Happy Birthday, John

I learn from Garrison Keillor that today is John Dos Passos’ birthday—he would be 111 (link). I’d been hyping Dos Passos’ USA just yesterday, so I’m in a mood to give him another salute. Okay, maybe it’s not the greatest novel. I suspect Mrs. Buce might vote for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! My learned literary adviser Taxmom might say Portrait of a Lady. I get the point in each case. I’ve read a lot of Faulkner with great enjoyment, but Absalom always struck me as a bit overwrought (if I had to name one Faulkner piece that comes near perfection, it might be Spotted Horses, surely the funniest piece of fiction in American history, and perhaps undervalued for that very reason--but see infra). With James, I guess I would say I admire Portrait of a Lady (for my money it is, at least, the best James novel, but see infra)—the scene where Isabel recognizes that she has made a bad decision and is stuck with it, is surely one of the great bravura set-pieces—but on the whole, I’ve never quite made up my mind about Henry James: suffice to say, I suspect that he isn’t quite as wonderful as he thinks he is, but that is true of all of us.

[With both James and Faulkner, maybe the problem is packaging: I suspect James’ natural habitat is the novella—I can’t think of anything I like better than The Jolly Corner. With Faulkner, the problem is almost the opposite: he didn’t write “novels,” but rather “one big novel” of which the individual components are just mosaic chips. That would be why the best introduction to Faulkner is still Malcolm Cowley’s Viking Portable Faulkner, which gives you a feel for the whole oeuvre, start to finish.—But I digress.]

What I will say is I can’t think of any American novel that ever delighted me more. I read it at white hot speed and it stayed in my mind for months, perhaps years—in a sense, I suppose, always. I haven’t reread it for a generation now. Partly, I suppose I fear it won’t seem as good. Partly, it is so fixed in my mind that I don’t need to.

Wiki says that USA is "deeply pessimistic." I guess I can see what they're driving at, but I confess, it never occurred to me. This may be in part Walker Percy's "alienated novel" paradox--you can write a novel about alienation, but you can't write a successful "alienated novel," because the very fact of literary connection denies alienation. So also, Dos Passos may have been in some sense "pessimistic," but I took heart from its energy and craft.

Dos Passos veered to the right later in his political life and it is perhaps fashionable to say that he is underrated because the lefties never forgave him. Maybe, but that seems to me an easy out. I read some of the later Dos Passos with enjoyment, but the bald truth is, he really didn’t have it for a second act. No matter: a hundred writers, a thousand, thousands, would be proud to do what he did. I see that the Library of America now has USA in a convenient single volume; maybe it’s time to give it another shot.

Fn.: I learn from Wiki that Sartre was a big Dos Passos fan, which is no surprise. I learn also that USA is an "influence" on Sartre's Age of Reason trilogy. Uh, huh, I guess I see. I read and enjoyed Age of Reason (a few years after I read USA). It never once occurred to me that the former was an influence on the latter. Maybe I was just being slack, but I think the real point is that, however enjoyable Age of Reason is, still USA is just a whole lot better.

The Law School Casebook as Work of Art (aka Remembering Casner & Leach)

A lot of law students profess to hate law school. Maybe they mean it; maybe they just think it is the thing to say. At any rate, I was not one. I thought law school was one of the most entertaining things I ever did in my life.

Partly, this was just personal: I was 28, in a career that seemed to be going nowhere, and this was my ticket out. But it was not just that. As my friend Ellen said: every day is a little story.

Exactly. One thing Ellen and I had in common was that we had worked for daily newspapers. So perhaps we were attuned to the possibilities of story. Anyway, I found the reading of law school cases to be high entertainment.

