Daily Dose

From Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

HEROES

"Heroes are immortal, which is why reminders of their mortality must be censored, from the mundane need to be clean to the pressing need to die."

From Chapter 6, On Asymmetry

Nhu Review

Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, by Monique Brinson Demery

Just as there are but so many plots, repeated with variations since at least Aeschylus said, "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!", so there are but so many biographies.  Plutarch to Ellman, hagiographers to haters, most biographers, ancient to modern, follow some established pattern.  Here then a new example of the "quest" biography, and not a bad one.

The form might as likely be called the "stalker" biography.  It could be argued that Boswell himself meets most of the requirements, but his magnificent book is not ultimately the story of his quest to meet Samuel Johnson, but rather the Great Cham, whole.  Rather, it is A. J. A. Symons, and his 1934 "experiment in biography," The Quest for Corvo to which I turn for the precedent. In that extraordinary classic, the biographer found himself in immediate, and seemingly insurmountable difficulties.  Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, was the author of a number of eccentric novels, all now considered minor classics in the English canon, thanks in no small part to Symons' biography.  In 1934, Rolfe was long dead.  In life, he had also been homosexual, a compulsive liar, a paranoid and a notorious pimp of Venetian gondoliers.  Considering Rolfe's penchant for self-invention and reinvention, his obscurity, and the times, Symons could not possibly have written either a straightforward, critical biography, or an honest book, without finding some new way to write it.  He did.  His book became a book about itself; his "quest" for the novelist, high and low, and a narrative as much about the search as the subject.  It was a brilliant idea, beautifully executed.  It allowed the biographer to mention, literally in passing, some of what he could not or dare not explore in depth. At the same time, it provided the central metaphor of a major critical work. 

Neither the subject nor this new book are likely to be so long remembered as Symons and Corvo, but this is likely to be the best book we will ever get on Madame Nhu.  Through sheer doggedness and charm, Monique Brinson Demery managed to track down the Dragon Lady in retirement, in Paris.  She did not give interviews -- though possibly because it had been decades since anyone cared to remember she was still alive.  Nonetheless, others had tried.  Demery succeeded, starting in 2005, in part, by being a nice young woman, always respectful and attentive, and a new mother, which seems to have brought -- on occasion -- something almost maternal out of the old monster.

Monster she was.  Demery is at pains to tell as much of the story of the beautiful young girl, Le Xuan, as she must the story of the notorious Madame Nhu; the woman who offered to buy gas and matches if any of the Buddhists who had set themselves on fire to protest her family's government decided "to have another barbeque."    It's a fascinating story.  Herself from a prominent family -- her mother was a Princess -- and sister-in-law to the President of Vietnam, Madame Nhu became the glamorous face of a corrupt, violent and feeble regime.  In 1963, her husband and his brother were assassinated.  Madame fled with just, it seems the clothes, jewels and money she could carry.  That was the story, anyway.  After that came decades of silence.

Demery then has to overcome not only that vacuum, but also the public assumption that her subject was long dead, evil, or at the very least irrelevant.  The story of how she accomplished the first is threaded through her argument against the later.  There were a lot of phone calls with the Dragon.  Quite wisely, whenever Madame Nhu's story shades into conspiracy, or worse, the mytho-poetic -- brave little mother, struggles along a refugee road with her baby tucked up under a fur coat -- the biographer returns to her own "quest" narrative, free to comment on what she either can't or doesn't need to verify.  It's a smart play, being seen to not trust entirely the story she is otherwise faithfully retelling.   If neither narrative ends up being wholly convincing, that too is less a fault than a virtue of the form.

There really isn't much more tell here but those bits of the story not already in the history books, in other words, Madame Nhu's early life, her personal memories and her own version of public events.  That's the exclusive.  That's the peg on which the new book hangs.  But this is not the story of a neglected heroine of Vietnamese history.  This is the story of a fundamentally unpleasant woman, a member of not one, but two thoroughly unpleasant families, both in their ways representative of a not just thoroughly unpleasant, but tragic period in their country's history and ours.  The obvious trap being that the sympathy needed to make and sustain a relationship with Madame Nhu is a not a sympathy ultimately which can or should be shared by the reader.  Demery clearly understood this.  Her solution isn't original, but it very nearly works.  

