The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Source of book: I own this.

 

This is book number three in the online book club a pair of friends and I have started. Previously, we read That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis and The Shining by Stephen King. 

 

I hadn’t read much Hawthorne in years, although I read through most of the short stories and The House of Seven Gables during and after High School in addition to reading The Scarlet Letter for school. I re-read that a little over a decade ago. I intended to read The Blithedale Romance for some time, but just never got to it. 

 

The Blithedale Romance is billed as being based on Hawthorne’s time spent as part of the Brook Farm utopian community, and it apparently caused a bit of a stir because some of the characters seemed based on real people. Hawthorne himself denied this in his preface, but the denial is a bit less than convincing. 

 

I was a bit surprised that the book itself has very little to do with utopianism. Very little indeed is said about the life of the community, and very few of those involved actually get names or faces. There is the farm couple, Silas Foster, the actual farmer, and his wife, who doesn’t get a first name, but all of the other named characters are the members of the love quadrilateral which makes up the heart of the story. 

 

Indeed, despite the readers of his era attempting to determine whether the book was written as an opposition to socialism or even attempts at social reform generally, or in favor of them, Hawthorne personally and in this book refuses to take sides. The issues of social reform are examined, but ultimately the book is one of personalities and interpersonal conflict, not great social ideas. 

 

Connected to this as well is the question of the narrator, Miles Coverdale. This is Hawthorne’s only book written in the first person, so it is tempting to identify Coverdale and his ideas with Hawthorne. This would be a grave mistake, as I realized by the end of the book. 

 

Hawthorne does not portray Coverdale in a positive way. While he initially seems trustworthy, if a bit bland, and a man ostensibly interested in social justice; by the end, it becomes obvious that he is a thoroughly unreliable narrator, a person to full of himself to be able to understand the dynamics of other relationships and personalities, a person who is unwilling to sacrifice more than a cigar for his supposed ideals, and a man who is incapable of honesty even to himself. 

 

In other words, I think Coverdale is the most loathsome of Hawthorne’s protagonists, and I actually find him less likable than even Roger Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter.

 

Hawthorne clearly understands this - he wrote the character this way, and gives him the unhappy life that is the natural consequence of his actions. 

 

In light of this, reading Coverdale’s eventual rejection of social reform as Hawthorne’s own view seems disingenuous. Coverdale isn’t Hawthorne, but he is a nuanced character created by Hawthorne for this book. Hawthorne all too fully understands the inherent flaws in Coverdale. 

 

To the degree that Hawthorne is making any sort of an argument about socialism and utopian communities, it is that all good intentions are undermined by human frailty. It is easy to claim a desire for social equality, but to actually interact on an equal basis proves difficult. It is easy to approve of feminism until you have to wash the dishes. It is nice to think of an egalitarian community, but less fun to go muck out the barn or hoe the crops. 

 

This gap between aspiration and execution is a key theme in the book. 

 

You see it in the main characters’ condescension toward the Fosters, who are the only reason they don’t starve. You see it in the of-its-time stereotypes of the Irish (as big-boned, washerwomen, and so on) blithely used by its characters. You see it in the way Coverdale and Hollingsworth are unable to see women as fully-realized humans. And most obviously, you see it in the way that grand plans and esoteric ideas never really result in concrete change, either in society, or in the characters themselves. 

 

The four main characters are Coverdale, the young poet who halfheartedly joins Blithedale; Hollingsworth, the social reformer (who is likely a composite of Brook Farm founder George Ripley, reformer Orestes Brownson, and prison reformers Charles and Murray Spear, who never were part of Brook Farm); “Zenobia,” the sensual and feminist woman that Hollingsworth appears to be a couple with; and Priscilla, a rescued seamstress with a mysterious past. 

 

When I say “love quadrilateral,” I mean that with all points connected. While Hollingsworth is ostensibly coupled with Zenobia, it becomes clear later [spoiler] that he is also connected to Priscilla. Coverdale claims at the end to have been in love with Priscilla, but spends a lot of the book fascinated personally and sexually with Zenobia. 

 

And that is just the heterosexual tension. Coverdale starts his stay at Blithedale ill after a slog in a snowstorm (drawn from Hawthorne’s actual experience), and is nursed back to health by Hollingsworth. They start out incredibly close, until Hollingsworth tries to recruit Coverdale to his scheme of converting Blithedale into an institution for reformation of prisoners. 

 

The language and symbolism Hawthorne uses goes beyond a simple friendship into man crush territory. Hollingsworth’s pleas sound like a marriage proposal, and Coverdale acts like he has had a bad breakup. 

 

Oh, and also, Priscilla throws herself at Zenobia’s feet in a manner carefully drawn to be like a suitor’s proposal, and the language the two of them use about each other is beyond ordinary friendship. 

 

Yes, I know that often same-sex friendships used language we now find homoerotic, but Hawthorne seems to be deliberately creating sexual tension here as well. 

 

This all sets up a series of betrayals that bring the book to its tragic conclusion. It isn’t that socialism has failed, but rather that the ideals of the community in having relationships as “brothers and sisters” have been undermined and destroyed by the conflicting goals and actions of the characters. 

 

Hollingsworth doesn’t care about either woman; what he cares about is money to build his reformatory. (The fact he fails at this too is part of the betrayal.) 

 

Zenobia wants to be loved for who she is, not for her money, but neither man truly respects her. Hollingsworth turns out to be appallingly anti-feminist, while Coverdale simply doesn’t care about Zenobia beyond his fantasies of her naked body and imagined sexual experience. 

