Genêt: London before World War II

London Was Yesterday
by Janet Flanner

This book is a collection of essays, both short and long, that Janet Flanner wrote for The New Yorker magazine in the 1934-1939 which was the time of Edward VIII's abdication "for the woman that I love" and the run up to World War II.

When Miss Flanner's editor, Harold Ross, gave her the job of reporting on France and England in the late 1920s, he told her that he wanted to know what the natives were thinking about themselves and their cultures and their nations, not what she thought of them. And Miss Flanner produced that kind of viewpoint for the U.S. readers.

Miss Flanner reported from Europe for The New Yorker from the late 1920s to her retirement in the early 1970s.

Her essays range from three sentence paragraphs on the doings and dancings of Josephine Baker or the funeral of Anatole France (is he even read today in France?) to several long portraits of Wallis Simpson (that beloved woman) and the new Queen, Elizabeth the wife of George VI who was the father of the present Elizabeth II, after the abdication of Edward VIII. I know that this sentence reads like the boring genealogy of the Bible.

Miss Flanner was a writer with a dry and wry turn of phrase and wit and a detached (easy for her, she was a Yank), discerning view of her subjects and their concerns. She could also do slapstick:

When Lotte Lehmann, as the Marschallin, had a chill and walked out on the opening act of the first Rosenkavalier performance, a leg came off fat Baron Ochs' sofa. Furthermore, an anachronistic wirehaired fox terrier stole the eighteenth-century levee scene, and the lady spy's hoopskirt flew waist-high after the Presentation of the Rose episode.

It is the Marx Brothers all in one.

History Lessons

The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman

This book is an informal history of the United States from 1940 to 1950. After discussing a section of history, the one on the economics of the period is truly boring and it shouldn't be because this is when a steel workers strike could stop the US economy cold, the author attempts to connect it to a movie of the time that echoes the concerns and fears of that history section. When was the last time that anyone has ever been frightened by a strike lately? How Labor has Fallen.

The movie that the author discusses along with the strikes of the period is The Long Night directed by Anatole Litvak that stars Henry Fonda as a World War II veteran with a bad case of PTSD who kills some guy and then barricades himself in his apartment and has flashbacks all movie long. I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know just how that relates to Strikes other than barricading oneself in one's room is sort of like walking a picket line in a strike. You can only hope someone is paying attention and if you kill someone, you do draw some notice from authorities and the media.

The history, other than the economic side, is mostly interesting and well presented by the author. The connection with some of the movies (the ones that I have seen) is slight to incidental. The author is really not all that interested in the movie correlation side of the book. I assume that his agent or publisher made him include the movies in the book to make it easier to sell. The author's own experiences in the time period, he was a drafted soldier in Army Intelligence in Japan, were much more interesting and well presented. I assume that correlating his own experiences with the history period was what he really wanted to do and probably was what he originally did in the book before he had to tart it up with Hollywood blondes.

What I took away from this book was that America was having a moment of Mass Fear and Hysteria and Paranoia in the later part of the forties. The loss of FDR must have been truly frightening despite the winning of the war. The similarities with present day America are also disconcerting. Once again we have elected officials like Senator McCarthy, only today we have many of them not just one, who manufacture Fear crises like the National Debt and Bengazhi!!! and the Second Amendment to advance their careers over the Real Life and the Truth and The Way that It Really Is.

Hmmmm, perhaps this is why Fantasy and Science Fiction and Magic movies are so popular these days. The crazies want us all to share their delusions.


The Entertainer: Movies Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century by Margaret Talbot

This is another history book about the times and the movies of those times. It is also a memoir of Lyle Talbot, an actor who began as a Magician's Assistant at the beginning of the 20th Century, starred in Roaming Theatrical companies and their plays, and then went to Hollywood at the beginning of the Talkies Movies and made his career as a B-movie lead and later as the best friend of Ozzie Nelson in TV.

The book is written by one of his daughters, Margaret, and she includes family history and reminisces to give an even more intimate picture of her father and his career and his family. Miss Talbot does a good job with remembering her father's and her past. Like Mr. Proust, it is the little things that she remembers that become the crux of the interpretation of her and her father's life. She also writes well.

As for Mr. Talbot, I have seen one of his Pre-Code movies, Three on a Match, (Bette Davis is in this one, but this is before Warner Brothers figured out just how interesting an actress that she was and was still making her play unremarkable Good Girls. When you think about it, it is amusing, Miss Davis found her Bad Girl after the Era of Bad Girls in the Pre-Code movies. It is also a tribute to Miss Davis' ability to handle subtlety and subtext in her acting and that is amusing because I don't often think of subtlety when I think of Miss Davis' acting.).

Any way, I liked Mr. Talbot and his character in the movie that I was watching mainly for Ann Dvorak, a Pre-Code Female Star. Mr. Talbot played a stinker with some moral scruples, you felt sorry for the poor sod. I have seen some episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet which was The Cosby Show of the fifties and sixties. I hated his character on that one. Mr. Talbot played the obnoxious neighbor and best friend of Ozzie. His character was one of those "Hail Fellow and Well-Met" men with idiotic jokes and Loud Camaraderie, and that shows just how undervalued his acting skills were when you compare the two characters.

Mr. Talbot was also in some of Ed Wood's cult classic Bad Films.

