Philip Larkin: Life, Art, and Love by James Booth

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

When it became obvious that Covid-19 would shut down most non-essential things in my town, I realized I should probably grab a few books to keep me occupied until the library reopens. One of those books was this biography of Philip Larkin, which sat there on the new books shelf tempting me for a few weeks. 

One of Philip Larkin's numerous photographic self portraits.

 While Larkin’s skill as a poet has never really been in doubt, at least during my lifetime, his reputation as a person has been much more dubious. So therefore, one of the key questions any biography is expected to answer is, “How much of a prick was Philip Larkin?” Having read this book, I think one obvious answer is, “Not nearly as much of a prick as Kingsley Amis.” 

But actually, I am not convinced Larkin deserves his bad reputation. There are a few things which contributed to his reputation as a bit of a jerk. First was that toward the end of his life, he “performed” his character in interviews and the like - his role as the crusty old man, librarian and poet. This included acting as if he was a reactionary conservative, which is, ironically, rather the opposite of his actual political views. 

The second problem for Larkin is that he corresponded extensively with various friends and relations, and these letters were mostly preserved. Thus, when he writes to Kingsley Amis, he will often make a tasteless sexist joke (like they would have made at school in the 1930s). He might make a racist statement to a friend in a context that was probably understood to be sarcastic, but which scans poorly by itself. 

The third issue I think has perhaps faded along with changes in society. Larkin never married, although he was in a long term sexual and romantic relationship with Monica Jones, while having quasi-romantic, romantic, or sexual relationships here and there with other women. His refusal to marry (and he most certainly did not wish to - he was clear on that), has been read as being a character flaw, which seems more unfair now that marriage is no longer considered the only reasonable choice for people. 

All of this came to head in Andrew Motion's biography published soon after Larkin's death. Booth's more recent biography seems written in significant part to correct the picture of Larkin as a monster that Motion painted. 

There is plenty of evidence that Larkin was a better man than his reputation as well. Those who worked with him, the women in his life, and his friends had positive things to say about him. One that particularly struck me was his reputation in his day job, Librarian at the University of Hull. In an era when professors routinely ogled and harassed the female staff, Larkin was notable for not doing so, treating his co-workers and underlings with respect and fairness. Far from being the cantankerous old man, he was a great boss with a sense of humor, excellent work ethic, and considerate of his staff. 

James Booth worked with Larkin near the end of his life, and conducted extensive interviews in writing this book. His background in poetry led to the decision to include a decent amount of poetic analysis in the book, as well as the biographical details. The book is well written and rather fascinating to read, although not everyone will find Larkin as interesting, I suppose. I enjoy poetry (as this blog makes pretty clear…), and like reading about complex personalities. 

Larkin is notable for being one of the very few 20th century poets who held a nine-to-five job with no expectation that he would ever write for a living. The other that the book mentions is Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive. This reality was both positive and negative for Larkin. He resented that he felt tied to his job, and became increasingly overworked and frustrated as budget cuts and new technology added to his stress. On the other hand, he was clearly very good at his job: people who knew him primarily as a librarian have insisted that he was underrated in that capacity. There is no question that he greatly expanded the Hull library, collecting countless historically important documents, and organizing the collection. 

There are definitely some fascinating details about Larkin in this book that I did not know. For example, he truly desired to write novels at first, before he capitulated, realizing his talent was in poetry. But he did write a few “lesbian fiction” novels under a pseudonym in his early twenties. I was completely unaware of them - Booth quotes some passages and so on, which was kind of interesting. I’m not sure I will be seeking them out, but it is definitely a side of Larkin that isn’t as well known. 

Larkin was steadfastly as non-political as possible throughout his life. He appears to have, at least in part, intended to avoid making the library appear partisan. But he also disliked politics at a visceral level (something I feel too), and had complications from his love life that incentivized a non-partisan approach. Monica Jones was pretty conservative, while Larkin was to a significant degree liberal. To preserve their relationship, they stayed away from most discussions. 

One exception to this non-political stance was a statement he made in a letter to his mother during his first major gig, a library position in Ireland. Larkin was appalled by the jingoistic parades, particularly the “staggering dullness…& stupefying hypocrisy (‘Civil & religious liberty’...)” As Larkin noted, the politics behind “civil & religious liberty” in Northern Ireland was “denying civil & religious liberty to Catholics & Nationalists, & damn the Pope, etc.” 

This is, indeed, the same twisted version of “civil and religious liberty” that the increasingly dominionist Evangelical-Industrial Complex believes in. Cram their bigoted interpretation of an ancient book down the throats of everyone else using the full force and violence of law and government. 

Larkin was a steadfast atheist throughout his life, and was particularly distrustful of religion as proxy for sectarian politics or as a way to fleece the faithful. Booth quotes a bit from “Faith Healing,” which is such a great poem, I decided to quote it in full here:

Slowly the women file to where he stands   

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly   

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,   

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care   

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,   

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer   

Directing God about this eye, that knee.   

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some   

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud   

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb   

And idiot child within them still survives   

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice   

At last calls them alone, that hands have come   

To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd   

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:   

By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps   

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make   

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.   

