NOTES OF A USED AND OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK DEALER

Issue 21. Saturday, March 23, 2002

These notes are published by Continental Books for customers and interested others. You might notice that there is some shift in theme and emphasis from issue to issue. This is not purely intentional. I write about what catches my wavering attention. Phrases and words jotted down, revised, erased, re-entered. Seeking the impossible line between the self and objectivity. And here it is: mildly opinionated, ambivalent, changing, hopeful, comic. Hell, it's only a newsletter. So off we go.

1. Riff on the physical book
2. More on alternate street names in NYC
3. The War in Spain
4. A dusty Evelyn Waugh
5. Jeager lost, Yeager found.

BOOK?

Bound on one side, free on the other. Flexible in its parts but the whole rigid. Except for an occasional flipped page it is docile and it settles quietly where it has been left. A stabile instead of a mobile. Considered an ephemeral throw away by some, yet capable of being stored and preserved for very long periods. The message, which in its spoken form is evanescent, is retained. The words of the author transmitted directly to a multiple of others, but capable of the intimacy of a tete-a-tete. Even with the rise of electronics, it remains a useful method of communication. Low tech, private, relatively cheap considering its durability. And it has an aesthetic. It can be a pleasurable material object, looking and feeling good. Mnemonic: if we forget, the books we retain remember. The variety of our cultures and civilizations recallable. More abundant than apples in the fall. Pick one, pick a bushel.

A STREET BY ANY OTHER NAME

The City Council of New York is well embarked on renaming the city's streets. Each sign logical but overall it feels irrational. Perfectly acceptable and long standing names for streets, avenues, ways, squares, corners, alleys and whatnots are being paired with alternate names that, while established by local ordinance, have no validity as postal addresses and have little effect on the consciousness of resident or visitor. Yet the process of establishing these new names is so popular among the council members that the city's grid will soon be saturated by dual but disassociated signs.

But why stop? Any intersection that can bear two names can certainly sustain a third and a fourth and even more. The only limit will be the height of the corner poles and the width of the signs.

It's part of a larger process of equalitarian pluralism. Whatever symbolic advantage one social identification achieves all the others must emulate. It also has a practical purpose as an identifier of the ethnic, commercial, or cultural precinct within which the new name sign resides. The old system is too abstract to do that. Multiple names also give us a symbolic density that is a value in itself.

Recently the City Council recorded its sense that too much member time has been committed to renaming the cityscape and, like any group of addicts in trouble, the members are on the verge of giving over the habit.

Lots of luck politicos. Once you are cured could you possibly give us back Idlewild Airport and 6th Avenue?

A news article about street names and the city council by Clyde Haberman in the New York Times on Saturday, Feb. 2 this year was headlined "NYC: Carving Out a Corner for Everyone." Precisely: We each get a Warhol 15 minutes of fame and a corner sign in perpetuity.

How about an alternate name for the city council itself?

THE WAR IN SPAIN WAS MAILY ON THE ARID PLAIN

1.
The First Sergeant of Karl Conshohocken's army troop in training in Mississippi during World War II was a veteran of the International Brigade serving on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. He was remarkably unsympathetic and ornery even for a man of his rank, and he was in strong contention with the troop's organized crime functionary from New Jersey for most hated man in the unit. Karl thought of them, respectively, as Monster and Mobster. Both were miserably criminal and dirty in spirit and made the rest of the company ashamed that they were on our side. It turned out that actually, in their hearts, they weren't.

Time approaching when the troop was to be posted overseas to combat service and these two made strenuous efforts to opt out. Mobster voluntarily contracted gonorrhea from a Vicksburg hooker but was forced to accompany the rest none-the-less, but Monster timed his application and acceptance for Officers Training so exquisitely that he was transferred to officer candidate school just a few days before the rest started on their journey out.

On Monster's final day with the unit he sat on his bunk lazily turning the pages of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" while observing the others packing. He finally coughed out a dry sadistic laugh and said, "I'm thinking of you guys hearing your first incoming 88's."

2
The Spanish Civil war is widely thought of as a rehearsal for the world war that followed. Germany and Italy actively supported the Falange rebels while the Soviet Union was on the side of the Republicans. In Spain itself the divisions were more complex. Professional soldiers led the revolt but many conservative officers remained loyal to the government. The rebels were supposedly pro clerical and the republicans anti, but pro government clerics, especially among the Basques, were visible and prominent while the most publicized and successful assault troops for the rebels were Islamic Moroccans.

The unities of the sides themselves were problematic. Some volunteers sent by Mussolini for service with the rebels went over to the Garibaldi Brigade of the Internationals at the first opportunity. The mix of monarchists, religious fundamentalists, fascists, and big landowners among the rebels was on its face incompatible. The Republicans made up of several antagonistic mass political parties, stretching from conservatives to liberals to socialists to anarchists to Trotskyites to communists to Stalinists, were never at peace among themselves.

