Never Victorious, Never Defeated

The setting is Pennsylvania during the years when America, aided by immigrants fleeing certain starvation in Europe for the mirage of banqueting in America, changed from an agricultural to an industrial nation.

Greedy men are vying for wealth: They must have markets for their goods.

Cornelia Marshall, granddaughter of a railroad entrepreneur Aaron deWitt, uses her brain and cunning to achieve power and wealth.

Like her father before her and greedy men around her, Cornelia is amoral, willing to use or destroy anyone who stands in her way, including her siblings, her husband, her children.

A few patriots and saints — including Cornelia’s brother-in-law and son — see the destructive force at work in the world and attempt to counter it.

They see American society being undermined by the rise of cities, the cultivation of war as a business tool, the growth of central government, the disappearance of moral teaching.

Nevertheless, they believe eventually men of good will and common sense will defeat evil at the ballot box.

Whether their optimism is valid remains to be seen.

Read Never Victorious, Never Defeated and draw your own conclusions.

© 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

The View from Pompey’s Head by Hamilton Basso is a novel about  New York City lawyer Anson Page whose work takes him back to his southern home.

Anson’s task is to determine whether a recently deceased editor for a publishing house embezzled a client’s royalties.

Anson’s law firm and their client assume his local connections will make it easy for him to find out why Mrs. Garvin Wales is sure Phillip Greene stole her husband’s royalties.

Anson assumes his local connections will make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to find out the truth.

Basso explores not only the murky process of growing up, but the Southern mindset, which Anson calls “Southern Shintoism.”

Basso takes his time telling the story, letting Anson delve into his memories of how things appeared to him more than 15 years before.

Anson’s memories are still vivid, some painfully so, but his understanding of their meaning has changed as he matured. Anson finally finds the solution to the mystery of the re-directed royalties through his adult understanding of Southern culture.

Though the novel moves with Southern summer speed, Basso keeps it moving without any extraneous elements. Without exerting himself to entertain, he keeps readers engaged, leading them effortlessly to understand the value of the South’s myths.

© 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Cannery Row’s most distinguished resident, a marine biologist known throughout town as Doc, has been unsettled since the war.

Doc gets an idea for a paper about changes in octopi that mimic apoplexy in humans but lacks a good microscope and the persistence to write it.

His neighbors think Doc needs a wife, pick one out for him, and arrange for the pair to fall in love.

The plot is sophomoric because that’s as close to higher level thinking as Cannery Row’s yahoos can reach. The Cannery Row crowd are dull as hoes, but they genuinely love and care for one another. That love puts Steinbeck’s homely non-heroes beyond the reach of sarcasm.

Sweet Thursday isn’t a literary masterpiece, but it’s durable.

You might not want the residents of Cannery Row as your house guests for August, but you’ll sleep a little better for believing that even losers are capable of sacrificial love.

 © 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Filed under: 1954 Bestselling Novels, Humor ]]> http://greatpenformances.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/sweet-thursday/feed/ 0 greatpenformances Dust jacket of Sweet Thursday showsOcean front docks http://greatpenformances.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/no-time-for-sergeants/ http://greatpenformances.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/no-time-for-sergeants/#comments Sat, 08 Mar 2014 06:00:54 +0000 http://greatpenformances.wordpress.com/?p=3456 ]]> Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants is a strictly-for-laughs novel about life in the military.

Will Stockdale’s father is opposed to his son being drafted, but Will never makes a fuss about anything.

From what Will tells, readers learn he’s an amiable, Georgia redneck, dumber than a box of wet rocks and totally innocent of how the world works.

(Andy Griffith played Pvt. Will Stockdale in the TV, Broadway, and film versions of the novel, which gives you an idea of the character’s personality. You can see Griffith as Will in the  black-and-white film version  at free movies.)

Bused off to camp to be sorted for duty, Will meets Ben Whitledge, a little guy with big dreams and military knowledge straight from the silver screen.

With the best of intentions, Will and Ben make total fools of the military — and never realize what they’ve done.

Hyman drew on his Air Force experience to create his picture of military life. Readers in 1954 would have understood the military processes that baffle Will and laughed at his ignorance. Readers in today’s post-conscription era will probably be little wiser than Will.

Today’s readers probably won’t laugh as heartily as 1950′s readers either. We’ve seen too many reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies to be delighted by redneck jokes.

In short, No Time for Sergeants is past its sell-by date.

                    2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

The Royal Box

Frances Parkinson Keyes provides a cast of characters in order of appearance. The book jacket provides an account of the love affair in 1926 that led to the murder-by-cyanide in 1951. The fact that both those reader aids were thought necessary in a work of popular fiction shows how complicated the novel is.

The poisoned man is Baldwin Castle, newly appointed ambassador to an oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. Years before, after being jilted by an English aristocrat, he’d had an affair with actress Janice Lester.

He left her pregnant.

When Castle and his new, second wife pass through London, they are entertained with a theater party in the Royal Box at the theater where Janice Lester is starring.

The guests include the woman who Castle thought jilted him; the ambassador of the country to which Castle has been assigned; Janice, her husband, and their adopted son who is really Castle’s and Janice’s son.

A dry-as-dust policeman figures out who done it.

And Keyes makes sure everyone’s life ends more happily than Baldwin Castle’s did.

© 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Irving Stone’s Love Is Eternal: A Novel about Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln is a case in point.

