MY READING PROJECT PROGRESS

Some people look forward to retirement in order to travel or begin another career, to teach, or to accomplish some other long deferred dream. I have done all the traveling I wish to do and I would bore students by lecturing too much. I have been fulfilling a lifelong promise to myself – to read more, especially things I read or was supposed to read during my hurried and often wasted education that lasted for about twenty frustrating years. Now, I am reading those things — at least some of them, at least some parts of some of them to see if I should have paid more attention.

My bookcases are filled with paperbacks and hard covered books and I can’t afford the room to buy more. My brother still goes to the library. I don’t have the patience to wait for the ones I like to be returned. 

To be honest, I prefer the convenience of the Netflix model to the outmoded technology of lending, a la Blockbusters. With the benefit of modern technology — the e-book — I am able to continue my obsessive practice of reading several things at once, that is, jumping from one to another after a chapter or two of each. Since my preference is for non-fiction, this is feasible to do without forgetting the plot thread of my reading: history or biography books lose little in this manner. And there is an unexpected benefit — since my interests are fairly narrow — or at least conjoin in odd ways. I find that several things I read coincidentally make reference to happenings and characters in others. 
For instance, I am reading about Martha Gellhorn in a biography about her (“Gellhorn: An American Life” by Caroline Morehead) and also one about Lillian Hellman, (“Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life” by Dorothy Gallagher) which also mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald, as does a book about the writing of “The Great Gatsby,” which includes reference to “The Beautiful and Damned” and some events of 1927, which is the subject of “One Summer: America, 1927” by Bill Bryson. My fascination with the 1920's led me to Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies,” on which a movie, “Bright Young Things,” was based.

Even the fiction I am reading seems to correlate nicely with other reading: Eric Ambler’s classic, “A Coffin For Dimitrios” takes place in Turkey and the Balkans in the aftermath of World War I, also the setting of “A Peace To End All Peace,” by David Fromkin, a history of the fall of the Ottomans after World War I, which set the stage for the intrigues in the middle east. 

“Los Alamos” by Joseph Kanon is a mystery novel set during the Manhattan Project of World War II, also the subject of “Genius” Richard Feynman’s biography by James Glieck, and of course, “The Making Of The Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, which is more general and deeper about the same subject. 

Reading about Lincoln or, generally, about the Civil War, you have to come across some of the same anecdotes, characters, and sense of the man and the era. My latest reading includes a novel titled “I Am Abraham” by Jerome Charyn, which is in the first person as if written by Abe, admitting to us his human faults, fears, marital problems. It dovetails with the other recent book I found about him, “Lincoln the Lawyer” by Brian Dirck. Ever since I discovered that Lincoln had been a criminal trial lawyer who defended murderers, I have longed to discover more about that part of his career. My thesis is that his legal training and talent contributed largely to his rhetorical genius as well as his political and ethical ideas. I am finding support for that notion in my reading.

One of the first books I read during this search was James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War era.” It led to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best seller (one of the few best sellers I was drawn to) “Team of Rivals.” It was then a short jump back in time to “Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War” by Steven E. Woodworth. In all of these sources I was hoping to find support for my suspicion that Lincoln’s obsession about keeping the union together was influenced by his hope for a continental nation as a guarantee of peace and prosperity. 

I thought that our founding fathers were conscious of Europe as an example of the fractious nationalism that they were desperate to escape and to avoid for the nation they called by the name of the continent: America.  “Napoleon: A Biography” by Frank McLynn and “Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792-1914" by Geoffrey Wawro provided some evidence for this argument. 

What followed logically were a string of books about World War I. “The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War” by Peter Hall contains diary entries of many soldiers, generals and privates, relating the miseries of that war that was supposed to end war. The origins of that war are covered in “The Lost History of 1914" by Jack Beatty, which argues that there were many missed chances to avoid the war. It is a companion to my re-reading of Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” and “The Zimmermann Telegram.” An alternative story about the same era is “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918" in which the author, Adam Hochschild, documents that forgotten battles by conscientious objectors in England and Ireland who actively opposed the war. 

