No Thomas Mann this week…Just a Revered Novel from 1952

Yesterday I needed to read something for a dispirited self, and I went downstairs to locate a tiny hardcover in my Hemingway collection. Published in 1952, this college edition of Old Man and the Sea has 127 pages. The cover is two-tone blue like the Caribbean Sea. Near the center is a shiny fish drawn in gold and below it is Ernest Hemingway’s signature in gold.

The fish remains unnamed, as if unique. It is neither a Marlin or Tuna. The old man, Santiago, “saw him first as a shadow that took so long to pass under the boat that he could not believe its length.  “No,” he said. “He can’t be that big.” But he was that big and at the end of his circle he came to the surface only thirty yards away …his tail out of the water.”

Santiago meant a lot to me the summer of 1957 before I began high school. The novel came into my hands by accident and it’s too long to explain how. But Santiago represented Hemingway’s maxim in French: "il faut (d’abord) durer ..”  One must (first) endure. Yet four years later on July 1^st in 1961, a month after high school graduation, the national news shocked me.

Hemingway had shot himself in Ketchum, Idaho. This meant his French maxim about endurance was succeeded by another: “il faut (après tout) mourir.” One must (after all) die.” At eighteen I could not process Hemingway’s suicide, not given his code about surviving. Nor did I understand then his masculine view of life.  Yet Santiago reflected what my father tried to instill in me about not being a quitter. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. It was not whether you won or lost; it was about how you struggled. This was the human test of character, and it needed to be guided by moral consciousness, not self-interest.

Still, Santiago loses to the sharks. Too many voracious ones to save his magnificent fish from mutilation. Yet there was nobility in both this old man and the boy who reveres him. Reading the novel yesterday, I again loved the simplicity of this story and its economical and clear language.  I’d read the novel often during four years in Venezuela when my spirit needed regular infusions of endurance. Thirty years ago, this summer, the Kenna family left Venezuela. I assumed we were leaving behind an oligarchy, one rife with corruption in the land of Napoleonic law. In this legal system, someone is assumed guilty until proven innocent. In my heart and mind, I believed I was returning to a country that believed in its Constitution and the fairness of our judicial system, when guilt must be proven under the law, in contrast to Venezuela’s Lady Justice.       

Next week: Thomas Mann as promised, the brilliant writer who escapes Germany’s Third Reich….

Sharing a Letter Today

I made the choice in this letter to our local paper that I would not be political.  Yet I like to think a good reader will see how the structure says what my thoughts are about the renaming of military installations.         

To the Editor:

On July 11^th, Fort Gregg-Adams was renamed Fort Lee. The Sustainment Commander, Major General Donahue, spoke that day. She said, “Lieutenant General Arthur Gregg and Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams represented the best of our Army. Their names are synonymous with trailblazing service, leadership, humility, grace, and perseverance. …. Their legacy reminds us of a timeless truth: character endures, even as situations change. In moments of transition, the strength of our values carries forward.”

Donahue went on to say this: “Today we are honored to connect the legacy of Private Fitz Lee to the history of this installation: a legacy deeply intertwined with the Buffalo Soldiers.” After reading this Commanding General’s speech, I learned that Lee was one of four given the Medal of Honor for heroic action during the Spanish-American War.

Born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Private Lee, blind by age 33, died in Kansas. His grave marker at Fort Leavenworth can be seen on the Internet. This search also led me to Charity Adams, who died in 2002.

Her life was remarkable during and after WW2.  As the commander of black female soldiers, she ran the postal service in England, then in France. Soldiers needed letters from home for morale. Under Adams this happened. As I learned on Wikipedia, what this woman achieved after the Army told me how remarkable she was.

Lastly, the late Arthur Gregg is a gentleman my husband and I met four times. This finest of men died at age 96 in October before the election.

An enlisted soldier, he rose in rank to be the first black Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army. After retirement in 1981, he continued to be vital to Fort Lee, the center of Army sustainment. This man was one of those persons ever present to others: a questioner, a listener, a man of true grace.

The Rapp Record has a strict limit of 300 words, which I had to meet. So I refrained from saying, “the dubious Spanish-American War.” Am I correct in thinking that this war relates to the newspaper magnet, William Randolph Hearst? Back to Wikipedia!

Thomas Mann next week…

Thanks to Two Readers

This past week… a book club member who read This is Happiness thanked me for suggesting this Irish novel. She wrote, “I loved the book for the words of wisdom on almost every page. The characters were real and I cared what happened to them.”

I also heard from the literary friend who gave me this novel. In e-mail Bill called the novel “amazing, joyful, and playful” and he described its historical detail as rich… like black and white photographs. (That’s perfect for the early 20^th century time frame in rural Clare County.) “You know a novel is good,” he wrote, “when a sentence pulls you to a stop and you sit back and enjoy images as they sink in.” Just now I went through my marked copy of This is Happiness and found examples to illustrate Bill’s words. “Time has unpeeled a history of infamy.” And what about this one? “Her eyes were Old Testament eyes, grave and grey and allowing not the slightest room for manoeuvre.”

I try to accept  that few read my blog on Literature I Love. Yet there are old friends and former students who read my words, and connection with them keep me writing something each week, which Ilona Duncan kindly posts for me.

Currently, I and book club members are reading Colm Toibin’s The Magician.

Next week I will write about this masterful novel, which presents the life of  German writer Thomas Mann in chronological order. This means a reader experiences Prussian Germany before the first world war and Germany during and after World War Two. I’m at the end of my second read of The Magician with  Toibin’s novel making me even more aware of despotic & fearful times in the USA today. And last night, thinking about Mann who came to the USA to escape The Third Reich, I decided to watch American Masterpiece on PBS.

The most recent one featured the life of  Hannah Arendt, a brilliant German-Jewish philosopher, famous for a book on totalitarianism and many other works. She, too, fled Germany.  Her famous phrase “the banality of evil” has been with me since the 1960s when she covered the Adolf  Eichmann trial in Israel.  And the documentary on Arendt juxtaposed in my mind with Rob Reiner’s recent Christian Nationalism.

To be continued next week….