Every Person is Waging a Great Battle: BookMarks Update, February, 2024

Read My Review

Friends:

When you open this email, Susan and I will be in London where we plan to spend the month of March visiting places we knew when we lived there in 1971 and traveling to Edinburgh, Somerset, and York to visit with friends and spend time exploring art galleries and museums. While in the UK, my reading will be British-centric, so keep an eye out next month for Shakespeare, Hardy, Bronte, Austen, Woolf, Sebald, and a few other old friends.

Here are the books I read in February:

The three books highlighted this month are superbly written, quite sobering, and disquieting. They remind me of a favorite saying: "Be kind. Every person is waging a great battle". That aphorism, often attributed in error to Plato, Philo, or Phaedo, was first written by a Scottish minister, Ian Maclaren in the 'British Weekly' in 1897. I was reminded of that saying as I read of the mental health crisis described by Jonathan Rosen, the seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction in the Middle East, and the personal essays chosen by Vivian Gornick for this year's 'Best Essays' volume.

Rosen was a childhood friend of Michael Laudor, a brilliant and ebullient young man who went from high school in New Rochelle to Yale, Bain Consulting, and finally Yale Law School. While in his 20's, he suffered a psychotic break and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. With medication and unstinting support from family, friends, and professors, he managed his mental illness well enough to work, publish, and ultimately secure million dollar contracts for a movie and book about his life story. The future looked bright, and then the bottom fell out. To avoid a spoiler alert, I'll stop there and just urge you to read this gripping and important book, not just to understand Laudor's situation but to grasp our society's disastrous failure to treat those who suffer in pain. Rosen's critique of our mental health system (The "tragedy of good intentions" in the title refers to the well-intentioned deinstitutionalization and closure of old style asylums followed by the failure to develop and fund community mental health centers and effective treatment options.) is well integrated into the main story line. This New York Times' 'Ten Best of 2023' book is a difficult but important book to read..

Reading 'Palestine 1936' in the context of today's war in Gaza was another painful but important engagement with a book. Kessler, a newspaper reporter not an historian, has written a readable and detailed (but not overly so) account of how Palestine became a British Mandate after the Ottoman Empire was dismembered in the wake of WWI; how Britain promised a Jewish Homeland in the Balfour Declaration while also promising the Arabs an independent land; and how nearly one hundred years later, those two peoples continue to clash in nearly endless violence. While opinions about Israel's conduct after October 7th might differ, everyone whether Zionist, progressive Jew, Palestinian, or just a citizen of the world, would benefit from a better understanding of how we arrived at the present disastrous situation. Kessler has provided a fine introduction to this understanding, and I highly recommend his book.

Finally, Vivian Gornick, an 88 year old African-American, feminist literary critic, has chosen 21 essays from the hundreds published in periodicals in 2023 in this, the 38th annual Best Essay volume. I've collected all the books in this series which began in 1986 with Elizabeth Hardwick as the guest editor and which have seen the elite of American letters in that role. Gornick chose essays because “they contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience….These are voices, real voices. The book you are holding is full of them.” There were essays by well-known writers like Sigrid Nunez, Edward Hoagland, and Kathryn Schulz who wrote about writing, aging, and the origin of Bambi, but the other essays were written by authors whose names I did not recognize and who recounted personal struggles with anorexia, alcohol, gender fluidity, addiction, prison, extreme poverty, homophobia, and chronic illness. Tough reading, but once again, one is left with the yearning for kindness.

The remaining books are a bit of this and bit of that. Paul Auster's 'Baumgartner' is a splendid novel with a baffling ending--well worth reading. If you're a fan of crime fiction and don't know Richard Stark, you should become acquainted with his recurrent character, Parker (we never do learn his first name). It's been fun to read a crime series (and Stark wrote 23 Parker books) where the main character is a bad guy. Stark is a pseudonym for Donald Westlake who won every honor in crime/mystery fiction because he wrote taut, interesting, and satisfying stories.

