A Memoir of Two Presidential Offices, and More

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s was published this year by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was already a familiar name, and nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the Memoir genre.

Doris Kearns Goodwin at a BooksExpo in 2018
Photograph attributed to Rhododendrites
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

It is a memoir of a kind I've never read before:

In the house where the Goodwins — now in their 70s and 80s — are living in Concord, Massachusetts, they were storing boxes of documents from Richard Goodwin's (the husband's) career in the 1960s. (Doris Kearns Goodwin explored documents of her own life as well, explained during the earlier chapters of the book.)

The Goodwins open the boxes and explore these, often reading documents out loud to each other, as a special book project.

The historian interweaves, into the history, their affectionate banter, reminiscences, and years-long debates over the respective and competing virtues of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the couple's nostalgia for the 1960s. (She does have a partial eye, and you can make up your own mind how many of her defenses of Johnson, for example, make sense.)

But Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin have a far from ordinary perspective on federal politics in the 1960s:

Richard Goodwin was a junior speechwriter for John F. Kennedy under Ted Sorensen, later a self-appointed Latin America expert. Then, after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote speeches and led messaging amongst other projects for Johnson's Great Society.

Finally, he tried to help Robert F. Kennedy and, at other times, Eugene McCarthy, win the presidency — helping both of them for the sake of thwarting the Vietnam War, but also helping Robert F. Kennedy due to their personal friendship.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was a White House fellow during Johnson's presidency, and later helped write his autobiography; she also writes about experiencing the 60s as a socially conscious Ivy League college student.

Bryan Cranston reads letters her husband wrote in his young years, and the Kennedys and Johnson speak in historical excerpts, in the audio recording. Although the audiobook was over 14 hours long, it did not feel that way: Doris Kearns Goodwin's narration, as well as the special additions, were engrossing.

The ending is extremely touching.

*

Ideal accompaniment: videos from the LBJ Presidential Library's account on YouTube, e.g. archived live-streamed videos from the 2014 Civil Rights Summit.

***

Cover of Becoming,
via Wikipedia

Another recently finished memoir:

Becoming (2018), by former First Lady Michelle Obama, has been reviewed often elsewhere.

It's enough to say that the accolades for her memoir about her childhood, Ivy League education, professional career, marriage, and life as the First Lady are justified.

It is comforting, as President Joe Biden's presidency nears its close and the next administration approaches, to see life in the White House from the perspective of a human, idealistic, thoughtful tenant.

***

Lastly, I have begun Jonathan Blitzer's far-ranging book on the history and polemics of migration at the US-Mexico border: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (2024). It was recommended by Barack Obama in summer, then nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

The American journalist's epic work is not always easy to read, because of its subject matter. It describes, for example, arbitrary killings and torture in El Salvador, from the 1930s to the present.

July 2024 In Books: What I'm Reading

Thanks to anaemia, a traffic accident, and a broken glass bottle, I've been (in roughly equal measures) sulking and reading at home.

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
Zeinab Badawi

Cover of Zeinab Badawi:
An African History of Africa
Penguin Books

It's been energetically praised in the British press, and I am also charmed by this book, which I found at a bookshop near the Free University here in Berlin.

BBC World anchor Zeinab Badawi sets aside many of the piles of colonialist histories of (in the earlier chapters of her book) northern African countries, to expose the reading public to snippets of neglected knowledge about former kingdoms, leaders, and citizenries. She draws from modern experts and personal travel in nations like Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea as much as she can, rather than relying on archives only.

It is also an 'alive' field of study: while ancient Egypt's dynasties are well charted, ancient sites of the kingdom of Kush in Sudan, and Adulis and Qohaito in Eritrea, are only partly excavated. There is much left to reveal itself.

Cover of Francisco Coloane: Feuerland
Unionsverlag

Feuerland (Tierra del Fuego (1956))
Francisco Coloane (tr. into German by Giò Waeckerlin Induni)

Like Jorge Luis Borges historical stories/essays, Coloane's collection of tales puts the reader back into the morally ambiguous, colonialist era – this time, in southernmost Chile.

Die untergehende Sonne ließ ebenfalls große Goldnuggets am Rand der Horizontpfanne zurück, goldene Kumuluswolken, mit denen die feuerländische Abenddämmerung ihre unablässig wechselnden Phantasmagorien entzündet.

('The setting sun left behind huge gold nuggets at the rim of the horizon's pan, golden cumulus clouds with which the Fuegian dusk was kindling its unceasingly changeful phantasmagorias.') 

The first tale touches on Romanian gold magnate Julius Popper, his mercenary army, and genocide of Ona Indigenous peoples; and the multifarious journeys of Europeans to South America. In inhabiting a men's world, it is rather like Hemingway. But perhaps it is more philosophical.

