Dashiell Hammett: The Glass Key (1931)

More with the deconstructing of the hardboiled hero.  For an author who basically invented the genre, Hammett spends an awful lot of time uninventing it.  To his everlasting credit, I hasten to add.

This time the protagonist, Ned Beaumont, isn't a private eye.  This can't be emphasized enough:  he's not a private eye.  I say this can't be emphasized enough because he acts like a private eye in a Dashiell Hammett book.  He solves the case, of course, but even before he does that he runs around doing the things a Hammett private eye does in order to solve a case.  Has run-ins with thugs and dames, turns up clues, steps lightly around cops, consorts with known criminals.  Gets the crap beat out of him.  Drinks alone.  Plays it close to the vest.

But he's not a private eye.  He's a political op, not a Continental one:  the right-hand man of the boss of an old-time political machine in an unnamed Eastern city that's not New York.  A boss who may well have committed the murder that's at the heart of this story, the mystery Ned's trying to solve.

Except - and here's the kicker - maybe he's not trying to solve it.  We never know, not until very close to the end.  The murder happens, Ned finds the body, Ned warns his boss that it looks bad for him, and then Ned spends the rest of the book running around doing the things a private eye does.  Except that we're not sure if he's trying to aid the investigation or hinder it, solve the murder or keep it from being solved.  He gets himself deputized to the D.A.'s office, but maybe he's trying to keep the cops looking in the wrong direction, away from his boss.  He's loyal to his boss - that's never (or seldom) in doubt (but then, watch that ending) - but we don't know if that loyalty extends to believing he didn't do it, or in fact means assuming he did do it and not caring.  In fact it's a distinct possibility for much of the book (and at one point it becomes a near certainty) that he doesn't want to know who did it, and just wants to gum things up so that nobody ever knows. 

And yet it reads like a detective story, because like I say, Ned acts like a private eye.  In every respect except for that one niggling detail that he may not be trying to solve the crime.  And how much does it say, and about what, that trying to expose the truth and trying to cover it up end up looking like the same thing?

Was Dashiell Hammett the best novelist of his generation?

Ernest Hemingway: In Our Time (1925)

I hate the idea of Hemingway.  You know the famous Nabokov quote:  "As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it."  That's how I feel.  I hate that kind of macho bullshit, always have. 

On the other hand I've always suspected, or feared, that I was doing him - or maybe just myself - an injustice in feeling that way, because I've never really given him a good solid read.  Read a couple of his books in college and they didn't leave any impression, but I was going through some shit then where nothing left an impression.  So I've always meant to go back to him.  Now, fresh off a Fitzgerald kick, seemed as good a time as any.  I'm starting at the beginning and I'll work my way forward until I can't stand any more.

For about the first half of this book I was on board.  I really like, for example, the trick of alternating fully-developed short stories with descriptive fragments, taken as if from soldiers' diaries or letters.  It sets up a productive tension between the fragments and the stories - how does each set of experiences relate to the other? is it one set of experiences or many? - that goes a long way to fulfilling the promise of the title, that this book is going to say something definitive about its age, and those who lived through it.  It also gives the book a modernist experimental flavor that I don't remember from my other EH reading;  the fragmentation, the collage effect, reminds me of course of This Side of Paradise, and I find it interesting that both writers started off experimental and became more conventional almost immediately. 

The style, though.  That famous Hemingway style.  It's a stumbling block for me.  I can appreciate it - did like it for the first half of the book or so.  It is refreshing at first, even this many decades after it became canonical;  and it is effective at suggesting restraint, shell-shock, strong feeling, numbness, any number of things.  But after a while it begins to feel maybe even more pretentious, more bombastic, more contrived than the ornate older styles against which it was reacting.  By the time I got to "Big Two-Hearted River" I was rolling my eyes. 

But then I started reading online criticism of the book - and I regret to say I didn't bookmark what I read, so I can't link to it - I don't remember where or what it was - but maybe that's part of my point, that Hemingway has become ubiquitous, and for good reason - I remembered struggling through this very story in high school and struggling with the idea of literary symbolism.  You know, what is it, how do you know this is a symbol of that and not of this other thing and aren't you just pulling it out of your ass anyway, all those things you have to work through when you're first learning to read in a literary way.  It's a good story for that;  the iceberg theory and all.  And I can't argue that this story doesn't do that:  doesn't suggest great trauma, great crisis, beneath a placid surface.  I have to respect it.

