I AWAIT THE DEVIL'S COMING, turn of the 20th century adolescent feminist memoir

I AWAIT THE DEVIL'S COMING
MARY MacLANE foreword by Jessa Crispin
The Neversink Library
$16 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mary MacLane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming is a shocking, brave and intellectually challenging diary of a 19-year-old girl living in Butte, Montana in 1902. Written in potent, raw prose that propelled the author to celebrity upon publication, the book has become almost completely forgotten.

In the early 20th century, MacLane’s name was synonymous with sexuality; she is widely hailed as being one of the earliest American feminist authors, and critics at the time praised her work for its daringly open and confessional style. In its first month of publication, the book sold 100,000 copies — a remarkable number for a debut author, and one that illustrates MacLane’s broad appeal.

Now, with a new foreword written by critic Jessa Crispin, I Await The Devil’s Coming stands poised to renew its reputation as one of America’s earliest and most powerful accounts of feminist thought and creativity.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: Adolescent female angst-o-rama...wouldn't get published today...but in 1902? YOWZA. Women weren't, in general, heard from in 1902. Girls weren't even supposed to exist publicly. And here's Mary MacLane talking about her girlish agonies in clear, concise, charming prose!

Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen, there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end.

Ah, adolescence. That moment when maturity bites but perspective fails. Perspective doesn't even exist, there hasn't been time for it to develop, and that's always been the source of trouble for the perspectiveless young adult. Look what happened to Romeo and Juliet! A wiser pair of heads would've figured out the plan without resorting to oh-so-romantic but ever-so-permanent suicide. But Mary, well, she's not about to End It All for Luuuv. She's got her eyes on a different prize:

Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there's a treachery in it.

She is, in fact, correct. The future is a treacherous damned beast, as adults well know. I'm actually retroactively impressed that Mary knew this. I suppose she came by the feeling naturally, having experienced the grim horrors of a childhood spent knowing with all your being that you are Other in a world that loathes otherness:

I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.

I recall this feeling with caustic bitter clarity. Poor thing! Montana *now* is not a place where it's safe or healthy to be Other, but 115 years ago...! The mind reels. The days of slogging through the quagmire to achieve nothing except survival live inside me as they did inside Mary:

It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone.

It's no wonder to me that Mary began to think in terms of The Devil, The Great Adversary. Her Otherness made these thoughts comforting. She looked around her and saw not even oceans...too few people in Montana...but brackish backwaters of unbearable averageness:

An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.

Heh. Yep, I relate, Mary. Awful to look around and see, in Mycroft Holmes's memorable phrase from the TV show Sherlock, "a world of goldfish." Her young heart clung to one thread of hope: ESCAPE!

As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.

Don't know how she saw that at nineteen, but it probably did as much as writing this book to save her from self-harm. Perspective might be lacking, perspicacity most certainly was not! And self-knowledge to a degree that impresses me. Mary clearly knew her own mind and came to her own conclusions about her place in this world:

From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs "limbs"; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From the depths of the 21st century, Mary, an old man salutes you. What a pleasure it was to get to know you just a bit. I expect we'd've been friends.

Be aware, ye modern readers, that Mary's company is like that of any younger person to an oldster. She repeats herself quite without seeing the repetitions. She has stumbled on insights we take for granted. She doesn't get that others have trod the same damn grapes for millennia now, but she's got a great excuse in being a small-town girl from nowhere much. So put your sour face back in the box and read this with a smile for best results.

SNOWBALL'S CHANCE, the dystopia of ANIMAL FARM gets worse

SNOWBALL'S CHANCE
JOHN REED
The Neversink Library
$15 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: This unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a controversial parable about September 11th by one of fiction’s most inventive and provocative writers

Written in 14 days shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball’s Chance is an outrageous and unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which exiled pig Snowball returns to the farm, takes charge, and implements a new world order of untrammeled capitalism. Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” has morphed into the new rallying cry: “All animals are born equal—what they become is their own affair.”

At first Snowball’s regime prospers: heated stalls, running water, and a window for each animal. The farm moves away from its agricultural economy as Snowball and his team of educated Goats recreate Animal Farm as Animal Fair, replete with citizen performers and criminal sideshows.