It's impossible not to picture the landscapes, birds, and animals that Coloane portrays in so much detail, in my mind's eye – no matter how ignorant I was of Patagonia going in.

Coloane experienced popularity abroad in the 1990s, and the Unionsverlag hardcover copy of Feuerland that I am reading was printed during that time.

"Patagonian landscape with single tree before night sky" (1832)
Eduard von Buchan (1800-1876)
Wikimedia Commons

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
Thant Myint-U

A descendant of a United Nations Secretary-General, raised in the United States but drawn into Burma/Myanmar at various epochs in the 1990s through to the present, Thant Myint-U has written not just a scholarly examination of the country's history.

Cover of Thant Myint-U: The Hidden History of Burma
W. W. Norton

He also gives a journalist's insights into life stories of Burmese people who have fallen prey to external and internal social, political, and economic developments; as well as a diplomat's insights into international and national machinations.

It would be too crude to state without qualification that the path to hell is paved with good intentions: the intentions of a few Burmese governments, of Aung San Suu Kyi, of the U.S. government, of the United Nations, ... But, with more nuance, this phenomenon is at least one leading thread in Burma/Myanmar's recent history.

I'm listening to the audiobook recording.

***

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. II (1830)
Thomas Moore, ed.

Inspired by a seminar I'm in about the Greek Revolution of 1821, which had led the English poet to travel to the mainland north of the Peloponnese, I looked up Lord Byron in Google Books. There I found a very "warts and all" compendium of letters, journal extracts, book passages by Byron's partner Teresa Guiccioli, and commentary from Thomas Moore (who had been Byron's friend), published 6 years after Byron died of fever.

"The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi" (1861)
Theodoros Vryzakis (1814-1878)
Wikimedia Commons

...This is more of a rant than a review. I will start by apologizing to the above authors for inadvertently grouping together their works with Byron's. Secondly, because people often feel injured by what they consider 'cancel culture,' I'll emphasize that I don't judge the many readers who appreciate Byron's poems on their own merits.

So:

First of all, this is not news, but: he was not a considerate romantic or sexual partner. He chatters incessantly about his 'conquests' to his male friends in his letters, underlining how little respect he has for these women. In 21st-century terminology: toxic masculinity leaks from every page.

Secondly, Byron keeps lying to himself and others about his intentions:

To give one example, he got rid of his illegitimate daughter Allegra in a convent school.

It was supposedly a good school. But she became 'peculiarly quiet' according to visitors who'd known her before, and she died from a fever there at the age of 5. Claire Clairmont, her mother, was inconsolable.

He had made a big deal in letters to friends about how noble he was, nobler than that atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley (who'd by all accounts been kind to Allegra), for wanting his daughter to grow up religiously and 'purely' ... Not that he'd ever put his money where his mouth is, and tried to be properly 'religious' or 'pure' himself.

Thirdly, he's hugely catty about Leigh Hunt, John William Polidori, and others. Part of it can be explained, I suppose, by his being bisexual but not wholly self-accepting.

But the worst passage so far is a letter to Sir Walter Scott, in January 1822:

I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. […] I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest; whereas, we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.

I think a few years of imprisonment might have helped, and I certainly hope no one will excuse him on the grounds of being 'misunderstood.'

***

Also reading:

Auf der Reise im Dazwischen (Austria, poetry) by Omar Kir Alanam
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (United States, nonfiction) by Michelle Alexander

June 2024 in Books: What I'm Reading... by Chekhov

Progress has been made in a 1970s Penguin Classics paperback of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories: I read "The House with an Attic (An Artist's Story)," translated by David Magarshack, today.

I. I. Shishkin and A. V. Gine in the Studio on the Valaam Island (1860)
by Ivan Shishkin (1831–1898). Wikimedia Commons.

One day [...] I found myself by sheer chance on an estate I had never been to before. The sun was already low on the horizon and the evening shadows lay over the flowering rye. Two rows of very tall, solidly planted old fir trees stood like solid walls, forming a beautiful dark avenue.

***

Chekhov's short story recounts an episode in the life of a cynical artist. The artist, the narrator of the tale and not in an omniscient sense, is renting a house in the countryside. There he gets to know a family of three women: the mother Yekaterina Pavlova, the elder daughter Lydia, and the younger daughter Zhenya.

Lydia is occupied with charitable works: teaching, providing medical care, and lending books. The artist squabbles with her: according to him, she is merely greasing the wheels of a homicidal system that condemns poor Russians to overly long working hours, which permit them no time to enjoy the fruits of education, and will make them sick anyway.

In Front of the Mirror (1870)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

I asked myself while reading if Lydia herself is attracted to the artist. Is she even more irritated that he does not fall in with her views, because her political principles force her to see an obstacle between them because of that? Is the artist also interested, but finds her 'too difficult'? I suspect it, but perhaps Chekhov didn't intend it – then either it's a subconscious subtext, or I am wrong. Perhaps the author sees Lydia's intention exactly as the artist interprets it: she thinks that she needs to punish the artist for his views, which get in the way of her labour.