I'll keep going.

Eugene Opera: La Traviata

So we went to the Eugene Opera again last night.  Last NYE it was Pirates of Penzance, this time it

was La Traviata. You know, serious opera.

As a time, as a way to spend New Year's Eve, it was just as delightful as last year.  Again with the Eugenisms:  I'm not sure quite how many places you could go to see opera and catch the distinct aroma of weed from the elderly couple next to you in line.  The elderly couple who look - braids and ratty green cape, and that's on him - like they just tooled down from their commune in the hills.  Some might roll their eyes at this.  I think it's great.  In Eugene, the aging hippies support their local opera company.  Why the fuck not?

So, you know, serious opera.  My first.  It was fine.  Not scary or intimidating at all.  Okay, the near-contact high may have helped, but more than that:  it was music.  I'm a firm believer in the Ellington Doctrine that there's only two kinds of music.  And this was the good kind.

I hardly need to say that I'm in no position to judge the quality of the performance.  Beyond the obvious, that is:  the main roles went to pros from out of town, and that was as it should be, because the chorus seems to have been mostly local talent, and even I could tell it was weak.  The gypsy girls' song in Act II was, um, underwhelming.

As for the main roles, though, all I can say is that I really enjoyed Leah Partridge as Violetta, and really really enjoyed Jake Gardner as Giorgio Germont.  It was satisfying music.  Beyond that...

Beyond that, as a lifelong pop music junkie but a babe in the woods of the high-art shit, I was mainly just trying to pay attention and see if I could get how this musical entertainment was working at all.  And what I came away from it was a sense of how direct it all was.  Infinite subtleties in the composition and the performance, but as theater it's essentially melodrama.  Now you're going to exult, now you're going to fear, now you're going to weep, and when you weep you're going to really, really weep.  As a kabuki fan it was all perfectly recognizable to me as high and respectable melodrama.  A tonic for an ironic age.

More short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Or, how to know when to stop reading?

I never set out to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Just most of him.  I naïvely thought (and, as a lit scholar myself, I really should have known better) that it would be fairly easy to identify the Fitzgerald Canon, and that's all I really wanted to read.  I seem to have read more than that, and that too has been rewarding:  "The Cruise of the Rolling Junk" seems pretty extra-canonical, but as I wrote, I think it's one of his most enjoyable things.

If I had set out to read everything, I'm not quite sure where I would have turned.  It seems there are a couple of ebooks out, just out, that contain the complete short stories and essays, and there is a complete-works scholarly edition finally coming out right now that presumably will eventually include all the short stories.  As it was, though, I think I was unconsciously figuring I'd read what's available in mass-market editions;  I'm really trying to figure out how American publishers curate and market American literature.  And on that score I've been mildly surprised and disappointed:  I figured at the very least Fitzgerald's original short-story collections would all be in print, but no.  And I figured the stuff uncollected in his lifetime might have been rationalized and made easily available.

But no, not really.  Up to this point I had read the pre-humous collections (Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille), and then the posthumous collections that didn't seem to overlap with the pre-humous ones too much (The Basil and Josephine Stories, The Pat Hobby Stories, Bits of Paradise, Afternoon of an Author).  At that point I thought all that remained was The Price was High, at which I balked - even the subtitle of that one admits that it's scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Those can't be Canon, right?

But then I looked at Matthew Bruccoli's The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which seems to be the current best attempt to identify the Best of FSF's stories, and realized that it includes a few from The Price was High.  More alarming, it included a few that aren't in there, and also weren't in any of the others I'd read.  I ultimately realized that the previous best attempt at the Best of FSF's stories, Malcolm Cowley's 1951 The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which drew from both collected and uncollected, and the uncollected of which stayed largely uncollected elsewhere, even as the book itself was superseded.  Confusing.

Anyway, since I'm in the mood to move on from this author, I read the stories from the Bruccoli and Cowley volumes that I hadn't yet read - about fifteen in all.  I'll pass on The Price was High (although Mrs. Sgt. T, who knows me rather well, says she's sure I'll read it someday, because I'm just that compulsive). 