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,   

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above   

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

As an indictment of that particularly American form of religion, it is surprisingly perceptive. I spent time in the charismatic movement during my teens, and, while there was a lot I liked (for example the racial integration and openness to emotion), there was also a troubling culture surrounding the “healing” stuff that appealed to emotionally damaged women in particular, and also attracted creepy-ass guys as the “healers.” Not exclusively, obviously, but to an uncomfortable degree. The last stanza is particularly intriguing, with Larkin’s empathetic yet damning illumination of the all-too-easy switch from living a life of love to seeking a cure for being unloved. 

“Faith Healing” isn’t particularly snarky, but Larkin could be pure acid when he wanted to. One line that particularly caught my eye was from a letter to Anthony Thwaite, declining to review Robert Graves’ latest book. “[I]f he says publicly just once more that he has a large family to support, I shall write to the papers asking whose fault he thinks that is.”

Or how about this one? When he sent a donation to “Friends of Dove Cottage,” he was informed that he had been made a life member. He replied, “In fact I was similarly enrolled a few years ago, when I made a similar generous donation, as you so kindly put it, so I now have the distinction of being a life member twice over. I very much fear, however, that they will have to run concurrently.”

These are just a few of the delightfully witty lines in the book. Larkin was complex, to be sure; more accurately, he was human, with all the virtues and faults that come with humanity. Reading this book very much made me eager to dive more deeply into his poetry. Hardbacks of his Complete Poems are irritatingly expensive, so I will have to either watch for a bargain or make it a rare splurge. 

In any event, I can highly recommend James Booth’s biography for fans of poetry in general and Larkin in particular. 

***

I should note that one of the reasons I got into Larkin in the first place is because of Clive James. 

Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This was yet another of those books I picked up randomly off the new books shelf because it looked interesting. It was a good choice. 

Dr. Seuss presumably needs no introduction. Since 1937, his books - for kids but fun for grownups too - have been part of the American canon. I imagine even the most sheltered Fundies are aware of the subversive Cat in the Hat, and probably a few other characters. I would even go so far as to say that we of Gen X had our childhoods shaped by Seuss - and the Beginner Books imprint he pioneered. Although on a different level of reading, Seuss was my generation’s Harry Potter - and I would add that, like Millennials, our generation’s reading is partly responsible for the significant generation gap both generations have with many Boomers. 

Just to give a few examples, I grew up on The Lorax. Which, in a rational world, would be a thoroughly uncontroversial book. After all, natural resources ARE finite, and pollution DOES destroy things, and we should take action to conserve the earth. Except, here in 2019, one entire political party believes conservation is a liberal conspiracy, apparently. I cannot believe I live in such times. 

Likewise, The Sneetches shaped how I saw beliefs in racial and cultural superiority, and The Butter Battle Book brought “mutually assured destruction” to my mind at a young age. Looking back, in many ways, Dr. Seuss was shockingly “progressive” by the standards of our current age. 

This book is a fairly detailed biography, running in excess of 400 pages, plus extensive notes. It isn’t boring by any stretch, however. Brian Jay Jones hits the perfect balance between detail and narrative flow. Because Theodor Seuss Geisel lived a long and eventful life, there is a lot to tell. 

I’m not going to tell much of the story, because that is the point of the book, after all, and Jones is a far better biographer than I would be. There are, however, some interesting details that stood out. 

One is the progression that Geisel (and thus his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss) made over his lifetime. Giesel didn’t really hit it big as an author until the 1950s, when he was in his 40s, so he had quite a bit of a life before that. After a mediocre stint in college (he graduated but dropped out of grad school), he ended up working in advertising, while making a little on the side from his political cartoons. His whimsical drawings and verbal zingers kept him employed. During World War Two, he enlisted, and was paired with Frank Capra (and a few other names that would become big later: P. D. Eastman, Munro Leaf, as well as Chuck Jones and the usual suspects at the Warner Brothers animation studio) to produce propaganda films for the military. These films, the Private SNAFU series, are pretty dang funny, very Loony Tunes, and recognizably Seussian. (They are available on YouTube, if you want to check them out.) Geisel’s work on the documentary, Design For Death, would win him an Oscar. 

All this to get around to my main point on how Giesel changed over time. In his first book (And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street), he would use an unfortunate stereotype - which was also used in the propaganda films. His political cartoons, likewise, from his early era all too often use cheap jokes at the expense of the usual suspects of the time: African Americans, Asians, women, and children. These haven’t worn too well, as he would later admit. However, things started to change noticeably. Recently, one of his best political cartoons has been making the rounds of the internet:

As time went on, Geisel would become more consistently progressive in his politics. Although his books are not often overtly political (and are only “partisan” in an era when the very ideas of conservation or the common good are partisan issues), they do show his concern for the marginalized, for the environment, and for - dare I say it? - common sense. (More on the last one later.) There is a certain irony in the fact that Boomers bought Dr. Seuss’s books in vast numbers for their kids, not anticipating perhaps that they would undermine their own politics a generation later. 

Going back to near the beginning of the book, one interesting fact was that Geisel’s father, T. R., was a bit of an inventor of sorts (in addition to being, pre-Prohibition, a brewer.) He would, as the book puts it, solve simple tasks with “complicated-looking devices that would, to later eyes, appear...well, appropriately Seussian.