A brilliant political satire and literary parody, John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance caused an uproar on publication in 2002, denounced by Christopher Hitchens, and barely dodging a lawsuit from the Orwell estate. Now, a decade later, with America in wars on many fronts, readers can judge anew the visionary truth of Reed’s satirical masterpiece.

My Review: Fifteen years on, Snowball's Chance is more relevant than ever. The 9/11 attacks appalled the world, and thereby gave the USA (assuming its leaders had been savvy and swift on the uptake) its single best opportunity to cement cooperation and common cause with our self-serving agenda in recent history.

We all remember how that turned out. Our soldiers are still paying the price for the bad-to-the-point-of-idiocy decisions made by the administration of the day.

But oh my my, it wasn't sold to the sheep—people, I mean—that way! Neigh neigh neigh, as the workhorses of the armed forces emitted. The glory days have begun at last! We'll shock and awe those sand-n-words back to the stone age!

The animals, even the pigs and the dogs, reveled in the song—not only in the group dancing, which was a new experience for all, but to have their voices joined together once again.

Just like the days of the rebellion!

And the thing so nice about it, was that now, with no more than a little song and a side-step, they could feel like this whenever they wanted—even when they were working in the fields!
It was then announced by Snowball, that by the Prize Pig's decree, the Manor Farm would henceforth be known by its proper name—

Animal Farm.

And the strains of the 21st century's first recrudescence of Horst Wessel were heard throughout the land. The Prize Pig squealed it loudest. And behind the Prize Pig stood Snowball, quietly examining the trusting mugs of the great unwashed masses for glimmers of intelligence and signs of dissent. These were bad things, unpatriotic things, to be subdued by every means available to the state. And those means were (and are) considerable, technology having no conscience and technologists little interest in ethics. All that was needed now was some sort of fig leaf to hide the swollen cock butt-fucking the body politic with no grease and not even a pretense at a kiss.

The USA-PATRIOT Act. Mass surveillance, suspended civil liberties, immense extensions of the government's power to act against its citizens if it damned well wanted to...amended, killed, then resurrected as the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015. No government ever gives up a power it has given itself. The names are changed to protect the guilty.

The debate was reported at length in The Daily Trotter, where Minimus, in his sudden November turn-around, proclaimed that the concessions Snowball had made to his various concerns were more than enough to allay any fears. His faith in Snowball was complete—and every animal on the farm should feel exactly the same way. "Forward Ho!" proclaimed The Daily Trotter. In a letter-to-the-editor (penned by an excitable field mouse), it was suggested that Snowball was not forceful enough to capture the character of the visionary, and that perhaps "Snowstorm" would be more appropriate. The next week, Minimus showed up at the Sunday Meeting looking like he had sat on a fretful porcupine. The Trotter reported that he was suffering a case of constipation....

And when the hot water and showers and bathtubs and lights and electric heaters and air-conditioners were turned on—on January 14th—what a glorious day it was! What a glorious winter it was! And what a glorious spring it was! And what a hero Snowball was!

Hot water and air conditioning buy a lot of silence, it would seem; as does the saddling of an entire nation with slave status under the yoke of the banksters. Get stroppy, get fired, get foreclosed on. I know this happens, it happened to me in 2005.

But the fable continues its inexorable course, one that we're familiar with from the 9/11 events but apparently haven't got the mother-wit to recognize happening again in the form of the most recent election's run-up and results. The post-mortems and the mea-culpas will last for years. None of which changes the events:

It would later be argued as to whether the evil-doers had secured preplaced weaponry from a passing peanut cart, or had foiled the bloodhounds by dousing themselves and their arsenal in apple-wood oil, in order to mask any tell-tale odor. But regardless of the method that his treachery had taken, this ferret's time had come....

He had drawn his blade, cut the throat of Arthur the Poodle, and assumed the controls of the Ferris Wheel—and before anyone could understand what was happening (was it part of the ride?) the Ferris Wheel had accelerated to its top speed. Gears ground. Sparks flew. And two pairs of squirrels were dragging paper bags through the ironwork—up to the axle that held the wheel in place. And then, in a moment horrifyingly lucid, the squirrels doused themselves with some greasy liquid, and set themselves on fire. The bags exploded, and the Ferris Wheel was loosed—kicked from its moorings.

