The Life of President Carter, Take Two

One of NPR's best books of 2020 was an exhaustive (800+ pages in paper, 30+ hours in audiobook) biography of President Jimmy Carter: His Very Best, by Jonathan Alter. Although it is rooted in portraits of rural Georgia during the Great Depression, when the president was still very small, and passes through the wartime 1940s and the halls of the naval academy in Annapolis, it always checks in again with contemporaneity.

His Very Best has ambiguities practically on every page. It makes clear that Carter was not always mild-mannered, not always the greatest husband to Rosalynn (pronounced 'ROE-za-linn'), a tough parent, a skeptic where he is now a kind of non-conformist Baptist, a future humanitarian who did not air his own liberalism on race at a time where the backlash to the civil rights movement made it uncomfortable, a political strategist despite his unworldly(ish) principles. Also: Depending on where you sit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may or may not see a contradiction (seemingly the author does) between the peace-brokering he did between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s, and his views on the Palestinian cause nowadays.

Every president proves as best he can that he is a man of the people, while running for office. Jimmy Carter himself may have overstated the deprivation of his childhood circumstances during political campaigning — sure, his family did not have running water for a while, but during the Depression they were rather well off compared to their indigent neighbours. In one passage the author, Jonathan Alter, also writes with painful directness about the way Carter's family economically exploited their Black neighbours even while the family was also at times more tolerant and more deeply helpful than their other White neighbours. — But Carter also seems a much more handy, self-made figure than his presidential peers. The author argues that he is an autodidactic renaissance man.

The truth, as one of Oscar Wilde's characters phrased it, is rarely pure and never simple.

The author — who states that the biography is unauthorized and does write a few very unflattering assessments, but also spoke with his subject for the sake of the book — tries to enhance Jimmy Carter's image, even without resorting to Carter's famously helpful post-presidential career. (Well into his 90s, he has still been on the ground with Habitat for Humanity, helping build houses for those who need them, for example.) 

Alter wants to show that what passed for weak policy in the 1970s is often common sense today: emblematic, the solar panels that the President installed on the roof of the White House. And the author does have a good case: another example is Carter's opposition to the death penalty, something that is now gaining wide currency amongst top Democratic Party leaders. Maybe Carter has been the first 21st century president.

I think the biography is in its approach also very much a reflection of 21st century thinking: we no longer need to pretend that large social struggles were won through immaculate saviour figures, nor is it useful or fair to pretend this. We do not need to write hagiographies of a Martin Luther King, Jr., as a saintly figure who glided through life enfolded by the aura of moral White approval, to appreciate his impact for the better on the course of history. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of all people who did not step into the light of the many others who came together to lead change, the people who would talk with a Menachem Begin and an Anwar al-Sadat — and help them be guided by their own thoughts and feelings toward some course of action that may make the world a slightly better place to live in. The future of civil rights and human rights may well lie (perhaps it has always done so) in a democracy of goodwill.

August 2021 In Books: What I'm Reading

Earlier this month I finished Jutta Person's Esel, a thin German-language volume of cultural history about donkeys and anthropomorphic interpretations of them by everyone from Roman satirists through Christian theologians to German romantics. My uncle M. gave it to me as a birthday present last year because donkeys are my favourite animals. Now another birthday gift, Paul Auster's 4321, is lined up to read next.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji, are also read, and although both were undoubtedly good, I won't write reviews at present because they'd be too half-baked.

Cover of A Hundred Million Years and a Day
via Gallic Books/Belgravia Books

In a big geographical leap, I've moved to reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, a French hit novel that is set at various times in the first half of the 20th century, It is written from the perspective of a solitary, dry-souled ivory tower paleontologist — written by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and translated sublimely and award-winningly by Sam Taylor. Perhaps because my French literary frame of reference is small, the atmosphere and the setting remind me of Marcel Pagnol and the spare style reminds me of Le grand Meaulnes. It's also well thought out; sometimes time-hopping in books is so tediously confusing that I want to gouge out my eyes, but here the back and forth — as the details are filled in — adds genuine suspense.