Helene Hanff's charming '84 Charing Cross Road' is a book which I re-read with pleasure every few years and which I buy whenever I spot one in a used bookstore. Hanff was a script reader and writer living on her own in 1940's New York when she saw an ad in the Saturday Review for Marks & Co, a London bookseller specializing in high quality used books. She wrote to them on October 5, 1949 requesting three books---Hazlitt's essays, a book by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the letters of Leigh Hunt. Frank Doel of Marks & Co wrote back to Hanff along with sending two of the volumes, and thus began a 20 year correspondence about books, food, travel, and life in post-WWII Britain. It's a lovely little book which I highly recommend. I only have three left on my shelves, so if you'd like one, act quickly.

Walter Benjamin was a literary critic and social commentator in Germany between the two wars. After fleeing Germany and settling in France, he once again fled the Nazis in 1940 dying at the Spanish border which had been closed to Jews the day before he arrived. For a time in the early 2000's, it was almost impossible to read a scholarly work on literature, art, or society which did not cite Benjamin. In her 2013 novel 'Artful', Ali Smith has a scene where her characters play 'Walter Benjamin bingo' at an academic conference, marking their grid every time a speaker mentions Benjamin's name. Benjamin's selected essays in 'Illuminations' are densely written, but worth reading, especially the one on 'Unpacking my Library' which is packed with insights about collecting. The introduction by Hannah Arendt is brilliant. In 'Walter Benjamin Reimagined' Frances Cannon provides a graphic treatment of his 'poetry, prose, aphorisms, and dreams', a more modern take on Benjamin's work. It's fascinating though a bit obtuse to read. The poetry of Jim Harrison (see below) and literary criticism (some of it very funny and often quite biting) from a Nobel Prize winning Polish poet round out the month's reading.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month features poems from three poets. Jim Harrison's 'Becoming' and 'Suzanne Wilson' are drawn from his book 'Saving Daylight' referenced above and worth reading in its entirety. Harrison, who died in 2016 at 79 years of age, was a hard-living, hard-writing man whose novellas, memoirs, and poems I have loved. Amanda Cohen's fabulous nugget of a poem was sent to me by my sister, the only other person in the world who could somewhat understand our Mother. Finally, I've included a poem by Charles Wright, a former Poet Laureate, Pulitzer and National Book Award winner who is still writing at 88. His poem about Walter Benjamin, one of the most fascinating men of letters of the last century is a fine complement to the Benjamin books cited above.

Since collecting books, arranging them on shelves and in piles, and even reading them, are such a central part of my life, I'm always drawn to quotations from writers about reading. Here are three of my favorites that touched a chord in me:

From Jess Walter, author of 'The Cold Millions' in response to Sunday New York Times Book Review By the Book's question about 'what books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? "Oh, pretty much all of them. Classics and best sellers, thrillers and books by writers' writers, poems and essays and books by friends and books that friends recommend. After 40 years of trying to catch up, I still live in a state of behind-on-my-homework anxiety, which is maybe natural for the autodidact, the fear that at any moment someone might ask me about Proust and I will say how much I enjoyed 'The Shipping News'.

And this one from Mildred Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic who when asked by By the Book "what books are on your night stand?" replied in part: "There's also a pile of magazines and newspapers. At night I choose which to read by asking myself: Can you risk having this in your dreams?"

And finally, from a NYT book review of Harold Blooms' posthumously published 'The Bright Book of Life' by a favorite editor/writer/critic, the late Robert Gottlieb: "If you suffer from what Bloom calls the 'rage for reading and rereading', you're on a never-pausing treadmill---no sooner have you consumed, yet again, "War and Peace" and "Middlemarch" and "The Charterhouse of Parma" and all of Jane Austen, but it's time to return to them once more: to have one final go before (as the ever morbid Bloom reminds us) it's too late."

Good reading and good travelling!