Reading the classics was also a goal. I began with Mark Twain, whose novels I have to confess were always difficult for me to get through in school. The dialect was part of it but mostly it was the mere fact that it was “assigned”. But now, I read “Huckleberry Finn” aloud to myself and loved it, laughed aloud many times and found the language to be subtle and appropriate to the often melancholy mood. 

On a roll, I decided to read “A Tale of Two Cities” and that worked, too. I always admired Sydney Carton as depicted by Ronald Colman in the movie. This character strikes me as a precursor of an anti-hero of later, noir type books of the Hammett and Chandler genre. I have “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens,” tentatively begun “Bleak House” but I am scared to death by the table of contents (thirty seven chapters?). 

Reading several Sherlock Holmes stories proved disappointing. Remembering the brilliant logic of the great detective that I enjoyed in my boyhood, I realized that the writing was of the dated “tell it don’t show it” school and the deductions were rather contrived.

Classics led me to Shakespeare’s complete works as well. I have always loved “Hamlet” and “Julius Caesar” and that led me to “Merchant of Venice” “Richard III,” “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet.” I began “The Tempest” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” but haven’t yet been able to make much progress. I have learned that continuing this project demands some discipline, which in this context means abrupt detours from dead ends, maybe returning later (when the street is paved).

Movies have also influenced my reading. “Shakespeare in Love” inspired a look back at the play it plays with, and in reverse, re-reading “Macbeth” made me watch and enjoy Polanski’s movie. PBS presented the “Henry Trilogy: Henry IV, Part I & II, and Henry V” which led me back to better follow the plays. 

My enjoyment of history and movies got me into “Master and Commander” and “Post Captain” by Patrick O’Brien which reminded me of “Horatio Hornblower” which I loved when my mother took me to see it at Radio City Music Hall when I was ten. The movie “Troy” encouraged me to re-read “The Iliad” and a companion critique, “The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War” bu Caroline Alexander, which elucidated the classic poem as an anti-war epic rather than one which glorifies the idea of war.

The movie, “The Good German,” led me to the book on which it was based, written by Joseph Kanon. It’s “Casablanca”-like story about World War II and the search for Nazi scientists at the start of the Cold War re-stimulated my interest in that era. I read “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945" by Max Hastings, “The Nuremberg Trial” by John and Ann Tura. This led me to “The Brigade” by Howard Blum, which is about Jews who fought the Nazis. As I mentioned, another Kanon novel, “Los Alamos,” reminded me about Richard Feynman.   

On the subject of the holocaust, I read Deborah E. Lipstadt’s “The Eichmann Trial” (partly due to my nephew Max’s discussion about the book about her libel trial that he adapted for a possible movie). That led me recently to read a novel by Robert Harris, “An Officer and a Spy” which relates the story of Major Picquard’s exposure of the truth in the Dreyfus Affair (the overview of which I had read in Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower.” 

Jewishness led me to curiosity about the history of “Jerusalem” by Simon Sebag Montefiore and “Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Reza Aslan. In something of a circular trip, I began “FDR and the Jews” by Richard Breitman and “Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939" by Thomas Doherty, all of which cover the general subject of the origins and effects of anti-Semitism. 

My fascination with films also tempted me to read biographies of “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” by Peter Evans; and “Jean Arthur: the actress nobody knew” by John Oller. Re-reading “Catch-22" led me to “Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here” a memoir by Joseph Heller of his childhood in my old neighborhood. Other biographies I have tried include “J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets” by Curt Gentry and “A Perfect Spy: a novel” by John LeCarre, which is autobiographical. “Churchill” by Paul Johnson (as well as Churchill’s own “the Gathering Storm”).

