My short story “If Mother Goes to the Penitentiary” is in Issue 4 of Bone Parade. Click on this link:
https://boneparade.com/2017/01/13/if-mother-goes-to-the-penitentiary-allen-kopp/
Tag: Allen Kopp
Barton Fink ~ A Capsule Movie Review
Barton Fink ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
Things are all balled up at the head office. Can it really be twenty-six years since the Coen brothers’ brilliant dark comedy Barton Fink first came out? I watched it again this week and liked it just as much as the first time I saw it on the movie screen.
Barton Fink (played by John Turturro) is a fuzzy-haired, bespectacled, New York, Jewish writer. He is a serious playwright who wants to create a “new, living theatre” extolling the common man. He has a hit play on Broadway. With his success comes new opportunities; his agent persuades him to go to Hollywood to write for the movies where he can make the big money he needs to continue writing his plays.
Hollywood for Barton is a vision of hell. He is installed in a seedy, seemingly empty hotel where everything is a little “off.” The fawning desk clerk named Chet appears to be the only employee at the hotel, except for the comatose elevator operator named Pete. “Have you read the Bible?” Barton asks Pete at one point in the story. “The Holy Bible?” Pete asks. “Yeah, I’ve read it. I’ve heard about it anyway.”
The wallpaper in Barton’s room on the sixth floor is peeling off from the Los Angeles heat. There’s a mosquito that buzzes around Barton’s head while he’s sleeping and it bites him on the face. (“We don’t have mosquitoes here,” someone tells him. “This is the desert. Mosquitoes live in swamps.”) The room is so quiet that he hears sounds coming from the room next door. It sounds like a man alternately laughing and crying in a distressed way. Barton calls down to Chet and politely complains. When the man next door finds out that Barton has complained about his noise, he confronts Barton. This is where Barton meets “Charlie Meadows” (John Goodman), the folksy and friendly insurance salesman (he says) who, we learn, is not really who or what he appears to be.
Barton’s problems with his hotel accommodations are nothing compared to the problems he has with the studio, Capitol Pictures, that employs him as a writer. His first assignment is to write a “wrestling picture for Wallace Beery.” He is completely out of his element here. He doesn’t go the movies, he says, and knows nothing about wrestling pictures. He doesn’t even know how to begin.
When Barton is visiting the studio one day, he runs into a writer named Bill Mayhew, vomiting his guts out in the men’s room. Barton discovers right away that this man is none other than the great writer W. P. Mayhew. “You are the greatest novelist of our time,” Barton gushes. “Why, thank you, son!” Mayhew drawls. He’s from Mississippi, don’t you know, and his character is obviously a take-off on the great American writer William Faulkner, who did, for a time, bastardize his great gift to write for the movies. Bill Mayhew is a terrible lush, but charming, and invites Barton to drop by his bungalow at the studio later in the day, where he will give Barton some pointers about writing a wrestling picture. When Barton arrives to meet with Mayhew, he (Mayhew) is in a drunken rage and can’t come to the door. Barton speaks instead to Audrey, Mayhew’s secretary. She is a Blanche Dubois-type character with a Southern accent. When Barton, who is lonely and knows nobody in Hollywood, asks Audrey to go out with him, she confides that she and W. P. Mayhew are “in love.”
Barton remains stymied with his script. He is “blocked,” he says. He must present an outline to the studio head. He doesn’t know what to do because he has written nothing. On the night before his meeting to present his outline, he is frantic and has no one to turn to, so he calls Bill Mayhew for some emergency advice. Mayhew is indisposed, Audrey says, and cannot come to the phone. When Barton tells her the predicament he is in, she agrees to come to his hotel room and try to help him with his script. “There’s nothing to writing a wrestling picture,” she says. Barton is appalled to learn that Audrey has done most of Mayhew’s writing in recent years, including his novels, because Mayhew has been too out of it with drink to do productive work. Audrey gives Barton a few suggestions for his script and then they kiss and end up together in bed. Fade out.
When Barton wakes up in the morning, Audrey is dead in the bed beside him, apparently stabbed many times in the chest. Barton is terrified. He knows he didn’t kill her, but he doesn’t know who did. Not knowing who else to turn to, he goes to the room next door and enlists the aid of Charlie Meadows. Charlie is sympathetic and, after helping to calm Barton down, disposes of Audrey’s body. All right, the body is gone, but the mattress is soaked with blood. What will Barton do about that?
Charlie has to leave town for a few days but will be back. He tells Barton to stay in his room and not talk to anybody. He asks Barton to take care of a box for him until he comes back. We don’t know what’s in the box—we never know—but Barton agrees to grant this little favor. The box is just about big enough to hold a human head.
When two police officers show up at Barton’s hotel, they are looking for Charlie Meadows. In a rapid-fire exchange of dialogue, they tell Barton that Charlie Meadows’ real name is Karl “Madman” Mundt. He’s a serial killer with a whole string of killings in his wake. Barton knows then who really killed Audrey.
In the last scene, Barton is seen sitting on a California beach, having escaped an inferno (part of the hell that he’s been in since he came to Hollywood?) at his hotel that Charlie Meadows/Karl Mundt set. He is carrying the box that Mundt asked him to safeguard. A girl comes along wearing a modest bathing suit. He tells her she is very beautiful and she blushes. He asks her if she is in pictures and she says, “Don’t be silly!” She sits down several feet away from Barton, facing the ocean, and raises her right hand to shade her eyes as she looks out to sea. The image that Barton sees of the girl is the picture he has been looking at the whole time on the wall above his writing desk in his hotel room. We know then how unhinged Barton has become. Does the girl really exist, except in his mind?
Few movies come along that are as memorable, inventive, and as much fun to watch as Barton Fink. The dialogue is a pleasure to hear (especially the exchange that Barton has in the lobby of his hotel with two hardboiled L.A. police officers), the photography and period sets are perfect, and the music score by Carter Burwell is beautiful and mysterious. One of my all-time favorite movies.
Everything is all balled up at the head office. By the end of the movie, we understand the significance of this statement.
Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp
Hidden Figures ~ A Capsule Movie Review
Hidden Figures ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
Hidden Figures is a story about breaking barriers that is, at least in part, based on fact. It’s 1961 and the “space race” between the United States and Russia is underway. Russia has put a spy satellite into orbit around the earth, giving Americans a feeling of unease, and Russia is the first to put a man (Yuri Gagarin) into space. As Al Harrison (played by Kevin Costner), the big boss at NASA says, “we (meaning the United States) have come in second in a two-man race.” This state of affairs puts a lot of pressure on the American space program and forces NASA to work its employees mercilessly.
Three black woman named Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan are new employees at NASA. Each of them is accomplished in her own way. Katherine Goble (played by Taraji P. Henson) has been a math prodigy since she was a small child. It takes a lot of calculating to launch a rocket into space and bring it safely down again. Katherine is more adept at the calculations than most of her male counterparts. She is, of course, underestimated because of her gender and her race. This is 1961, remember, so black people can’t use the same coffee pot as the white people, not to mention toilets and drinking fountains. Al Harrison seems a cold and forbidding boss, but as he sees how capable Katherine is, he develops a grudging admiration for her and becomes, in a way, her mentor. When Katherine wants to attend all-male briefings to better understand what is going on with swiftly implemented changes, she is told there is no protocol for a woman to attend briefings. “There is no protocol to put a man into orbit around the earth, either,” she says.
Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer, who won an Oscar playing a maid in The Help) is mechanically inclined. As a new employee at NASA, she heads up a group of black female employees, but she is stonewalled when she tries to get the pay and title of supervisor. (This slight is probably more about her race than her anything else.) When NASA installs a mainframe computer that takes up an entire room, Dorothy is the only person who seems to know how to get it going.
Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monáe) is only an adjunct to her male counterparts, but she longs to be NASA’s first black female engineer. She lacks a few classes, though, to even qualify. She can pick up the classes she needs at a school near her home, but she’s not allowed to attend because it’s an all-white school and she’s black. Having no intention of being thwarted, she petitions the court to bend the rules a little bit to allow her to get the classes she needs. She finesses a white judge and he rules in her favor.
After being out-classed by the Russians at the beginning of the space race, the American space program finally finds its legs and does some amazing things, including putting a man, Alan Shepard, into space and putting another man, John Glenn, into orbit around the earth. At the end of Hidden Figures, when Katherine Goble is asked if the seemingly impossible goal of putting a man on the moon can be achieved by the end of the 1960s, she says with confidence, “We’re already there.” To her it’s the next barrier to be broken in a long line of them to come.
Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp
Perfidia ~ A Capsule Book Review
Perfidia ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
Writer James Ellroy is unapologetically politically un-correct. If you are offended by racial slurs and blunt sex talk, he is not the writer you should be reading. He manages to insult almost every ethnic and niche group. He gets away with it, it is assumed, because all his novels are set in the not-too-distant American past, where racial prejudice and racial slurs were much more a part of everyday discourse than they are now. “If you’re looking for political correctness,” Mr. Ellroy says, “go someplace else.”
His big (almost 700 pages) novel Perfidia (a Spanish word meaning betrayal or treachery) is set in Los Angeles in the days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. With all those Americans dead in Hawaii and with the country now at war, fear and unease—and in some cases, hysteria—are the order of the day. The west coast of California seems the logical place that the frighteningly aggressive “Japs” will attack next. And those mandatory blackouts don’t do anything to ease peoples’ fears, either. (Imagine moving through a big city at night with all the lights turned off.)
The Japanese people in the Los Angeles area are being rounded up, no matter how innocent or blameless they are. Their property is being confiscated and they are being housed in “internment” camps. Americans are so anti-Japanese because of Pearl Harbor that they want to kill or at least defile almost every Asian they see. (Most people can’t tell the Japanese from other Asians). It’s in this atmosphere of fear and distrust that Perfidia is set.
Dr. Hideo Ashida is an Americanized Japanese. He is a brilliant forensic chemist employed by the Los Angeles Police Department. When all the Japanese people on the city payroll are canned just because of their ethnic background, Dr. Ashida manages to hold onto his job because he is so good at solving crimes. (He is, of course, called Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto, but he seems impervious to insult.) When he is out in public in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, people call him names, spit on him and, in some cases, threaten him. The police department assigns bodyguards to keep him safe.
Dr. Ashida has what he believes is a “shameful” secret. In the world that he inhabits of hyper-masculine, crime-fighting alpha-males, he is secretly gay. The lone object of his desire is one Bucky Bleichert, a boxer with whom he has been friends since high school. He sets up a hidden movie camera in the shower room to capture footage of Bucky naked. The one femme fatale in Perfidia, one Katherine “Kay” Lake, offers Dr. Ashida a roll in the hay but he, of course, isn’t interested.
On the day before the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese family of four, the Watanabes, are brutally murdered in their home. It appears to be a sort of ritualized killing, maybe a suicide, but the police just can’t figure it out. There’s an apparent suicide note written in Japanese that speaks of the “coming apocalypse,” but it’s too ambiguous. On examining the background of the Watanabes, the police discover they are “Fifth Column,” meaning they are part of the non-fighting branch of the Japanese military whose job it is to create disorder on the civilian front. The Los Angeles police are hoping to find a Japanese suspect to pin the Watanabe murders on, to somehow mitigate the internment of the Japanese people. If it turns out that a white person committed the murders, it will be a public relations nightmare.
If you read Perfidia and some of the other novels of James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, among others) you know that the Los Angeles Police Department of the past was unspeakably corrupt, or at least it is that way in the Ellroy universe. Most of the upper tier of the police department are on the “make” in some way or other. They have no allegiance to anything other than themselves. They take drugs, cheat on their wives, kill without compunction whenever it suits them, cover up evidence, and involve themselves with gangsters and shady characters that will advance their own interests. They don’t account to anybody but themselves. These crime fighters are in some ways worse than the criminals they pursue.
Some real-life people (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, J. Edgar Hoover) appear as minor characters in Perfidia, and James Ellroy paints a very unflattering portrait of them. It’s probably a good thing they’re all dead or they might be initiating some legal action. Bette Davis having a torrid affair with police sergeant Dudley Smith? It somehow doesn’t fit in with the idea we have of Bette Davis. (Bette’s husband, we are told, is a “chains-and-leather queen.”) Joan Crawford seducing a young police officer half her age? Maybe so, but it’s an odious thought. J. Edgar Hoover with pomaded hair and buffed fingernails developing “crushes” on handsome L.A. police officers? I somehow doubt it. It’s all part of the badly damaged world of James Ellroy.
However you look at it, Perfidia is fun to read for its portrayal of a time and place. Very few of us alive now were alive seventy-five years ago at the start of World War II; this is a vivid “re-imagining” of those days. As long as the novel is, the chapters are short, the paragraphs are short, the sentences are short and punchy, and we never get bored. Keep turning those pages and eventually you’ll come to the end and want more.
Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp
Gulliver’s Travels ~ A Capsule Book Review
Gulliver’s Travels ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift lived from 1667 to 1745. His most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels (complete title: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships) was first published in 1726. It’s an account, in four sections, of the seafaring adventures of one Lemuel Gulliver, ship’s surgeon, and his sometimes-bizarre adventures among the strange inhabitants of strange lands that nobody in Europe ever heard of or knew about. It’s always through misfortune that Gulliver has his adventures. First he is shipwrecked and finds himself in the land of Lilliput, where the people are about six inches (according to Gulliver’s measurement) tall. The tiny people don’t trust him, of course, because he is so big and might take it into his head to smash them to pieces. It takes many hundreds of them to tie him down, including by the hair of his head. Eventually they come to trust him, though, and let him roam freely. He falls out of favor with the King and Queen, though, because he puts out a fire in the tiny Queen’s chambers in the castle by urinating on it.
He returns home to his wife and children in England after his adventures in Lilliput, but he is a seafaring man and just can’t stay away from the sea. He is only home for a few months before he sets out again. This time misfortune brings him to Brobdingnag, a land where all the inhabitants are giants compared to him. He is kept as a pet or a curiosity in a “traveling box” and eventually ends up in the royal court, where he spends many hours conversing with the king in the king’s native language, which Gulliver quickly learns. On a trip to the seaside, the box in which he is traveling is snatched up by an eagle and dropped into the sea, where Gulliver is rescued by sailors and returned to his native England.
On his next seafaring adventure, Gulliver’s ship is attacked by pirates; he is marooned and soon picked up by the “flying island” of Laputa. The people of Laputa aren’t overly big or small, but they are strange. They blindly pursue science without any practical results. They use great resources and manpower to research preposterous schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marbles for pillows, mixing paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons. After his sojourn in (or on) Laputa, Gulliver is awaiting passage to Japan when he visits the island of Glubbdubdrib, where he visits a magician’s dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, including Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, and Aristotle, among others. On the island of Luggnagg, he discovers the immortal race of people known as the struldbrugs. They don’t have the gift of eternal youth, though; they get old and stay old forever.
On his fourth and final adventure, Gulliver returns to sea as captain of a merchantman. His crew mutinies and keep him tied up below deck for weeks, after which they leave him on the first piece of land they come to and then continue as pirates. He comes across a race of hideous humanoid creatures, which he finds out later, are known as Yahoos. The Yahoos are filthy and savage, human beings in their basest form. We learn that Yahoos are merely what pass for people back home. This is Swift’s statement about the human race and his not-very-high opinion of it.
Soon he meets the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent talking horses. He finds them to be everything humans are not: kind, caring, thoughtful, considerate, selfless, and completely alien to the idea of lying, war and warfare. In short, they lack all the qualities that make human beings so odious.
Gulliver is treated well by the Houyhnhnms and comes to admire them among all creatures he has ever encountered. He comes to want to be like them and live as they do. Much to his dismay, however, an Assembly of Houyhnhnms decides that Gulliver, as a Yahoo, has too much reasoning ability for his own good and poses a threat to the Houyhnhnms. They expel him, even though he would like to live among them forever, and he thereby returns to England. He is unable to reconcile himself to living again among the Yahoos, even though he is one of them, and remains a recluse in his own home in England, avoiding his family and all other people, and spends his time in the company of his horses in the stable.
Gulliver’s Travels exists on several levels. It is a satire, a science fiction story, a fantasy, an adventure story, and a forerunner to the modern novel; strangely accessible and readable, almost three hundred years after its first publication. Jonathan Swift stated that one of his purposes in writing the story was to write it for all, the high-born and the low, and to vex the world rather than divert it. It became an instant classic upon its publication and a huge literary success.
Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp
La La Land ~ A Capsule Movie Review
La La Land ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
I was prepared to hate La La Land but, once we got past the cutesy singing-and-dancing traffic jam that opens the movie, I didn’t hate it. I can’t say it’s really my favorite kind of movie, but it’s passable entertainment for a late-December afternoon at the local art film theatre. It’s a bittersweet romance and a musical fantasy rolled up together. Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) both have a dream: she wants to be an actress and he wants to be a jazz pianist and own his own jazz club. Their lack of success, however, is dazzling. She came to Los Angeles from a small town in Nebraska and has been struggling for six years to gain a foothold in the acting profession, working at a lousy job in a Hollywood coffee shop to keep herself going. He gets fired from his job playing background music in a dimly lighted restaurant because he plays real jazz on the piano instead of “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls.”
Mia and Sebastian have several chance encounters, the first one being an ugly traffic confrontation. She happens to hear him play in the restaurant where he works on the night he gets fired, and when she tries to congratulate him on his playing, he won’t even listen to what she has to say. Eventually they get together, though, and, in typical movie fashion, they “fall in love.”
Sebastian has another chance encounter (this movie is full of them) with an old musician acquaintance who offers him a steady job in a musical combo. The only problem is that Sebastian is away from Mia most of the time and they begin to have problems arising from their separation. Mia, for her part, continues to struggle with soulless acting auditions. She writes a one-character play and hires a theatre to perform it in, but, at the play’s one performance, only a few people show up, and she doesn’t even make enough money to pay for the theatre. Disheartened and disillusioned, she retreats to her small-town home in Nebraska. Wait a minute, though! She gets the “call” after she’s gone that might be her big breakthrough. Although Sebastian and Mia are officially finished, he drives from Los Angeles to Nebraska to get her to deliver the good news to her and see that she makes it to the audition in time.
There are singing and dancing in La La Land, but not of the Fred Astaire variety (which I detest). Whenever Mia and Sebastian are alone together, in several scenes, they go into “fantasy singing-and-dancing mode.” One of these happens at dusk on a parking lot overlooking the bowl-like valley that is Los Angeles. The most notable scene of this kind, though, is at the famous planetarium (the Griffith Observatory) where James Dean and Natalie Wood took a memorable high school field trip, along with their class, in the classic 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause. Mia and Sebastian are the only two people at the planetarium and, in their singing-and-dancing number together, defy gravity. For me, the most effective and innovative scene of the entire movie is at the end when Mia and Sebastian have their final chance encounter in a roomful of people and Sebastian plays “their song” while we are treated to a montage of soundless (except for the music) “what if” scenes. What if he hadn’t brushed her off the night he was fired? What if he hadn’t been offered a job that kept him mostly on the road? Will there be a sequel? No, a sequel would only spoil the bittersweet.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Fences ~ A Capsule Movie Review
Fences ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
Fences was first a Pulitzer Prize play by August Wilson and is now a movie directed by Denzel Washington. Set in Pittsburgh of the 1950s, it touches on themes of family, duty, loyalty, and overcoming one’s difficult past. Denzel Washington plays Troy Maxson, an uneducated black man who rides on the back of a trash truck and empties trash cans into the truck. He has a best friend and co-worker named Jim Bono; a brain-damaged (from the war) brother named Gabriel; a dutiful wife named Rose (played by Viola Davis); a 34-year-old musician son (by another wife) named Lyons; and a teenage son named Cory who wants to play football. We learn about Troy’s life as he reveals it in dialogue. One of eleven children, he left home at age fourteen to make his own way. He fell into a life of crime and stealing and ended up in prison, where he spent fifteen years. If prison taught him nothing else, it taught him to go straight.
He’s had a stable marriage with Rose for eighteen years. He goes to work every day and owns the house he lives in, but life isn’t easy for him. He struggles to pays the bills and, when he wants to advance in his job from trash collector to driver, he is dismayed to learn that his company only hires white men as drivers. His friend, Jim Bono, chides him for not having a driver’s license and not being able to read, but if there’s one thing Troy has, it’s determination. Life has made him hard and intractable. He seems at times to have lost the touch of humanity he needs to get along with his family. If we come to understand Troy, we also come to not like him very much.
When Troy comes to Rose in the kitchen one day and tells her he is about to become “somebody’s daddy,” she reacts about as expected. He has taken up with a much younger woman named Alberta and has impregnated her. When he tries to explain to Rose why he has sought the company of another woman, Rose isn’t buying it; all she can see is the betrayal. She says she might have expected it when he was ten or fifteen years younger, but not at his age. “Age has nothing to do with it,” he says. Alberta makes him laugh “down to the bottoms of his shoes” and makes him forget for a little while how hard his life is.
I was lucky enough to see Fences performed live onstage a number of years ago. The movie version is essentially unchanged from the play. (The playwright, August Wilson, wrote the screenplay.) It’s fairly static and stagey for a movie; they (the filmmakers) have opened up the action a little bit, but not much. Most of it takes place in the back yard of Troy’s home and it’s a fairly talky affair. If you like authentic-sounding dialogue and are a fan of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, you’ll love Fences. If you’re a big action fan, though, and are looking for some action, you’ll probably be disappointed. This is what you might call a deep character study, a slice of life, for the more serious-minded among us.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ~ A Capsule Book Review
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a 1961 novel by Scottish writer Muriel Spark, is the story of an unconventional teacher in a conservative Edinburgh girls’ school (Marcia Blaine School for Girls) in the early 1930s. She has her own “set” of six girls (“Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” she says, “and she’s mine for life.”) and “progressive” teaching methods that make her a target of the “establishment” figures in the school, personified by stuffy headmistress Miss McKay. The ever-vigilant Miss McKay and others in the school would do anything to get the goods on Miss Brodie with the objective of getting her fired. They suspect her, on principle, of gross immorality and a multitude of sins and vices, short on specifics as they are. (We have here a perfect example of a novel incorporating the literary theme of “one against many.”)
Two male teachers (rare as they are in this environment) in the girls’ school are besotted with Miss Brodie. There’s Teddy Lloyd, the one-armed art master (he lost his arm in the “Great War”) and Gordon Lowther, the ginger-haired singing master. Teddy Lloyd already has a wife and a houseful of children, but this doesn’t dampen his interest for the unmarried Jean Brodie. Gordon Lowther, bachelor, lives in a big house all alone and seems to bring out the mother instinct in Miss Brodie and other of the female teachers. The two sewing mistresses, sisters named the Misses Kerr, do some housework for Mr. Lowther, and it’s in the performance of these duties that they find Miss Brodie’s nightdress folded underneath the pillow on his bed, the implication being that Miss Brodie and Gordon Lowther are sleeping together (and probably doing more than sleeping). As affectionate as Miss Brodie feels toward Gordon Lowther, she is in love with Teddy Lloyd, the art master, and he is in love with her. Miss Brodie, as she is eager to tell everyone, is a woman in her “prime.” Her prime is theoretically the best time of her life and she devotes her prime not to any mere male but to the edification of her students.
The girls in Miss Brodie’s set are all exceptionally smart and talented, except for the doltish girl named Mary, who dies at a young age in a hotel fire, the implication being that she is too dumb to figure out how to escape a burning building. All in the set adore Miss Brodie slavishly and spend a lot of time in her company away from school, visiting points of historical interest or just talking over tea in Miss Brodie’s home. Miss McKay, the headmistress and Miss Brodie’s avowed enemy, has little private talks with each of the girls in the set, hoping to find out what exactly it is about Miss Brodie that makes her so different from the other teachers. All in the set remain faithful to Miss Brodie, but one of them will eventually betray her and Miss Brodie will go to her grave (dead from an “internal growth” at age fifty-six) not knowing which one it was.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a concise (156 pages), ironic, gem-like novel that is fun to read and never very challenging. We find in Miss Brodie one of the true “characters” in 20th century fiction. She claims to have had a fiancé named Hugh who died in World War I, but we wonder after a while if he is just somebody she made up. And, despite her dalliances with Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd, she seems a natural-born spinster, made for finer things than just being somebody’s wife. In her admiration for Hitler and Mussolini (at a time when they are seen as a terrible threat to the rest of the world) and in almost every other way she can think of, she challenges convention. (“Safety does not come first,” she says in response to a poster on the wall at school. “Goodness, truth, and beauty come first.”) She refuses to join the “crowd” or the “herd,” even if doing so would make life easier for her. She is one of those who will always be at odds with the authority figures of the world. It’s a small club, but it exists.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Shiloh ~ A Capsule Book Review
Shiloh ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
The Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing) was fought in southwestern Tennessee, on April 6th and 7th, 1862. It was the mostly unsuccessful effort by the Southern forces to keep two armies of the Northern forces from joining together and advancing into the Confederacy. The soldiers of the South, commonly referred to as the Rebels, considered that they were trying to keep a foreign invader out of their land, as the Revolutionaries had done in 1776. Casualties were heavy on both sides (about 20,000), and people everywhere were shocked by the wholesale carnage. The Battle of Shiloh was the biggest and costliest battle up to that point in the Civil War. There were, however, worse battles to come.
Shiloh is a short (225 pages) novel by writer/historian Shelby Foote. Although it’s fiction, it’s based on actual historical records of the battle. The action is told from the point of view of regular fighting men (not generals or officers) who lived the battle firsthand: aide-de-camp, adjutant, rifleman, cannoneer, and scout. It’s told in the language of the common man, what he sees and hears on the ground, rather than that of the military strategist or the West Point graduate. We get the Southern point of view and then the Northern point of view in alternating chapters throughout the book. Both sides believed they were fighting a just cause and both sides were determined to win without giving an inch to the enemy. Many people in the South believed the war to be a lost cause from the start, considering the superior numbers and weapons of the North.
The Southern forces were winning on the first day of battle, but on the second day the tide turned in favor of the North. The two Northern armies joined forces and repulsed the Southern forces. The South wasn’t giving up, though. It was going to be a long and terrible war.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
The Beautiful and Damned ~ A Capsule Book Review
The Beautiful and Damned ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
In college literature classes, we learned that there are about seven basic themes in all of literature and that nearly all great novels incorporate all seven of them. One of these themes is “the fall” or “fall of man.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (published in 1922), is an example of the theme of “the fall.” It concerns the young and doomed (by his own hand, by his own frailty) fictional character known as Anthony Patch. Anthony is young in the early years of the twentieth century. He is of the privileged class. He attends Harvard University and is the heir to a considerable fortune, being the only living relative of his grandfather, Adam Patch. We don’t learn how Adam Patch made all his millions, only that he is a “reformer.” From that word, we can deduce that he’s moralistic and Puritanical.
Anthony meets a debutante named Gloria Gilbert and falls in love with her. Gloria’s beauty is the wellspring of her shallowness and self-centeredness. Her beauty and desire for social status are all she has going for her. Men are, of course, drawn to her, but that’s because they’re shallow. We know that when she gets older and her looks begin to fade, she will be finished. Anthony persuades Gloria to marry her; she is easily persuaded because one day he will be very rich. The two of them are happy for a while, at least a few years, but Anthony discovers that marrying Gloria was the worst thing he ever did.
It seems that old Adam Patch will never die. Anthony could get a job, but all he does is wait around for years for the big day when the old man dies and leaves him all his money. Anthony and Gloria are a socialite couple. They throw parties (or attend parties that other people give) every night. Drinking all the time, Anthony becomes an alcoholic, if he wasn’t already one. Gloria and Anthony have only limited money that they get from their investments but—not to worry—when Anthony gets his millions all will be well. The longer they wait for the money, the more they get on each other’s nerves. They begin to hate each other and their marriage deteriorates.
One night in summer old Adam Patch decides to pay an impromptu call on his grandson and his wife at the house they’re renting. On that night, Anthony and Gloria happen to be “entertaining” guests with drinking, dancing and raucous fun. Adam Patch is appalled at what he sees (people drunk out of their senses, dancing in their underwear). He dies soon enough, but when he does Anthony discovers that he has disinherited him, leaving all his money to servants. Anthony contests the will, being forced to retain an expensive lawyer, but he isn’t given much hope that the case will go his way in court.
So, Anthony and Gloria wait out a lengthy court case, with no reason to believe they will win it in the end. Anthony continues his drinking, his money problems get worse, and he and Gloria become more alienated from each other. While World War I rages, Anthony is drafted into the army. He ends up in a miserable training camp in Mississippi and it’s while he’s there that he begins an affair with a local girl named Dot. For Anthony it’s just a little fling while he’s away from home, but for Dot it’s all or nothing. She proclaims her love for him, suggesting that she might kill herself if for any reason he should happen to leave her. She knows that Anthony has a wife back in New York, but she doesn’t care very much, believing that he will choose her (Dot) over his wife. It’s while Anthony and his unit are waiting to be shipped to France that Germany surrenders and the war ends. Dot isn’t giving Anthony up without a fight, though.
After Anthony’s stint in the army, he returns to Gloria and things only continue to get worse between them. The suit he filed to contest his grandfather’s will isn’t going anywhere and Anthony and Gloria are down on their heels. They don’t know what they are going to do for money. Neither one of them will consider going to work and earning any honest dough. They drink and quarrel, as their friends and their hopes abandon them. Anthony becomes completely unraveled and degrades and humiliates himself. But, wait a minute! The court case is still pending! Is there any chance, even a slim one, that it might still go Anthony’s way, since public sentiment has turned against “reformers” because of Prohibition?
Almost more than any other American writer of the twentieth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a chronicler of his age, the World War I era, the years leading up to the war, the 1920s, Prohibition, and the “Jazz Age.” We get a vivid impression, though his books and stories, of what it was like to be alive in those days that were so different from our own. Of course, a hundred years’ passage of time has romanticized the era. Maybe in 2116, people will have a romanticized view of 2016 because they didn’t live it and couldn’t possibly know what it’s like with its leaf blowers (I hear one now), cell phones, microwave ovens, computers and political lunacy.
The Beautiful and Damned, if not a great a novel, is certainly a very good one, with a strong story, vivid characters and a strong sense of time and place. Where else could we learn about New York “café society” in the years before, during and after World War I? (Through Fitzgerald’s descriptions, we see the New York streets, the park, the buildings and the trees around Anthony Patch’s apartment.) The story of Anthony Patch and his lovely bride Gloria, we are told in background material, parallels the real-life story of Fitzgerald’s tumultuous relationship with his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. Plenty of heartache to go around.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Literary Fictions 