BOOK REVIEW

The Summer Man (1967) by Jory Sherman

This book review is offered as part of Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the fine mix of reviews by other book bloggers.

The women of Cambrian Grove were restless and bored with small-town men... Johnny was an exciting stranger, a folk singer who played his guitar with sensuous vitality. 

Renowned author Jory Sherman writes like a poet, which isn’t surprising considering he started his writing career as a poet. There is music in his prose — the lines have a certain rhythmic quality to them, like the notes of a musical score, as evident from his narrative style in The Summer Man.

Sherman wrote The Summer Man in 1967 (Challenge Books) and, I presume, it is one of his earliest works in general fiction before he went on to make a name as a prolific award-winning Western author. So far this is the only book of his I have read and if his writing style and storytelling is anything like it is in The Summer Man, I am going to read almost everything he has written.

The Summer Man is the story of wandering folk singer Johnny O’Neil who is as skilled with women in bed as he is playing the guitar. His nomadic existence takes him from one place to another and into the waiting arms of one lonely housewife to another. He fills a vacuum their husbands can’t or won’t. However, his restless nature does not permit him to stay very long in one place lest he gets used to the idea. The women, sexy as they come, are loath to see him go. But Johnny moves on because he is basically a loner and loves his freedom more than anything else.

Until one day, he arrives in Cambrian Grove, to the home of his best friend, Jim, an insecure alcoholic badly in need of rehab, and his sister Marty, a divorcee seeking love and comfort again. And then he meets Marty’s friend and neighbour, the beautiful and sensuous Lola, and life for the wanderer is never the same again. The explosive chemistry between the folk singer and the forlorn housewife is what this story is about.

"Lovely and lost, she struck a poignant minor key and touched Johnny in a new, disturbing way." 

Prolific author Jory Sherman. Photo: www.jorysherman.com

Sherman’s description of the lovemaking between Johnny and Lola is so poetic that you actually think you are reading one. The lure of Lola is so powerful that Johnny sheds his inhibitions and tells her that he loves her, a sentiment she reciprocates without hesitation. But then, Lola has a husband who doesn’t behave like one and Johnny has a disposition he can’t seem to get rid of.

"Lola offered more than a tender night's pleasure. Johnny knew he should move on, that it could only end sadly. Still he lingered."

I liked The Summer Man for the way it is written and not so much for the story. Although the story is narrated in the third person, in a mild sort of way, Johnny talks about his own itinerant life and sexual dalliances in the first person, but without being too explicit. For an initiation into Jory Sherman’s writing, the book made for interesting reading. I am looking forward to reading his Western fiction.

JUKE BOX

Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas

Everybody was kung fu fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they fought with expert timing

There isn't a single 1970s kid in India who didn't swing or lip sync to the popular disco song Kung Fu Fighting written and sung by the Jamaican-born, UK-based singer Carl Douglas and produced by the Indian-born, British composer and singer Biddu Appaiah. The 1974 song, with its farcical lyrics, became a hit single and sold eleven million records at the time. It also made disco music more popular than ever. In this video you have Douglas and Biddu (extreme left) singing and swaying to the martial arts number.

Mind Your Language, 1977

This week the British sitcom Mind Your Language is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other interesting reviews over there.

The family often sits down to watch Mind Your Language, the popular and entertaining British sitcom of the late seventies. My generation first got to see it on the state-run Doordarshan channel in the early eighties. It was a hit in India and in most parts of Asia. In those days and long before cable TV, Doordarshan (which loosely means ‘Far Sight’ in Hindi) used to telecast only British serials like To the Manor Born, Some Mothers Do 'ave 'em, Sorry!, Are You Being Served? and 'Allo 'Allo! Some of these sitcoms are now back and they are as funny as they were back then. Yes Minister came later.

The only American serial that ran around the time was Lucy. She was fun too, up to a point, and as long as Mr. Mooney was around. 