 

Priscilla wants freedom from the spiritualist charlatan she has been nearly enslaved by, but Hollingsworth and Zenobia end up betraying her to him. 

 

And Coverdale: what does he want? Perhaps to feel like a good, progressive person, but without actually having to act like one? Is he content to live in his own fantasy world, without actually learning to relate to other people? Does he really see Blithedale and its people as just fodder for that epic poem he intends to write someday? That last one is all too plausible. 

 

The Blithedale Romance is a good example of what Hawthorne does best: examine the psychology of humanity gone wrong. As in The Scarlet Letter, nobody - nobody - has pure motives. Particularly the respectable or self-righteous characters. Hawthorne pokes at the sore spots in this book, particularly those of people who aspire to be social reformers. It really is the question of whether one is doing any good, or just making one’s self feel good about it. 

 

I have to quote a few lines, starting with this one by Coverdale that hints about how useless he would be as a utopian. 

 

“What a pity,” I remarked, “that the kitchen, and the house-work generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life - the life of degenerated mortals - from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day.” 

 

Zenobia snarkingly points out that it is in the middle of a snow storm, so you need clothes and food, which can’t just be picked from the trees. In any case, Paradise has always been a human fantasy, only approached by those wealthy enough to experience it on the backs of the oppressed. 

 

Later that night, Coverdale sees Mrs. Foster (the unnamed wife of Silas) “fall fast asleep” while continuing to knit. I mention this because I suspect it is possible that my wife could indeed knit in her sleep, although I haven’t yet seen it. 

 

Priscilla also creates, in her case, these fine purses, which Coverdale muses might be “a symbol of Priscilla’s own mystery.” 

 

I had to look up dates, because, I mean, Freud, right? Well, The Blithedale Romance was published in 1851, and The Interpretation of Dreams didn’t come out until 1899. Heck, Freud wasn’t born until 1856. So maybe rather than saying Hawthorne was intentionally using Freudian imagery, maybe it was Freud using Hawthornian imagery? It sure looks like Hawthorne was consciously using the “purse as symbol of the vagina” a half century before Freud spelled it out. 

 

Gender fluidity also makes an appearance. In Hawthorne’s day, the respective spheres of women and men was more rigid, and, thanks to the Cult of Domesticity, certain virtues were assigned as “female” even more than they are now, which is difficult to comprehend, given our current moment of toxic masculinity and fear that any physical affection or caretaking is somehow “gay” if a guy does it. 

 

Coverdale laments that men are socialized against caretaking, but notes that Hollingsworth seems to be an exception. 

 

But there was something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft place in his heart.

 

This is a paradox, in light of Hollingsworth’s fairly vicious anti-feminism later in the book. But I have seen it myself, in plenty of otherwise tender and naturally nurturing men who have bought into the patriarchal ideology. 

 

Not too long after this, Coverdale becomes disillusioned by Hollingsworth, after realizing that Hollingsworth is really all about his philanthropy, and doesn’t care about specific people that way. This observation was interesting to me, because I have seen a similar phenomenon, where a cause leads to a person mistaking their own obsessions for divine revelation. 

 

He had taught his benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments, unless they could minister, in some way, to the terrible egotism which he mistook for an angel of God.

 

I also took note of the extended conversation between Zenobia and Coverdale on whether men or women were the more happy. I decided it was too long to reproduce, but it was fascinating. Coverdale thinks women are happier, because if they get that one great thing - namely marriage - that’s all they need. Zenobia insists that men are happier, because they have so many more options - they can find happiness in any of a plethora of facets of their life. As I mentioned, don’t mistake Hawthorne for Coverdale. This conversation reveals far more nuance. 

 

I also found this line interesting, as part of Coverdale’s opinion that utopia was a young person’s project. 

 

Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this.

 

But Coverdale also pulls back, unwilling to entirely commit even to that. His ideals remain at best nebulous and ephemeral. 

 

But, so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near, without finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with, in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any farther. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. 

 

After yet another truly blithery monologue from Coverdale, when he waxes eloquent about how all of them will be remembered in his epic poem centuries in the future, Hollingsworth finally calls him out on it. 

 

“You seem,” said Hollingsworth,” to be trying how much nonsense you can pour out in a breath.”

 

That has to be the funniest moment in the book. 

 

Near the end, after Hollingsworth’s betrayal of Zenobia, she and Coverdale are left alone. She too upbraids him for his ineffectiveness and lack of understanding. 

 

“Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad.” 

 

That is the tragedy of Coverdale. Even after everything, he himself admits that he has not change, that he has learned nothing. 

 

Even though the book doesn’t really address the utopian community or utopianism generally, it is a good read, with plenty of psychodrama that remains relevant in our time. 

 

If you want to read one of the best - and certainly the most humorous - accounts of a utopian experiment, I recommend The Experiences of the A. C. by Bayard Taylor. (And also his account of visiting California during the Gold Rush, El Dorado.) 

George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm by Miranda Carter

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

The question of what war in history was the most senseless and stupid has a lot of competition, but it is pretty difficult to dispute that World War One belongs in the conversation. A war that few wanted, that was completely avoidable, and which led to the greatest carnage of any war to that date. Oh, and it set the stage for phase two of the conflict, World War Two, and strongly contributed to totalitarian Communist revolutions in Russia and China. That’s a lot of damage from one incredibly pointless war. 

 

But how did things get to that state in the first place? There are a lot of interconnected reasons, and much ink has been spilled about that. Miranda Carter takes a look at a less explored part of the equation by going all the way back to the three cousins that were on the thrones of major powers at the time of the war, their lives, and how they contributed to the conflict. 

