Southern Bookman

New biographies give updated evaluations of Martin Luther King Jr., George Orwell

Martin Luther King Jr. and George Orwell both changed the world through language and ideas.

King and Orwell receive fresh evaluations in recently released major biographies.

Jonathan Eig's life of King presents the fullest portrait yet of the slain civil rights leader, according to reviews and articles. Eig was the first King biographer to examine recently released FBI files involving King.

Author D.J. Taylor gives a similar updated evaluation of the author of "1984," "Animal Farm" and classic essays.

Taylor investigated recently released documents for his "New Life" of Orwell, which updates his previous biography of the writer, published in 2003.

Eig, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote acclaimed biographies of Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig, told the Guardian that he had access to thousands of FBI documents, which include the agency's recordings of King during extramarital affairs. J. Edgar Hoover's organization attempted to blackmail King with the recordings.

The biography also discloses tha King's often repeated criticism of Malcolm X was based on an inaccurate interview by author Alex Haley and that the two civil rights giants admired each other. The book shows King as more radical than the standard portrayal.

Orwell and King shared a belief in the truthful use of language and the advancement of human freedom.

The two major biographies affirm their continued relevance.

Farewell Martin Amis, prominent British novelist

Martin Amis' death last week at the age of 73 brought a shock of recognition.

I saw the British writer expatriated to the United States as perpetually youthful. In my mind, he had never changed from the brash novelist who shocked the literary world in the late 1980s and early '90s with his novels "Money," "Time's Arrow" and "London Fields."

That Amis was a only year older than me when he died at his home in Lake Worth,  Fla., was a memento mori.

Like his close friend and literary combatant Christopher Hitchens, Amis was a victim of esophageal cancer. All of those cigarettes, alcoholic binges, sarcastic jokes and literary battles took their toll on England's former literary outlaws.

As with Monty Python's comedy, Amis' novels were too smugly British for me. But "Experience," his 2000 memoir, was one of the best books of his generation, and I consumed the literary essays collected in Amis's  "The War Against Cliche" like a plate of fine oysters.

"Experience" warmly praised Amis's father, the lauded novelist Kingsley Amis, and Kingsley's contemporaries Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow. The book also presented a lively account of literary London in the 1970s and 1980s, including Hitchens and other then young stars.

Martin Amis showed a compassionate side with his expression of grief for his murdered cousin, Lucy Partington. Reading his heartbreaking lament for the young woman, I also felt deep sorrow and sense of loss.

Over the years, I read accounts of Amis and his circle in memoirs by Hitchens and noted biographer Claire Tomalin, one of Amis's paramours when they were both young literary celebrities.

Like Hitchens, Amis moved to the United States and proved himself an acute observer of American politics and culture.

A longtime resident of Brooklyn with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, and children, Amis was a leading figure in the borough's re-emergence.

While I didn't care for Amis' later books, including his last novel "Inside Story," I followed his career when he made news with comments perceived as anti-Islamic and through profiles in The New York Times and other publications.

Amis's death does mark the end of an era, to resort to one of his hated cliches. Amis was one of the few writers who still commanded attention on the international stage.

 

 

 

 

 

Returning to Philip Larkin's "The Trees"

This is the time of year when I return to Philip Larkin's "The Trees."

 

Larkin is a prominent example of a writer of dubious character who wrote wonderful poetry.

 

Like T.S. Eliot, Larkin expressed appalling anti-semitic, misogynistic and racist views. A number of his poems display a world-weary cynicism, etched with acidic humor.

 

But poems like "The Trees" reveal that Larkin's negative personality traits covered an exquisite sensitivity to beauty.

 

When my birthday approaches each May, I'm called to Larkin's poem, with its promise of renewal.

 

The Trees

 

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In full grown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

Adam Hochschild in examination of World War I-era political violence sees parallels to today

The United States' brief entry into World War I unleashed four years of extreme political violence and repression.

Author Adam Hochschild looks back on that still shocking era in "American Midnight, The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis."

Hochschild sees the horrifying events of 1917-21 as a precursor to today's political conflicts. As with today, disinformation, fears of immigration, labor unrest, racial violence and censorship fueled turmoil.

President Woodrow Wilson plays a central Shakespearean role in the book, heralding the U.S. entry into the war in 1917 as spreading global democracy and freedom while condoning his administration's suppression of groups painted as un-American.