Mind Your Language, made by LWT (London Weekend Television) and directed by British director-producer Stuart Allen, is about an affable and gentlemanly English teacher Jeremy Brown (Barry Evans) who teaches English as a foreign language to a heterogeneous bunch of students from across the world. 

Mr. Brown and his class.

The students are all grown-ups—with families, love lives, careers, unemployment, and immigration issues—who attend Mr. Brown's class with unfailing regularity even if it leaves the "professori" at his wits end. It doesn't help much that the students, especially Danielle (Françoise Pascal) from France, are fond of their teacher and go out of their way to put him at ease even if the outcome is the opposite of what they'd intended. They mean well and Mr. Brown knows it.

The students speak in halting English and without a care for the language in terms of diction, pronunciation, accent, phonetics, spellings, figures of speech. Still, they communicate all the same, with each other and with Mr. Brown who has a befuddled expression on his face most of the time. 

Mr. Brown: What was that again?

 
When the students answer Mr. Brown’s questions, the result is often hilarious. For instance, when he tells the Greek student, Maximillian (Kevork Malikyan), that the collective name for a group of cows is a herd of cows, the Greek student replies, “Of course, I heard of cows!”

His best friend Giovanni (George Camiller) plays class monitor in Mr. Brown’s absence. In one scene, when Mr. Brown returns, the lanky Italian tells his teacher in mock seriousness, “Professori, I don’t know how you put up with these people everyday!”

Mind Your Language is full of such humour, as the foreign students speak in their own distinct voices, reflective of the country they come from. This leaves Mr. Brown and Ms. Dolores Courtney (Zara Nutley), the very propah and formidable school principal, exasperated and at a loss for words.

While the sitcom is a family entertainer, it has been considered offensive for political incorrectness, pitting one nationality against another. 

Mr. Brown with Ali Nadeem and Jamila Ranjha.

For example, the sari-clad Jamila Ranjha (Jamila Massey) is a housewife from India while Ranjeet Singh, a Sikh portrayed by Albert Moses, is from Punjab, which, in spite of being a part of India, is shown as a separate country.

The serial also shows frequent rivalry between some of the students—Ranjeet Singh of Punjab against Ali Nadeem (Dino Shafeek) of Pakistan (reflecting the bitter relations between the two countries); a Chairman Mao-obsessed Chung Su-Lee (Pik-Sen Lim) of China against Taro Nagazumi (Robert Lee) of Japan (a throwback to WWII rivalry); and Maximillian of Greece against Giovanni of Italy (probably alluding to the Greco-Italian conflict during WWII).

On the racial bias in the series, Ranjeet Singh is often portrayed as being subservient—every time he makes a mistake he joins his hands, bows, and says, “A thousand apologies” to Mr. Brown or Ms. Courtney.

For some reason, Ali Nadeem, the most comic of the lot, mouths English catchphrases like “Oh blimey!”, “Jolly good,” and “Yes, please.” He’s at his innocent best when he smiles, "Squeeze me, please!" instead of “Excuse me, please!”

None of these so-called issues bothered me. I had a good laugh throughout the series.

History in a vintage ad

I don’t remember posting vintage advertisements on this blog before. I usually hop over to noted author Bill Crider’s blog Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine for a regular dose of vintage ads that tell their own story.

There are always exceptions to the rule, though, and I am making an exception with the above advertisement I came across in Weird Tales: Isle of the Dead, Vol.28 No.31, 1936. 

In this ad titled Let Me Tell You (finger-wagging) astrologer Pundit Tabore guarantees a solution to most of life’s problems that include relief from your enemies. I couldn’t think of putting it any other way.

The ad intrigued me for two reasons: one, it’s a nondescript ad placed by an Indian in an American pulp magazine, and two, the address at the bottom of the ad, Upper Forjett Street. I suppose astral readings and fantasy and horror have something in common.

