Kenneth M. Cameron's Blog: Frightned Man

Have you read Miss Read? If not, and you like cozies, rush right out and buy one of the Thrush Green books (Thrush Green will be in the title), although if you like cozies, I suspect you already know her.

If not, and you hate cozies, read no further. I'd have said that I'm a cozy-disliker, but in fact I get secret cravings for Miss Read, find her the perfect companion when I'm sick in bed.

"Miss Read" is a pseudonym, of course (clever - almost as good as Miss Book) of an Englishwoman of enormous ability (in a narrow compass) who has been writing since at least the 1980s. At first encounter, her books seem simple and sweet, as cozies should be. The Thrush Greens and others are in fact series, with the same characters continuing sometimes into death, and the same tone and subject matter. But if you read at all critically (but should you read a cozy critically?), after one or two you begin to notice recurrences: e.g., everybody's white. Well, fair enough, you say; England was once pretty much all white. And you notice that everybody who ranks as a character is middle class, except for the odd servant, and all but one of them live down the hill in another village. And, as the books are illustrated and you can't help looking at the illustrations, you notice that all the women wear skirts and all the men (servants excepted) wear tweed jackets and ties, apparently all the time. Even in bed, maybe. And hats, real hats like fedoras, except the servants, who wear cloth caps.

But the women are far more important than the men; in fact the men, except for the local clergyman, a fine character, are almost marginal. And most characters seem to be late middle-aged or older.

Erotic love is unknown. ("No sex, please, we're British.") New marriages are known, but mostly post-menopausal; local gossips said of one such marriage, "At least there won't be children," so there's a sub rosa assumption of sex, but nothing flamboyant (think of the newlyweds as your parents). In one of the books, a young widow with a child arrived; the book's main question was which much older man would get her; one did; and then a baby appeared between books and was kept offstage until old enough to talk like an adult.

Thrush Green is located in the Cotswolds, a beautiful part of England and now one of the more popular for punters' second homes. But there are none of those in Thrush Green, just as there is no corner store run by a Pakistani family, which at one period (the 60s through the 80s?) was a staple of small English villages. In fact, as you read you come to see - think of the skirts and the jackets and ties - that the books aren't quite like now or even like recently in several ways. No new technology, for one; no football yobs; no terrorism; no Diana; no Rupert Murdoch; no Scottish or Welsh referenda, no IRA, no divorcing royals. But there wouldn't be in a cozy, would there?

But Miss Read is better and subtler than that. The world of Thrush Green is not simply not the world of our now; it is not even the world of Miss Read's now in the 1980s and 90s. It is the world of the 1930s.

So, a nostalgia for things as they were (and should still be?), from sexual propriety to classism to dress codes to, above all, behavior. Everybody, with a few clear exceptions, is nice. Which is exactly the way England was in the 1930s, so long as you were white, well-off, native-born, Christian, middle-aged, repressed...

There's an interesting essay on Literary Hub, "Against Amazon: Seven Arguments, One Manifesto," by Jorge Carrion. It's more venting than manifesto, but deeply human and obviously deeply felt. It's an argument for books and bookstores and against the speed-driven, impersonal, robotic likes of Amazon.

Need I say that I love bookstores? Not the huge ones with the fake coziness of seating arrangements and coffee shops, but real ones with a real, probably not rich, owner somewhere on the premises. There used to be a wonderful such bookstore in Baltimore, the Peabody, which even sold beer you could drink as you browsed. In Rochester, NY, where I grew up, there was, near the Eastman School of Music, a one-room bookstore run by Mr Weiss - I knew him for years, and he was never anything but Mr Weiss - who knew books and book people, and who would also let a very young buyer buy a ten-dollar book on time. When young, I collected first editions of Edna St. Vincent Millay and collections of 1920s poetry. He learned to save such books for me. I got over that interest and finally gave the collection to a university, but I moved on to fishing books and, whenever I returned home, checked in with him. The last time, in his old age, he was closing the store, but he disappeared into the cellar and returned with a box, saying he had bought it once upon a time and forgotten it. So we opened it together, and it contained a dozen fishing books, some of them relatively rare ones from the early 19th century. The prices that he had paid for them in the 1940s were penciled inside them - 4 and 5 dollars. I asked him what his prices were now (in the 1980s). "You've been a good customer. Those are the prices for you." He wouldn't be dissuaded. He said something about their going to somebody who would take care of them. I took most of them and still have them.

That was what a bookstore should be. And a bookstore owner.

Carrion talks about the smell of actual books; this is especially true of old books. And the feel - the weight in the hand, the texture of the paper. These are appeals to our human senses, appeals that satisfy beyond same-day delivery or lower price, beyond Kindle convenience.

I read this week that audio-book sales are up among under-35 buyers, and some publisher is going exclusively to audio. This to me is ominous - the threat of a world with fiction but without books. Voices but no literacy. Could we bear a world in which nobody could read because machines would do it for us? Some Silicon
I hear something on that score and I think of Mr Weiss, who loved books so much that he spent his life helping other people love them. Real books.

I think I'm with Carrion in wishing that Amazon's influence were less pervasive, less successful. We need the humanity of the real book, which has odor, heft, texture, wisdom - just like another human being.