***

The book I'm most enthusiastic right now because it makes me happy is Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey by Bob Avian and Tom Santopietro. A basic knowledge of musicals or of mid-20th century film is enough to make its revelations understandable.

The aim of the authors is to tell us exactly what we want to know: each chapter is grouped quite tightly around a specific musical. Fortunately the gossip is generous and not mean-spirited. We hear that Jerome Robbins, a god of sorts among choreographers, was tremendously unpleasant; but we are also told that this was because he was unhappy.

In general Avian (from whose perspective the book is written) and Santopietro express modern views. Avian, in his eighties, makes little attempt to present a great man's (or woman's) sadism as ideal or even as a useful evil. He presents it as a flaw, but as a flaw whose owner still deserves sympathy.

I love the old-fashioned turns of phrase in the book, too, however: 'great gal', or "[... q]uicker than you can say “West Side Story,” Audrey set her cap for Michael and snagged him."

It feels twee or reductive to call Avian delightful, but the adjective comes to mind anyway.

The authors are friendly raconteurs, as we see not just there, but also when they wink at the audience with sentences like this vignette from an unsuccessful play production:

Act Two contained a King Lear ballet—yes, you read that right—and I was completely at sea.

Avian also mentions his experience of 1960s drug culture in a characteristically wholesome way:

I tried pot for the first time and thought, “Hmm, this sure is a lot of fun. And creative.”

He died in January this year, as I was startled to learn when reading his Wikipedia biography.

Readers who want memoirists to disembowel their private lives might find this book not for them, but fans of Broadway, or of 20th century American film star history, and perhaps also fans of New York City's social history in general, will probably love this. National Public Radio included it in their list of the best books of 2020.

*

"Tony award-winning Broadway choreographer Bob Avian dies aged 83" by Adrian Horton (January 22, 2021) [Guardian]

***

As part of my research into the history of the earliest decades of the 20th century, I have also jumped into the World War I chapters of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell's Autobiography. Published well after that War, when the Cold War was still on, it is like the oak in Jean de la Fontaine's fable — not in that its roots touch on the realm of the dead, but rather that its roots touch on the realm of Victoria and an era of absolute British aristocratic privilege that seems utterly absurd now.

I first read the autobiography when I was a teenager struggling with my own opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He was briefly an imaginary posthumous mentor.

And now — even as I wince at his views on relationships during the passages about Lady Constance Malleson, Katherine Mansfield and Lady Ottoline Morrell; even as I find him overprivileged in one passage, and mindbogglingly out of touch in another; and even though I don't admire his catty moments — in general it feels like his intelligence, his wonderful turns of phrase, and his dedication are not in doubt. And his insights on political and social celebrities are also great, if partial, gossip.

Cover of Why Men Fight (1917)
via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a passage where he has been imprisoned due to his activism against the First World War, in a rather posh prison division thanks to the intervention of former British prime minister Arthur Balfour:

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. [...] I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [...] and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.

(Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1978. p. 256)

*

I'm also reading Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, about a large midcentury American family that included a high number of sons with schizophrenia. I am struggling with it. As a takedown of the conformist 1950s ideal of domestic bliss, or of the unalloyed joys of military service and being in a military family, I think Hidden Valley Road is the most effective.

I would like it better if the family could have written their own history. It's not much fun of reading their lives as a psychological literature exercise. From my amateur armchair perspective, I like it better when we acknowledge that we can follow some of the thought patterns of the more conspicuously mentally ill, for example.

I've known people who are genuinely healthy in mind, like the psychological equivalent of an amazingly athletic person. In most cases I would say, however, that we are participants in, and not observers of, the human battle for logic, reason and proportionate emotional reactions. If we don't acknowledge that, it's unhealthy for ourselves and harmful to others.

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading Next, Part 2

Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, FL
Photograph c. 1940, in the State Library and Archives of Florida
via Wikimedia Commons

UNWISELY I am working at reading farther into the Teilchen-detektoren book about physics, the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Ο μεγάλος περίπατος του Πέτρου by Alki Zei, Cavafy's poems and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, at once. Yet, for inexplicable reasons, the impulse hit to begin reading even more books.

