R.I.P. 2013

These were among the authors we lost in 2013: Nobel laureates for Literature Doris Lessing and Seamus Heany, novelists Chinua Achebe, Evan S. Connell, Ruth Prawyer Jhabvala, Alberto Bevilacqua, Christopher Koch and Ian Banks.(Quotes from some of these authors are collected at the Guardian.)

Crime novelist Elmore Leonard, science fiction writers Frederik Pohl and Richard Matheson. Popular novelists Tom Clancy and Sol Yurick. 

 Poets Wanda Coleman, Anselm Hollo and Daniel Hoffman. Translator William Weaver.

 Roger Ebert, first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and distinguished film critic Stanley Kaufmann. Literary and cultural critic Richard Stern. Journalists Anthony Lewis and Jack Germond. Historians Michael Kammen and Lacey Baldwin Smith.

 Actor and writer Peter O’Toole. In various categories of nonfiction: Ada Louise Huxtable, Colin Wilson, Keith Basso, Syd Field, Marshall Berman, Herbert Blau, Philip Slater, Candace Pert, ecologist Annette Kerr, psychiatrist William Glassner, Herbert Mitgang. Literary scholar and publisher Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

The authors are gone: may they rest in peace.  The books live on.  Thank you.  As some of these well-worn volumes attest, they have been and remain part of my life.

The Life and Ideas of James Hillman Vol. I: The Making of a Psychologist
 by Dick Russell
 Helios Press

 Eminent American psychologist James Hillman is known most widely through his many books. The Oprah Imprimatur helped The Soul’s Code become a best seller in 1996, and his next book (The Force of Character) also spent some time on the lists. Hillman had devotees long before that, however, thanks to Re-visioning Psychology (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), The Myth of Analysis and more than a dozen other books.

 But except for a few remarks and references (notably in his last book, A Terrible Love of War in 2004, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle) he didn’t write directly about his life, and neither did anyone else. I exchanged emails with Michael Ventura, his coauthor on We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, who thought Hillman wasn’t interested in his own biography being written.

 Since Hillman centered The Soul’s Code on other people’s biographies, this seemed at least ironic. But he asserted that a person’s biography (especially childhood) was overemphasized, and psychological biographies were of little use. Still, the barest outlines of his life were intriguing: for example, he was Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich during Jung’s lifetime, and an American in a bastion of European intellectuals.

 In his last years (he died in 2011) it turns out Hillman was cooperating with a biographer, and a highly unlikely one. When you think about who would write the life of the founder of archetypal psychology, the most subtle, sophisticated and successful post-Jungian approach, you don’t necessarily think immediately of a sports writer who coauthored books with wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura, and wrote about JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

 So this long volume turns out to be surprising on several scores. It is remarkably well written in every respect. The prose is graceful, the narrative and description are well-proportioned and involving, and Russell solicited and presents interesting commentaries from Jungian analysts at key moments. Russell also excerpts relevant passages from Hillman’s writings, and furnishes scholarly footnotes.  This appears to be a careful and well crafted biography, done with creativity and taste.

 The other surprise is what a remarkable life James Hillman lived. It began in America’s first entertainment mecca of Atlantic City (Russell’s description of the city in the early 20th century is fascinating.) Hillman's parents owned and ran prominent and fashionable hotels, where notables in many walks of life stayed (including Eleanor Roosevelt.) Young Jim met and listened to the talk of visiting movie stars, politicians and intellectuals. He rode in a car beside Amelia Earhart.

 Hillman’s family also had roots in Jewish religious life; his maternal grandfather was a prominent American rabbi. With World War II underway, Hillman got an early admission to the Jesuit Catholic Georgetown University, where he became interested in government and politics. He traveled to Central America and hitchhiked across the U.S. before being drafted into the Navy in 1944. Because of weak eyesight he was assigned to the hospital corps, and began learning therapy by treating disabled veterans.