From there, the Twin Mills were struck down and the Woodland Creatures exacted their vengeance on the Pig Fair. And the fable ends.

The future doesn't, however. The value of fiction is that it doesn't stop being relevant when its inspiration recedes into memory then fades into myth. To Kill a Mockingbird is still challenged for removal from school curricula and libraries. Young people are, if not encouraged, then allowed to piss and moan about its "relevance" as a means of delegitimizing the book's enduring and invaluable lessons of the costs of Doing the Right Thing even when everyone you know shouts you down. There's no reason to suspect a book that features a flinty, honorable fighter for justice and the daughter who worships his ideals wouldn't be popular with a political elite such as the one we have now, is there?

My review of Animal Farm argues for the continued relevance of a parable of corruption's eternal depredations. The book isn't about Stalinist Soviet times. It's about the time-tested maxim that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Snowball's Chance tills the same fertile soil. John Reed saw the need for a stern reminder of the eternal verity that people are no damn good, and wisely chose to "stand on the shoulders of a giant," to paraphrase the probably apocryphal utterance attributed to Isaac Newton. George Orwell was no monadnock of probity: he's known to have snitched on leftist friends, expressed privately an anti-Semitism he didn't condone publicly, and was a homophobe. Hardly a role model. Except he was right about the very important fact that Stalin was a monster and the left of his time was willfully ignoring the truth in order to preserve what they saw as a greater good: Socialism was a laudable political path and socialists must needs be lauded.

Hogwash. No more does John Reed accept the moral purity of Snowball, or of Minimus, or of Diso the beaver. He and Orwell jab at the clay feet of the idols that are used to distract the bulk of humanity. The idols fall as they may, and that's a good thing. That's the reason Snowball's Chance needs to land on your TBR. Never miss a chance to topple an idol, even—or especially—one of your own.

THE PRESIDENT, a non-Inspector Maigret Simenon novel...damn good, too

THE PRESIDENT
GEORGES SIMENON translated by Daphne Woodward
The Neversink Library
$10.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, The President was hailed by the New York Times as a “tour de force.”

At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement—self exile—on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesman and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier’s former attaché, Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography—a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Now the long-thwarted Chalamont has been summoned to form a new coalition in the wake of the government’s collapse. The premier alone possesses the secret of Chalamont’s guilt, of his true character—and has publicly vowed: “He’ll never be Premier as long as I’m alive... Nor when I’m dead, either.” Inspired by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, The President is a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a probing account of the decline of power.

My Review: I got a CARE package from one of my old pals from Texas, filled to the brim with Simenon works...but not the Maigret stories, to my relief (read 'em all) and delight (I've never read any of the non-Maigret books)! The President is a delicate and careful autopsy of a once-powerful man's reluctant and relieved laying down his armaments. His life always consisted of public service, unmarried and childless and grasping for the levers of power to make his isolation into welcome solitude.

Simenon's Maigret novels are, as murder mysteries must be, formulaic. Simenon's gift came from creating a rich and satisfying story from these commonly available materials. It's a bit like watching Meryl Streep in a movie: She IS the role, she can't be more than glancingly perceived as the actress who starred in any other movie. Chameleons have that talent...so do cuttlefish...yet to find the gift of remodeling one's self in our smelly, sweaty human selves amazes and delights us every time.

This 152-page tale is a welcome surprise in this era of bloated, dull series books that could and should have been short stories. In my view, the less an author says, the more s/he has to focus and deliver a high-quality experience. Simenon wrote what was necessary to illuminate the long career of the eponymous president and place it in an historical setting. The impact of the actions taken by the president become, by design but still of necessity, quiet bombshells...silent even in their death throes.

This is a book to savor, to sip and ponder the complex flavors mixed in exacting proportions. A simple story, made well, translated carefully, and presented without hype. It is a treat in a literary landscape as pillowy-soft and cloyingly sweet as today's is simply to be told that great hearts still beat faster in pursuit of desired items and outcomes. And they remain great hearts, giving their all and making no excuses.