A Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

Source of book: Borrowed from my brother

 

From time to time, my brother and I share books. He has a knack for coming up with unusual books that I would not have discovered, but that turn out to be excellent. A case in point is Noodling for Flatheads. 

When I first came to Kern County in my teens, I was not particularly familiar with the Basques. If you haven’t lived in a place with Basque heritage, you may not know of them either. 

 

Kern County and Reno may not seem that similar, but one thing they do have is a history of Basque immigrants settling there and herding sheep. This is why you can eat Basque food in both places. Bakersfield also has a lot of Basque surnames, including the late judge, Louis Etcheverry, who presided over the longest bench trial I ever did. (See below)

 

I have also eaten Basque food many times, and it is delicious and unique. That was my first taste of pickled tongue. The cuisine has elements of both French and Spanish, but also its own unique flavors. If you can’t come here and try the food yourself, you can at least make the oxtails from Woolgrowers - I cook it pretty often, and it is so good. 

 

The history of nations is often messy, and in the case of Spain and France, this is very much the case. The boundary is drawn at the divide of the Pyrenees mountains, but this choice divided the homeland of the Basques between France and Spain. This homeland is in the mountains and foothills, on the west side. The east side also has unique cultures, with the additional culture of Catalonia - an area which includes Barcelona. Readers of Patrick O’Brian’s novels will recognize Catalonia as the homeland of Stephen Maturin. 

 

The Basques, though, are not merely a different culture from France and Spain. They are a group which is unique in Europe. Their language, Euskara, is not related to any other known language. It is an outlier, a remnant from a time before the root language of everything from Latin to Swedish swept across Europe. Some of the features of the language indicate that it dates back to the stone age. In that sense, the Basques are the most indigenous group in Europe, the most original inhabitants. 

 

Despite this, the Basques have never really had a country of their own. Going back to Roman times, the loosely tribal groups of Europe were mostly conquered by the empire. This included the Basques, but, as in subsequent conquests, they retained their language, culture, and a degree of self-governance. 

 

The book’s title is a bit tongue in cheek. The book is about the history of the Basques, mostly in Spain, but also on the French side. While it mentions the emigration of Basques to the US, the book has nothing about that history. 

 

The period covered is from the Roman era, when written records were kept, through the present. There is a brief mention of the pre-Roman era, but nothing of anthropology of the language or ethnic group before that. Most of the book recounts the era between the formation of Spain as a nation through the present. 

 

So, consider the book a history of the Basque people in their homeland for the last 2100 years or so. 

 

The history in this book is difficult to summarize, so I will not attempt it. The book is worth reading if you wish to learn the history. 

 

I did want to feature a few quotes and tidbits, however. The chapters are headed with quotes either from Basque writers, or about the Basques. The first one, from The Decameron, is ludicrous. 

 

“Nomansland, the territory of the Basques, is in a region called Cornucopia, where the vines are tied up with sausages. And in those parts there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese on whose slopes there were people who spent their whole time making macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then cast it to the four winds, and the faster you could pick it up, the more you got of it.” 

 

Throughout the history of the Basques, one of their demands of the various conquering nations was that they keep their traditional laws. These pop up in the book periodically, and they are interesting. Some seem pretty outdated, but there are a few that might be considered progressive. 

 

One of these that is fascinating is that, unlike the rest of Europe, real estate is inherited through the female line, not the male. The reason given for this is that women farm the land, while men went off to war. 

 

Once the laws were put in writing after centuries of being an oral tradition, the first article affirmed that the intent of the laws was to guarantee justice to the poor as well as the rich. 

 

Basque religion retains elements of the pre-Christian beliefs. (Actually, all religion is syncretistic, but we just pretend it isn’t…) One of these is a pre-Christian version of Santa. Or, one might say, Bad Santa. Olentzaro slides down the chimney on Christmas Eve, but is there to harm people. So, always keep the fire burning bright on Christmas Eve. 

 

Another factoid in this book is one that has bothered me since I was a child. We were taught that Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the globe. This is bullshit. Magellan did not make it around the globe. He picked a stupid fight partway around, and got stabbed in the neck. 

 

Guess who did circumnavigate the globe? That would be Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who took over command after Magellan’s death. Elcano was a Basque, who, like many Basques, were the most experienced sailors in Europe. 

 

There is some evidence that the Basques may have visited North America at the same times as the Vikings, by the way. The Basques invented whaling, years before whales were hunted for oil, not food. From Vasco de Gama (“Vasco” is the Spanish word for a Basque man) to, well, every Spanish exploration of that age, you will find Basque sailors everywhere. 

 

Another person who was Basque, but not known for it was Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Now you know. 

 

There are fascinating historical asides throughout the book. One of these is about the burning of witches. One forgets that history isn’t a linear progression, but more a cycle. Charlemagne outlawed the execution of witches in 787. But it came back into vogue 800 years later. This comes up because rural Basque women were targeted by Pierre de Lancre, who was Basque himself, but changed his name to hide the fact and seems to have been motivated by a hatred of everything Basque. 

 

On the French side, as often happens with witch hunts, De Lancre’s terror seemed unstoppable until someone had the courage to denounce it, and then it quickly disintegrated. 

 

This is something to keep in mind in our own times, with our current witch hunt targeting transgender people. We need to keep denouncing this for what it is, and stand against witch hunts of all kinds.

 

There is another fun connection drawn in this book. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, mentions Spain as a negative example. By seeing the wealth of a nation as consisting of gold, Spain was actually impoverishing itself. What Smith failed to notice, however, was that at the same time, the Basques were gaining wealth through their trade to and from Latin America. This is a lesson that Trump has yet to learn. 

 

Later in the book, the author notes that “without the Basque and Catalan provinces, the two most productive regions, Spain would become an impoverished third-world nation.” 

 

The Basques suffered a good deal under Franco, who tried to outlaw the Basque language and culture. The story of Basque Nationalist leader Jose Antonio Aguirre is interesting, and offers some parallels to our own time. 

 

Aguirre didn’t live to see the end of Franco’s reign, and spent the last 20 plus years of his life in exile in France. Franco’s fascist regime sold itself as being pro-Catholic. That is, pro-Christian. This is the same argument MAGA fascism uses to sell itself to gullible religious people today. 

 

In contrast, Aguirre was a devout Catholic who rejected the premise of fascism. 

 

“I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”

 

Damn. I couldn’t have put it better myself. 

 

During the Franco regime, the resistance included a more violent group, the ETA. The group assassinated one of Franco’s deputies, Carrero Blanco, who was intended to be Franco’s successor. While I am not in favor of violence, including political violence, I did find the response of many Spaniards to the incident to be fascinating. 

 

The method of killing was a bomb hidden under the pavement where Blanco parked. It blew him and the car several stories high. The joke that immediately began circulating was that Blanco had become the first Spanish astronaut. 

 

The other line, which is pretty darn good, translates to “One more pothole, one less asshole.” 

 

Not all of the resistance was violent, however. Most was peaceful. Not that that stopped Franco from arresting dissidents over and over. In one case, Telesforo de Monzon, this reached a ridiculous pinnacle. 

 

He managed to be arrested one last time, when his funeral procession from St. Jean de Luz was briefly stopped by Spanish police on its way to the family home in Vergara. 

 

Another ETA member who is still around, living in Cuba, is Joseba Sarrionaindia, a novelist who writes in Euskara. One of his quotes starts a chapter, and I thought it was good. 

 

“In people’s lives and in social history there is always a first mistake, a little mistake, which happens almost imperceptibly, a momentary slip-up, but this first mistake creates others, and these mistakes follow each other; accumulating little by little, one on top of another. Eventually, this creates a growing and fateful error.” 

