jguyreview: "Elmer Gantry" review

jguyreview: "Elmer Gantry" review

"Elmer Gantry" review

The protagonist of the Sinclair Lewis novel, “Elmer Gantry,” is a sham preacher who uses the church pulpit to advance his insatiable lust for power and self-glorification. Pugnacious, provincial and unscrupulous, he’s a character many would recognize – the burly, baritone-voiced pastor, always seeking publicity for his “moral crusades.”

Lewis’s book is picaresque in its portrayal of a rogue character going from one adventure to the next, never finding redemption. Part of the fun in reading the book is finding out what despicable thing Elmer Gantry is going to do next.

At times, the book lags as the story transitions to Elmer’s next adventure, but overall it keeps the reader engaged. The book’s most page turning appeal is in its portrayal of the cozy relationship between church and commerce. Church life is depicted as affectation – rotarianism in the guise of devout worship. The backroom politics, in-fighting and rivalries of the church business are a world in which the self-aggrandizing Elmer thrives.

In this respect, “Elmer Gantry” follows the vein of Lewis’s earlier novels, “Main Street” and “Babbitt.” Written in the 1920s, the books are a social critique of post-World War I mainstream America, portrayed as vapid, soulless and with an unthinking drive toward affluence. In “Elmer Gantry,” the white-bred Protestant church is an arm of the Establishment, preserving the status quo. The novel reflects a trend of the era – propagated in best-selling books like Bruce Barton’s “The Man Nobody Knows” – of equating Christianity with capitalism, a forerunner of the recent “prosperity theology” trend.

With “Elmer Gantry,” Lewis responded to several trends and news events of his era, which sound strangely contemporary. Elmer is a fundamentalist preacher who denounces the Godless teaching of evolution – an issue that first arose out of the Scopes trial. He rides to fame by attacking immorality. If Elmer Gantry were around today, he would be lashing out against gay marriage, abortion and fighting the “culture wars.” In the novel, he rails against alcohol and other forms of vice like gambling, tobacco and prostitution – the political footballs of his day. Like many clergymen of recent years, Elmer indulges in the same illicit pleasures he condemns from the pulpit. He is an incessant womanizer and carries on extra-marital affairs.

The novel begins around 1902 when Elmer is a college football star at a Baptist school in rural Kansas. Nicknamed “Hellcat,” he is rebellious, irreverent and disdains piety. He is revealed in the first few paragraphs to be a drunkard and bully. One night, he picks a fight with men heckling a proselytizing fellow classmate and his actions are misinterpreted to be a public conversion to the Christian faith.

Initially, Elmer vacillates between trying to please his atheist roommate, Jim Lefferts, and those trying to bring him into the fold. But Elmer has a sonorous voice that buttresses his powers of elocution. His ability to command an audience can yield him the dominance and adoration he desires. The ministry seems a perfect fit for his inexorable narcism so Elmer Gantry becomes a Christian.

Privately, Elmer is indifferent to the ideas he espouses so bombastically from the pulpit. He feels there may be something to this Christianity, but essentially he neither believes nor disbelieves. Extremely shallow, it’s as if he lacks the most fundamental introspection needed to comprehend spiritual matters. Elmer is drawn to the business side of church, pulpit orotund, officiating over the various components of church beauracracy and using sales and marketing techniques to publicize his churches – and himself. He is described at various points with words like “commercial” and “ward politician.”

The book follows Elmer through seminary school and his ministerial career as he advances to the helm of bigger and wealthier congregations. He progresses from backwater country churches ultimately to a large metropolitan church in the fictional city and state of Zenith, Winemac, the same setting as the novel “Babbitt.” Everywhere Elmer goes, he leaves behind scandal and shattered lives, while he emerges unscathed. Under the scrutiny of today’s aggressive media, he would be exposed as has been the case with many modern Gantrys. Towards the end of the book, however, there is a question about whether this Teflon preacher’s luck has run out.

Lewis appears to have fun with this character, mocking him with a sense of humor. He sets up scenes in which it appears that Elmer will finally show a shred of compassion, then hits the reader by having him do something cruel. In the final chapters, however, his ambitions and rising power grow pernicious, foreshadowing disturbing trends of the coming decades. He becomes the head of an organization, NAPAP (National Association for the Purification of the Arts and Press), which sounds uncannily similar to such future operations as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family. He appears alarmist, fear-mongering and McCarthy-esque, when addressing a meeting of clergymen and running down a list of saloons and brothels, and proclaiming that they be shut down. He convinces the police to make him a lieutenant leading a vice squad.

In the most chilling scene of the book, a young woman is humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” when Gantry’s posse forces its way into her home like the Gestapo. Then they barge into the bedroom of her half-dressed roommate and a man, bent on arresting them for the crime of pre-marital sex.

Elmer’s ego grows dangerously delusional in the final chapters of the book as he imagines becoming “super-president” and “emperor of America.” While Elmer is one-dimensional, other characters provide the depth that gives the book its substance – particularly the characters Jim Lefferts and Frank Schallard. They are counter-weights to Elmer.

While Elmer is domineering over everyone else, he is the subordinate one in his friendship with Lefferts, whose approval he is always seeking. The best of friends, the two are opposites. Elmer is crude, uncultured and eschews books. Jim is elegant, scholarly and possesses a personal library. While Elmer “swallows ideas whole,” Jim is contemplative, deliberate. Even their positions on the football team denote their differences. Elmer plays tackle, a supplier of brute force; Jim is quarterback, the team strategist. (Elmer is only strategic in dreaming up his own PR.)