Also fun was the parallel between the early 2000s and another time when Americans did stupid stuff in reaction to European events. Anyone remember “Freedom Fries”? From that time when France urged caution in starting a couple of wars? (France was right, in case you hadn’t noticed…) Well, during World War One, the same nativism and xenophobia was turned against the Germans, and we had, rather than hamburgers, “Liberty Sandwiches.” For Geisel, as a German-American, he and his family received a good bit of prejudice during this time. 

Geisel had difficulty selling his first book, for quite a while. One of the common criticisms it received was that it had no moral. Furthermore, the narrator was not punished for making up a tall tale. Geisel complained about this, saying, “What’s wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at?” This all sounds kind of familiar, from my wife’s Fundie days. And yes, Elsie Dinsmore does get mentioned in this book. 

On a related note, Geisel believed - and advocated for - a then-revolutionary idea: that children were humans, and smarter than they were given credit for. Thus, they hated being talked down to, and saw through stupidity and condescension. In Geisel’s view, children were to be talked to directly, as absolute equals. 

[Side note here: the whole thrust of the Patriarchy and Fundamentalist movements is to restore rigid hierarchies, including that of parents over children. Gothard in particular emphasized that - and it applied to adult children too…]

How about another weird fact? One that I didn’t know, believe it or not. Did you know that Dr. Seuss invented the word “nerd”? It’s true. The word was first used in If I Ran The Zoo. It referred to a grouchy imaginary animal, but the word took on a life of its own, and within a year made a Newsweek article on changing slang. 

There is a lot more in the book that I could have quoted. Dr. Seuss was certainly quotable, despite his shyness on a stage. I referenced The Butter Battle Book above, and there is a quote from him about that which I think bears repeating. There was a surprising amount of controversy over the book, which caught Geisel off guard. He particularly resented the accusation that he was anti-military. 

“I’m not anti-military. I’m just anti-crazy.”

And that is exactly how I feel. Like Geisel, I acknowledge the need in our world for the good guys to have access to force to oppose the Hitlers of the world. And I support our military. But I am anti-crazy, and would like us to use a lot better judgment in how we pick wars. (See “freedom fries” above…) 

One final thing chronologically: near the end of Geisel’s life, the San Diego Museum of Art presented an exhibition of his work, from the cartoons to the illustrations to the more “serious” art he painted. The critics were largely savage, claiming that what Dr. Seuss did was not real art. 

This is, to put it frankly, bullshit. 

It may not be “traditional” art, but it is certainly art. Take a look at any of the books. The drawings are at least as much of the fun as the words - probably more. And they took plenty of work to get right. 

Back in 2015, we took one of our regular vacations to the San Diego area, and went to see an exhibit on Dr. Seuss at the San Diego History Museum (it features local history, and Geisel lived in nearby La Jolla for the second half of his life.) Included were some of his paintings, as well as the whimsical “animal heads” that used real antlers and so on with stuffed versions of his creatures. (He had a collection of these in his home - proof of either weird taste or a good sense of humor.) 

 Wow, the kids are a lot bigger now...

 

One of the more typically "Seussian" of his works. 

 These two are definitely more unusual - and weren't seen until after Geisel's death. 

I think they are actually not bad - he specifically intended them as tributes to the modern artists they resemble.

Brian Jay Jones has also written biographies of Jim Henson and George Lucas, which I am inclined to read in the future. While this one was a largely positive portrayal, it did include some of the skeletons as well, so it wasn’t a straight-up hagiography. I thought Jones struck good balances throughout, making the book informative and interesting. 

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

Source of book: Borrowed from my son (who is a serious tinkerer too).

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. The club has usually read along with the “One Book, One Bakersfield” project sponsored by our local library. Some years, this has been a bit boring - one theory is that books have been selected partly on the basis of which authors were willing to come out and speak at an event. This one, however, was not. I was unable to attend the event, but did read the book and discuss it at our club meeting. 

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this book. I was familiar with the rough outline of the story, but was worried it might fall into either the “isn’t Africa backward” genre or the “see, everyone can succeed if they just try” category. But this book didn’t go either of those directions. Rather, despite the use of a ghost writer (more or less), it really did tell a fascinating story - William Kamkwamba’s story. 

Kamkwamba came to fame after he built his own windmill generator – at age 14 - to bring electricity to his home. But that isn’t all that there is to the story. In fact, in some ways, it is just an incident in the broader arc. 

William starts the story with his earliest memories. He grew up in Malawi, the son of subsistence farmers. His parents had an interesting courtship story, which he tells in the first chapter. From there, they worked hard to survive and build a decent life. 

Disaster struck, however, in the form of a terrible drought and famine. This section of the book was horrifying and difficult to read. The descriptions of hunger and hopelessness, of people dying in the road, of children who starved to death and never returned to school, are the things of nightmares. It is almost surprising that William even survived it. 

There are certainly some things to understand about how the drought played out. First, it is a reminder of how fragile human existence can be. We forget that in modern first-world nations. We have the infrastructure to transport food, and the wealth to purchase it. For those who have neither, starvation is a real risk. Second, there is a contrast between the first drought (the bad one) and the second - and the difference was in the response of the government. In the first, a corrupt system denied the famine existed, sold food to other countries so the leaders could pocket the proceeds, and brutally punished those who complained. A change in leadership made a difference for the second drought. By proactively directing resources to the most vulnerable areas, a famine was avoided. It seems weird to have to say this, but humans are at their strongest when they look out for the weakest. A society or nation is only as strong as its most vulnerable point. Malawi lost tremendous ground during the first drought because of its failure to ensure that the victims of the famine survived. It literally took years - a decade even - for the communities affected to bounce back. And the promising lives lost were gone forever. 