 

It is easy to think of examples in our society. One little mistake was failing to prosecute and convict Richard Nixon. In a very real way, Trump is the result of the compounding mistakes since. One could think of many others. 

 

I wonder as well what the first little mistake was for my parents, the little slip-up that snowballed into an increasing embrace of authoritarian parenting, leading to Gothard’s cult, and eventually the destruction of our family relationships. What was that first step? 

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the well-known things which are Basque, but that people do not always realize are Basque. 

 

Picasso’s famous anti-war painting, Guernica, is a memorial to the bombing massacre inflicted on the Basque city of Guernica (Spelled Gernika in Euskara) by German and Italian fascist troops in 1937. This incident of the wanton slaughter of civilians in what was officially peacetime is not as well known as it should be.  

 

Bilbao is the largest city in Basque country, and it is the site of one of the most iconic buildings ever created: the Guggenheim. Frank Gehry’s bold and swooping design is like nothing else. Or at least it was until Gehry used much of the same design language to create Disney Hall in Los Angeles. 

 

I’ll end with one of the final observations by the author. Basque country transcends national borders. For the Basques, culture and language are more important than arbitrary lines. This is one way that the European Union has improved things for many border-straddling groups. With movement largely free, Basque Country can be reunited in a very real sense. 

 

The author notes that this arbitrary border drawing is a problem around the world. (Jonathan Kwitny made the same point in a very different book.) 

 

When Europeans decolonized Africa, they left it with unnatural borders, lines that did not take into account cultures. This is often stated as the central problem of modern Africa. But they did the same in Europe. The Pyrenees may look like a natural border, but the same people live on both sides. 

 

The author notes that the trend in Europe today is away from seeing nations as entirely separate. Europe is bound together economically, with free movement of citizens. Instead, people are seeing nationhood more as culture and identity within larger structures. 

 

Ironically, this is what the Basques have sought this arrangement for themselves for the past 1800 years. Maybe they were on to something. 

 

This book is definitely an interesting one, filled with unfamiliar history (to an American at least), colorful people, and the spirit of a people who are just a bit different. 

 

***

 

My trial: 

 

This was a conservatorship case that required medical testimony. I ended up subpoenaing two doctors. One was great, and very helpful. The other one, not so much. After starting off bragging about his memory, he couldn’t remember jack shit. 

 

After the testimony concluded, Judge Etcheverry called for a brief sidebar in his office. He told me and opposing counsel, “If I thought he had a sense of humor, I would have said, ‘I find the witness’ memory to be merely average.’” 

 

Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny

Source of book: Borrowed from the Library

 

Where to start with this post? I suppose I could start by saying that this book is a good companion to two books I read previously, covering some of the same ground, but with its own additional information. Both A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin and Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer are about the problems created by intervention in foreign governments by the United States (and the United Kingdom in the first.) 

 

While both of those books were well researched, thoroughly supported by evidence, and well written; Endless Enemies adds an additional layer of knowledge. Jonathan Kwitny was one of the most badass investigative journalists of the 20th Century, and this book is a clinic in how to do journalism. 

 

Throughout the book, as Kwitny recounts events and documents and conversations, he explains exactly how he got the information. In a typical explanation, he will name the reporter who first published the information, then he will contact the actual people involved, and either get confirmation of the fact, or a refusal to answer questions. In an impressive number of cases, Kwitny himself was on the ground in the foreign country and has personal knowledge of things. There are also a lot of documents involved - and this was before email, so stuff on paper. 

 

The pattern is clear: get the information, verify the information. 

 

Also important is that Kwitny, unlike so much media these days, wasn’t content to just publish what officials told him. He is clear in this book that officials lie. It is what they are paid to do. You cannot take their word, but have to actually investigate and then report the truth. (Kwitny notes that even in his time, this was a problem for most of the mainstream media, all too willing to parrot the talking points from the US government.) 

 

Another thing to understand about Kwitny is that he did a lot of his work for the Wall Street Journal, which he considered the most honest of the major media during the 1970s and 80s. He states in the book that he was not pressured to conform to a narrative in his reporting. I’m doubtful that is still the case. 

 

As of the time this book was published, Kwitny would likely have been considered a right-leaning writer. He was definitely not in favor of Communism, or indeed in any planned economy. The book is unashamedly in favor of free enterprise, and indeed capitalism itself. Although with caveats. Kwitny, unlike today’s right wingers, understood that unregulated capitalism is just monopoly by another name. Much of this book describes the way that big business co-opts government (especially our own) to gain monopoly power over markets, thus suppressing free markets. 

 

The free market is demonstrably the most bountiful economic system on earth. And it has become the odd role of the United States of America to deny that system to hundreds of millions of people the world wide. 

 

These days, of course, because Kwitny was pro-democracy, believed capitalists needed regulation, opposed foreign meddling, and refuses in the book to blame poverty on brown skinned people, he would be considered a commie pinko by today’s American right wing. How times have changed. 

 

The book’s subtitle gives a good indication of what the book is about. 

 

How America’s worldwide interventions destroy democracy and free enterprise and defeat our own best interests.

 

Such a radical idea, right? The thing is, he makes a strong - indeed incontrovertible - case that our interventions have in fact been against democracy in the third world, have suppressed rather than encouraged free enterprise, and have ultimately gone against the best interests of our nation and its tax payers. 

 

By installing and supporting dictators, forcing countries to accept dominance by our giant corporations, and doing this at incredible expense to taxpayers, our government has served the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else, here and abroad. 

 

The book focuses on four specific parts of the world where we have meddled in different ways. In this, the book is a bit different than Overthrow, which specifically looks at instances where the US overthrew existing governments. There is overlap, of course, but we have also intervened in other ways, and those are also subjects of this book. 

 

The book begins its tour with Africa, looks at the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. 

 

It starts, however, with a look at the common thread: the way loans to the third world intentionally keep countries impoverished while ensuring that Western corporations have access to natural resources. 

 

I want to quote this bit about Lebanon, which the US has pretty well fucked since the 1950s. 

 

The newspapers said the marines were put there to put an end to twenty-five years of bloody civil war, so that Lebanon could “get back on its feet” and start a democracy. Nobody seemed to remember that Lebanon’s twenty-five years of civil war began when the CIA sabotaged a democracy that was already in place. 

 

Kwitny points out that the US has a lot of good things about it - freedom of speech, economic freedoms, a willingness to stand up to Hitler. But unfortunately, our government has failed us in foreign policy since the end of World War Two.

 

Americans have an interest in foreign affairs. They want and deserve security, peace, and prosperous trade. But these goals elude them. Their government’s foreign policy has left them in constant peril of war with a seemingly endless list of enemies. 

 

We have fought a seemingly endless series of wars against countries that never wanted to fight us, all in the name of an ideological war against “Communism,” which, as Kwitny points out, isn’t even the right category for an undeveloped economy. In most of these cases, “communism” became the name for any opposition party to US corporate interests, even if the term wouldn’t actually apply. 

 

This has led to negative consequences for the US, which we keep experiencing because we refuse to change our actions. 

 

But a refusal to see such events [hostages and political murders] in their context leaves the United States perpetually unprepared for crises abroad, when these crises are the natural consequence not only of events long visible, but often, in part, of the U.S.’s own actions.

