Prepare to be immersed in Russia on the verge of World War One and the following Revolution. Fitzgerald has done aThe Beginning of Spring: Russia 1913
Prepare to be immersed in Russia on the verge of World War One and the following Revolution. Fitzgerald has done a a masterful job of historical research creating Moscow culture as it existed. The Tsar yields complete power. Tolstoy is now considered a political figure hostile to the State. Equally watched are the country's students, considered the most dangerous and vocal against the empire.
But this would not be a Fitzgerald novel without a group of characters slightly out of place, clueless as to how they find themselves in places they haven't the slightest notion how they found themselves in such a pickle.
From the Introduction: The Beginning of Spring " The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romanticize artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges.
Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.
And it is that mix of humor and tragedy you will find in this novel as well as her others. This is my third Fitzgerald. I will not be content until I have read them all. In a nushell, they are enchanting.
Our hapless unsettled outsider here is Frank Reid, the owner of a printing company in Moscow. It's not his business decision to start this business. His father began the business. Frank was born and raised in Russia. He now owns it. Father has died leaving him the heir. Included in the legacy is a mammoth printing press which must be sold or "Reidka's will without doubt fail.
Frank's problems multiply. His English born wife, Nellie, leaves him a letter delivered by messenger that she has left him. Not only has she left him, she's taken thei three children. Frank wonders why she had a letter delivered by messenger. She had always had a lot. To say. Well, not lately. Yes, too wound up in the business, Frank.
Frank's next surprise is a message from a train station. Nellie has dropped the children off. Would Mr. Reid be so kind as to come fetch them? Of course, but what will he do with them. He must have someone to watch them.. A visit to the Chaplaincy yields no likely governess.
Enter Frank's second in command who produces an employee from a department store who sells men's handkerchiefs. She has no experience as a governess. Frank's partner ultimately suggests that the presence of an attractive young lady might lead to a sexual relationship.
Enter Frank's brother in law Charles with only the news he hasn't been able to locate Nellie. After meeting the governess Charles offers Frank to take the three kiddies to England provided the governess goes with him. Frank's answer is a resounding NO. Frank. Loves her. And tells her.
It is the beginning of spring. It is warm enough for a trip to the family Daucha. Frank's love asks for five days to think about his proposal.
And that's all you're getting out of this reviewer. Why? I want you to READ THIS BOOK. Fitzgerald didn't begin writing fiction until age 60. She's considered the finest writer in Great Britain in the past forty-five years. Based on the three novels I've read, I believe it....more
The Proud Tower: Barbara Tuchman's View of the World on the Road to War
Channel Firing BY THOMAS HARDY That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our
The Proud Tower: Barbara Tuchman's View of the World on the Road to War
Channel Firing BY THOMAS HARDY That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be:
“All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters.
“That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening....
“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).”
So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!”
And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”
Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
We are about to embark on a great quest. That is to explore a world at war.
Of course we speak of World War I, which would come to be known as World War I. It is not only that we seek to explore that world and war, but to attempt to understand why it happened, what brought it about.
Not only should we seek to understand what brought it about we must be aware that we seek to do all these things regarding a world that existed one hundred years ago that went to war in 1914 and did not return to a state of uneasy peace until 1918. And in attempting to understand what surprised the world as the greatest conflagration the world to that point had ever witnessed, it becomes necessary to know what the world was like.
Who were the people who lived there. How did they live, what did they do. Nor can we begin to understand the hellish waterspout that sucked so many nations into the depths of seas tinged with blood without understanding that it was not merely a world of politics or property but a world of art, music, dance, and philosophy.
These are the conflicting aspects of culture that are inconsistent with the idea of war. The attempt to put these seemingly impossible inconsistencies together can bring about a great distubance of the human spirit that a world capable of music as beautiful as "The Rites of Spring," clashing with the quivering chords rising into a crescendo of horns that might sound the trumpets of doom, based on the writings of a man who died, mad, in an asylum, but whose philosophy was adopted by a nation as its theme, acknowledging the right, the need of exerting its power over whole nations out of a sense of nationalist fervor.
Such things are of the type that enter our dreams and become our nightmares as we sense the end of one world and the beginning of another. It is as though we are walking as somnambulists in a world unknown to us. For it is unknown to us. We must be capable of forgetting, unlearning the modern world of which we consider ourselves to be a part.
This is a journey that requires a guide. Just as Aligheri required a guide into the Inferno we must have our own Virgil. It is highly likely that we will find the need of a Beatrice for the war we will eventually explore was not a paradise, but a Hell as fiery as the first book of The Human Comedy.
As we speak of Virgil we must think of a world of epic stature, that grew as great as Rome and fell just as surely as Rome. In one way we are traveling through a world as ancient to us as we would consider a symbol of its literature, the Aeneid. In his journeys from the sacked city of Troy, Aeneas met and fell in love with the Queen of the Carthaginians, Dido. And Virgil commented that a nation should be ruled by a woman to be so foreign to his people he had to document "Dux femina facti" which means the leader of the thing was a woman.
So our guide is no Virgil. Our guide is a woman, Barbara Tuchman. And as it once was, once again "Dux femina facit."
To be continued...January 30, 2014.
Our Guide
Barbara Tuchman was born Barbara Wertheimer, January 30, 1912, the daughter of prominent banker Maurice Wertheimer. Well that didn't take long. Interrupted. 2/5/2014
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