 

To say that the royal families of Europe in the modern era are an incestuous mess is perhaps even an understatement. By the late Victorian Era, everyone was related to everyone, and not just by marriage. The families had intermarried for generations, so a chart of the connections looks less like a family tree and more like a family spider web. (Carter starts the book with four pages of family trees, and notes all the places the four connect.) 

 

King George V of England and Wilhelm II of Germany were first cousins and grandsons of Queen Victoria. Nicholas II of Russia was related to the others by marriage - he married another of Victoria’s grandchildren, and Wilhelm I married another member of the Romanov family. Oh, and George’s father Edward VII and Tsar Alexander III both married members of the Danish royal family, which intersects with the other trees in other places. It’s a total mess, and I’m probably leaving some connections out. 

 

In any case, George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm were originally close due to their family connections. The great matriarch, Victoria, firmly believed that the key to keeping the peace in Europe would be the close family relationships of their rulers. Which, perhaps, demonstrates her lack of understanding of families and how they actually function. 

 

By World War One, these relationships had deteriorated, undermined by constantly shifting political issues, alliances, and personal feuds. Take your average family disputes and add enormous egos fed by a lifetime of coddling and entitlement, mix in some narcissism, sprinkle a lot of military honor culture, and fold in colonialism, and you have a combustible mix which was bound to explode sooner or later. 

 

This book is nearly 500 rather dense pages long, but at least the writing and storytelling is good. Carter does her best to give a lot of detail, including a tremendous amount of primary-source information: correspondence, diary entries, newspaper articles, minutes from conferences, and so on. The result is a flood of information that can only be absorbed in moderate doses. (Hence why I have been working on the book for a couple months.) 

 

What does emerge is a compelling picture of the massive cultural shift from the early 1800s to the early 1900s from monarchy and military honor culture to the constitutional legislative and administrative state. England had already made most of the shift - even Victoria was essentially a figurehead by the end of her reign - but both Russia and Germany were initially full autocracies, and governance of large and complex states suffered greatly as a result. 

 

I cannot attempt to give more of a summary of these three interlocking stories of the main characters, let alone the roles of other important people, from Edward VII to Bernard von Bulow to Rasputin. These are all fascinating stories too, and fill out the colorful society portrayed in this book. 

 

There are a lot of great quotes that I think illuminate the complexities of the political issues of the time. I’ll try to discuss a few highlights in the hope that those who are fascinated with history will give the book a read. World War Two tends to suck the historical oxygen from the room with its dramatic personalities, big bombs, and its notorious genocide, but understanding this second war requires examining the first, and the decades of events that led to it. 

 

Of the three, Wilhelm is the one that fascinated me the most, in no small part because he reminds me so much of Trump. The time was different, so, while Wilhelm (as well as many others in all three countries) was antisemitic, he didn’t need to win a vote, and so didn’t rely on stirring up hate for his power. The rest, though, are there. The narcissism, the persecution complex, the inability to focus on any one thing long enough to do more than fuck it up, the massive and irrational ego, and so on. 

 

Wilhelm’s problems didn’t come out of nowhere, though. His German father wanted him to grow up German, in military culture, while his English mother (Victoria’s daughter) preferred a strict British school experience. This meant eventually a rather abusive tutor and a lot of parental conflict. 

 

A depressive, he seems to have become convinced that he was locked in a Manichean battle to mould Willy’s character, without being able to see that everything he was doing was making it worse. The plan was, as Wilhelm later wrote, to “grasp hold of the soul of the pupil…to ‘wrench it into shape.” Rather than realizing that at least part of Willy’s arrogance was an attempt to hold on to some shreds of self-confidence in the face of constant character demolition, Hinzpeter believed that what his charge needed was “humiliation.”

 

This is, unfortunately, the core of every authoritarian parenting style. The task of “raising a child” is all about making the child a certain way, and humiliating the child if he or she wasn’t compliant. And no, for most children, this backfires. I know my parents love to accuse me of being arrogant, but I know that what really bothers them is that I stand up for my beliefs when those beliefs conflict with theirs - it is the same power struggle as when I was a child, except they have lost the power they once had. 

 

Wilhelm went on to say later:

 

“The impossible was expected of the pupil in order to force him to the nearest degree of perfection. Naturally the impossible goal could never be achieved; logically, therefore, the praise which registers approval was also excluded.”

 

Like Wilhelm, Nicholas was raised with certain beliefs about his role in the world - namely, the Divine Right of Kings, which England had rejected in favor of a constitutional monarchy. It is fascinating to see the direct correspondence between the Christian Nationalist movement, which has coalesced around Donald “Grab ‘em by the Pussy” Trump as their messiah, the old Tsarist project, and Putin’s aggression.

 

[Ivan the Great] acquired a set of useful messianic myths about Russia’s world mission: to recapture Constantinople, or Tsargrad as the Russians called it, for Christianity (and rather more usefully, to gain secure access to Europe and the Mediterranean for its grain and navy), and to “protect” the Slavic peoples of the Balkans against the Ottoman empire. This dual mission caused his authority to be underwritten by the Russian Orthodox Church. The tsar became the great defender of Orthodoxy; the Church, tied closer to the state than in any country in Europe, declared that the tsar was God’s representative on earth and he must be obeyed at all costs. 

 

It all ties together: religion, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, and power. 

 

Back to Wilhelm, this passage also made me think about Trump, and his pretense to being a man of culture, when everyone knows he is an ignorant idiot. 