One unique novel was “Jack 1939" by Francine Mathews, which imagines the college student Jack Kennedy as a spy for FDR in Hitler’s Germany. Another book on which a movie was based: “A Most Dangerous Method” by John Kerr, delves into the origins of psychiatry with Freud and Jung. “Lady At The O.K. Corral” by Ann Kirschner explores the lives of Wyatt Earp and his “wife / mistress” Josephine Marcus. “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight” by Bingham & Wallace, covers the Supreme Court’s ruling in his draft problem. 

World War II also provided the fascinating story of three American generals: “Brothers, Rivals, Victors” by Jonathan W. Jordan. My interest in Paris and World War II and crime led me to a fascinating novel / memoir about the search for a murderer in occupied Paris, “Death In The City Of Light” by David King. That also led me to “Brave Genius: by Susan Carroll, which chronicles the story of Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, two friends who worked for the resistance and later won Nobel Prizes in their fields. 

Crime and noir genre stories have always attracted my attention. I re-read favorites, “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep” along with “Farewell, My Lovely.” I also discovered Jim Thompson, reading “A Swell Looking Babe,” “The Getaway,” :The Grifters” and “Pop. 1280" to which I added my Netflix access for the movies that were based on these novels. Another Eric Ambler thriller, “Journey Into Fear” was basis of a classic film (directed by Orson Welles, starring Joseph Cotten). I re-read “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming to remind me about the pleasure of reading about 007 instead of watching a parade of CGI explosions.

      At Greg's urging, I began "Cryptonomicon" by Neil Stephenson, but find it tough sledding. Like some other contemporary writers, Michael Chabon being another, I have trouble with the style. I was reared spoiled by writers who stick to a far more economical narrative technique. But I will keep at it.  

LILLIAN HELLMAN: An Imperious Life by Dorothy Gallagher

Lillian Hellman is one of those legendary literary figures whose name pops up in so many interesting contexts that you feel you know her. Beware of stripping away the veneer of legend. What lies beneath may be disappointing, even ugly, depressing, shattering to your long held faith.
I first heard of her through my interest in movies and Dashiell Hammett. They were lovers for many years and it was said that he modeled Nora Charles on her. She wrote the courageous play, “The Children’s Hour,” (1934) about two teachers tragically accused by a student of being lesbians. The second movie version, with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn (1961) seemed to be an apt metaphor for the McCarthy era — like Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” which was about the Salem witch trials. 
I had heard that Miller, Hammett and Hellman were all victims of the HUAC witch hunts. Hammett went to jail, and Hellman bravely challenged the committee, famously writing: “I refuse to cut my conscience to fit the fashions of the day.” 
TV often showed the movie version of Hellman’s anti-fascist play, “Watch on the Rhine,” starring Bette Davis and Paul Lucas. Davis had starred in another adaptation of a Hellman play, “The Little Foxes.” Both were directed by William Wyler, Hellman’s good friend. She had written the screenplay for “Dead End” on of my favorite Depression era films, which starred Humphrey Bogart, also directed by Wyler. 
Hellman next came to my attention in the 1970's with her memoir, “Pentimento” which included a story called “Julia.” The movie starred Jason Robards as Hammett, Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as her tragic and heroic childhood friend who was killed by the Nazis. The film won three Oscars.

This book claims that the image was almost all bullshit. 

It is refreshing to read a biography written by someone who is not an apologist or in awe of the subject. Dorothy Gallagher’s book has been called by reviewers bitchy, and a hatchet job. It is scathing in its criticism, nasty in its tone. Even her acknowledgments of Hellman’s achievements — her talent, her skill as a playwright, her wit, are often grudging, sarcastic, and conditional, accompanied by far more convincing  “Buts”. When she does relate Hellman’s version of an event or person, Gallagher conditions it with “maybe” or “possibly.”
Hellman’s life also touched other characters whose lives interested me:  Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Dorothy Parker. 
According to the author, Gellhorn and Hemingway both despised Hellman, denied her inflated claim of involvement in the Spanish Civil War cause. 
Parker, though a life-long friend who was helped financially by Hellman during her decline, was a posthumous victim of Hellman’s predatory greed when she became her executor and tried to negate Parker’s wish to leave her estate to Martin Luther King and the NAACP. Hellman made nasty remarks about both: “he’s just a southern preacher.” 
Hellman also became executor of Hammett’s estate, made vast sums exploiting his copyrights and tried to deny his daughters their share.