I remembered law school, and Ellen, and little stories, the other day as I was throwing out some old papers and I found this, which I had laboriously tapped out on my old (even then!) Underwood in the fall of ’63. It comes from the first edition of Casner and Leach Property, one of the old war-horses of the law school classroom. The piece is called “Homily on Minimum Pain and Maximum Profit in Reading Cases.” C&L (it reads like Leach) are discussing the case of one Cobb who had sued a railroad. They make my point better than I could make it myself:

The flavor of the case—the dogged persistence of the litigious Cobb, the railroad trying to wear him down, the red-faced Supreme Court having to eat its first opinion, reversing itself on the grounds of ‘excessive damages,’ and having another jury (of Cobb’s neighbors) slap the case right back at them at substantially the same figure. … The winning party and his lawyer will regale their friends with details of the triumph for years; the losers will say as little about it as possible. If you sense the humanity and drama of the conflict, while still focusing principal attention on the matters of legal significance, you will enjoy it more and, for that reason, get more out of it. … Each case should be to you an item of vicarious experience. If you could only live long enough, you would find the apprentice system the best method of learning law. … Next best is vicarious experience—and this is what the reading of cases offers you.

A. James Casner and W. Barton Leach, Property (1951)

I admit, I had embarked on the law school path with a good deal of trepidation: if this doesn’t work, what will? I can still feel the sense of recognition and relief that overtook me when I read—and grasped the point of—this passage.

To cleanse my mind while hacking through the jungle of case law, in those days I was always reading John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy about America in the decade after World War I. For all kinds of reasons, I think USA may truly be the great American novel (just a few days ago, guest-blogging for CreditSlips, I excerpted a Dos Passos bit about Henry Ford). But—as I guess I dimly recognized even back then—there is a more than trivial overlap between Dos Passos (on the one hand) and Casner & Leach. Dos Passos more or less invented the “kaleidoscope” or “jump-cut” novel—half a dozen interweaving stories, interspersed with “newsreels,” and vignettes of more-or-less-accurate history, to paint a full-bodied three-dimensional picture of the world. Note to self, write an essay on the casebook as work of art. Or maybe this is it.

Fn.: Apparently C&L is still in print, but Cobb and the railroad have gone on to the great casebook in the sky. For the next edition, the editors might want to rethink that decision.

How Henry Made it Somebody Else's Problem

(Cross-posted from CreditSlips)

Since we are (I am) on the subject of literary bankruptcy, I can’t resist a reprint of a passage from John Dos Passos’ USA, which, for my money, really is the great American novel. Dos Passos interweaves his fictional trilogy with semi-documentary historical vignettes. Here, in “Tin Lizzie,” from 1919 (the second volume), he tells how Henry Ford survived the collapse that followed World War I:

…In 1918 [Ford] had borrowed on notes to buy out his minority stockholders for the picayune sum of seventyfive million dollars.

In February, 1920, he needed cash to pay off some of those notes that were coming due. A banker is supposed to have called him and offered him every facility if the bankers’ representative could be made a member of the board of directors. Henry Ford handed the banker his hat, and went about raising money his own way:

he shipped every car and part he had in his plant to his dealers and demanded immediate cash payment. Let the other fellow do the borrowing had always been a cardinal principle. He shut down production and canceled all orders from the supplyfirms. Many dealers were ruined, many supplyfirms failed, but when he reopened his plant, he owned it absolutely, the way a man owns an unmortgaged farm with the taxes paid up.

…in 1922 Henry Ford had sold one million three hundred and thirty-two thousand two hundred and nine tin lizzies; he was the richest man in the world.

My dad managed credit bureaus back in the 30s and 40s, when it was still a small-town drugstore counter kind of business. I remember him telling me the story of how Henry solved his own problem by making it somebody else’s problem. I don’t think my dad ever read Dos Passos; maybe he saw it at first hand.

How Henry Ford Survived a Depression

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker (link) [via Newmark’s Door (link) {via DeLong (link)}] argues that General Motors is trapped by its dealers, paying the price for decentralization, locked into relationships from which it can’t profit and can’t shake.

