Maggie Smith

One of my very favourite actors. A couple of weekends ago I was in the mood to watch an old favorite of mine, in which she stars, so I got My house in Umbria. Still delightful. I've watched so often, I know much of the dialogue — even some in Italian.

Last weekend, Saturday, specifically, I needed a film to watch. Looked through TCM's list, and picked out a couple. Watched Travels with my aunt — after five minutes, zzzz! Awoke an hour later, and turned it off. Oh, well.

Cristofo Colon

After reading Flotsametrics, by Curt Ebbesmeyer, I got this Columbus biography; Ebbesmeyer praised Columbus as an important navigator and an antecedent in flotsametrics. This book is not so much a biography of the man as a biographical sketch of the explorer and sailor. Well written, it flowed easily and was a good read.  John Noble Wilford has written a number of other books.

The Red Book Of C.G. Jung

Modern men in the throes of a midlife crisis have been known to overhaul their careers, their relationships—even their bodies. Few, though, intentionally induce hallucinations in order to commune with demons and deities and end up creating a text transforming—at least indirectly—the entire field of psychology.

The Red Book Of C.G. Jung - owned by 3 libraries in Nassau, plus Great Neck
The Hammer Museum - at UCLA
Philemon Foundation - is preparing for publication the Complete Works of C. G. Jung. 

Carl Gustav Jung was 37 when by most accounts he lost his soul. As psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani explained, "Jung had reached a point in 1912 when he'd achieved all of his youthful ambitions but felt that he'd lost meaning in his life, an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth."

In fact, the dilemma was so profound it eventually caused the father of analytical psychology to undergo a series of waking fantasies. Traveling from Zurich to Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in October 1913, Jung was roused by a troubling vision of "European-wide destruction." In place of the normally serene fields and trees, one of the era's pre-eminent thinkers saw the landscape submerged by a river of blood carrying forth not only detritus but also dead bodies. When that vision resurfaced a few weeks later—on the same journey—added to the mix was a voice telling him to "look clearly; all this would become real." World War I broke out the following summer.

These experiences prompted Jung to question his own sanity. But they also motivated him to embark on what turned out to be a 16-year self-seeking journey documented in a red leather journal titled "Liber Novus" (Latin for "New Book"). It features ethereal, often unsavory passages and shocking yet vibrant images expressing what Jung himself termed a "confrontation with the unconscious."

As Jung explained on the final page: "to the superficial observer, it will appear like madness." Yet Mr. Shamdasani says Jung was engaged in a clearly controlled experiment. "There wasn't anything like a psychosis," he insists. In fact, what emerged during what many describe as a crippling depression were Jung's groundbreaking theories on archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—the interior work one must engage in to become a person or individual.

Books on Guilt

One is a series of "Five Best" columns that appear at the weenekd in the WSJ. In this one Pascal Bruckner confesses his admiration of these books about guilt.

1. The Trial. Franz Kafka.  Knopf, 1937.

One morning Joseph K. is arrested for no reason at all, brought before a court and, eventually, executed in a quarry: His ordeal has become a poignant metaphor for the experience of citizens in totalitarian regimes. In the eyes of the ruthless judicial system in Franz Kafka's "The Trial," Joseph K. is guilty of existing, no more than that; his crime is the very fact that he is alive. Nothing he can do can save him once he has fallen into the hands of the judges. The more he protests his innocence, the more he arouses suspicion. "Innocent of what?" one judge asks. "The Trial" (first published in German in 1925) is terrifying because the hero, without understanding why, begins collaborating with the machine that crushes him. One is reminded of the people convicted during the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s when they shouted, as they were about to be executed: "Long live Stalin! Long live the proletarian revolution!"

2. And Then There Were None. Agatha Christie. Dodd, Mead. 1940.

Ten people who have nothing in common find themselves on Indian Island. They have been invited there by a mysterious Mr. Owen, who has, unfortunately, not shown up. A couple of servants see to their comfort. On the living-room table the guests find 10 Indian statuettes, and in the bedrooms hangs a nursery rhyme announcing how each guest is to be murdered. The deaths follow one another implacably, hewing to the poem's predictions as though the characters' fates were foreordained. Everyone has sinned enough to deserve death; everyone bears the mark of Cain. Within this Puritan framework Agatha Christie displays her passion for playing with crime. As it turns out, one of the 10 guests is the murderer—and he knocks himself off as well, using a sophisticated technique to make it seem as if he has been killed by someone else. Christie's taste for trickery is stronger than her taste for punishment. Thus there is no tragedy in her work: Evil can always be overcome by a shrewd detective.

3. Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad. 1902.

In Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," an officer in the British merchant marine named Marlow sails up a serpentine African river to look for Kurtz, an ivory-trader from whom no word has been had for months. As Marlow ventures into the interior, oppressed by the dense jungle, he hears a strange report: In a mad quest for ivory, Kurtz has begun slaughtering the natives. Conrad took his inspiration from the atrocities committed by the Belgian King Leopold II, who was then master of the Congo and who tortured and massacred his recalcitrant subjects. Kurtz, of whom we get only glimpses, is fascinating because he speaks the language of the tormentor, not that of civilization: He feels no remorse; he is a man who never feels guilty. A pamphlet he has written on civilizing the natives ends with the terrible words: "Exterminate all the brutes!" He weaves a bond between the logic of profit and the logic of annihilation. Conrad's genius consists not solely in denouncing colonialism but also in anticipating the disasters that followed decolonization. We can read this short novel as a still-relevant depiction of the abominations that have stained the recent history of Africa.

4. The Fall. Albert Camus. Vintage. 1956.

At the height of the Cold War and communist domination over the French intelligentsia, Albert Camus published "The Fall," the brief confession of a "judge-penitent" named Clamens, who let a young woman commit suicide before his eyes by throwing herself into the Seine and did nothing to help her. Clamens has taken refuge in Amsterdam, preferring the canals' still water to the Seine's impetuous flow, and he likes to confide in strangers. He tells them that he does not regret what he has done—and then forces the strangers to confess, in turn, a crime of their own. I am a bastard, he seems to say, but so are you. Clamens practices public confession as kind of contamination, a way of implicating all humanity in his crime. The novel was an indirect attack on Jean-Paul Sartre, who was always ready to flagellate himself for being a bourgeois and to accuse France and Europe of causing all the world's ills. In the tradition of the 17th-century French moralists, Camus, concealed under this penitent's habit, denounces the moral hypocrisy of a certain kind of leftist.

5. The Human Stain. Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin. 2000.

Coleman Silk has been forced to retire from his professorship amid murky accusations of racism, an episode in which he lost everything—his job, his family, his reputation. Embittered, he visits his new neighbor, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, to suggest that Zuckerman avenge him by writing his story. We discover that Silk's main crime is having tried to escape the racial prison in which America incarcerates its citizens: Born black, Silk has passed himself off as a Jew to escape the stereotypes he might have had to endure. Refusing to accept being identified by the color of his skin is, of course, an offense that Silk's "tolerant" colleagues find intolerable.

—Mr. Bruckner is the author of "The Tears of the White Man" (1986) and "The Tyranny of Guilt," recently published by Princeton University Press. Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

Continent in carnage

The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy
By Peter H. Wilson
(Belknap/Harvard, 997 pages, $35)




The war fought between 1618 and 1648 remains, by many measures, the most destructive in Europe's history. During those years the Holy Roman Empire—which governed most of the European continent east of the Rhine—lost as many as eight million subjects, or a staggering 20% of its population. This amount to three times Europe's death rate during World War II. Whole swaths of central Europe were depopulated, abandoned to wild pigs and wolves.

Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory, immortalized by the stormy prose of Friedrich Schiller, who in the late 18th century published a multi-volume Sturm und Drang history of the war. In the English-speaking world, the closest we have to a classic narrative is Veronica Wedgewood's stylish, if outmoded, history of 1938. A definitive account has been needed, and now Peter Wilson, one of Britain's leading historians of Germany, has provided it.

Genius In Exile

One morning in September 1940, a newly arrived European musician paid a visit to the conductor Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles and found him ­discussing Gustav Mahler with his fellow-exile Bruno Walter. The visitor went on to lunch at the new home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, where he worked on some chamber music with Mann’s son Michael, a ­viola player. In the evening, he dropped in on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood, assisting in a run-through of his violin concerto.

For a brief and unrepeatable moment, an eyeblink in cultural history, the City of Angels contained the future of classical music.

Classical music is, of course, a misnomer: something is classical because it is valued for its transcendence, and is from an earlier age. This classical music is really Western European orchestral music. Much as I like it, some of it, anyway, I can not help but notice that it is a bunch of white men that are its stalwarts, its stars. Surely there was much more other music around that qualified as beautiful, transcendent; just depends where we look.

For the duration of World War II, Los Angeles was at the cutting edge of musical creation. How the frontiers of a rarified art ­relocated to a place ruled by sun, surf and superficial movies is the subject of “A Windfall of Musicians,” ­Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s engaging study, based in the main on survivor interviews and documentary archives.

