Armchair Travel
Thursday, March 30, 2006
  Alexander Dumas
Georges Simenon wrote more than a hundred books without a dud. Alexander Dumas wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. They're not as easy to read, but they're all equally rewarding, if not more so because they're all a lot longer.

Everybody thinks they know "The Three Musketeers" from the ten gazillion movies made of it, but all the plots and subplots are way too intricate for any one movie and what you wind up with is an idiotic jumble of randomly selected scenes where the viewer is left utterly confused about the connections between them, which are much too complicated to explain.

In the book, it's all laid out brilliantly. Not just in "The Three Musketeers," but in all the sequels, "Ten Years After," "Twenty Years After," "The Man in the Iron Mask," and a bunch of other books about D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis; there were actually four musketeers, you see. And that's just one bunch of books. Dumas wrote hundreds more and his son wrote a bunch of great ones too.

If you haven't read "The Count of Monte Cristo" -- well, I don't know what to say. Take all the interesting parts of fifty modern Hollywood 'blockbusters,' or 'thrillers,' splice them all together masterfully, supposing you could, and... there's still no comparison.

Why? Well, for one thing Dumas' father, the son of a slave and a nobleman, was a brilliant and courageous soldier under the various revolutionary governments, rising to the rank of general at the age of 31, and served in the campaigns of Napoleon I. But after the Egyptian campaign he was betrayed and imprisoned for 20 months, emerging partially paralyzed and penniless.

Dumas himself, though he had fair skin and blue eyes, had an Afro (like Pushkin) which he wore as a badge of honor. He encountered the scorn of racists throughout his life but he laughed it off and shamed them with his brilliance, becoming far and away the most popular writer and dramatist of his or any other era.

After the opening of his first play, when he was 20, the audience stood and cheered "as if seized by madness." From that day on his popularity never waned. He earned enormous amounts of money, and spent even more on mansions and mistresses.

He knew profound poverty as a child and vast wealth as an author, so in the course of his life he met people from all walks of life.

Although his father died when young Alexander was only four, his mother's stories and those of his father's comrades gave Dumas an intimate view of power politics in France during some of the most exciting times in the nation's history.

He recounts it all -- the excesses of the Bourbon court, the political infighting, the guillotine and the terror, the street fighting, the funny names like Brumaire and Thermidor that the revolutionaries gave to the months of the year and the days of the week, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, the empire, the restoration, the whole ball of wax.

But he always recounts it from the point of view of the characters involved, and they're always so lifelike they just about step out of the book and into your living room.

Okay, okay, sometimes you need to skim over the parts where the hero is being truer than true and the heroine is being purer than pure. But the minor characters are all so great -- like the crooked innkeeper and the drunken friar and the monk turned public prosecutor who likes to order a few dozen executions every day.

Dumas has an unerring sense of drama that infuses all his works. They are all based on historic situations of which he had a bird's-eye view, but they are all treated brilliantly as well. Just as Mozart created an immortal opera based on a simple barber named Figaro, Dumas created immortal novels based on historic personages and incredibly lifelike characters.

And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them -- a virtually inexhaustible source of great reads.
 
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
  Georges Simenon and Inspector Maigret
Another author who never disappoints is Georges Simenon, who writes the Inspector Maigret mysteries. When I see one of those I snatch it up and put aside whatever else I'm reading.

I just can't wait to join Inspector Maigret as he puffs on his pipe, stokes up the stove in his office on the Quai des Orfevres, sends out for beer and sandwiches from the Brasserie Dauphin and proceeds to interrogate some colorful character snatched off the streets of Paris.

Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown and Hercule Poirot and all those guys all use deductive reasoning. Maigret uses inductive reasoning.

He mulls over the whole picture, over and over, pipe after pipe, aperitif after aperitif, immersing himself in the life of the victim -- family, acquaintances, business associates, every tiny detail of their daily routine, until something just doesn't fit. It seems to take a great deal of Calvados and beer other forms of alcohol to do the job properly.

And of course, since Maigret is French, we always hear what he has to eat, and it always sounds delicious.

Very occasionally he might mention some puzzling bit of evidence to Madame Maigret back in their apartment in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. She never butts in, but quite often she will give him a telling insight into the character of a suspect or a witness or a victim.

They didn't have children, you know, and one always senses a little pang of regret about that -- as when Maigret's old friend introduces him to his strapping young son -- but as they stroll arm in arm, as they like to do, through their favorite little park, they make a touching picture of connubial harmony.

And every Maigret book gives a glimpse into some aspect of Parisian life that could only come from someone with firsthand experience. Simenon was a police reporter in Paris for many years.

There's one about a murder on a barge on the canals, so you find out all about the system of locks and the bars where the boatmen hang out, and there's one about the hobos who live in shanties under bridges. We also get glimpses into the lives of butchers, strip club owners, diplomats, gangsters, burglars, pimps, and all kinds of bohemian types. This is Paris, after all.

The French have a system where an "examining magistrate" is put in charge of each investigation and gets to boss the police around. Often there are smart-ass examining magistrates who screw things up, but they generally end up looking like morons. The smart ones learn to let Maigret handle things his own way.

Simenon wrote some books without Inspector Maigret, but those don't really do it for me. You need to look for Maigret in the title.

I love all the details of Maigret's life -- deciding whether to ride the bus or take a taxi, looking for a double-decker bus where he can smoke his pipe, climbing the steps to his office, greeting Old Joseph the messenger, dispatching his inspectors Janvier, LaPointe and Torrence, on missions around the city and ultimately wresting a confession from the guilty party in a marathon interrogation at the Quai des Orfevres.

I've mentioned some authors who do not disappoint -- Hammett, Sjowall/Wahloo and Van Gulik -- who wrote a handful of books. But Simenon wrote dozens and dozens and dozens of books and seems utterly incapable of producing a single dud. When you stumble onto a guy like that you know you're really onto something. I can't tell you how many wonderfully enjoyable hours I've spent in the Police Judiciaire and the Boulevard Richard Lenoir.

In this respect, Simenon reminds me of Alexander Dumas, so I guess he's another heir to Pushkin and the blind Greek guy.
 
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
  Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Another sure-fire good read is any book by May Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Thank you Lisa Becker for turning me on to them. They wrote books about the Swedish police in the '60s and '70s. They have great characters, starting with inspector Martin Beck and his associates, and great situations that are clearly drawn from real-life police work.

