Two Novels by Herman Wouk

 

The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar are sufficiently well-known works of fiction that I won’t summarize them here. These novels are great reading. The former is one of the best fiction books I’ve read in ages; I literally couldn’t put it down.  This reading of Marjorie Morningstar was my second. I kept skimming the remembered chapters to leapfrog ahead to the ending which I couldn’t remember.  I wasn’t disappointed. 

I think Herman Wouk has a particular gift for writing about women. This is especially so in Marjorie Morningstar but even in The Caine Mutiny and that other curious novel of his, A Hole in Texas, Wouk seems to attribute a certain unattainability to his female protagonists, an inscrutability that the men in their lives can never fully apprehend.

Astoria by Peter Stark

 In the year 1808, German immigrant John Jacob Astor wrote a letter to President Thomas Jefferson suggesting Astor’s vision for American control of the fur trade on the North American continent.  In the years leading up to 1810, Astor, already having a significant footprint in the fur trade of upstate New York and northward, put his vision into action with the organization of two groups, one sea-going and one overland.  The two groups would meet at the Columbia River to there establish the young United States and Astor himself as major players--if not the only players--in the lucrative fur trapping-and-trading business of the Pacific Northwest.

The tale of John Jacob Astor’s visionary undertaking is as good an adventure story as you’ll ever read.  It is also a good entry point for exploring America’s inexorable push westward as the nation sought to fulfill its “manifest destiny” and extend the American nation from coast to coast.  

The opening chapters of the book deal with the sea-faring party of the Tonquin under the leadership of the sternly impersonal navy man, Captain Jonathan Thorn.  These chapters alone tell some hair-raising adventures! After rounding Cape Horn, stopping in Hawaii and losing some eight men, Thorn finally piloted the Tonquin across the bar and sailed up the Columbia River in March of 1811.   

Meanwhile, the overland party led by Wilson Price Hunt followed well behind schedule and didn’t come paddling down the Columbia River until February of 1812.  Theirs was an equally if not more hair-raising trip and the author does justice to the successes, trials and psychological intrigues of both parties with detailed and engaging narrative.  With all the intervening drama covered, we are brought up to the War of 1812 and the effect this international conflict had of essentially cancelling out much of the Astorians’ gains in the area.  The author discusses the significance of Astoria in the nation’s early history and gives a helpful follow-up summary on what happened to some of the more prominent Astorians.

None other than Washington Irving wrote the original account of Astoria at Mr. Astor’s request (and at Mr. Astor’s home at present-day location 87^th Street and York Avenue, NYC).  His book is entitled Astoria, or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains and was published to acclaim and popularity in 1836.  Irving made use of diaries and had also the advantage of personal interviews. 

Our current author, Peter Stark, used Irving’s work, minus the personal interviews of course, and other sources and added some nice signature touches of his own to the telling of the Astorian enterprise.  Mr. Stark grew up in the western environs and seems very familiar with the great outdoors having sailed and canoed with his father, and presumably, having done some hiking, camping and maybe mountain-climbing as well.  Stark went on-site to the Snake River, the Bighorn Mountains, the Blue Grass Mountains, the Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island and other places to steep himself in the atmosphere in which the events of his book unfolded. 

I found the book to be a page-turner and very good reading even with occasional detours to look up dates and places.  The pictures and maps could have been better in my opinion.  The only possible quibble I might have is with what appeared to be the almost obligatory discussion in the Epilogue of whether or not John Jacob Astor was a mean capitalist with no feeling for the men who suffered and died for his cause.  That line of thinking serves only to cloud the facts and politicize history.

You will be glad to know that I read this book on the recommendation of a dining companion at a pleasant evening gathering. At the time, I was reading (actually re-reading) Bernard de Voto’s colorful and endlessly informative  The Year of Decision 1846 along with probably another book or two about the Oregon Trail and the westward expansion (see below).  My dining companion had just read Astoria.   I knew that we were reading about the same ball of wax but I couldn’t line up the people, places and dates until now when I got about a third of the way in to  Stark’s book. 

Astor’s venture was part of the beginning of the westward expansion. The year 1846 heralded its completion. You might say that I started my westward reading journey from the wrong direction!  By 1846, Astoria had faded into history and America’s Manifest Destiny had just about played itself out.  Texas and its vast miles had joined the Union in 1845, the Mexican-American War would yield us California, Arizona and other western land by 1848.  The disputed Oregon territory, site of Astoria, was finally ours in 1846, settled between President Polk and Great Britain at the 49^th parallel. Americans were about to begin the rush to California and hundreds moved along the Oregon Trail to the fertile Willamette Valley while the Santa Fe Trail carried others to the Southwest. 