It was not always thus. At least by common folklore, Henry Ford used the dealership system to ride out the post-WWI depression. The story is famously retold in John Dos Passos’ great novel:

In 1918 [Ford] had borrowed on notes to buy out his minority stockholders for the picayune sum of seventyfive million dollars.

In February, 1920, he needed cash to pay off some of these notes that were coming due. A banker is supposed to have called on him and offered him every facility if the bankers’ representative could be made a member of the board of directors. Henry Ford handed the banker his hast,

And went about raising money in his own way:

he shipped every car and part he had in his plant to his dealers and demanded immediat5e cash payment. Let the other fellow do the borrowing had always been a cardinal principle. He shut down production and canceled all orders from the supplyfirms. Many dealers were ruined, many supplyfirms failed, but when he reopened his plant,

he owned it absolutely,

the way a man owns an unmortgaged farm with the taxes paid up.

In 1922 there started the Ford boom for president…

John Dos Passos, The Big Money 56

(Washington Square Press Paperback ed. 1961)

Appreciation: History: A Novel

I first heard of Elsa Morante's History: a Novel about thirty years ago when I saw it on someone's list of indispensable books for the 20th Century,* along with works like Hope Against Hope Nadezhda Mandelstam or Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West and the like. I finally got around to it just now (we did it as a readaloud). I'd say it is a remarkable piece of work with may virtues, but as to best of the Century--I wonder if the recommender had actually read the last couple of hundred pages. Say at least that in the grand tradition of novels, it has some important limitations. Although come to think of it, I suppose it may be in this case that the limitations are at least as thought-provoking as the novel itself.

The core story is simplicity itself. Ida is a(n Italian) widow living in Rome with her son, NIno. She is raped by a German soldier. She has a second son, Useppe. Ida and the child of rape live through War II together with the discontinuous participation of Nino.

It's a stark framework. Writing about innocence is one of thee toughest tricks in the literary armory--perhaps only Dostoesvskii and Cervantes have ever fully succeeded. At least in the first part of the book, Morante does pretty much succeed: she tells the story of Useppe with empathy and and a keen observational eye, without moralizing and without judgment.

But on a closer look, we can see that the real theme of these early chapters is not innocence but (is there such a word) "ferality." Useppe is feral (as are all infants?). But so is his Nino, and so, in her own way, is Ida. So also indeed are any number of others in the story, including a whole menagerie of sympathetically rendered animals (she includes, although it isn't relevant to much, about the most sympathetic portrait I ever expect to read of a murderous pimp). Each has a core of vitality with they deploy, with greater or lesser success, to help them cope with a world they aren't remotely equipped to understand.

It's customary to characterize History as a "war novel," and in a large sense, this is not wrong. Indeed, Morante leave no doubt that she intends it to be a war novel: she intersperses her account of the lives of her characters with a sort of newsreel account of events in the larger the world--after the manner of Dos Passos, I suppose, though not nearly so artfully done. Yet the presence of war is oddly abstract, registered more in indirect impact than in direct encounter. Ida's apartment is bombed out, but she is not at home. They to a refugee shelter; then they bunk in a small apartment with another family; then they find a place of their own, and the war ends. In a sense, this is right: in fact Rome suffered far less direct harm in the war than so many other cities (indeed about the only significant bombing on rome was thee attack that took her apartment).

But the war does affect both Useppe and Ida in one important way: hunger. The details are unclear to the reader (as to Ida herself?). but it does seem they both suffered permanent damage from wartime malnutrition. And Ida (although not Useppe) suffers in a second, perhaps more important way: fear--stark, nameless, pervasive, disabling fear. Ida seems to be fearful almost by nature--shy, cautious, easily overawed and wracked by guilt, so fearful. But the war adds an extra reason: she is Jewish, or at any rate part Jewish and thus, perhaps, liable to be rounded up and sent away by the occupying Germans. I say "perhaps" because Ida herself never actually learns whether her blood taint is sufficient to bring her within the condemned circle.