It won't surprise anybody that these stories ended up being a mixed bag.  All of his collections are.  The Cowley volume includes at least a couple of gems:  "The Rough Crossing," about an intense few days on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic, and the marital discord it shakes loose, is one;  "An Alcoholic Case," the most harrowing thing I've read by FSF about his alcoholism, is another.  The Bruccoli volume also includes some gems:  "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar" is as high-spirited and stylish as it sounds;  "More than Just a House" is another slightly pat relationship story, but any time FSF is honestly in touch with poverty it gets interesting;  and "The Lost Decade" (actually in the Cowley book too) is another intense short piece about alcoholism.

All of which is to say that I probably will find more gems in The Price was High when I get around to it.  Which in itself is another way of saying that I don't entirely agree with either Cowley's or Bruccoli's selections.  But if I had to recommend a one-volume selection of FSF stories, I'd probably say the Bruccoli is best.  However I still think the ones he published in his lifetime should be in print, and that's what you should reach for first.  See what he wanted to be remembered for, then read what he wanted forgotten.  He wasn't right, but he had the right to be wrong, and it's interesting to see how he exercised it.  I mean, it's worth realizing that, in 1935, he would rather preserve something as slight as "The Night of Chancellorsville" than "The Swimmers."

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk

This is a three-part travelogue that was published in magazines in 1924, but not in book form until

2011. It's a mystery to me why it took so long, and why it's not better known.  As I've noted before, FSF's nonfiction just may be, with a few exceptions in either direction, where it's at.

Because I take it back:  this made me laugh.  Out loud.  At least a couple of times.  The idea is that it's a road trip, a true spur-of-the-moment, for-no-good-reason road trip of the type young Americans take:  Scott and Zelda wake up one morning in their Connecticut cottage and realize they need real Southern biscuits and peaches for breakfast, so they drive all the way to Alabama to get them.  In a car that's falling apart, through an America that's decades off from an interstate highway system.

I'm coming to realize that Fitzgerald's best characters were Zelda, the unflappable flapper, and F. Scott, the buffoonish author who thinks he's above it all, and in this book he plays those characters to the hilt.  It's sitcom stuff but it's great:  they have the devil-may-care attitude that leads them to think that money will buy them safety and comfort everywhere they go, but he also lets us see that in fact they don't have the money, and therefore they're in constant comic peril and real discomfort.  (Since they're driving through the South and Fitzgerald's a frightfully unself-conscious racist some of this peril is expressed in horrific terms, but.)

And most importantly, writing about his best and easiest subjects freed Fitzgerald up to make some really decent jokes.  It's all a natural performance, and quite witty.  A more or less random selection, from p. 65: 

About the time we crossed the white chalk line which divides Virginia from North Carolina, we became aware that some sort of dispute was taking place in the interior of the car.  It began as a series of sullen mutters but soon the participants were involved in a noisy and metallic altercation.  I gathered that things were being thrown...

Silly cartoon humor: the white chalk line.  Situational humor: the sophisticate mystified by machinery.  Witty self-deprecating irony: the parts of the car at war with each other mirroring the marital disputes they in some measure give rise to.  Plus, wonderfully musical writing:  "sullen mutters," "metallic altercation."

One of his best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Vegetable (1923)

His only full-length published play.  It's hard to judge it, of course, just by what's on the page,

because the kind of comedy it was intended as is probably the kind that only comes to life on the stage.  Then again, he did publish it, so he must have intended it to have some kind of life beyond the stage.  But it doesn't:  it's dead on the page.

It's partly because it simply isn't funny.  Maybe it was funnier at the time - maybe the jokes haven't aged well - but I rather doubt it.  After all, the play bombed, and the book doesn't seem to have done much better...  The situations aren't particularly funny, the characters aren't particularly funny, and the dialogue isn't particularly witty.  It reads like the kind of thing that was screamingly funny when Fitzgerald and his friends concocted it - but the humor metabolized out along with the alcohol...  I've now read most of Fitzgerald (I'm a few volumes behind in my blogging, but I think I'm ready to say I've read enough now), and one thing I don't think he was, was funny.  There are smiles and smirks in his writing, but precious few actual laughs.  He's not that kind of writer.  He tries to be here - he thinks he is - but he's not.