I’m certainly pointed in the right direction now. The story of America’s push westward and the lives of the mountain men, trappers and traders, plus the visionaries and pioneers, the opportunists and wanderers who led the way is exciting and many-layered in all it has to reveal about how the American Republic and the American spirit intertwined to build the nation we have today. Should you be interested, allow me to list my to-date curated parade of books on this exciting phase of American history, a parade to which I can now add Astoria by Peter Stark.

 

Coda:

Accounts, diaries, etc. of the very early explorers to be compiled:   

Fr.Marquette and trader Joliet, 1673; Great Lakes to the Gulf for France

Francisco de Coronado; 1540-42; SW U.S. and Kansas

Sieur de LaSalle; 1682; Great Lakes, lower Mississippi, La Louisiane for France

            Alexander MacKenzie   early explorer who crossed the Rockies in Canada

The Year of Decision 1846             Bernard De Voto

Two Years Before the Mast            Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Across the Plains in 1844            Catherine Sager

The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate

                                                 Eliza Donner Houghton

Across the Plains with the Donner Party

                                                 Virginia Reed Murphy

Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail

                                                  Lewis Hector Garrard

History of the Donner Party     Charles Fayette McGlashan

A Life Wild and Perilous          Robert Utley

The American Fur Trade          Hiram Chittenden

Undaunted Courage                  Stephen Ambrose

Astoria                                      Peter Stark

Astoria , or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains

                                                  Washington Irving                               

Astoria & Empire                     James P. Ronda

Astorian Adventures                 Alfred Seton

Robert Stuart’s Narratives             in The Discovery of the Oregon Trail 

     Philip Ashton Rollins, ed.

Adventures of the First Settlers on the Columbia River    

     Alexander Ross

 

You may also wish to consult the report I wrote in 7^th grade titled “Trappers, Traders and Mountain Men”  😊  

                                                

Three Books About Donald Trump

These are not biographical books in any sense.  They are more in the vein of Rudy Giuliani’s Leadership.  Here we have campaign managers, an adviser and a press secretary who worked with Donald Trump, each author giving some insight into Trump and his presidency, but mostly, each author taking the opportunity to have their say regarding what they did during the Trump presidency.

Understanding Trump by Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich gives a thoughtful analysis of the political and historical landscape that accounted for the tremendous appeal and success of Donald Trump.  Gingrich is a Trump supporter and a very clever guy himself.

Let Trump Be Trump by Corey Lewandoski and David Bossie

The campaign managers give a tell-all-style account of what it was like to work with Trump, how he thought and how he conducted the business of getting elected to the presidency.  Good reading.

The Briefing by Sean Spicer

Sean Spicer’s book was the most tentative in its treatment of Donald Trump. It was also the most self-referential book.  Spicer seems a sincere and accomplished guy, but he’s a company man and too much a part of the establishment swamp to have anything insightful to offer about Donald Trump.

In the depressing aftermath of the 2020 election, I was looking for something, anything, to read about Trump that was neither mainstream media schlock nor highbrow intellectual elitism, both of which slam Trump as too boorish and stupid to be President. These books skimmed the surface but they all clearly conveyed that Trump is intelligent, high-energy and entrepreneurial.  He is always thinking outside the box.  He's an arrant maverick in a place like Washington D.C. and a force to be reckoned with.  He's a special threat to any and all career politicians, bureaucrats and  stick-in-the-muds.   

The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

This has to be one of the worst books I have ever read.  It follows the lives of some people whose names I can’t remember.  If I ever knew them.

We are supposed to want to read about these people because, I suppose, they are so colorfully small-town and one-dimensional yet they are so human and complex in their basic-ness.  The author supplies us with all the details of their sex lives.  I guess this is the way we are to see their one-dimensionality blossom into complexity. The whole mess is beyond me.  I found McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to be along the same lines; I couldn’t get past the first 40 pages.

Five Days in November by Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin

Clint Hill is the Secret Service agent assigned to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy during the Kennedy presidency. It is Mr. Hill in that iconic home movie footage who is seen jumping onto the trunk of the presidential limousine to push Mrs. Kennedy back down into the car after it passed the Book Depository in Dallas that fateful day in November of 1963.  