Martin Beck has one huge buddy who likes expensive sportscars and has a habit of crashing through doors like they were made out of cardboard, another guy who's great at analyzing records and forensic evidence.

And there are loads of comedic politicans posturing and perorating and generally screwing things up.

But what's really great is the way they analyze minute bits of evidence and slowly but surely solve the cases. It's always really well done and -- is this a theme of my blog? -- they're clearly written by someone with firsthand knowledge of law enforcement.

A lot of the time, though, you wish they'd let the murderer go, because the victim turns out to be someone so loathsome they had it coming big time, like the drug dealer who is killed by the father of a girl he lured into pornography or "The Abominable Man," who is truly abominable.

One of their books is called, "The Cop Killer," where this hitchhiker is picked up by a homicidal maniac. The cops pull them over and the maniac, trying to shoot it out, dies in a hail of gunfire.

One of the policemen dives into a ditch and is stung by a bee. The policeman is allergic to bee stings and dies. So everyone is chasing this poor hitchhiker who is branded as a "cop killer." As I said, it's the kind of thing you couldn't possibly write unless you had firsthand knowledge of police work.

There's "Roseanna," where Martin Beck and his buddies do some amazing detective work with very slim bits of physical evidence to find out who killed this woman on a ferry, "The Fire Engine That Disappeared," which is also very clever and "The Man Who Went Up in Smoke" where Martin Beck goes behind the Iron Curtain to Hungary and meets a detective a lot like himself.

Then there's "The Laughing Policeman," "Murder at the Savoy," "The Man on the Balcony," and there may be others -- but take my word for it, they're all superb reads.
 
Thursday, March 23, 2006
  The Judge Dee Mysteries
The Judge Dee mysteries by Robert Van Gulik are also all good. There's about a dozen of them. Some of them are better than others, but they're all very enjoyable.

Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat in China and Japan for many years. A diligent scholar and a very imaginative writer with a gift for detail, Van Gulik adapts Chinese popular stories to the Western mystery genre.

The original Judge Dee stories were like "Columbo" -- you knew who the bad guys were at the beginning and the suspense was in seeing how they got found out. Van Gulik turns that around and puts the solution at the end because that's what most Western readers are used to.

He downplays the torturing of witnesses, an established practice in Chinese courts, but he keeps one other element unique to Chinese mysteries: the supernatural assistance that the magistrate may get from the deceased.

A provincial magistrate like Judge Dee is detective, prosecutor, defense attorney, judge and jury all rolled into one. His job is to get to the bottom of things. If he wants to know something he says so and people come to the tribunal and kneel down and knock their heads on the floor and say, "This insignificant person is named so and so, and respectfully reports etc. etc." Not a bad way of getting things done if you ask me.

We get wonderful glimpses of life in Imperial China: "This guy sold his daugther into slavery -- without paying the 'selling your daughter into slavery' tax, and what's more, he was undercutting the price the government was offering for Korean war slaves."

In another book, I forget which one, we learn about the practice of fighting with "loaded sleeves." Chinese robes have these long sleeves that they use as pockets. Loading a sleeve with a rock or a lead ball is a variation on the old 'pool ball in a sock' idea. It makes a very stealthy, very deadly weapon if you know how to use it.

During the Boxer Rebellion when foreigners in China were getting massacred, a group of Roman Catholic nuns, believing all was lost, held up their hands to God. The attacking mob feared they had loaded sleeves and backed off and let them go into one of the fortified compounds -- a true story attested to in the introduction.

In "The Chinese Gold Murders," the first book, Judge Dee is on his way to his first assignment as a provincial magistrate in a province on the Korean border with his family servant Hoong Liang.

They encounter these "gentlemen of the road" -- Robin Hood types -- who demand their horses. Judge Dee doffs his traveling robes and starts sword fighting with one of the brigands and it's touch and go.

Then along comes an army patrol. Judge Dee calmly identifies himself as the new magistrate and explains to the officer that he's been traveling with his assistants and they had decided to stop and stretch their muscles and have a little fencing practice. The officer buys it and the patrol goes on its way. Then Judge Dee wants to have at it again. Is that class, or what?

The two brigands, Chao Tai and Mah Joong (not the game), recognize a classy guy when they see one and refuse to fight. Later they catch up with Judge Dee and Sergeant Hoong at a local inn and say, basically, "Hey that was a good idea you had about our being your assistants," and he hires them, which turns out to be a really good move.

The nice thing for the reader is that Chao Tai and Mah Joong can circulate in the Chinese underworld and go to floating brothels in the harbor and places like that. Van Gulik was also a collector of Chinese erotica, and, for his time, he has some pretty spicy scenes from the seamy side of Imperial China.

Scenes that seem to be -- I'm just guessing here -- written by a guy who knows what he's talking about.
 
  Raymond Chandler



Chandler isn't as subtle as Hammett, but he makes up for it with imagination and verve.
 
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
  Hammett's Heir - Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett served in an ambulance corps during World War I and he contracted influenza and tuberculosis. His service in the Aleutian Islands in World War II, when he was in his fifties, worsened his health problems and his incarceration by the House Unamerican Activities Committee pretty much killed him, although he helped things along himself by doing some serious boozing.

He wrote comparatively few books: "The Maltese Falcon," "The Dain Curse," "Red Harvest," "The Glass Key" and "The Thin Man," but the early stories which he wrote for pulp magazines are collected in posthumous volumes like "The Continental Op," "The Big Knockover," "Dead Yellow Women," "Son of the Continental Op," "Return of the Continental Op," "Return of the Bride of the Son of the Continental Op," etc. etc.

But after "The Thin Man," the spigot pretty much dried up. He started a book called "Tulip," which is included in "The Big Knockover," but frankly I don't get it.

He had hooked up with Lillian Hellman at this point and I guess he just couldn't do the hard-boiled solo guy anymore. He could have gone on cranking out a book every year like Agatha Christie, and he could have made tons more money, but either he couldn't or he wouldn't.

Raymond Chandler could and would and did meet that demand with books like "Farewell My Lovely," "The Long Goodbye" and "The Lady in the Lake." Thankfully, Chandler makes no bones about adopting Hammett's style. It's like he's channeling Hammett, albeit without as much subtlety. He himself said that when he was stuck for a plot he had someone crash through a door with a gun.

But he had the same familiarity with actual investigations and police work, and he used it with imagination and verve. You could say he's methadone for the deprived Hammett addict.