Frank is a fellow student at the seminary where Elmer trains for the ministry. Scholarly, pensive, empathetic, he is everything Elmer is not. The son of a Baptist minister, he is tortured by doubts that go against his religious training. Still, he feels a responsibility toward the people to whom he is ministering.

The characters, Jim and Frank, juxtaposed with Elmer illustrate one of the book’s most prevailing themes: provincialism versus intellectualism, or “Fundamentalism” versus “Higher Criticism,” terms which recur throughout the book. Fundamentalism first came to prominence in the 1920s. The conservative Christian movement promoting literal interpretation of scripture was a response to Higher Criticism, a school of thought that originated in Europe during the 1870s and spread to America at the turn of the century. Higher Criticism did not accept the Bible as literal or infallible and judged it by the same standards as other literary and historical works.

Lewis’s book piques interest in early 20th century history with quick mentions of the Four Minute Man movement (a PR campaign to drum up support for World War I), the Klu Klux Klan (at the peak of its popularity in the 1920s) and violent labor strikes. These passing references place in concrete terms the intolerant ideas Elmer and other well-heeled church leaders perpetuate: prejudice, nativism and paternalism. Church is depicted as a social mechanism for the affluent to keep the common people in their place, an idea Lewis first introduced in “Babbitt.” Today, with declining attendance, churches probably don’t wield that much social control, but it is interesting to examine their cultural role 80 to 100 years ago.

Along with references to such forgotten trends as “muscular Christianity” and the “New Thought” movement, “Elmer Gantry” makes allusions to famous people of the time, obscure today. Some say Elmer’s character was inspired by Billy Sunday, the vitriolic, two-fisted professional baseball player-turned-evangelist. Interestingly, Sunday was accused of plagiarizing the writings of agnostic Robert Ingersoll into his sermons, something Elmer does repeatedly throughout the novel.

The character Sharon Falconer is a dead ringer for Aime Sempe McPherson, a renowned evangelist of the ‘20s. McPherson, a self-styled “phrophetess,” and “faith healer” was a shrewd businesswoman who pioneered the concepts of Christian enterprise, megachurches and the use of glitzy showbiz theatrics in church services. She was known to be difficult to work for and to have had several lovers -- all characteristics that Sharon has in spades.

Sharon is the female counterpart to Elmer, but much more compelling. The only true love of Elmer’s life, she is sensual, passionate and delusional, believing in the cult of her own marketed image. Under her tutelage, Elmer cuts his teeth in the religion business. Like no other character in the book, she is the quintessence of the gimmickry and tacky commercialization of Christianity today. When Lewis describes the ostentatious cross revolving iridescently above Sharon’s just constructed dream temple, one can see it vividly. Sharon is Joan of Arc-like in the most climactic scene in the book. A few of the side characters in “Elmer Gantry” are worthy of being protagonists in their own novels, but none more than Sharon. In the most eldritch scene of the book, she and Elmer make love before a pagan altar – a scene that seems over the top until one learns that it mirrors an account told by a man who claimed to be a former lover of McPherson’s.

Most of the material for “Elmer Gantry,” however, was gleaned from Lewis’s direct observations of regular, everyday people – more interesting than the celebrity references. Lewis modeled Elmer’s character much more on the Kansas clergymen he observed than he did on Sunday. He attended several church services in the Kansas City-Overland Park area, became acquainted with several clergymen and took part in Bible studies. Lewis did his research; he brilliantly captures vernacular and colloquialisms of the early 20th century Kansas. He evokes images of the prairie, small village life and the rustic sounding names he gives his fictional towns are irresistible. It has been speculated that Terwilinger College where Elmer attends is based on Ottawa University, a Baptist school in northeast Kansas and that Thorvilsen College, Tewillinger’s rival is modeled on Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas.

The most common criticism leveled against “Elmer Gantry” – and a legitimate one -- is its one-sidedness. From the tone of the book, it would be easy to conclude that Lewis was atheist or agnostic, but the record of his personal views is opaque. While some of his early writings attack religious hypocrisy, in his youth, Lewis considered becoming a missionary. One could speculate that he was afflicted with an inner conflict of faith versus doubt like Frank – the character he would create. One might also surmise that he turned his back on religion and became an atheist like Jim. However, Jim had polish and Lewis was awkward and gangly. There is another interesting possibility. Eddie Fislinger, a somewhat dim-witted college student, is something of a pest with his constant declarations of religious piety. As a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, Lewis was known to drive fellow classmates crazy with his persistent religiosity. So perhaps Eddie is a version of the youthful Lewis. Maybe all three characters possess components of Lewis’s personality. Lewis’s own comment on Elmer does nothing to clear the ambiguity: “I kind of like that guy.”

The concepts of faith and belief are explored in an exchange between Frank and a theology professor Bruno Zechlin. In the most penetrating dialogue of the book, the older man confides that he’s an atheist. Their conversation introduces the most thought provoking theme to appear in the book: Is religion, even if proven false, a good thing because it brings hope to peoples’ lives?

Lewis squanders an excellent opportunity to produce a counter-argument from the perspective of belief and spiritual authenticity. Andrew Pengilly, an old Civil War veteran turned Methodist minister, is the only truly virtuous and genuine clergyman in the book. At one point, he and Elmer meet and the old man asks him, “Mr. Gantry, why don’t you believe in God?” There is a thud as the chapter ends. Lewis could have produced lively dialogue, exploring the theme of sincere religion versus churchy pretensions, but he lets the opportunity slip by.

