Book Review: The Year of the French (rerun)

The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan

St Patrick’s day gives me a good hook for re-posting this review, in the hope of inspiring a few more people to read this superb book.  Ralph Peters calls it “the finest historical novel written in English, at least in the twentieth century,” going on to say “except for ‘The Leopard,’ I know of no historical novel that so richly and convincingly captures the ambience of a bygone world.”

In August of 1798, the French revolutionary government landed 1000 troops in County Mayo to support indigenous Irish rebels, with the objective of overthrowing British rule in Ireland.  The Year of the French tells the (fictionalized but fact-based) story of these events from the viewpoint of several characters, representing different groups in the complex and strife-ridden Irish social structure of the time.

Owen MacCarthy is a schoolmaster and poet who writes in the Gaelic tradition.  He is pressed by illiterate locals to write a threatening letter to a landlord who has evicted tenants while switching land from farming to cattle-raising.  With his dark vision of how an attempt at rebellion must end–“In Caslebar.  They will load you in carts with your wrists tied behind you and take you down to Castlebar and try you there and hang you there”–MacCarthy is reluctant to get involved, but he writes the letter.

Sam Cooper, the recipient of the letter, is a small-scale landlord, and captain of the local militia.  Indigenously Irish, his family converted to Protestantism several generations ago to avoid the crippling social and economic disabilities imposed on Catholics. Cooper’s wife, Kate, herself still Catholic, is a beautiful and utterly ruthless woman…she advises Cooper to respond to the letter by rounding up “a few of the likeliest rogues,”  jailing and flogging them, without any concern for actual guilt or innocence. “My God, what a creature you are for a woman,”  Cooper responds. “It is a man you should have been born.”  “A strange creature that would make me in your bed,” Kate fires back, “It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it…What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it.”

Ferdy O’Donnell  is a young hillside farmer on Cooper’s land.  Far back in the past, the land was owned by the O’Donnell family…Ferdy had once shown Cooper  “a valueless curiosity, a parchment that recorded the fact in faded ink the colour of old, dried blood.”

Arthur Vincent Broome is a Protestant clergyman who is not thrilled by the “wild and dismal region” to which he has been assigned, but who performs his duties as best he can. Broome is resolved to eschew religious bigotry, but…”I affirm most sincerely that distinctions which rest upon creed mean little to me, and yet I confess that my compassion for their misery is mingled with an abhorrence of their alien ways…they live and thrive in mud and squalour…their music, for all that antiquarians and fanatics can find to say in its flavor, is wild and savage…they combine a grave and gentle courtesy with a murderous violence that erupts without warning…”‘

Malcolm Elliott is a Protestant landlord and solicitor, and a member of the Society of United Irishmen.  This was a revolutionary group with Enlightenment ideals, dedicated to bringing Catholics and Protestants together in the cause of overthrowing British rule and establishing an Irish Republic.  His wife, Judith, is an Englishwoman with romantic ideas about Ireland.

John Moore, also a United Irishman, is a member of one of the few Catholic families that have managed to hold on to their land.  He is in love with Ellen Treacy, daughter of another prominent Catholic family: she returns his love, but believes that he is caught in a web of words that can only lead to disaster.  “One of these days you will say a loose word to some fellow and he will get on his horse and ride off to Westport to lay an information with Dennis Browne, and that will be the last seen of you”

Dennis Browne is High Sheriff of Mayo…smooth, manipulative, and devoted to the interests of the very largest landowners in the county, such as his brother Lord Altamont and the mysterious Lord Glenthorne, the “Big Lord” who owns vast landholdings and an immense house which he has never visited.

Randall MacDonnell is a Catholic landowner with a decrepit farm and house, devoted primarily to his horses.  His motivations for joining the rebellion are quite different from those of the idealistic United Irishmen…”For a hundred years of more, those Protestant bastards have been the cocks of the walk, strutting around on acres that belong by rights to the Irish…there are men still living who remember when a son could grab his father’s land by turning Protestant.”

Jean Joseph Humbert is the commander of the French forces.  A former dealer in animal skins, he owes his position in life to the revolution.  He is a talented commander, but  the battle he is most concerned about is the battle for status and supremacy between himself and  Napoleon Bonaparte.

Charles Cornwallis, the general who surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, is now in charge of defeating the French and the rebels and pacifying the rebellious areas of Ireland.   Seen through the eyes of  a young aide who admires him greatly, Cornwallis is portrayed as a basically kindly man who can be hard when he thinks it necessary, but takes no pleasure in it.  “The color of war had long since bleached from his thoughts, and it remained for him only a duty to be scrupulously performed.”

