The Guardian's 100 Best Nonfiction Books: No 56 – 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain (1883)

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers his pick of Mark Twain’s Life On the Mississippi for number 56 in the 100 best nonfiction books.

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.”

Here is the unmistakable voice of America’s greatest and most original, prose writer describing the childhood that would inspire his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Mark Twain (for it is he) goes on:

“When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had the hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”

Life on the Mississippi is not just the brilliant sketch that precedes the vaster and more colourful canvas of a celebrated novel, it expresses the heart and soul of Samuel Clemens, the alter ego of Mark Twain. Alongside The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), this tour de force of unreliable reportage, spliced with travel, history and memoir, provides a deep insight into Huckleberry Finn as well as a key to its author and his outrageous originality. As his most recent biographer, Ron Powers, has put it: “Twain’s way of seeing and hearing things changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things. He was the Lincoln of American literature.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/27/100-best-nonfiction-books-56-life-on-the-mississippi-mark-twain 

How British Spy And Traitor Guy Burgess Charmed The Observer’s Man In Moscow

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on British spy and traitor Guy Burgess and his meetings with a British newspaperman.

Ever since two members of the Foreign Office, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, both Cambridge graduates, screeched their Austin saloon to a halt in Southampton docks and scrambled aboard the midnight ferry to Saint-Malo in the closing minutes of 25 May 1951, their dramatic flight has sponsored a minor genre.

Now, with the release by MI5 of secret documents dealing with the Burgess and Maclean scandal, there is a new perspective on the betrayal that enthralled a generation. Two biographies of Burgess and a forthcoming account of Maclean (Orphan: The Lives of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps) are just the latest manifestations of 1950s spy-mania. From thrillers and biographies to Alan Bennett’s television drama An Englishman Abroad, the “missing diplomats” (it was several weeks before their treachery as Soviet spies was confirmed) have inspired thousands of column inches.

The awesome scale of Russian penetration became a national obsession. In government, there was disbelief; among the reading public, fascination. Throughout the 1950s, the top newspaper story from Moscow was less to do with Stalin or Khrushchev than Burgess and Maclean, who became a strange kind of national brand as familiar to British readers as Fortnum & Mason or Gilbert and Sullivan.

Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert – review

The second recent biography of the cold war spy adds much to a familiar story thanks to newly released files

 

Read more

For the defectors, their new life in the Soviet Union was both Yeomen of the Guardand Pirates of Penzance. Burgess was as worldly, reckless and compelling as his co-conspirator was stiff, ideological and forbidding. Where Maclean made a new career as “Mark Frazer”, instructing Soviet diplomats and avoiding British journalists, Burgess remained himself, a charming and erratic high-living homosexual, who continued to cruise and booze with Rabelaisian joie de vivre.

The sensational irruption of Guy Burgess, either on the telephone or in person, became a bizarre rite of passage for the English visitor to Soviet Moscow. On his first meeting with Michael Redgrave, who was playing in Hamlet with a touring Shakespeare company, Burgess was so drunk he threw up in the star’s dressing room, a story that would eventually attract Bennett’s attention.

Not everyone was enchanted by Burgess: Edward Crankshaw, for instance, was typical of the 1950s Observer. Like David Astor, his editor, he had done secret work in the second world war, serving in Moscow and then at Bletchley Park. Astor, who often hired journalists with wartime intelligence connections, brought Crankshaw on to his staff in 1947 to specialise in Soviet Russia.

As an Observer recruit, Crankshaw had even been summoned by Burgess, in his Foreign Office guise, for a dressing-down for being “too soft towards Russia”. It was Crankshaw’s first meeting with Burgess and he was not impressed. But he was no ordinary journalist. Steeped in Russia, Crankshaw seems always to have mixed reportage with espionage, attracting the attention of both the CIA and the KGB.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/cambridge-spy-guy-burgess-charmed-observer-files

The 100 Best Nonfiction Books: No 7 - 'The Right Stuff' By Tom Wolfe (1979)

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a series on the 100 best nonfiction books and selected Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff as number seven.

It was the right choice.

Newspapers and magazines often provide an indispensable patronage for writers. The Right Stuff is one of several great books in this list that derive from the interaction of high journalism and a higher literary ambition. In 1972, Rolling Stone commissioned its star reporter to cover the launch of Nasa’s final Apollo moonshot, one of many moments that marked the end of the 60s.

Tom Wolfe responded with what he later described as just “some ordinary curiosity”. What was it, he wondered, that would make a man “willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?”

Wolfe decided, he says rather disingenuously, “on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17.”

The upshot was a four-part piece entitled “Post-Orbital Remorse”, which appeared in Rolling Stone during 1973. There was, however, an afterlife to Wolfe’s “ordinary curiosity”. He had stumbled on a “psychological mystery” – the motivation of the men involved, and his fascination with his own response. “I discovered quickly enough,” he wrote later, “that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question, or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/14/100-best-nonfiction-no-7-right-stuff-tom-wolfe

Catch-22: No 80 On The Guardian's 100 Best Novels List

I've read Joseph Heller's comic classic Catch-22 three times in my life. I was a teenager in high school the first time I read Catch-22 and I thought the WWII novel was funny.