 

I think Kwitny’s analysis of the mistakes we keep making in Africa is spot on. It also happens to match what African writers themselves have said. By clinging to our Cold War binary of “capitalism versus communism,” we fail to actually understand the real issues abroad. In speaking of the Congo (many of the names were different in the 1980s), he has this to say: 

 

The first is provincialism. Accustomed to the context of big-power diplomacy, no one in the foreign policy-making chain of command could see the Congo for what it really was: a couple of hundred mini-nations, whose people were consumed with the daily chore of warding off hunger. These nations had long been occupied against their will by white people and occasionally forced to do slave labor for whites. Suddenly, under rules laid down by whites, they were proclaimed to be one “country,” with common leadership. 

 

When governments changed, most of the country didn’t even know it, because it had no effect on their lives. 

 

Back in the hinterland, where Americans didn’t go because the roads were too bad, millions of farmers hoed on, little concerned. Chaos in government is recognizable only to those who are used to getting some benefit from government. Very few Congolese fit that description. 

 

The colonial powers had divided up Africa for their own convenience, drawing lines across ethnic lines, in ways that made sense for their exploitation of resources, but would never have become borders naturally. It should be no surprise that new countries that have no common language, religion, or ethnicity might be…unstable. Just saying. 

 

In fact, the issue of “communism” has rarely ever even been a driving force in these conflicts. Economic ideology is just not the biggest factor in conflict, despite the claims by the US government.

 

But even more important historically was the shock to those who survived - the realization that tribal hatred was stronger than anyone’s philosophy. The real problems of Africa were being written in blood over the platitudes and ideological cant that people had come to believe. 

 

The US made this worse, not better, by propping up brutal dictators, overthrowing governments, and fighting against democracy. 

 

It is on the whole a pretty sorry record, though not exactly unpredictable, considering that native and colonial monarchies dominated previous African history. The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. It’s a sad situation when people are left to learn their “democracy” from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

 

The CIA doesn’t come off well at all in this book, and it deserves all the censure it receives. 

 

The obvious question raised by all of this is what the best interest of the United States really is: to perpetually try to corrupt as many overseas governments as we can so that when a military crisis arises we may have some crook on the scene in our pocket? Or to try to encourage, by example and reward, a world of clean governments that are strong through their own popularity - governments that allow their peoples’ free-market impulses to interact productively with our own peoples’ free-market impulses, and which for all these reasons are unlikely to become involved in a military crisis at all? 

 

But corrupt governments allow giant corporations to extract profits. And also, everything is about the Cold War, and that war was built on lies. 

 

There is also a dangerous hypocrisy at work. Unlike the great imperial powers of the past, today’s great powers mostly shun nationalistic rhetoric. They baldly deny that they are building empire. One hears little talk of the ethnic superiority claimed by other conquering peoples, like Rome’s, or Germany’s, or England’s. Usually, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. even deny that they are acting to protect themselves from each other. Almost in unison, they proclaim an ideological motivation - and justification - for what they do. They argue that by enabling the rule abroad of those who proclaim an ideology similar to theirs, they are performing a selfless favor for other countries. 

 

But it really has always been about Empire. 

 

In our handling of Zaire, great effort was made to suppress both democracy and free enterprise - in fact, to suppress almost everything we say we believe in. 

 

And we haven’t even benefitted anyone economically. Even the corporations find their access to be in jeopardy due to political unrest. 

 

So tenuous is our indirect line, through Mobutu Sese Seko, to Zaire’s mineral wealth that it could snap at any time. Similar situations confront us around the globe. We have sought to accomplish so much that is beyond our ability to accomplish, that we have threatened our ability to accomplish the one thing we need to accomplish. Peaceful commerce is so natural, so universally beneficial, that real effort is required to sabotage it. Inadvertently, we have applied that effort.

 

We also have ended up undermining ourselves in the Cold War. Interestingly, the U.S.S.R. also did so - both powers pretty well screwed themselves. 

 

The excuse for intervention, of course, is the notion that if we don’t fight, Moscow will win by default. Yet as one travels the globe, from Indochina to Cuba to Angola, one finds that the Third World countries where the Soviets are alleged to hold the strongest influence are precisely those countries where we have fought. Meanwhile, in countries that weren’t militarily threatened by the United States, where Soviet influence had a chance to flunk on its own merits, it has. 

 

One of the most depressing things in this book was the well-documented interconnection of business and government. It was (and probably still is, even more so in the Trump Era) an incestuous circle jerk of lawyers, diplomats, and politicians. Two of the big players were Allen and John Foster Dulles, who worked for the big oil companies through their law firm, then went into politics, where, predictably, they used their influence to have the CIA and the military do the work of Big Oil. 

 

In other words, the CIA director and the secretary of state at the time of the Mossadegh coup were, in private life, well-paid lawyers for the major oil companies.

 

Yes, it was that bad. And that is why we ended democracy in Iran.

 

We are left with no explanation for the coup except for one that might at first glance be rejected as a piece of Socialist Workers’ party campaign rhetoric: a retrieval of the rights of two Rockefeller-controlled oil companies, whose lawyers were running the CIA and the State Department, to monopolize Iranian oil in U.S. markets and thereby fix gasoline prices for the American consumer. Can it be? If so, adding insult to injury, the same consumer was also being dunned for tax money to hire and outfit the U.S. agents who were carrying out the coup.

 

These wars - culminating in Vietnam, another war based on lies and morally indefensible - have led us to the distrust of the American government we see today. 

 

The loss of a U.S. citizen’s ability to believe his own government officials on such matters is one of the saddest results of the whole anti-communist crusade. In some ways, it is sadder than the loss of life the crusade has cost, because officials who constantly lie for what they see as the greater good create more loss of life, through every war and covert action the country is sucked into. 

 

There are multiple chapters on Cuba, which has to be one of America’s greatest own goals of all time. And we still refuse to change policy, even though Castro is long dead. 

 

Starting with our United Fruit wars, we made it clear that we didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people of Latin America - we just wanted to exploit their land for profit. The rise of Castro was enabled by this. 

 

The U.S. had delivered Castro a power he never could have bought - a legitimacy he could have won no other way. 

 

For that matter, why haven’t we normalized diplomacy with Cuba? Why do we not trade with them? We do with China, after all. And brutal places like Saudi Arabia as well. 

 

The answer is something I discovered over a decade ago. The people and companies who were rich in pre-revolutionary Cuba expect to be reimbursed for their losses. This expectation is fuelled by companies like United Fruit, who dream of returning to the good old days, when they owned most of Cuba’s land. 

 

To this day, United Brands is part of a business lobby opposing improved relations with Cuba until Cuba pays the claims of 979 U.S. companies whose property was seized by the Cuban government. 

 

Kwitny spent a good bit of time in Cuba, and not in the tourist areas. He recounts the interviews he did there (and a number are in the book) and his observations of the country. 

 

The fact is that Cuba is among the most functional countries in Latin America. Its infant mortality rate is like the first world - and better than it is in the US. Ditto for life expectancy, education, medical care, and so on. Cubans live better than other third world citizens - Kwitny describes this through his interviews with a wide range of people, from those in menial jobs to students to business owners.  

 

And all this despite the US embargo. 

 

One of the interesting questions raised by this chapter is what constitutes happiness? By some measures, Cubans are happier than Americans. They have less money, but they have more security - guaranteed jobs, food, healthcare, and education. Even the issue of money is tricky - many wealthy nations, the US included, concentrate that wealth at the top, and the poorest of the poor here are left to live on the streets. Perhaps overall well-being is, as one Cuban interviewed said, “more important than money.”

 

While Kwitny is no fan of communism, and does note the authoritarian aspects, he also notes that this is actually far less invasive than the thugs of the dictators running many countries - dictators the US put there and maintains. He also notes that the Soviets subsidized the Cuban economy, but the amount in play very likely was less than tourism and trade would have brought in. 