Now Forjett Street, located in the upmarket neighbourhood of south Bombay (not very far from where I work), and Forjett Hill on which the road sits, is named after Charles Forjett who was commissioner of police in British India from 1856 to 1864. According to a report in The Times of India, Forjett was a genial and excellent officer who wore native clothes, spoke the local languages fluently, and cracked down on criminal rings. He was also credited with creating the first formal police structure for Bombay (now Mumbai).

There is nothing amiss about the advertisement itself for Pundit Tabore’s “descendants” are thriving in India even today, conning the gullible and the illiterate.

Short Story: Charlotte Bronte

Napoleon and the Spectre

Charlotte Brontë, the celebrated English novelist and poet, has written a ghost story — yes, you read that correctly — and a very witty one too. 

In Napoleon and the Spectre, the Emperor of France is about to fall asleep when he hears a rustling sound near his bed. Unnerved, Napoleon drinks a glass of lemonade to quench his thirst and, I suspect, to quell his fear. Soon he hears a "deep groan" coming from the closet in his apartment (I thought he lived in a palace). 

"Who's there?" cried the Emperor, seizing his pistols. "Speak, or I'll blow your brains out." (Does that sound like Charlotte Bronte?)

This threat produced no other effect than a short, sharp laugh, and a dead silence followed.

Napoleon jumps off the couch and, with sword in hand, steps toward the closet only to discover that the rustling sound was made by his cloak which had fallen from the peg. Then, just as he is about to drop off to sleep, he perceives shadows which he attributes to lit candles.

"Pooh!" exclaimed Napoleon, "it was but an ocular delusion."

"Was it?" whispered a hollow voice, in deep mysterious tones, close to his ear.

The emperor loses his sleep and his senses when he suddenly comes face to face with the apparition that has a powerful hold on him. Napoleon follows the spectre, hideous in appearance, through the streets of Paris and to a lofty house on the banks of the Seine.

He enters the house and finds himself standing before Marie Louise, the Empress of France. Napoleon is flummoxed.

"What! Are you in this infernal place, too?" said he. "What has brought you here?"

"Will your Majesty permit me to ask the same question of yourself?" said the Empress, smiling.

Apparently, the emperor, wearing his night dress, has sleepwalked right into his wife's drawing room where her guests are having a ball. Napoleon suffers a fit of catalepsy and falls to the ground.

My first thought upon reading this short story was: did Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre, really write this haunting tale? Looks like she did. Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks tells us that Napoleon and the Spectre is from the manuscript of The Green Dwarf dated July 10, 1833-September 2, 1833. It was republished in The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories in 1925.

The story is brilliantly well written, both prose and substance evoking instant laughter as you read through it and imagine the look on Napoleon's face, the poor devil. Though, frankly, I can't imagine what made the eldest of the Bronte sisters poke fun at the French emperor. She must have had good reason.

But, did Charlotte Bronte really write this story? Here's the link. What do you think?


Dr. Hale's rules for writing 

By William Henry Hills Robert Luce, Editor, The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892, a monthly magazine to interest and help all literary workers.

It is hard to believe that Dr. Edward Everett Hale (Edward Everett Hale [1822–1909], American author, historian and Unitarian clergyman) will be seventy years old April 3, but it will not do to contradict the birth record and the arithmetic, in spite of all his unfailing energy and youthful activity in many different undertakings. Dr. Hale is one of the men who will be always young, and it may be in consequence of this that he has written so many things that will never lose their freshness. One of the best of them is the chapter in "How to Do It" on "How to Write," which is full of crisp and practical suggestions. Dr. Hale's rules for writing are evidently those which have always governed his own literary work; and while others may not be able to follow them with equal success, they are worth remembering by every writer. The rules are:

"First, Know what you want to say; second, Say it; third, Use your own language; fourth, Leave out all the fine passages; fifth, A short word is better than a long one; sixth, The fewer words, other things being equal, the better; finally, Cut it to pieces. Any writer who will make these rules his guide in daily work will find in them an important help to literary success."

Courtesy: Project Gutenberg EBook

BOOK REVIEW

The Haunted Hour: An Anthology
by Margaret Widdemer (1920)

This book review is offered as part of Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the eclectic mix of reviews by other bloggers. It will be worth your while.