Ultimately, what seems lacking is neither fairness or facts, but perhaps ironically, something of Madame's own ruthlessness.  In 1980, the late, great English writer, Caroline Blackwood, published, The Last of the Duchess, ostensibly a biography of the Duchess of Windsor.  What the book became was a portrait of Suzanne Blum, aka "Maitre Bloom," Wallace Windsor's final gatekeeper and as grim an old villain as ever saw print.  What made that book so memorable was that the author, herself a rather glamorous, if chilly beauty in her day, not only seemed to understand her glamorous, chilly and surprisingly empty subject, but also to relish, frankly, the cruel intellectual superiority of her keeper and tormentor.  It was all a bit shocking, and no little bit thrilling, if ultimately very sad indeed.  There was something of the same barely concealed disdain for stupidity and weakness in Blackwood's fiction, perhaps in Blackwood, so the Duchess, her lawyer and their biographer, at least in that perfect, hard little book, were set in a triangular balance, endlessly reflected back at one another a kind of pitiless realism that perfectly suited the subject.

Monique Brinson Demery seems a perfectly nice young woman.  Madame Nhu was many things, some of them even admirable, as Demery convincingly shows, but nice, Madame Nhu never was.  The very idea.  Attractive, intelligent, tough, Nhu was all of these.  Her biographer makes a convincing case for her as survivor and as a victim of both her circumstances and the public's perception of her as something much worse.  That's the real problem here.  Demery acknowledges the factors, including the sexism and racism that contribute to her subject's transformation into an oriental cliche.  She tells what should be a compelling story of an astonishingly young woman's rise and fall, and what could have been a touching story of long exile and an amazingly unhappy family history.   Madame Nhu, however flattered, resists.  In the end, however much one might want better of her, she seems to have taken Shylock for her model:

"The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

There just wasn't much more to her, however she got to be what she was.  That being the case, as a reader, I rather resented the biographer's efforts as well.  Madame Nhu turns out to be not much a mystery.  But, like Madame in this if nothing else, her biographer has made what she could from what she had to work with.

Fey.

The real tragedy of Madame Nhu it seems, never quite the subject of this book, is what happened to Vietnam, back before everyone, blessedly was able to forget her.

Mindful Clerihew

THICH NHAT HANH

Now, don't you fawn
On Thích Nhất Hạnh.
One must not trouble the sage,
As he's already engaged.

Recommendations: 10 Good Books I Shouldn't Have Liked: Part One

This is the season of the 10 Best Lists. Everybody does them: reviewers, critics, radio-hosts, bloggers, and one sees them everywhere, from newspapers -- remember those? -- to morning TV talk shows. The agenda of course is to promote sales, not just to rank the year's best books. Well, I work in a bookstore. Doesn't bother me, the commercial aspect. In fact, recommending books with the idea of selling books is about the best part of what I do. This sort of thing comes to me as easily as pointing from my desk to the restrooms ("Up the stairs one floor and to the left.") Need a list? I'll make you one. I'll make you a dozen. Well, one to start, anyway.

I love lists. I make them constantly; everything from groceries to poems I mean to remember, to books I wish were back in print. Like most compulsive list-makers, I seldom read my lists after making them -- as in a way it is the making that counts -- and besides, I don't always remember to take them with me wherever I'm intending to go, can't find them when I get wherever I end up, or can't read what I wrote. Yet, I keep making 'em. There's something satisfying, as I've said, in just the making; perhaps the brain conflates the list with the task, the titles with the reading, etc. Fine with me. Still gives me a charge. (Such a sedentary character must accept such endorphins as come my way.) Come the end of the average workday, my pockets are littered with notes, some of which, if closely scrutinized in a strong light, I may even be able to decipher, and some of these, most likely, will be lists: movie recommendations from coworkers, book titles on fiction featuring bees, compiled for a customer's Christmas list, ten books on Greece, or by Greeks, or about Greek cuisine... whatnot. In keeping with the rush to recommend, I offer this list, not just of books, new this year, that I happened to have read and really enjoyed, but of books I ought not to have read at all, would not have read had circumstances not required that I do so, or that few would think to find on a list of mine, or that I was frankly surprised to find I liked better than some of the books I took up with more enthusiasm. These then are the least likely of the best this year, at least from my lists.