Lewis also makes some disappointing decisions in the development of certain characters late in the book, mostly with Frank. He turns this likable character into a whining crybaby as he launches on a tirade about his fellow ministers and loss of faith. Clearly, Lewis was casting Frank’s intellectualism as effeminate in contrast to Elmer’s simple-mindedness in connection with virility, but it’s not worth it. This was the sad waste of a good character.

Also, Lewis’s treatment of two female characters -- Lulu (Elmer’s mistress) and Cleo (his wife) -- late in the book is unrealistic. They remain obsequious to him despite the emotional abuse he heaps on them. In reality, Cleo probably would be servile to Elmer, but more out of resignation or fear, than love, which is what she does in the book. Also, early in the book, Elmer gets Lulu in trouble and deserts her. How likely is it that she is going to show up years later and throw herself at his feet? Or did he really get her pregnant? She tearfully gives every indication that she’s in the family way, yet when she reappears years later, married with two kids, there is no mention of whether one of them might be Elmer’s child. So what happened? Did he knock her up or what?

This is the only flaw in the plot development, but it’s a bothersome one. The problems with plot and character keep “Elmer Gantry” from being a great book, but it is very good, well worth reading and definitely a classic.

“Elmer Gantry” was written at a time when people were more naïve and apt to put blind faith in their ministers. No doubt, that mindset contributed to the controversy the book provoked. Sunday called Lewis one of “Satan’s cohorts.” The book was banned, Lewis was threatened with jail and lynch mobs wanted to get hold of him, ironically the same kind of violence intolerant thugs resorted to in “Elmer Gantry.”

Today, after so many evangelists have been exposed as frauds, Elmer Gantry appears a familiar character. In our era of megachurches marketing “hip” services, “Intelligent Design” controversies, court battles over church and state boundaries and the mega-hot-button issue of gay marriage, “Elmer Gantry” is timely.

Best line: “Oh, I hate the little vices – smoking, swearing, scandal, drinking just enough to be silly. I like the big ones – murder, lust, cruelty, ambition!” – Sharon Falconer

Gateway literature: “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement” by Allan J. Lichtman. This book traces the origin of the Christian conservative movement to the 1920s.

“In His Steps” by Charles Sheldon. This book, written in 1896 by a Kansas minister, introduced the phrase, “What would Jesus do?” Although the phrase has been adopted by conservative evangelicals, Sheldon was a liberal pioneer of the “social gospel” movement. If not his book, one would do well to at least read Timothy Miller’s essay on Sheldon in the book, “John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History.”

“Oil” by Upton Sinclair. A character in the novel is based on Aimee Sempe McPherson.

“The Scarlett Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This classic novel gets a mention in “Elmer Gantry and if you haven’t read it, you should.

Outside the Box literature: “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. At one point in “Elmer Gantry,” the cynical, worldly attorney and church deacon T.J. Rigg describes his role with the church as a “hobby.” He takes a paternalistic tone that reminds me of Mr. Norton, a minor character in the “Invisible Man” who uses his trusteeship of a black college to boost his ego.

"The Fixer" review

The most salient feature in Bernard Malamud's "The Fixer" is the way he depicts anti-Semitism through the Christ-like suffering of a Jewish man unjustly imprisoned. Yakov Bok, the protagonist, is falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy, hiding the body in a cave and draining the corpse of its blood (blood being a recurring motif) in tsarist Russia in 1911.

Bok undergoes several years in a rancid, rat and bug-infested solitary cell, regularly getting beaten and tortured, while awaiting trial. He's malnourished, confined in chains and subjected to incessant body cavity searches by sadistic guards. He lives in Solzhenitsyn-like conditions -- a foreshadowing of the Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps to come in the 20th century.

Hallucinating, contemplating suicide, the man is at the crucible of his existence, an existential affliction not unlike Job of the Old Testament. However, Jesus Christ is the Biblical character Bok most parallels. A "fixer," Yakov is a carpenter. His three-year personal journey begins at age 30. Like Christ, Yakov is railroaded on a trump charge, accused of subversion against the government and the religious leaders and establishment of his day clamor for his decimation. Yakov reads the Gospels in prison and feels an affinity with this man, whom his tormenters worship.

Here, in wonderful irony, is the key -- and most abstract -- parallel. Jesus, a perfect man, paid the penalty of death to atone for the sins of mankind. Yakov, ostensibly incarcerated for murder, is really being punished for a crime he's blameless of -- "Christ-killer." The fixer refers to it in a reference to "bloodguilt" and quotes like, "Since the crucifixion the crime of the Christ-killer is the crime of all the Jews."

However -- and this is where Malamud's writing shows expansiveness -- Yakov is an unlikely martyr. Calling himself a "freethinker," he eschews religion and keenly reads the works of Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Dutch philosopher, was exiled from the Hebrew community for works deemed heretical, primarily his view of God as an abstraction, synonymous with nature.

An unlikely savior, Bok comes off as a caustic, unlikable man in the book's beginning. Bitter about his life and short on empathy, he stopped sleeping with his wife for her failure to bare any children (a “failure” more likely due to Bok). She leaves him for another man and Yakov calls her a "whore" to her father's face. Unmerciful, he's like a slave driver to his emaciated, old horse.