While I read poetry whenever I am in the mood for it, I have never read ghostly poetry, at least not in an anthology of poems and verses by more than sixty poets.

The Haunted Hour: An Anthology edited by Margaret Widdemer, the American poet and novelist (1884–1978), is a compilation of some very imaginative ghost-poems that are divided into eleven categories — The Nicht Atween the Sancts an' Souls, All the Little Sighing Souls, Shadowy Heroes, Rank on Rank of Ghostly Soldiers, Sea Ghosts, Cheerful Spirits, Haunted Places, You Know the Old, While I Know the New, My Love That Was So True, Shapes of Doom, and Legends and Ballads of the Dead.

Several names in the anthology are familiar to me. These include Rudyard Kipling, H.W. Longfellow, Walter by De La Mare, Christina Rossetti, Sir Edwin Arnold, Katharine Tynan, William Butler Yeats, and Sir Walter Scott.

Bret Harte, whom I know to be a writer and not a poet (my ignorance), chips in with A Newport Romance, a rather longish but quite an enjoyable poem.

Then there are six poems by Theodosia Garrison, American poet and author, whose poem The Neighbours I liked very much. It goes... 

At first cock-crow
The ghosts must go
Back to their quiet graves below.

I have read Garrison's poetry before but not her prose. More than anything else, I remember Garrison for her very quotable quote — "The hardest habit of all to break is the terrible habit of happiness." Never break that habit.

A few more poets ring a distant bell and I might have read their poems in passing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading their long and short verses, at least the ones I could comprehend. It’s not always easy to understand poetry.

Coming back to Margaret Widdemer, there isn't a lot about her on the internet. According to Wikipedia, in 1919, she won the Columbia University Prize for Poetry (now the Pulitzer Prize) for her collection The Old Road to Paradise (1918), a prize she shared with Carl Sandburg, fellow writer, editor and poet, for his collection of poems titled Corn Huskers.

Widdemer established her credentials as a poet with her first poem The Factories (1917) that looked at the sensitive issue of child labour. In her memoir Golden Years I Had (1964), she recounts her friendships with Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her essay Message and Middlebrow, published in Review of Literature in 1933, apparently popularised the term "middlebrow" which means "Someone who is neither a highbrow nor a lowbrow."

Margaret Widdemer, who lived until 94, was a prolific writer as is evident from her forty novels that included The Rose-Garden Husband and Why Not?, nine poetry collections, nine children's fiction, two books on writing titled Do You Want to Write? and Basic Principles of Fiction Writing, and three memoirs, namely Golden Friends I Had, Summers at the Colony, and Jessie Rittenhouse: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology.

Her first two novels, The Rose-Garden Husband (1915) and Why Not? (1916), were made into films — the 1917-film A Wife on Trial and the 1918-film A Dream Lady, respectively. 

I am no critic of poetry. I only enjoy reading poems. The purpose of writing about this (forgotten) book is to bring it to the reader's notice. I will, therefore, leave you with Margaret Widdemer’s brief preface to The Haunted Hour: An Anthology. It reads as follows... 

“This does not attempt to be an inclusive anthology. The ghostly poetry of the late war alone would have made a book as large as this; and an inclusive scheme would have ended as a six-volume Encyclopedia of Ghostly Verse. I hope that this may be called for some day. The present book has been held to the conventional limits of the type of small anthology which may be read without weariness (I hope) by the exclusion not only of many long and dreary ghost-poems, but many others which it was very hard to leave out.

"I have not considered as ghost-poems anything but poems which related to the return of spirits to earth. Thus, ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ a poem of spirits in heaven, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ whose heroine may be a fairy or witch, and whose ghosts are presented in dream only, do not belong in this classification; nor do such poems as Mathilde Blind's lovely sonnet, ‘The Dead Are Ever with Us,’ class as ghost-poems; for in these the dead are living in ourselves in a half-metaphorical sense. If a poem would be a ghost-story, in short, I have considered it a ghost-poem, not otherwise. In this connection I wish to thank Mabel Cleland Ludlum for her unwearied and intelligent assistance with the selection and compilation of the book; and Aline Kilmer for help in its revision and arrangement."