In the early 1940's the members of the International Brigades were considered fabulous and brave figures incapable of petty meanness. The monstrous sergeant was apparently an anomaly. It took a long time for the gray to fill in between the black and white, good and evil, that dominated depression era perceptions. Even in the months following May 1945, there was a minor agitation among American and British soldiers stationed in Biarritz, France, a few miles from the border with Spain, for military intervention against the repressive Franco regime. Only much later was the massive and cruel oppression by Stalin of his own people and of selected supporters of the Spanish Republican government generally accepted. The emergence of a democratic regime in Spain after the death of Franco was a shocking moment for those who remembered the Iberia of the 1930's, almost as astonishing as the shattering of the USSR.

Peter Wyden in "The Passionate War, The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War" lays out the whole story, warts and all. It is a popular history emphasizing the experiences of real people, especially the famous and near famous: Hemingway, Eric Blair, Dos Passos, Andre Malraux, W.H. Auden, Cornford, Robert Capa and so on. Among the Spaniards: Franco himself, La Passionaria (Dolores Ibarruri), Derruti (A major anarchist personality). The recurring stories of the Americans Robert Merriman and James Lardner are particularly poignant. Both died in the final battle in which Americans participated.

3
The international military units that are based on a unity of ideology are particularly irritating to their opponents for they represent a transcending but not universal identity. They are, in that sense, presumptuous. Their youth and dedication are charming except in the event, when they emerge as deadly shock troops. Orwell in "Animal Farm" sees them as playful puppies that the pigs train up to be dogs of war.

Karl Conshohocken is the father of Elmer Conshohocken, the famous composite book dealer.

For a more serious history Wyden himself recommends Hugh Thomas. "The Spanish Civil War," revised edition of 1977.

THREE CHEERS AND A PROVISO

If you are in the mood for black humor try "A Handful of Dust" by Evelyn Waugh. The hero, in his guileless simplicity, is dragged through the most appalling experiences and finally falls into an end state of galling exile and involuntary servitude. It is no way to treat an Englishman.

Tony Last, a youngish minor landowner, looses his bored wife to adultery. She takes up with the shallow son of a bourgeois tradeswoman, a Mrs. Beaver, who is a horrifying representation of exploit-the-rich commercialism. Then his young son is killed in a fox hunting accident. Then he is abused by a prostitute who brings her child, a nagging daughter, to their assignation. Then a brief innocent shipboard interlude with a Caribbean beauty who dumps him when she learns he is married. Then a trip into the unexplored Brazilian jungle looking for a mythical lost city. He is sick with a recurring fever when his anthropologist guide and associate drowns. Then his final "rescue" by an evil, although bland in appearance, heart of darkness character who keeps Last endlessly at work, with no hope of escape, reading and rereading the novels of Dickens aloud.

It projects as an unconsciously dedicated masochistic life. Compared to Tony Last Voltaire's Candide was on a picnic. But Waugh's narrative is not uniformly dark. Each episode is introduced and carried with lightness and hope. The reader always anticipates a happy outcome. Then without warning the ax falls. No, there is often another bit of hope but also, it turns out, unavailing.

The images are of the skittish horse, the wild and ravenous fox, the pig, the torpid and bug filled jungle, the honorable but indifferent tribesmen: Civilized man at home and abroad is surrounded by an inattentive and uncaring nature and culture. Not inappropriately the first book Last reads to his captor is "Bleak House."

. The publisher touts this novel as a comedy of manners. A total misinterpretation. It should be categorized with Joseph Conrad and Louis Ferdinand Celine, in content if not in style.

It might attract those who like the blues, but if you are blue yourself stay away.

The on line literature on Waugh analyses the literary and religious allusions in which "A Handful of Dust" is drenched. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Waste land:" "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

Some argue that the fearful image Waugh gives us inexorably pushes us toward faith to replace the lost city, the forever gone medieval order and all the failed utopias that have followed it. But the harsh world, others would suggest, is mitigated by love and kisses, by work well done, by amity among friends. The creative energy Waugh himself expended in constructing this novel might be thought of as a contradiction of the ostensible message.

But follow this through for yourself.

http://www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk/Introduction%202.htm Excerpts of Waugh statements during interviews

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/72mar/sissman.htm Discursive meander over several Waugh novels.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-03/handful.htm Literary analysis of A Handful of Dust.

In our last issue's story on the non-stop, non-refuel around the world flight by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager in 1986 I totally missed Yeager's presence on the web by substituting a J for a Y in her name. Y is the open sesame.
Get Jeana Yeager's story at http://www.edwards.af.mil/articles98/docs_html/splash/feb98/cover/jeana.html
Thanks to mclori.

That's the package. Tie it up.
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Alvin Katz copyright 2002