He's a character many can identify with. Yakov's bitterness could well be that of any of us -- toward a lover we feel betrayed by; living hand-to-mouth, while less intelligent people flourish; not being better educated; and a multitude of missed opportunities and disappointments. Yakov feels detached from history, the world and wants to connect -- tragically unaware of what that will mean for him.

Humanly flawed, an unlikely martyr for the children of Judaism, Yakov rejects his faith, culture and arguably shows cowardice. He leaves his shetl (Jewish community), shaves the beard identified with his culture, changes his name, stops speaking Yiddish and tries to pass himself off as a gentile, hoping it will lead to economic gain. When a ferryman goes on a Hitler-like rant against Jews, Yakov drops his sack of Jewish phylacteries into the river. It's a chilling scene -- the Dneiper River symbolizing the River Hades leading to the land of the dead, the ferryman going on a diatribe like the Holocaust put in words.

"I say we ought to call our menfolk together, armed with guns, knives, pitchforks, clubs -- anything that will kill a Jew and when the church bell begins to ring we move on the Zhidy quarter, which you can tell by the stink, routing them out of wherever they're hiding -- in attics, cellars or ratholes -- bashing in their brains, stabbing their herring-filled guts, shooting off their snotty noses, no exceptions made for young or old because if you spare any, they breed like rats and then the jobs to do all over again. And when we've slaughtered the whole cursed tribe of them...we'll pile up the corpses and soak them with benzene and light fires that people will see all over the world."

It's an excellent use of foreshadowing -- something Malamud does with dead-on effect throughout the novel. Not a word is wasted. Every mention of a sausage, crucifix, bloody eye...is made with deliberateness, the symbols and augurs communicating the novel’s themes and advancing its plot. The writing is taut, achieving depth through subtlety. "The Fixer" has a readability that is the fortunate result of clear pacing, scenes and conversations segueing into the next situation, the next insightful passage. Malamud provokes such thought through intelligently written dialogue that reveals interesting characters and relationships.

Yakov's relationship with his father-in-law, Schmuel, is the book's most endearing. The old man is something of a mentor to Yakov. His gentleness, patience and religious faith complement Bok's abrasiveness, impulsivity and ambiguous view of God. It's significant that, while in prison, Yakov says to himself, "If I must suffer, let it be for something. Let it be for Schmuel."

This resolve to sacrifice himself for another is key to Yakov's transformation. But the best example of his atonement is played out in the emotional scene when his estranged wife Raisl visits him in prison. Not entirely void of his bitterness, he is able to relate to her and acknowledge where he was at fault in the relationship. From a visceral level, this is the most significant scene in the novel. Raisl tells Yakov that she bore a child by the man she had an affair with, whom she has since left. She tells him of being ostracized in the shetl and by the rabbi (another excellent use of irony) for bearing a child out of wedlock, and Yakov signs a form, saying the child is his. The best thing about this magnanimous gesture is that it's made, not as some heroic sacrifice on behalf of an oppressed people, but as an individual act performed for someone with whom he had a tumultuous history.

The second best thing about this scene is Yakov's resolve. The authorities tell him that with a signed confession, he can be released, just as he was earlier told that if he accepted Christ, he could be set free. But he doesn't budge an inch. The show of courage marks a reversal of the cowardice he showed earlier, the denial of who he was. Along with the prison conversion to a bigger humanity, Yakov is shown to be a smarter character. It's a demonstration of Malamud's skill as a writer that he portrayed Yakov as stupid when he needed him to be and smart when the plot called for it. This is done in a subtle way that shows transformation, not inconsistency.

Early in the book, Bok enters the city of Kiev, an area forbidden to Jews. In one of his earliest acts of selflessness, Yakov helps an old drunk man who is passed out in the snow. One can argue over Yakov's judgment in performing this Good Samaritan deed. A button on the man's coat identifies him as a member of the Black Hundreds, an arch-conservative, anti-Jewish organization. From the relationship Yakov forms with this character, Lebedev, all the traps are laid that will ensnare him. Lebedev offers Yakov a job as a bookkeeper in his brick factory, requires that he live on the plant property (in an area forbidden to Jews) and his daughter, Zinaida, does everything to seduce him. As a reader, one can see all the landmines Yakov is blind to, and you want to yell at him to get out.

It's great plot construction. Malamud sets up the scenes with adeptness. Also, it's not without purpose that Malamud has Lebedev read the Bible’s Sermon on the Mount to Yakov. It's significant that Christ's poetic words are belied by the public railing for Yakov's destruction. Malamud goes beyond anti-Semitism to cast light on the human propensity for cruelty, its full-circle, regenerating ubiquity. In Yakov's world, what comes across is that: the piety is false, hatred of Jews is stronger than any professed faith in Jesus; the mass of people don't care about bringing the boy's real killer to justice, only pinning it on a Jew, and if he is acquitted, they'll find another Jew to sacrifice.

Based largely on an actual incident, the Beilis case, "The Fixer" was written some 50 years later in the 1960s. Now, 40 years after the book's publication, its themes are still relevant. For America, the obvious parallel is the long detaining of Guantánamo Bay prisoners denied due process. The issues raised in this novelistic treatment continue to reverberate in America, the world over: justice and humanity as casualties of political ambition; vilification of a group to inspire patriotism, national unity and deflect from societal dysfunction; and the press and religious establishment accommodation in the mass manipulation.

Consistently safeguarding his work from the maudlin, Malamud suggests there is potential for the oppressed to become oppressors. In one scene, Yakov "imagines himself tearing the deputy warden's face apart and kicking him to death." It's a shadowy, uneasy future Malamud hints at. Amid the sacrifice, the heroism, there lurks the danger of creating martyrs, saviors, idols. One can see how a Lennin or Trotsky can happen. Malamud doesn't let the reader off easy.