This book, with its many glossy photos and relatively scant text is essentially a coffee table book, but it does thoroughly chronicle the assassination and funeral of the President from the vantage point of Mr. Hill who was a constant presence during that time.  I felt it was worthwhile going through it.

Mr. Hill is a man with a story to tell; by the end of his career as a Secret Service agent he had served under five presidents.  I highly recommend this interview with Mr. Hill before even picking up any of his books.  He is a dispassionate storyteller (though he does finally share how the assassination impacted him personally) and he remains impartial about politics and personalities which allows the reader to distill what Mr. Hill has to say and then form one’s own opinions about the high pro-file people and events Mr. Hill encountered in his career.

Ten Dates Every Catholic Should Know by Diane Mozcar

Here are the dates and chapter headings just as given in this readable and rich book of less than two hundred pages.    

313 A.D.         The Edict of Milan and the Liberation of the Church
Constantine granted Christians the right to worship freely thus ending years of persecution.  Not to be confused with Theodosius I who declared Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 A.D.
 
452 A.D.         St. Leo Repulses the Huns 
I liked this chapter because of the historical background to the actual event when Pope Leo confronted Attila from across the Mincio River---“I am Leo, the Pope.”
 
496 A.D.         The Baptism of Clovis Gives Birth to France
One can never tire of reading the history of France’s formation as a Catholic nation: the Frankish Merovingians, Clovis, Clothilda, St. Genevieve, St. Remigius and the miracle of the chrism.
 
800 A. D.        The Coronation of Charlemagne, Father of Christendom
More on France with the Frankish mayor domos—Arnulf, the Pepins, Charles Martel, Pepin the Short--- who replaced the lazy Merovingian kings until the time of Charlemagne himself.  The author sees this era as the consolidation of Western Christianity.
 
910 A.D.         The Founding of Cluny and The Revival of Religious Life
William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine is the layman who founded Cluny.  Read on about St. Berno and St. Odo who carried out its mission.
 
1000 A.D.       Gateway to the Church’s Most Glorious Age
The High Middle Ages (1000-1300 A.D.) is the backdrop to events including Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy.
 
1517 A.D.       The Protestant Catastrophe
Obviously, a chapter about the Reformation. 
 
1571 A.D.       The Battle of Lepanto: Our Lady’s Naval Victory
Christianity is saved from the infidels.  The author sets the stage for Pope Pius V’s call to arms with Don Juan of Austria at the helm. She begins with John Hunyadi and St. John Capistrano and the Siege of Belgrade in 1456, includes Scanderberg and Albania and Suleiman the Magnificent’s attempts to break through to Vienna.  I have to admit I found the background more interesting than the famous naval battle itself.
 
1789 A.D.       The Age of Revolution
This chapter is devoted to the French Revolution as ushering in the “heady ideas” that “continue to influence the world today.”

1917 A.D.       Fatima and the Twentieth Century
One hundred and four years after Fatima, how much has changed?  The author notes the “doctrinal confusion” and “moral ambiguity” of the 21^st century. Yet, I think she intends the events of Fatima to be taken as hopeful despite our rather shoddy track record so far.
 
Now read the book.  You will not be disappointed.  The author writes in an accessible scholarly tone and she clearly knows and loves her subject.
 

Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson by Jan Jarboe Russell

Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson is of course our 36th First Lady of the United States, Ladybird.  She is rather inadequately portrayed in this book, but, this is the biography of Mrs. Johnson that I hastily grabbed from the small Harker Heights library collection so I read it.   I believe there are better books out there and until I read them I will comment only briefly on the general impressions of Ladybird I formed from both this book and the Johnson biography by Woods.

Ladybird, born in 1912 in Karnack in East Texas, would seem to be fairly representative of college educated women of her time and place. She worked for a time but is not described as particularly ambitious, yet neither does she come across as an empty-headed belle awaiting her Prince Charming. 

Indeed, with no particular training or related experience, she executed quite well the demands of being the wife of a high-profile political dynamo who ultimately ended up in the White House. 

A few rather unimportant thoughts remain with me after reading this book.  The first is the matter of how Ladybird handled the alleged adulterous affairs of her husband.  What is it with these men that they seem compelled to have women on the side?  It’s so thoughtless and self-involved. Supposing the accounts of LBJ’s philandering are true, it is said that Ladybird handled the philandering by ignoring it and, obviously, outlasting the “other” women.  I find it hard to believe that Ladybird never once confronted LBJ. She seems too practical and sensible a woman to have taken such treatment without a fight.    