Don't get me wrong; Raymond Chandler is brilliant. He's the heir to Hammett, who's heir to Dumas, who's heir to Pushkin, who's heir to -- who else? -- the blind Greek guy. And because Chandler wrote many more books for many years after Hammett was long gone, he developed his own unique style.

His books contain some truly amazing insights about this odd world and his hard-boiled dick, Phillip Marlowe, gets fleshed out much more than Sam Spade or Monsieur Rick. Like me he likes to play chess games from books.

Here are the opening paragraphs from "The Long Goodbye":

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one.

"He had a young looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other."

Marlowe later finds Lennox staggering around drunk on the street and takes him to his house to sleep it off. Lennox talks about quitting drinking. And Marlow says, "It takes about three years."

"Three years?" Lennox looks shocked.

Then comes one of those insights I was talking about:

"Usually it does," Marlowe says. "You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little bit strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well."

Like his illustrious literary forebears, Chandler does not disappoint.
 
  Robert E. Lee and Traveler


Nice looking horse, don't you think?
This sketch was made by A. R. Waud, an illustrator from Harper's weekly.
It appeared in the August, 1957 issue of American Heritage.
 
  Mary Astor En Francais


Men are men in France, too.
 
  Lovely Mary Astor

Mary Astor was featured prominently in all the promotional posters for "The Maltese Falcon."
 
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
  The Original Hard-Boiled Dick
On my list of authors who do not disappoint, Dashiell Hammett is number one. I grab every book of his that I find. If I have them already, I give them to friends.

Hammett only wrote one bad book, "The Dain Curse," and even that's worth reading. The brilliant, lifelike characters and situations outweigh the utterly improbably plot in which a child is tricked into committing a murder.

Everyone knows "The Maltese Falcon" because of the movie, which, by the way, stuck to the book verbatim. But even if you know the movie by heart, the book is a great read.

Sam Spade is the original hard-boiled dick who's sitting in his office taking a nip from the bottle in his desk drawer when a beautiful woman walks in and explains she's in terrible trouble.

The scene has been repeated so many times it has become a cariacature like Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir." There's also a great graphic rendering in "Calvin and Hobbes." But when Hammett did it, it was new, and he could only do it because he had worked as a private detective and knew firsthand what it was like.

I love the part where the young "gunsel" is covering Sam Spade with two guns in his coat pockets and Sam Spade grabs the collar of his coat and yanks it down and then grabs him and takes his guns away. It takes about two seconds and the movie renders it perfectly.

Hammett's great gift, besides his firsthand knowlege of detective work, is in careful plotting, exact expression and brilliant characterization. You have to love "the Fat Man," Gutman, and the pansy, Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, who play essentially the same roles in "Casablanca," possibly the greatest movie ever made.

If you had to rely on the character of "Sam Spade, brave hero" to keep the reader's interest, you would have a boring book because Spade's character is concealed by his hard-boiled persona. It is revealed only in his actions, just like -- who else? Monsieur Rick in "Casablanca."

This is the reason Hammett and Bogart were a match made in heaven. Hammett could never have dreamed of a better actor to play Sam Spade, and Bogart could never, ever have dreamed of a role better suited to his talents. Ever see him as the bad guy in "The Oklahoma Kid"? Not the same thing. You could say the same for Greenstreet and Lorre.

As I say, the other characters have to keep the reader's, and the moviegoer's interest, and here Hammett really really shines. Consider the scene where Sam Spade meets Gutman in his mahogany-paneled suite in the Alexandria Hotel.

Gutman is described as "flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks," which doesn't fit with Greenstreet very well -- he's not that fat -- but never mind. After seating Spade in a plush chair, he pours him a drink of Johnny Walker.

"We begin well, sir," Gutman says. "I distrust a man who says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does."

Spade "makes the beginning of a bow" and Gutman goes on, "Well, sir, here's to plain speaking and clear understanding." Then he asks, "You're a closed-mouth man?"

Spade shakes his head. "I like to talk."

"Better and better!" the fat man exclaims. "I distrust a closed-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice. We'll get along, sir, that we will."

Then they get settled with cigars, a process Hammet describes very exactly, and the fat man says, "Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. And I'll tell you right out that I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk."

"Swell," says Spade. "Will we talk about the black bird?"

"The fat man laughed," Hammett writes, "and his bulbs rode up and down." Again, Greenstreet wasn't that fat, but he was certainly fat enough.

"Will we? We will. You're the man for me, sir, a man cut along my own lines. No beating about the bush, but right to the point. 'Will we talk about the black bird?' I like that, sir. I like that way of doing business."

I really like the way Hammett weaves the history of the crusades and the Knights of Malta into a murder mystery in San Francisco, and it's up to Greenstreet to relate this amazing tale, which he does brillinatly. His performance, like Peter Lorre's, were really what made it such a fantastic movie. You throw in Spade's heroics at key moments, and Mary Astor's knockers, and a director like John Huston, and you get a movie that's second only to -- "Casablanca."

Hammett's books are great because he actually worked as a private detective. His seedy pornographers and coked-out heiresses were based on his own experience. Because he described and employed these secondary characters so well, he was heir to the greatest author of all time, Alexander Dumas, about whom more later.

"Red Harvest" has an enormous amount of killing between these rival gangs of bootleggers in a southwestern town, but it's very well done. It was the inspiration for the Bruce Willis movie, "Last Man Standing."

"The Thin Man" is another brilliant classic, both the movie and the book, too well known even to comment on. See the man is thin because he's only on ... No, I won't give it away. You'll have to read it for yourself.

The best Dashiell Hammet book, for my money, is "The Glass Key," about this guy who works for a politician in Chicago. It's a corker.

Hammett went to jail, by the way, for refusing to cooperate with Senator Joe McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee, even though he didn't have any information that had anything to do with their investigations. They pissed him off and he said, "Fuck you," so in my book he's an American hero.
 