Here goes:

1) This would be best example this year of a book I much anticipated -- and yet was prepared to dislike. A "new" life? Was that necessary? I've read at least two full-length biographies already, and Kermode's latest book of criticism, among other critical works on the gentleman, so did I need another book on the author of Out of India? Well, yes. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster, by Wendy Moffat, was in many ways among the most satisfying new biographies I read this year. Quite a surprise.

What I feared was a point being made at either Forster's expense -- as has happened all too often in the last few years when theorists have decided to use the work of artists to prove art inferior to theory -- or an attempt to either traduce or sanctify the man. Either of the latter possibilities almost makes for as dreary a reading experience as the former. Homosexuals seem to specially tempt scholars to this sort of thing. There is a category of modern biography, probably defined for me at its best and worst by C. A. Tripp's Lincoln, wherein a respected scholar makes a mission of reinterpreting the evidence in such a way as to, as it were, queer the picture. This can be, as it was with the book by Tripp, both a delightful provocation that sends all the old birds of The Ivory Tower aloft in indignation -- which, I admit, can be fun to watch -- but usually ends in a book that is less a biography than a not altogether satisfying exercise in embroidery. (See also some relatively recent writing on Henry James.) With a personage like Forster however, there would seem have been no one since the more innocent days of Lionel Trilling who didn't already know. (Morgan Forster was the kind of fellow that one's grandmother, even had she been convent-raised and lived her whole life on a Montana cattle-ranch, would have pegged as rather a queer bird.) With all the details in numerous memoirs by his friends, and in the earlier biographies, and the evidence of his posthumously published novel, Maurice, what more needed to be said about E. M. Forster's sexuality? Well, as it turns out, quite a bit.

What Moffat does is restore to Forster, and to the people with whom he spent the better part of the second half of his life, the dignity of preference. Using Forster's personal papers, and taking him at his word, Moffat convincingly shows that far from some tragic old eunuch who'd written himself out, Forster in middle age made himself a new life, a queer life, about which he felt he could not write honestly as a novelist. When it came to the so-called "battle of the sexes," Forster had to admit, he did not have a dog in that fight. And he did not feel he could write, or more importantly in a way, publish fiction that dealt honestly with his life as a homosexual, after he'd secretly written Maurice, so he did other things. Unlike earlier biographers, Moffat takes this choice seriously; she does not psychoanalyze, conjecture or prevaricate, she quotes, bless 'er, the man himself, and the result is not only admirable, but remarkably readable and convincing.

2)A Common Pornography: A Memoir, by Portland bookseller and publisher, Kevin Sampsell, is also a book I've already written about here, but having read it through a second time, I've come to think it even better than I did the first time. This book represents a whole school of writing, as I was at pains to stress when I first addressed it, that I do not like. It is cool. I do not like cool. Sampsell writes about horrible shit, like his father's abuse of his sister, with the same detachment that he writes about his sister's bad taste in interiors. I found this maddening, and mean. Even the first time through though, I had to admire his ruthlessness, not as regards his family, but his writing; not a word but what was right, not a sentence that he didn't need, not a thoughtless paragraph.

Well, maybe I calmed down a little about the decline of Western Civilization, or at least civility, or maybe I was just forced to defend the book to other people and found myself making a better case than I intended, but for whatever reason, when I read it a second time, Sampsell's book felt... honest. It moved me. It was still uncomfortable, and not an experience I would recommend to anyone unwilling to be made impatient with the emotional stupidity of the American straight male -- at least as represented here by what I can't help but think is a careful self-parody of the author -- but the book is that good that more people should read it. I came to see that there may not have been any other way for Sampsell to write this memoir than the way he did. The only alternative I can imagine would have been for him not to write it all. A case, I still think, could be made for that, but not anymore by me.

3) Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature's Bounty, by Seattle environmental reporter, Craig Welch, is not the kind of book I would ever pick up and read. All that green. Among my like-minded leftists, there is no subject on which we are less likely to be thoughtful, let alone interesting, let alone entertaining, than what's still being done to "nature's bounty." Craig Welch manages to make his book on environmental piracy in the Puget Sound all three. How'd he do that?

Well, to start, by being a reporter. So much of what I might read on matters environmental is just polemic. I don't need to read that. I agree. I'm not an idiot. Global warming is real. Capitalists are greedy fuckers. I should be composting more. You've convinced me. (I live in Seattle, for heaven's sake!) Real reporting; factual, observed, researched and considered reporting, is all that is required to inform the citizenry in a functioning democracy -- when it is done ethically and well, which is admittedly an increasingly rare thing nowadays -- about serious matters. I'm not saying somebody shouldn't be shouting, just not at me, thank you very much.

Welch also made what I think is a pretty brilliant choice about how to report this story. I don't know if it was something that seemed self-evident to him while he was following the facts, or if he consciously decided, when he came to write the book, to write it as true crime, but it works admirably. From the first scene on a dark city street, staring down into the water from a cop's truck, looking at what may be an empty boat... or a crime in progress, I was hooked.

I'm going to use a word that might discourage some of the devout, but this book was fun! Oh, yes, yes, I was outraged, indignant, credulous and all that. I was also turning the pages -- fast. This was exciting stuff! And not just because I didn't know a damned thing about this murky business, but because I wanted to know what happened next. I cared not just about the geoduck -- pronounced "gooey duck" and an admirable if revolting animal it is for all that -- but about the human beings, good and bad, about whom the author was writing with the same objectivity and curiosity. This is how it is done, my fellow sandals & socks wearers, when telling a story to grown-ups.

4) In the realm of the even less likely read, I can think of no work of fiction this year that I took up more stubborn reluctance than Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes. Everybody loved this thing. There wasn't another new novel I heard so many booksellers go on about since it came out, and the reviewers were tripping over themselves to be among the first to proclaim its historic significance, the power of its realism, its devastating emotional truth.

Well, I hated every minute of the damned thing. I know everything, by way of our disgraceful history in that benighted country, that I need to know to be sure that the idea of reading a first time novel, of inordinate length, told at a grunt's eye-view, by a veteran of that war, was for me about as attractive a prospect as spending a week on a battlefield tour of Pleiku in a vintage jeep. No, I was not old enough to either serve or march on LBJ's White house, but I am just old enough to have been made thoroughly sick of hearing, and reading about the whole ugly business for forty fucking years.

So why did I read the whole damned book? I didn't have to do it. True, I only took it up because it was being considered by the awards-committee on which I was serving, and I put it down as often as I picked it up, but I wasn't required to finish it. I was assured that if I just stuck it out, I would become engrossed, that the characters would get to me, that the detail would fascinate me. Well, I didn't, they didn't, and it didn't. The story was neither new to me nor told especially well. The characters were as familiar to me as they would be to anyone else who'd read Michael Herr's Dispatches, or anything much of the two volumes from of the Library of America's war reportage, or Joseph Conrad. And all that realist detail as to everything from bullets to rotten boots? I suppose, had I otherwise have been made to care about the book, that stuff might have really put me right there, in the shit.

I remain unconvinced that Malantes has written the great novel so many insisted this was. So why then recommend it? Because the book Karl Malantes did write, for all its tedium, its familiarity, and its grossness, is still a damned good book, and easily the best new novel I read out of all the new novels I had to read this year. Like reading Dreiser, I found myself wondering how a book this clumsily written, this bloated and ugly, could be so satisfying, could make me keep reading even when there was nothing in it that appealed to me as either history or fiction. My only answer to this would be a value I do not generally bring to the reading of novels: sincerity. Malantes means what he says. This is important to him. It is important not just that he get it all down, but that he get it right. I trust absolutely that he did. I don't have to admire the book to believe it. What the author did is admirable. It did move me. It did teach me something of what that war was, of what that experience was for him, and for all the men like him.

I have no more interest in the subject now, or Malantes as a novelist, than I did when I forced myself to start the first chapter, but I can recommend the experience. It was salutary.