 

The sad thing is, Cuba’s most natural trade partner would be the US, and yet we refuse to take the action that would lead to closer relations (and a reduction in the Soviet/Russian threat.) Why will we not do this?

 

For the past quarter century, the United States has fretted and fumed, and applied great resources trying to change conditions in Latin America. Yet the condition the US has concentrated on changing has not been bloodshed, poverty, illiteracy, or disease. The US effort has been directed toward changing the government of Cuba, where all these evils exist less than almost anywhere else in Latin America. And the US has punished any nation that tried, even slightly, to emulate Cuba. 

 

In discussing countries like Nicaragua, Kwitny notes that their long-term interests don’t lie on the other side of the world. The problem is that America continues to stifle popular government, democracy, and free markets in these countries, driving them to seek help elsewhere.

 

Kwitny talks a lot about the central mistake of the Cold War: deciding that Communism was somehow something new and uniquely evil, totally different from other dictatorships. Thus, a civil war wasn’t just a civil war, it was an invasion of this new evil. Rather than having faith that the US system was superior and that people would therefore choose it, we decided to devote our resources to stamping out this idea, as if one could even do that. (And also, isn’t stamping out ideas the sort of thing authoritarian systems like…Communism are known for? Just saying. 

 

When communism became a scapegoat, however, it was no longer an evil among evils. It was a unique evil - so insidious that it could override all cross-cultural barriers and all known norms of human behavior. Thus the Chinese revolution could never be seen as an ordinary civil war, the coming of yet another dynasty to China. One side called itself communist. That side must, by our perception, consist of brainwashed hordes, manipulated by a handful of satanic agents. It was inconceivable that they were rational human beings pursuing what looked to them, rightly or wrongly, to be the most advantageous course. 

 

Related to this is the fact that the colonial powers didn’t actually export free markets. They exported a system where they got to exploit the native peoples and their resources. This next passage is from a discussion of Indonesia. 

 

But, like so many postcolonial leaders, Sukarno had fallen into the trap of judging the capitalist economic system by the way the system worked in the colonies. Just as the U.S. today defends monopolistic, non-free market economies, the European colonial countries generally did not export a free market system as an example to their foreign wards. Rather, they sent abroad a form of feudalism. 

Thus, to Sukarno, capitalism was an economic system under which the Dutch owned everything. This system worked fine in Holland, where everybody was Dutch, but in Indonesia it seemed grossly unfair. So Sukarno adopted socialism. 

 

The chapter on China is fascinating. It is very out of date - a LOT has changed there in 40 years to put it mildly. What is interesting is that some of what Kwitny expected did in fact happen. 

 

In many ways, China’s history is a cycle of openings and closings to the outside. There is always the lure of material advances, followed by the threat of internal disruption, and then the clampdown. How do you let in things and keep out thoughts? The emperors never learned. The current government is searching for a way to admit technological ideas while filtering out other ideas.

 

With the opening of China to trade, a lot of Western ideas did in fact enter. China hasn’t embraced an open society, though - it remains authoritarian. But, interestingly, it has become far more capitalist than it was. 

 

In fact, the best description of China’s economy these days is “authoritarian capitalism.” There is still government involvement, and single party rule. But there is sure a lot of free enterprise taking place - and China is experiencing many of the nasty side effects of capitalism: billionaires, soaring inequality, unaffordable housing, urbanization. 

 

As China becomes the world’s premier power, a process being accelerated by the Trump administration’s dismantling of American power, it will be interesting to see if it follows the US and USSR in blundering in foreign policy. 

 

Kwitny is no fan of the international arms trade. He assigns equal responsibility to the US and USSR for making the world a more unsafe place through the selling of weapons, usually with little if any accountability for how they are used. (See: Israel right now. But there are a myriad of examples past and present.) This trade is a significant factor in keeping brutal dictators in power, and spreading suffering across the globe. 

 

The book also describes the sordid history of using mobsters at home and abroad in foreign policy. Like that time “Lucky” Luciano was freed from prison as a reward for using the mob to invade Sicily during World War Two. This hasn’t been a good long term strategy for the US, as it has associated us with the worst sorts of people and organizations. 

 

I also want to note another line, where Kwitny really nails it. 

 

Considering the low wages that Gulf & Western gets by with, the food aid could be seen as a U.S. taxpayer subsidy to the company, not to the people of the Dominican Republic. 

 

This applies at home as well. All those social programs right wingers keep winging about - Medicaid, food stamps, other subsidies - aren’t really about subsidizing the poor. They are about subsidizing the corporations that refuse to pay a living wage. We can have the discussion about whether those subsidies are beneficial to society, but we need to stop blaming the working poor for them. 

 

The last chapter is Kwitny’s argument that the US is, through its foreign policy, not only betraying the values we claim to hold, but also denying the benefits of a good society to the third world. In his view, history itself since World War Two has amply demonstrated which ideas lead to good results. 

 

In the decades since then, the Third World itself has offered many equally stunning examples of similar countries that chose different roads. In every case, the more market-oriented and the more pluralistic the road chosen, the more successful the country has been in meeting the needs of its people. 

 

Kwitny isn’t wrong. Free markets outperform planned economies. Pluralism brings opportunities to everyone and attracts the best from everywhere. 

 

This doesn’t mean that Kwitny was a libertarian, though. Free markets, like any public good, need to be protected from those who would prey on them. 

 

The issue is not simply public versus private. The productive economies of Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore have benefitted from considerable government participation. On Taiwan, especially, the government intervened to make sure that much of the economy’s profit was spread to the poorest parts of the countryside via large public works - hydroelectric projects and good schools, for example. This intervention helped keep production high, by maintaining morale among farmers who might not otherwise have participated in the industrial boom. 

 

If that sounds a lot like the New Deal, or what President Biden was attempting to do during his term, you would be right. Kwitny goes on:

 

Government under Marxist socialism is obviously very different. The problem with these radical governments is that instead of attacking poverty, they invariably end up attacking only wealth. Some government intervention is generally necessary in order to attack poverty, especially after decades or centuries of feudal accumulations of wealth. Monopolies must be restrained and competition encouraged. Industrious individuals need access to land or other means of production to show what they can turn out. Marxism, though, has almost invariably brought about the vengeful destruction of productive power, not the thoughtful redistribution of it. 

 

I thoroughly agree with Kwitny here. The goal has to be giving everyone access to the resources - the means of production - rather than letting it accumulate with a few wealthy individuals or families. But simply destroying in vengeance impoverishes everyone. Thoughtful redistribution. 

 

Of course, these days, Kwitny would be considered a flaming pinko for saying so. Which is ironic considering how strongly anti-Marxist he was. 

 

There is only one reason why a country would want to adopt Marxist-socialism today. Unfortunately, it is often a valid reason. Marxism-socialism is often the only way a country can avoid American imperialism. Joining the Soviet arms network is often the only way to have a national government that is independent from CIA manipulation, and that stands a chance of bargaining at arm’s length with multinational corporations. 

 

And therein lies so many of our problems. Ditto for the Middle East, where radical Islam is perceived as the only option to push back against CIA manipulation and corporate plundering. 

 

I also loved Kwitny’s analysis of what really made America great. (Which are the very things Trump and his goons and ghouls are working to destroy.)

 

We misunderstand our own message to the world. We misunderstand the source of our strength, our prosperity, and our freedom. The distinction between private and state enterprises is not what is fundamental to American achievement. Our achievement is based on a division of power. 