Although admitting Hellman’s talent as a writer, Gallagher asserts that Hammett gave her the plot of “The Children’s Hour” from a story he had heard about a trial in Scotland. She strongly implies that he deserves more credit for her work than Hellman was willing to admit. He was so much a part of Hellman’s writing, with advice, editing, revising this and all of her plays, that after his death, she wrote no more plays. 

Hellman’s anti-fascist, anti-McCarthy courage was not so courageous, nor very noble. She was not “right” about her steadfast support for Stalin, dishonestly and stupidly ignoring obvious facts contrary to her beliefs of the righteousness of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. 
Hellman was foolish in other respects as well. In what seems a bit mean-spirited gossip mongering, Gallagher points out that tor years Lillian Hellman paid for therapy with a psychiatrist who was little more than a charlatan. He gave celebrities advice about their health and sex lives, had sex with some patients, fleeced others. Gallagher claims that George Gershwin and his lover, Kate Swift, were both his clients. He had sex with Swift, told Gershwin, who had a brain tumor, that his headaches were from neuroses. Hellman took his advice regarding her many love affairs.  
In detail, Gallagher snipes at almost every aspect of Hellman’s life, exposing the meanness, self-deceiving, selfishness that Gallagher documents in Hellman’s work, her relations with lovers, friends, the public. 

It is ironic that Gallagher’s book is published as part of a Yale Press series called “Jewish Lives” because, according to the author, Hellman was a pretty bad Jew. She was born into a nominally Jewish but very secular family whose German ancestors landed in Georgia in the 1840's and thrived in business in the antebellum south.  Hellman’s father married into the wealthy family, but he was a failure in business, died leaving her mother a poor relative of a rich family, an obvious and traditional source of resentments. Two of her famous plays, “The Little Foxes” and “Another Part of the Forest,” were about southern families corrupted by greed. 
Her fictitious families (called the Hubbards) are not overtly Jewish, a fact which Gallagher sees as a noteworthy example of Hellman’s less than noble denial of her Jewish identity. I think this is a weak argument: if Hellman had made the family Jewish, it would have been dismissed as stereotypically (for the time) anti-semitic. Gallagher also quotes Hellman’s occasional negative quips about Jews as further evidence, but I have heard this stuff all my life, sometimes from members of my own family. Although Hellman readily acknowledged being Jewish, she denied any knowledge of the religion or identified with it as “race” or a “people.” This is not unusual, especially among that era’s long assimilated Jews, and especially those raised with no real sense of community. Hellman looked down her long nose at New York ghetto Jews. This too was not unusual for her time and society, even among liberals.  
Gallagher make a similar point about “Watch on the Rhine” which Hellman based on Otto Katz, an anti-Nazi German who was a communist and a Jew. Hellman amended both of those traits, creating her hero as a liberal generic anti-Nazi resistance leader. Gallagher also notes that Hellman’s friend was later “purged” by the Soviets, tried and executed for imagined crimes against the state, facts which Hellman ignored in her blind love of the Party. 
Hellman was also involved in the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary into the play. She was offered the chance to write it, but turned it down, suggested Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, two non-Jewish screenwriters who had written the scripts for the “Thin Man” movies. She advised them to diminish the Jewishness of the story, deleting the girl’s ardent self-identification as a Jewish victim. 
Contrary to Gallagher’s implied criticism, I think both of these modifications are justifiable as commercially viable choices. I think that Hellman was no different from many Jewish artists of her generation, who suppressed their Jewishness to assimilate. Her friend George Gershwin knew it and did it too.  