The toll wasn’t just from deaths. The financial cost was enormous, as families sold everything they had, including seed corn, to avoid starvation. The resources of the whole community were devastated and took years to rebuild. 

Likewise, the cost to the children was incalculable. In the case of William, his chance at an education was lost for years. Honestly, had he not been “discovered” by someone with a global platform, he likely would never have finished his education. This was true for thousands of others who were not fortunate enough to get publicity. They just quietly were relegated to subsistence farming, with no chance at social mobility. 

This was another distressing reality brought to light in the book. Without the public infrastructure to provide a free public education, most children do not finish school. The entire country then suffers from a lack of educated leaders and innovators, and cannot advance. The cycle then feeds on itself. 

I was struck by some similarities to the effects of educational segregation here in the United States, as described in White Rage by Carol Anderson. (I read that concurrently with this book.) The United States lags other first world countries in education, in significant part because of its obsession with maintaining racial hierarchies and refusal to fund and support minority students. (Take a look at, say, Alabama, if you want to see true third-world education and poverty.) The US continues to shoot itself in the foot, too. As higher education costs have soared, many (most?) of my parents’ generation - who got free or very affordable college themselves - keep blaming my kids’ generation for student debt. The refusal to actually invest in education (and cull the exploding numbers of administrators) will increasingly lead to an under-educated population. And the US will fall further and further behind. (Also, keeping educated immigrants out - as in Stephen Miller’s push to severely cut back H-2B visas - will further cause educated and innovative immigrants to look elsewhere.) Hatred and xenophobia and racism hurt everyone. 

If I were to give my immediate impressions of the book, I would start with the compelling story of William’s life. Even if he had never come to unexpected fame, his story would be a good one. He is clearly an intelligent young man, with an ability to find solutions on a shoestring. How many more Williams are there in Malawi? In Africa? In America? How many of them will never have the chance to get an education, to survive childhood, or have access to the resources to make a better world? It is something worth considering. William Kawkwamba is above average, but not a once-in-a-lifetime genius. He’s someone who should, in all justice, have the chance to use his talents. And there are millions like him. We as a society and as a human race should be focused on ensuring that all of us have that chance. 

I rather enjoyed reading this one, and also the discussion we had regarding it. It is my understanding that there is a kids version too, which leaves out some of the more disturbing stuff, like William’s mom nearly dying of malaria and the dead bodies in the road. We have the full version, and I think it is fine for most kids, honestly. Kids don’t need to be protected from death and illness - they sure wouldn’t have been able to avoid it in an earlier era. I could see it making a good starting point for discussing a bunch of issues - from the importance of investment in the public sector, to the mechanics of making a generator. 

The Boys In The Boat by Daniel James Brown

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I recall that this book was recommended to me by a few different sources, which is how it ended up on my ever-lengthening reading list. It rose to the top, however, when my brother read it and praised it. Since he has good taste (except for that Dirk Pitt thing), I figured I had to read it. 

The Boys In The Boat is mostly about the nine American rowers, from the University of Washington, who won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. But it is also about one of the rowers in particular, Joe Rantz, who had a backstory that really did need to be made into a book. His rise from poverty and abandonment to become one of the most famous athletes of his time is a great story. The author interviewed Joe extensively before his death, as well as one of his daughters, who had absorbed the old stories and could recount her father’s words. 

While the story focuses on Joe, there are other memorable characters. The other “boys in the boat,” most of whom came from similarly impoverished backgrounds, are given a bit of time in the book. Other rowers from other schools and nations get mentions to the extent that they are interesting, and the history of competitive rowing itself is told briefly as needed. In addition, the rivalry of the great rowing coaches, Al Ulbrickson of Washington, and Ky Ebright of Cal, is a crucial part of the story, as is the genius of George Pocock, arguably the best maker of rowing shells of all time. 

Of necessity, the book also addresses the rise of Hitler, and the massive propaganda machine that was created to whitewash the Nazi experience for the benefit of the rest of the world. The book specifically looks at the role of actress and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, and her propaganda film of the Games. And also a good bit at Goebbels, of course. In 1936, the elimination of Jews was already starting, but this fact was carefully hidden behind the glossy facade. Within a few years, of course, the world would be on fire again, and Hitler’s atrocities would be laid bare before the world. 

Before reading this book, I will admit I was pretty ignorant of rowing. Other than, I guess, the fact that I own a kayak, and can paddle well enough to get around. But rowing as a sport is a good bit different. Particularly eight man crew, which involves perfect timing and technique, a coxswain to steer and keep time, and a 62 foot long boat. The speeds are pretty insane too, and watching a race is pretty exciting. Fortunately, the author assumes the reader needs a bit of a primer, and subtly works information into the book as needed. This is completely unobtrusive, and well explained. 

The story of Joe Rantz would make a book in itself. Joe was the younger of two sons, with a significant age gap between him and his brother. When he was four, his mother died. After living with an aunt for a while, then with his older brother, he returned to live with his father...and wicked stepmother. Actually, that is a whole can of worms right there. Soon after Joe’s older brother married one of a pair of twins, Joe’s dad married the other. Awkward. Stepmom Thula hated Joe, and kicked him out of the house at age 10. Literally. He had to beg his food and fend for himself. From age 14 on, Joe lived in an old house his dad abandoned, and supported himself through school. All while his dad, stepmom, and their kids were living across Puget Sound and ignoring him. 