Another thought, perhaps of only slightly more unimportance, is the fact that Ladybird outlived her husband by 34 years!  That’s a long time.  If this book covered how she spent those years, I have to confess that I’ve forgotten what she did. Ladybird’s health did suffer in her later years; she died at age 95 in 2007.

My third and perhaps only significant thought requires an introduction.  The Johnsons donated their ranch, the ‘Texas White House,’ to the National Park Service before LBJ’s death in 1973.  One of the highlights of the year 2015 for me was that Paul and I took a tour of the LBJ ranch.  How truly exciting to be walking through history and entering the rooms of a place I had heard of on the nightly news but could never understand. My 12 year old self couldn't conjure up even the vaguest picture of  what it meant for the President to be heading to the Texas White House.  Texas was miles away both geographically and in my imagination and, anyway,  nobody that I knew had more than one home. 

The ranch setting, in the Hill Country of Texas along the Pedernales River, is bucolic and beautiful.  The house is roomy and comfortable but not at all ostentatious.  Though the tour does not extend to the second floor of the home, it is an intimate tour and includes a walk-through of the President and First Lady’s closets and bedroom.  As part of the dining room and kitchen tour, we were of course reminded that on that fateful day in November of 1963, the Johnson staff was preparing for the upcoming overnight stay of President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline.  There is an airplane hangar (with exhibits and gift shop) and runway on the ranch and there are other historic sites, including the burial plots of the President and First Lady. 

Contrary to some accounts, the park ranger who conducted our tour said that Mrs. Johnson lived in the house even while it was open to the public.  The fact that, at her advanced age and no longer squarely in the limelight, she would share her privacy by sharing her home brings me to my third thought.  Claudia  “Ladybird” Taylor Johnson rightly saw herself  as a public servant who had a responsibility to the people she and her husband had served.  She saw herself as an individual in her own right who would occupy a place in history.

Windows for the Crown Prince by Elizabeth Gray Vining

During the post-World War II American occupation of Japan, Elizabeth Vining was selected to be the English tutor for Crown Prince Akihito. Written with complete and refreshing candor, this book recounts in Mrs. Vining’s own words her four years in Japan in that capacity.

The idea of an English tutor was not imposed by the Occupation but was, rather, the idea of Emperor Hirohito himself.  He stipulated that the tutor should be a “Christian but not a fanatic,” someone who did not speak Japanese and someone who knew little to nothing about Japan.  Elizabeth Vining certainly fit the bill.  Elizabeth Janet Gray Vining was a Quaker, a native of Philadelphia, PA, graduate of Bryn Mawr College and Drexel Institute of Technology.  She was a respected and well-connected member of the Quaker community and an established writer of children’s literature.  A connection through her time in the American Friends Service Committee made her a highly suitable candidate for the position of tutor.  

Though she did have some ties with the international community in Japan, Mrs. Vining ventured off to Japan alone and a widow. Her marriage to Morgan Vining had ended in tragedy when her husband was killed in a car accident just several years into their marriage. They had no children. It was during this period of mourning her husband that Vining left her Episcopalian faith to become a Quaker.  In the last two years of her stint in Japan, she was joined by her sister, presumably to fill the loneliness she only alludes to but must have surely felt so far from home.

In Japan, Mrs. Vining had a furnished home, a cook and a driver.  Her constant companion, secretary and interpreter was (Mrs.) Tane Takahashi, also a Quaker.  Who was actually Mrs. Vining’s boss is not clear, but she reported on occasion directly to General MacArthur.  She also had not infrequent entrée to the imperial family.  She regularly dealt with the chamberlains assigned to the Crown Prince and made recommendations and reports on his education to the chamberlains as well as to the Emperor and Empress.

Mrs. Vining led a privileged life in post-war Japan, but that is not to say that she didn’t work hard.  Her initial assignment included tutoring the prince once a week in English and teaching no more than 8 hours a week at the Gakushuin he attended. The prince was 12 at the time of her arrival, having just completed their equivalent of elementary school.  He would now go on to the equivalent of American junior high school under a slightly new and democratized system instituted by the Occupation.  Her duties expanded  rather quickly into tutoring others including members of the imperial family (but never the Emperor). She lectured and traveled as well, both in Japan and elsewhere.