Gateway Literature: I think of "The Fixer" as part of a trilogy of books, the other two being Kafka's "The Trial" and Albert Camus's "The Stranger." All three novels involve the legal system and take an existentialist view of the absurdity of life. While all the books contain elements of each other, each takes its own focus. "The Stranger" raises the issue of finding meaning in an absurd reality. "The Trial" focuses on the surreal, impersonal nature of modern beuracracy. Significantly, it takes a secular view of man's guilt by nature of being human, while "The Fixer" refers to inborn Jewish "bloodguilt." Interestingly, you can take that back to the Christian view of inherited sin.

Outside the box gateway literature: “Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. I always hated the line, "Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified." It's so anathema to my beliefs. But after reading Yakov playing the martyr and hearing myself and other people in his complaining, I've come to the opinion that we all have a tendency toward self-pity. We all play the martyr and put ourselves on the cross.

Also, Anderson influenced Faulkner and Faulkner influenced Malamud so really, how far outside the box is it?

"The Razor's Edge" review

“The Razor’s Edge,” by W. Somerset Maugham follows the spiritual quest of a disillusioned World War I veteran probing life’s deepest questions: Does God exist? Why is their evil in the world? Does life have meaning?

Laurence “Larry” Darrell, aviator in the Great War, returns from France to America, a changed person. While his friends’ lives are wrapped around material pursuits, those things are unimportant to him. He turns down a lucrative job offer, leaves behind a fiancée and walks away from his affluent social circle in Chicago, becoming part of the expatriate scene in Paris. He immerses himself in books, and his search for knowledge leads to a spiritual sojourn through London, Germany and India where he finds inner peace in Eastern religion.

The overriding theme of “The Razor’s Edge” is spirituality versus materialism with Larry representing the former and Elliott Templeton representing the latter. Elliott left America for France as a young man and made his fortune as an art dealer. He’s an aristocratic gentleman – a gadabout who lives to attend high society parties and dine with the socially eminent, using them as stepping stones to advance his own profile. Maugham describes Elliott as an “archsnob,” but also as “the kindest and most generous of men.” At the novel’s opening, Larry is engaged to Elliott’s niece, Isabel Bradley.

The book’s main characters are introduced during a dinner party at the Chicago home of Louisa Bradley, Isabel’s mother and Elliott’s sister. Gray Maturin, Larry’s best friend, is among the guests. He’s an ambitious young man being groomed for a position in his father’s security firm, the company Larry declines to work for. Larry is in love with Isabel. Louisa and Elliott view Larry as unfocused and lacking direction. They want Isabel to marry Gray. The name, Gray Maturin, symbolizes that the character is adult and stable in contrast to Larry’s perceived unsettledness and immature refusal to conform.

Maugham takes a unique approach, placing himself in the story. He’s an excellent listener, to whom other characters confide. As narrator, he shows their perspectives through relaying their conversations with him. He’s a friend of Elliott’s, yet also develops a friendship with Larry. Maugham’s success as a novelist and playwright grants him access to the upper class, yet he’s also familiar with the seamier, bohemian side of Paris culture.

“The Razor’s Edge” spans from 1919 to 1944. Maugham develops his characters over that period with realism and acumen, most notably Isabel. Initially she is portrayed as “sparkling and vivacious,” a 19-year-old-girl with an engaging naiveté and budding sexuality. Years later, married to Gray, she is worldly, cynical, possessive and lusty – as materialistic as her uncle Elliott and more manipulative, but without his kindheartedness. Her shallowness has hardened in inverse to Larry’s personal growth.

Maugham depicted the conflict between the material and examined lives – the quick pursuit of financial security and the deep journey toward introspection. His literary exploration of Hindu polytheism was a departure for Western audiences of the 1940s. He wrote in the book’s opening pages that the characters were inspired by actual people. It has been speculated that he modeled Larry on Guy Hague, an American who took up Eastern religion in the ‘30s. Shri Ganesha, the yogi, whom Larry becomes a disciple of in India, is said to be modeled after Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, a guru Maugham met during a 1938 visit to an ashram in India.

There is a recurring ephemeral theme in “The Razor’s Edge.” Youth is fleeting, customs change and Europe, a decaying empire, is being supplanted by America, a burgeoning world power with inexhaustible wealth. (The Depression shows the country is not so immune.) Amid the uncertainty, Larry seeks permanence and transcendence.

The pivotal moment in his life plays out with a Christ-like allusion. In the WWI, his friend Patsy fends off German fighter pilots endangering Larry. In the melee, Patsy’s plane is shot down. Hence, he sacrifices his life so another can live. There are other parallels to Christ in the novel.

Maugham melds worldly affluence with spirituality and sexuality. Elliott, a devout Catholic, profits financially from advice acquired through his connections with the Vatican. His piety, notwithstanding, he subscribes to the bawdy customs of French society.

Maugham reveals the sexual underbelly of Paris – kept women, infidelity, prostitution and homosexuality. He subtly – some may say not so subtly – reveals his own homosexuality. An older character, he remains single, takes women on platonic dates and is familiar with the “tough joints” in Paris. At Isabel’s request, he takes her to a dive where “men danced with podgy boys with made-up eyes.” Maugham also gives Elliott’s character a punctilious, effete quality, which hints that he is gay.