 

Wilhelm considered himself an expert on many things, and was not shy about saying so. In subsequent years, he would personally inform the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that he was conducting Peer Gynt all wrong; tell Richard Strauss that modern composition was “detestable” and he was “one of the worst”; and, against the wishes of its judges, withdraw the Schiller Prize from the Nobel Prize-winning German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whose downbeat Ibsen-esque social realism he didn’t like. A hundred years before, when courts had still been centres of cultural patronage, such decisions might have been accepted without comment; now, however, even in Germany the emperor’s taste was frequently the subject of hilarity. 

 

It wasn’t just art, either. Wilhelm thought he was a genius about everything (sound familiar?) but was fundamentally incompetent. 

 

Wilhelm appeared unable to distinguish the trivial from the important - he’d spend hours looking at photographs of warships or moving the position of the smoke stacks on a new cruiser, rather than read government reports. He had no idea how he was going to accomplish all the great things he had promised. For him kingship had been a rather vague notion of having power, being great and beloved. Worse, he was an appalling vacillator, changing his mind - he was too often influenced by the last person he’d talked to, and constantly in quest of popularity - with such frequency that it drove his ministers mad and made the government look irresolute and confused. 

 

Hmm, again, that really sounds familiar. Predictably, this led to chaos and ineffective government, at a time when modern societies were becoming ever more complex and technical to govern. 

 

This lack of focus, even chaos, was becoming characteristic of German politics. Even those embedded in the system could see it. Holstein privately complained that sometimes he seemed to be working in an “operetta-style government.”

 

It wasn’t just in Germany that the aristocracy was finding itself losing the unquestioning obeisance it was used to. 

 

The obsession with appearances extended further than uniforms into an insistence on certain rules and conformity of behavior and had more sinister consequences than mere pointlessness and triviality. It almost guaranteed that a kind of hypocrisy became encrusted in the culture of court and the upper classes. In Germany, the dominance of and cultural fascination with the army pressed upon the Berlin court and predominant class a caricature hyper-masculinity. In England the aristocracy’s insistence that they lead society by virtue of their virtue meant that they believed they must appear above reproach in everything. Too much was expected, too much forbidden. The conflict could be seen in Wilhelm himself: the imperative to be manly and soldierly all the time had turned him into a caricature and forced him to take refuge in periodic breakdowns. Among Edward’s aristocratic set public exposure was the ultimate sanction, but one could do almost anything society in the wider sense condemned - have mistresses, gamble, take an unseemly interest in livestock or small boys - as long as one wasn’t discovered or didn’t open up that world to scrutiny, for example by leaving one’s spouse. It was the price the ruling class found itself increasingly paying for laying claim to social seniority and power on the basis of seemingly pristine morality and perfect appearances. Aristocracies had perhaps always lived by appearances, but with a public increasingly self-aware and demanding, and a press increasingly powerful, when the rest of the world got a handle on scandal behind the court’s closed doors, the effects could be devastating; while those who kept irreproachably to the rules would too often be forced to live lives of desiccated self-denial. 

 

If anything, the Russian government was even worse and more incompetent. Nicholas had even more power, and even less ability to effectively govern. Added to this was a deep introversion and a distrust of everyone outside his close circle. As a British diplomat wrote about the impossibility of a functional relationship with the Russian government said, “Nothing remains secret here long. The difficulty here is to sift the truth from the lies.” 

 

In connection with the problem of distrust of the British, the author notes that there was a rational basis for this. 

 

The British had a bad habit of moving in their troops on high moral grounds and then accidentally taking over.

 

This also sounds familiar, yes? 

 

Nicholas was in way over his head, and responded in the worst possible way most of the time. The world was changing, but he was unable to accept that truth. 

 

Russia was in the grip of great social and economic change, and the government was increasingly inadequate to confront it, and he himself believed utterly that he was the only man who could rule it. But he closed himself away. 

 

This too sounds relevant today, doesn’t it? Things are changing, but the American Right refuses to accept it and find solutions to the actual problems we face, choosing instead to try to return to a mythical past. 

 

European courts, all desperately trying to keep out new forces - trade, the bourgeoisie, industry, democracy - which they saw as threats to their status and influence, but their only weapon besides barricades was a desperate holding on to the past. They had ceased to be places where one went to seek one’s fortune, where art was created, or political debate took places, as they had been in the eighteenth century, instead becoming strangled by hierarchy and a million tiny rules, the more arbitrary the better. 

 

Yet another way of channeling one’s insecurities in socially harmful ways. Again, Nicholas was the worst about this. 

 

Nicholas compensated for his anxious feelings of inadequacy and lack of preparedness by holding tenaciously to his belief in divine right. The moment the crown had touched his head, he had become a vehicle for God’s purpose and had magically absorbed a kind of spiritual superiority which made him, whatever his inadequacies, better equipped than any minister to know what Russia needed. It was a mystical idea far more literal even than the pronouncements about his relationship with God which had brought Wilhelm such derision in Europe, and in Nicholas it encouraged a kind of fatalism which would make him oddly passive in a crisis. 

 

An interesting parallel to the Divine Right of Kings in politics is the Divine Right of Parents in patriarchy. I really do believe that my parents compensated for their feelings of inadequacy as parents (and really, no parent is adequate - we are all making it up as we go) by embracing this idea that God spoke through them to their children. Parenthood itself granted that kind of spiritual superiority by magic. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work out well in the end for them either. 