More Ghost Stories

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

The first line in the book blurb on the Barnes & Noble site caught my eye and my sense of the ridiculous:

"Bestselling novelist Helen Dunmore’s historical novels have earned her comparisons in the press to Tolstoy and Emily Bronte."

What? Who would make such outrageously unbelievable comparisons but a book review comedienne? That is comparing apples to raisins or a fly to a saber toothed Big Cat.

Miss Dunmore has written an enjoyable (and a quick read---take that Tolstoy) ghost story about the Battle of Britain and the dreary and rationed aftermath of World War II for the British people. The main characters' lives are arranged and circumscribed by death and deprived life and love. Everyone wants more but no one can have it. It just isn't there anymore. The war wore it out.

The book is about a 1950's doctor's wife in one of those old flats that has a bathtub in the kitchen and dirt in the cracks of 1800's woodwork that not even an archaeologist can dig out for research into climatic changes of the Industrial Revolution. When her husband the doctor is out on a late night call, the wife answers a tapping on the dirty window pane of the main entrance door to find a WWII pilot asking for admittance. The wife is none too circumspect and all too bored with her life and waves the pilot in for a sexy landing. And from there, we explore sex with a ghost or an incubus.

One of the advantages of sex with an incubus is that the living don't pay attention to it. So the wife doesn't really have to hide her affair from anyone (her husband) except the old hag who owns and rents out her flat. The Old Hag, as with most Old hags, knows more than anyone else about the pilot incubus. The Old Hag wants her Youth and her Love back, but she doesn't have the ration credits to obtain it.

Southern Musings: Strange Fruit

I read Molly Haskell's Frankly, My Dear: "Gone With the Wind" Revisited. The book was fine, but the bibliography was fascinating for me. I decided to read some of the books that she had used to write her book. A socio-ethnio-fantasio-ography of a region that I had once lived in.

Just checking out your references, Miss Haskell.

First up, Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith.

Miss Haskell characterized it as a novel by a lesbian about an interracial love affair in the Deep South (Maxwell, Georgia). How could I resist? And by the way, I thought the title was about the product of that love affair and by product, I was thinking a baby. Well, there was an illegitimate, miscegenated "foetus" as it was called about half the time in the book, but there was also a lynching because of that baby to be. And the aftermath of that lynching is what is usually known as "strange fruit".

The plot is white, weak boy meets over-educated, black, nurse girl (only Nonnie, the black girl, is always described as white looking and is always standing in a "white" light). White Boy meets Black Girl and they go at it, but there is no real sex in the book. There is a lot of pawing and petting, but nothing sexy. Hetero-sex between any of the races is crude in this book.

After White Boy and Black Girl go at it---uh oh---there is a baby on the way. And this conversation takes place:

White Boy: "I've been a fool to get you in trouble like this. To tell you the honest truth I thought---you'd---know---how not to---having gone off to college---and everything---"

What? White Boy is in his mid-twenties at least, he went off to war (I thought it was WWII, but it was WWI, and you'll see why I thought this) and he doesn't know about Condoms? The army teaches its soldiers about Condoms. I've seen silent British Army WWI training films about the evils of sex with evil women and the US Army wasn't doing the same? What a douche! And with a douchebag is how I suppose White Boy thought Black Girl practiced birth control. That, or she called up Margaret Sanger, or wrote her, when Miss Sanger was in jail for passing out birth control manuals.

Black Girl looks in horror at White Boy, and why wouldn't she? This is what she fell in love with? Girl, you went to Spelman College, and this is what you sleep with and then you go home to Maxwell (haha) Georgia and nurse some little white boy with cerebral palsy? Go be a school teacher up north. And pass for white and get yourself a Real White Boy up there, if that is what you have to have.

So to get out of his predicament, White Boy gives Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth $100 to marry his Black Girl (but she's not really all that black, especially when she is standing in that white light in front of the Swamp). White Boy gives Black Girl who stands in front of the Swamp (the Swamp just lurks in the background of this novel a lot---no action there) $200 for an abortion or baby clothes, I'm not sure which is which and White Boy isn't either. White Boy then joins the church and proposes to a White Girl (who doesn't have to stand in a White Light to be White).

Black Girl has a Brown Brother (and she has a Black Sister---we have all sorts of racial shadings and prejudices) who finds out about the White Boy and the Baby and he shoots the White Boy and puts him out of his stupidity. That should have happened sooner. Maybe Jesus in Heaven can teach White Boy some smarts.

Brown Brother takes off with White Boy's $200 to start a new life up north. Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth gets hunted down and lynched for not killing his White Boy childhood friend. And besides Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth was really, really black and I think that he lived in the Swamp so he was the best one to lynch, anyway. And Black Girl marries Black Doctor and has her sort of White baby.

The novel was slow going at first, but it became a sort of more understandable and more explained and expositioned sort of Faulkner novel. And I'm no Faulkner fan.

The book jacket said that the novel that I read was in its ninth printing (so it sold even without the sex), and it cost $2.75. The jacket and the copyright page had the following:

"IMPORTANT NOTICE

THIS Wartime edition is complete and unabridged. In order to keep this book in print as long as possible without exceeding their paper quota for 1944, the publishers have had it entirely reset and have made a new set of plates. The new type size is only one point smaller that that of the first edition, but it allows more words to the page and therefore fewer pages. All printings beginning with the seventh will be made from the new plates."

And that is why I thought this book occurred in WWII.