The second time I read the novel was a few years later when I was an 18-year-old sailor serving aboard an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. Unlike Heller at the time, I was a military hawk and I supported the U.S. efforts in Vietnam. Yet I enjoyed the anti-war novel even more the second time I read it, as I recognized more clearly and intimately some of the absurdities of military life and war.

The third and last time I read Catch-22 I was in my 40s and I was serving as the civilian administrative officer of  a Defense Department Command in Philadelphia. I was working closely with high-ranking military officers, so from this additional perspective, I got a kick out of Heller's satiric look at command leadership.

Today I remain a military hawk and I still don't subscribe to Heller's world-view. But now that I've left the Defense Department and I cover the military as a writer, perhaps it is time to once again read Catch-22. 

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian takes a look back at the novel, as he ranks Catch-22 at number 80 in the newspaper's list of 100 Best Novels.

In 1962, writing in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan saluted Catch-22 as “the most striking debut in American fiction since Catcher in the Rye.” Within a year, he had been joined, in a chorus of praise, by writers as various as Harper Lee, Norman Mailer and Graham Greene. More than 50 years later, this brilliant novel still holds an unforgettable comic grip on the reader.

“It was love at first sight,” Heller begins, setting the tone for everything that follows. “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

Bombardier Yossarian is in a military hospital with a pain in his liver that’s not quite jaundice. Hinting at the famous “catch” of the title, Yossarian can be treated if he’s got jaundice, but discharged if he hasn’t. If neither, then he’s in a Kafkaesque limbo, where he’s at the mercy of fate.

This anticipates the notorious conditions under which a combat airman can be grounded: you have to be insane before you’re excused flying combat missions, but if you don’t want to fly any more missions that proves you are not insane. The OED defines this “Catch-22” as “a difficult situation from which there is no escape, because it involves mutually conflicting or dependent conditions”, which is a very dull way to describe the absurd crux whose mad logic exhilarates every page of one of the greatest war novels of all time.

Bombardier Yossarian, who is at odds with his own side as much as with the enemy, is an unforgettable second world war Everyman, whose cat-and-mouse relationship with a cast of deranged oddballs – Milo Minderbinder, Major Major and Doc Daneeka – is played out, amid mounting absurdity, on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean. It’s 1944, and Yossarian has figured out that “the enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on”.

Inevitably, the high comedy with which the novel opens eventually modulates into a darker, bleaker humour, and movingly, it’s the tragic death of rear-gunner Snowden which reminds us that Heller’s merriment is the kind of gallows laughter that’s inspired by the horror of war.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/30/robert-mccrum-100-best-novels-catch-22-joseph-heller

Note: I was disappointed in Mike Nichol's 1970 film adaptation of Catch-22, despite the film's fine cast. In contrast, I thought Robert Altman's 1970 film M*A*S*H was a fine adaptation of Richard Hooker's comic novel.

You can read Roger Ebert's review of the film Catch-22 via the below link:

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/catch-22-1970

The Guardian's 100 Best Novels: No. 62 - 'The Big Sleep' By Raymond Chandler (1939)

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, selected by the newspaper as number 62 in their 100 Best Novels series.

Enter Philip Marlowe, one of the great characters in the Anglo-American novel, a protagonist to rival and possibly surpass Sherlock Holmes. Marlowe holds the key to the enduring appeal of this novel and the six that followed. In 1951, Chandler told his publisher, “It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life.”

Maybe he should not have been surprised. Chandler fully understood the archetypal fictional detective, and had been polishing the character for years. In The Simple Art of Murder (1950) he describes such a man in a famous passage:

“He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man… He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”

Chandler might have been describing Philip Marlowe, who made his debut in this first novel, after several appearances in Chandler’s pulp fiction stories. He once observed of his celebrated style: “I’m an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/24/100-best-novels-the-big-sleep-raymond-chandler

  

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Raymond Chandler's influence on crime novels and crime films via the below link:

 

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/on-raymond-chandlers-influence-on-crime.html

 

 

And you can read my interview with Tom Williams, who wrote a Raymond Chandler biography via the below link:

 

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/03/my-crime-beat-column-mysterious.html 

The Guardian's 100 Best Novels: No 54 - "The Maltese Falcon" By Dashiell Hammett (1929)

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on Dashiell Hammett's classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon, which comes in at number 54 in the newspaper's 100 Best Novels series.

Raymond Chandler, who has yet to appear in this series, once said: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did, he did superbly.” He added, in a summary that helps define Hammett’s achievement: “He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving.

The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces Sam Spade, the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to Philip Marlowe. Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some 30 or 40 times.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/29/100-best-novels-the-maltese-falcon-dashiell-hammett-sam-spade-raymond-chandler  

You can check out the Guardian's list of 100 Best Novels via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-100-best-novels

Herman Melville, The Last Great Enigma Of American Literature

Robert McCrum wrote an interesting piece about Herman Melville and Jay Parini's The Passages of Herman Melville, a fictional account of the great author of Moby Dick in the British newspaper The Guardian:

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/30/herman-melville-mark-twain-parini