Monday, March 20, 2006
  More About That Same Issue of American Heritage
My last three blog entries were based on two stories from one issue of American Heritage, August 1957. But in that same issue there are nine other stories that are just as interesting:

*one about Cotton Mather fighting the doctors of Boston to allow innoculation against smallpox in that city in 1721, when the idea was in its infancy,

*an article about Philip Hone, an assiduous diarist who chronicled the rapid growth of New York from 1820 to 1850 entertaining notables like Davy Crockett and Daniel Webster, with beautiful engravings of early New York,

*an article about how Louisa May Alcott's mother was able to keep her family sheltered, clothed and fed while her husband, philosopher Bronson Alcott, was devoting himself to his calling as a full-time dingaling,

*a great article about specialist engineering battalions with no combat experience blowing up German tanks and holding vital crossroads like Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge,

*a great Winslow Homer gallery,

*a nifty story about the McGuffey primers ("A is for Axe") that schooled several generations of Americans, and finally,

*a story about the visit of Prince Napoleon, cousin of the Emperor Napoleon III (there were a lot of guys named that in France at that time) who comes to America in 1861 just after the first Battle of Bull Run and talks to Lincoln and his cabinet members and General McClellan, and then crosses over the lines and talks to all the Confederate generals and policians. They talked to both the winning and the losing generals from Bull Run just weeks after the battle.

Okay, I'm still talking about the same edition of American Heritage, August 1957, and there's still more -- an account of the terrible Triangle Fire in New York, and a sweet short story about a Vermont soldier coming back from the Civil War... how did I get going on this? I want to go to bed.

Oh, one last thing. There's a pencil sketch of Robert E. Lee riding away from his meeting with Grant at Appomattox, drawn by someone who was there. I've always heard that his horse Traveler was one heck of a fine looking horse, and now it's almost as if I can see for myself.
 
Thursday, March 16, 2006
  "We Brung a Little Bacon and We Brung a Little Beans"
I mentioned before that you can't do better than old copies of American Heritage. I've got a stack of them in the throne room. In the same edition as the story of Jane Honeyman, August 1957, there's a story by C. S. Forester (the author of the famous Captain Hornblower series) about Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans, along with a picture of the battle by a guy who was there, rendered by a French lithographer.

Ever hear that song, "Eighteen-fourteen we took a little trip,/ Along with Colonel Jackson down the Mighty Mississipp./ We brung a little bacon and we brung a little beans,/ And we fought the Bloody British in the Town of New Orleans."?

There's also a picture of Sir Edward Pakenham the British infantry commander, brother-in-law to the Duke of Wellington. Turns out the great Wellington, who was later to cook Napoleon's goose at Waterloo, was offered the command and turned it down, saying, in effect, it was a dumb idea.

I guess that was enough to persuade Sir Edward to give it a go, just to show his stuck-up brother-in-law a thing or two.

Well Forester lays the whole thing out -- Jackson's preparations, the brave offer of assistance by the pirate Jean Lafitte, British blunders in not taking control of the river, et cetera et cetera. Stuff I won't bore you with, but which I really love.

Forester suggests that Pakenham might have been napping during a War College lecture about infantry attacks on open ground against entrenched opponents without sufficient artillery preparation. His regulars had broken a line of American militiamen during the preliminary skirmishes, so he decided to give it a go.

The result we can hear from what I consider a primary source, i.e. somebody who was there:

"We fired our guns and the British kept acomin'/ There warn't as many as there was a while ago./ Fired once more and they began arunnin'/ Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico."

Now when you're dealing with original sources, you're going to find extraneous material that you can't always consider reliable. For instance: "We fired our cannon til the barrel melted down/ Then we grabbed an alligator and we fired another round./ We filled his jaws with cannonballs and powdered his behind/ And when we set the powder off the gator lost his mind."

There's another inaccuracy, I think, in the old song that was probably made for the sake of the meter: "Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise if we didn't fire our muskets 'till we looked 'em in the eyes."

The part about Old Hickory's orders is right, but I think we're talking about rifles here, not muskets. I'm basing that on the next two lines of the verse: "We held our fire 'til we seen their faces well/ Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave 'em ... / Well we fired our guns, etc." Hunting squirrels with a musket would be a pretty futile proposition.

I'm also basing my conjecture on the number of British casualties: 2,000 (compared to 21 for the Americans - can't find a breakdown of killed/wounded) and one other vital statistic: number of bullets that struck Sir Edward Pakenham as he led his futile charge: 3.
 
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
  "It Was All Over in Less Than an Hour"
John Honeyman first met with George Washington in Philadelphia in 1775. They were both veterans of the French and Indian War. Honeyman, a weaver at the time, agreed to act as a secret agent, and they decided he was more likely to make himself useful to the British as a cattle merchant. That's why he changed his profession and moved his family to Griggstown. (All this is from an article by Leonard Falkner in the Agust 1957 edition of American Heritage. Thank you Leonard Falkner. Thank you American Heritage.)

The following year, on December 14, 1776, Washington sent a letter to his officers:

"Let me entreat you to cast about to find out some person who can be engaged to cross the river as a spy, that we may, if possible, obtain some knowledge of the enemy's situation, movements, and intentions; particular inquiry to be made by the person sent if any preparations are making to cross the river; whether any boats are building and where; whether any are coming across land from Brunswick; what purpose, etc.

"Expense must not be spared in procuring such intelligence and will readily be paid by me.

"We are in a neighborhood of very disaffected people," Washington continued. "Equal care therefore should be taken that one of these persons do not undertake the business in order to betray us."

This letter was unusual for Washington, who usually dealt with his spies privately. As Falkner points out, it indicates how desperate he was.

On December 18, 1776, Washington wrote to his brother, "I think the game is pretty near up." His army was subsisting on crackers and nearly half of them had no shoes. And their enlistments were up January first.

Then, on December 22, Honeyman had himself 'captured' by the Continentals. They did a convincing job of knocking him down and tying him up, just in case anyone was watching.

They took him to Washington's headquarters where, behind closed doors, he told Washington that the Hessians in Trenton were utterly unprepared. Lord Cornwallis had ordered them to dig breastworks around the city, but they hadn't got around to it.

This was the information Washington needed to decide on his bold stroke.

But Honeyman's contribution to the American cause was even greater after his 'escape' from Washington's headquarters because he was able to give vital 'disinformation' to the enemy. He managed to make his way over the ice on the Delaware and collapsed at the British sentry post.

He was taken to Colonel Johann Gottileb Rall, the commander of the Hessians. Honeyman told Rall that the Continental Army across the river was hopelessly disorganized and on the brink of mutiny.

"Rall was delighted," Falkner writes, "It confirmed everything he had thought. There was nothing to worry about from that quarter, and so he went ahead with his plans for a big Christmas."

Then came Washington's bold stroke. I urge you to read about it. The ragtag army that crossed the Delaware, thanks to the guys from Marblehead, a great town with a funny name.