Her work ethic, her deeply-held beliefs in Quaker ideals, her love of American democracy and her genuine concern for her fellow human being all combined to mark her as a person of immense integrity and sincerity.   She undertook her job as tutor with a broad view of its impact in the post-war international world. She had a desire to promote “the ideals of liberty and justice and good will upon which peace must be based if it is to endure.”  At the same time, she took a very personal interest in the Crown Prince often expressing sadness that he couldn’t grow up like a normal boy and always advocating to the imperial family and the chamberlains that he be given that opportunity.  She and the Crown Prince-later-Emperor had an enduring relationship which continued until Vining’s death.

This book is an obvious sidebar to Bergamini’s Japan's Imperial Conspiracy.   Bergamini mentions, without much fanfare, Mrs. Vining’s selection as tutor in his chapters on the Occupation. Thus was I reminded that I had often heard of Mrs. Vining and her books growing up as I did a Quaker in Kennett Square, PA where Elizabeth Gray Vining was a local figure. (The reader will be reminded that my own formerly Catholic and Presbyterian parents joined the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers, and we all attended London Grove Friends Meeting into my teen years.) The thrift, industry, honesty and simplicity historically characteristic of Quakers is embodied in Mrs. Vining. The human secularism of the Quaker faith, a Christian sect actually, is just Western enough and just Christian enough that it would appeal to the Emperor who didn’t want anything too fanatical. 

Which brings us to the Emperor.  Vining herself had the traditional view of the Emperor. She had been told by people in Japan that Hirohito was someone who “disapproved of what the war party did in his name and who had at different times attempted to avert war.”  She described him as a shy figurehead who was manipulated by his jingoistic military and hardline advisors.  There is of course not a shred of evidence to support that in Bergamini’s book and I was not tempted to subscribe to Mrs. Vining’s view of the Emperor. 

She did, however, acknowledge the opposite view.  Mrs. Vining devoted a chapter to the War Crimes Tribunal which, as a V.I.P.  member of the Occupation, she was permitted to attend.  Her discussion did give a nod to Bergamini’s perspective when she wrote: “Elements in the United States and Australia also declared the Emperor responsible, and in some quarters his abdication was called for.”  She went no further than that.    

I’m sorry but I can attribute nothing good to Emperor Hirohito.  I seriously doubt that his seeming open-mindedness in suggesting an English tutor for his son arose out of any love for American values or from a desire to be more Western.  Instead, I consider it was a calculated move on his part to dissemble and appear to be working with the Occupation. It was “belly talk.”  I find it instructive that he preferred the tutor-candidate to have as little familiarity with Japan and its culture as possible.  That way, he could present exactly the view of his homeland that he wished, or at least as much of a one-sided view as the Occupation would allow. 

Despite Mrs. Vining’s very admiring descriptions of Japan and its customs, geography and history,  I found myself still regrettably incapable of warm feelings for this nation and its culture.  For example, Mrs. Vining devoted an entire chapter to an account of a Japanese poetry-writing tradition dating back to the 10^th century.  The tradition consisted of the emperor, at the time of the New Year, announcing a theme upon which everyone could write a poem in waka verse and submit their creation to be judged as part of a contest of sorts. Typical themes were Spring in the Mountains or New Grass.  For the year Mrs. Vining describes, the theme chosen by the emperor was Morning Snow.

Vining submitted a poem and was then invited to the “annual party when the New Year poems were read in the presence of the Emperor and Empress.”  Before attending the party, the head of the Bureau of Poetry—the Bureau of Poetry!-- paid a visit to Mrs. Vining to instruct her in all the intricacies of the “party” which read more like some arcane ritual with no meaning or purpose that I could discern.  To cap off the evening, the Emperor’s poem was chanted 5 times by the chanters while “Most people stood with their heads bowed, as if in prayer.”  Here is the Emperor’s poem:

At the sight of snow deep in my garden of a morning my thoughts go to people who are shivering in the cold

I’m rendered speechless. What complete nonsense.  Another example of what would seem to be a society of children playing at being grown-ups, except some of the grown-ups were able to aggregate to themselves the power to act to conquer the world, and, with little regard for human life in the process.    

Elizabeth Vining leaves out very little in this book.  She is thorough and detailed in recounting everything from the rationale for the English lessons she used to her exchanges with General MacArthur to her relationship with the Crown Prince and the imperial family. Elizabeth Vining is in my estimation a singular woman, an accomplished individual who was true to the values and principles she professed. Elizabeth Janet Gray Vining died in 1999.  She lived out her remaining years in Kennett Square, in the Quaker retirement community, Kendall, where my sisters worked!  Once again, history ties us all together.