The influx was provoked by Adolf Hitler, whose ­seizure of power on Jan. 30, 1933, soon enough meant the banishment of modern art and Jewish musicians from German public life. Hollywood offered exiled ­writers a chance of employment, luring in the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, the best-selling “Grand Hotel” novelist Vicki Baum and Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the World War I classic “All’s Quiet on the Western Front.”

Musicians sought sanctuary first on the East Coast, with its venerable symphony orchestras and prestigious ­universities, drifting west in disillusion with the deep ­conservatism they encountered. Los Angeles, for all its open-air lifestyle, was no paradise. ­Schoenberg ­partnered Charles Chaplin and George ­Gershwin on the tennis court but found himself teaching music to ­“superficial and external” students, many of them ­concerned more with their credits than the ­challenge of art. Appalled by the ubiquity of commercialism, ­Schoenberg told the artist Oskar Kokoschka that he was living in a “world in which I nearly die of disgust.” Lotte Lehmann, a serene Lieder singer, wrote a novel called “Of Heaven, Hell and Hollywood,” leaving no doubt about the infernal realm she now inhabited.

I have searched high and low for the book, but it is not to be found, alas.

Ms. Crawford, who has spent much of her working life teaching and making music in Southern California, brings a physical familiarity to her narrative and a keen eye for poignant detail, the shock of the new. She quotes Vicki Baum’s first impression: “I stayed drunk for weeks with this sun and air and the beauty of the hills.” Ms. Crawford makes too much of minor figures like Ernst Toch and perhaps too little of Kurt Weill, whose Hollywood visits require deeper research. ­Nevertheless, “A Windfall of Musicians” is valuable for its account of how the West became a cultural force in America, a rising counterweight to the ­tradition-stifled East.

Up to a point, that is. In 1997, the trustees of the ­University of Southern California decided to rename the Arnold Schoenberg Institute building after a recent ­donor and vacate its contents. Vienna rescued the composer’s archives, his scores, his letters and his paintings, housing them in a purpose-built Arnold Schoenberg Centre. With this crowning slur to history, Los Angeles was cleansed of its modernist accident, or aberration.

The woman behind the New Deal

Downey, Kirstin. (2009). The woman behind the New Deal : the life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and his moral conscience. New York: Nan A. Talese

Other than the name, I knew nothing about Frances Perkins. Now I know a great deal. She became interested in social work very early in her life, worked with Hull House in Chicago (with Jane Addams), and wound up in New York. The day of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire she was in a friend's house on Washington Square North, and ran to the location of the fire (on Washington Square East -- I actually took an NYU course in a building in that same location).

FP met FDR early on in New York government. She knew Robert Moses before he worked in State government. She knew Al Smith. When FDR won the Presidency, he appointed her Labor Secretary, the first woman to ever serve in the Cabinet. She accomplished a great deal, indeed.

The book contends that Social Security, Unemployment insurance and others New Deal programs were her ideas that FDR adopted. I have never read about that before. The book also contends that when FDR told Cabinet member of the Pearl Harbor attack, FP suspected that he had known about it, for he did not show the same surprise and shock that other Cabinet members showed.

Revealing, sympathetic, the book does a good job of uncovering a forgotten figure who played an important role in 20th century America. Indeed, the world: she was instrumental in saving LIO people from Europe, and got Churchill and FDR to support it after the War.

In her personal life, FP was quite unlucky. Both her husband and her daughter were bipolar, in an age when there were no medicines to effectively deal with the illness. She did make friends, close personal friends with several women. Mary Harriman Rumsey, older sister of Averell, in particular, was very close friends with FP. They shared a house for some time.

Yet about halfway through, the book gets sloppy in its assertions. I'd like to see more documentation on some of the declarations made.

And then there is the Venona Project.

"The Americans and British long had been skeptical about Soviet intentions. As a result, between 1942 and 1945, the United States and Great Britain engaged in the Venona Project, intercepting encrypted cables between Russian intelligence agencies and Soviet spies based in America. They began successfully decrypting these messages in 1946. National security officials kept the information secret, but released some facts through the FBI, and through that agency to Truman.The deciphered messages exposed several hundred Americans, including some government officials, as communist spies."

Connections

In reading the review written by William Anthony Hay of 1848, by Mike Rapport (post below this one), I came across the name of Metternich. I know the name, but little about the person. Thus, I googled the name; the first link was Wikipedia. In the article's bibliography I found the entry: Zamoyski, A. (2007). Rites of Peace: The fall of Napoleon & the Congress of Vienna. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. HWPL owns it.

A Year of Living Dangerously

1848
By Mike Rapport
(Basic Books, 461 pages, $29.95)

Reviewed by William Anthony Hay

Dramatic changes over the early 19th century and the long shadow of the French Revolution set the context for 1848.