by Peter Cates

John Dos Passos

Novelist John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was most famed for U.S.A., a trilogy of 3 novels- The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money– all of which were published between 1930 and 1936, years of the “Great” Depression and the resulting misery and turbulence .

Dos Passos was a very committed progressive until the mid-30s Spanish Civil War between General Franco’s fascists and the Loyalists who wanted a socialist government. When the Soviet Union sent soldiers and supplies to help the Loyalists against Franco who had the support of Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin’s agents were murdering fellow Loyalists, including a close friend of Dos Passos.

The author became disillusioned with progressivism and became a staunch conservative who was later a loyal supporter of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.

From the beginning, his novels mixed fiction with historical vignettes and were written in an impressionistic manner where the rules of English grammar and sentence structure were often disregarded. Also, he would show a certain bias in depicting the struggles of social justice versus the selfish rich.

A 1961 novel Midcentury has a similar narrative pattern but the bias has changed to a more conservative one as seen in the following passage in which the labor unions have their own thugs and workers are getting very little for their membership dollars while Union leaders own Cadillacs (as in Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters) :

“Denial of the working man’s most elementary rights, the underworld’s encroachment on the world of daily bread, slugging, shootings, embezzlement, thievery, gangups between employers and business agents, the shakedown, the syndicate, oppression, sabotage, terror.

” ‘Instead of serving the members of the unions, you are serving a national dictatorship, ‘ Senator McClellan told a restaurant workers’ organizer. ‘Captive members have no control, no authority, no contract, no entry to the union’s affairs. They are virtually captives. They have to do what they are told if they want to work.’ ”

For what it’s worth, Dos Passos’s technique of writing remains an inspiration to novelists whose world views are radically different from his, quite the tribute to his style and originality.

Edward Stettinius

FDR’s Secretary of State Edward Stettinius (1900-1949) accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta in February , 1945, for meetings with Churchill and Stalin. In 1946, he had personality conflicts with Truman and resigned.

In a book of memoirs on the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt and the Russians, which was published in 1950, a year after Stettinius died suddenly from a heart attack, he describes Stalin’s equally evil Security Chief Beria (1899-1953):

“I had been informed that he was one of the strong men in the Politburo, and he impressed me that evening as being hard, forceful, and extremely alert.”

Edith Mathis

A 1966 LP (Seraphim 60015) features soprano Edith Mathis, still living at 85, singing nine very beautiful German songs by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) who is best known for his oratorio Messiah. She is accompanied by a very accomplished group of musicians on the recorder, flute, oboe, bassoon, violin, viol da gamba and harpsichord.

Victor Herbert

RCA Victor’s 1960 album, The Music of Victor Herbert (1856-1924) presents a dozen of his operetta songs which were rightfully popular more than 100 years ago and are still heard from time to time. They include March of the Toys from Babes in Toyland, Ah Sweet Mystery of Life which was a megahit 78 for Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy and In Old New York.

British arranger George Melachrino and his orchestra gave performances which conveyed the music’s melodic simplicity without the syrup so often heard on way too many occasions.

Herbert was also a cellist and Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Scandal

I recently started bingeing on Scandal, starring Kerry Washington, Katie Lowes, Darby Stanchfield, Guillermo Diaz, Tony Goldwyn and others who give fine performances in a series that depicts a crisis management law firm in the nation’s capital. Beginning in 2012, the show ran for seven seasons . Thus far, season one’s first four episodes have left me eager for more.

The 1934 black and white Anne of Green Gables had fine performances from 16-year-old Dawn Evelyn Paris (1918-1993) who later took the name of Anne Shirley as her own after portraying the main character; Helen Westley as Anne’s gruff but good-hearted guardian Merilla; O.P. Heggie as Merilla’s kindly brother Matthew; and Sara Hadon as a nosy neighbor, the typecast kind of personality she was quite gifted at during Hollywood’s golden years.

by Peter Cates

Roger Boyle

For some years, I have found that the only criticism worth reading, whether books, music, etc., is that which has a passion for the subject, and a sense that the writing is a means of putting one’s thoughts in order while bringing the reader along in this journey.

In his endlessly rereadable Collected Essays, Graham Greene achieved this consistently. Among his interests were the English playwrights from after Shakespeare to the 18th century. One essay, An Unheroic Dramatist, is a 1937 book review of The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, edited by William Smith Clark.

Looking up Boyle (1621-1679) on Wiki, I find out he was an Irish Protestant landowner, soldier, historian and poet. He was ferociously anti-Catholic and sided with the English against the Irish Catholics and other independents. And he blew the way the wind blew. He supported the rule of King Charles the First (1600-1649) before that monarch was overthrown and beheaded in the Tower of London, then aligned himself with the King’s adversary Oliver Cromwell after the latter took power and, after Cromwell’s death in 1659, made the leap to safety in supporting King Charles the Second who came back to the throne after being in exile.