Wilson's already tarnished reputation is further diminished by Hochschild's exposure of his racism, political rigidity, self-righteousness and authoritarian policies.

Hochschild credits A. Scott Berg's monumental biography of Wilson for his portrait of the president who accepted Great Britain and France's harsh reparations imposed on Germany. Felled by a serious stroke, Wilson also suffered the severe disappointment of the U.S. Senate rejecting his grand ambitions for a League of Nations.

The United States' late intervention into the war to bolster the depleted French and British armies in their war against Germany  triggered the passage of the Espionage Act, which remains in force today, most recently leading to charges against Donald Trump for removing classified White House documents and Jack Teixeira for distributing secret reports over the Internet. Teixeira follows Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Reality Winner among those charged under the act.

After the U.S. entry into World War I, the Espionage Act and related sedition legislation led to widespread arrests of union members and Socialist Party followers. The overwhelmingly nonviolent radicals were sentenced to prison for giving speeches or writing articles opposing the American involvement in the war.

Imprisoned dissenters deemed unpatriotic included Socialist leader Eugene Debs, who had shown surprising political strength in a presidential campaign, and the spellbinding anarchist leader Emma Goldman.

Like a raging fever, the political paranoia and repression rose in a series of waves. After Wilson brought the nation into the war, political violence targeted German citizens and immigrants, many of whom were forced to change their names and sell their businesses.

The Bolshevik Revolution raised to a boiling point irrational fears of a Communist overthrow of the American government, a paranoia stoked by right-wing politicians. The deadly flu epidemic at the end of the war exacerbated tensions.

As the grand finale of the "red summer" of 1919, a series of raids under Wilson Attorney General A. Wilson Palmer, directed by the young J. Edgar Hoover, resulted in massive arrests and efforts to deport hundreds of Eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish.

Hochschild in one of the memorable character studies that distinguish the book unveils the heroic action of Assistant Labor Secretary Louis E. Post to prevent many of the deportations.

Sadly, Ellis Island, the symbol of American openness to oppressed people from Europe, was used as the makeshift prison for those facing deportation. The anarchist Goldman, after several years in prison for expressing her ideas, was one of those expelled from the country that she had come to love.

In a memorable scene, Hochschild pictures Goldman encountering the young Hoover on a tugboat taking Goldman to the ship that would transport her to the Soviet Union, which she eventually hated because of its totalitarianism. She later traveled to Canada, but never again returned to the United States.

Hochschild's expansive examination of the era encompasses censorship of books and radical publications by the U.S. Postal Service, vigilante attacks against members of the International Workers of the World, whose members were known as "Wobblies," and increasing attacks against blacks, often veterans of the war.

Despite the right wing crackdowns against unions, violent strikes continued in the last years of Wilson's presidency, especially after he'd suffered the debilitating stroke during a courageous cross-country train trip to build support for his League of Nations. Wilson was incapacitated for the last 17 months of his presidency, during which his wife, Edith, carried out his duties.

Wilson's successor, the often maligned Warren G. Harding, is seen by Hochschild as almost heroic in curtailing the excessive violence, although outbreaks kept flaring up.

Harding freed Debs from prison, although he commuted his sentence rather than giving him a full pardon. Barely mentioned are the scandals of Harding's administration, uncovered after he died of a heart attack before completing his term.

Hochschild touches briefly upon the destruction of Tulsa's black business sector by white residents in 1921, and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan through the 1920s.

"American Midnight" ends with a warning that today's political conflicts could accelerate into a repeat of  rhe World War I-era's political violence, if the country's not already at that hour of darkness.

 

Published in the spring of 1925, "Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Great Gatsby" changed English literature

Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" were both published in the spring of 1925.

Tuesday marked the 98th anniversary of the arrival of Fitzgerald's lyrical novel about the doomed love of Jay Gatsby for Daisy Buchanan. Woolf's book, haunted like Fitzgerald's by World War I, came out in May of that year.

Both books examine social customs of the upper class, assailed by the arrival of new money. While Woolf's British hierarchy is more rigid and tradition-bound than Fitzgerald's, both exhibit a destructive snobbery and sense of impending doom.

Both look at changing sexual relationships as women gain more independence and economic freedom.