Joe eventually had the chance to pay his way through University of Washington. He tried out for Crew in order to earn some scholarship money, and went on to become one of the best rowers Ulbrickson had seen. By his side through much of this was his eventual wife Joyce, who herself came from poverty and a dysfunctional family. They would be a source of stability and love for each other for over 60 years. 

Of necessity, the book recounts a number of important races over the course of three years. Fortunately, the author does an outstanding job of pacing the book and filling in other details so that it never gets monotonous. A race will be followed by a section on Nazi Germany, followed by a bit on one of the rowers, or the boat, or other interesting related topics. 

Rowing is one of those sports which has historically been an upper-class thing. Which is weird because it started (in its modern form) with Thames boatmen. However, the Etonian sorts took it over, and by the 1930s, it was mostly an Ivy League thing. But that was already starting to change. The West Coast rowers were either a mix of classes (in the case of Cal) or overwhelmingly blue collar (in the case of Washington), and they were starting a run of dominance over their East Coast rivals. This didn’t sit well with the Ivy Leaguers, and this came to a head right before the 1936 Olympics. Washington won the trials, which meant it had the right to represent the US in Berlin. However, due to the Depression, funds were short to assist with travel expenses. The runner up, the Pennsylvania Athletic Club, had plenty of cash. And a bigwig with them also sat on the US Olympic committee. Which announced after the race that the Washington crew would have to pay their own way. But, if they were too poor, then Penn could take their place…

It is inspiring that the $5000.00 in necessary funds was raised by mostly small donors back in Washington, allowing the boys to go. 

Another inspiring scene occurred when the Americans sang “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here” out of time with the Nazi marching during the opening parade. It was just one example of subtle pushback by the American athletes (including the legendary Jessie Owens) during the games. Within a few years, an army of the same sort of young American men would be marching into Berlin under very different circumstances. 

The race itself was thrilling. The Americans faced several seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Their “stroke oar,” Don Hume, was suffering from a severe case of pneumonia, bad enough that he was confined to bed for the week before, and passed out at the end of the first trial run. He was nearly non-responsive at the start of the gold medal race, and failed to respond to Moch’s instructions during - although he rowed by instinct. Finally, something snapped, and Moch was able to drag him along by eye contact. 

The other issue was every bit as serious. The course had six lanes, and they were nowhere near equal in difficulty. The inner two were calm and sheltered. The outer two were subject to wind and currents. Ulbrickson calculated that the advantage was about two boat lengths - a huge amount of difference. Through an opaque process which still has not been adequately explained, the German and Italian boats were assigned to the best lanes, while the Brits and Americans were given the worst. Particularly the Americans. 

So, in order to win the race - by a very fine margin - the Americans had to overcome a 2 length disadvantage AND do it with a gravely ill oarsman. And yet they did. That’s the quintessential American mythology, though, right? Blue collar boys fend of the trust fund babies, overcome huge obstacles, and shove it in Hitler’s face? Oh so very much yes. 

It was also kind of interesting what happened to the boys afterward. The 1930s were essentially the dawn of a new age in America, with the New Deal, affordable education, an explosion of technology, and rapid social mobility for some. (If you were white.) The blue collar boys in the book made good. Joe would study hard and get his degree in engineering, and then work for Boeing the rest of his career. Others would opt for medicine or law or business. With the exception of one who died early of lung cancer, they would live long and prosperous lives. And, in some cases, be instrumental in the cause of the war. Not in combat, though. Ironically, they were too big. Rowers even in the 1930s were over six feet - often by a good margin - and wouldn’t qualify for military service as a result. By the time the war broke out, most had degrees in areas that were needed on the homefront - particularly the engineers. Rantz and others would design and build aircraft and vehicles, for example. 

One exception to the height was Bobby Moch, the coxswain. He had to be short and small to get the job. A picture of the crew is amusing, because there are eight giants...and one tiny shrimp. (Moch was my size, so I get to tease a bit.) 

Moch would make good himself, leveraging a coaching job for MIT into admission to Harvard Law School. Moch did a good bit of appellate work, arguing and winning a case in front of the US Supreme Court. I tried to find the case, but was unable to in a reasonable amount of time. I could probably go borrow the Lexis account at the local law library, I guess. I did, however, find his name as counsel on a few US Court of Appeals cases. Hey, a short badass lawyer. Got to love that. Also, Moch found out from his parents just before leaving for Berlin that he was Jewish, and that his family had hidden that fact due to rampant antisemitism both in Germany and in the United States. Judging from the way the race went down (and Moch’s subsequent career), he had ice running through his veins. 

One final tidbit which I thought was interesting. The book takes a bit of a detour to mention two of the British rowing crew. The coxswain, Noel Duckworth, was another tiny badass. He would win honors in the war, due to his time as a POW, during which he saved quite a few lives. Oh, and he wasn’t a soldier - he was a chaplain who went along with the prisoners so they wouldn’t be shot. The other English rower was Ran Laurie, who was the father of Hugh Laurie. Which was kind of a cool connection. 

