Not So Great

Despite the name of this blog, I’ve mostly wandered away from what are considered (even if only under protest) the “Great Books.” In the first years, I had plenty to say about Greek tragedians and German philosophers, about medieval theology and modernist scientific treatises. But these things don’t fill my reading schedule now. If certain nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novels can be included in a canon of Great Books, then I guess exlibrismagnis still occasionally lives up to its name. But science fiction? Historical fiction from the last few decades? Recent presidential biographies? You have been indulgent and gracious to stick with me through those classic-adjacent books. At least I haven’t (often) written about Tarzan and Hercule Poirot!

But I’m also interested in what might be called the Great Subjects, and good American history treats all of them: religion, ethics, politics, science, education, and (to quote Gilligan’s Island) the rest. (What makes Great Television is a matter for a different blog.) So part of my plan for this ten-year schedule was reading the Oxford History of the United States. And now, after all that introduction, I’m ready to tell you a short story of how my wish to read the OHotUS led to me reading a Not So Great Book.

I started putting together this plan around 2015. The Oxford series didn’t have a volume on the early colonial era, but it had at least a plan for nine other volumes covering everything from the Revolutionary era to the twenty-first century. What could be better? I picked a different book on early American history to read year 1, and then had a handy 9-volume series to fill out the decade perfectly. The only potential hitch: Bruce Schulman’s entry, covering the years 1896 until 1929, wasn’t out yet. But I remember when I first saw the plan on OUP’s website, it said the book was expected in 2014 (hmm, maybe I started planning earlier than 2015), and I didn’t need that book until 2023, so the Plan seemed safe. 

But then Oxford Press changed the date. I definitely don’t remember all the steps, but every couple of years, the publication date crept back slowly until they finally just started showing “TBD.” Even the title changed. Still, other secondary sources – Amazon and Wikipedia, for instance – held out hope for the book, all saying at one point that the book would appear in November 2023. Just in time! Alas, November 2023 rolled around, and there was no Brand Name America or any other title by Bruce Schulman forthcoming. So I skipped ahead (a trial for my low-grade OCD) and read David M. Kennedy’s very good book on the Depression and WWII. Surely there was just a little delay, and I’d get my Bruce Schulman book in 2024. To boost my confidence, amazon.ca and amazon.uk started saying the book would come out in September 2024, they listed an ISBN, and they started accepting payment for pre-orders. But, woe is me! September 2024 came and went, with no new book on American history, 1896-1929. So again I read ahead, enjoying James T. Patterson’s excellent Grand Expectations, covering 1945 until 1974. 

But I couldn’t take the out-of-orderness of it all anymore. The fabric of my space-time continuum was tearing. I either had to read Bruce Schulman or find a substitute. It occurred to me to write to Oxford University Press. I got a very lovely reply confirming the ISBN I found on the other nations’ Amazon sites and saying that the book would come out in 2025. I wrote again in a few months to ask if they had any better ETA and got a less lovely reply saying only that clerk A would have to ask clerk B, who presumably knew better, and get back to me. It finally occurred to me to write to Bruce Schulman! I don’t know why it’s taking him so long to write his book, but it doesn’t take him long to write an email. I heard back from him within 24 hours, and he said that the people I talked with at Oxford must have incorrect information since he hasn’t finished writing the book, so it couldn’t possibly have an ISBN.

*sigh*

OK, this “short” story isn’t turning out to be so short.

*sigh*

I started looking for a substitute. But do you know how hard it is to find a book on American history that covers 1896-1929? Can you imagine how difficult it is even to find a combination of books that covers the period? I finally found John Milton Cooper’s Pivotal Decades, covering 1900-1920. I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Cooper’s biography of Woodrow Wilson, so I was sure this book would fit the bill. He’d probably say a bit about the end of the previous century and fill in the 1896-1900 gap. Now I just had to find a book on the 1920s.