All this is the canvas on which the early part of the book is worked out. But along about two thirds of the way through the book, two things happen to trigger a radical shift in focus. One, the war ends. And to, Useppe grows up--or at any rate, grows beyond the innocent infancy that has characterized him so far, so we would expect him to grow up. With regard to Useppe at least, Morante responds to the change in a not entirely predictable manner: she keeps him young. Useppe, that is, is defined as remaining outside ordinary human society--notwithstanding his age--for the rest of the book. It isn't clear exactly what afflicts Useppe. That is--it becomes clear he suffers from epilepsy but this alone can hardly account for his absolute inability to relate to anybody outside his family.

Inside the family, there is his mother, of course. There is his brother, but his brother comes to a bad end. And there is a dog. Animals proliferate throughout the book, but none more important than Bella, the big, cheerful, friendly beast who becomes Useppe's boon (and almost "only") companion. And here I feel Morante takes a wrong turn. That is, here for the first time she chooses not merely to allow Useppe to languish in his innocence. Rather she begins that enterprise of imputing--to Useppe, but also to Bella--the kinds of qualities we are tempted to impute to the innocent, so as to make them better than ourselves. It's a terrible temptation to an artist and one that never leads to convincing results.

Something else unexpected happens after the war ends: Morante more or less abandons Ida. She focuses on Useppe and Bella. But she also shifts to spotlight to an entirely different character--Davide, a young, intense, warm-hearted, bewildered young man who is trying to puzzle his own way through the dreadfulness of his recent experience. Like Ida, Davide has Jewish blood, but in his case, it matters: he has lost his entire familiy to the Camps. Morante sketches Davide with great tact and understanding--indeed, most of her character portraits are first rate. But he is, at least a character from a different novel. And however insightful she is at sketching, the portrait remains static: he remains a "character" not a protagonist--neither in his own life, nor in anyone's else.

I won't spoil the ending here though you would hardly expect so somber a story to end well. But I will note one gaping hole in the structure that becomes apparent on a broad overview. That is the character of Ida herself, and in particular, her utter helplessness, her almost complete passivity in the face of everything the world has to offer. I need to tread delicately here because I risk being seen as blaming the victim and I wouldn't remotely want to do that: fate treated Ida with great cruelty, in so many ways for which she is not remotely responsible. Yet there is almost never a time when she seems able to lift so much as a finger to make her own lot better. She won't tell anyone--anyone--that she is pregnant, much less raped (except the midwife who finally succors her through her delivery). She won't tell her own son that he has a new brother: she lets him find it out. Even then, she won't correct his inference that she must be a slattern.

And so it goes. She hears that Germans are out to get Jews; she can't bring herself to find out just who and how they will be coming. She won't ask for information. She won't ask for help. She won't offer to help. She won't seek to cooperate with anybody who might help her.

And it is not just Ida at issue here, of course: for good or ill, she does have the two sons. The older one bullies her shamelessly, but that becomes almost a side issue. It is Useppe who needs her. Obviously she loves him desperately. Yet she can scarcely being himself to care even for him. One can feel for Ida--one would have to have a heart of stone not to feel for Ida. Yet the only two times when one feels fully on her side are when she bestirs herself to commit acts of petty theft to find food for her baby.

It's a sad world we are in, then--a world where the innocent (and the feral) may suffer. It's a book about the rottenness of war, but it is in a way a book about the rottenness of life itself. I am not sure that Morante herself has sorted out all the possible implications. An admirable book, then, in its way, with much to offer. But if we are putting together a list of the books that really define the last century, I'm not persuaded that this one belongs on it.
===
*A bit of searching reveals that what I had in mind was a piece from the New York Times book review dated June 3, 1979, headed "Immortal Nominations," with the lede: The Book Review asked a number of writers the following: Which post-World War II boos have already established themselves or may eventually establish themselves in a group of a hundred or so of the most important books of Western literature; also, which prewar books that were not considered in this category might now be, in light of the history of the last three decades.