Margaret Widdemer

If you want to learn more about Margaret Widdemer, you can read the short essay titled Asbury Park Life: Stimulus for Author by Peter Lucia.

Note: The preface is courtesy Project Gutenberg Ebook

FILM REVIEW

The Circus (1928)

This week Charlie Chaplin's The Circus is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other interesting reviews over there. 

The ending of The Circus, the silent film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin in 1928, reminded me of the ending of a typical Bollywood film where the hero sacrifices his love for the sake of his best friend.

In this film the Tramp steps aside so that Rex (Harry Crocker), a tight rope walker in the circus where they are both employed, can marry the girl of his dreams, played by Merna Kennedy.

As Rex and his new wife, a circus rider and the stepdaughter of the mustachioed owner and ringmaster (Al Ernest Garcia), depart with the caravan of clowns and animals for a new town, the Tramp replaces his bowler hat and walks away, his little suited frame moving from side to side in that familiar manner we know so well. 

The film is funny right from the start when policemen chase the broke and hungry Tramp because they suspect him for a pickpocket. The Tramp seeks refuge in the circus and finds himself in the ring, smack in the middle of an act that fails to excite the restless spectators. The Tramp, inadvertently so, brings the circus alive with his mad dash in and out of the big tent with the cop hot on his heels. The audience thinks it is all part of the show: they jump out of their seats, throw their hats into the ring and burst into uproarious laughter, demanding more buffoonery from the Tramp who clearly has more pressing matters on his mind, like saving his skin.

It’s not long before the ringmaster, a mean taskmaster, realises that the fortunes of his loss-making circus lie with the Tramp and exploits the situation to his advantage. However, it takes the ringmaster a while to realise that the Tramp is funny without appearing or meaning to be so. He can't be trained as a clown.

There are many tender moments in this film, like the time when the Tramp, reluctant at first, gives away his single boiled egg and sliced bread to the horse-riding girl who is prohibited, by her overbearing stepfather, from eating for the rest of the day. 

 
As the Tramp turns the circus around, unwittingly, he uses it as a clever leverage to demand better treatment of the girl he has fallen in love with. Later, he overhears the girl tell a fortuneteller of her love for the tight rope walker. This breaks his heart and he begins to under-perform till the ringmaster kicks him out of the circus. In the end he unites Rex and the girl and walks away, as he usually does in his inimitable style.

The most memorable scene in the film is when the Tramp, while running away from the ringmaster (I think), accidently enters the lion’s cage and gets locked in. This scene, captured in the presence of a real lion, or so I read, runs for nearly ten minutes and is an absolute stand-out. It’s an edge-of-the-seat comic scene, if there’s ever one, especially in a silent movie. 

The Circus, one of two of my favourite Chaplin films, the other being The Kid (1921), won the Tramp his first Academy Award. I am not surprised it did for The Circus is one of the most hilarious and entertaining films I have seen from Chaplin’s portfolio. Not all Chaplin films succeed in making you laugh, but this one does and all the way through its 71-minute run.

I have always rated Charlie Chaplin a few notches lower than Laurel and Hardy who will always rank first, for me at least, followed by Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers and the rest of a fine class of comedians that include The Three Stooges, Mel Brooks, and George Burns. 

Laurel and Hardy are as jobless, penniless and hungry as the Tramp, but it is the sheer innocence and cheerful disposition of the duo, in spite of the unending troubles they find themselves in, which endears them to my comic senses. Laurel and Hardy is slapstick in its truest form which often seems contrived in Chaplin’s films: their stark portrayal of life’s realities often overshadows the absurd hilarities I expect from comedy films. With Laurel and Hardy you have no such worries — you sit back and soak up the humour.