George Washington by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn

Having just read Mary Higgins Clark, Mount Vernon Love Story, I thought it might be worth my while to read a biography of George Washington as a natural follow-up.  This book, not really a biography, is part of a series called The American Presidents edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.  It is the only book on George Washington that I found in the Harker Heights library. It’s a small library, what can I tell you.

Though our soldier-hero-president George Washington wasn’t the central theme of Clark’s Mount Vernon Love Story, she brought him to life effectively and I realized just how very little I knew about our first president.  From Clark’s book I learned that George Washington had an overbearing and stern mother, Washington’s mother being his father’s second wife. Washington had dreams of being a sailor but his mother prohibited it. Washington was not considered an educated man by the standards of his day or ours for that matter.  He was not from the upper crust of colonial landed gentry, his father being only a second or third tier landowner. Washington was, as we all know, physically commanding standing at over 6 feet.  He was athletic, a fine horseman, a brave soldier, a courageous leader and he was a good dancer, a prized quality with dancing being a popular pastime of his era. 

I read this short book in a focused manner using what I'd read about Washington in Clark's book as a starting point.  Clark's depiction of Washington was very accurate. Here are the salient points of this book for me.

Washington was unanimously elected Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Army.

Washington was unanimously elected President of the Constitutional Convention in 1787

Washington was unanimously elected President of the United States in 1789

Washington served for two terms from 1789 to 1797.

He worked hard to control his emotions, preferring instead to present always a calm manner and a voice of reason, reason being a quality he valued highly.

He had the somewhat daunting task of establishing parameters for and shaping the nature of the executive branch in this new and experimental form of government. He rose to the occasion.   He did not particularly like the idea of political parties and he often found himself negotiating between Hamilton (Federalism) on the one hand and Jefferson (Republic-anism) on the other.

 

 

Martha Washington, An American Life by Patricia Brady

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington (1731-1802) followed her hero-husband, General George Washington, from camp to camp during the Revolutionary War, and she followed him again to New York and then Philadelphia when he served two terms as the first president of the United States. 

 Martha Washington is what you would call a well-adjusted person, confidently self-knowledgeable and comfortable in her person, never pretending to be something she isn’t nor striving to be something she cannot be.  This is an enviable quality and made her likeable, successful and happy in her marriage. 

This was a nicely-written book, not terribly heavy reading (although I did get lost with all the family relations, nieces, nephews, adopted nieces and nephews and grandkids and great grandchildren).  The author gave just the right amount of attention to the backdrop of historical events playing out as we delved into Martha Washington’s life. 

 Martha’s first husband, Custis, was 20 years her senior and lived only seven years after they were married.  Martha was left widowed with two children and quite financially well off if not rich.  The Custis fortune was considerable.

What piqued my curiosity about Martha Washington was the book Mount Vernon Love Story by Mary Higgins Clark.  As mentioned elsewhere, Clark wrote about George and Martha's "love story," their marriage, in an engaging and understanding way.  After reading this book, Martha certainly seems to have been pretty much everything that Clark described and more.  

Clark's book gave slightly greater emphasis to the romance between George Washington and Sally Fairfax.  It is true that bachelor George had an eye for the married Sally Fairfax and that Fairfax and Washington had a flirtation and correspondence, but this author made very little of that unrequited romance seeming to explain that it was simply out of the question that Washington would have ever tried to steal Sally from his friend George Fairfax or, had he tried, that Sally would have succumbed.  It just wasn’t done.

 Read this book if you would like to “get inside” Martha Washington and her era.  It is a biography refreshingly devoid of psychologizing and tendentious analyses that many modern biographers so smugly (and boringly) engage in. 

Mary Higgins Clark

 I’ve mentioned the author but not a title!  That’s because when you read a Mary Higgins Clark book, you read her, Mary, the queen of suspense. 

I have finished my 7^th Mary Higgins Clark book. I don’t even need to tell you the title because Ms. Clark has a no-fail formula that consists of a compelling who dunnit, a female protagonist who is always spunky and independent-minded and a setting that is usually New York City or the tri-state area.  There is a healthy dose of District Attorneys and special investigators plus other assorted characters who end up fitting together as if it’s a Dickens novel.  

There are a lot of Catholic references and there’s a fair amount of gritty violence and fright in her books but always presented without gratuitous or graphic description.  There are truly unsavory characters but no foul language.  There is almost always a romance. 

What have I left out?  Only that her books are completely engaging and are easy reading for the end of the day when you want to disconnect and unwind.  

One thing I always wonder, though, why does Mary always mention what her characters are eating?   For example, she writes, Dinner was pasta with a glass of red wine or They both ordered omelettes, salads and coffee.  Why do you think?

Of the 7 books I’ve read, two stand out.  Where Are the Children is a fast read that is truly creepy. The other is her very first book, an historical novel called Mount Vernon Love Story.  It’s about the marriage of  George and Martha Washington and was apparently a flop.  Yet, in my opinion, this book is clearest proof that Mary is in fact a very good writer.  She used an interesting chronology to present the story and she wrote about the Washingtons with a gentle sort of realism, portraying them kindly, but not blind to their faults.  