5) To those that know me well, this next one will seem like cheating on this list. I collect every book published in this series, whether I want the damned things or not. It's a series. As a collector, that's what one does. Also, I collect and am a fan of the writer, as a writer, and as an important figure in American lettres. So how could I not buy H. L. Mencken's Prejudice: The Complete Series, in two volumes, from The Library of America? Obviously, I did. Employee shopping day, right on the top of my stack to get the extra holiday discount, there he was. First book I opened and started reading when I got home. I already own these essays in their original volumes -- actually, in rather shabby later printings, but still, I own 'em all. And yes, I've already read most if not all that's in them. But the truth is, I ought not to love Mencken as I do. His politics, generally speaking, were appalling, (meaning not like mine,) and these books, in particular are often Mencken at his least nuanced, shall we say.

Mencken was a brute and a bully, in addition, as one learned from some of his posthumously published diaries and such, to being a closet anti-Semite and a racist. Mencken was also, by every report I've read from Manchester to Teachout, a charming man, a boon companion, a good husband, brother and son. Mencken was also an exceptionally good, largely self-taught scholar and thinker, among our greatest newspapermen, and one of our most important and influential literary critics and editors, but what Mencken was above all else, was the supreme sonofabitch in American literature. As I've already said, I shouldn't love him, but I do.

With the considerable and painful exception of never having written a single masterpiece, Mencken is America's Swift. Like the bitter Dean, what Mencken does better than almost anyone else in the language is invective. Mencken was a cynic, a reactionary in everything but sex and literature, and an atheist of the trip-your-grandma-on-her-way-to-church variety, but he was also a stylist and a champion of language. Swift was a priest, a Tory, a jobber and a misanthrope. He was also a genius. I don't think Henry Louis Mencken was quite that, but he wielded a blackjack better than anyone in English after Twain had laid down his cudgels. It is to Mencken, more than any other American in the first half of the last century, that we owe the vanquishing from intellectual respectability of the canting, couthless, boobs, bores, and incompetents that stifled our literature, censored our press and reduced the discourse in this country to "the level of the chiropractor, a press-agent or a Congressman." If the idiots are still very much in evidence in our politics, our culture and what we would now call "the media,"
it was not for want of effort by Mencken.

To read even just the first paragraph of his "Essay on Pedagogy," from the Fifth Series, and so from fairly late in his career and from well past the heydays of his influence on the culture, is to marvel at his prescience, his unstinting enthusiasm and his solid common sense. In good, plain language, he defines what makes, and unmakes, a good novel. It is an excellent example of Mencken as a critic, and rational crusader for the good book. He is, by the time of this piece, the guy who knows a good cigar by his fingertips.

But why I for one can't help but love the old sonofabitch is for stuff like "Star-Spangled Man," his devastating deflation of the Fraternal American on parade, from the Third Series, or his more famous vivisection of the South in "The Sahara of the Bozart," from the Second Series. Mencken is best when he's mean.

So while far from the dearest companion in my library, Mencken defines for me the pleasure of obloquy, sober swearing, and the company of a grand grouch. The man, simply put, is funny as Hell.

Busy Old Fool

I once overheard an old friend, not without affection, describe my character to a third party as being comprised of "equal parts indignation and enthusiasm." I've always treasured that characterization, and thought it just, so far as it goes, which has often as not proved to be further than it should. When I was younger, like all young men, I was quick to both, and again like young people generally, I tended to overstate. Nothing I resented could I find other than outrageous, nothing I disliked but I hated it, and nothing and no one I liked but I loved. Books, friends, lovers and enemies all had from me something of the same intensity, received something like the same consideration, and suffered the effect of what another friend of that period described as my "dive and rip" method of getting acquainted. I could not at that period get to know someone but that I wanted and felt I needed to know everything about them: what they thought, what they read, who and what they loved and why. Even with a good new book, I could not read it but then had to read everything about the subject, everything I could find by and about the author, everything and anything that might sustain my interest and extend it to the next book and the next. In just this way I exhausted not just my friends, and a few teachers, but the pawky selection to be had in the little libraries to which I had access at the time. On subjects as diverse as OZ, the American Civil War, Edgar Allen Poe, the mafia, fascism, Daumier's caricatures, Emma Goldman and UFOs, I remember reading my way in turn through every book, encyclopedia entry and article there was to be had in my home town. When I came to serious literature, I attacked fiction in just this same way, convinced that if I meant to appreciate anything, I had to read everything and know whatever there was to know about everything I read. I still think that not a bad way for a young man to read. If history fueled my sense of injustice, and biography gave me heroes, if reading The King James Bible taught me less religion and more about verse than I realized at the time, if reading Twain, curiously enough, made me better prepared when I came to read James to appreciate his humor, it all proved to be a better preparation than much of the little formal education I received for everything that's come after. To a surprising extent, I still read, and live by the light that was kindled in me then by the books I happened on more often than I was handed. I can't quite imagine, looking back, why or how I read what I did, other than to marvel that the day must have had more hours in it when I was a boy than it does now, and I can't help but regret that there were not more adults along the way who might have better directed my interests and guided my reading, to say nothing of my affections and my time, into more productive paths, but nothing I now think did I really waste, and for such help as I had I am grateful.