We divide power throughout our society. The powers of government are divided among federal, state, and local units. At each level, power is divided among the executive, the legislature, and courts. Even so, government doesn’t play nearly so great a role in the U.S. as we encourage it to play overseas. Most decisions are barred to government. Many decisions are reserved to each individual to make for himself. Others are relegated to professionally competent authorities: within broad social guidelines that are politically ordained, doctors guide the day-to-day functioning of their own profession, as do accountants, plumbers, English literature professors, and (there’s a hair in every pudding) lawyers. 

 

I’ll forgive the slur against my profession due to the general truth of the claim about professionals.

 

In the business field, what has distinguished American society has been not only its Rockefellers, but its ability to restrain its Rockefellers, and to preserve open competition. What has distinguished us is not only our Standard Oils, but our ability to break up our Standard Oils. Monopolistic controls have been allowed to persist mostly in foreign dealings, through influence over the State Department, not the Justice Department.

The open chance for small businesses to grow, for the eccentric with a gift to become an entrepreneur, for the individual farmer to figure out a better way of planting or marketing, has been a lifeblood of our system. Equally so has been the power of consumers, individually or banded voluntarily together, to contain the excesses of large and small businesses. 

 

I might recommend a couple of excellent books for more in this line: American Amnesia by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson for the role government has played in creating American greatness; and American Capitalism by John Kenneth Galbraith for the concept of "countervailing power” as a restraint on capitalist exploitation.  

 

I’ll end with what I think is a great summary of how Cold War thinking has poisoned our foreign policy and even far too much of our domestic politics. 

 

By viewing the world as a chessboard, on which all the pieces are either black or white, either our friend or the Soviets’, our leaders are ignoring the principles of which genuine friendships, and partnerships, are made. Only out of such principles can come true national security. 

 

I must admit that this book did make me a bit nostalgic for the days of my youth, when the American right, for all its flaws, still contained thoughtful and nuanced ideas and thinkers. As I noted at the beginning, Kwitny wasn’t considered a leftist when this book was written. His central commitment was to the truth, however, not partisan politics. His commitment was to human thriving and human decency, not political loyalty. And these days, that makes one a leftist. 

 

This book was not “enjoyable” - it was depressing and infuriating in so many ways. But it also stands as a monument to true investigative journalism, and an inspiration to those of us who truly believe in a better world. 

Grendel by John Gardner

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was recommended to me by an online friend who is a fellow string player, poetry lover, and philosophical thinker. It was a great recommendation. 

 

Many of us of a certain generation read Beowulf in high school. It is pretty much the OG English literature, and a worthy classic. Since it was written in Old English, which barely resembles its modern child, most of us have to read it in translation. I recommend the Seamus Heaney one as particularly delightful. Tolkien also translated it, and I hear that is good. (Definitely avoid the plagiarized retelling by white nationalist and generally terrible person Doug Wilson.) 

 

Beowulf is an ancient story, and feels even older at times. It conjures up early iron age culture, and the kind of “boozing and fighting” ethos that is a lot more fun in a story than in real life. As an example of both the “monomyth” and the “overcoming the monster” tale, it contains so many iconic elements of stories to come. Among other elements, it has the “rule of three” - the three different monsters the hero must overcome. 

 

The first of the monsters is Grendel, and he is, well, a very interesting monster. On the one hand, he is a prototypical non-human horror show, ugly and stupid and violent. We all know the type, present in pretty much every horror story since the dawn of time. Considering that for much of human history, the wild was full of unknown and hungry creatures, it is no surprise that we can conjure up unhuman horrors to personify our fears. 

 

On the other, however, at some point, the Beowulf story had an anachronistic Christian gloss put on it. (It is disputed whether the writer tried to append this to an older, pre-Christian story, or if a later editor changed a few things.) In any case, while the story is set in Denmark before Christianity came on the scene, it chooses to ascribe Grendel’s history to a story in Genesis. To wit, Cain gave birth to his own race of monsters, of which Grendel and his mother are the last. (You can decide for yourself if this makes any theological sense in light of, say, the Flood…)

 

Thus, in a very real way, Grendel is the most fascinating character in the story. Who is he? What motivates him? He isn’t just a projection of human fear, but a potential story himself. 

 

This is what John Gardner sets out to do in this book. Tell the story of the first third of Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel himself. 

 

The other thing Gardner did, was to take Sartre’s existentialism and build a character out of it. Because Grendel’s thoughts and motivations are drawn directly from Sartre - in some cases, close to word-for-word.

 

The third monster, the Dragon (who is essentially a personification of Death in the original) makes an appearance in the book, in a rather fascinating chapter, where he encourages Grendel to embrace nihilism, and devote his life to collecting treasure. 

 

If this sounds academic and dry, it isn’t.

 

Rather, this book is poetry in prose. Beautiful writing, poetic language and even rhythm - and a bit of actual poetry in passages too. As dark and existential as the book is, it was also an absolute joy to read. 

 

Along the way, Gardner challenges all of the foundational myths of Western culture, from our tribalism and cultural chauvinism to our self-justification for enslavement and colonization. Because Grendel is an outsider, he is able to see through all the lies and flowery poetry to see the raw use and abuse of power by the most heartless and violent of men. (And it is men…) 

 

I wasn’t familiar with Gardner before this, but he turns out to have been an interesting character in his own right. While generally respected as a writer, he greatly damaged his reputation with a book of literary criticism, On Moral Fiction, in which he said some really harsh things about living authors - including greats like John Updike. This was driven in large part by his view that literature needed to moralize, not just portray. 

 

Unsurprisingly, the literary establishment wasn’t too happy about this, and pretty much ostracized Gardner. I suspect Gardner may have been a bit too full of his own ideas to understand and credit competing ones. It is also a bit ironic to me that Grendel itself doesn’t have a clear moral, and in fact encourages one to root for senseless violence. 

 

By the way, that is not a criticism of the book. I think Gardner’s approach is excellent, and makes one think. But I do think he perhaps was a bit sanctimonious about how other authors wrote. 

 

Gardner’s personal life was a bit tumultuous as well, with two failed marriages. He died in a motorcycle crash at the far too young age of 49. 

 

That will serve as an introduction to the book. I did want to highlight my favorite passages, most of which I chose because of the deliciously descriptive and evocative writing. Throughout, the image of a cold, meaningless world, inhabited by human monsters killing each other for useless metal, is brilliantly brought to life. 

 

Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king’s grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist. 

 

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. 

 

The whole description of humankind is strangely terrifying. Here is a bit of it. 

 

The women worked the ground and milked and fed the animals while the men hunted, and when the men came in from the wolf-roads at dusk, the women would cook the game they’d caught while the men went inside and drank mead. Then they’d all eat, the men first, then the women and children, the men still drinking, getting louder and braver, talking about what they were going to do to the bands on the other hills. I would huddle, listening to their noise in the darkness, my eyebrows lifted, my lips pursed, the hair on the back of my neck standing up like pigs’ bristles. All the bands did the same thing. In time I began to be more amused than revolted by what they threatened. It didn’t matter to me what they did to each other. It didn’t matter to me what they did to each other. It was slightly ominous because of its strangeness - no wolf was so vicious to other wolves - but I half believed they weren’t serious. 

 

Grendel is fascinated by the bard, because he is able to tell lies, to make human violence seem poetic (hey, kind of like the original poem!), and to soothe consciences that otherwise might misgive. 

 

He sings to a heavier harpsong now, old heart-string scratcher, memory scraper. Of the richest of kings made sick of soul by the scattered bones of thanes. By late afternoon the fire dies down and the column of smoke is white, no longer greasy. There will be others this year, they know; yet they hang on. The sun backs away from the world like a crab and the days grow shorter, the nights grow longer, more dark and dangerous. I smile, angry in the thickening dusk, and feast my eyes on the greatest of the meadhalls, unsatisfied. 

 

The chapter where Grendel and the dragon discuss the meaningless of life has so many fascinating lines. The dragon does most of the speaking. 

 

“An angry man does not usually shake his fist at the universe in general. He makes a selection and knocks his neighbor down. A piece of rock, on the other hand, impartially attracts the universe according to the law of gravitation. You grant there’s a difference?” 

 

Hmm, MAGA in a nutshell. Angry at the universe, decides to hit their neighbors…

 

The dragon advises Grendel that he is in a way, the inspiration for humans. He is the “other” they can look down on, even as he embodies their worst traits. Even Grendel, as disgusted as he is with humans, can’t quite go this far. The dragon’s response is interesting. 

 

“Do something else, by all means! Alter the future! Make the world a better place in which to live! Help the poor! Feed the hungry. Be kind to idiots! What a challenge!” 

 

“My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”

 

After this, Grendel again hears the song of the bard, but understands it differently. 

 

He spoke of how God had been kind to the Scyldings, sending so rich a harvest. The people sat beaming, bleary-eyed and fat, nodding their approval of God. He spoke of God’s great generosity in sending them so wise a king. They all raised their cups to God and Hrothgar, and Hrothgar smiled, bits of food in his beard. The Shaper talked of how God had vanquished their enemies and filled up their houses with precious treasure, how they were the richest, most powerful people on earth, how here and here alone in all the world men were free and heroes were brave and virgins were virgins. He ended the song, and people clapped and shouted their praise and filled their golden cups.

 

Oh god, when I think back on my days in Evangelicalism, and how much of this we did. And how ultimately stupid and un-christian it was, assuming God loved us more than everyone else. It’s embarrassing. This is the Christian Nationalist dream, of course. God is an American. A white American. And if we could just get rid of those other people he doesn’t like, we can go back to being rich and powerful and “free” and heroes in our own story. Sigh. 

 

The book explores some of the side stories in the original, the backstory before Beowulf comes. One of these is the education of Hrothulf, nephew of Hrothgar, who will eventually usurp the throne. Gardner has him learn from a peasant, one who seems a bit more educated than expected. 

 

“To step out of the region of legality requires an extraordinary push of circumstance,” the old man yelled. He was deaf and shouted as if everyone else were too. “The incitement to violence depends on total transvaluation of the ordinary values. By a single stroke, the most criminal acts must be converted to heroic and meritorious deeds.” 

 

Astute readers might recognize a bit of Nietzsche in that idea. And, of course, the way that authoritarians convince otherwise decent people to act in violent and destructive ways. 

 

As the book nears its close, Grendel realizes that his problem is increasingly boredom, tedium, meaninglessness. Nothing matters, nothing changes, there is no thrill left to him. He may be free, but to him, “Tedium is the worst pain.”

 

Finally, Beowulf comes, and Grendel knows that one of them will end. He also sees, however, that Beowulf will likely be the end of the glory of Hrothgar. The new upstart will seize the glory, and prove the futility of the Scyldings’ religion. 

 

Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men’s hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain. 

 

Oof. But it rings true more than I would prefer. 

 

In the final confrontation, Beowulf doesn’t merely physically injure Grendel, he speaks philosophy that taps into Grendel’s greatest fears, his greatest subconscious terror. 

 

A meaningless swirl in the stream of time, a temporary gathering of bits, a few random specks, a cloud…Complexities: green dust, purple dust, gold. Additional refinements: sensitive dust, copulating dust….

 

In the end, and by that I mean Grendel’s end, and perhaps our own, it is dust to dust, ashes to ashes. We return to the earth, the universe goes on to the last syllable of recorded time. 

 

As I said, it is a beautiful, poetic, disturbing, and thought provoking book. Poetry, as Dickinson said, “tells truth but tells it slant,” and that is how I feel about this book. Don’t take it literally, don’t get bogged down in the specific philosophical ideas. Look at it slant, enjoy the experience, let the words wash over you. 

 

And thank you R.V.S. for introducing me to this book. 

 

The Seagull: Malibu by Anton Chekhov and Ellen Geer

It has been far too long since I have seen anything at Theatricum Botanicum - maybe before the pandemic? One factor has been that my wife and I have been more regularly going to the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Combined with the fact that we have seen a few more professional productions of musicals, our entertainment budget has been spent elsewhere. 

 

I had been hoping to see two of the plays at Theatricum this summer, but only one fit into the schedule. Oh well. 

 

The Seagull: Malibu is a retelling of Chekhov’s classic play, updated for the 21st Century. Ellen Geer may not be a familiar name to everyone, but she is actually a true fixture in the Los Angeles theater community. She is the daughter of Will Geer (Grandpa Walton) and actress Herta Ware. 

 

Although Geer and Ware divorced (in significant part because Will Geer was gay), they remained close friends, and co-founded Theatricum Botanicum in 1973. These days, Ellen Geer is the artistic director, and occasionally acts, along with her daughter Willow Geer and half-sister Melora Marshall. (I have praised Marshall’s acting in previous posts - she is amazing.) 

 

As far as I can tell, the main thing that Geer did with Chekhov’s play was change all the cultural references and the setting. Instead of a Russian resort lake in the 1800s, we are taken to 1970s Malibu, with all the crazy clothes that implies. 

 

For those not from the area, Theatricum Botanicum is located in Topanga Canyon, one of several that connect the San Fernando Valley (where I grew up) to the Pacific coast, snaking through the Santa Monica Mountains. A few miles to the south, you come out suddenly on the coast - at Malibu. So this is a very local setting, and all of us LA denizens got the new jokes. 

 

The cultural references were all updated, so “current” events (for the 1970s) are mentioned, modern English-language literature is name-checked rather than Russian. And the play-within-the-play that forms the center of the first act is updated to be about climate change, rather than the original early symbolist idea. The names of a couple of characters are changed, although they still nod to the originals. 

 

With these exceptions, the play is completely faithful to the original, as far as I can tell, from the opening line, to the closing. 

 

Unlike later plays like The Cherry Orchard, with its conflict between external forces and the inaction and denialism of the characters, The Seagull is all about internal conflicts. 

 

The romantic yearnings of the characters drive most of the action; everyone feels misunderstood. Because the love is unrequited in most cases, a happy ending is impossible. This being Chekhov, we also get the iconic gun. 

 

From the very opening line, it is clear this is Chekhov, and that things will end badly. Masha walks in, Ted asks her why she always wears black.

 

“I am in mourning. For my life.” 

 

The characters are all together at a vacation home owned by Thad (Sorin in the original), an old and ill man. His sister, fading actress Arkadina, is hoping to reclaim her lost glory. Her son, Constantine, is a young playwright, hoping to break through to fame. 

 

Arkadina is having an affair with younger (and popular) pulp novelist Trigger (Trigorin in the original). Meanwhile, Constantine is madly in love with Nina, the daughter of a nearby landowner. However, she abandoned Constantine to chase after Trigger. (This will end poorly for everyone later in the play…) 

 

At the same time, Masha, the daughter of Ivan (Ilya in the original) and Paulina, managers of Thad’s estate, has it bad for Constantine, who ignores her. Schoolteacher Ted (Semyon in the original) is in love with Masha. Oh, and Paulina is also bonking the doctor, Dore, on the side. 

 

Whew, that’s complicated, right?

 

Anyway, Constantine puts on his play, starring Nina, but the narcissistic Arkadina spoils everything with her criticism. 

 

Later, Constantine kills a gull and presents it to Nina, who is revolted. Trigger decides to write a short story based on the seagull. 

 

The plot for the short story: a young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a gull, and she's happy and free, like a gull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom. Like this gull.

 

Much drama ensues, culminating in Constantine attempting suicide, Arkadina leaving with Trigger, and Nina running off to NYC to become an actor. 

 

The final act takes place some years later. Masha has married Ted and has children, but hates him and her life. She is still mooning over Constantine. Nina has had a child with Trigger, but that child died, Trigger abandoned her to go back to Arkadina, and Thad is dying. 

 

Near the end, Nina repeatedly says “I am a seagull” before correcting to “I am an actress.” And really, it isn’t her that is that luckless bird. It is Constantine, who has been destroyed by the heartlessness of Nina and his mother. Perhaps, though, most of the characters are seagulls, thoughtlessly destroyed by those around them.

 

This production was, as usual for Theatricum, excellent. Their outdoor stage is still a wonderful and unique venue, with the entire hillside a part of the set. As would be expected for Chekhov, the set was fairly minimalist and simple - just the furnishings of the house, with a few changes between acts. 

 

It isn’t really possible to pick a standout performance, because everyone in the small cast was excellent in their roles. Every character is complicated; there are no cardboard roles. 

 Thad and Constantine

 Nina and Trigger

 

It was a good date night for my wife and I. I will recommend our dinner choice, Laa Laa Pan, for delicious Indonesian food. One of the reasons I love living in California is the diversity. 

 

This is the third Chekhov play I have seen live. I saw The Cherry Orchard at CSUB before I started writing about theater, and I saw Three Sisters at The Empty Space locally. I have also read Ivanov years ago. I think I just need to add Uncle Vanya to complete the set of mature plays. 

 

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Source of book: I own this.

 

I have been reading with a couple of longtime online friends. Recently, we decided to read March by Geraldine Brooks, but since a couple of us hadn’t read Little Women since childhood or thereabouts, decided that maybe we should brush up. 

 

I must have been in either elementary school or at the latest junior high, so it has been a really long time for me. I also didn’t particularly like the book back then, so I figured it would be interesting to revisit it as a middle-aged adult and see if I felt differently about it.

 

In short, everything that irritated me about the book back then still does, but I missed some of the sharp social satire as a child. So, it still isn’t a favorite, but it has its good qualities. 

 

What irritated me? Well, god this book is so freaking preachy! I mean, it is moralizing so much of the time. Relax your commitment to your responsibilities just once and your sister nearly dies! Get pissed when your bratty little sister burns your writings, and she nearly drowns! Have a negative thought and…well, you get the idea. 

 

What I did find a bit more nuanced this time is that the Marches really are human - more so than one thinks at first. Even Marmie has a few cracks. 

 

Also irritating? The Marches are kind of poor, sort of. But they still have a servant. I know this was normal at the time, and god knows I read plenty of books from the era. But this one particularly wallows in the “poor us” vibe a lot of the time. 

 

Another Victorian trope that hasn’t aged well is the “young girl marries man decades older than her.” Maybe this wouldn’t irritate me so much if our politics right now weren’t dominated by disgusting old men with a taste for underaged girls. It’s all so gross that it is difficult even if Jo is in her mid-20s and old enough to make her own choices. 

 

As one friend pointed out, though, a lot of these irritations are due to the fact that Alcott needed to make money. Her publisher wanted Jo to marry, so that’s what she had to do. Likewise for the moralizing - books for girls needed to encourage them to be good little servants of everyone. 

 

And yes, there were moralistic books for boys too - we just don’t tend to read them anymore. Which could have a couple of factors. One, presumably, is that Alcott’s writing is far better than, say, Horatio Alger. Another might be that we have loosened our standards for boys - it is culturally accepted that Tom Sawyer is an acceptable book despite its lack of moralizing - while retaining the “literature for girls must encourage them to be good” double standard. Perhaps both. 

 

There was also another dated issue, come to think of it. What is up with the “I was madly in love with your sister, and, now that she rejected me, I am in love with you” thing? This would make sense in, say, a Jane Austen novel, where marrying for money and connections might make romantic love less of a concern. But nobody is marrying the March girls for their money or connections. Certainly not someone like Laurie, who has plenty of both already. 

 

This was a subject of conversation as we read the book. My wife’s sister is nice enough - I like her - but there is no way we would have worked as spouses. And this is the case for most everyone I can think of. Sisters are not interchangeable (and neither are brothers.) 

 

I will, in the interest of full disclosure, note that my wife’s grandfather was dating her grandmother’s older sister briefly before switching, but my understanding was that it wasn’t a serious situation at that point, let alone an engagement. 

 

Okay, so enough about the stuff that irritated me. 

 

The writing overall is good. It’s not perfect, but the writing definitely transcends the ordinary and elevates the story. The characterization is decent; in the case of Jo it is excellent. There are some gaps, though. Marmie seems too good to be real most of the time. Mr. March almost doesn’t exist, despite being (supposedly) present for the second half of the book. Beth is beatified and lacks personality, in my opinion. Her trait is simply “good,” which doesn’t feel real. 

 

Meg is kind of in the middle. She gets less attention than either Amy or Jo, but she does feel pretty realistic as the Oldest Daughter™, particularly given Mr. March’s general absence as a useful person in the household. Her marriage is pretty believable. (FWIW, because of the particular dynamics of my birth family, I exhibit a lot of the Oldest Daughter traits.) 

 

Jo is, of course, the stand-in for Alcott herself, and it is only natural that she is the main character, and the one everyone likes (or perhaps even wants to be.) She feels so much more real than everyone else (except maybe Amy.) 

 

And Amy, well, she’s complicated. She does grow up as the book progresses, but by god she is a brat at the beginning. (As one with a difficult younger sister, I thoroughly sympathized with Jo on that.) She does appear to grow up, and the real-life May (Amy is an anagram of that) did apparently become closer to Alcott later in life, before her untimely childbirth-related death. But one does suspect that the burning incident must have occurred in real life, because it feels so real and emotionally raw. 

 

The best part of the book, to me, is the social satire. In particular, the send-up of the publishing industry, with its unquenchable thirst for drama and lurid pulp. Alcott’s own experience here shows, and she makes it really hilarious to read about. 

 

Likewise, the failed outing with the rich girls, the class niceties, the trials of having small children, and other details where Alcott seems to have written what she wanted, rather than what her publisher desired are quite good. 

 

So, I would say that I enjoyed the book at many times, and winced at others. 

 

Before I get into my favorite lines, I want to mention that in a post-script, I want to look a bit at Alcott herself, and the possibility that were she alive today, she would identify as transgender or non-binary. I know it is impossible to know for sure when talking about people from past eras, when culture did not have the language to express these things openly. I will note that as the parent of a transgender son, I was struck by how many things Jo says that are word-for-word familiar from my own experience. 

 

Favorite lines - there are quite a few. Alcott could write. 

 

It is difficult to dislike Laurie, who seems to be the rare (relatively) rich kid who is a genuinely decent person. We all know that he should have married Jo (except, as I noted above, Jo/Louisa probably wasn’t cishet - far more convincing than “we are too alike.” Unless you read that a certain way.) This early exchange is great, and feels plausible in real life. 

 

“I’m not Mr. Laurence. I’m only Laurie.”

“Laurie Laurence - what an odd name.”

“My first name is Theodore, but I don’t like it, for the fellows called me Dora, so I made them say Laurie instead.”