Therefore I'm rereading Anne of the Island, which is one of the sequels to the early 20th-century Canadian children's book Anne of Green Gables. And, more ambitiously, reading the 17th-century French drama Bajazet by Jean Racine for the first time. I don't even know what that play is about, because I'm still reading biographical introductory material and don't want to 'peek ahead.' Of course that makes it more fun: exploring old literature as if it were new and just hatched from the egg is exciting and (hopefully) rewarding.

The Three Escapes of
Hannah Arendt
by Ken Krimstein
Bloomsbury, via
Amazon.com

Lastly, godfather M. gave me a graphic novel about Hannah Arendt: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein. After Marjane Satrapi's memoir of life during the political revolutions in Iran during the second half of the 20th century, Persepolis, it's the second graphic novel I've ever read. It was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. And I'm glad to have a starting point to approach the philosopher. My mother has read her work and it sounded like not to read it is to miss timely and relevant perspectives.

*

Also, I am re-reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Its existence is, of course, not a great secret amongst fans of classics and literary romance.

North and South, ©BBC (2004)

The BBC adaptation of 2004 has lent it a broader, happy and active readership. Also, on YouTube one can probably still find an older adaptation where Patrick Stewart, predating his Star Trek captainship, strides through the scenes as the tradesman hero.

Amongst the author's other works, Wives and Daughters was depressing and 'domestically claustrophobic' as far as I recall, as well as unfinished. I don't feel like rereading Ruth or Cranford, and I never read Mary Barton or the life of Charlotte Brontë. In short, North and South is my favourite Gaskell work.

*

Note Regarding Process: Last year these 'monthly round-up' blog posts appeared with the heading "What We'll Be Reading Next." But this month, new publications are not likely to be discussed and it would be silly to imply that other people must read the same older publications that I am, so I've chosen to use the first person singular instead.

May 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

Illustration from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
by W. W. Denslow
via Wikimedia Commons

"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019

May 6th will be the 100th anniversary of the death of L. Frank Baum, the American children's author who wrote the Wizard of Oz books, mentions The Guardian. We still have perhaps two-thirds of the series in our bookshelves, so I might take a look at them again.

Walt Whitman, the poet who foisted upon us (indirectly) the film Dead Poets' Society and who inspired much other art by writing Leaves of Grass, was born 200 years ago on May 31st.

As far as new books appearing this month, I feel drawn to the reprint of Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, edited by Bryan Karetnyk, that Penguin Classics will be releasing tomorrow. Also, having enjoyed a New York-centred novel for teenagers, The Poet X, read on an audiobook by the author, Elizabeth Acevedo, I'm looking forward to With the Fire on High.

***

The Poet X (2018), which I read on the recommendation of a colleague, is a series of fictional autobiographical poems written by a Dominican daughter of a Catholic family. Xiomara's passion for writing, her growing skepticism of the Catholic religion of her upbringing, and her anxiousness to break free from the rigid repression of her mother's household to venture further in both writing and in a relationship with a boy classmate, drive her away from her old life.

If I were to have read all the verse that I listened to per audiobook in a paper book, it might have felt weaker, because the print lacks the momentum and the authenticity that the author's voice gave it.

The heart of the book is slam poetry anyway, however, so it naturally lends itself best to a spoken performance.

Skimming through the Amazon preview, however, I see that even in printed form it is already pithy:

My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in the pews
wearing pretty florals and a soft smile.
They got combat boots and a mouth silent
until it's sharp as an island machete.

In terms of other Young Adult books I've listened to these past few months, I felt that Angie Thomas's On the Come Up and The Hate U Give — because they see the fictional southern American suburban "ghetto" of Garden Heights in a more detailed and encompassing way than Acevedo's Bronx — were more ambitious than Acevedo's book. But the principal characters in The Poet X are well and ably sketched, although the marginal 'extras' are a bit of a lost opportunity. For example:

Shake my head as even the drug dealers posted up
near the building smile more in the summer, their hard scowls
softening into glue-eyed stares in the direction

of the girls in summer dresses and short shorts

via Amazon.com

In On the Come Up or The Hate U Give, we're likely to be told about what the dealers' families are like, why they're selling drugs, who has the dealers under their thumb and how likely the dealers are to escape from gang affiliations and this livelihood if they want to escape.