"What about the Tory farmers in the neighborhood?" I'm sure you're asking. "Didn't they warn Colonel Rall that the Continental Army was on the move?"

Good question! "Tory farmers in the neighborhood quickly passed along the word that the rebel army was getting ready to move," Falkner writes. "As Rall sat playing cards and drinking in the home of a Trenton loyalist Christmas night, a Tory farmer from across the river pounded on his door.

"The servant wouldn't let him interrupt the game, so he wrote a note warning Rall that the Continentals were coming. Rall stuffed it in his pocket, unread, and went back to his cards and wine."

"He was sleeping off a monumental hangover next morning, as were most of the rest of the garrison, when Washington's troops, many of them barefooted, others with rags around their bleeding feet, marched through a sleet storm in two columns that converged with perfect precision and stormed down unprotected King and Queen streets into the village.

"It was all over in less than an hour," Falkner concludes. "Rall was mortally wounded, shot as he tried to organize his men in the center of the village." The Tory farmer's note was still in his pocket.

"One hundred and six of the mercenaries had been killed or wounded. About 900 were taken prisoner and paraded through the streets of Philadelphia. The Continental casualties were four wounded."

Washington's army was supplied with cannon and arms and ammunition and, of course, finely crafted German boots, and no doubt they had one hell of a party that Christmas -- all thanks to John Honeyman, who then spent seven years branded as a traitor.

After the war John Honeyman became a farmer, prospered, had five more kids and lived to the ripe old age of 93. Falkner tells us he "stubbornly avoided glamorizing his war experiences."

Jane Honeyman never married, and when her father died, she went to live with her nephew, John Honeyman's grandson John Van Dyke, then a young lawyer. She told him this wonderful story, and he had it confirmed by several Continental Army veterans, including the young officer who led the mob that surrounded the Honeymans' house back in the winter of 1777.

So this is not just a pretty story. It's been nailed down tight.

Much later, in 1873, John Van Dyke, then a justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, published the story in a local magazine, where it was spotted by William Stryker, president of the New Jersey Historical Society.

The rest, as they say, is history. So the next time you're called upon to give a toast, consider the inscription on the fountain erected to the memory of John Honeyman in 1930 at Washington's Crossing State Park:

"DRINK OF THE FOUNT OF LIBERTY
LET POSTERITY INHERIT FREEDOM"
 
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
  The Story of Jane Honeyman
This is an amazing story by Leonard Falkner that I found in the August 1957 of American Heritage. For my money, there is no better bang for the buck than old editions of American Heritage. I get them free or for a quarter, but they're worth a buck or more.

This story is about Jane Honeyman, born around 1766 in Philadelphia. Her mother was Irish and her father was a Scot, a veteran of the French and Indian War. She was upset when, at the age of eight, the family moved from Philadelphia, where her father had worked as a weaver, to Griggstown, New Jersey, where her father became a procurer of cattle for the British Army, or rather, for the German mercenaries, hired by the Birtish Army, who were occupying Trenton.

Jane Honeyman had a club foot; that was bad enough, but soon everyone in the town began to torment and terrify her and her family. And on top of all this, Jane had begun to believe that her father was a traitor to his adopted country, and to all the values he had spoken of when she was little.

When they first moved to Griggstown in 1775, there were lots of other families who were loyal to the British king, but after General Washington won his great victory at Trenton, in Christmas 1776, they were all gone. And Jane had never heard her father or her mother talk about loyalty to the British king before.

Poor Jane could only conclude that her dad had betrayed the cause of liberty for the money. And her mother could say nothing to dissuade her.

Her father, John Honeyman, was captured by Continental Army troops on December 22, 1776, when he ventured out to procure a cow for the Hessians back in Trenton for their Charistmas celebration. He had been interrogated by General Washington and later escaped when a haystack near the house in which he was confined caught fire and the guard went off to help put it out. Honeyman broke out through the window and went immediately to report to the Hessian commander.

Then, in 1777, when Jane was ten years old, came a night she would remember all her life, the most terrifying event in the family's history. After the American victory at Trenton, her father had fled to loyalist friends in Brunswick, New Jersey.

A group of patriotic citizens with torches surrounded the Honeymans' home and threatened to burn it down unless the traitor John Honeyman surrendered.

On that day her mother, Mary Honeyman, walked out the front door and asked to speak to the leader of this hostile mob. A Continental officer was pushed forward to act in this capacity, and Mary Honeyman presented him with a letter dated November, 1776, signed by George Washington, which read, "The wife and children of John Honeyman, the notorious Tory, now within the British lines and probably acting the part of a spy, are to be protected from harm."

Fortunately the Continental officer recognized Washington's signature and persuaded the crowd to go home. Her father returned home later and was tried twice for treason -- a hanging offense -- but each time he managed to get off on a technicality.

In 1779 an advertisement appeared in the New Jersey Gazette that John Honeyman's farm would be auctioned off along with the property of other known loyalists on April 8, but for some unknown reason the sale never took place.

Then, four years later, came one of the greatest days in American history.

On that day in 1783 Jane Honeyman, then 16, was sitting on the front porch when she saw a troop of Continental cavalary approaching, along with an enormous contingent of curious neighbors.

A famous personage dismounted, walked up the steps, and knocked on the Honeymans' door. You'd recognize him; he's on the money. On that day George Washington shook hands with John Honeyman and thanked him for his service to his country.

From that day forward, Jane Honeyman had no trouble holding her head high when she went into town. But more than that, she knew her dad was really a hero. And he was.

For the story behind this story, you'll have to check out my blog tomorrow.
 
Monday, March 13, 2006
  Mary Phylinda Dole, "A Doctor in Homespun"
Every once in a while in book collecting you get a rare find, a book that gives you goosebumps the first time you open it.

One of those rare finds for me was a copy of "A Doctor in Homespun" by Mary Phylinda Dole, signed by the author, which I purchased at a flea market in Northfield, Mass. I think I may have paid an outlandish six dollars. Generally I pay a quarter, maybe a dollar for a book I really want to read.

If I'd known what I'd got ahold of, believe me, I would have paid a whole lot more. Everything about this book delights me from head to toe. Mary Phylinda is an exemplar of everything that is good about the human race.

I lost my copy of her book in a housefire, along with a few other things, but fortunately I had located her great-niece and obtained a copy for my mom.

Mary Phylinda was born around 1870 in Ashfield, I believe -- I don't have the book handy -- one of the Franklin County hill towns. She became an orphan at a young age and was brought up in her uncle's family.