 But it wasn’t his first choice of career. He turned to broadcast journalism in Europe and then to a literary career as a novelist. He eventually attended Trinity College in Dublin, in the environs James Joyce immortalized, and among his closest friends were the future novelist J.P Donleavy and poet Patrick Kavanagh.

 About halfway through this volume Hillman makes his circuitous way to Zurich, first as student and then an analyst and the founder as well as first Director of Studies. He’s made a very fortunate marriage to a Swedish woman who was beautiful, intelligent and rich.

 Hillman’s few but important meetings with Jung in the last year of his life are documented. So are the hothouse politics of the Jungian community, which eventually fan the flames of a scandal when Hillman engages in sexual relations with a patient. His chief antagonist is his own analyst and mentor, who himself had seduced a patient—Hillman’s own wife.

 This episode is handled without sensationalism or moralizing either way, along with Hillman’s own thoughts about it later. The book ends with Hillman about to return to America in the late 60s, deposed from his position in Zurich and ready to confront changing times in his native country.

 Along the way, Hillman’s writings are ably described, enriched by contexts of the time. Though Hillman was an inspiring and beloved figure to his students, patients, and colleagues, there are probably many more who know him chiefly and perhaps only through his books. He applied his creativity and literary craftsmanship to these writings in a genre that he more or less invented. He often noted the roots and history of words, and language and story were key elements in his psychological approach. Among the few personal comments in his books were assertions that he felt himself to be above all a writer. So it is that Hillman continues to have new readers, while we profit from re-reading his work.

 This volume enriches that reading experience, and like the best biographies it tells us a lot about those years (the 1920s into the 1960s) in the world. The book is clearly printed on not exceptionally good paper, and the sections of photographs are well done. For some reason the publication of this biography was delayed for something like a year, which for me meant the difference between reviewing it for a print periodical or only here online. That’s too bad, because it doesn’t seem to have received many reviews, and it deserves them.

 Of course, people with prior experience and interest in James Hillman constitute the readership that was waiting for a biography. They shouldn't be disappointed.  But others could find a way into Hillman’s work through this book. Hillman was surprisingly involved in the wider world in a fascinating time, the 1920s through the 1960s of this volume. From a hotel in Atlantic City to James Joyce’s Dublin to Jung’s Zurich! He introduced the jitterbug to Ireland! It’s a fascinating tale, fostering insights into a creative new psychological method with roots deep and true. This book is not sensationalistic and though it’s not necessarily for everybody, it could well be a rich reading experience for more than the already initiated.

Making It

The growth of the American economy and related changes in the twentieth century were driven by achievements in manufacturing: the innovations of technology, the incomes of manufacturing workers that fueled a growing consumer economy.

But at least since the 1970s the manufacturing sector has been in decline.  Americans were buying more and more products made in Japan and China, and other countries even when made by ostensibly American companies.  For awhile it was fashionable to see this as a natural transition to a different kind of economy, based on services and consumption.  But there have always been doubts about how smart and sustainable that might be.  Those doubts, furthered by various bubbles and crashes caused by the so-called "services" of financial institutions, are urgently expressed in these three books.

America's Assembly Line by David E. Nye (MIT Press), while written in straightforward and undramatic prose, manages to say something interesting on almost every page.  The facts and stats can be deceptive--it's the selection and the focus that's so fascinating.  In one way, it's 20th century history and culture as seen from the factory floor, and as reflected in the assembly line.  (Among the many factual gems is that the term "assembly line" was popularized by FDR, and wasn't in general use until the 1940s.)

The assembly line itself of course goes further back, to methods of mechanizing production in the late 19th century.  But the 1940s gave it a mystique through the U.S. production of the weapons that won World War II (though Nye also cites German mass manufacturing--using U.S.-born innovations--as a factor both in the rise of the Nazi government and the German war effort.)

The assembly line  is most associated with the American automobile industry, and so Nye chronicles its history, including the 21st century .  The auto industry itself became the symbol of the American middle class, buying its shiny new cars with wages earned in its factories.  The threat to these jobs by automation had long been feared, and combined with other factors, the rise of robots has made those nightmares come true, with pretty much none of the remedies that scholars debated being applied.