The “Razor’s Edge” is multi-layered, written with brevity and precision. Its exploration of war induced existential questions reverberated in the writings of Camus. The disaffection of post-war young people who disengage from Western materialism and draw toward Eastern thought would be played out in the beat writings of the 1950s. As long as war takes the lives and innocence of all-too-young people, “The Razor’s Edge” will have resonance.

Gateway Literature: “Talks With Sri Ramana Maharshi.” This collection of conversations, recorded by Munagala Venkataramiah, of the famous yogi and his devotees includes a brief account of Maugham’s encounter with the man in the 1930s.

Also, I recommend reading Henry James. Early in the “The Razor’s Edge,” there is a Jamesian quality to Maugham’s contrasting of social classes and cultures from the two sides of the Atlantic. Therefore, I would suggest checking out “Daisy Miller” written in the 1870s by Henry James, which contrasts the traditional Old World British customs with those of the youthful, brash emerging power of America.
I suspect that the character of Elliott Templeton was somewhat inspired by T.S. Eliot. Eliott Templeton was an American-born Francophile who moved to France and converted from Methodism to Roman Catholicism, the predominant religion in France. T.S. Eliot was an Anglophile who left the America for England and converted from Unitarianism to Anglicism. Therefore, I would recommend Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland,” his masterpiece lamenting the degradation of culture in the aftermath of World War I.
Interestingly, Maugham mentions Henry James and T.S. Eliot in “The Razor’s Edge.”

Out of the box gateway: At one point in “The Razor’s Edge,” Larry describes a spiritual experience “of the same order as the mystics have had all over the world through the centuries Brahmins in India, Sufis in Persia, Catholics in Spain, Protestants in New England.” This intelligent demonstration of religious knowledge and experience calls to my mind the classic “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” It was written in 1902 by the philosopher-psychologist William James. Henry’s brother.

Best line: “Darling, when it came to the point I couldn’t see myself being Mary Magdalen to his Jesus Christ. No, Sir.”
This line is spoken by a side character, Sophie MacDonald, and it sums up perfectly her relationship with Larry. She’s in the background, but the quietly intellectual, yet rampageous, self-destructive Sophie is my favorite character in the novel.

"Weakfish" review

Weakfish,” by Michael Dorn, takes the reader inside the tortured spirit of a child picked on by his peers. The book also probes the mindset of the bully -- a predatory figure adept at detecting the mildest vulnerability of person in the crowd, then closing in for the kill.

Dorn uses aquatic metaphors to describe the relationship between victims and bullies. The vulnerable child, he calls the “weakfish,” targeted by the “barracuda” the predator which preys on him. These fish are taken from the ocean (community) and placed in an aquarium (school) where watchful eyes can distinguish the predator and prey. Adults are responsible for maintaining a safety net for the weakfish.

Subtitled “Bullying Through the Eyes of a Child,” the books tells the true story of “Stephen,” a boy who suffers near death injury, sexual humiliation and getting robbed at knifepoint.
The barracudas in Stephen’s world thrived because adults weren’t paying attention. School was his “prison of fear” and the criminals were in charge. Bullies are masters of seizing on what Dorn calls “negligent privacy” – those moments when an adult isn’t looking or leaves the class unsupervised. That’s when class tyrant takes over. At this point in the book, Dorn delivers the most thought provoking passage in the book.

“A bully in a school can be but a smaller version of a bully of nations,” Dorn writes. “Adolph Hitler was one such bully. More than 11 million Jews and ethnic minorities would die so he could maintain control of his evil empire. Joseph Stalin would cause or allow the deaths of millions of his own people during his reign and was never reluctant to squelch any form of resistance, however slight. So it is with a bully in a classroom to a smaller extent.”

School, as Dorn points out, is a microcosm of the larger world. Is it that far of a stretch from the barracuda who forced Stephen to simulate sexual acts in the school bathroom to the soldiers who, for laughs, forced prisoners to pose in lewd, degrading sexual poses?

It’s beyond the scope of this thin book, yet the above mentioned quote and tales of schoolyard terrorists compel the reader to contemplate the link between childhood bullying and news accounts of rape, torture and war crimes.

The specific news stories Dorn cites are of school violence that parallel Stephen’s experiences. Many of these incidences ended in murder or suicide. Stephen’s encounters with bullies, fortunately, didn’t spiral into such tragic endings. Amazingly, he has gone on to live a happy, fruitful life. And this is where the book offers hope.

Stephen was encouraged by a few standout teachers who went the extra mile to encourage him. Scout leaders, church members, police officers and civic leaders also took an interest in him. Even with that extra boost from caring adults, it’s a miracle he could overcome the abuse he endured. Somehow, the helping hand altered his life toward a brighter future. It’s significant that his parents, albeit not without flaws, imparted him with some values. Many victims of bullying don’t have such resources, and as Dorn acknowledges, turn to drugs, crime and self-destruction.

A veteran law enforcement officer and school security expert, Dorn has been instrumental in enacting safety measures that have benefited schools throughout the United States. He strongly advocates the use of surveillance cameras, metal detectors and armed school resource officers and he’s quick to refute any argument that these things turn schools into police states.

However, he is adamant that these factors are no substitute for vigilance on the part of adults. High-tech surveillance, like a school’s location, has little bearing on a school’s safety. The one school where Stephen felt safe was located in a run-down neighborhood where he was one of only five white students, yet the principal was likely to show up unannounced in a classroom at any time and staff was quick to intervene if a student was being mistreated. The attitude of respect, demonstrated by the adults, filtered to the children. Working in the education field, I have witnessed similar success stories in schools where the top leadership has set high behavioral standards.

