Ex Libris

Two works by Americans are canonical references for anyone who really wants to understand this monumental, cataclysmic event:

• Red Star over China, by Edgar Snow
• Fanshen, by William Hinton

Edgar Snow worked as a journalist in China as a young man and traveled to Yenan, the remote base of the Chinese Communists, shortly after the Long March brought them there in 1935. This was a period where little to nothing was known of Mao Tse-Tung and his associates or the Communist movement in China, extensive as it was. There had been a number of Soviet areas in south China governing millions of people in the early thirties - it was because of their encirclement by the Chiang Kai-shek forces of the Kuomintang (KMT) in the fifth anti-Communist extermination campaign that the legendary Long March was necessary to escape the old bases and relocate in the northwest at Yenan in Shaanxi. Snow interviewed Mao and other top leaders fresh from this epic campaign; till that point and long after, his account was the only one known in the West. He somehow got Mao to open up about his own background, something almost irregular among these self-effacing revolutionaries.

I still remember the day in seventh grade when, alone in the classroom, I found the geometry problems section in the appendix of one of our books and started to work them out, tentatively at first, but increasingly confidently as they started falling into place. Joyfully too -- bitten by the bug and still infected after all these years. The problem notebooks become buried under files with more pressing business, always to be brought back to the top after a time to receive another solution.

The preoccupation can become an ongoing part of your psyche. Ramanujan used to say that a Hindu goddess came to him in dreams with his formulas and he would write them down first thing in the morning. Poincaré has a story (as I remember it) that he had hit a stone wall on a problem after considerable application. He decided he needed a break and took a trip to the country by bus. When disembarking, as his foot rose from the last step and before it fell on the ground, the solution came to him. I was waiting for a friend at a bar once and drew a diagram of a geometry problem I'd been working on unsuccessfully on a napkin, not even applying myself, just doodling absent-mindedly, when the solution revealed itself.

This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart – but you will never forget it

So says the front of my copy of The Catcher in the Rye (24th printing of the Signet paperback, December 1962), a wrenching picture of Holden in flight on the cover. J. D. Salinger, Rest in Peace, dead at 91 on January 27, 2010. Like my friend Dan says, a moment of note for boys of a certain age.

The Catcher in the Rye was my first hint that a book can hit the mark, a gentle introduction to the power of literature at the age of fifteen.

Oddly enough, I wouldn't include most science fiction of my acquaintance in this category. Take that wonderful Philip K. Dick story where an itinerant handyman from around 1900 is transported together with horse and wagon to far in the future and interferes in major ways with the society of that time due to his preternatural mechanical ability and instinctive understanding of their advanced technology. It's a trick premise, but once granted, the changed physical and social environment depicted is well within reach. The people and their motivations, the political machinations, and so on -- all are similar to what you'd find in Jane Austen, given the different context.

Taking yourself too seriously is an occupational hazard of teaching. That's not surprising -- teachers have near absolute authority in the classroom, often with little oversight or supervision, especially at the higher levels; and an effective classroom presence requires projecting confidence, knowledge, and authority. The situation lends itself to dramatic and comic possibilities. Many good academic novels are written by professors, English professors in particular, and abound in allusion. Jane Austen specialist Morris Zapp in David Lodge's Changing Places, for example, names his children Elizabeth and Darcy. I missed that one until Lodge hit me over the head, but then was ready for Janet Dempster, heroine of George Eliot's Janet's Repentance. One uptight genius in the story talks himself out of a promotion by admitting he's never read Hamlet, because he thought it bought him some points at a dinner party.

Patrick Hunter S.J. introduced me to the Russians one day in 1962 by way of a little Chekhov story called Gooseberries. If you can even call it a story, direct and artless as it was. There was little plot and less drama, a first person story within a story about a retired government clerk who had realized his fondest lifelong dream of retiring in the country, only to be consumed by an empty all-consuming greed and without the spiritual resources to recognize or even admit to himself his utter failure. "You must never forget there are people in pain", summed up the narrator as I remember it, "We all need someone in the wall to knock on occasion to remind us." Mr. Hunter was a sly one, my religion and home room as well as English teacher. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam -- he lived it (still does, God willing).

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's [slave's] two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

-- Abraham Lincoln (March 4, 1865 at his second Inauguration)

The great mathematician Niels Abel encouraged all to study the masters rather than their pupils, good advice in the case of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Inspired by the Jeremy Brett adaptations from British TV, excellent in their own right and meticulously faithful it seems, I took up the hardcover Castle edition, complete with the original Sidney Paget illustrations ($8.00!). Conan Doyle released the first twenty-four stories between July 1891 and November 1893, and finished Holmes off in the last one (The Adventure of the Final Problem). The hero returned in The Hound of the Baskervilles and thirteen more stories (The Return of Sherlock Holmes) from 1901 through 1905. All were serialized in The Strand magazine and are about fifteen pages long in my edition, excepting the novella length Hound.

It is fitting to memorialize this epic battle today, the seventieth anniversary of its turning point. Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, the fascist hordes had thrown the Red Army back across to steppes, all the way to the banks of the mighty Volga. They had massacred their way through western Russia and the Ukraine, successfully continuing the blitzkrieg tactics resulting in the encirclement and near annihilation of multiple Soviet armies. Soviet propaganda then and subsequently put a stoic face on it all, but realistic accounts betray the sense of hopelessness and despair prevalent in the army as they saw their best and bravest cut down in unequal matches again and again, never ending it must have appeared at the time. The massed armor, air support, and superior organization and communications of the Wehrmacht seemed invincible.