The result is the U.S. with the highest divide between rich and the rest, while falling behind other industrial nations in production.  Yet Nye doesn't lose track of the manifest ills of the assembly line--not so long ago considered the breeding grounds for alienation and cultural stupor.  He briefly looks into alternatives and concludes that the entire American economy built around the assembly line needs to be rethought, for environmental and resource reasons as well as global economics.  But he offers only a vague revisionism.  "In 2013 it was time to reinvent both production and consumption and construct a greener assembly-line America."

Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing  by Vaclav Smil (MIT Press) goes through the same historical period in a more generalized way, making a case for how essential manufacturing was and remains for the American economy.  He pays a bit more attention to the present and the future however, with somewhat mixed results.  But he does highlight a present danger, in noting that the U.S. has not only lost much of its manufacturing business but also its manufacturing capacity, and direct access to crucial manufactured products.

He emphasizes materials needed for the much vaunted high technology and information economy that is supposed to be America's strength.  There are parts and products no longer made in the U.S. that are essential to every computer in the country.  Smil however doesn't draw the essential conclusion, for he believes that "subcontracting and outsourcing have made the concept of the country of origin of many manufactured goods a rather meaningless notion."  But it would take only disruption of cheap transportation or a geopolitical crisis to put meaning back into it.  Similarly, he points to a future of more sophisticated and pervasive robotization without much to say about how to deal with even further loss of income and employment.

He does trace the rise and fall of Japanese industry since the 1980s, when it was poised for supremacy, and notes a chilling contribution to the decline: the inability of Japan to make political decisions.  He also notes the current rise of German manufacturing, which (he writes) is based on moderate-sized companies embedded in local communities with family ownership.

Making in America: From Innovation to Market by Suzanne Berger with the MIT Task Force on Production in the Innovation Economy (MIT Press) is a compact but wide-ranging report based on a two-year study of 250 manufacturers in Germany and China as well as the U.S..  Here manufacturing history is the backdrop and the future is the focus.  Again, the case is made that manufacturing is important to the U.S. economy, its people and the U.S. itself.  The emphasis falls on technologies and how they are used, and how companies are organized to reflect new technologies in all parts of the business. They seem to favor small, flexible, sophisticated firms over the industrial giants of the past.  Notably this book concludes that Chinese firms prosper not chiefly because of cheap labor but "because they are able to translate between advanced product designs and complex manufacturing requirements."

The last part of the book focuses on the key question of employment.  Their survey found that at least in 2012, finding employees with the requisite skill levels wasn't the problem a lot of people were saying it was.  The needed skills were at the high school graduate level.  "So there is little evidence of across-the-board skill demands that go beyond the capabilities and credentials of the population. Nor...does the demand for advanced skills seem to be rising rapidly."  But there are problems finding advanced skills for the more innovative firms, and the book goes into the need for new relationships between firms and educational institutions, since small firms can't do the kind of training large companies used to do.

New ways of pooling and organizing skills and other efforts beyond single companies to regenerate "the industrial ecosystem" are discussed.  While these have a familiar ring--public-private cooperation and a kind of social media emphasis on continuous communication--the task force has some success stories to go by.  But they also found that some managers who complained they couldn't get qualified workers were coincidentally not paying competitive wages.  The core problem of decently paid employment is not adequately addressed, nor is the Third Industrial Revolution Smil alluded to, when a new generation of more sophisticated robots goes to work, with little chance they'll take off to a higher paid job.

Brown Dog
By Jim Harrison
Grove Press

This is a longer version of my review in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review on Sunday December 8, 2013.

 Jim Harrison not only achieved fame with “Legends of the Fall” in 1979, he also revived a fictional form. At about 80 pages, it was longer than a story and shorter than a novel, and therefore an almost extinct species in mainstream fiction called a novella. It appeared in book form with two other novellas, the first of six such Harrison collections.