The message: Adults are responsible for creating a safe environment for our children. Dorn’s book is simple and concise. The tone is heartfelt, absent of bitterness and motivating, without being pollyanna. As a parent of two small children, I come away galvanized to impact their world, positively. Surely, that was Dorn’s intent.

Gateway Reading: For more information about how to stop and prevent bullying, parents, teachers, coaches and others who work with children would do well to read such acclaimed books as “The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander: From Preschool to High School – How Parents and Teachers Can Help Bread the Cycle of Violence” by Barbara Coloroso and “Bully-Proofing Children: A Practical, Hands-On Guide to Stop Bullying” by Joanne Scaglione and Arrica Rose Scaglione.

Dorn’s book is an excellent resource on bullying within school, but that’s only part of the problem. In today’s world, kids can be bullied in their own living rooms by way of the internet, and adults need to be armed with the education to stop these predators. Two highly rated books addressing this problem are: “Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying” by Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin, and “Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats and Distress” by Nancy E. Willard and Karen Steiner.

"Sometimes You Get So Alone It Makes Sense" review

Charles Bukowski was a barfly who lived a trashcan life and wrote about it.

Beautifully.

Skid row. Whorehouses. Rooming houses. Horse tracks. Crass, crude words. Poems often written naratively, suffused with simplistic dialogue, one word per line.

“Sometimes You Get So Alone It Makes Sense” is one of several poetry collections and novels published since Bukowski’s death at age 74 in 1994.

With humor and pathos, Bukowski chronicled his downtown Los Angeles life of sleeping on park benches, scrounging dumpsters for the daily paper and panhandling for rent money.

He also gave readings at colleges and coffeehouses and gained a following. Women wrote fan letters, inviting Bukowski to hook up when he came to their towns. Fellow writers offered constructive criticism of his work.

Bukowski’s taste for art and literature comes through without pretension or affectation. Reading Dostoevsky and listening to Beethoven were as common to Bukowski’s life as working the assembly line at a Nabisco factory or sharing a bottle with derelicts in a rundown room.

I wouldn’t want Bukowski’s life for myself and definitely not for my children, but I respect his talent and integrity. Anyone can go slumming’ and scrawl vulgarities, but it takes a thoughtful mind to unearth meaning in existence. Bukowski didn’t romanticize the low life. He humanized it. He gave a voice to the man who lost at the card table and the prostitute he’s fighting with in a cheap motel.

Some would look down on Bukowski, joyful at sitting drunk before his typewriter at 3 a.m., but he radiated contempt for the writer, drunk on the word, “poet.” He hated affluence and effeteness in writers who “understand nothing but the ends of their fingernails and their delicate hairlines and their lymph nodes.” He believed substance was only possible through living hard times and “regathering.”

Occasionally, a poem promises more and falls flat, but more often he pulls off simplicity. Bukowski wrote for the psychological gaps caught in the white noise of modern, impersonal life.

“The freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions. The freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives,” he writes in the poem, “drive through hell.”

Beyond the brothels, garbage cans and puke in Bukowski’s poetry, there’s something like…humanity.

Gateway literature: A friend introduced me to Bukowski around 18 years ago at about the same time he introduced me to “Naked Lunch” by William Burroughs so I recommend that.

Scarlet Letter review

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is a classic look at the individual at odds with society. It’s the story of a woman who summons great psychological reserves in converting public shame into personal triumph.

One of the first works of fiction to take a critical look at American history and culture, “The Scarlet Letter” provokes thought on numerous issues – societal change, Calvinism, faith and good works, regeneration, and the bond between parent and child. The book’s tone is most prominent and critical when addressing the marriage of church and state and the suppression of free thinking by a tyrannical majority.

Hawthorne’s writing demonstrates: knowledge of colonial Puritan culture in references to daily life and historical figures; the Bible in his use of symbolism and mention of Biblical characters; and Shakespeare in the psychological exploration of his characters. In a couple of places, his florid writing style is maudlin and melodramatic to contemporary taste, but overall it is a welcome departure from what we are used to. His writing, characteristic of 19th century style, is ultimately readable, rhythmic and provides a portal into another time.

Published in 1850, “The Scarlet Letter” is set in the 17th-century Puritan-controlled Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the opening scene, Hester Prynne (name rhymes with sin) is led from prison to a scaffold. A harsh crowd watches her public humiliation. She’s wearing a scarlet “A” for “adultery” on her clothing and holding a baby she bore out of wedlock. A Puritan tribunal admonishes her to reveal the identity of her child’s father. She refuses, as she will throughout the novel. By choosing independence over conformity, Hester gives up community for isolation.

The greatest strength in Hawthorne’s writing is his use of Biblical allusions in the exploration of moral ambiguity and irony. He draws on the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in relating to Hester’s fall from grace and estrangement from her Boston village. However, for Hester, disengagement from a so-called “utopia” means emancipation. Freedom to interpret the knowledge of Good and Evil allows Hester to develop intellectually. While her village is stagnant, she is progressive, her worldview more consistent with the philosophies then taking root in Europe than Puritan dogma. Interestingly, while she possesses a freedom of mind that can cross an ocean, her lover -- a scholarly man of letters -- is "hemmed in" by the Puritan orthodoxy.