A commonplace, first in my family and later among my friends, is that I was always old. At least until my beard turned white, it was among the most frequent, and weirdly flattering things said of me that I had always been "at least middle-aged." Now that I am, I know of course that that wasn't true at all. Middle-age, as I'm only now learning, is that stage in life when one comes to recognize one's limitations as irreversible, yet, presumably before old age, at least for those healthy enough to see it through gracefully, has taught the full wisdom of accepting what one doesn't know and what might never be. Indignation, of a rather mild kind, still rises in me at such a suggestion, and enthusiasm, if less likely to ignite and harder to keep alight, still warms at least most of my evenings' reading.

What I do not have now, I see, is that impatience to know something, anything new, that made me read so widely if not well, and that allowed me when I was a boy to be bored without stopping. That is what I think I now miss most. Taking up, for example, a huge new novel on a war in which I never had much interest, I could only manage, even with the best intentions, and in part at least as a duty to the awards committee on which I've agreed to spend another year, perhaps one hundred pages before I flung the thing away. What was I doing, I found myself asking no one but myself tonight, reading this catalogue of criminal stupidity, jungle-rot and futility, when I might instead be reading something, anything else from my nightstand? I can't just this minute imagine that there is anything about this particular war, a war within my memory, that I would wish to know that I don't already, certainly not from the perspective of yet another American veteran. Now that's just an idiotic thing to admit, I know, but so, I suspect, must any middle-aged, civilian reader, born before the end of Napoleon's era, have felt, had they had no unfulfilled curiosity about the siege of Moscow, when confronted by yet another foot soldier's memoirs. No amount of precise, not to say fetishistic detail of uniform, weather, rations and the condition of a soldier's feet, no recreation of maneuvers, however exacting, and no discussion of the politics within the army, could save such a book for such a reader. Perhaps only a Leo Tolstoy, writing well after the death of nearly everyone involved, and to a purpose greater than accurate reportage, could make a masterpiece out of such familiar suffering and carnage. And if this novel's not a masterpiece, or even anything much that's new to me, why am I reading it?

This book, this new book is a novel of a war I already know, a war I remember, a war about which I've already read enough if not too much, or at least too much of this. If I was already reluctantly reading this novel, and already willing to concede that even I could see how good and earnest it author's intentions were, nevertheless tonight I was finally convinced, and forced to admit, that it is indeed not a novel likely to someday find a place next to Tolstoy, or even be ranked as being by the James Jones of the Vietnam Conflict, and so... to Hell with it. This may not then be a bad novel -- and there have certainly been enough people whose opinion I respect who have encouraged me to think it a good book and worth reading -- but nevertheless, I simply do not want to read another word of the damned thing tonight.

And that, my friends, is a middle-aged man's confession. I can work up neither the indignation nor the enthusiasm to read another word. Maybe there is something in this new book I don't know and need to, or at least some story I would be the better for having read. Maybe I'll pick it up off the floor tomorrow and decide to give it another hundred pages to convince me, and maybe I won't.

Tonight though, before bed, I'm going to be reading Donne's Songs and Sonnets, again. War be damned.