"Mrs. Dalloway" is haunted by the dying old world, shattered by the war. "The Great Gatsby" takes place in the new American society of money, sex and celebrity.

Fitzgerald's book is narrated by Nick Carraway, while Woolf employs an omniscient third-person narrator. However, the last chapter of Woolf's book is told from the point of view of Clarissa Dalloway, her voice approaching the stream of consciousness of James Joyce's "Ulysses," published in 1922.

"The Great Gatsby" and "Mrs. Dalloway" share a fresh, inventive language that marked a turning point for English literature, along with another book published in 1925, Ernest Hemingway's short story collection "In Our Time."

Like Nick Carraway and Clarissa Dalloway, Hemingway's Nick Adams is a new, 20th century archetype.

I've imagined the characters of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Great Gatsby" attending a huge party together. Imagine their conversations, flirtations, costumes. Perhaps jazz would play, at least if the occasion were hosted by Jay Gatsby.

"Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Great Gatsby" arrived two months apart, literary siblings in a changing world.

400th anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio celebrated

Shakespeare lovers are marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright's First Folio.

The First Folio, compiled by Shakespeare's fellow King's Men actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death at age 52

One of Western civilization's central treasures, the First Folio preserved 36 of Shakespeare's plays, 18 of them printed for the first time, including "The Tempest," "12th Night," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Julius Caesar," "The Winter's Tale" and "Macbeth."

Heminges and Condell also established dividing the plays into histories, tragedies and comedies.

Artist Martin Droeshout's famous portrait of Shakespeare appears on the title page, along with a poem by Shakespeare's fellow poet and playwright Ben Jonson. Another Jonson poem calls Shakespeare the "Sweet Swan of Avon."

A total of 235 copies of the First Folio remain, five in the British Library. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., owns 82, the world's largest collection.

The First Folio set the standard for further editions of Shakespeare's collected plays. The texts, some of them from "foul copies" and production notes, are considered reliable, unlike some of the earlier "quarto" editions.

Mostly unknown workers in London's early printing industry produced one of the world's great masterpieces. Heminges and Condell preserved Shakespeare plays that audiences throughout the world still revere.  

 

 

Microchip wars will decide world's fate, writers Chis Miller and John Lanchester reveal

Microchips will decide the West's coming war with China and humanity's future.

London Review writer John Lanchester in an expansive review in the publication's March issue examines the central importance of those little silicon wafers.

Lanchester for years has been one of my favorite writers, especially in uncovering the inner workings of the world's economy. He's also a noted novelist and critic of English culture and history.

In an appreciative review of Chris Miller's "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology," Lanchester gives a detailed and fascinating synopsis of the development of semiconductor technology.

From William Shockley's invention of the transistor and founding of Silicon Valley, through successive microchip innovations by Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore and the continued miniaturization and prevalence of microchips in military weapons and consumer products, Lanchester shows the successes and downfalls of companies like Shockley Semiconductor,  Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Texas Instruments.

While American innovations led the semiconductor revolution, U.S. companies lost their competitive dominance to the Taiwanese firm Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

Texas Instruments and other American firms still compete in the semiconductor industry, but TSMC is now by far the leading semiconductor manufacturer.

The Taiwanese capitalist giant is itself dependent on European companies for the complex equipment needed to program the chips through an intricate process known as extreme ultraviolet lithography.

As Lanchester details, the American firm Cymer developed the laser technology for EUV products. But the Dutch firm ASML has risen to the top in making the huge machines needed to create the ultra-tiny microchips.

While Taiwan makes most of the chips that power products from cars to Iphones, China is desperate to acquire chips for weapons and products it manufactures. China's economy now rivals the United States, yet the communist system lags in technological innovation.

Lanchester points out that the Biden administration's ban on microchip exports to China in October 2022 is "a declaration of economic war."

China Chairman's Xi's increasing aggression toward the United States and seeking closer ties with Russia's Vladimir Putin accelerate the new cold war, which might heat up with a Chinese attack against Taiwan like that of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

With no microchip manufacturing industry, communist China has increasing incentive to take over Taiwan militarily. The United States' economic future depends on Taiwan's independence.

Oil, water, alternative energy sources, climate change, food and population increases will determine humanity's future. But those tiny chips will rule the world, as Lanchester's essential review of Miller's important book shows.