I offer the opening paragraph of Greene’s book review for an assessment of Boyle’s merits as a writer and playwright:

“Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, is one of the great bores of literature, and it can hardly have been a labour of love for Mr. Clark to edit for the first time eight ponderous heroic plays, hardly lightened by two attempts at comedy. Yet all admirers of the period will be grateful: there is a peculiar satisfaction in seeing one more gap in Restoration scholarship filled with such immense efficiency: no crack between the bricks. …They will read with gorged satisfaction that one of these plays, The Tragedy of Zoroastes, has never before been printed that Orrery’s first play, The Generall, had been previously printed only in a private edition of eighty copies. Another great booming bogus piece, The Tragedy of King Saul, is added to the Orrery Canon for the first time. All this, with the really magnificent notes on Restoration [term for the 1660s monarchy of Charles the Second] stage-craft, is a not unworthy harvest of eight years labour.”

This is a very good example of Greene’s razor sharp clarity with words, his passion for this period of literature, his occasional willingness to be bored and his finely tuned ability at separating the wheat from the chaff.

Forgettable songs

A 1910 acoustically recorded 10 inch shellac record, Columbia A897, contains two glaringly awful old-fashioned deservedly forgettable songs:

Side A – Any Little Girl, That’s A Nice Little Girl, Is The Right Little Girl For Me, as sung by then 18-year-old Walter Van Brunt (1892-1971).

Side B – I’ve Got The Time; I’ve Got The Place, But It’s Hard To Find The Girl, as vocalized by Henry Burr, the frequently used recording name for Harry McClaskey (1882-1941).

Deservedly forgettable but a historically fascinating record of sheer idiocy in Tin Pan Alley songwriting before World War I erupted.

How to Get Away With Murder

Last night I watched the first episode of an ABC series, How To Get Away With Murder, which ran for six seasons beginning in 2014. The opening episode was sporadic in its interest but actress Viola Davis as the main character, a law professor at a prestigious university somewhere in Philadelphia, was well worth watching.

 

 

 

 

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by Peter Cates

What It Takes

A 1992 book, What It Takes, by the late Richard Ben Cramer (1950-2013) examined the lives of six candidates in the 1988 race for the White House: Republicans Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush (1924-2018) and Democrats Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephart and Gary Hart. It weighs in at over 1,000 pages and is written in an incisively fascinating narrative style that lends itself to dipping into because, life being much too short, one may not have enough time to slog through the entire volume.

In my continuing series on past presidents, I couldn’t have come across, among the piles of unread books in my house, this one at a better time as when I needed something interesting on George Herbert Walker Bush, #41, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Since birth, Bush had lived a life of wealth and privilege inside a bubble and Cramer zeroed in on a key moment before the 1981 inauguration when the newly-elected vice-president represented Ronald Reagan at the Massachusetts funeral of former Democrat House Speaker John McCormack:

“It was as George Bush left the church, and all the other mourners were held at the door, as he was guided through a gauntlet of men to the limousine waiting in a ten-car train, as the agents closed him in behind bulletproof steel and glass, and stood round the car, scanning the sidewalks and the empty street ahead, as the motorcycles roared to life and George Bush could no longer hear the men and women with whom he had prayed only minutes before, and he could see only the backs of the agents and the streak of two-wheelers past his shaded window, as even the church was rendered invisible by the men and machines walling him away, then George Bush drew one deep breath, as he turned from the window, and he said to friends in the car:

” ‘God!…Isn’t it great? D’ya ever see so many cops?’ ”

For what it’s worth, I voted for HW in both 1988 and 1992, he had some truly good qualities that, in scanning this book, Cramer seems to have ignored, and I have never regretted these votes.

A hilariously true quote about the vice-president job description was provided by FDR’s #2 man, John Nance Garner (until Franklin dropped him from the 1940 ticket in favor of Henry Wallace): “A bucket of warm spit!”

Coincidentally, both Bush and Cramer shared the same birthday of June 12, along with my nephew Philip Cates, in Florida.

California Split

A 1974 film, California Split, directed by Robert Altman (1925-2006), dealt with the sleazy world of gambling casinos in Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada. One saw the full range of humanity, warts and all, at the card games, slot machines and horse races, from the out of state grandmothers to the starry eyed youth.

The wide spanning cinematography had a certain poetic lyricism in its capturing of detail. The landscape of a highway bus ride from Los Angeles to Reno, along with the glimpses into the 1970s street life of both cities, gave me goosebumps.

I remember enjoying it a lot when it first came out 50 years ago, I recently rewatched it on Amazon Prime and I enjoyed it even more.

Elliott Gould, still living at 85, and the late George Segal (1934-2021) portray two addicted gamblers, Charlie and Bill, who bet heavily at poker games, blackjack, boxing matches, basketball games etc., winning a little, losing a lot and getting into difficulties with their banks, bookies and more ominous characters.

One situation has them winning a lot of cash at poker in LA but encountering a dangerous sore loser who, later that evening, robs them at gunpoint and kicks their ribs several times in the process.. Later in Reno, Charlie sees the robber, follows him into the men’s room, kicks him in the ribs, busts his nose and takes back his cash.

While in Reno, the two, having staked each other, experience a miraculous winning streak of over $82,000, and divide the cash evenly; Charlie wants to continue with the heavy betting everywhere and anywhere but Bill decides to turn over a new leaf and the two men go their separate ways.