 All of these novellas were stand-alone narratives, with one exception. One tale in each of the five collections after Legends of the Fall was about an increasingly popular character called Brown Dog. Now this volume collects all the Brown Dog novellas plus a new one that carries forward and in some ways caps the series. Brown Dog fans have been waiting for this, and now they can share with other readers the rare if not unique experience of a chronological narrative written and published over some twenty years.

 When Brown Dog first appeared in the collection The Woman Lit By Fireflies in 1990, Harrison suggested to an interviewer that it was his attempt to write something comic for a change. But after the character’s second tale (in 1994’s Julip) he told other interviewers that there would be at least one more, mentioning both the picaresque tradition and the serial narrative. The ultimate result is a sequential series of six tales that at a certain point engaged Harrison’s skills as a novelist, so that there are mysteries gradually unraveled (though some remain) and a main character who is not quite the same at the end.

 “Just before dark at the bottom of the sea I found the Indian.” With that provocative opening sentence, the first Brown Dog misadventures begin. They involve salvaging a dead Indian in full regalia preserved in the cold deep waters of Lake Superior, and the struggle over ancient burial grounds with some wily and ambitious young anthropologists that drives the narrative through the next novella as well.

 Brown Dog—otherwise known as B.D.—is 47 when we meet him. He grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near an Indian reservation. He still lives nearby. An Indian girl gave him his name because as a lovestruck youth he was always hanging around like a dog. He doesn’t remember his parents and doubts that he is Indian (a question that gradually gets answered) but when a bosomy 24 year-old anthropologist shows up at the local bar, he’s not averse to pretending.

 His appetites, particularly for sex, often get him in trouble and lead to numerous episodes of ribaldry, but he is also deeply and happily grounded in the natural world of woods and water. His greatest ambition is to fish as much as possible.Like many of Harrison's male characters in his other fictions, B.D. is physically strong and is especially fond of dogs, birds and particular landscapes. Unlike many if not most, B.D. is poor and doesn’t read much (though he has taste.  He reads A Hundred Years of Solitude one page a session, so it may take years to finish it.)

 “Westward Ho” finds B.D. on the run from the law with a dubious Indian activist in Hollywood.  Harrison had noted that for him Brown Dog was a kind of alter ego, one with less constraint. (Harrison's own nickname was "Brown," because his complexion is darker than your average Nordic, which is his heritage.)   In this novella, the author might be splitting his fictional self in two, as it prominently involves a Hollywood screenwriter from the Midwest who overindulges in food, drink, drugs and sex.  Harrison doesn't talk much about his Hollywood period but he does more or less admit to some of that.

To this point the novellas are primarily picaresque adventures, suggesting a rural American Tom Jones, or perhaps more appropriately, certain Native American tales about the trickster figures of Coyote or Raven. But with “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” the series—and this book—develops narrative direction and urgency, as B.D. tries to save his young stepdaughter, “a woodland creature” with a form of fetal alcohol syndrome, from a sterile state institution.

 After further adventures in Canada and Montana, B.D. is back home in the last and previously unpublished tale. A little older and a biological father with a contemporary twist, he feels the need for family and to make peace with his unknown past. At last he learns his parentage, with symmetries on several levels and a connection to at least one other Harrison fiction.

 Though a single narrative voice doesn’t emerge until at least a third of the way through the series, there’s no mistaking Harrison’s signature style. His paragraphs are like waterfalls of musically balanced sentences that don’t always relate in obvious ways. Observation, flashes of memory and epigram tumble together to achieve both bursts of illuminating surprise and a kind of mesmerizing momentum.

 As a book, Brown Dog is rich in character and incident, rude humor and melancholy. It is both heartfelt and ruefully real. It’s unusual and welcome in the number and variety of characters living on the geographic and economic margins, including educated small town professionals. Whether helplessly cruel or basically goodhearted, they all struggle with the often surpassing power of their impulses.. Some are sly and irredeemably cruel but others have moments when their basic good-heartedness inspires their choices. B.D. is often the catalyst for both sets of behaviors.