Her description of life on a happy, prosperous family farm in Ashfield is one of those rare first-person glimpses of life in New England in the 1800s that cannot be matched by any work of history. For the historian, it's the real stuff, a primary source.

Imagine a family that went to the mall once a year and mostly sold stuff. I hope you've seen "The Oxcart Man" by Donald Hall if you have kids; it's a beautiful book. Mary Phylinda's family was like that, spending all year making things to sell at the fair and then buying one or two precious items. They were dedicated to the opposite of consumerism, which I think is why they were happy.

She was the first graduate of Mt. Holyoke College, and she went on to become a doctor, the way having just been paved for her by groundbreakers like Elizabeth Blackwell, an intrepid soul well worth Googling.

When Mary Phylinda set up her practice in Greenfield in the 1890s, in what is now the children's wing of the library, she had a visit from the head of the local medical society. On behalf of all his colleagues he welcomed her to the practice of medicine, which says a lot about Greenfield. Many communities would never accept a woman doctor.

One reason she was welcomed into the medical community was that she responded to all the emergency calls from the hill towns, which probably suited the other doctors just fine. She had a sleigh and a carriage and an intrepid horse whose name I forget. Winter and Summer she was all set. She could just take one or the other. The problem was in the Spring and Fall when some roads were packed snow and some were mud.

One of the most tragic childhood diseases of Mary Phylinda's day was diphtheria. Finding a case of diphtheria was especially heartbreaking for a doctor because there was just nothing you could do.

Mary Phylinda Dole was resourceful enough to find her way to France to work as an intern at the institute of Louis Pasteur, then a very old man. As you probably know, Pasteur's discoveries were a breakthrough beyond anything ever known in the history of medicine, before or since, all because of a mistake his incompetent assistant made with the samples in the laboratory which I'll tell you about some day if you're interested, or even if you're not.

Mary Phylinda was present when they made the first trials of a diphtheria vaccine and -- to make a long story short -- it worked! Imagine the thrill of bringing a discovery like that back to America. Think of all the families that would know joy instead of sorrow. She must have been seen as a worker of miracles, which in a way she was.

This stuff gives me goosebumps. I'm going to get the book from Mom so I can post a photo of Mary Phylinda, so stay tuned. I'm also going to post one of Grace Metalious in sneakers, jeans and a plaid wool shirt, at her kitchen table, in the very act of changing the national consciousness.
 
Friday, March 10, 2006
  The Last Presidential Fedora



Here we see Ike and JFK at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland. Ike has been called to advise the president during the Cuban missile crisis. Ike was the last president to wear a fedora, and after his presidency, hats on men disappeared almost completely from American life.
 
  Omar, Ike and Ernie





This photo of General Omar Bradley, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and Scripps-Howard columnist Ernie Pyle is from "The Story of Ernie Pyle" by his best friend and editor Lee G. Miller. (Acme Photo)
 
Thursday, March 09, 2006
  Homer Wasn't Making Stuff Up
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Homer is that he wasn't just making stuff up. He was reciting old poems that were based on real people and real events.

There's a lot of debate about this, but they figure the sack of Troy, or rather one of the many sacks of Troy, took place around 1450 or so BC. Homer lived in the 800s or thereabouts, so there are about six centuries between him and the events he was singing about.

These centuries are known as the dark age of Greece because we don't know much about them except that nobody built much of anything or did much trading, and right about this time the Egyptians had an invasion of "Sea People" whom they finally licked and resettled in their border colonies in Palestine. That could explain why Goliath in the Bible -- you know him, right, slain by a rock in the noggin -- was wearing what sounds like Greek battle gear.

There was a lot of volcanic activity around this time, and the so-called Dorian invasion and so forth, maybe more than you want to know. The period actually spans the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. "The Iliad" mentions both bronze and iron weapons, supporting the theory that it was cobbled together over the ages.

When you think about it, if one side had bronze weapons and armor and the other side had iron weapons and armor, it wouldn't be very sporting.

But anyway, after all those centuries, Homer still has the kernel of truth. There have also been many studies over the years by experts in navigation that show Homer had detailed knowledge of the entire Mediterranean -- features like the whirlpool at the Straits of Messina and the Gates of Hercules, which we know as the Rock of Gibraltar. They even say the distances are given correctly.

But the best example is the "Cataloque of Ships." The "Cataloque of Ships" is a list of all the cities that sent ships to Troy with Agamemnon. It's a long and seemingly boring list that Greek teachers would often allow their students to skip.

Back in 1876 a fan of Homer named Heinrich Schliemann -- I'm sure you've heard this story, but it's still exciting -- figured that if those cities were rich enough to man and equip a ship, there ought to be something left of them, so he took Homer's list that had been handed down for 600 years and, a thousand years after that, went to those cities and dug up an entire civilization -- enormous stone fortresses and palaces and royal tombs full of treasure.

The gold leaf death mask that Schliemann took to be the face of Agamemnon turns out to be some other guy, but still!

Think of all the students skipping over that list all those years.
 
  The Blind Greek Guy
I've mentioned Homer several times. He's a guy who is well represented in the book sections of flea markets and rummage sales -- and well he should be. "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" make great reading.

You have to find a translation you like, because some of the old ones by Victorian scholars make Homer sound like a blowhard.

Whenever a translator is putting more emphasis on creating what he or she considers an artistic poem in English, you end up with a dumb poem that gives you zero understanding of the original.

Every educated person in the Greek and Roman worlds knew these works by heart, so it's rather unlikely that a modern writer is going to improve or elucidate it by reworking it in his or her own poetic style.

And if you monkey with the original to make an artsy poem in English, you wind up obscuring everything that makes the original great. I like a translation that's just as literal as it can possibly be, even if it makes awkward English. For Homer, W.D. Rouse's translation is the one I recommend. Fortunately, these works are used in schools all over the place, so they turn up all the time at rummage sales.

Even Caligula, the emperor I referred to, the guy you don't want as a wedding guest, was known to quote whole passages of Homer and all his guests quoted passages right back. He (Homer, that is) had, and still has, enormous appeal to the widest possible variety of people. He was the Ernie Pyle of the ancient world.