 

 

 

Remembering John Keats, on 202nd anniversary of his death

I first fell in love with Keats when I was an English major at Louisiana State University.

Each week, I walked up the steps at O.K. Allen Hall, named for Huey Long's main crony, to go to the office of a professor whose name I've sadly forgotten. She spoke with a proper and forbidding British accent, and always wore a formal dress. I learned over that semester in southern Louisiana's gorgeous springtime of her kindness and humor.

I took a class in Keats' work from the lovely lady, in which I was the only student. Each week, we discussed Keats' poems and letters. She told anecdotes about the young poet, as if she'd been a member of his circle in early 19th century London.

On the 202nd anniversary of Keats' death in a small apartment overlooking Rome's Spanish Steps, I look back on that young student. I was not quite 25, the age at which Keats died of tuberculosis, believing himself forgotten.

As with Melville, Keats was rediscovered posthumously. Now, he's the best remembered Romantic poet, subject of a continuing stream of books.

Over the years, I visited the place where Keats died in the care of painter Joseph Severn, and his grave at Rome's Protestant Cemetery with its bitter epitaph, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." I've also gone to the home in London where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, wrote his great odes and walked along the Hampstead Heath.

Soon to turn 72, I've never stopped reading his poems.

 

Proust lovers mark 100th anniversary of C.K. Scott Moncrieff's first English translation of Proust's "Swann's Way"

Along with "The Wasteland" and "Ulysses," another modernist classic's 100th anniversary is heralded this year: C.K. Scott Moncrieff's pioneering English translation of "Swann's Way," the first volume of Marcel Proust's massive novel "In Search of Lost Time."

Moncrieff's florid translation appeared in September 1922, two months before Proust's death in Paris at age 52. Although he never completed the entire novel, Moncrieff translated several other volumes of Proust's masterpiece under the title"Remembrance of Things Past," taken from Shakespeare's sonnet. Proust before his death expressed his displeasure at the English title.

"Swann's Way," which tells of wealthy Paris financier Charles Swann's disastrous love affair with the lower class courtesan Odette, is the most-read volume of Proust's work, similar to"Inferno" in Dante's "The Divine Comedy." After "Swann's Way," most readers don''t continue with the rest of the book.

Over the years, "Swann's Way" has been translated several times, most recently by Lydia Davis in a critically acclaimed edition.

While Davis and other translators have more accurately rendered Proust's language than Moncrieff's overly emotive style, Moncrieff's translation gives sumptuous reading pleasure. Moncrieff's version of Proust is the last great Victorian novel.

 

 

Elton John says farewell to Nashville with love, gratitude

Yes, it's been a long, long time.

Yet the 75-year-old Elton John still gives his all. In an outpouring of love and gratitude, Sir Elton thrilled 60,000 adoring fans in an incandescent concert at Nashville's Nissan Stadium Sunday night.

Spectacular video images beamed from giant screens above the stage shifted during the evening to photos from Sir Elton's 50-year career and closeups of him and his topflight band of old colleagues still rocking.

In homage to Sir Elton's grandiose concert costumes, many in the crowd wore flashy outfits and outrageous glasses, earning a word of appreciation from the consummate showman. Sir Elton wore a fairly restrained white coat with tails, switching to an elegant blue jacket and at the end a lounging outfit for a tender encore.

Sir Elton and mates propelled the crowd to stand and dance for most of the show, performing a generous selection of his greatest hits. "Rocket Man" took the evening to a higher stratosphere from which it never descended.

In his final performance in Nashville on his "Farewell to the Yellow Brick Road" tour, Sir Elton noted the city's musical heritage, and that of Memphis. He gave tribute to those cities with his piano playing, an encyclopedic offering of rhythm and blues, rock and country chords along with runs that echoed Mozart and Bach. With all of the high-tech effects and immense stadium, he could have been a guy singing and playing in an intimate club.

The crowd joined in on a raucous performance of "Crocodile Rock," thousands of voices spanning Baby Boomers to Generation Z harmonizing on the "ooo,ooooooo" as personal phone flashlights formed a continuous arc. All seemed transported to a time when rock, and the world, was young.

During his encore, Sir Elton performed his and Bernie Taupin's first hit, "This Is Your Song." Everyone there believed it.