 

Despite the name, the book actually spends more time talking about Edward VII than George. This is because George didn’t ascend to the crown until fairly late - 1910 - and during most of the timeframe of the book, Edward was king. Honestly, Edward wasn’t terrible: he was pretty good at what he did. But he was also a figurehead, not a ruler. Even if he didn’t always understand that. 

 

His powerlessness made Edward lose his temper frequently. It was hard for the British royals to reconcile themselves to this. The habit of deference and courtesy around them meant that the reality of their lack of power was not reflected by the way people felt obligated to treat them.

 

The Boer War also changed the dynamic. Although the British empire wouldn’t actually shrink until World War Two, the threads were already starting to unravel. Public opinion was shifting, particularly abroad. 

 

Anti-British cartoons, especially in Germany and France, showed British soldiers bayoneting Boer babies; Edward himself was drawn standing on the mutilated bodies of Boer women and children. As the war entered its second year, the British army, under the leadership of Lord Kitchener, had become utterly ruthless in an attempt to flush out the last Boer guerrilla fighters. It burned farms, shot prisoners, and interned women and children, Boer and black, in concentration camps, efficient new invention pioneered a few years before by the Spanish during the Spanish-American War. There the internees died in shaming numbers of famine, thirst, cholera, and mistreatment. The conditions were so appalling that criticism was beginning to leak into mainstream British politics. 

 

The Nazis didn’t invent anything. Much of the worst of what they did was borrowed from countries we like to pretend were the “good guys.” 

 

The Boer war cost Britain an incredible amount both in lives and treasure. But also in prestige. 

 

Almost immediately the British government handed over £3 million for reparations and the reconstruction of the two Boer states and promised their incumbents self-government within the British empire - a gesture which kick-started the country’s international rehabilitation, but also signalled the pointlessness of the struggle, and prompted questions for the first time about whether the empire was costing Britain rather than enriching it.

 

Hold that thought, because colonialism is going to be a huge factor in the downfall of Russia, and eventually Germany as well. 

 

Into this stew, Wilhelm kept inserting himself, believing that he and only he could conduct the personal negotiations necessary to end conflict.

 

The Greek royal family quietly loathed him, and his cousin Marie of Romania found him unbearably condescending. The paradox was, of course, that being so bad at personal relationships, Wilhelm should believe so deeply in conducting international relations through personal relationships.

 

Again, sound familiar? Anyone else these days think he has the key to the art of the deal but is really terrible at it? 

 

Speaking of modern narcissists, how about Russia’s ongoing colonialist adventures?

 

For Russia, even more than for most countries, war had often proved disastrous. The Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s had been disasters. Both had left Russia in debt and near-bankrupt, had crippled development, created internal disaffection and lasting hostility with foreign powers. The government and its institutions were in no state to bear the strains of war, and unlike, say, Britain, the country wouldn’t bear the expense. It was a lesson the Russian government would have done well to remember before it found itself at war with Japan in February 1904. 

 

As an aside, Haruki Murakami talked about this conflict and its sequel in a forgotten episode of World War Two, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 

 

Germany eventually would find itself making terrible decisions because of its lust to join the great colonialist powers and expand its colonies. 

 

The problem with aggressive programmes of imperial expansion in distant places is that, when they go wrong, the consequences are felt much closer to home. Russia had already experienced the bitter results of an imperial misadventure; now it was Germany’s turn. 

 

In this case, it was the disaster in Morocco, which ended up solidifying the alliance between France and England. 

 

The book talks a good bit about the relationships of the British royals to the politicians with actual power. Many of the names are familiar to me because Winston Churchill talks about them extensively in his writings on British history and World War Two. 

 

I’ll mention David Lloyd George and the way that both Edward and George hated him, both for his policies and his commoner background. Henry Asquith also gets some play, and he is always witty. 

 

The most surprising thing, though, was to read about a tiff between George and Winston Churchill. Churchill quipped in a report on employment legislation that there were as many “idlers and wastrels” at the top of the social ladder as at the bottom, which is pretty self-evident. George fired back that Churchill was a socialist. Which is pretty funny, considering that Churchill was pretty conservative. But for a monarchist or a white supremacist today, anything that challenges hierarchy is “socialist,” right?

 

Closer to a true socialist (although not really that close) was Lloyd George. 

 

The much-loathed Lloyd George had drafted his Budget and launched it with speeches which cheerily and baldly pointed out the gap between rich and poor in a way that no British statesman ever had, and with great panache and humour. “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts and is more difficult to scrap.” 

 

That’s a great line. Just substitute “billionaire” today, and it is still true. Perhaps even more so. This also serves as a bit of a warning for today’s Right Wing - history shows that when inequality rises too high, changes come, whether peacefully or violently, but they come. 

 

After twelve years in government the Conservatives were an exhausted force. It was surprising perhaps that a party so predicated on privilege had lasted so long, though as governments have learned since, you can get voters to vote against their own economic interests if you can find something sufficiently powerful to counter them with - religion, a powerful hate, a collective (even if unrealistic) aspiration. 

 

Um, Christian Nationalism, white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hate, and MAGA anyone? As Lyndon Johnson correctly noted before I was born:

 

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."                                                                                                                                                                                                       

There are a few more pithy quotes about foreign policy and politics that I have to mention. 

 

How to calm the inevitable accusations from Germany that the Convention was aimed at them? For lack of any other ideas, the British government went for the tried, trusted, and utterly unsatisfactory method of a state visit. 