The Boys In The Boat is a thoroughly enjoyable book. Brown clearly spent hours interviewing dozens of people, and going through the correspondence between Joe Rantz and Joyce, which contained a lot of good information. Coming on the heels of our own visit to the Seattle area, I was able to envision where much of the story took place, although obviously things look a bit different now. The writing is excellent, particularly in the way it takes an arcane topic and makes it not just understandable, but compelling. Brown also centers the story in history: the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, the Dust Bowl, and the rapid westward shift of the center of American life. 

***

In the 1930s, rowing was a male domain. But now, women compete as well. Here is an exciting race from 2012. Not particularly the body language at the end. Six plus minutes of full body exertion takes it all out of them by the end. Insanely difficult work. 

Such A Strange Lady by Janet Hitchman

Source of book: I own this. 

My wife has outstanding taste in books, and never fails to find me great used books for various occasions, including Christmas of 2016, when she found this one. 

Such A Strange Lady is a biography - the very first written - of Dorothy L. Sayers. (The “L” was important to her - it was from her maternal ancestor Percival Leigh - one of the founders of Punch.) Most will know her, if at all, for her Lord Peter Wimsey murder mysteries, although the number of people I know who have heard of her is disappointingly small. Fewer still will know of her amazing feminist essays, collected as Are Women Human? And yes, you absolutely should read them. 

My history with Sayers starts with her short story “The Inspiration of Mr. Budd,” which I read for 7th or 8th grade literature. I was smitten, but didn’t really follow up on her at the time. Later, in law school, a good friend happened to bring Murder Must Advertise along to a law school conference. I borrowed it, and read it before we had to return to our respective coasts. (There is a reason I wasn’t an A+ law student. I cared...enough. But not enough to work that hard and give up reading for fun. Oh well, no real regrets.) 

So anyway, it was interesting to read more about her life. She was the child of a country clergyman - one who actually exemplified the Christian ethic, often giving away more of his modest income than he could afford to help the poor. He also was determined to give young Dorothy - an only child, and a bit peculiar - as good an education as a boy. She wasn’t exactly a model student, although she was obviously highly intelligent. She was also socially awkward, tall and big boned, louder than people thought she should be. She got through school fine, and managed to get into Oxford. She completed her courses there with moderate distinction. But she was given no degree - Oxford didn’t get those to women at the time. (She would eventually get her degree many years later, and Oxford would see the error of its ways after she left.) 

Sayers struggled after graduation to find her place in the world. She taught. And hated it. She wrote, but took a while to find success - which she did by writing genre fiction - the Lord Peter mysteries, which she felt were beneath her, but they paid the bills. She worked for a while in advertising, where she was actually pretty good. Although most of us are too young (and in my case too American) to remember it, there was a fantastically successful campaign for Colman’s Mustard, featuring the fictional adventures of the “Mustard Club.” While the idea wasn’t hers, she ended up writing most of the copy. And, she later used her experiences in Murder Must Advertise.

Later, Sayers would return to her more scholarly roots, with a series of plays (performed mostly on radio) with religious themes, several books on theology and religion, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Predictably, this last drew some undeserved derision - how could a mere writer of mystery novels attempt a translation. Sayers reminded the critics that long before she was a writer of fiction, she was a scholar - and the fiction served to pay her bills. 

Sayers had little luck in love, alas. She had a child out of wedlock. The father is unknown to this day - she was extremely private about it. She gave the boy her name, although she outsourced the raising for the most part. She later married a flaky sort, who slept around on her, and drank. They seemed to get along after a fashion, although she didn’t exactly mourn his death openly. (To be honest, I wonder if she was on the Autism spectrum. It would make sense of many things about her. As the author puts it about her childhood, “Like the cat, an animal she dearly loved, she tolerated, rather than embraced, civilization.”)  

There are some highly interesting things in this short book. First is the fact that the author had to make do with a relative minimum of information. Her family refused to cooperate at all, leading to an absolutely fantastic line in the introduction:

“I must absolve from any errors Miss Sayers’ family, close friends, and executors, from whom I had no assistance whatsoever.”

I also must quote a few things regarding the religious plays. During World War Two, Sayers wrote a radio production for the BBC on the life of Christ. It was a multi-part series, to be performed by actors (horrors!) and in modern English. Predictably, this was met with great pearl clutching by the Fundies of 1940s British society, and much pressure was put on the BBC to cancel it. This was particularly silly as Sayers wrote a rather respectful play, in keeping with her devout beliefs - but also her modern artistic sensibilities. As with modern Fundie boycott campaigns, this rather backfired. The BBC stood firm, and the campaign gave free publicity to Sayers. As she put it in her tributes to the actors and producers, with her characteristic wit:

It is moreover irresistibly tempting (though is it kind or Christian?) to mention the Lord’s Day Observance Society and the Protestant Truth Society, who so obligingly did all our publicity for us at, I fear, considerable expense to themselves. Without their efforts, the plays might have slipped by with comparatively little notice, being given at an hour inconvenient for grown-up listening. These doughty opponents secured for us a large increase in our adult audience and thus enabled the political and theological issues in the most important part of the story to be treated with more breadth and pungency than might otherwise have seemed justifiable...The irony of the situation is, however, not of my making--it is part of the universal comedy. Let us record the plain fact: the opposition did us good service; let our gratitude for that go where all gratitude is due. 