I'm not at all sure I understand that stuff after the semicolon, but there it is.

Patrick on the Second Rate

Ooh, Patrick Kurp knows how to hurt a guy (link)! First he’s knocking my (former) chosen profession and next he’s knocking the Great American Novelist. The profession would be journalism, where I spent my 20s, and I’ll try to fashion some non-trite nostalgia about those days later. The novelist would be John Dos Passos and I have pretty much given up on commending him to any but the already converted.

But Patrick goes on to catalog a sampling of the “second-rate,” and he has set me to thinking. Okay--I’ll grant him Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, a couple of famous-for-being-famous blowhards never so well employed as when eating each others’ brains out like Dantean sinners.

Hemingway—well, I think I am beginning to see a theme here: it's not so much writing per se as celebrity: Patrick doesn’t like celebrities who trade on the false coin of writerhood without producing anything of importance. And Hemingway certainly went through something like a 40-year dry spell, during which he did little except call attention to himself and produce galumphing portentousness like The Old Man and the Sea.

But Hemingway did write The Sun Also Rises and a dozen—okay, half a dozen--stories that capture time and place so convincingly that you can’t see those times and places without him. And that is enough, I think, to give him (however grudgingly) a pass.

John Didion certainly counts as a celebrity, although it is hard to say she is insufferable is Hemingway, Mailer or Vidal. As a writer? Well, she certainly isn’t “first-rate” in the sense that Shakespeare or Chekov are first rate. But that can’t be the only test. Short of Shakespeare, I suspect she may turn out to be one of those writers who speak for a time and a place the way Hemingway spoke for a time and a place—and with a lot less to forgive.

I don’t know what poor Steven Crane is doing in this company. He wrote a couple of priceless little items and then died, without ever making a nuisance of himself in any important way. Maybe Patrick is annoyed at the way we impose Red Badge of Courage on schoolchildren. Fine, but then let’s at least keep Maggie, a Girl of the Streets—no schoolchildren there.

But I’ve got a couple of more general thoughts. One (I guess this is trite), I can’t think of anybody who is first-rate all the time. Certainly not Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Maybe Proust comes close, but even there, we have some longeurs. But two (perhaps not as trite)—for a remarkably large number of writers, I’d say that their best stuff is not their best and (if you get my meaning) vice versa. I’ve long thought that Buddenbrooks was a much better book than Magic Mountain, certainly than Doktor Faustus. Say what you will about the late novels of Henry James, I still won’t be persuaded that they are as good as Portrait of a Lady or the best of the novellas. I’m not sure Virginia Woolf ever wrote a really good book, but she wrote magnificent lines and paragraphs (okay, might be a guy thing). And Joyce—dare one say that one would trade perhaps 80 percent of Ulysses for Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist?

I almost called this post “In Praise of the Second-Rate,” but I can see that that is not quite my point. It’s not so much first- and second-rate, as it is over- and under-valued. I certainly agree that celebrity is not the same as achievement, or even talent. But I don’t want the best to be the enemy of the good, and even a fathead like Hemingway can once in a while be a pretty good writer.

Book Lists, I Love Book Lists

When I gave thought to beginning posting again, it occurred to me I could post here and cross post to Facebook.  But I can just as well post to Facebook and cross post here.  So here we go: an item I put up at FB a couple of days ago.  As i say, I love these lists: kind of a mark-to-market self-assessment.

===

Oooh, I love these book lists. The question was: can you name 10 books that made a direct and immediate difference in how you think? Sure can. In chronological order:

Arthur Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order. Explained the unspoken political and social presuppositions of the world I was born into.

Mark Sullivan, Our Times. Helped me to understand the Ohio of Warreen G. Harding, under whose shadow I was living at the moment.