 

Or this one, again poking a bit at the British: 

 

That the German Foreign Office was using a warship as leverage seemed to the British Foreign Office and Asquith a dangerous precedent: not merely another swipe at France, but a direct challenge to British naval supremacy and therefore its Great Power status - gunboat diplomacy had always been a particular British specialty. 

 

In the run-up to World War One, the German military (which held increasing and eventually near-total power over German politics due to an ineffective Wilhelm and a mostly powerless legislature) decided that war was necessary and inevitable - in fact, it started to advocate for “preventative war” - as much an oxymoron as a preemptive strike usually is in practice. 

 

In the end, either Russia or Germany could have stood down, and kept the war from happening. But once Germany decided that invading France was necessary as “preventative war,” it was nearly inevitable that world war would come. The aftermath of the war may have been mishandled and guaranteed that Germany would fight again, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Allies were right: more than any other country, Germany was responsible for the war. 

 

There are a couple of incidents that didn’t fit into the flow that I wanted to mention somewhere, so I’ll do it here. 

 

First is the story of Nabokov’s great-uncle. The Grand Duke Sergei was blown to tiny bits by an anarchist’s bomb, one of a series of anarchist acts which form the basis of Joseph Conrad’s fascinating novel, Under Western Eyes. The great-uncle was a friend of Sergei, and was offered a carriage ride home. He declined, and missed being blown up. Then, a few years later, he was offered a ticket on the Titanic, but likewise refused. 

 

He comes into the story because he was elected to the Duma after the reforms. Nicholas distrusted the Duma, considering them to be a bunch of peasants. However, Nabokov’s father was one of the new members, and their family went back centuries as part of the aristocracy close to the tsars. 

 

The final incident was after Wilhelm had, yet again, made an idiot of himself in foreign policy, the Reichstag finally had enough, and publicly denounced him. He pouted as usual, and his lackeys tried to calm him down. 

 

In an effort to distract him, the kaiser’s entourage decided to put on an entertainment, the kind that amused him: a ballet spectacular performed by the middle-aged members of his various cabinets. The climax was a performance by Field Marshal Count Dietrich von Hulsen-Haeseler, the hefty, fifty-six-year-old chief of Wilhelm’s military cabinet. Described in some sources as wearing a pink tutu (“not for the first time,” Zedlitz-Trutschler wrote), in others in a pink ball gown - what was undisputed was that he was in drag - with a large feather in his hair, he performed a series of energetic pirouettes, jumps and capers, flirtaciously blew kisses to his audience, stumbled off the stage and suffered a massive heart attack that killed him instantly. It was reported that by the time the doctors arrived, rigor mortis was so far advanced that it was extremely difficult to get Hulsen out of his tutu and into his military uniform. 

 

Yeah, that’s a pretty crazy story. Too implausible for fiction, clearly. Also, Wilhelm’s cabinet was gay as hell - eventually there was a huge scandal and a bunch of trials. Unfortunately, it also led to an increase in hyper-masculinity in German society and eventually Hitler’s attempts at extermination. 

 

That at least gives some idea of the best lines in the book. There is so much more information, though. If you like history, it’s a well written and well researched book with a fascinating story to tell. 

 

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book is one of the NPR recommendations from last year. Sidik Fofana is a teacher, who decided to write about gentrification from the point of view of the tenants who are all too easily displaced. Like the author, the characters live and work in Brooklyn. 

 The Tenants Downstairs is a collection of eight interconnected short stories, each told from the perspective of a different tenant. Old men and women, middle aged residents, teens, and children each get a chance to tell their stories. 

 

Through their stories, a picture emerges of a community under pressure and threat from forces bigger than them. Hanging on to their homes because of rent control and tenant protections, they find themselves a single missed payment away from eviction, as demand for their apartments by far wealthier people erodes the former lenience. 

 

Nobody in this book is wealthy, but some are at least lower-middle-class, often working multiple jobs or having a side hustle to make the rent and keep the kids fed and clothed. The teens are juggling trying to learn in a struggling school with homelessness, deaths of family members, and bullying. 

 

I’m not going to summarize the plots, but just note that every perspective is unique. The same incident is described differently by different characters - very true to life. The book isn’t long, but it is a good read. 

 

There are a few quotes that I think express some pushback against the white, middle-class tendency to blame low income people for their own problems, particularly if those people have darker skin. 

 

Our world is set up to “work” for certain people, and not for others. Just this last year, I have had several situations in my life where my options were an order of magnitude better simple because my wife and I make enough money to weather emergencies without worrying about the necessities. It makes a big difference, and I appreciate the privilege. 

 

Just an example here is that a vehicle breakdown for our family is an inconvenience, not a threat. Yes, with kids in college and different schedules, getting everyone where they need to be is a pain in the butt. And it sucks to pay for car repair. 

 

But neither of us risks losing our jobs, and the cost isn’t money that we needed for rent and food. That’s what having enough money means to us. Not buying the latest and greatest, but not having to worry. 

 

As one resident, trying desperately to make rent, explains:

 

“You didn’t come up here for no shoot-ups. You came here to make a good life on your own.” 

 

“People on TV don’t understand that and never will. They need to stop frontin like all people want in life is food and a roof.”

 

People in this book are complex. It is easy to see the flaws and the mistakes, but it is complicated. Like we all are. Some just have more of a margin for error. I thought this humorous moment was nice. 

 

Me and Boons walk down two-fifth to my crib. Whole time Boons is bumpin into incense and soap stands and stoppin Yellow Cabs when they had the green light. He yellin, Y’all done fucked up and let me back, New York! Y’all shoulda flushed me down the toilet when y’all had the chance. That’s Boons, though. He the type to not learn shit in the bing. 