Actresses Ann Prentiss (1939-2010) and Gwen Welles (1951-1993) portray two prostitutes Babara and Susan who share an apartment with Charlie and both women brought a wonderful sensitivity to their roles.

Actress Barbara Ruick (1930-1974) brought a beautifully vivid presence as the bartender in the private room hosting a high stakes poker game. Before the movie was released, she complained of headaches and nausea, went to bed early and was found dead in her hotel room the next morning. The cause of death was an aneurysm . The closing credits mentioned her in memory.

Her husband was composer John Williams, still living at 91, who dedicated his Violin Concerto also to her memory.

In the 1956 musical Carousel, Miss Ruick portrayed Carrie Snow, the close friend of Julie Jordan portrayed by Shirley Jones, and sang beautifully in that role. The musical was also filmed in Maine’s own Boothbay Harbor.

The Sound of Tomorrow

In 1963, RCA Victor released a one dollar LP sampler of its new pop and classical releases, The Sound of Tomorrow, and sold it through Buick automobile dealerships around the country. I bought my copy at the then-Silver Street dealership, in Waterville, that was owned by a friend of the family, the late Nick Saporita and played it to death.

I came into a second copy of the LP recently as part of a free crate of records otherwise headed for a dumpster. The Sound of Tomorrow referred to the Dynagroove recording process which proved, in the long run, because of its dryness of sound to be a deterioration in quality of sound rather than an advance.

Anyway, the pop and classical selections were quite good, ranging from the jazz influenced percussion of Dick Schory’s Stompin’ at the Savoy and Sid Ramin’s brassy arrangement of Spring is Here to soprano Leontyne Price’s Un Bel Di or One Fine Day from Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly and Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony in the Mahler First Symphony Scherzo movement.

by Peter Cates

Fred Bonnie

Bridgton native Fred Bonnie (1945-2000) attended a two-room schoolhouse, in North Bridgton, until his father’s death in 1954 and the family’s move to Portland. He graduated in 1964 from Cheverus High School and in 1971 with honors from the University of Vermont.

Mr. Bonnie moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he became gardening editor for Southern Living Magazine for a number of years and taught writing courses at the Uni­versity of Alabama.

He wrote novels, collections of short stories and books on gardening and best expressed his beginnings as a writer and his thematic concerns in two paragraphs found in the author biographies section of the 1989 anthology Maine Speaks:

“Growing up in Maine had a lot to do with my becoming a writer. As a child, I was indoctrinated with the Natives-versus-Outsiders frame of mind. Complaining about the outsiders has become the state sport. In Portland, I was exposed to a broad range of human types. Portland is small, but has some people most of us would call weird. A port city tends to have street people, some interesting, some just pitiful. But decades before the street people gained national news attention, they were common in downtown Portland.

“As a part-time dishwasher in a downtown restaurant when I was in high school, I observed at close range the types of people John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell were writing about in the 1930s and ‘40s. I write about people trying to deal with life. I’ve always sympathized with underdogs. I hope I always do.”

In a short story, The State Meet, and in keeping with Fred Bonnie’s interest in, and compassion for, the underdogs of society and the ever-present undercurrents of indescribable anxieties intruding into the inner emotional lives of these underdogs, Fred Bonnie’s gift for connecting Maine’s at times not so beautiful landscape with the terrors of a teenage boy on a very long bus ride from Portland to a state cross country race at an unnamed University near Bangor is conveyed in the following passage-

“By the time the bus reached Bangor, the sky was grayer and colder. Rain seemed certain. Daniel hated running in the rain, with the paths muddy and the grassy fields like swamps. The drive from Bangor to the University field house was short. They arrived long before Daniel could accept being there. He was the last one to leave the bus.”

On May 13, 2000, Fred Bonnie died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident three days earlier. He was 54.

Lionel Barrymore

An MGM/Longines Symphonette LP features the great actor Lionel Barrymore (1878-1954) portraying Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens justly immortal A Christmas Carol. Barrymore conveyed a presence in that role that, for me, was only surpassed by Alastair Sims in the 1951 black and white English film version, although others such as Reginald Owens in the 1937 MGM American version; Mister Magoo in the early ‘60s cartoon; and George C. Scott in one made for TV during the 1980s, each scored points as the miser turned kind man in the space of a few hours.
Side 2 has David Rose and his orchestra doing 12 Xmas carols in nicely old-fashioned arrangements with lots of strings and quite the change from Rose’s brassy 1960s megahit, The Stripper.

Ronald Reagan

In the on-going survey of former presidents, I shall deal with Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) quickly and concisely.

A. His last film as a mobster in the 1964 made for TV, The Killers, with co-stars John Cassavetes, Claude Akins, Lee Marvin, Clu Gulagher and Angie Dickinson was riveting.

B. His brokering of a treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev remains a fine example of diplomacy, good will and friendship with a former Premier of the former Soviet Union and an ideological adversary.

C. His courage in writing a farewell letter to the American people when he was beginning his downslide with dementia and Alzheimer’s.