Reading Diary

I completed the Willem Elsschot Three Novels volume. The Leg, Elsschot's short sequel to Soft Soap (published 14 years later, in 1938), is an interesting riff on the expiation of guilt, in which the slick entrepreneur Boorman undergoes a crisis of conscience over an outcome that actually has little if any connection to anything he may have done -- not that what he did do wasn't lousy, it was, plenty of room for guilt there, but he creates an idee fixe out of a specious cause-and-effect. Laarmans, his protege, gets the worst of it...Laarmans reappears in the last of Elsschot's 11 short novels, Will-o'-the-Wisp, a mysterious and affecting tale of three foreign sailors looking for a woman who has given them a false address; Laarmans becomes their guide. Martin Seymour-Smith has well said that in this short novel "Elsschot...achieves a tenuous, sad sense of human brotherhood, of broken dreams, of sweetness"; it strikes me as a small classic of European literature...I re-read the Malcolm Gladwell essay on The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit that I link to in the post below. Gladwell's key point is that Sloan Wilson's Everyman protagonist Tom Rath, with typical human resilience, does a good job of overcoming his World War II trauma, as reflected in this introspective passage:

...all these facts were simply incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. That, [Tom] had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind.

But Gladwell perhaps undercuts his conclusion by reasonably pointing out that "by our standards [Tom] and almost everyone else in the novel look like alcoholics." Perhaps that is evidence that Tom is not coping so well? -- or perhaps it is just a reflection of the social norms of the time, but in that case, maybe the society as a whole was not coping very well. Sloan Wilson seems very un-self-conscious about all the drinking he describes, and that falls in line with much other work of the time. John Cheever's characters drink like fish, too. And remember, in the television series Bewitched, Darrin Stephens's usual nightly request to his witch wife after arriving home from another hard day in the advertising trenches -- "Sam, pour me a double"? The new advertising series Mad Men re-creates this drinking culture, but of course it cannot help doing so with calculation; the documents of the era are most revealing about the drinking because they're not trying to make a point about it...Speaking of re-creations of eras, Nancy Franklin in the June 9/16 New Yorker reviews the new Seventies-based series Swingtown, and does not find it very laudable compared to Mad Men:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2008/06/09/080609crte_television_franklin?currentPage=1

Franklin, always a droll and readable critic, puts her finger on one bit of laziness that frequently drives me crazy in movies and television:

...to a serious fault, [Swingtown] makes use of the most overplayed music of the period. “Dream Weaver,” “Dancing in the Moonlight,” “Come and Get Your Love,” and other such beige tunes are thrown one after another onto the soundtrack, until your ears are crying. With few exceptions, the songs are not integrated into the show—the characters don’t hear them. They’re there just to pander to viewers of a certain age.

You hear this sort of aural shorthand in movies set in the Forties, with Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" or the Andrews Sisters's "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" standing for the entire decade despite the fact that they were only two popular tunes among many.