Although Hellman was actively and vocally anti-Nazi from early in the 1930's, she was quoted as focusing more on the evils of fascism in general and against communists in particular than on the Jews, even after exposure of the holocaust. 
It is in Hellman’s life-long commitment to communism that Gallagher finds the richest paydirt. Gallagher indicts Hellman for many sins of deception, stupidity, immorality. 
She points out that both Hellman and Hammett had lauded Stalin and the USSR despite news of the brutal purges of Trotskyites and other opponents, the suppression of dissent including artists, writers, and intellectuals, the forced famine of the Ukraine. Their worst sin was  continuing blind approval of Stalin long after others had abandoned the Party in the face of the non-aggression pact with Hitler. For most this was a last straw. But Hammett and Hellman both hewed to the party line: now refusing to criticize their new “ally” Hitler and in fact bitterly attacking those who abandoned the Party line as weak liberals, until all was forgotten after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and eventually, the U.S. entered the war as Stalin’s ally. 
Hellman later in life dissembled, tried to revise her previous stances, claiming that she never wholly supported Stalin, etcetera, grudgingly acknowledged her ignorance of the true facts, while still keeping to her general leftish bent. Gallagher challenges even this, noting all the many chances Hellman had to learn the “true facts,” including several visits to the USSR during which she could have learned the truth of Stalin’s evil but chose to stay ignorant. 

Which brings me to Gallagher’s overall theme: that Hellman ignored the facts and hid the truth about almost everything in her work, politics, life. 
The crux of the thing occurs when “Julia” became famous. A woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a letter to Hellman and then wrote her own book, noting the coincidence between her life and “Julia’s.” Gardiner had been raised in wealth and privilege, but in Europe had become an active anti-Nazi, had gone to Austria, worked for the resistance, and eventually returned. 
Critics began to question the sources of Hellman’s supposed memoir. No corroborative evidence existed to support Hellman’s claims. Eventually, Mary McCarthy, writer and critic, was asked by Dick Cavett on his T.V. show about overrated writers. She named one, Lillian Hellman. Pressed by Cavett to explain, McCarthy uttered one of the most quoted jibes ever: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Hellman sued McCarthy for slander, and died before the suit came to trial. But the damage was done. Gallagher cites many sources to challenge the veracity of the Julia tale. It never happened, not to Hellman, or her childhood friend, if she ever really had one. 

After noting all of the discrepancies in the details of Hellman’s account of the “Julia” story, Gallagher poses the theme of her book this way:

“It was no secret to Hellman’s friends that she ‘didn’t know the boundary between fact and fiction’ as Norman Mailer said after she died. In her personal life this mattered only to her friends: they could take her with a grain of salt, or not at all. But Hellman had a public life, and she wrote about it. She wrote about herself as witness to the world — in Moscow, in Spain, in Vienna and Berlin . . . at the very time of crucial historical events. Her readers saw the world through her eyes. She wrote about her relations with celebrated people . . . and her readers saw them through her often unadmiring eyes.

“Does it matter if she was actually in all of those places, at those times, and if she saw what she said she did? Does it matter if one or many of the stories that make up her memoirs are invented? Readers enjoy them and, after all, every memoirist, everyone who tries to tell a true story for that matter, fails to some degree. It is not the truth that is tricky and unreliable, as Hellman would have it. Memory is the problem: the color of a dress, the arrangement of furniture in a room, the words of a conversation — these things can be lost or confused. Truth remains in the facts; facts can be verified, but only if the writer cares to do so. 

“Hellman either knew or did not know Julia. . . . She did or did not belong to the Communist Party.”

Gallagher quotes “historian and author Timothy Garton,” about the “‘frontier’ between ‘literature of fact’ and the ‘literature of fiction’”:

“Imagination is the sun that illuminates both countries. But this leads us into a temptation . . . ‘look just across the frontier there is a gorgeous flower — the one novelistic detail that will bring the whole story alive. Pop across and pick it. No one will notice.’ ... But if we claim to write the literature of fact, it must be resisted.