Wait a minute! As it turns out, I remembered that the first grown-up, professional history I ever read was on the 1920s. I remember vividly reading it in my basement when I was about 15. I think it took about three days. I didn’t know what Prohibition was really like. I didn’t know gangsters had anything to do with Prohibition. I didn’t know about President Harding’s mysterious death. Wow! If this is what actual history books were like, why were the schools making me read textbooks?!

OK, now all I had to do was remember the name of that book, and my ten-year history-reading plan was saved. I knew it had the word “decade” in the title. But I couldn’t figure out how to construct a search query to find it. “book american history 1920s decade” didn’t do it. I talked to my son about it. He pointed out to me that I was still searching the way I did in the oughts. Back then, you could ask a question with all the little words, but the search engines just worked on the keywords. So I’ve just been searching by keywords for twenty years. But AI understands language well enough now that you can ask specific questions. So I searched, ‘What’s the title of a book written before 1980 on the U.S. in the 1920s that has the word ‘decade’ in the title?” Google replied, “There is no well known book written before 1980 about the U.S. in the 1920s with the word ‘decade’ in the title, but here are some other books that might work for you.” Then it listed a couple of books about the 1920s and a couple of books with the word “decade” in the title. Stupid AI! “No well known book”?! If it were well known, I wouldn’t have had to ask you! I depend on the internet to know less-than-well-known things! So I gave up on finding that book and chose another. I settled on Nathan Miller’s New World Coming.

All right. October 2025. Time to read these histories and learn about 1900 to 1929. Cooper’s book was good, although he was much less critical of Wilson than he was in his biography of the President, written about fifteen years later. I agree with his later, negative critique, so I found his unqualified admiration for Wilson in Pivotal Decades surprising and disappointing. Still, good book. Written well. I learned a lot.

Next I started Miller’s book and loved the prologue about F. Scott Fitzgerald. To frame a general history with a story about one person, and that person an author and not a politician, was novel and intriguing. Things boded well for Miller. 

But then a surprising problem came up. After the prologue, the main narrative started, and Miller dipped back into WWI quite a bit as context for the 1920s. As a result, his subject overlapped Cooper’s in the matter of several years. Curiously, as I read along, I noticed that many details overlapped, as well. What are the chances that two authors would use the same anecdote to illustrate one point, that same quotation to summarize another point, the same statistic to emphasize yet another? Then I read a paragraph that I had just read a few days earlier. Gahhh! Over ten years of work choosing a history of the 1920s, and I had to choose one by a plagiarist! (Cooper's book came out several years before Miller's.) I’m still reading it. I’m fully into the 1920s now, well past anything Cooper wrote about, so my fits of déjà vu have gone. It’s very interesting and written well, but I can’t help wondering what talented author wrote this part originally.

Ugh! Yesterday I remembered the name of the book I read in the 70s: The Shattered Decade. I looked it up, and it’s long out of print. There’s one copy available on thriftbooks.com. I’m going to get it (don’t you buy it first!), but I’ll finish Miller. I’m too far into it now, and I have a schedule to keep.

A Villainous Post

I just wrapped up a season of fantasy baseball in a position typical for me: I finished 6th out of 8. I’ve loved playing this game for the last thirty years, but I’m so bad at it! I think the problem breaks down into three parts. (Thanks for reading while I work out my frustration in print!) First, I have a stubborn loyalty to ideas that I think ought to work, even if statistics suggest otherwise. Second, and maybe this is the same thing, I’m a slow learner: if I don’t see some relationship or pattern, memorizing a formula doesn’t work for me until I can finally internalize the reason for the formula. And I usually have to try something over and over and make, in my estimation, a hundred mistakes before the right way really settles into my brain. Third, fantasy baseball essentially boils down to having a drafting strategy in March and then watching for six months to see how that strategy works. It takes way too long for me to make my hundred mistakes in a game in which each turn lasts a year!

Yes, I’m a slow learner. It seems I’m often confessing my weaknesses in these posts, things about literature or the life and people and ideas depicted in that literature that didn’t really make sense to me until I was over 50 . . . or 60 . . . or 65. A few months ago, I wrote about realism in some heroines that many people don’t think are realistic. Today I want to write about realism in a villain that I didn’t really understand as realistic until just two days ago. I just finished C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet for the third time. I probably read it for the first time when I was about 20. The book has two villains: Devine, who wants to exploit Malacandra (we know it as Mars) because its abundant gold will bring him power on Earth, and Weston, who doesn’t care a fig for any single human being but wants Humanity with a capital H to survive forever by taking over the galaxy, even if that means killing sentient extraterrestrials. It’s Weston I want to talk about today. (I think I understood greed even when I was 20.)

To be fair to my younger self, the villains of my childhood and youth were all exaggerations. Snidely Whiplash (from Dudley Do-Right) and Dick Dastardly (from Wacky Races) took what were already exaggerations from melodrama and cartoonified them. The Joker and the Riddler (either the comic-book versions or the TV versions) could be taken either as mere personifications of weird ideas or as caricatures of serial killers. I’m not sure I ever took an outlaw from Cisco Kid or Gunsmoke seriously enough to think of him as a depiction of a character from life. Of course there were mad scientists, swamp creatures, the Blob, Frankenstein’s monster, Wells’s (and Welles’s) Martians, and other imaginative antagonists that didn’t appear anything like realistic to me. Then when I was 18, I met Darth Vader; it never occurred to me then even to wonder whether the man in the spacesuit who spoke while his machinery breathed for him and choked underlings with a hand gesture was realistic. Even the very idea of a villain, a character who constantly goes about trying to do harm to a given person or group, seemed to me more like a plot device than a realistic human being. I didn’t know anyone like that. Even the bullies at school just sat around being bewildered most of the time and only occasionally thought that abusing me might be fun. It wasn’t until I started reading lots of Dickens (I’m sorry I always seem to get around to him!) that I found out that a villain in a story might be something as mundane as a businessman who cares more about continuous profit than the well-being of his neighbor. It probably helped that I started paying attention to the news in the 1980s and learned about blackguards like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Back to Lewis. Weston is taken by the Malacandrians (who are good, unfallen creatures) to meet Oyarsa, who is, as I understand it, the angel of the planet. He sees people living simply and assumes they are uncivilized and ignorant and superstitious. He hears the unbodied voice of Oyarsa and assumes a witch-doctor must be using ventriloquism. He identifies someone he believes to be the shaman (actually an old creature who has merely fallen asleep) and tries to tempt him with a cheap necklace from Woolworth’s. He dances around shouting “Pretty! Pretty!” to all the other creatures while trying to get them interested in the plastic baubles. All of this display only makes the Malacandrians laugh. I think I thought I was supposed to laugh at the ludicrous character myself. In an angrier mood, he tells them they have no idea who they’re dealing with and that if they don’t do as he says, “Me go Poof! Bang! and you dead!” You don’t understand the primitive mind, he tells his fellow earthlings when they urge him to stop. All of this looked to me like it came straight out of the recipe book for fictional bad guys, not out of observations from life. It was reasonable but inexperienced of me to think this way: I had read about people like Weston in stories and seen characters like him in movies, but I had never met anyone who did or said these things in real life.

But the other day, it occurred to me that I had actually known many people like Weston. Take out the details of the dance and the cheap necklace and the threat with the gun (I thank God I’ve never had to deal with that threat in real life!), and Weston is completely recognizable. He assumes he is the smartest person in any group he finds himself in. He assumes that a simple life, or any life unlike his own, indicates stupidity. He assumes a stupid person is of inferior worth. He thinks of all relationships in terms of strength and weakness, winning and losing. He cares only about his own wishes and believes he can manipulate anyone by means of his superior skills into suiting those wishes; if he ever thinks about the others’ wishes that he is violating, it’s only to think that their wishes don’t matter as much as his on some objective cosmic scale. And yet for all his supposed superiority he depends on tools – guns and trinkets – to get his way. I’ve known many people like Weston. I’ve worked with them. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinners with them. I’m sorry to say I’ve gone to church with them. It was an amazing, awesome, satisfying, revealing, sad, powerful moment when I suddenly found, in the middle of a fantasy about space travel, a stark bit of earthly realism.