 

Another fascinating moment comes when a gay guy explains how so many (particularly in movies) make assumptions about gay men that aren’t accurate, expecting them to be promiscuous and ready to kiss any other man when given the chance. 

 

Look at all the movies. Anytime they show us, we gotta be on our knees. It can’t jus be us regular. If they did a movie about my buildin, they wouldn’t care about the two dudes upstairs who been together for years. They wouldn’t show when they jumped the broom in the bingo room. How everybody was happy even though it wasn’t official. They wouldn’t show the butch lady in 4D who is always wearing a necktie and got a computer certificate. They don’t care about that. That’s why we gotta be more. But some people is hell-bent on making you a prostitute.

 

But like I said to Qua all they think we do is run around givin each other sex. They think you gay was cuz suttin happened, even though you tell them you knew since the very first time you was at the public pool and you seen the lifeguard’s penis accidentally come out his shorts like a beaver. Again, that’s why I be careful what I do. I do what I do behind closed doors. I don’t be publicizin or braggin. When I’m around straight men, I make them feel comfortable. Even if I gotta change how I talk. That make it easier for all us. That’s what I tried to tell Qua. Plus, my aunt when she was alive said you can sell whatever you want, but it’s over when you start sellin you. 

 

The last story, about an old man who just wants to sit outside on the sidewalk and talk people into playing chess with him, also has a line about misperception. 

 

See, the problem is when you old, everybody think you satisfied with the livin you’ve done. They like to think of you as perfumed in dry piss waitin for your call to sunset. Never mind you could have a whole twenty years left. They’ll still act like your back is crooked. You think I just come out here to expire?

 

And that is how this book is: it pushes back on stereotypes, on assumptions, on the flattening we do when it comes to other people. No one in this book is simple. Everyone has hopes and dreams and weaknesses and a story to tell. And all of this is lived in community - the very thing that gentrification most threatens, just like redlining and freeway building has in the past. 

 

It’s a short book, compact and succinct. It shows rather than preach, just giving a window into other lives, and the way they are lived. Give it a try and then take some time to think afterward. 

 

The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

As a classical musician, this book went on my list as soon as it came out. It sounded like an interesting blend of genres, and a chance to read fiction that actually got music stuff right. (And don’t get me started on all of the god-awful terrible no-good faking that goes on in movies.) 

 

Brendan Slocumb is a professional violinist and teacher, a black man who managed to build a solid career in the extremely white field of classical music. He decided to try his hand at writing, in order to open the world of his experience to a wider audience, and, I think, he has generally succeeded with this book. 

 

Before getting into the book itself, I wanted to note that less than two percent of professional classical musicians are black, and probably lower than that for string instruments. Classical music has been viewed as a white person’s art form for a long time, although when I was a student, Chinese American, Japanese American, and Korean American kids were the bulk of those I played with in young orchestras (again, at least in the string section.) Black and Hispanic classical musicians remain fairly rare, and are rarer the further up you go. 

 

This perception of classical music as a white art form tends to be self-perpetuating. Students who don’t fit the “look” - and often the economic status as well - are not consistently encouraged, and they do not see themselves represented that often. The cycle continues. 

 

As a white kid, I at least looked the part, although our family was consistently lower income than most - all those doctor’s kids had instruments costing four or five figures while in elementary school, while I scraped along with a hundred dollar instrument. 

 

For Slocumb - and his protagonist, Ray - they started out on school rentals, and lacked the family encouragement and assistance that made me the musician I am today. Both the true story of Slocumb and the fictional story of Ray are inspiring, and I truly hope that a generation of black musicians are encouraged by this book to pursue their craft and join those of us making what I believe to be the most beautiful music ever created. 

 

Over the years, I have had the privilege of playing with a number of fine African-American players, and I can confirm that the stories that Slocumb tells in this book match the stories I have heard from my colleagues over the years - including an incident at a hotel that was very much like the book - our orchestra manager (a conservative white woman, by the way) gave the hotel staff holy hell over the incident, and made it clear that we didn’t do that shit. 

 

And the other stories - getting crap from cops, being mistaken for a waiter at gigs, the stereotyping, having to fight for respect at every level - Slocumb’s experience is distressingly common and universal. 

 

So what is this book? It probably is good to set some expectations. It is genre fiction - ostensibly a mystery/thriller sort of book. The writing is mostly good, but there are some clunky moments. I felt that the last bit, with Ray’s successful career, felt like slathering it on a little thick. 

 

The mystery itself requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. The premise is meant to be attention-grabbing: a black kid’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s old violin turns out to be a Stradivarius. And certainly, selling a book about such an instrument being stolen is easier than just a straight-up coming-of-age story about a black violinist as he overcomes poverty, prejudice, and long odds to become a brilliant success. 

 

Which is kind of too bad, because this bildungsroman hidden inside a mystery story is actually the best part of the book. 

 

The ending, too, seemed a bit obvious and a bit contrived. The problem (speaking as one raised on classic British mysteries) is that there are too few suspects. The extremely limited number of people who had the opportunity to steal the instrument means you pretty much know the answer to the mystery from the beginning. I also found the solution to be psychologically unconvincing - a person sociopathic enough wouldn’t just appear seemingly out of nowhere like that, so I felt it didn’t really “work” in light of the rest of the book. That’s my main quibble, and I think it was the result of the mystery being the framing story - and selling hook - for the main story, which is a different sort of book. 