This book is largely about the way in which the past lives on in the present, both in the world of physical objects and the world of social relationships.  Two characters who make a brief appearance are Richard Manning, proprietor of a decrepit and debt-laden castle, and his companion Ellen Kirwan:

Biden, Hamas, and Israel

In this rather confused video clip (some of it in text form in this article), Biden seems to be saying that (1) he believes the “30,000 Palestinians killed” number which has been circulating, which most observers believe is bogus, (2) that Israel is violating the international rules of war, which he says “we” changed following WWII, and (3) strongly implying that Israel is conducting carpet bombing, which is false.  He also says that Hamas would like a ceasefire because they would “have a better chance to survive and rebuild.”  He is apparently just fine with this outcome.

He also says he told the Israeli war cabinet:  “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”

Whatever one thinks about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it requires a special kind of cluelessness to not notice the geographical closeness of Gaza-based Hamas to Israel, and the immediate and murderous nature of the threat that Israel faces.

Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.

Worthwhile Reading

Hayek, Fascism, and the Administrative State

Privilege in Bourbon France

An interesting piece on the tradition of limited government in Spain

A Danish manager working in Russia finds that his workers are looking for a more authoritarian style of leadership

Related: Culture and combined arms warfare

Civilization versus the Pathocratic State

The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity

Why are semiconductor companies not more enthusiastic about taking the lavish subsidies available under the CHIPS act?

 

Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism (update)

John Dos Passos was an American writer.  In his younger years, he was a man of the Left, and, like many leftists and some others he was very involved with the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

But he was more than a little disturbed by some of those that shared his viewpoint.  Describing one protest he had attended, he wrote:

From sometime during this spring of 1926 of from the winter before a recollection keeps rising to the surface. The protest meeting is over and I’m standing on a set of steps looking into the faces of the people coming out of the hall. I’m frightened by the tense righteousness of the faces. Eyes like a row of rifles aimed by a firing squad. Chins thrust forward into the icy night. It’s almost in marching step that they stride out into the street. It’s the women I remember most, their eyes searching out evil through narrowed lids. There’s something threatening about this unanimity of protest. They are so sure they are right.

I agree with their protest:  I too was horrified by this outrage.  I’m not one either to stand by and see injustice done.  But do I agree enough?  A chill goes down my spine..Whenever I remember the little scene I tend to turn it over in my mind.  Why did my hackles rise at the sight of the faces of these good people coming out of the hall? 

Was it a glimpse of the forming of a new class conformity that like all class conformities was bent on riding the rest of us?

Quoting Dos Passos and connecting his observations to our own time, Jay Nordlinger wrote:

I know these people. I saw them in Ann Arbor. I saw them in many other places afterward.  Today, you can see them on campuses as “SJWs”: “social-justice warriors.” You can see them wherever there is arrogant, intolerant extremism (no matter which direction it’s coming from).

The thing that frightened Dos Passos in the attitude of these protestors–who were, remember, his allies–is in my opinion quite similar to the thing that is so disturbing about so many of today’s “progressive” protestors.  Dos (as he was called) was entirely correct to be disturbed by what he saw, but I don’t think he diagnosed it quite correctly.  Though he refers to the protestors he observed as “those good people,” quite likely many of them weren’t good people at all–even if they were right about their cause–but were rather engaging in the not-good-at-all pleasure of conformity and the enforcement thereof, and would given half a chance have gone all the way to the even-worse pleasure of bullying.

I recently posted Koestler on Closed Systems, which discusses the nature of intellectually closed systems–which can include political ideologies–and the characteristics of those who are attracted to such systems and allow themselves to be dominated by them.  The phenomenon discussed about–the unwholesome pleasure of behaving with cruelty while simultaneously feeling virtuous–is another factor which often drives political belief and, especially, political activism. We have seen a lot of that behavior in the abuse, intimidation, and sometimes outright violence that we have seen directed at Jewish college students in recent months.

Whether or not Dos’s view of the motivations of the Sacco & Vanzetti protestors he saw is a fair one–and I am simply layering the explanation that seems to make sense to me on top of Dos’s description of his own subjective reactions–the spirt of conformity certainly drives a great deal of political and other wickedness.  I remember a German man who was interviewed near the beginning of the TV series The World at War.  Although he was anti-Nazi, he described the emotional pull he felt when viewing Party rallies–a strong desire to be part of such a cohesive and committed group.