Bertram Wolf, Three Who Made a Revolution. Thrilling. Showed me what it was to have a political and social imagination.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.* I wasn't all that much of a reader when I was a kid, so I didn't have a basis comparison. Imagine my surprise, in later life, to realize that I had started at the top. Read it in time to be wary of the Viet Nam War.

Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberland. Helped me to understand Kentucky during my time there as a reporter. By a country lawyer who nailed it better than any journalist I know.

Grant Gilmore, Secured Transactions, First few chapters--on the history of chattel security--taught me more about how the law works than any other book, ever.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Too short.

John Dos Passos, USA. Why have I never been able to sell the people I care about on this marvelous tapestry of American life?

George Eliot, Middlemarch, I had a girlfriend in my early 40s who told me that no one was fully adult until they understood Middlemarch. She was right,

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. I finally got round to Prousf in my 50s. Reassuring to know that, however much longer I may live, I will never be short of ideas to chew on.

*Spelling error corrected. Cripes, can't any of you guys out there read proof?

Irvin Who?

Quick now: who hosted the 1935 Academy Awards?  

You don't know, do you?  And if I tell you that the answer is Irvin S. Cobb will you still be as unenlightened as you were before?  Maybe, and that fact is interesting in itself.   It was Cobb  I was quoting (from memory) the other day in a comparison (perhaps impertinent) to the ghost of Hamlet's father.  The exact quote is 

 Kentucky rotgut] smells like gangrene starting in a mildewed silo, it tastes like the wrath to come, and when you absorb a big swig of it you have all the sensations of having swallowed a lighted kerosene lamp.  A sudden, violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victim's watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across.

Gangrene is good; I missed that.  I find the text in an old favorite of mine, not yet discarded: The American Treasury, 1455-1955--"select, arranged, and edited" (it says here) by Clifton Fadiman, assisted by (the soon-to-be-disgraced) Charles Van Doren (at p. 254)  My copy says I acquired it in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1957, which is to say, just about the time I flamed out of Antioch College and began by unsteady foray into journalism.  

The Treasury accords Cobb two other claims to fame.  One:

There is this to be said for New York City: it is the one densely inhabited locality--with the possible exception of Hell--that has absolutely not a trace of local pride.

Id., at 73.  Well, I guess I wasn't there, but if he was writing in the time of Jimmy Waker or Grover Whelan, I suspect that as to New York City, this is flat wrong. As to Hell--well, it is good he included the qualifier, because I've read my Dante and I'd say that Hell is suffused with local pride.  

The third Cobb item in the is his supposed riposte on hearing that his boss,  Charles S. Chapin of the World was ill:

I hope it's nothing trivial.

At p. 994.  Fine again, except that I could swear I've heard it Ben Hecht, to Gene Fowler possibly to others.  You find all this somewhat less than hilarious?  Okay,  except that it's all the more interesting how these crashing banalities come from the mouth of one who was (per Wiki) the most highly paid journalist of his time.  Some compare him to Mencken, another celebrity journalist, except I suspect that  the comparison does more to highlight the differences than the similarities.  Mencken, for his part, had a way of shaking things up--of disturbing the verities in ways that may continue to matter (like my bud Dos Passos he went sour in his old age, but let that pass).

Cobb on the other hand seemed to like nothing so much as to comfort the comfortable.  It is a Cobb novel that underlies Judge Priest, the 1934 John Ford movie--Will Rogers, Hattie McDaniel and, yes, Stepin Fetchit.   David Thomson in his "personal introduction to 1,000 films" describes Judge Priest as "outrageous, shockingly racist, and serenely opposed to all forms of progress or argument.  At the same time" (Thomson continues) "it feels like a yarn spun on a porch in the late afternoon sun, and it reminds us of how closely and mysteriously allied such story-telling can be with the blunt lineaments of fascism."

Might  be a bit much to blame Ford on Cobb, but my guess is that what Thomson calls "the blunt lineaments" are right there in the original. 

