What I'm reading: Me
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
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
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