At any rate, the artist falls for Zhenya. As Zhenya is only 17 years old, and portrayed as naive rather than well-informed and independent for her age, I winced while reading.

She longed for me to introduce her into the sphere of the eternal and the beautiful, into that higher world in which, as she imagined, I was quite at home

In the passage where he describes Zhenya's body as "unformed," the artist seems himself to feel a line has been crossed, albeit not in a legal or criminal sense given customs and legislation of the time. The story was published in 1896, and Chekhov died in 1904.

Corner of overgrown garden. Ground elder (1884)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

It's the second story of Chekhov's I've read where his characters self-reflect ambiguously about what 20th century sociological theorists might call the 'male gaze.'

(In the short story Ariadne, he writes about a young Muscovite who is dismayed at the thought of treating partnerships as pairing together heterosexual couples regardless of liking or character or any other factor. Another character, who conducts an adulterous affair with the titular Ariadne, just thinks that any woman is fair game if he's attracted to her: no deep feelings, thoughts, or sentiments needed.)

APPARENTLY Chekhov's stories were often not so much 'inspired by' as directly based on his own life and people he knew. Which sounds dangerous, but as his stories appeared in magazines and Russians in his circles read and reacted to them, he seemed to be fine risking a fist to the face from a disgruntled acquaintance.

Given that garden-variety gossip arguably informed his plotting, it isn't clear to me: was he trying to make a deeper point about Lydia's character here? or can we just understand "The House with an Attic" as a straightforward narrative drawn from real-life experiences of 1. debating how to improve the Russian society of his time, and 2. finding a love that escapes?

THE PROTAGONIST'S ASSERTIONS about sociopolitics seem largely unreasonable, with veins of the reasonable. Of course everyone is prone to exaggerate due to the heat of debate, or because they lack direct illustrations and examples. Chekhov was a doctor, but/so it's hard to believe that the author agrees with every word:

Lydia asks,

But you also deny the usefulness of medicine, don't you?

The artist replies,

Yes. [...] Do away with the main cause of disease, physical labour, and and there will be no more diseases. 

*

I like the poignant ambivalence when Chekhov leaves hopeful loose threads in his stories – to be continued – for his characters, instead of plunging into an impressive but gloomy dead end.

A Forest (1890s)
by Ivan Shishkin. Wikimedia Commons.

April 2024 In Books: What I'm Reading

The Leipzig Book Fair ran last weekend, and I'd intended to read Dutch and Flemish books before then. I didn't, much, but picked up music scores from German publishers.

Before, I'd dropped into a Polish-German bookstore in the Berlin areas of Kreuzberg/Neukölln. The bookshelves were full of books I might want to read and hadn't read yet. NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory and Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, for example. Zimbabwe's Bulawayo I'd heard about on YouTube, and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk's prose was so good when I read an excerpt from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead that it has been on my mental list to read more.

Before that, I'd watched the 4 episodes of the literary Canada Reads 2024 competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's YouTube channel.

Jessica Johns's fantasy-thriller book Bad Cree was available in the Berlin bookshop just after I heard of it on Canada Reads.

Courtesy of ECW Press

But the first Canadian book I want to finish is Denison Avenue by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes. So far it is one of the best books that I have read in years.

After those, I hope to read The Future by Catherine Leroux or Shut Up You're Pretty by Téa Mutonji.

***

In multimedia:

MIT's OpenCourseWare programme's self-guided English literature course of study on the medieval epic Beowulf, based on 2023 lectures for undergraduates. MIT has published lecture videos, reading lists, and other useful material on its website and on YouTube. It begins with a crash course in Anglo-Saxon grammar. I highly recommend it.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Roald Dahl's strange short story that left me wondering if it was fact or fiction (but I never tried seeing through a pack of cards, as it felt like too much trouble especially if it would likely only prove that I was gullible) when I was a child, has been adapted into a film by Wes Anderson. Breaking the fourth wall, the film weaves in Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl, the narrator. It is available on Netflix, and has won an Academy Award.

Spring Scenes in: The Ugly Duckling

As Berlin breaks out of the winter stasis at its customary slow pace, I wanted to celebrate spring with seasonal classics.

"Maiabend im Tieftal - Erfurt" (1885)
by Emil Zschimmer (1842-1917)
via Wikimedia Commons

William Wordsworth's famous poem "To a Daffodil" has already appeared in this blog. So, moving on to the next inspiration, I browsed translations of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales to find springtime scenes.