But I could forgive that, actually.  Comedy often doesn't age well, and in fact comedy doesn't always have to provide laughs to be worthwhile.  There can be other things on offer.  What really sinks this book is that it puts the worst of Fitzgerald's social attitudes front and center.  The plot revolves around a shlubby Everyman for whom bootleg alcohol is the pillow of Kantan:  he dreams he's President.  The problem is that, rather than enjoying his success and then awakening to realize that all earthly glory is as transient as a dream, he screws everything up as President and then wakes up thankful that he's just a simple man after all.  In other words it's a profoundly antidemocratic work that laughs at little people for being little people, and tells them that they shouldn't aspire to great things, but should be content with their little stations in life.

If there is humor here, it's the snide laughter of the elite, aimed at shaming the plebes into remaining in their place. 

Batman & Robin (1997)

I got through a whole review of Batman Forever without once mentioning Robin.

No great loss, though.  I confess that I have little use for Robin as a character, at least in the movies.  As written he seems meant to be just what the comics character was meant as: an audience surrogate for adolescents, and a way to lighten up the Batman.  But I'm definitely of the camp that says Batman is at his best when he's at his darkest:  he needs no lightening up.  And the third movie didn't need an adolescent surrogate:  every character was one already.

Plus, the film was hopelessly confused as to what Robin was supposed to be anyway.  As written he was an adolescent, but Chris O'Donnell looked every day of his 25 years when he played the part.  Nobody - not a single person - bought him as a teenager.  I mean the very next year he'd play a lawyer, right?  And so the chemistry between Batman and Robin - hell, let's leave chemistry out of it:  the story makes no sense.  ...Of course, leaving chemistry out of it was probably exactly why a grown man was cast as Robin:  fear of the skeevy overtones that the once-(probably-)innocent pairing would inevitably take on in 1995.  Especially when the suits have nipples.

There was a potential there for an interesting deepening of the Batman character, though.  I mean, even as Val Kilmer's playing him, he's the definitive loner, but the entry of Robin demands that he become part of a team.  And it's clearly against his will:  what Bruce Wayne is having to deal with is the inevitable consequence of his success.  He's breeding imitators.  They're his responsibility whether he likes it or not.  The vigilante inspires other vigilantes - is he okay with that?  I don't say that this theme was handled with any more subtlety than the others, but it could have been.

Okay, I've delayed long enough:  we have to get to the fourth movie now.  And in the fourth movie, they've stopped even trying to put in any interesting subtext.  They've completely dropped any shadow at all from the Batman character.  Now he's the dad in The Brady Bunch - a harried pater whose familias is growing in unexpected ways.  Batman is a mildly reluctant team player here.  And so he has no meaning whatsoever.

In its own way, Batman & Robin is as big a disaster as Superman IV was.  The production values are infinitely higher, which means it does provide some intermittent cheap thrills, but it quite intentionally reduces Batman and the whole enterprise to a joke.  And not a very good one.

What's happening here is what happened 'round about the third or fourth Roger Moore 007 film:  everybody involved decided they could no longer take seriously this thing they were doing, and assumed audiences felt the same.  They disrespected it.  And the result is just pointless.  It's an unthrilling action movie, and an unfunny comedy.

It's not the fault of the casting.  It's the fault of the writing and directing.  To be sure, the casting has some real problems.  Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl is a mistake;  she was clearly cast because she was that girl in that Aerosmith video, so the kids must like her.  Meanwhile that very year Sarah Michelle Gellar was showing how you create a girl-power hero, putting Silverstone to shame.  But Batgirl is not as big a problem as Ahnold is.  I'll own up to having less use for Schwarzenegger than I have for Robin - his appeal is just as lost on me, and always has been.  But even if you liked him in Terminator or Total Recall it's just painful to watch him here, barking out oversimplified punch lines like they were marching orders.  He's a big sucking sore in this movie.

And the thing of it is...I actually like George Clooney as Batman.  Let me qualify that.  Of all the actors who have played Batman he looks most like Batman, with his square jaw and his easy mastery.  Now, he's a comic actor, and I'm not sure how he would have done with the darker scripts his predecessors were given.  But he does the best he can with what he has, and almost pulls it off.  It's not his fault the movie around him is what it is.

Then again, I like George Lazenby, too.