Also fascinating to me regarding the plays is her nuanced take on one of the underrated characters in the Gospels: Judas Iscariot. To portray him as a cartoon villain is indefensible in my mind. Sayers wrote about this to her producer when the project was in progress. 

Judas is an insoluble riddle. He can’t have been awful from the start, or Christ would never have called him. I mean, one can’t suppose that He deliberately chose a traitor in order to get Himself betrayed--that savours too much of the agent provocateur, and isn’t the sort of thing one would expect of any decent man, let alone of any decent God--to do. And He can’t have been so stupid as to have been taken in by an obviously bad hat;--quite apart from any doctrinal assumptions. He was far too good a psychologist. Judas must have been a case of corruptio optima pessima; but what corrupted him? Disappointment at finding that the earthly kingdom wasn’t coming along? or defeatism, feeling that the war was lost, and one had better make terms quickly? Or just (as the Gospels seem rather unconvincingly to suggest) money and alarm for his own interests? If we can get a coherent Judas we can probably get a coherent plot.

I have wondered along the same lines since my youth. It is so refreshing to hear Sayers talk of the same questions. In fact, I must say that whenever I read her writing, I find gems like this, where she understands the nuance and asks the hard questions. It was unsurprising to discover that she flirted with agnosticism in her teens and college years, before finding a more mystical and complex version of faith. 

For those who haven’t discovered Sayers, she is an underrated writer and thinker. She is also a member of my Fantasy Dinner Party. (You have one of those, right? Past and present people you would invite to the greatest dinner party of all time?) Sayers has been on my list for decades, and I still think she would be fantastic. 

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

Source of book: I own this.

 

The history of beliefs about the age of the earth make for an interesting pattern. Every culture has its own origin tales and creation stories. My eldest had to read a bunch of them for literature last year, in fact, and found them fascinating. While not about creation myths exclusively, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces paints a fascinating picture of the similarities and their likely origin in the human psyche. After all, we have an innate need to understand our origins - and perhaps even more so, to understand our purpose. To this end, we write origin stories.

The evidence is strong that the ancients didn’t view truth as primarily empirical data. This is why even a good historian such as Herodotus places obviously fictional scenes in his histories. The point wasn’t so much “accuracy” as we moderns would understand it, but the narrative itself. The stories have meaning, and that meaning isn’t primarily literal. What a war means to the people who tells of it therefore will tend to win out over truth in many cases. (See the Lost Cause Myth, for a modern American example.) One can easily draw an analogy to creation myths as well. They are told, not so much for their scientific accuracy, but because they make a point that is meaningful to the culture in which they are told. Thus, even within a culture, the stories are not expected to be literally, factually true, but that they tell a truth about human existence.

Let me give an example: the kids and I have been touring the Western national parks over the last few years. The American Southwest is one of the last places in our nation where Native American historical sites have been preserved, along with the cultures which birthed them. Many of the sites have taken the time to find storytellers of the old myths, and the videos which resulted are fascinating. (In particular, Mesa Verde National Park has an extensive collection on video and in print on the origin myths told past and present by the builders of the Ancestral Pueblo civilization and their descendents.)

But here is the thing: as far as I can tell, most of the storytellers don’t believe that humans literally crawled out of a hole in the ground from the underworld. To make that literal idea the point of the myth is silly - and cheapens it. It’s like the person who tries to reduce a symphony to the mathematical calculation of the frequencies.

This is why, in my view, ancient peoples were not as wedded to our modern understanding of factual truth like we are. While the Genesis creation stories (and yes, there are two contradictory stories in the first two chapters) may reflect a genuine Ancient Near East belief about creation and the structure of the universe, I am not necessarily convinced that the editors who assembled the Old Testament during and after the exile believed every word to be factual truth. In fact, I think they would have given a truly awkward look at someone who insisted on that.

Having been raised Fundamentalist (in the cultural sense as well as the doctrinal sense), it was rather a surprise to me to discover a number of years ago that a literal reading of Genesis is actually a modern affectation, and most assuredly NOT the historical view of the Church. None less than St. Augustine warned against Christians making total fools of themselves by asserting literal interpretations that conflicted with scientific discoveries.

Well, what happened then? As the Middle Ages gave way to the so-called Modern era, a new approach to science started to take hold. In contrast to the Ancient Greek approach - abstract thought rather than messy experimentation and testing - a new scientific method based on observation, objectivity, and reproducible experiments became the norm. Along with that came a belief in reason rather than dogma. We call this (and related developments) The Enlightenment. While there is evidence that The Enlightenment was a mixed bag, like any human school of thought, it certainly changed the world, in many ways for the better.

The problem came when theologians decided to approach the ancient text of the Bible using Enlightenment tools. Instead of seeing the creation myths as holding spiritual and poetic truths, they……….did math.

While he wasn’t the first, James Ussher was the one who most definitely fixed the date of creation. (In case you wondered, it was the year 4004 BCE, on Monday, October 23, at precisely 9:00 AM. God is apparently not a morning person.) Yeah, feel free to laugh a bit at the pseudo-precision.

Sadly, Ussher’s view soon became the dominant belief in “Christian” Europe and America - displacing the older viewpoint.

It is with this background that Simon Winchester begins his story of one of the lesser-known names in modern science: William Smith, the father of English geology.