***

The "The Ugly Ducking" (1843) (which is famous enough that it requires no synopsis) has a lovely description of spring. It's an analogy of the Ugly Duckling's winter of discontent turning into glorious summer.

It would be very sad, were I to relate all the misery and privations which the poor little duckling endured during the hard winter; but when it had passed, he found himself lying one morning in a moor, amongst the rushes. 

He felt the warm sun shining, and heard the lark singing, and saw that all around was beautiful spring. 

Then the young bird felt that his wings were strong, as he flapped them against his sides, and rose high into the air. 

They bore him onwards, until he found himself in a large garden, before he well knew how it had happened. The apple-trees were in full blossom, and the fragrant elders bent their long green branches down to the stream which wound round a smooth lawn. Everything looked beautiful, in the freshness of early spring. 

From a thicket close by came three beautiful white swans, rustling their feathers, and swimming lightly over the smooth water.

From: Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales. Mrs. H. B. Paull, transl. London/New York: Warne & Co., 1888.
[Wikisource, but I've changed the paragraph structure]

(English translations differ strongly in their translation of 'elders.' 'Lilacs' and 'syringas' appear in other editions published before the First World War. These seem to be the correct translation. 'Syringa' is the Latin genus name for 'lilac.')

***

Men det vilde blive altfor bedrøveligt at fortælle al den Nød og Elendighed, den maatte prøve i den haarde Vinter – – den laae i Mosen mellem Rørene, da Solen igjen begyndte at skinne varmt; Lærkerne sang – det var deiligt Foraar.

Da løftede den paa eengang sine Vinger, de bruste stærkere end før og bare den kraftigt afsted; og før den ret vidste det, var den i en stor Have, hvor Æbletræerne stode i Blomster, hvor Sirenerne duftede og hang paa de lange, grønne Grene lige ned imod de bugtede Canaler! O her var saa deiligt, saa foraarsfriskt! og lige foran, ud af Tykningen, kom tre deilige, hvide Svaner; de bruste med Fjerene og fløde saa let paa Vandet. 

— Hans Christian Andersen. "Den grimme Ælling" (1843) [Wikisource]

Illustration from Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1890—1907)
via Wikimedia Commons

 

January 2024 in Books: What I'm Reading

As December ended, I tried to finish as many books as I could before New Year's:

Ken Krimstein's graphic novel about The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, for example. It instilled an appetite for Weimar Republic-era philosophy that I haven't yet followed up on. It had a few moments of the perfervid enthusiasm of a Dead Poets' Society, but either way it is very well done.

My uncle also gave me Berenberg's German-English edition of Eliot Weinberger's poem Die Sterne. Interspersed with Franziska Neubert's illustrations of starry patterns, which nod I think to Weinberger's cross-cultural approach to star lore and remind me of Islamic art (at least, modern Islamic art) that eschews depicting people, it is a soothing read.

It's also happily tying in with a hardcover edition, with picturesque gilt-edged leaves, of Jean Menzies's collection of English retellings of ancient Greek myth: Greek Myths: Gods and Goddesses. Which was a present, too, from a British former teammate.

Chekhov's Lady with a Lapdog and Other Stories are proving harder to read, just because they aren't very cheerful. But it is impressive again to consider how a man who didn't see his 50th birthday was able to write with so much observation, at such a stylistically sophisticated level, about such a large range of characters.

*

Aside from that, I read The Light of Days by Judy Batalion in a young readers' edition.

It extols young Polish Jewish women who fought Nazis as well as the Jewish police in the cities, towns and villages in the early 1940s. Incredibly grim as the events are, I was impressed the author pulled through the writing and research.

It's also a more morally ambiguous book than I think the author realizes. She cheerfully describes the deaths of Nazis, or (in some cases) the attacks on Jewish police who have been detailed at the coercion of German authorities to round up fellow Jews, as if she were a World War I-era Briton talking about 'potting the Huns.'

Whereas at other times, Nazis, Germans who aren't Nazis, Polish people, and Jewish police help Jewish civilians to escape, even at great personal risk.

Did grenades, bullets, lightbulbs filled with acid, etc., always hit the oppressor instead of the helper? 

I think it was more complex for the Jewish fighters to kill others than the book relates. Likely Batalion's research would have dug up evidence, if there had been any, of PTSD or feelings of guilt related specifically to guerrilla warfare. But I'm not sure if all Holocaust survivors would have been open about having these feelings.

I grew up around my grandparents' deep, war-related queasiness around weaponry. None of them, of course, were Holocaust survivors. Still, their attitude reinforced for me that people who knew best knew guns and their use, saw these as a serious, grim thing. In a limited context, guns can determine who dies and survives; as a broader response to violence, I am not sure they resolve anything as intended.

*

The next book once The Light of Days was finished: We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, a book on First Nations, Native Americans, and stand-up comedy by the Canadian author Kliph Nesteroff.