 

Thus, the beginning and the ending of the book were my least favorite parts. It is the middle, where the author goes back and tells Ray’s story, that truly shines. 

 

I also thought a few moments were a little off - Ray’s search of a house seemed a bit illogical in the places he looked that were too small to hide a violin. More than anything, I think the fact that this is the author’s first book shows a bit. The writing is a bit uneven in places, and usually when he is trying to tell the mystery story rather than the musical story. 

 

Many of the incidents in the book actually happened to Slocumb. For example, the time he was unable to get in to play a wedding because the host didn’t believe a black kid could be a violinist. Or the arrest in Baton Rouge by a cop looking to harass black motorists. Or the auditions where the judges openly used racial slurs. Or the assumption that black violinists could only play jazz. 

 

Oh, and also, his own beloved violin was stolen in his senior year of high school. This violin makes it into the story, by the way, as the replacement instrument Ray uses during the Tchaikovsky Competition: a 1953 Eugene Lehman. 

 

Also taken from real life is his mentor and violin teacher Dr. Rachel Vetter Huang, who appears under a different name in the book, and his grandmother, who keeps hers. 

 

The prose in these passages sounds more natural than the mystery passages. They feel more “real,” undoubtedly because Slocumb is simply telling his own story, writing his own life, and channelling the reality he knows best. 

 

For a violinist, the book has a lot of easter eggs. If you know, you know. Slocumb said in an interview that he had to tone down some of the technical stuff so that normal readers could understand it. 

 

There is also a LOT of name-dropping. And by name-dropping, I don’t generally mean people (although there are a few of those, and the joke about Ricardo Muti is delicious, subtle, and unexpected.) What I mean is dropping the names of pieces of music. Slocumb unashamedly talks about much of the standard repertoire of a classical violinist, the pieces he loves, and the ones he isn’t as fond of, and all of the technical demands and rewards of each. If you are, like me, a violinist, this is fun stuff. If you aren’t really a classical fan, well, your mileage may vary. 

 

Conveniently, Slocumb put together a Spotify playlist for the book, with 50 (!) selections. There are some lesser-known gems in there, to be sure, in addition to the works that literally played in my head while listening to the book. 

 

I have done my best here to avoid spoilers, but I do want to mention a few subplots that I thought were fascinating. 

 

First is the way Ray’s generally unsupportive family ends up seeing him as a source of money, once he starts making it as a professional musician. This is a story that is all too common. Certainly, you hear this about professional athletes. And not just African Americans, not by a long shot. People who dismissed all the hard work and commitment suddenly want to take credit when there is money involved. 

 

Second is the subplot involving the Marks family - the descendents of those who enslaved Ray’s ancestor - and the source of the violin. They sue him, claiming it is a stolen work of art. That area of law is beyond the scope of my knowledge, so I can’t speak with any confidence on the legal aspect, but at least the idea of trying to bankrupt a struggling artist with attorney fees until he caves sounds plausible. As does the eventual resolution after a particularly brutal description of the horrors of the enslavement of Ray’s ancestors comes to light. (I believe this too was taken from historical descriptions, although it isn’t clear if it came from Slocumb’s own family history.)

 

From the viewpoint of cosmic justice, rather than our own legal system, which has never recognized the obvious legal rights those enslaved (and their descendents) should have been able to assert against those who enslaved them, the Marks family should have owed Ray and his family millions of dollars for the labor they stole. Just like Jourdon Anderson should have gotten his own back pay. 

 

In any case, the sense of entitlement the Marks’ have mirrors all too well the experience I have had in talking to white Southerners. Not all, and I know some notable exceptions, but…..let’s just say there is a noticeable pattern. And I do not mean to let people from the North or West off the hook - plenty of racism to go around. But the sense of entitlement - a belief they are owed deference from “those people” - is pretty obvious. But always couched in that lugubrious politeness - some of Slocumb’s best writing is in these passages. 

 

Finally, all of the passages about auditions, performances, rehearsals, and the competition - that’s good stuff that any classical musician will recognize. Ray is world class - Slocumb quipped that he is a bit jealous of Ray - and I am nowhere near that stratosphere myself - but who hasn’t had a flop sweat over an audition? Or had to deal with an arrogant player in youth orchestra? Or had a conductor who took out his personal frustrations over his stalled career by denigrating a guest artist? 

 

In this sense, Ray isn’t “just” a black violinist - although he is that - his character feels familiar to all of us who love the instrument and the music. (And who fan-boy on Hilary Hahn like Ray does…) He is also a well-written character. We get his frustrations, his failings, his triumphs - and we really do have to cheer him on when he stands up for himself. A particularly great moment is when he tells the concertmaster of a small regional orchestra “charity really is a bitch, isn’t it?” echoing her complaints about the “charity” of having to have a black guest artist. 

 

I ended up starting the audiobook on the way down to an LA Phil concert, because my hold came up right at that point. Kind of interesting, although Mahler isn’t really a solo violin composer - unless you count the 2nd movement of the 4th Symphony - tuned up a full step. But classical nonetheless, and also the fact that Gustavo Dudamel is an example of a musician of color who has risen to the top. 

 

The audiobook is read by J.D. Jackson, who is marvelous. He deserves his reputation as one of the best audiobook artists of our time. I’m tempted to listen to one of the Colson Whitehead novels he has narrated, just to hear him do it. (Although Beresford Bennett was so good as well…) 

 

For obvious reasons, I think my musician friends will enjoy this one, but those who like a mystery, or just want a look into a different world from a unique perspective, may want to give this book a try.