We'll know which hobbies and childhood plans are stored on the other side of the line that separates law from law-breaking, where the dealers' ethical boundaries lie, where the balance is between joy at a generous income and distaste at its origin, what their family, friends, and neighbours think of their dealing, and what happens to the neighbourhood.

In Acevedo's book, as far as I recall the only thing we know is that they're sleazy and physically threatening. All of this is no reflection on her writing, because she might be just faithfully writing what she knew. But it is a little sad that given a complex neighbourhood, the depiction of its humanity does not extend further, and that the world is separated into the proverbial sheep and the goats.

I like logical prose and understated self-description and careful similes, so the poetry is often wasted on me. For example,

Jesus feels like a friend
I've had my whole childhood
who has suddenly become brand-new;
who invites himself over too often, who texts me too much.

This doesn't seem like an apt comparison to me, if I'm being fastidious.

I think that Acevedo's book is also firmly anchored in a conservative world where well-inclined teachers are authorities to appeal to and imitate, and one can leave poverty by 'obeying the rules.' In Thomas's books, the teachers can be good or bad, but in both cases certainly don't know everything. Also, she's likelier to think that 'the rules' suck or don't work. On Friday, American politician Ilhan Omar Twitter-posted a quotation from Malcolm X:

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

via Amazon

Thomas mentions Malcolm X in The Hate U Give, and I think she'd approve of this quotation. She also seems to believe, refreshingly, that teenagers even at 16 have the right to chart their own paths and morality independently of the adults (relatives or non-relatives) in their environment. I was worried about Acevedo's book because — in contrast to my own experience, at least — the relationship with the mother seemed so toxic that I wasn't sure if it was redeemable; but Xiomara's path forward still lay closely bound with her family, although the author does not condemn her impulse to flee them for a while.

*

To switch from The Poet X to On the Come Up, On the Come Up also worried me for different reasons. It seems to accept the instant celebrity that dominates the internet age; I'd have expected Angie Thomas to turn against that.

Bri, On the Come Up's protagonist, has worked to become a rapper for years, filling notebooks with her verse. I guess she has therefore earned the confidence to put her rap forward on YouTube and on the radio, and to seek a record deal. But it surprises me a great deal that the adult professionals didn't require her to do more training, or to receive more input from mentors or other professionals, so that her career would be more solidly grounded and versatile.

Besides, I suspect that instant fame — which Bri experiences — is so psychologically damaging that I can't imagine why it is still tolerated. Reality TV stars, parents of a murdered child, high school students who survived a bullet, someone who was in an internet meme — all of these people face a remorseless artillery of publicity and comment, which surely amounts to psychological torture and journalistic malpractice. Thomas might have experience with this herself, because she rose to fame meteorically once The Hate U Give was appreciated and accepted for publication; although she is not as young as her heroine, she was not yet 30 at that time. But the main criticism of fame she offers in On the Come Up is that words can be twisted against a rapper (or author), to allege horrible or at least dangerous messages that were never intended. This can lead to violence by people who see such messages where none exist, and to personal and professional reprisals against the unfortunate rapper or author.

But, to end the carping criticism, Thomas's and Acevedo's books spotlight a part of the American experience I rarely see described with such a ring of truth and of affectionate, firsthand knowledge. That is why I'm pleased about Acevedo's new book, mentioned above, which is about teenage pregnancy and will appear on May 7th; and pleased about Thomas's remarks on Twitter that she is working on a new novel.

***

Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes

Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean

Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)

***

In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.

Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900)
"Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of
the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as
the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army."
Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother
and one of her sisters died, early in her life.
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.

Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.

But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'

It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.

Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.

When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.

"Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913"
The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood.
From the Bibliothèque nationale de France
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.