to turn bitter and brooding like warm stale canteen water. Living in some of the most beautiful country on God’s Earth, why wallow in despair?

Dry Bones is a colorful, absorbing and entertaining contemporary western yarn. Craig Johnson’s love of the stormy Wyoming landscape he calls home tumbles across every page. The western novel may be in permanent eclipse, but I’m thankful Johnson (and others like Loren Estleman) are around to keep it alive. There really was and is an America outside our great cities. It does neither our nation nor our literature any good to forget that.

 

Research on an upcoming high-seas novel has led me on voyages to many far-flung literary shores. Among the latest distant islands is S.S. Silverspray by John Langdon, a novel published by MacMillan in 1958. (Langdon worked on many ships as an electrician before finally coming ashore as a reference librarian at San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute Library.)

S.S. Silverspray is so forgotten, its presence barely registers on Amazon or any other maps. I however was lucky to dig up a copy of it at, I recall, at Bibliomania in downtown Oakland.

S.S. Silverspray is a link in the chain of Skippers Gone Bad books, a row that includes Moby Dick, The Sea Wolf and The Caine Mutiny. Bad captains are always a good hook. While the law of the sea has the captain going down with his ship, in these stories the danger is the ship going down with its captain.

The S.S. Silverspray is a 1950s freighter bound from San Francisco to the South Seas. Its master is Milo Hansmalch, a man whose know everything about ships and nothing about people. He possesses a stupendous bigotry and brutish outlook that leads to clashes with his multi-ethnic crew and into a variety of storms both human and natural.

Silverspray is not a particularly ambitious fable in the vein of Melville or London. It’s more of an exercise in social-realism and focuses on the day-to-day life of its crew of fifty. There’s a plenty of precise detail about the workings of a freighter of that era and the various challenges faced by a big ship on the high sea. It made for invaluable research for my purposes.

On the negative side, there’s seems to be little relationship between the men and the environment they’re sailing through. Hansmalch’s problems, while serious and morally fatal, never impact the fate of the ship itself—the final drama takes place in port. Its close focus and realism makes it closer to say a Frank Norris story than a Herman Wouk epic.

Langdon’s knowledge of and respect for the ship’s crew members leads him to give equal time to all the characters from the utility man number one on up. On a humanistic level, that’s commendable. On a fiction level, it makes the novel feel unfocussed and adrift. Nor is the writing very good, with awkward dialogue that includes poor stabs at authentic dialect that, as they often do, lead to the kind of stereotyping the author sincerely tries to avoid.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo of S.S. Silverspray by author

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.