 

Jo, of course, hates Josephine, and wants to be Jo. Just like the real life Louisa went by Lou. 

 

I also love this line about the terrible teacher - we all know the sort. 

 

Boys are trying enough to human patience, goodness knows, but girls are infinitely more so, especially to nervous gentlemen with tyrannical tempers and no more talent for teaching than Dr. Blimber. 

 

And, of course, Aunt March, who I probably would have been better able to charm than Jo - for some reason, older women have generally liked me, a good thing since my legal practice serves a lot of seniors. 

 

Some old people keep young at heart in spite of wrinkles and gray hairs, can sympathize with children’s little cares and joys, make them feel at home, and can hide wise lessons under pleasant plays, giving and receiving friendship in the sweetest way. But Aunt March had not this gift, and she worried Amy very much with her rules and orders, her prim ways, and long, prosy talks.

 

Again, we all know people like this. Like both of those. I hope to be in the first category. I do like children, and enjoy spending time with them. We all know Aunt Marches too. 

 

Marmie is, as I said above, too good to be real. But for the most part, her advice really is solid. With a few exceptions, she speaks wisdom. If only more parents did. For example, this advice to Amy:

 

“It is an excellent plan to have some little place where we can go to be quiet, when things vex or grieve us.”

 

Another great bit of advice comes after Meg’s marriage, when poor Meg has gotten so bogged down in motherhood that she is neglecting her husband - and more importantly, herself. 

 

“Don’t shut yourself up in a bandbox because you are a woman, but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take your part in the world’s work, for it all affects you and yours.”

 

And lest you think Marmie was all aspiration, she came up with practical ways to take the burden off Meg, including having John take a more active role as a father.

 

“Besides, you owe something to John as well as to the babies; don’t neglect husband for children, don’t shut him out of the nursery, but teach him how to help in it. His place is there as well as yours, and the children need him; let him feel that he has his part to do, and he will do it gladly and faithfully, and it will be better for you all.” 

 

I never regret that my wife went back to work when we had infants, and I got time with them overnight when she did. A man’s place is with his children too. This was progressive stuff for the Victorian Era. 

 

Back when this book was written, before television or movies, entertainment was a bit different. Emerson, for example, made pretty decent money from his lectures. Ditto for William James. Going to lectures was indeed a thing. Alcott pokes a bit of fun at this. 

 

It was a People’s Course, the lecture on the Pyramids, and Jo rather wondered at the choice of such a subject for such an audience, but took it for granted that some great social evil would be remedied or some great want supplied by unfolding the glories of the Pharaohs to an audience whose thoughts were busy with the price of coal and flour, and whose lives were spent in trying to solve harder riddles than that of the Sphinx.

 

And, I would be remiss if I don’t mention the great lines about lurid literature. Regarding a story a boy lends her, she says:

 

[She] soon found herself involved in the usual labyrinth of love, mystery, and murder, for the story belonged to that class of light literature in which the passions have a holiday, and when the author’s invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the state of one half of the dramatis personae, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall. 

 

And also, for Jo’s own writing, where she was “already deep in the concoction of her story, being unable to decide whether the duel should come before the elopement or after the murder.” 

 

That’s gold right there. 

 

Another hilarious line comes in an exchange between Jo, who does not suffer fools well, and Amy, who thinks that poor girls don’t have the luxury of disapproving of eligible young men - the girl only comes off as “odd and puritanical.” Jo’s response is razor-sharp.

 

“So we are to countenance things and people which we detest, merely because we are not belles and millionaires, are we? That’s a nice sort of morality.”

 

While I generally felt the romance between Jo and Professor Bhaer was a bit forced, I did find her initial impression of him to be fascinating. 

 

Why everybody liked him was what puzzled Jo, at first. He was neither rich nor great, young nor handsome; in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant; and yet he was as attractive as a genial fire, and people seemed to gather about him as naturally as about a warm hearth.

 

He was essentially one of those good, genial sorts that made everyone feel relaxed around him. I know the sort, and this really is true. 

 

This observation also rang true for me:

 

Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety; it shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations.

 

A book probably cannot be of a certain era and written by a white person without having at least one wince-worthy passage involving ethnicity. This one is no exception, although it is better than average. Regarding the polyglot that is Paris, there is the description of “Haughty English, lively French, sober Germans, handsome Spaniards, ugly Russians, meek Jews, free-and-easy Americans.” Yeah, not her best work there. Fortunately, this is as bad as it gets, other than a brief mention of a “quadroon” - that’s more dated than bigoted, in context. Alcott actually made a solid effort to avoid the easy and cheap racism of the time - even avoiding the “Irish will steal you blind” thing for her protagonists. 

 

The final quote I want to highlight is this one, after Amy and Laurie get together. 

 

Amy’s lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward; men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don’t take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do; then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit for it; if it fails, they generously give her the whole. 

 

That cuts, but she is all too right, I am afraid.

 

Anyway, it definitely was interesting to revisit a book this long after I first read it, and see it with new eyes. Even if she could have cut out all the preachy stuff. 

 

 

Stay tuned for March, which is apparently from the perspective of the father, based on Bronson Alcott, who likely suffered from mental illness, which contributed to his struggle to support his family.

 

***

 

Was Louisa May Alcott transgender or non-binary?

 

This is a matter for debate. It is always difficult to apply modern understandings and terminology to people of the past. Without the vocabulary, judging interior experiences is near impossible. 

 

Was the reason that Dr. James Barry (among other notable accomplishments, performed the first successful cesarian section by a Brit) lived as a man that he wanted the opportunity of being a physician? Or was he transgender? It is easier to be sure in the case of Alan Hart (developed tuberculosis treatment protocols we still use), who lived later and expressly identified as a man. 

 

These are just two that came readily to mind - there are a lot more historical figures who lived as a different gender than they were assigned at birth. How many of these were to bypass unfair restrictions on female opportunity? How many were transgender individuals in an era when the language for that didn’t exist? 

 

Complicating all this is that there are competing groups who wish to claim notable figures like Alcott and Barry and Hart. Feminist women would love to have them as examples of what women can accomplish despite obstacles put in their way. But transgender people would also like to have them as their own. Without the chance to talk to the individuals in question, we have to do the best we can with what we know. 

 

A good start in understanding Alcott is this article. 

 

I personally find the argument that she was transgender to be fairly compelling. At minimum, she would be considered non-binary today, not fitting neatly into the category of female. Here are some of the things that stood out to me. 

 

First, this exchange from Little Women:

 

Meg: “You should remember that you are a young lady.”

Jo: “I’m not!” “It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy’s games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.”

Beth: “Poor Jo! It’s too bad, but it can’t be helped. So you must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls.”

 

This is exactly the sort of thing I have heard from transgender people, including my child before he came out. “I’m disappointed I am not a boy.” Frustration with female appearance and adoption of male-signalling appearance and gestures. 

 

This also fits with Alcott’s own life. She preferred to go by “Lou,” dressed in male clothing much of the time (except when required by social expectations), referred to herself as the “uncle” to her nieces and nephews, and “brother” to her sisters, as in the book, and, after she virtually adopted her older sister’s children after their father’s death, she referred to herself as their “father.”. She described herself as a “man” and a “gentleman” at various times. 

 

At one time, she dressed as a man for a costume party, and wrote about how thrilled she was that she passed well and was mistaken for male. 

 

Perhaps this quote, though, is the most definitive:

 

“I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.”

 

Draw your own conclusions, but I think that non-binary is the minimum, and probably transgender would be the best description of Alcott.