I’ve read her at all because I picked up a hardcover signed copy of Daddy’s Little Girl at our church bazaar for $1. 

Do jump on the Mary Higgins Clark bandwagon!

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

 Dark, brooding, mysterious.  These are the adjectives that come to mind in trying to describe Heart of Darkness.  Perhaps, though, the editor’s introduction puts it better, that what this book “most resembles is a nightmare.”

Marlowe, first name apparently Charlie, is again our narrator but this time instead of taking us into the primitive darkness of Borneo as he did in Lord Jim, Marlowe heads us up the Congo River on a rusty steamer to find Kurtz. Kurtz is a white man, an ivory trader who has set himself up nicely deep in the darkness. What does Kurtz represent?  Where is the darkness?  What does it represent? 

Is Africa a Garden-of-Eden paradise corrupted by Western white men and his so-called morality.  Or is Africa a primitive, amoral wilderness in need of the West and a Western leader, in this case, Kurtz, to instill order?  If so, does Kurtz bring morality and civilization to the darkness? Or does he succumb to and become subsumed by the darkness? (Those human skulls decorating his palisade do raise some eyebrows.) 

If we weren’t living in a cultural era when every aspect of our lives is so racially and ethnically tinged, I would have read Conrad at a fairly superficial level, that is, as a Westerner and a Christian who is deeply skeptical of the wildness and wilderness of the non-Western world of Africa (and, in Lord Jim, Southeast Asia).  I would have simply concluded that Conrad uses these places to represent chaos and amorality where, when the Western world does penetrate, a modicum of order and safety prevail even though civilization never completely converts the darkness.  I might have also said that Conrad was questioning the ability of the human person to be truly moral and civilized.  I even considered that Conrad was questioning whether man can be virtuous, whether evil and darkness can be ever be vanquished, whether the Christian God even exists.

As for trendy condemnations of Conrad as a racist, that discussion is dull and a complete waste of time. 

Joseph Conrad was Polish.  I found that astonishing.  His real name was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.  He spoke three languages, presumably Polish, English and French and wrote in English, which I assume was not his native language. He became an English citizen at the age of 29 and he was a sea faring man, a captain, and used his own experiences as the basis for his writing.

Despite not really feeling successful at plumbing the depths of either Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim, I truly enjoyed being transported to Conrad’s darkness in both of these books. 

 

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

 Lo these many years I’ve avoided reading this book.  A dull, dusty paperback version of Lord Jim was always floating around our house when I was growing up.  The book could almost always be found sitting on the little bookshelf in the bathroom.  The type was dense and small and the pages were yellow and dry. I’d press the book shut as soon as I’d opened it and I was always opening it, trying to figure out what it was about, why it looked so boring, why that shadowy figure on the cover in black and red.

 Yet now, some decades later, the story has captured my imagination. 

 Jim had a dilemma. Jim escaped his dilemma in the second half of the book. Jim then found himself in another dilemma.  The resolution of his final dilemma was a bit recondite, but my interpretation is that he resolved his final dilemma in a manner directly opposite to the manner in which he resolved his first dilemma, with an act of self-sacrifice in the case of the final dilemma rather than an act of cowardice as in the case of his first dilemma.

 For Jim’s dilemma is indeed cowardice and the circumstances under which he commits his act of cowardice make for excellent reading and just a good story about pilgrims and voyages and shipwrecks in foreign seas. I loved the way Conrad used a narrator, Marlowe, to tell the story and I liked the dis-chronology Marlow—Conrad—used to tell us the story.  It kept me hopping, involved, made for a mystery-type of read.  The setting, 19^th century British colonialism amidst the remote islands of the Celebes Sea, the Java Sea, the Malay peninsula, the isle of Borneo and other places I had to look up on a map, also made the book intriguing.

 As for what the book is “really” all about, I don’t know.  The introduction of the edition I read (Everyman’s Library, 1992) had a somewhat helpful piece written by Norman Sherry, but there was nothing there that I could finally hang my hat on.  At times, Conrad seemed to want us to see a distinction between the romantic vision of the world that Jim had and a pragmatic vision of the world that opposed him.  To that I would add what I wrote about Heart of Darkness and the theme of civilization’s ability to tame the evil and wildness in the human soul. 

 This book demands to be read a second time if only for the story part of it.  Oh, and why did I read it in the first place, this dry, dusty paperback of my youth? Not being a student of literature,  I thought that maybe it was Conrad’s Lord Jim which had inspired Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny.  There is a common thread in that both stories have the air of a psychological drama about them and include a cowardly act, but then again, Wouk’s book called to my mind everything from Conrad’s Lord Jim to Melville’s Moby Dick (Captain Queeg and Queequeg and ships and Pacific islands) and Billy Bud (a sailor who has a dilemma).

 See my notes on Joseph Conrad the person in my Heart of Darkness commentary.