I think one reason for this wide appeal was that Homer, like Ernie, knew how to use homey details. When we hear about the Cyclops tending his sheep, he's putting the rams in this pen and the ewes in this pen, and then he's letting them out to graze and so on. Homer clearly knew a lot about raising sheep. He knew a lot about raising horses and making weapons and armor. He describes the threshing of wheat and the dances on the threshing floor. And he clearly had a mariner's knowledge of the moods of the sea and the ports of the Mediterranean.

When he returned victorious from the sack of Troy, the Great King Agamemnon was murdered by his wife in the bath, or maybe her boyfriend, I forget. Anyway, when Odysseus finally makes it back to Ithaca after twenty years, he wants to check out the lay of the land, so to speak. Who does he go to? Who does he know he can trust? The swineherd, of course. And in that scene we see that Homer knew all about raising pigs, too.

I think this was important for Homer and his predecessors -- for he drew on a poetic tradition of about six centuries, give or take a decade or two here or there -- because it had something for everyone who gathered in the villages to hear him.

I also like the kind of wink that Homer gives you whenever the gods and goddesses intervene in the affairs of humans. He always gives the discerning reader a perfectly natural explanation. Like when the Goddess of Wisdom, Athena, visits Odysseus' son Telemachus in the form of a wise old friend and helps him make up his mind, or when Hermes, God of Information and Commerce, takes the form of a fellow traveler and warns Odysseus about the witchcraft of Circe and gives him a root or somethings to eat to make him immune to her powers.

I guess the classic example is when Paris, Helen's boyfriend, is fighting Menelaus, her husband, and getting the worst of it. Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and a buddy of Paris', snatches him up and deposits him back in his nice cozy bed in his dad's palace inside the fabled walls of Troy.

It's not like he took off and ran, Homer seems to be saying. He wanted to stay and kick the shit out of Menelaus or die trying. He just kind of got swept up by a goddess and ended up inside the city walls. Don't you hate it when that happens?
 
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
  Entering the Twenty-First Century
I would be greatly remiss if I did not acknowledge in this blog the individual who has dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century.

Back around 1978, I think it was, I was the editor of the "Granite State Gazette" and I hired, right out of high school, a young cub reporter named Max Hartshorne. Best move I ever made. We had some great times at that paper before he went on to fame and glory in Portland.

Max was into the computer age early on; I inherited his old Kaypro, which for me was a big step up from the old selectric typewriters I had been using since college days.

I remember when he told me I ought to get something called "email" I replied that I didn't have anything to say to anybody in the world. Pretty funny when you look at all these blog entries.

Years later he bought a website. I didn't really know what one was. Now it turns out that while web design involves a bunch of skills hitherto unknown to humanity, a website still requires a lot of old-fashioned editing skills that date back to Homer -- not Homer Simpson, the blind Greek guy.

So now I get to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world as associate editor of GoNOMAD. And for an old-fashioned newspaper editor, web design is like being in Oz.
Back at the Granite State Gazette we used to have to literally cut and paste strips of type and headlines and get someone to make half-tones of the photos, which generally ended up looking like they were taken in a coal mine.

Now it's edit the copy, insert photos, align left, align right, put in links -- which, when you think about it, are really kind of super twenty-first century footnotes -- put in some key words for the spiders, you know, and bingo!

Max and GoNOMAD Webmaster Joe O'Beng, my friend and patient teacher, are introducing me, in small doses, to the mysteries of HTML. Somtimes I even edit the code! Imagine that.

And all this because a guy had a little vision and decided to be bold! Way to go, Max. And thanks.
 
Friday, March 03, 2006
  "This Girl and I Liked to Whirl"
When Ike was five he went to a family reunion at his uncle's house in Topeka. There were a lot of grownups there who didn't interest Ike much, so he started wandering around the grounds. An aggressive gander chased him back inside. His uncle gave him a broom handle and sent him out again.

"More frightened at the moment of his possible scolding than I was of aggression, I took what was meant to be a firm, but was really a trembling stand the next time the fowl came close. Then I let out a yell and rushed toward him, swinging the club as fast as I could. He turned and I gave him a satisfying smack right in the fanny.

"From thence on, once he found out I had a stick he would continue his belligerent noises whenever he saw me but he did not again come near me. I never made the mistake of being caught without my weapon," Ike concludes. "This all turned out to be a rather good lesson because I quickly learned never to negotiate with an adversary except from a position of strength."

I'm quoting this from "In Review," but it's probably from one of Ike's other four books. Here's a sample of Ike anecdotes:

He loves reading ancient history so much that his mother has to lock up his history books to get him to do his chores.

He gets in fistfights from time to time, when his cause is just, and usually comes out on top, by his account.

His mother, a pacifist, wept when he joined the military.

As a new cadet at West Point, he and another cadet were ordered to report to the room of this martinet senior in their dress coats. They reported in their dress coats and nothing else. They suffered for it, but they got a good laugh.

He receives a demerit at West Point for jitterbugging (It was termed indecent dancing.) with the same young woman after having previously being given a warning about the very same behavior. I guess I'll have to let Ike tell it for himself:

"After I became an upperclassman, I went to cadet dances only now and then, preferring to devote my time to poker. On one of the rare occasions when I did go to a dance, I met a girl, a daughter of one of the professors. We started dancing in a way that the authorities of the time felt was not in accord with the sedate two-step, polka and waltz that made up the repertoire of cadet dance music.

"This girl and I liked to whirl, just whirling around the room as rapidly as we could. I suppose the exercise probably showed a little more of the girl's ankles, possibly even reaching to her knees, than the sharp-eyed authorities thought was seemly. I was warned not to dance that way anymore.

"A few months later, it happened that I stopped in at a dance, possibly because it was one of the affairs known as a 'Feed Hop' where food was served late in the evening. Often the poker players would take a recess from our Saturday night game, rush over to get sandwiches and a cup of coffee and go back to the game.

"I met the same girl again and forgot entirely the warning issued earlier. The exuberant sensation of swinging around the room was too much for me to ignore and so, in due course, I was hailed before the Commandant. He informed me that I not only danced improperly, but had done so after a warning. For this offense I was demoted from the grade of sergeant to that of private.

"I was, in matters of discipline, far from a good cadet," Ike confesses. "While each demerit had an effect on class standing, this to me was of small moment. I enjoyed life at the Academy, and had a good time with my pals, and was far from disturbed by an additional demerit or two."
 
Thursday, March 02, 2006
  "This Dreadful Masterpiece"
I've been trying to figure out a way to give you a brief sample of Ernie Pyle's writing, but the power of his genius just does not come across in short selections. His columns were really "of a piece," and you have to read the whole thing to get the full effect.