“Why? For moral reasons, above all. Words written about the real world have consequences in the real world. ... moral reasons are sufficient; but there are artistic ones too. Writers often cross this frontier because they think their work will be enhanced as a result. Reportage or history will become literature. Paragraph for paragraph that may be true. But as a whole, the work is diminished.
“... It is the one question was always ask of those who bring us news of the world. Did that really happen? Is it true?” 

In our time, other memoirists have been exposed as frauds; journalists have manufactured news, invented sources, imagined interviews. So what? Isn’t it all entertainment. “Infotainment?” the web, blogs, free lance agenda driven reporting is the new norm. 

These questions I’ve thought about with regard to the border of art and reality, the difference between fact and truth. Does the artist have any responsibility to tell the truth? Does the goal of entertainment always justify or excuse deception? 
Movies and novels are meant to entertain. Art aspires to some more: to express beauty, to tell at least a part of the truth about nature, humanity, life. Artists talk a lot about seeking truth. There is something called “poetic truth” which implies seeking a deeper reality than exists in “mere facts.” 
All art is a lie, we are told by modern and post-modern philosophers. Of course, this clever argument is a truism. Yes, a painting of a pipe is not a pipe. Yes, Ben Kingsley was not Gandhi. T.E. Lawrence looked nothing like Peter O’Toole and many of the events of “Lawrence of Arabia” did not happen. This was a fictional story, not a documentary, and even those make choices to include, omit, emphasize, dramatize facts about the subject, take a point of view. 
The greatest works of historic historians have all included biased reportage. 

And yet I have often been troubled by things I have read and watched about things I knew about, and knew to be false, deceptive, manipulative. As a lawyer, I groan at the misrepresentations of the law and the system I know. Acquaintances in other professions have similar complaints: doctors, teachers, ministers, even movie makers, moan about dramas about their professions.
But “it is only a show, or “only a movie” I am told. True, and I can ignore the dramas that don’t purport to be anything other than mere entertainment. No one can take seriously Perry Mason’s weekly ability to pluck the guilty from his courtroom audience, although I do remember when this show was popular, that we lawyers took the time to caution prospective jurors not to expect us to pull that rabbit from our hats. 

My problem comes in the kind of “docudrama” that is intended to do more than merely amuse or entertain: but to expose an issue or to send a message, to teach. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a good example of a courtroom drama that sends a message. I have never heard a southern lawyer complain about any lack of authenticity in its depiction of the rape trial and I have no qualms about it.

But what about other legal dramas or satires which are intended to reveal something about the law or lawyers or the justice system. “The Verdict” is one of those. Lawyers protested the implausible plot that had an incompetent alcoholic shyster suing a Catholic hospital for medical malpractice while the prestigious firm representing the Church planted a spy to have sex with the plaintiff’s lawyer. After the lawyer insults the judge, incompetently prepares and argues his case (which if real would have been settled), the jury returns a huge verdict in his favor, ignoring the judge’s instructions. This is the happy end of the movie, which every lawyer laughed at, knowing that any judge would have reversed the verdict, and any appeal would have left the client poor.
But it was a good movie. Paul Newman was great in it.

Al Pacino was terrific in “In Justice For All,” in which he is forced to defend a corrupt judge, but then exposed his guilty client in court. Friends mimicked his tag line: “No, judge, you’re out of order; this whole system is out of order!” wished they had the guts to shout it in their cases. But some took it as an indictment of defense lawyers and their corrupt complicity in an unjust system, a dangerous distortion of reality.

The most outrageous example is the oldest one: “Birth of a Nation” in 1915 depicted the rise of the KKK as a justifiable and even noble response to the asserted evils of the reconstruction era. With D.W. Griffith’s immense artistic skill taking full advantage of the new technology of the cinema: editing, musical score, close-ups, stirred emotions of the audience to a fever pitch. Race riots resulted in lynching of Negroes and supported the nationwide revival of the Klan, resulting in fifty more years of murder and repression. Yet President Wilson, the great intellectual and morally pious president, praised the movie as “writing history with lightning.”