Oh, and I see there is a fourth and final Cobb item in the Fadiman collection:

Epitaph: a belated advertisment for a line of goods that has been permanently discontinued.

Probably cheesy to observe that Cobb  may have wound up describing himself.

Afterthought:  Apparently not quite forgotten.  Evidently there is a bridge that bears his name someplace.  And the Paducah Wal-Mart is located on Irvin Cobb drive.

Big Books

Devoted fans will note that I have updated my Amazon books link.  Woolgathering on the exerbike this afternoon I got to thinking about "big books"--the kind you can dive into and just wallow around in for a week or a month or longer--Middlemarch or War and Peace that sort of thing.  I asked myself: what kind of "big books" explain the 20th Century? 

I see I can give no more than a fragmentary answer to that question, but I herewith offer some of my favorites.   They certainly aren't the kind of thing you are going to breeze through on a weekend--for me, it's pretty much the record of a lifetime. I first read Bertram Wolfe's Three Who Made a Revolution during my "remedial college" years when I was about 25--my battered original copy is still here, eight feet off my right elbow as I write.   I was conscious then that it read like a novel, and I bet it still does.  Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy I read just a bit later--the two together probably shaped the political views I carry with me today. Free market ideologues like to claim Schumpeter as one of their own, but that's a sign that they haven't read him, or that they suspect we haven't read him: he is far too much of an electic, too much of an ironist, for such facile categorization (for extra credit: I have always found it s defect in Galbraith that he has no intelligible program, no teetable hypothesis; in Schumpeter, this bug seems to be a feature--why the difference?).

Others came later. The Spanish Labyrinth was a traveling companion on my first trip to Spain. Autobiogrpahy of an Unknown Indian carried me back and forth on the long plane flights to and from Mumbai.    Hope Against Hope we did as a readaloud, and not an easy task I can tell you--hypnotic, but exhausting (I still haven't read its companion, Hope Abandoned; for a long time I figured it was just a weaker sequel, but Patrick Kurp assures me it is worthy in its own right, and I am meaning to get around to it).  Rebellion in the Backlands (in a new translation, just Backlands) ought of course to be bracketed with its novelistic companion, The War for the End of the World--I cannot imagine why I did not just list them both.  Black Lamb and Grey Falcon the sprawlingest, messiest of the lot, I did as a book-on-tape in the car.  I think it hung around for a couple of years, but I can easily conjure up its tang today--some of the best bits of compassionate comedy I've ever encountered.  The Brothers Ashkenazi, I read just a year or two ago in my commuter motel room, on the recommendation of Joseph Epstein.(hat tip).

I note obvious gaps.  China, for example.  I've read Jonathan Spence's Search for Modern China  in prep for a trip to China; I found it most helpful and instructive but still it comes across as a very good textbook, somehow not the thing I want on this list. Japan: I've read as fair amount about Japan but nothing that qualifies as both (a) big and (b) 20th Century.  Africa--oh, wait, I forgot  to mention Norman Rush, Mating, his not-quite-a-novel account of Americans in Botswana.  Do I file that one under "Africa" or "America?"

And speaking of America, I see I have nothing from the good ol' US of A, but I just thought of a candidate: John Dos Passos' great trilogy, USA, another sentimental favorite from back in my Schumpeter/Wolfe phase.  It's one I', a little iffy about reading again because I liked it so much the first time and I'm a teensy bit afraid I might not think so highly of it the second.

And I end with Ibn Khalid, Muqaddima which, no, is not 20th Century at all (the conventional date is 1377) but whch underwent a kind of rediscovery in the 20th Century (Princeton published a Bollingen three-volume set in 1967).  Anyway  the subtitle is "An Introductioin to History."  Might not be too much to say that it explains everything about the 20th Century, along with all other centuries, before and after. Anyway, I just discovered it only a couple of years back.  In lifetime reading terms, perhaps it forms a bracket with Schumpeter/Wolfe.