In 1940, when he was sent to London, Ernie was kind of famous. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, said in her column that she read every word of his dispatches. So did several million Americans. But it was in England that he finally became a national figure.

A couple of entries ago I wrote about Nero wanting to see a great city burn, and the masterful description of the burning of Rome in "Quo Vadis" that I didn't even try to sample -- lions and elephants, escaped from the vivariums, running through the streets, walls of flame and smoke, crowds of people fleeing for their lives. You just have to read it for yourself.

But I'd like to give you this long selection from Ernie Pyle because in this column I think you can sense that he has achieved that transcendence that every writer dreams of, albeit it in horribly tragic circumstances. Truly, it reminds me of Homer. And I don't mean Homer Simpson. I mean the blind Greek guy.

"Some day when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges. And standing there, I want to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.

"For on that night this old, old city -- even though I must bite my tongue in shame for saying it -- was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

"They came just after dark, and somehow I could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night. Shortly after the sirens wailed I could hear the Germans grinding overhead.

"In my room, with its black curtains drawn across the windows, you could feel the shake from the guns. You could hear the boom, crump, crump, crump of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart. They were not far away.

"Half an hour after the firing started I gathered a couple of friends and went to a high, darkened balcony that gave us a view of one-third of the entire circle of London. As we stepped out onto the balcony a vast inner excitement came over all of us -- an excitement that had neither fear nor horror in it because it was too full of awe.

"You have all seen big fires, but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires -- scores of them, perhaps hundreds. There was something inspiring in the savagery of it.

"The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of the firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor, only to break out again later.

"About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee in a blind fury. The bombs did not make a constant overwhelming din as in those terrible days of last September. They were intermittent -- sometimes a few seconds apart, sometimes a minute or more. Their sound was sharp, nearby, and soft and muffled, far away. They were everywhere over London.

"Into the dark, shadowed spaces below us, as we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pinpoints of dazzling white, burning ferociously.

"These white pinpoints would go out one by one as the unseen heroes of the moment smothered them with sand. But also, as we watched, other pinpoints would burn on, and pretty soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white center. They had done their work -- another building was on fire.

"The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape -- so faintly at first that we weren't sure we saw it correctly -- the gigantic dome and spires of St. Paul's Cathedral. St. Paul's was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions -- growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield. The streets below us were semi-illuminated from the glow.

"Immediately above the fires the sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke all in pink. Up in that pink shrouding there were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light -- anti-aircraft shells bursting. After the flash you could hear the sound. Up there, too, the barrage balloons were standing out as clearly as if it were daytime, but now they were pink instead of silver. And now and then through a hole in that pink shroud there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star -- the old-fashioned kind that has always been there.

"Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows -- the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

"Later on I borrowed a tin hat and went out among the fires. That was exciting too, but the thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London on a holiday night -- London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pinpoints of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares, and the grind of vicious engines. And in yourself the excitement and anticipation and wonder in your soul that this could be happening at all.

"These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful scene I have ever known."
 
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
  Ike's Advice - Dien Bien Phu
I have a book that I would dearly love to give to my daughter Sarah, who is studying international affairs, because it contains so much wisdom, and I keep trying to finish it, but it's just one of those books you have to read a little bit at a time.

I remember reading the first chapter of "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevksy when I was about 14. Enraptured as I was, I had to put the book away. I couldn't read any more for three years. I guess there was some stuff I couldn't understand yet.

The book I'm talking about tonight is called "In Review: Pictures I've Kept" and it's by Dwight D. Eisenhower. On the dust jacket there is a picture of Ike in an overcoat, holding his hat, sitting on a stone wall in Gettysburg.

There is a picture in this book of Ike walking with John F. Kennedy at Camp David. JFK was asking Ike's advice during the Cuban missile crisis -- good move! But what's most historic about this picture -- aside from the fact that Ike was probably giving JFK some advice that kept us all from being blown to smithereens -- is that Ike is carrying a hat and JFK is not.

Ike was the last president to wear a hat and after that hats on men disappeared from American life.

But the book is more than a collection of photographs. It's got selections from all of his other books. As I read this book I can't help but think of all the people who died because some bonehead or boneheads failed to heed the advice that Ike put in this book.

Let's start with Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam's post-WWII struggle for independence from France. In 1951, Ike, not yet president, was commander of the newly constituted North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.

"NATO forces needed greater Frenchg participation," Ike writes, "but this was largely denied because of France's losses and costs in the Indochina war.

"These losses and costs to the French might be lessened, I believed, if allies could carry part of the load in defending Indochina. Such a development would depend, of course, upon a clear appreciation throughout the Free World that the war was in no sense an effort by the French to sustain their former domination of the area, but was in fact a clear case of freedom defending itself from Communist aggression.

"To bring about such an appreciation, there would have to be a definite and public pledge on the part of the French to accord independence and the right of self-determination as soon as military victory should be attained.

"I repeatedly urged upon successive French governments the wisdom of publishing to the Free World, and particularly to all Indochina, such an unequivocal commitment."

Simple, obvious advice from someone who knew what he was talking about. Wouldn't the French give this pledge, just to acknowledge that the opinion of the Free World was worth something, and at the same time end this costly, indeed ruinous struggle? Not! Apparently it was a matter of national honor.

Later the French occupied Dien Bien Phu. Ike wrote, "It was difficult then -- as it is now with the advantage of hindsight -- to understand exactly why the French decided to send 10,000 crack troops into this position, strong as it was, whose only means of supply was by air."

When a French diplomat explained to Ike that the French strategy would "draw them out where we can then win," he replied,

"The French know military history," Ike replied. "They are smart enough to know the outcome of becoming firmly emplaced and then besieged in an exposed position with poor means of supply and reinforcements."

Now clearly this statement is false. The French were not smart enough to know this, nowhere near smart enough. But, nevertheless you must admit, it contains a great deal of wisdom.

And before you get too smug about the stupidity of the French, you must consider the subsequent stupidity of our own government in pursuing policies that were still more ruinous in the same exact location. Think of all the people, Americans and Vietnamese, who would not have died if Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara had heeded Ike's advice:

"Willingness to fight for freedom, no matter where the battle may be, has always been a characteristic of our people," Ike wrote, "but the conditions then prevailing in Indochina were such as to make unilateral American intervention nothing short of sheer folly."
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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