Hester is the strongest of the pair. She demonstrates self-reliance, industry and creativity. Through her self-assertiveness, she renders impotent any power of the male-dominated church hierarchy to label her. With her sin out in the open, she is able to move on with her life. Her lover doesn’t have that peace of mind. He is tortured by inner guilt, secret shame and the feeling that he is a fraud.

The permanent bond between Hester and her lover is their daughter, Pearl (whom Hawthorne based on his daughter Una). Here, Hawthorne creates his most thought-provoking element of moral ambiguity. Pearl is the source of Hester’s greatest joy & greatest torment in life. How can this living person be so beautiful, yet only exist because of a sinful act? Poignantly, her daughter’s name is taken from the scriptural reference at Matthew 13:45-46 to “one pearl of great price.”

This is part of the moral wilderness Hester has to make her way through, symbolic of the physical wilderness in which she lives. The town’s people lack Hester’s depth of mind. They invent myths and superstitions to explain things they don’t understand, such as their reference to the demonic “black man” in the wilderness.

The townspeople are short-sighted and lack insight. They see what they want to see. Clues to the paternity of Hester’s child lie in the open, but nobody would suspect a man of “whitest sanctity” to be guilty of such a vile sin.

Hawthorne invites the reader to consider those areas where sin and sainthood are not easily defined. Hester is martyred in her disgrace. She becomes a sister of mercy, offering succor to the poor & dying. In an excellent line, Hawthorne writes that the “scarlet letter had the effect of a cross on a nun’s bosom.” This is an interesting line, when compared with his description of Hester & her baby on the scaffold. “Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the Divine Maternity.” (Actually, Hawthorne’s daughter became a nun.)

Significantly, Hester is not entirely free of Puritan conventions. Inwardly contemplative, her outward life is conventional and restrained. She sublimates her passionate energy through her embroidery work. Aside from the iridescent letter on her bosom, her clothes and features appear sober. They hide her natural beauty, depriving her of qualities “that passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace.” Hawthorne writes that she lost those qualities “of which had been essential to keep her a woman.” Essentially, he is saying she suppressed her natural womanly sensuality.

He suggests that our sins, those flaws that make us human, allow us to become better, more compassionate people. Here, Hawthorne is saying that if the closet door were open, we would all be guilty. Every one of us, as humans, could be wearing a scarlet letter.

Sin and redemption are recurring themes in “The Scarlet Letter.” Even one of the most despicable characters in the book makes atonement in the end. For Hawthorne, writing the book was his own way of penance.

His great-great-great grandfather, William Hathorne, a Puritan settler to Salem, Massachusetts in 1630, was a high-ranking magistrate who scourged and sometimes killed Quakers. This is significant, when considering a reference in “The Scarlet Letter,” to the “sainted footsteps of Anne Hutchinson,” the Quaker founder who was banished from Massachusetts. Hawthorne’s great-great grandfather, John Hathorne, presided over the Salem witch trials. Of all the judges, Hathorne was the only one to never express remorse. As a boy, young Nathaniel was haunted by the sight of the old Gallows Hill, visible from his back porch. On his mother's side, a relative was accused of having incestuous relations with his two sisters. He skipped town before going to trial. The young women were forced to go to church and in public with the word, INCEST affixed to their bonnets

In his adulthood, Hawthorne distanced himself from his infamous paternal family by adding the “w” to the spelling of his name. Unlike his ancestors, he had a mistrust of institutional authority and organized religion. He hated religious fanaticism and hypocrisy. In his most invective stab at colonial Puritanism, Hawthorne refers to their children as “little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived.”

Hawthorne’s book gives insight into the era he was writing in, as well as the period he was writing about. Hester Prynne’s proto-feminist character is significant to the cultural tides of the mid-19th century. Around that time, a convention in Seneca Falls, New York addressed women’s rights, and it has been speculated that Hawthorne modeled Hester on female activists of his time. Living in Connecticut, he was acquainted with some of the most influential minds of his time. He was familiar with leaders in the Transcendentalist, abolitionist and women’s movements. However, his hesitancy regarding any organizational structure kept him from affiliating himself with any of these movements.

Always independent, Hawthorne wore a scarlet letter of his own for much of his life. A graduate of the liberal arts Bowdoin College in Maine, he worked chiefly as a writer, meaning he often lived in poverty and was dismissed as “shiftless” and an “idler.” But, he had well-connected friends – most notably one who would become president, Franklin Pierce – and he managed to secure employment at the Salem Custom House. A few years later, he suffered the humiliation of being fired. That’s when his wife, Sofia, told him, “Now you can write your book,” which became “The Scarlet Letter.”

The book remains relevant today. Our Puritan past lives on with the Religious Right, which is also judgmental, intolerant and likes to get government and religion in bed together. We are both a prurient and puritanical nation. People love to pontificate about the moral corruption in society, yet they keep feeding the beast. We have our modern pillories of shame – “You Tube,” trashy “reality” shows, tabloids. Morals are more relaxed today, but people hypocritically cast stones at others.

America still hasn’t shaken the puritanical hang-ups of our past.

Gateway literature: “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s Cold War era play about the Salem witch trials. Nathaniel’s relative, John Hathorne, is a character in the drama.

Outside the box gateway: There are one or two references in “The Scarlet Letter” to earthly images being representative of a greater reality, which sounds like Neo-Platonism. Hawthorne refers to the Puritan clergy’s disdain for the “corrupted religion” of Rome, while scholarly pursuing the works of its influential theologians. So I would recommend “Confessions” by St. Augustine. He was strongly influenced by Plato.