Because Endeavour are re-publishing seven or eight novels I wrote under the pseudonym George Bartram in the early seventies and eighties, I am re-reading the books to make sure there are no howlers I missed the first time around. (Why a pseudonym? Because the same publisher had bought my first two books - Our Jo, a carefully researched historical novel, and Fair Game, a thriller - and they said that they couldn't publish two such different books by the same apparent author. I objected that the two books had in fact been written by the same real author but I lost, so a pseudonym it was to be. I wanted something like Zack Cohen or Anaxemander Parlucci, but they insisted that it had to be nicely Anglo-Saxon (and by implication white and gentile), so I did a mashup of the names of two of our cats and got George Bartram.) Thus, I'm re-reading a book called White Peril by one George Bartram, who was my clone. Or is it avatar?

White Peril was written just after the resignation of Richard Nixon for abusing his power and longer after the resignation of his original vice-president for having had a hand in the till. By the time it was all over and we could see how disgraceful and how amoral that crowd had been, I was, like much of the country, fed up. The clincher for me was the disgraced vice-president's announcement that he was going to write a thriller - my genre, cynically cheapened beyond what even I was doing.

My response was to write a satire, as I thought it. I had a lot of anger, and, re-reading it, I realize that it shows. The book doesn't work as a satire, however; it is in fact a parody. The plot is a put-down of a corrupt presidency, but what comes across to me now is a parody of the Fu Manchu novels and those of John Buchan, and the deep racism of both. Clearly, racism was my subject - still is sometimes - and especially that kind of British racism - the "Nordic," white, "manly," upper-class disdain for "lower races" and "inferior peoples" that enables guiltless imperialism. (What we now call white supremacy.) Not a bad idea, but it missed Nixon & Co. by a mile.

The book is pretty funny, nonetheless - IF you've read the Fu Manchus and the Buchans. (Author's big mistake - most people then hadn't, even fewer now.) I have a writer friend who still quotes passages from it and laughs his buns off. However, comedy, as my agent told me decades ago, is seldom wanted by publishers and seldom sells. As it was, White Peril had what must have been the shortest print run and the shortest bookstore life of any book that year. It got no reviews. (This in the days when every hick-town newspaper had a reviewer and everything got reviews.) It's also too long and too one-note.
I'm just as happy, nonetheless, to see it emerge again. Racism hasn't faded as a subject, to be sure, and parody/satire is more appropriate to it than it used to be. The title may not signal comedy as it once did, the old expression "yellow peril" having been a racist tag for everybody east of India but now faded. I suspect, too, that at best White Peril could now be read as a period piece, and the quotation from John Dean, Nixon's lawyer, after the title page will probably ring no bells whatsoever.

The moral? Perhaps something about avoiding comedy, something about being sure you're aiming at the right target, something about reining in anger. But also something about finding in old age that what you wrote when young was not as bad as you feared.

Corrective,11/19/2017: White Peril will not be re-published, for pretty much the reasons I give above: nobody will get it, and the parody of racism will come across as racism. KMC

When I signed on to this after years of silence, I was presented with what seemed an endless list of books to rate. I gave a number of what I suppose are standards a 1 for what turn out to be different reasons. I've already talked about GWTW; the others I can remember - Huckleberry Finn, The Old Man and the Sea - were given so low a rating because of their authors' betrayal of their craft. This is difficult territory: I also would give Wagner a 1 because of his anti-Semitism, which makes little critical sense because he didn't write anti-Semitic music - did he? (Many people find the Ring cycle anti-Semitic; Wagner himself wrote that Mendelsohn wrote "Jewish music," which is certainly anti-Semitic and certainly nonsense.)

The rating of 1 makes possible the rating of 5, which I also sprinkled fairly widely through the list (George Eliot, twice; Jane Austen two or three times). No bottom, no top.

I think that Huckleberry Finn is three-quarters of a masterpiece - two great characters, the myth of the journey, the river, those sharp and sometimes shocking pictures of towns and people, above all the courage of Jim and of Huck's helping of Jim. But for whatever reason (his wife's horror is the usual culprit) Twain chickened out and put that stupid Tom Sawyer ending on the book, reducing what had come before to mush and making what had come before something to be apologized for. So, for a great writer, a 1 for lacking faith in his own work.

The Old Man and the Sea got its 1 for a different reason. I revere Hemingway's early work: he revolutionized American prose style; he gave new form and possibility to the novel; he wrote stories that were so clean and concise that they were almost poems. Then he got famous and rich and, after about 1932, more and more a (by implication) large ego who loved himself in his writing. The difference between the author and his heroes blurred; his writing got flaccid and lost the concision of the earlier work. By the end of WW 2, he wrote one of the worst books ever to see print, Across the River and into the Woods, full of self-pity and self-praise and obese prose that was a parody of his early style. Some years later, he published The Old Man and the Sea (first in Life magazine, as I remember, with a glamorous portrait of Hemingway on the cover). In his best years, this novel would have been a brilliant, spare short story; now it was a novel in which the action is slim, the spinning-out long, the content almost relentlessly symbolic (great old author writes masterpiece, critics tear and devour it but he brings the thing home courageously). As with Twain, a great writer with a great record should do better: the better you get, the higher the bar.
So, a 1.
No 1, no 5.

Black lives matter more than white fiction.

Yes, I gave Gone with the Wind a 1 on GoodReads. The reason? They didn't have a zero.
GWTW is fake history and white propaganda written at a time when the "Lost Cause Myth" went unchallenged. It gives the South a fake-Brit aristocracy of manners and Oxbridge learning; it ignores the underpinning of those pretentions to elegance - slavery. The ante bellum Southern upper class kept itself well-off at the expense of the blood and sweat of their slaves.

Read The Half Not Told. Read John Hope Franklin. Read Eric Foner. Read James Baldwin. Read The Wind Done Gone. Read The Underground Railway.