 B.D. himself emerges as a singular character, at once unworldly and self-aware, wounded and grounded, “virtually the opposite of anything the culture thought was acceptable”  with a sense of wonder less engaged by billions of stars in the night sky than “the billions of green buds in thousands of acres of trees surrounding him” as he sits motionless on a tree stump in “a state much envied by the ancients.”

For Pleasure: Fall 2013

In his new book, How To Read Literature, Terry Eagleton asserts that "given the brilliance of the novel and the billions of English-language readers in the world," it is likely that at any given moment, someone is reading Jane Austen's Emma.

My math may be inadequate but somehow I doubt this, though I'm willing to agree that Austen's novel is being read every year, and even every month.  I may be on safer ground however in asserting that this year I may have been the only non-graduate student or historian to have read all 934 pages (plus notes) of Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History by Robert Sherwood.

Sherwood, a Pulitzer Prize playwright, was a speechwriter in FDR's White House, and got access to lots of documents, memos and correspondence, including Hopkins' diaries.  This book makes full and fulsome use of those documents, so it is in the most specific sense a documentary.  It begins where other books about Hopkins end: when he stopped being the chief architect and administrator of the New Deal.  It chronicles his later and much different roles as FDR's private diplomat, and Hopkins comes across in Sherwood's telling as a key figure, a man uniquely trusted by key wartime partners such as Churchill and Stalin.  He was trusted because he immediately grasped what was needed, and was an honest broker.  They seemed fond of him personally as well.

Sherwood writes of Hopkins' "passionate hopefulness" that made him a positive force in the two greatest dangers that confronted the U.S. in his time, the Great Depression and World War II.  At the same time, he was a trenchant analyst and adviser.  This book reproduces my favorite Hopkins' quote.  At the beginning of  the FDR administration when the Depression was most acute, someone proposed a project to help the unemployed  that would take a lot of time to prepare but would do so in the long run.  "People don't eat in the long run," Hopkins snapped.  "They eat every day."

Hopkins was also a lightning rod for opposition to FDR, much of it hateful.  Because FDR was so popular, critics focused on Hopkins and hounded him the entire time he served the U.S. and the Allied cause with such dedication that he fatally ruined his health in the process.

Sherwood makes succinct observations about FDR as well, calling him "one of the greatest geniuses as an administrator that ever lived."  He also documents time after time when Roosevelt's political instincts--particularly on how to communicate with the public--went against advice but were most often right.

But the overall effect of this book is accumulated through the details--the numbers of ships and planes England or Russia needed, the timing of various but huge strategic moves, the detailed descriptions of the meetings, all the decisions involving immense resources and numbers of lives.  As Sherwood himself observes, "...one can hardly read these cold, dry minutes without sensing the Homeric awfulness of the responsibility imposed upon the few who were compelled to decide so much."  Through these details a sense of what the war was really like, and what these people were like, emerges with more power and authenticity than through any briefer summary.

The other reading I did was principally related to theatre.  The plays I was seeing as local theatre columnist weren't very inspiring for awhile, so I turned to reading David Hare's plays, mostly those collected in David Hare: Plays 2.  I'd watched some interviews etc. with him on Youtube and I wanted to read some of his prose as well, so off the same library shelf I took his account of performing his own one-person play, Via Dolorosa, a book called Acting Up.  Hare writes with very definite views of the process (which change along the way) and he offers a wealth of observation about theatre and its relationship to society.  As I knew I wanted to read it again and refer to it, I bought a copy.

Reading plays is a special skill most of the time.  I can read Tom Stoppard's plays for their language but without a very good idea of their structure or how they might look on stage.  But some playwrights are easier to read than others, and Hare is one.  Partly because his descriptions and stage directions are so clear and specific, but mostly because the narrative is clearly in the dialogue.  Another playwright who is a particular pleasure to read, I found, is A.R. Gurney.  I read Volume IV of his Collected Plays with great pleasure and admiration.