According to the novel’s dust jacket, Stone’s goal is to take readers inside Mary Todd’s heart; however, even getting into her head would take a team of psychiatrists: Both Mary Todd and Lincoln suffered from depression that at times was almost pathological.

(The liner notes also say “Literally the whole [Civil] war was fought across her bosom,” a claim whose veracity I doubt. But I literally digress.)

Irving devotes most of the novel to the Lincolns’ political struggles. Stone shows Mary shrewdly aware of how the successful politician’s wife should behave but totally unaware that her husband’s election to the presidency was a fluke of the electoral system, not an indication of his popularity.

Readers get very little sense of the Lincolns as a couple before the White House and no sense of the Lincolns as a couple afterward.

Stone ends Love Is Eternal with Abraham Lincoln’s widow wanting to die.

And he leaves readers with no reason to want her to live.

Readers may enjoy these photos of Lincoln more than Stone’s novel.  I’m indebted to @dougpete for the link.

© 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Statue of Frederick Duke of York, London

Mary Anne is a novel about Mary Anne Clarke and the scandal that she precipitated in nineteenth century England. It was penned by her great-granddaughter, author Daphne du Maurier, who may be suspected of a bit of bias.

A precocious child, to keep the family fed Mary Anne passes her proofreading work off as that of her ailing stepfather.

She marries an scapegrace who prefers the bottle to work. To support their four children, Mary Anne writes gossip columns until she discovers more lucrative employment for her brains and body. Before long, she is mistress of Frederick Duke of York, second son of King George III.

Mary Anne revels in her powerful role but piles up debts furnishing the amenities the Duke is used to. To supplement the Duke’s allowance, she begins pedaling Army promotions — and preparing her own downfall.

Although the characters are historical figures, not one of them seems real. Du Maurier fails to provide plausible explanation for the critical pivots on which the story turns: Mary Anne’s family relationships.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the duMaurier’s account is that although the Duke’s enemies accept his adultery, they are scandalized that he pushed through promotions knowing his mistress was bribed to use her influence with him. He was forced to resign as Commander-in-Chief.

Your life will be none the worse if you leave Mary Anne on attic shelf.

© 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

As a boy, Luke Marsh decides medicine will be his life. Luke grubs his way through college. When his father dies suddenly during Luke’s first year of medical school, Luke marries a nurse with a plump bank account so he can push on to become a doctor.

Luke finds most of his colleagues lacking in skill, dedication, or selflessness. He also finds patients are a real nuisance. Luke can’t relate to anyone except on a professional basis.

If Luke is a misfit, his wife, Kristine, is overdue for canonization or psychotherapy. She overlooks Luke’s adultery, excuses his incivility, pays his bills, and lets him use her as a doormat.

Luke and Kristine go on digging their rut deeper until it seems impossible for the story to ever be resolved.

Thompson does finally pull the story to a halt with a device only slightly more credible than a magic wand. But at that point, a fairy godmother would have been welcome.

© 2014 Linda Gorton Aragoni

I cannot present the list without throwing in some gee-wiz facts about one of the lesser-known novels on the list.

Mika Waltari wrote and published The Egyptian in Finnish in 1945. The novel became wildly popular and was translated into more than three dozen languages.  An English translation by Naomi Walford of  The Egyptian ranked first on the 1949 bestseller list in America. (I read the Walford translation.)

Hollywood took note.

In 1954, The Egyptian was made into a movie by the same title.  Again, the novel soared to the bestseller list, this time, however, in fifth rather than first place.

You may recall that something similar happened with The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. It made the bestseller list when it was first published in 1942, stayed there for a second year, and reappeared on the bestseller list a third time in 1953 when the movie version appeared.

Here is the list of the 1954 bestsellers. The date my review is scheduled to appear here is in square brackets.

1. Not As a Stranger by Morton Thompson [Feb. 22]
2. Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier [Feb. 25]
3. Love Is Eternal by Irving Stone [Mar. 1]
4. The Royal Box by Frances Parkinson Keyes [Mar. 4]
5. The Egyptian by Mika Waltari
6. No Time for Sergeants by Mac Hyman [Mar. 8]
7. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck [Mar. 11]
8. The View from Pompey’s Head by Hamilton Basso [Mar. 15]
9. Never Victorious, Never Defeated by Taylor Caldwell [Mar. 18]
10. Benton’s Row by Frank Yerby [Mar 22]

Oddly enough, the central characters of each of these novels are not themselves memorable.

Armageddon is a fictional account of the Berlin airlift. The effort’s mastermind controls the action from off stage. What readers remember is the incredible ingenuity and endurance of the mass of unnamed men and women who made the airlift succeed.

The Man is a fictional account of a run-of-the-mill senator shocked into rising to the occasion when, through no effort or desire of his own, he becomes America’s first black President. Douglass Dilman’s very ordinariness makes the story memorable and him forgettable: I can picture scenes from the novel vividly, but had to go back to look up the title character’s name.

The Martyred also turns around a character whose personality is less memorable than those of the less pivotal characters: South Korean Army Capt. Lee.

Lee puts his brain power into discovering what happened to a group of South Korean pastors when they were captured by the Communists.  The intellectually understandable facts provide no explanation. The pastors’ behaviors arose from fear, love, and faith rather than from facts. Thus their behavior is comprehensible only through sympathy and insight.

If you want a real brain workout, read and compare these three novels.

That will keep you off the streets until the snow melts in Maine.