Smith was born in humble circumstances, but had a sharp mind for both figures and practical engineering. He embarked on a successful career as an engineer, focusing on drainage, coal mining, and canals. As a result, he came in direct contact with the various strata of rock underlying England. He was astute enough to notice that the rocks were always in the same order, regardless of where along the uplift band you were, and the fossils found in those rocks were predictable based on the stratum they were found in.

This ended up being the foundation on which the science of geology would rest. Smith’s work laid the foundation for Charles Lyell’s revolutionary theories, which in turn led to Darwin, and so on.

Smith is best known for his map - the one of the title - which is considered the first geologic map ever created. He spent 15 years working on it - which mean many, many miles of walking throughout England, taking samples, and comparing them. No drones or satellites were at his disposal, and the railroads and canals didn’t reach most of the places he needed to visit. So it was either an expensive horse-drawn conveyance, or, more often, his feet.

Smith’s story is a bit tragic in a way, however. Because he was a commoner, he was disrespected by many of the geologists of his day - who were part of the aristocracy. He was denied membership in the official society. But worse was the fact that his maps were brazenly plagiarized, undercutting his sales, and keeping him in relative obscurity. A combination of this and some poor financial decisions eventually led him to debtor’s prison.

Fortunately, after that, his life improved. He was recognized by the next generation of geologists as an important figure. His aristocratic rivals fell out of favor, and he was eventually given a pension by the Society so he could live out his twilight years in comfort.

As usual, Simon Winchester tells a compelling story, with just enough background information mixed in with the biographical to paint a complete picture. His writing is also rather good, adding to the experience, and making the arcane details interesting.

One observation in the book really struck me. In describing Smith’s humble background, but also his access to education - a relatively new thing in the 18th Century - he points out an argument which is still being used today by the privileged classes.

No matter the outcry that allowing the working classes to become educated was to debauch them and tempt them to abandon the manual labors for which they were best suited. “Nineteen in twenty of the species were designed by nature for trade and manufacture,” said a writer in The Grub-Street Journal at the time of Smith’s birth. “To take them off to read books is the way to do them harm, to make them not wiser or better, but impertinent, troublesome and factious.”

This was, of course, the argument during the Jim Crow era for why African Americans shouldn’t be educated at public expense. And it still continues today - I hear it from white right-wingers as an argument against diversity programs for higher education, and in the dismissive “they should be working another job if they have time to have sex” trope. At the heart, there is a belief that those at the lower strata of society should just accept their lot, their oppression, and be grateful that the upper class doesn’t starve them to death. Perhaps that is why education makes people “uppity”...

Winchester also makes a statement that really resonates with me. My first real break with my Fundamentalist upbringing occurred while I was still a child, and first understood the distances of stars. As we have been able to calculate stellar distances, the size of the universe has grown dramatically. (For how we calculate these distances, see How Old Is The Universe? by David Weintraub.) From there, it was easy to pivot to geology. In the American Southwest, the strata are pretty easy to see - as are the fossils. It is unmistakable that sediments have layers, and that they occur in particular orders. And that the fossils are consistent throughout the world. Here is Winchester on the revolutionary meaning of this discovery.

For the first time the earth had a provable history, a written record that paid no heed or obeisance to religious teaching and dogma, that declared its independence from the kind of faith that is no more than the blind acceptance of absurdity.

The blind acceptance of absurdity - and that is what so much of Evangelicalism is about these days. And not just regarding science. Whether it is the belief in the congenital inferiority of women, the persecution of sexual minorities, or vicious tribalism, to be Evangelical is to, of necessity, have faith that is blind acceptance of the absurd.

Here is St. Augustine, in words which ring true today:

It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are.

   

The more things change…

Before creating the map, Smith intended to write a book. For various reasons, this never happened. (Which is probably a good thing. While Smith was brilliant in many ways, his writing was boring as heck.) I mention this in part because the prospectus contained this Alexander Pope epigram:

All Nature is but Art Unknown to Thee.

All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see.

While there are a number of secondary characters in the book who played important roles in the story, there are two I specifically wanted to mention. First is Smith’s archrival, George Bellas Greenough, who formed a perfect foil for Smith. Greenough was of the old school, where geology (and science in general) was meant to be done by thinking and writing, not field work. That sort of thing was for the common laborers. Like Smith. It was Greenough who plagiarized Smith’s work, and who kept Smith out of the Geological Society for decades. It wasn’t until he lost his grip on power that Smith was able to be recognized. A great line about Greenough was that he was thought to have a second-rate mind but first-rate connections.

The second character is that of Sir Joseph Banks, a man who is so inseparable from the great age of discovery and the English scientific establishment. As always, he comes across in this book as remarkably generous and egalitarian. I strongly recommend reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes for more on this extraordinary man.

One final word, on this book. I really enjoyed the chapter where Winchester tells of his own experience as a child, walking from school down to the beach, where he discovered a fossil. (To his regret, he lost it at some point before adulthood, and was never successful at finding one as perfect as that one.) It is clear that Winchester still has that sense of wonder - and it really comes through in his writing.

Fortunately, Winchester has written quite a few books, so I expect I will be enjoying his writing for years to come.

***

A few fossils from our perambulations:

This is from Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas: it is part of the Permian reef which also contains Carlsbad Caverns.

Cenozoic era fossil at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon.