James E Hartley

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?

Jean Hatzfeld has an amazing pair of books about the Rwandan genocide.

If you haven’t read Machete Season and Life Laid Bare, you should. The first explores the genocide through a series of conversations with the murderers; the second looks at the same events through interviews with the survivors.

Jean Hatzfeld has an amazing pair of books about the Rwandan genocide. If you haven’t read Machete Season and Life Laid Bare, you should. The first explores the genocide through a series of conversations with the murderers; the second looks at the same events through interviews with the survivors.

They are brutal books.

Tales of nice normal people picking up machetes and hunting through swamps looking for their former neighbors in order to hack them to death. Day after day after day.

It is hard to decide whether the accounts are more chilling when told by those who survived or those who spent a month killing their neighbors.

Hatzfeld has a third book. The Antelope’s Strategy. The subtitle: Living in Rwanda after the Genocide.

The book picks up after an amazing turn of events. The genocide ended when the government fell. Not surprisingly, the killers are imprisoned. (Well, maybe it is surprising that they were imprisoned rather than executed.)

But then, seven years later, with the agricultural fields throughout the country lying fallow and a need for workers to grow food, the government announced that the killers would be released. They returned to their old homes, suddenly living side by side again with the very people they had formerly tried to murder.

So, imagine you live in a Rwandan Village. Take you pick: which is the harder situation?

1) You survived the genocide by hiding in the swamps, evading the butchers, and now the very people who used to hunt you live next door—not just people like the people who hunted you, but the very same people;

2) You spent some time running through the swamps trying to kill people, and now you suddenly find yourself living next to someone whose family you hacked up with a machete and who only lives now because he evaded you.

Rwanda is full of people in both those situations. Hatzfeld interviews them. And the big question:

Can you forgive?

Is it even humanly possible to forgive in this situation?

Is it humanly possible to love your neighbor as yourself in this situation?

This is a gut-wrenching book in a very different manner than the previous books by Hatzfeld. In those books, the reader is faced with the depths of the depravity of Man.

In this book, we are faced with the limits of the ability of man to be good.

It is Right and Good to forgive. God forgives; we should forgive. (“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”—it’s the Lord’s Prayer, after all.)

Not only is there depravity at the heart of man, but man has no ability, literally no ability, to be this forgiving.

“But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

The next time you are annoyed at someone on the other side of the political spectrum in America, remember this book.

Let’s be honest—nobody has wronged you this much. You have nothing to forgive that is on the same scale as the sorts of things people are forgiving in this book.

We should all learn to be a little more forgiving.

Taft for President

The book: The Bully Pulpit, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

When this I book came out, I had zero interest in reading it.

Zero interest.

Teddy Roosevelt just doesn’t thrill me all that much.

H.L Mencken’s essay, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy” concludes:

Enormously sensitive and resilient, almost pathological in his appetite for activity, he made it plain to every one that the most stimulating sort of sport imaginable was to be obtained in fighting, not for mere money, but for ideas. There was no aristocratic reserve about him. He was not, in fact, an aristocrat at all, but a quite typical member of the upper bourgeoisie; his people were not patroons in New Amsterdam, but simple traders; he was himself a social pusher, and eternally tickled by the thought that he had had a Bonaparte in his cabinet. The marks of the thoroughbred were simply not there. The man was blatant, crude, overly confidential, devious, tyrannical, vainglorious, sometimes quite childish. One often observed in him a certain pathetic wistfulness, a reaching out for a grand manner that was utterly beyond him. But the sweet went with the bitter. He had all the virtues of the fat and complacent burgher. His disdain of affectation and prudery was magnificent. He hated all pretension save his own pretension. He had a sound respect for hard effort, for loyalty, for thrift, for honest achievement.

His worst defects, it seems to me, were the defects of his race and time. Aspiring to be the leader of a nation of third-rate men, he had to stoop to the common level. When he struck out for realms above that level he always came to grief: this was the “unsafe” Roosevelt, the Roosevelt who was laughed at, the Roosevelt retired suddenly to cold storage. This was the Roosevelt who, in happier times and a better place, might have been. Well, one does what one can.

There didn’t seem much else to say.

But then my wife bought me the book for Christmas, and my wife has an unerring ability to buy me books I will enjoy. So, lifting this doorstop of a book, I started in.

Less than a week later, I was done. Amazingly good book. Highly recommended.

The big surprise: it’s not actually a biography of Teddy Roosevelt—well, it is that, but not only that.

I suppose the subtitle should have tipped me off (“Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism”), but it didn’t.

I just assumed from the title (the part above the sub-part) that it was really about TR.

Even after reading Goodwin’s Preface, I assumed it was a book just about TR. Goodwin noted in her Preface: “Perhaps most surprising to me in my own process of research was the discovery that Roosevelt’s chosen successor in the White House, William Howard Taft, was a far more sympathetic, if flawed, figure than I had realized.”

Totally right—a huge surprise to me too. This book is much more than a biography of Roosevelt; it is also the biography of Taft and a half-dozen assorted journalists.

I am not sure I can even begin to convey my total shock at discovering Taft. I took a whole bunch of college level courses on 20^th Century history, and in particular 20^th century American history. I spent endless hours learning about all the 20^th century Presidents—all of them.

Well, it turns out, all of them except Taft. Taft was always that guy between Roosevelt and Wilson, that guy whose most famous act was getting stuck in his bathtub, that guy who didn’t do a thing. Nothing. Zero. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Taft other than
1) that bathtub story,
2) that he lost to Wilson in an election in which Roosevelt also ran against him, and
3) that he later ended up on the Supreme Court.

A total zero in every single 20^th century history class I had had and every single book about the 20^thcentury I have read. Apparently Goodwin shared my same belief that Taft was a nonentity.

Yet, it turns out, he was anything but a nonentity. He should be much better known.

You know how every now and then (well, all the time) someone argues that it would be good if we could move away from all these sound-bite, hyperactive politicians and get a President who is the solid, dependable, hard-working, thoughtful, accomplished, non-self-serving, decent, humane, good person we all know would be vastly better than the politician type we get?

Well, that is Taft.

Biographically, he didn’t lack a thing you would want in a president. His personal demeanor is exactly what you would want. Everyone, everyone, knew he would be a good President.

But, you don’t have to take my word for it—or Goodwin’s. Henry Adams: “the best equipped man for the Presidency who had been suggested by either party during his lifetime.” Or, on his legislative success as President, the New York Times: “When people come to write history fifty years from now, they might give credit to the worth of a plain-minded gentleman whose head wasn’t thoroughly filled from the beginning with himself, but who really and honestly tried to enact into legislation the things he himself had written into his party’s platform.”

A good, decent and (surprisingly) effective President. Yet, he was destroyed in his reelection bid by both Wilson and TR.

Why? Taft wasn’t a politician. At all. Roosevelt was if nothing else a political animal. And Roosevelt propelled Taft into the Presidency (they were longtime friends) and then when Roosevelt could not stand having the national spotlight on someone other than himself, he destroyed Taft in an attempt to regain the spotlight.

There is a second act—Taft eventually made it onto the Supreme Court, which is where he spent his whole life wanting to be.

Taft is, in other words, a fascinating person. Utterly fascinating.

Taft and Roosevelt had careers which were inextricably intertwined. They were both fatally flawed, but their flaws were quite different.

Taft is the more sympathetic figure; he wanted to do right but ended up in over his head because everyone one around him kept calling on him to enter deeper waters.

Roosevelt’s failing were all his own.

Roosevelt would do well in the modern primary system. Taft would never have a chance of making it to the Iowa caucuses. Yet, when people ruminate about what they really want, they describe Taft.

Some people say politics today is totally different than in the old days—it turns it is exactly the same.

Fiction Posing as Nonfiction

“Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we’re in need of at the time we’re reading.”

Reality Hunger, by David Shields.

I liked the book for reasons that have nothing to do with the author’s main thesis, but that isn’t the sort of thing that would bother Shields in the least since part of his thesis is that I probably shouldn’t agree with his primary thesis.

The quotation at the outset is from his book, though he would frown on the fact that I put it in quotation marks and am noting the source.

Part of his thesis is that I should just steal everything I want to use—plagiarism is not a crime in Shields’ world—it is something to be done proudly.

(Students: Don’t try this at home. Really. Do not plagiarize. Shields is wrong.)

Shield’s primary thesis, for those who are interested, is that the rash of “memoirs,” some fake, some not, are the best thing going in literature—after all, all writing is fiction and so fake memoirs are fiction masquerading as reality because after all reality is nebulous anyway, but we all want more reality and…well, I could keep going, but his argument is deliberately opaque and wandering and probably self-contradictory and Shields likes it that way, thank you very much, so to start trying to carp about the idea that it is impossible to summarize a book which Shields would not want summarized in the first place is one of those things not to be done, especially since Shields would undoubtedly be quite happy that the book generated a tediously long “Sentence” (Shields is also not a fan of grammatical stricture) which just wanders all over in an attempt to capture a meditation, or dare I say compose an essay (essai) about something which may or may not be what Shields was discussing. Suffice it to say; Shields’ book was fun to read—nice style—all numbered paragraphs—he, like Nietzsche, likes apothegms.

Wandering, tangential ruminations about things. I liked it. (Hard to believe, I know.)

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
Every man’s work—whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else—is always a portrait of himself.
Nothing is going to happen in this book.
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

That is more David Shields. Or, really, more David Shields plagiarizing other people.

Maybe I agree with those things. Emphasis on maybe.

I recently read Wodehouse, Big Money. That is true. Does that mean that what I am about to write about it is also true?

It’s trivially easy to write in cryptic epigrams.

It’s even easier to read cryptic epigrams.

Maybe you learned something from reading that last paragraph. Maybe I just said something about myself. Is this paragraph an autobiography?

Big Money is about as formulaic a Wodehouse novel as there ever was. Then again, I suppose that could be written about every Wodehouse novel. You could write the entire plot by the end of the second chapter and you wouldn’t have missed a thing.

That is, of course, the beauty of Wodehouse. One part of me stands aside his books simply admiring his ability to take a perfectly predictable plot with perfectly predictable jokes and turn it into yet another masterpiece. The lack of variety is part of the very joke woven into the novel.

“The male mind did not appear to be able to grasp immediately that a woman doctor need not of necessity be a gargoyle with steel-rimmed spectacles and a washleather complexion.” I am not at all sure why that quotation was just put in at this point. Which is, in a nutshell, the problem with reading David Shields. If he is right, then it makes no difference what follows what and in what order it all comes and how it is all phrased. It doesn’t even matter if that is really a quotation from Big Money or a different Wodehouse novel. Shields is a literary nihilist. Wodehouse is not.

I enjoyed reading both Wodehouse and Shields. Yet, only one of them is saying something True. And it is the writer of fiction.

Big Money reminds us once again that life is a comedy; it is full of improbable events and the only proper reaction to living in this vale of tears is to laugh and laugh and laugh. Any other way leads to madness.

Shields, despite being funny, has forgotten to laugh. He takes this whole writing business far too seriously. He wants writing to dig deep and expose one’s soul in some sort of autobiographical auto-da-fe, all the while arguing that there is really no way to do so. Again, despite being funny, Shields has written a very grim book.

If my library was not ordered alphabetically, I would put Shields’ Reality Hunger next to Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in the hopes that the latter would somehow teach the former that a book with nary a joke in sight is both funnier and a better picture of the human soul than the funny book with the nihilistic view of life and literature.

Come to think of it—this idea of ordering the books in my office by determining which books really should get together for a talk over coffee has staggering implications. Where would Big Money go?

Recommending Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.

This is the seventh novel by Llosa I have read. I have also read a collection of his non-fiction work.

I am thus reasonably certain that I enjoy reading Llosa.

(Well, it’s either a) I enjoy reading his work or b) I am supremely masochistic when it comes to reading. I am fairly confident that it is the former, but would entertain arguments that the latter is more accurate.)

So, having now finished eight books by Llosa, it seems reasonable that I would be able to answer a rather simple question: What makes Mario Vargas Llosa (a Nobel Laureate, no less) someone whose work is a pleasure to read?

And now the problem for the day. I have no idea why I like Llosa. None.

I have read eight books he wrote, but to the best of my recollection, I have never once recommended his work to anyone.

Part of the reason that I have never recommended him is that I would have a very hard time picking which book of his to recommend.

I’ve liked every one of them enough to think I should read another book. Yet, they all have this quality about them, this undefined quality, which makes me think, “Well, I liked that book, but I am not really sure who else would like that book.”

Consider the novel I just finished. Young Peruvian author—who currently writes news blurbs, but wants to write novels—hooks up with his older, divorced, Bolivian Aunt. (Don’t worry too much: there is no blood relation between the Young Peruvian and the Aunt.)

Meanwhile, the Young Peruvian novelist regularly interacts with a scriptwriter for radio serials. The Aunt and the Scriptwriter meet once, but otherwise the stories do not overlap.

Every other chapter in the novel is a short story which is the storyline from one of the radio serials written by the scriptwriter. The main story meanders along in the odd numbered chapters.

Eventually Young Peruvian and Aunt get married much to the distaste of the larger family. The scriptwriter goes insane. In the epilogue, we find out the marriage does not last.

End of story.

Now, I have a hard time imagining that anyone read the preceding description and thought, “That is a book I simply must read.”

So, is it the prose style which makes the book sing? It can’t be—the book was written in Spanish, so this is a translation, and his novels, all of which I have enjoyed, have different translators.

So, it must be something about the way the stories are told which makes him so compelling.

And that is what puzzles me—after seven novels, it seems like I should have some ability to describe what it is that makes Llosa novel so good, and yet I cannot.

It also seems like after seven novels, I should be able to tell someone, “You really ought to read book X. It’s really good—I think you’ll like it.” Not that I should be able to tell everyone that—but I should be able to tell someone that, right?

At this point, my inclination is to conclude with a recommendation that you, The Reader, should read Book X. But then I think about the novels I have read, and I cannot figure out which title to substitute for X.

After a lengthy pause, staring out my window, I arrived at the following, thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion the present post:

Dear Reader, Mario Vargas Llosa is a Nobel-prize Winning Peruvian novelist. I have enjoyed every novel of his I have read. You should try reading him. A good place to start is (select one) [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Storyteller, The War of the End of the World, Who Killed Palomino Molero?]

And right after finishing that conclusion I realized, that all books are not equal. So, really, start with The Storyteller if you like the idea of reading Peruvian short stories; The War of the End of the World if you like long Victorian British novels; Death in the Andes if you like vaguely disturbing endings; or Aunt Julia if you like clever short stories which feel like they just continue after the story is done.

Next up on my Llosa reading list, by the way: The Feast of the Goat.

Pity Poor Malcolm Gladwell

Imagine you were a rather good journalist, who could write stories about people and events which were worth reading.

Interesting stories in which a fine ear for a telling anecdote helps illustrate a larger point.

Imagine you are making a decent career doing that.

Imagine you have worked your way up to writing for The New Yorker. (The New Yorker! That is a magazine Easterners of High Class all read. Californians? Well, I never understood why a magazine pretending New York was the Center of the Universe made sense. But, even still, if you are writing for The New Yorker you have arrived. If you can make it there…)

Then suddenly, you have an idea: some of the sorts of stories you are telling can be linked together to tell an even larger story.

So, you write a book—a real book, not just a magazine article—which is roughly a collection of magazine-article-like things but united by this common theme, see, and thus it is a book—a real book—and so you get royalties and fame and go on talk shows, like, you know, an expert.

It is the journalist high.

So you do that. Twice.

You publish The Tipping Point and Blink and you are famous and getting those Royalty Checks and you are on TV and people like you, they really, really like you.

You are famous! And everyone loves your books.

So you do it again. You write Outliers. And some people love it—you are famous, see, you get $45,000 for giving a speech, see, so you must write good books, right?

But, other people start noting something.

The book doesn’t really hang together as a book. The seams are showing.

It reads more like a set of stories in which you are pretending there is a common theme.

The critics even make it into your Wikipedia entry: “The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, ‘impervious to all forms of critical thinking’ and said that Gladwell believes ‘a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.’” That hurts.

So you go back to the drawing board and you publish a book which really is just a collection of your articles. You don’t pretend otherwise. Nobody even knows that book exists.

So you go back to the well one more time, and you publish David and Goliath.

Sigh. I read that book. And I sighed. (See—the Sigh is right there three sentences ago.)

The subtitle of David and Goliath is Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

The essay on David is cute—while we think of David as an underdog, truth be told, if you were in ancient times and you were betting on a mano a mano between Behemoth and Slingshot Artist, you would want to put your money on the guy who can kill the other one from a distance.

It’s a lot like a battle between a guy with a gun and a guy with a large sword. Yeah, you saw that movie too. It was funny, laugh out loud funny, because at first you think Indy is doomed, but then he pulls out a gun and you realize that the joke is that of course he would win. David and Indiana Jones are the same guy.

Like I said, cute story—though Gladwell really should have made that Indiana Jones comparison.

So, a book about underdogs! Americans love underdogs! Americans love Gladwell—see those royalty checks! So Americans will buy this book! And they did! And…it’s not very good.

Don’t get me wrong, the individual chapters are all good—if they were in a magazine I was reading, I’d like them. (Then again, since I don’t read The New Yorker, I would be unlikely to see them.) Gladwell does write well and he does have that ear for a good anecdote.

But, put all these articles together and pretend that the combination makes some larger point? Uh…hardly.

If you tried to draw a large cohesive lesson from this book, you end up in a mess really fast.

I tried. Briefly. I gave up as soon as I tried to connect two chapters and realized that no matter which two chapters I picked, the larger story was inherently contradictory. There is no larger story here. There are some good individual chapters.

Gladwell is an article writer, not a book writer. But all the money is in books. So, he will undoubtedly keep trying.

And the book market being what it is, it will be interesting to see how long before everyone notices that this here Emperor has No Clothes. If you want to pay $45,000 to hear Gladwell give a talk, be my guest. He probably even gives a really good talk.

But the strange part—the reason he gets these large checks is that everyone assumes he is writing books on a common theme, but he is really publishing collections of magazine articles. And people who publish collections of magazine articles aren’t nearly as famous.

So, this is why you should pity Malcolm Gladwell. Well, pity him as he is on the way to the bank cashing his checks…but that is beside the point. Pity him. Sooner or later, the game may end.

In the meantime, you should enjoy his books—just don’t be fooled into thinking that there is a larger point than is contained in the individual chapters.

Losing Your Dharma

“It’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool.”

If your response to the preceding is “Wow, man. That’s deep. Really deep,” then I have a book for you.

If you respond like any sane person and say “Uh, not only is that untrue, it’s a rather stupid mantra,” then sorry, No Book for You.

The Book: Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. The bit above is the high point of the tale.

It occurs when Kerouac’s alter ego is climbing a mountain and gets scared he will fall off, and then realizes he shouldn’t have been scared. Deep. Seriously Deep. Like Wow. Metaphor for Life, you know.

Two hundred pages of that and you have one seriously Deep Reflection on, like, you know, Life and Stuff.

You think I’m making this up? No way, Man. Let me quote the Master:

This is it. “Rop rop rop,” I’d yell at the weeds, and they’d show windward pointing intelligent researchers to indicate and flail and finagle, some rooted in blossom imagination earth moist perturbation idea that had karmacized their very root-and-stem….It was eerie.

At this point, you have already clicked the above image of the book in order to go straight to Amazon to buy the book in some hallucinogenic haze or decided never to even think about reading this book.

I read it with one of my tutorials. Each of the five students picked a book. From that list, this was the book I least looked forward to reading. I had already read On the Road a few years back in a different tutorial and thought it was a tedious waste of time.

On the Road is better than The Dharma Bums, though. However, that may be because I read the former longer ago and so the pain of reading it has dulled.

In the discussion about the book with my students, I gamely spent two hours trying to convince anyone in the tutorial that this book held the Secret of the Universe.

I failed.

Perhaps it is not their Dharma to see the truth that becoming a Dharma Bum holds such marvelous possibilities. All the students seemed to think this book was just about a bunch of Losers in the 1950s who decided to pretend their Aimless Lives had Meaning.

The students also made some disparaging remarks about hipsters.

One student seriously objected to the portrayal of women in the book. Every woman in the book exists solely in order to have sex with Our Heroes. I tried to convince her that this was the Dharma of those women; that to exist solely as sexual objects for the Dharma Bums was a Deep Meaningful experience, but she didn’t buy it. Like I said, I really tried very hard to sell this book. I failed miserably,

I did learn something from reading this book. It is even easier than I thought to spin out an ersatz Buddhist philosophy and pretend you are saying something even when you know what you just said means nothing at all.

Once you realize you can’t fall off a mountain, your Dharma is realized to entail a self-actualization of a what we might ignorantly call a Soul screaming to abandon the Norms of a society which denies its Oneness. That was Deep, wasn’t it?

My other odd realization: Kerouac’s alter ego in this book spends time in a fire watchtower in the middle of nowhere. It serves as a time for reflection.

The titular characters in Mark Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka also spend time in a fire watchtower in the middle of nowhere reflecting on life. Presumably there is a connection, but I’d have to reread Helprin’s book to figure out what it is.

Helprin’s book, by the way is worth reading.

In fact, a few years ago, the Mount Holyoke News ran a feature on Professors and the Desert Island Test for books.

(It was not a long running feature, by the way—I was the first and last entry—I guess my answers were too dull to make the series last two issues.)

I was asked to pick three books to take to a desert island, but I couldn’t pick any three books. I had to pick one book from my discipline, one recent book, and one free choice.

The recent book was the hardest choice. Seriously, how many recent books are you confident you would want to read over and over and over for years on end?

So, I picked Freddy and Fredericka because it fit the category and I had recently read it and I really liked it and I figured maybe some student would actually read it.

So, I’ll repeat the advice again: it’s a really good book—well worth your time.

The other two books are also worth your time, but were much more predictable choices. So predictable that I suspect that even if I didn’t say what they were, anyone could guess what I said.

But, to confirm your guess: The Wealth of Nations, which is a massive work of philosophy with endless side notes and ruminations masquerading as an economics book. I’d rather read it over and over than, say, Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States.

The free book? The Bible. That answer had the virtue of
a) being true—I really would take it—and
b) being nicely scandalous for a publication at Mount Holyoke.