Here’s a related post: A desire to fit in is the root of almost all wrongdoing.

Although most assume that an immoral person is one who’s ready to defy law and convention to get what they want, I think the inverse is often true. Immorality is frequently motivated by a readiness to conform to law and convention in opposition to our own values.

One feature common among today’s ‘progressives’…and maybe among those of Dos Passos’s time too…is coupling the feeling of courage that they get from believing that they are defying law and convention with the feeling of security they get from conforming to an in-group.

See also C S Lewis on The Inner Ring.  Speaking at King’s College in 1944, Lewis said:

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Book Review: The Business Novels of Cameron Hawley

I saw a reference to an author named Cameron Hawley, who wrote novels centered on business during the 1950s thru 1960s…sounded interesting, so I read one of them and went on to read two more. Here they are, in the order that I read them.

The Lincoln Lords. Mr Lincoln Lord has been a successful executive at several companies, but he seems to make a practice of changing jobs when the going gets tough.  He has amazing social skills and is viewed as a first-class speechmaker…however, he has often relied on his friend (sometimes his employee), Brick, to write those speeches.  Lincoln’s son has a closer relationship with Brick than with his dad…and Linc’s wife, Maggie, has begun to wonder if her husband’s skills are limited to being a good front man.  Brick has long had a thing for Maggie, and she has sometimes found herself very attracted to him.

When Linc loses his job just shy of age 50, the couple has to move out of their suite in Manhattan’s Waldorf Tower and are having difficulty paying their son’s private school tuition.  The executive recruiter that Linc is working with is not very positive about his chances, given his age and his record of job-switching. But Linc does receive a lifeline in the form of an offer to run a small canning business–‘a little Jewish cannery’, as some refer to it. He takes the offer, and the book portrays the problems of a big-company man running a not-so-big company.  The cannery, Coastal, is beset by many problems, the most serious of which is that their largest customer, Gellman Stores–which represented over half of their business–has dropped them as a customer.  Linc reflects that he has always been very effective at analyzing the alternatives presented to him and choosing the best one, but now things are different–he doesn’t just need to analyze the alternatives and select from among them, rather, he needs to develop these possibilities himself.  Can he succeed without the resources, name, and momentum of a large company behind him?

Here’s a recent review in a pwc publication.

Cash McCall.  The title character is a mysterious individual who has rented an entire floor of a prominent Philadelphia hotel (which he may or may not own) and flies himself around in a WWII B-26 which he has converted into an executive transport.  He describes himself as  ‘a dealer in secondhand companies’…he acquires them, fixes them, and then sells them.

Grant Austen has spent three decades building his modestly-successful plastics company. But, like the Coastal cannery in the first book discussed, he has allowed his business to become overly-dependent on a single customer–and that customer is demanding that he invest in a very expensive specialized press, with no guarantees at all about the volume they will purchase.  This problem, combined with his other frustrations (many of which have to do with the tax code and government controls), leads him toward a decision to sell his company.

Grant’s daughter, Lory, is an artist, specifically, an illustrator of children’s books. She had previously met Cash while on vacation, without knowing anything about who he was, and the two were very attracted to one another. The budding romance broke off in some confusion, partly because Cash felt he was too old for her and partly because Lori was afraid of the intensity of her own sexual desire–but the mutual attraction remains.  She is surprised and conflicted when she meets Cash again in the role of potential acquirer of her father’s company–in which she owns a 10% share.

In addition to being a significant shareholder, Lori often serves as her father’s confidant in discussing business issues. Which makes her mother unhappy, because she sees it as one more thing demonstrating the absence of closeness in her relationship with her husband.

Another complexity involves Andscott, the company which is Grant Austen’s company’s main customer (they’re buying cabinets for the television sets they manufacture).  Andscott is being run by a former USAF general; he was an excellent wartime leader but not so impressive as a civilian executive. The success or failure of Andscott is even more important than the success or failure of a typical company, because a very large block of stock is owned by a medical research foundation which is supporting vital research–and is entirely dependent on its Andscott dividends.

The book was made into a 1960 movie with James Garner as Cash McCall, Natalie Wood as Lory Austen, and Dean Jagger as her father Grant. I thought both the book and the movie were very good: the movie has a lighter tone than does the book and is almost–not quite–a comedy.

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